Inglorious Basterds

When history looks back on the history of film in the 2000s, the defining narrative is going to be the ascension of TV as the primary visual artistic medium, and mainstream film’s increasing polarization between micro-budget indies and creative dead end rehashed blockbusters. But, even as TV has become a better medium for conveying narrative, cinema maintains its unparalleled ability to create singular moments and cast a spell on the viewer that lasts as long as the movie rolls. Quentin Tarantino, for all his annoyingness in interviews, knows that cinema is about moments, and packs his film full of the sublime collisions of visual, audio and narrative content that make movies so special. Basterds is full of transcendent, singular moments that so perfectly use the medium, he makes everyone else look like they’re not even trying to make movies that resonate and matter.

One of the interesting things about Tarantino movies is that in many ways, they’re written as a collision of theater and cinema. The film features a couple of lengthy setpiece conversations that are literally just people sitting at a table talking, but through the editing and performance, they build incredible tension. The opening scene of the film is a perfect example of that. You start off with the inherent tension in Landa, a Nazi officer, coming to visit this family. His total confidence contrasted LaPadite nerves. Throughout the film, until the very end, Landa is always in a position of total control, there’s a surface calm, but also the potential to explode into violence at any minute.

By revealing to us the family beneath the floor boards, the whole scene takes on a new tension. We know that LaPedite is trying to trick Landa, and the question becomes, can he do so? So, the tension mounts until the fantastic section in which Landa decides to keep up the charade until the last minute, and the quiet conversation of the film’s opening is broken up by an onslaught of weapon fire, and a bursting haze of dust bits floating in the air.

One of the interesting things about Tarantino’s approach is that he focuses almost exclusively on character in constructing his films. The overall narrative, the ostensible quest by the Basterds and Shosanna to kill the Nazis, develops in a very leisurely way, and the vast majority of the film is these things that would be considered digressions in other movies. The typical screenwriting approach is to just give the audience enough to get the information they need then move on, anything not essential to the story should be cut. What is the ostensible ‘point’ of the first scene? It’s to establish Landa as a menacing force. That can be done much quicker, and still get you the same narrative information. But, the extra time spent is both enjoyable on its own terms, and gives you an even better sense of the character.

And, by keeping the scene so slow and conversational, the mounting tension at the end is even more powerful. As the film’s first music cue rises up on the soundtrack, Landa’s true intent becomes apparent, and leads to the act that sets up the film’s primarily emotional motivation, Shosanna’s revenge.

The film’s chapter structure, as well as its fonts and credits, recall the format of Kill Bill. I like the chapter structure because I think it gives you an implicit explanation of why certain characters are absent from the narrative for so long. You’re not wondering where Aldo is, or where Shosanna is during the sections they’re off screen, you know they’ll likely be back in the next chapter.

So, chapter two picks up the ostensible primary story of the film, that of the Nazi-hunting basterds. This is easily the film’s weakest chapter, Pitt as Aldo Raine is a lot of fun, but lacks the more nuanced character of the other, European characters, and the other Basterds, apart from Stiglitz don’t make too much of an impression. As the film wound down to its climax, I didn’t want to see any of these guys succeed in taking out the German high command, I wanted that to be Shosanna’s victory. There’s a level of sadism in what they do that’s a bit unpleasant, even if it is being done to Nazis. The clever punishment given to survivors is more satisfying to watch than simply seeing someone’s head beaten with a bat.

And, if the film has one misstep, it’s in the casting of the Basterds, particularly giving Eli Roth such a prominent role. Where a great actor could make even a small role like that really come alive, Roth doesn’t do much more than say the words. He doesn’t do anything glaringly wrong, but I feel like the role could have been much more. Similarly, I’m not sure if BJ Novak and Samm Levine were cast deliberately for their non-menacing qualities, but they generally came off as doofier, comic relief, particularly during the funny “Little Man” conversation at the end of the film.

But, looking at the film as a whole, all the American characters do seem designed primarily as comic relief. I was thinking that the film might be stronger if it just focused on Shosanna and Landa, with no stuff about the Basterds, but without the humorous counterpoint of the Basterds, the stuff with Shosanna could wind up feeling a bit self serious and the film as a whole would be less unique. Pitt isn’t the lead of the film, he’s the comic relief, conspicuously off camera for most of the film’s real emotional moments, like the sequence in the basement tavern, or the climactic shootout.

Shosanna was easily my favorite character in the film, and her emotional arc was the most fully realized. Considering the episodic nature of the script, I’d hesitate to call it “her film,” but it’s her story that I kept wanting to see more of. The sequence set in occupied France once again brings in that element of casual menace. Shosanna is continually forced to play nice with the people who killed her family, for fear that any sign of resistance would prompt an investigation and the discovery of her true identity.

Much of the chapter’s significance lies in what Shosanna tells Zoller in the projection booth, that he’s gotten so used to being hailed as a hero, he doesn’t know when someone means no anymore. The Nazis, thanks to their military power, are so used to getting everything they want that they see people simply as objects in their path to be conquered. Zoller has mixed feelings about this, he claims to not like being hailed as a war hero, and has issue watching his own “exploits” dramatized on screen. He ostensibly wants Shosanna to like him not for what he did in the war, but for the person underneath.

The problem is, he isn’t going to take no for an answer, she’s going to like him no matter what. And, the more prickly she is to him, the more he wants her. He’s being hailed by people in this café, but he only wants her to like him. So, he arranges the premiere at her cinema as a way getting even closer to her, which puts her closer and closer to both her worst nightmare and her ultimate goal, the chance to get revenge against the people who killed her family, to show them who they really are on screen.

The sequence in the café is another masterpiece of subtle tension, as Landa draws out the eating of the Strudel, leaving us uncertain whether he knows who she is, or is just messing with her because she can. It’s also interesting to see the juxtaposition of Shosanna’s concealed hatred for these people with her struggle to put up a public face that won’t offend them. She’s bound to them now and has to play along until she gets the chance to get back at them.

So, she hatches the idea of using her aunt’s old films as a bomb, to burn down the theater and destroy them all in the process. More on that shortly, but I’ll note how effective the transition from her request for filmmaking equipment is in jumping us over to Operation Kino. We know that she’s doing her own Operation Kino while the Basterds and their new British ally are working on the official Op Kino in France.

The Mike Myers sequence is another one that would be much shorter in most films. The goal is just to establish this guy is an expert on cinema, and will be going undercover to blow up the premiere. You can do that in a voiceover, a letter, whatever, but the scene as it plays works because Myers is fun to watch, and it starts laying in the key themes about the way that the German national cinema, and by extension, the German national mind, was co-opted by Nazi themes at the expense of the more ambitious 1920s impressionist cinema.

Hollywood of the 1930s and 40s shaped the American national image, and during World War II, its propadanda films were key to creating the narrative of the war. Goebbels was trying to do the same thing with his films, and in the process, he tried to rewrite history, eliminating the moral ambiguity of post Weimar work and replacing it with the overt heroes and villains of the Nazi propaganda cinema, specifically “Nation’s Pride.” On the one hand, this scene, like the exploration of nitrous film earlier, is an insidery film reference that could be seen as self indulgent. But, it also works without any outside knowledge of history, setting up the thematic significance of Shosanna using the old films as a means of destroying the German elite.

That leads into the basement tavern scene, another great work of mounting tension. Tarantino establishes multiple areas of drama, including Hickox’s questionable German skills, Stiglitz’s mounting rage and the uncertain motivations of the German officer, who may or may not know about Hammersmark’s deception. Again, the way the scene is played out lets this tension build to a huge crescendo before exploding suddenly in the seemingly inevitable result of a Mexican standoff, a room filled with gunfire, leaving nearly everyone dead.

It’s difficult to comment on morality in a film like this, where we’re seemingly led to support the cartoonish scalping of Nazis, but at the same time confronted with a much more real vision of the war on the European side. It could be a comment on perceptions of the war in America vs. Europe. In America, it’s a fun excursion, where the inherent evil of the Nazis makes it easy to indulge in an over the top us vs. them exercise killing German soldiers who’ve sold their souls. But, for Shosanna, the violence is real, and simply killing individual soldiers isn’t enough, it’s the ideology that has to be destroyed.

That’s what the end of the film, the most audacious chapter, is all about. The German high command has created an ideology of hate, one that is symbolized by the films that Goebbels creates. As they all gather around the screen to watch a film that seems to consist solely of Zoller mowing down American soldiers, she has the chance to explode that ideology in their face and confront them with the real cost of that violence.

In Kill Bill, the cinematic high point of the film was the preparing for the battle sequence in Volume I. Scored to the now iconic “Battle Without Honor or Humanity,” the tension is built to a huge level as we watch all the pieces moves into place in the most visual, cinematic way conceivable.

The instantly iconic “Cat People” sequence in the film does the same thing, as we watch Shosanna arm herself for the battle to come. I love films that don’t adhere to the expectations we have for period drama. In that sense, Basterds has much in common with Marie Antoinette or Public Enemies, both films that deliberately played with our expectations for a costume drama or a gangster movie. “Cat People” works perfectly in the moment, no matter what time period it comes from. And, I love the way that we get the badass hero suits up montage for a woman putting on makeup and a dress, not the soldiers getting their guns. The sequence is full of memorable images, like the way that the rouge on her cheeks is spread to evoke Indian war paint, or the slow dissolves, rather than a push in, that go from wide shot to closeup as she stands at the window and looks out.

She emerges from her personal space to the theater and we witness the premiere already in full swing. She stares down at them, her face behind a veil that evokes Fassbinder’s Maria Braun. The whole sequence builds such incredible momentum, I wasn’t sure that the film would be able to sustain it for the climax, and Tarantino’s choices frequently seem anathema to keeping that tension going. After we build this crescendo of Shosanna’s rage, we jump over to a lengthy comic scene with Aldo and crew trying to present convincing Italian accents for Landa.

It’s a testament to Tarantino’s skill that he consistently stops the film when it should be rushing forward to do that sort of comedy stuff, but is able to recapture the momentum whenever needed. The lobby scene, or the later scene with Landa and Raine negotiating about ending the war both are entertaining on their own merits, but feel decidedly besides the point next to the action in the theater.

But, he can easily jump from the goofiness of the Italian name stuff to the incredibly tense scene with Bridget Von Hammersmark in Shosanna’s office. That scene is great on its own merits, riffing again on Tarantino’s love of feet, but also ties in to the overall narrative, through staging it into Shosanna’s office. Landa has taken her family, he’s taken her theater and he’s even taken over his office and is using it to kill people. But, she has a plan to get back at him.

At this point in the film, I was annoyed that Landa hadn’t captured Omar and Donny, since I didn’t want to see these two not particularly developed characters succeed in their plan and not give Shosanna the satisfaction of her vengeance. So, there was great tension during the Landa and Raine scene, as we’re left in uncertainty about what was going to happen in the theater.

But, we eventually get back there, where every action is juxtaposed against the much celebrated action on the screen, Zoller’s wholesale massacre of other soldiers. This is the German mythos, the German ideology played large on the big screen, and it brings great delight to everyone in the audience. Hitler and Goebbels see this film as something that can inspire the people and keep the war alive, even as the Americans crash onto French shores. They understand that war is ultimately about ideas, it’s whose mythos is stronger, who wants it more. Zoller becomes an aspirational figure, someone who could inspire the people to fight harder, even as things become more of a lost cause. If he can singlehandedly defeat three hundred soldiers, then no obstacle is insurmountable.

The film lulls the German audience into an easy connection with the death on screen, it casts a spell on them that subtly influences their morality. Shosanna intercuts her own message in to the film, one that subverts the moral intention of everything that the Germans are doing. Instead of one hero and a hundred faceless victims, it’s the victim speaking to them, the murdered extra becomes the star and destroys the illusion that Goebbels worked so hard to create. Zoller isn’t a hero, he’s only perpetuated the conflict.

The projection booth is Shosanna’s inner sanctuary, the beating heart of the theater that is her weapon. She sets it in motion, and when the reels shift, the deed is done, she has sealed her own fate, and will go down with the blaze. But, before that, there’s Zoller threatening to upend the plan. As I said before, Zoller’s approach to her in the projection booth is a moment that sums up the entire German ethos, this belief that they can take whatever they want because they are entitled to it. He will have her by any means because he’s the hero on that screen, he’s the person they’re all there to see, and she will love him for that.

But, Shosanna gets to do what those three hundred faceless soldiers couldn’t, she guns Zoller down. It ties in to both a meta cinema comment and a very real idea. Three hundred deaths is a statistic, it loses meaning or perspective. As we see more and more people gunned down on the screen, the audience laughs, but it becomes increasingly meaningless, a spectacle. They are the extras, but Shosanna is the star. A random soldier can’t kill Zoller, but Shosanna’s story has led her here and given her the spotlight to take him down. One death is a tragedy, three hundred deaths is a statistic.

That’s also why Shosanna’s quest means more than the Basterds’. She has real motivation, and her desire for vengeance exists on an emotional, real world level, not a spectacle level. It’s a tricky thing to weld the two narratives together, because the joy we get from watching Nazis get scalped earlier in the film would seem to be the same joy that Hitler gets from watching Zoller on screen. Is Tarantino equating us to Hitler? I think he’s more pointing out the inherent joy of watching violence portrayed on screen. I just read an interview where he mentioned that a woman getting bashed into a table out of nowhere in a romantic drama would be horrifying, but Steven Seagal killing seven people is fun. Movie violence exists in a different reality than real world violence, the Basterds’ quest takes place in movie reality while Shosanna’s takes place in a more reality based context.

So, the death of Shosanna is a shocking, tragic moment. As she’s shot up, the screen explodes with a flurry of colors and dust in the air, in death, she transcends reality and becomes pure cinema. It’s a moment that would be shocking simply for its content, but the music choice and slo-motion cinematography turns it into so much more. Shosanna is dead, but like a ghost, we see her rise up on screen and taunt the German people with what they’ve been complicit in.

The goal of “Pride of a Nation” is to refine the perception of the German nation by ignoring the past and focusing only on the heroism of one soldier. They want to erase all other narratives and preserve only that one. That’s why it’s so significant that Shosanna and Marcel should use the old films that her aunt held on to as the fuel for the fire that will consume the Nazis. This is literally her family history, the prized possession of her aunt and uncle, but it’s also the symbolic stand in for everything the Nazis want to destroy. In the scene with General Fenech, we hear that Goebbels seeks to supercede the Jewish cinema of 1920s Germany, and the Jewish controlled cinema of Hollywood. The history of film is a Jewish history, and that history is what interrupts the new history Goebbels seeks to write, then literally burns it down.

The most powerful image in the film, and its most effective summation, is unquestionably the screen catching fire as Shosanna laughs, turning her into an angel of vengeance, descending into hell to cast her wrath down on the German high command. That moment is chilling, and it builds as Donny and Omar break into the opera boxes and gun down Hitler, and the other Nazi personnel. Those scenes, shot like Scarface, see the Germans becoming victims of the very cinematic violence they were just enjoying.

The theater burns and with it, the symbols of Nazi iconography. Over the flames we hear Shosanna laugh, and in the smoke, we can see glimpses of her face, hanging in the air like a ghost. And then the whole thing blows up, the dynamite a satisfying cap to the climax.

The film ends with Landa negotiating the terms of his deal. It strains credibility a bit to think that Landa would abandon the Nazis, but in the context of the film, they’re already on a downward slope, and he’s just looking out for himself. Why does he kill von Hammersmark when he himself will soon be a traitor? Perhaps he’s taking out his rage at his own betrayal on a surrogate version of himself, or maybe he’s just sadistic, it’s hard to say.

Raine ends the film with a satisfying callback to the earlier chapter, as we see that Landa may be able to make a deal, but he can never escape the legacy of what he’s done. Raine claims it just might be his masterpiece, which is of course, a meta comment by Tarantino on the film we’ve just watched.

Is it Tarantino’s masterpiece? I’d have to see it again to say for sure, but I don’t know that anything can match the raw energy and excitement, the experience that is Kill Bill Volume I. But, I think this is definitely a stronger film than Pulp Fiction, Reservoir Dogs or Pulp Fiction, and it’s in many ways Tarantino’s most ambitious film. Shosanna is one of his most compelling characters, and there’s a confidence to the film’s construction that few can match.

Most of all, it’s a cinematic experience, full of memorable visuals and enduring moments, all designed to build tension and create a deep immersion in the world of the film. Calling a film “cinematic” is usually just a short hand for having good visuals, but there’s a huge difference between simply shooting pretty pictures and making a compelling film experience. This is an experience at every level, a masterclass in how to use music in films, and how to build tension through subtle means. It’s about suspense, about the buildup to the action, not just the action itself, and it’s just incredibly fun. You get caught up in the world and the characters, and the stylistic flourishes just immerse that. So, it may not be his best film, but it’s certainly a masterpiece, and likely to find a spot on my best of the decade list at the end of the year.

And Now What?: Funny People

The “And What Now?” series continues with the film that inspired it, a look at Judd Apatow’s Funny People. I think there’s a wide gap in the media discourse about the film and the film itself. The big story about the film was the idea that this was Apatow’s most serious project yet, a film that brought him to a crossroads between the goofy comedies of the past, and a serious meditation on life and death, with the implicit implication that the film would prove too difficult or dramatic for audiences to deal with. Has that happened? Perhaps, the film certainly hasn’t performed as well as some other Apatow films, but I think that’s largely a function of the media presentation of the movie rather than the movie itself.

I don’t think that Funny People is that much more dramatic than Knocked Up. Both films featured a blend of lowbrow raunchy comedy with some moments of real emotional soul searching by the protagonist when he’s given some unexpected news that breaks up his comfortable, but empty life. Sure, the hook of Funny People is darker, but the film is still pretty funny. And, it’s troubling to me that the studio will likely blame the film’s ‘failure’ on its ambitious blend of comedy and drama, and ambling narrative approach, meaning they’re less likely to greenlight another comedy that doesn’t have an obvious high concept hook. I’ve been trying to support mostly original films this summer, and it’s not good to see this and Public Enemies presented as ‘failures’ when in reality they’ll make more money back down the line than a film like Wolverine or G.I. Joe that opens huge, but quickly plummets. But, the opening weekend gives those films the allure of success, an allure that alludes Enemies and People.

But, business stuff aside, I think the film does represent a more mature Apatow in the sense that the dual protagonist structure allows him to explore both the person he was, in the form of Seth Rogen’s Ira, and the person he might become, Sandler’s George. It’s clearly a personal film, but I think it represents one of the central problems that successful directors face, the growing distance from normal life that comes with success. Apatow makes movies all day, that’s the world he’s in, and if he’s going to write authentically, it’s going to be about that world.

But, I think that ‘normal’ people always find it difficult to sympathize with the troubles of someone like George who, on the surface, seems to have everything he could ever want. The scene where he gets the news he has cancer, then has to pose for a photo with a fan makes clear that there’s a huge downside to being a celebrity. You always have to be on, no matter what, and it’s even tougher for someone who’s supposed to be funny. But, it still feels a bit like whining when nearly everyone in the audience would gladly trade places with George, or by proxy, Sandler or Apatow.

So, the question arises, what are the stories you can tell once you’ve got everything? You can wind up with a film like this, or Fosse’s All that Jazz, an exploration/critique of what fame has done to you. But, where do you go from there? When you’ve told your showbiz story, what do you do next?

I think the thing that makes Funny People or All That Jazz work so well where other films set in the world of film fail is that it’s not assuming that this world is inherently interesting, it’s just using it as a way to explore character.

But, the question still arises, where does Apatow go from here? He’s created such a defined aesthetic, a brand, that at this point even films he’s not involved with, like I Love You Man, make it seem like he’s ubiquitous. I like a lot of Apatow produced stuff, but at the same time, I’m more interested in seeing him develop his own voice than in getting more watchable but unexceptional films like Forgetting Sarah Marshall. Can Apatow keep walking the line between comedy and drama as well as he has in his past two films, or will he retreat into the easier world of straight up comedy? And, where will he draw on for his material?

I hope that Apatow isn’t scared off by the mixed reaction to Funny People and keeps going deeper and more character centric with his films. I know the film was criticized for its two and a half hour running time, but it’s precisely that lengthy running time that allows the film to build a world, and give you a sense of these characters’ lives. You could tell this story in 90 minutes, but in doing so, you’d cut out the moments that make it great. The more built up the world is, the less you notice the gears of a three act screenplay grinding under the surface. I get no satisfaction from just “watching a story unfold,” I want to get immersed in a world and characters’ lives, and that’s what this film did.

I don’t think Funny People was a flawless film by any means, but I love the way it built on the rambling narrative style and mix of comedy and drama in his previous films, and I hope he can continue to find the way forward and doesn’t become like the George Simmons character in the film.

Comics and The Con

It’s time for one last post on San Diego Comicon. I’ve read a bunch of great coverage about the con, a lot of which centers on the idea of what places do comics actually have at the event. With the big Hollywood presentations drawing all the press attention, and everyone talking about Twilight fans ‘ruining’ the con, where’s the discussion of comics themselves? People seem indignant that ‘their’ con has been stolen away by all this Hollywood stuff.

Having actually been there, I think they paint a kind of fatalist picture of the situation. Now, maybe it was really different in previous years, but the way I saw it, there’s essentially two cons. There’s the con that draws all the media attention, the Hall H stuff, the movie studio presentations, all of that is out there, but so is what was likely the same con from the 80s, the comics publishers and creators, still out there selling their wares and meeting with fans.

I think the central flaw in most peoples’ writing is the notion that the media would be covering comics stuff, and people would be going to the comics booth if only that Hollywood stuff wasn’t sapping the attention, that you’d have 100,000 fans buying comics if Johnny Depp hadn’t shown up. But, the reality is, without those Hollywood stars, you wouldn’t have nearly as many people in attendance, nor would you have anywhere near the media presence. The Hollywood section of the con has latched itself on to the existing comics con, and become its own promotional event.

So, it’s illogical to criticize the media for not focusing on comics when they’re not really there to cover the con, they’re there to cover Twilight, or Lost or whatever it is. Comics, despite being a key source for film concepts, still don’t have the cultural cachet that most people would be particularly engaged in whatever news comes out of comicon. The biggest comics story, Marvel’s acquisition of the Marvelman trademark, centers on an influential, but obscure comic that hasn’t even been published in fifteen years, and a character who even most comics readers don’t know. So, if you’re saying the media should cover the comics end of things, what should they report? I suppose there’s always the general check in with various creators, but that’s not news, there’s no urgency to report that someone just showed up to the con, and I don’t think there’s really a mainstream audience out there interested in it.

Back when I first seriously got in to comics, about ten years ago, there was a constant dialogue about trying to “save” comics, to get them cultural respect and mainstream acceptance. The strange thing is that it’s happened to a large extent, every movie seems to be based on a comic, superheroes are cool, and “graphic novels” definitely draw respect from people. I saw people all over reading Watchmen before the movie came out, and Alan Moore has become almost a household name.

The problem is, that apart from reading Watchmen, more people seem to respect comics than actually read them. And, even the people who read Watchmen don’t generally seem to branch out much further beyond the obvious classics like Maus or Dark Knight Returns. Those are nearly twenty-five year old books, surely people should be reading something more current.
So, even if people don’t support comics that much directly, isn’t it good that all these people are cool with going to an event called comicon? I’ve never read Twilight the book or seen the movie, but I love the fact that it’s cultivating the kind of fervor in young female fans that something like Star Wars did for me as a kid. If you’re going to comicon, on some level you’re still that kid who’s just an unabashed fan of something, and it’s great to see properties reaching girls on that level. And, the relative quality of the property doesn’t matter, it’s seeing people engage with something so strongly. Why are the same people who’d camp out for a Star Wars movie criticizing people for doing the same thing for Twilight?

After all, what comics, or any genre work, really need is that gateway work, the one that hooks you and makes you a fan for life. Get someone hooked young and they’ll keep coming back, and if Twilight leads to someone checking out Buffy, or if the Twilight comic leads to someone checking out more comics, that’s great. Isn’t that what ‘we’ always wanted, to see women and girls reading comics and engaging with genre material? To the fifteen year old boy carrying a “Twilight Ruined Comicon” sign, I can only say, where is your own self interest? Are you going to be more likely to get a girl who loved Twilight and thus accepts your comics or anime or sci-fi habit, or a girl who just looks down on that stuff. Twilight is the perfect gateway drug, be happy it’s out there.

I guess the problem is, people want others to engage with comics or genre stuff, but only in one specific way. So, superhero fans wouldn’t want to see someone go and snap up a bunch of Fantagraphics books, any less than someone would want to try to push Jimmy Corrigan on someone and see them go over and read a Geoff Johns comic. I definitely evangelize Morrison’s work and the TV shows I like, but on some level, you’ve got to realize, not everyone is going to engage the same way you are.

The problem for comics is that, particularly on the monthly level, readership levels are so low, and with rising prices, the question becomes, can the medium as we know it sustain itself? When an issue of Seaguy, a comic by the biggest writer in comics, sells 9,000 copies, it raises some questions. Comics may have to die and be reborn in a cheaper, more efficient format.

In the end, the comicon I went to was an amazing experience. Sure, the Hollywood parties may be out there, but the comics parties were there too, and it did still feel like a community. There’s a million things going on, but the con that was is still going strong in its shadow.

The Films of Kenneth Anger: Vol. II

Over the past two days, I watched all the films of Kenneth Anger Volume II. I got the DVD from Netflix, and I’ll admit it sat on the sidelines for a few weeks, but after checking it out I was shocked by just how good all these films were. I’d previously been familiar with Anger’s work from seeing “Scorpio Rising” in Intro to Film Part II in my days at Wesleyan, and I really liked it, but it turned out to be only the start of Anger’s work.

The thing that makes me like Anger’s work so much is the fusion of pop iconography and mystical imagery in an avant garde structure. Anger is one of the all too rare artists out there who manages to skillfully jump between low culture and high culture styles, making things that could seem pretentious, like Scorpio’s cuts to Jesus, work because they’re mashed up with the over the top sounds of an early 60s pop song.

Bringing in the magical component makes him even more like Grant Morrison, another artist who incorporates the style of low culture into avant garde narrative structures. The distillation of narrative to a series of iconic images and pop moments in Final Crisis feels like comics’ answer to the sort of jump cutty visual language Anger employs here. One of the major problems with most avant garde films is that they forget that on some level every piece of art is meant to entertain. It can be thought provoking and challenging, but there should be that visceral spark of fun, and all of Anger’s work has that.

The first couple of films in the collection are scored with the same sort of 50s and early 60s pop songs that David Lynch used to such wonderful effect in many of his films. Even after hearing it a bunch of times, a song like “Blue Velvet” feels utterly alien, I really like the song, but it feels like a transmission from another world. These pop songs are caught at the crossroads of a changing culture, moving from the crooner era of the 40s into the rock era of the 50s. Pop music essentially coalesced into the film it now inhabits with the arrival of The Beatles, who laid the groundwork for basically everything that’s followed. So, the more prog sounds of the later films feel more comfortable and familiar than the songs in “Scorpio.”

“Lucifer Rising” is the other long work in the set, and it’s a really fascinating film, a more concise and effective version of a lot of the themes that Jodorowsky explored in The Holy Mountain. I have a soft spot for the sort of mystical imagery that I’m sure a lot of people would call pretentious wank. I think film does have a legitimately mystical component, and the best filmmakers are the ones who manage to turn cinema into a kind of religious experience. Telling a story is fine, but casting a spell is much more challenging and ambitious. Malick is a filmmaker who does this, as are more recently Gaspar Noe and Wong Kar-Wai.

Anger draws on religious imagery as a way of building a cosmology within “Lucifer.” I’m not sure exactly what the film is saying, but watching it, the combination of images and music succeeded in drawing me into the world of the film. I love the visuals, particularly the astounding on location shots at the Sphinx and pyramids, as well as the arrival of the UFO at the end.

Grant Morrison has talked a lot about how his comics aren’t about magic, they are the magic, and that’s how I feel it is with these films too. In neglecting traditional narrative, Anger targets the subconscious directly and is able to draw you in. It’s the kind of filmmaking I love to see. Film can do so many things, it’s tragic that it’s been trapped in this prison of the three act narrative, composing the work on a page not on screen. I think that’s one of the things that makes filmmakers like Wong Kar-Wai and Malick so significant, the fact that they work off script so often, and actually build their films out of images not just translating the words on a page, and Anger does the same thing here, creating works that are distinctly cinematic and enthralling.

San Diego Trip

After roughly ten days out on the West Coast, I’m back in New York, and have successfully made it through my first comicon experience. San Diego was pretty much what everyone said it would be, jam packed with people, a grueling trip and also a lot of fun. We were out there shooting stuff for the Grant Morrison project, and wound up doing twenty six interviews over four days, which is a lot tougher than it sounds when just walking people up to the interview site can be a fifteen minute round trip.

But, I think we got a lot of great stuff, and were able to talk to the vast majority of people that we wanted to talk. Some of the people we talked to were Geoff Johns, Mark Waid, Cameron Stewart, Chris Weston, Jill Thompson, Frazer Irving, Matt Fraction, Jason Aaron and many more. I’ll be posting clips of these interviews over the course of the next few weeks, primarily stuff that won’t end up in the film, but is interesting on its own merits.

Because we spent so much time doing these interviews, there wasn’t that much time to spend on the show floor. I wound up buying only two comics the entire show. Wednesday was the day I spent the most time on the floor, and that was insane with people trying to snap up free stuff. I got a free copy of the first JH Williams/Rucka Batwoman issue, and Flash: Rebirth, both of which I wanted to check out anyway, so that was good.

The floor, and show in general, reminded me of basically a double sized New York Comicon. The major difference was the much more significant film presence here. At New York, there were a lot more comics sellers, and the floor felt a bit more manageable. Here, there were basically two cons. On the left side of the floor was film stuff and video games, while the right was more typical comics sellers and random vendors.

Because of the huge crowds, I wound up not making it into any panels at all. Work meant there was no time to line up that early, so I missed getting into Avatar by about five hours, and Lost by probably about a half hour. I’d have loved to see both, but ultimately it was probably not worth the wait.

The weird thing about being at the con is that you don’t get any of the buzz or news that’s covered in the mainstream media. I didn’t hear about the Marvelman announcement until I called someone who was still on the East Coast, I got very little buzz about any of the films, and am just now catching up on which films “won” the comicon buzz war. And, I think that there’s very much two cons. Comics haven’t disappeared from the con, they’re just one piece of a larger spectrum. It would still probably be the largest specifically comics focused convention, it’s just even that huge comicon is dwarfed by the Hollywood presence, or the random anime fans or whatever else is going on.

But on the ground level, it’s the comics stuff that sticks with me, and because it’s a more limited social scene than New York, everyone clusters in one place and by the end of the weekend, you’ve got a very singular scene of comics people hanging out, and that was a lot of fun. It’s tough to go out until two every night, then be up at 8 or 9 to get back to the con, but it’s definitely worth it.

So, where does comicon stand today? It’s still getting bigger and more crowded, but I had a really fantastic time.

I topped it all off yesterday with a trip to Imperial Beach, the town where John From Cincinnati was filmed, and took place. It was pretty amazing to go along and recognize locations from the series, and feel the vibe that the show had. The beach was great, there were a ton of people surfing, and it definitely felt off the beaten path, not the kind of touristy area that much of California is. If you’re in the area and a fan of the show, definitely make the trip. It’s the closest you’ll get to a second season.

Public Enemies

Yesterday, I finally went to see Michael Mann’s latest film, Public Enemies. Mann has made some of my favorite films, going back to Heat and The Insider, but it wasn’t until I saw Miami Vice in 2006 that he became one of my favorite directors. The Insider is still probably the stronger film on the whole, but Vice was so perfectly atmospheric and inventive in the way it told its story. It’s the closest a Hollywood blockbuster has come, and possibly ever will come, to the poetic film language of a Wong Kar-Wai or Terence Malick.

Mann embraced digital video with Collateral, and refined the aesthetic on Miami Vice, emphasizing the unique properties that digital video has, rather than running away from them, and he continues that exploration with Public Enemies, a film that feels like no other period film to date. What Mann does is use the visual language typically associated with very realistic, of the moment works and then spins it to depict the world of 1930s crime. The effect is to ground you in the reality of the moment in a way the vast majority of period films fail to do.

Most characters in period films feel alien to us, they speak in a different language and take part in large scale conflicts that have become cultural myth. And, typically ensconced in lush cinematography and production design, they feel a part of a glamorous world that’s more alien than any piece of sci-fi. Enemies turns the conventions on their head, by stripping the past of that idealized glamour. We see movie stars on the screen, in the film’s finale, and the characters we see feel far removed from that world. The harshness of the digital video makes it at times feel like we’re watching people wearing costumes in the present day, not people in the 30s. But, the thing is, that’s what the past was really like. They lived in the same world as us, walked on the same streets, wearing those kind of clothes.

I could see people saying it feels wrong to have that aesthetic in a work set in the past, but I’d argue that it actually gives the characters an emotional immediacy that is rarely seen. This is an arty, personal drama, played out against the backdrop of the 1930s. Unlike most period films, there’s no attempt to give us a sweeping view of the world, the primary focus is very intimate. In fact, the scenes that don’t work as well are the ones that try to give context for Dillinger’s flight by establishing the world that Hoover and Purves inhabit.

The Purves/Dillinger dichotomy is an echo of Heat, which was all about juxtaposing the lives of criminals and the cops who were trying to catch them. That film was brilliant because it made you care equally about everyone, you wanted Deniro’s character to get away at the exact same time you wanted Pacino to catch him. In its expansive world building and split point of view, it achieved the same emotional effects as The Wire.

Here, Purves feels much more one note. Christian Bale is an actor whose consistent intensity can make it difficult to find any kind of emotional identification point. I don’t want Bale to follow DeNiro down the path of awful comedy franchises, but I’d love to see him stretch by taking a role like DeNiro’s pot smoking lowlife in Jackie Brown. And, because the character isn’t as fully realized, the scenes focusing on him feel mostly superfluous, particularly against the emotionally engaging stuff with Dillinger and Billie.

The relationship between the two of them captures some of the same feeling of the fantastic Colin Farrell/Gong Li relationship in Miami Vice, the sense of trying to live in the moment, while facing down an inevitable split. I like the way the relationship just sort of happens, there’s something of a meet cute, but it’s really just established and we accept it and move on. The development is very subtle, lacking the obvious emotional beats we’ve come to expect from a Hollywood film. It’s the casual intimacy that sells it, notably the first sex scene, and the scene in the bath. The jump from that bath scene to a bunch of feds busting Dillinger was particularly jarring and effective in establishing the inevitability of Dillinger’s downfall.

This film follows Mann’s approach in Miami Vice of decentralizing the narrative and instead immersing you in the specific psychology of our main character. Dillinger does very little in the film, there’s a bit made of his charm over the public, but the show he puts on for the world isn’t emphasized, nor is much of the mythology built up around him. You get hints of Dillinger as a kind of Robin Hood figure, but there’s no direct exploration of how the people feel about him or the context of the world he’s in or any of that. Instead, we infer the world around him and build it through the story.

And, the film resolutely refuses to hit the usual beats, there’s no montage of big money spending, and even the bank robbery sequences just show the bare minimum of visually evocative images before moving along. It’s not about the action, it’s about our emotional engagement, and emphasizing the reality of what doing this stuff would actually entail. That’s not to say the film is unerringly realistic, the sequence at the end where Dillinger wanders like a ghost through the office of the task force designed to capture him is a beautiful way of showing him looking back on his life before his death.

Much like with Miami Vice, the film features an extensive supporting cast that is not particularly developed as characters in the traditional sense. The rest of the crew don’t have those little quirks that typically pass for character development, instead they’re just there. I couldn’t say most of their names or specific jobs, but you get a sense of who they are, and the world they inhabit just by the way they behave. The performances are strong all around, but not showy or attention grabbing. You just accept these people as the characters they are. Even Depp, one of the world’s biggest stars, disappears into the role, coming alive when he’s with Billie, but spending the rest of his time devoted to the mission.

Even more radical than the narrative dedramatization is the aesthetic. I loved the way that many of the action scenes were lit almost solely by the machine gun fire. Think of the shootout in the woods, where Purves’s gunfire standing on the car turns the scene into an almost abstract series of sparks puncturing the darkness. The sound of the guns is far from what we typically hear in a film, stripping away the big sounds and playing them more like large scale firecrackers.

Mann is one of the only filmmakers to understand how to use the unique properties of digital to create images that have a mystery and beauty that eclipses 35mm film. This film reminded me of Inland Empire at times in its low lighting, and reality with magic slipping in aestethic. Think of something like the way that Billie’s makeup always looks very much like makeup that’s been applied by an actual person, not the perfect makeup of a typical film character. That builds the reality of the world, but I think it’s also beautiful.

As the film moves towards Dillinger’s death, the eerie abstraction continues. He walks out of that theater, a gunshot explodes and we see chaos in the streets and that’s it. It’s not an overwrought finale, it just happens. He never finds out that Anna betrayed him, it just happens. Some would say that Mann’s dedramatized goes too far in depriving us of the pleasure we might want from a film like this, but in eschewing the expected beats, he takes characters away from the prison of being in a period film or a gangster film and finds the real people underneath.

I don’t think the characters and emotion is quite as deep as Miami Vice, but this is a really interesting followup, deepening the stylistic innovations of that film, and again playing with the unique aesthetic of digital video to deepen our emotional investment with the character. This film is almost like Ashes of Time, Wong Kar-Wai’s film which used the genre elements, in that case martial arts action, as a kind of abstract visual commentary on the character beats. That’s what all the shootouts are here, precursors to Dillinger’s inevitable death.

Mann has grown so much as a filmmaker, and reinvented himself in a really interesting way. I love his early work, but I’m much more interested in the approach he’s taking now. It’s great to see an artist remain so vital this far into his career. This is the best movie of the year so far, and I’m sure it will be high up when it comes to make the year end top tne list.

Lost: 5x14-5x17

Appropriately, I’m writing the post for the last piece of Lost season five on a plane. This season finale was the show’s best episode since the season two finale, “Live Together, Die Alone,” combining pretty much all the elements that make the show work, the weird scientific elements, the religious power of the island and its mysterious history into a relentless episode that resolved very little, but felt more satisfying than either of the past two finales.

But, first the buildup to that episode. Farraday’s trip through time in “The Variable” gave some better context for the life he’d been leading, and gave us a better understanding of why Eloise has such a strictly deterministic view of the world. She’s known for thirty years that she was going to shoot and kill her son, and that contributes to her detached, almost godlike demeanor when she speaks with Desmond. She feels that we’re all subject to the rule of destiny, and so she carries a sense of fatalism through her entire life. It must have been painful for her to see Daniel grow up and realize that he is becoming the man she’ll shoot on the island.

These episodes tie Eloise and Widmore much more closely to the history of the island, clarifying that both of them acted as leader before Ben’s ascension. Presumably they were there during the era when the Dharma people got killed, though Eloise seems to have left the island earlier than Widmore. She’s not on bad terms with Ben, like Widmore is, presumably because she knows that Ben plays a role in bringing Jack and Kate back to the island, so that they can fulfill their destiny and ensure that Daniel gets killed.

A lot of these episodes deal with similar time issues as The Invisibles. Because it’s a pre-determined time continuum, everything that has happened will happen. They are powerless to change the past because past/future are all relative and one day our present will be someone else’s past. The notion is present is merely a function of one’s position in the timestream at any given moment. Daniel thinks that he can avoid his fate, but everything he does to try to defy it only leads him closer to his death.

It’s sad to lose Farraday, he was a great character, one of the better of the new additions to the show in season four, and it still seemed like he had a lot of story to tell. Will we ever get to see what’s up at Ann Arbor, and who exactly the DeGroots and Alvar Hanso are? That stuff isn’t strictly essential to the show, but I hope that we get at least a bit more time hopping in season six to cover the creation of the Dharma Initiative, and more of the ongoing history of the island.

Let me start off with the one thing I found problematic in the finale, because the vast majority of it worked fantastically, and that’s the rapid flip flopping of Juliet’s motivations. As Sawyer and Juliet get on the sub, there’s some lingering pauses, leading us to believe that Sawyer has some kind of scheme in the works and is going to get off the sub and go back and save his friends. That’s the motivation he had three years earlier when they chose to stay behind, though likely some of that motivation was also to stay behind for Kate.

But, as we’ve seen Sawyer has grown a lot over the last three years, and together he and Juliet have found a place to call home. There’s a heavy emphasis on Sawyer’s frustration at having the life he built over the course of his time with Dharma torn apart by the arrival of Jack and Kate. Considering the glimpses of Sawyer’s past that we’ve seen, this is the only time that he’s actually had any sort of regular stable life. The show is about people lost on an island, but what the flashbacks in the early days emphasized is the notion that very few of these people have anything to go back to on the mainland. Maybe the characters are all meant to stay on the island, hence Jacob’s involvement in their lives to subtly push them there. In the case of Sawyer, the home had had was torn apart, and he can’t be bothered trying to save things anymore, he’s walking away from it all to go live with Juliet on the mainland.

This desire for escape ties in thematically with the scene with Rose and Bernard in the jungle. They also emphasize the idyllic comfort of the island. What is there for them to go back to when they’ve got each other? They’ve walked out of the ongoing conflict between various factions for control of the island and just chosen to live their own lives. It’s like Boy in the second volume of The Invisibles, the war holds no allure for them anymore if they can just be together. And, it’s a great example of the way that more and more people are viewing the island as home. Everyone who leaves it spends the rest of their lives obsessed with its mysteries.

You know things were going to be trouble when Kate winds up on the sub with Sawyer and Juliet, as she’s surely destined to cause trouble. The problem with the episode largely stems from the way the writers choose to write Juliet and her sketchy motivations for constantly changing her mind throughout the episode. She decides to leave with Sawyer, then decides that morally she needs to stop Jack from detonating the bomb. This could potentially make sense, though I wanted her and Sawyer to leave the island together, and let Kate go off on her mission.

The bigger problem comes when Juliet decides that she is going to help Jack set off the bomb, because of the way Sawyer looked at Kate. So, even though she acknowledges that he’ll stay with her forever, she all of a sudden decides that that isn’t enough because she thinks that he still loves Kate more. That’s problematic on a story level for a couple of reasons. One is it makes Juliet seem awfully flaky, and turns this whole atom bomb storyline into yet another adolescent trouble within the love triangle.

But, more importantly, as Miles says, no one really seems to think through the plan. If you’ve got an incident involving an unspecified release of electromagnetic energy, wouldn’t it be likely that setting off this atom bomb would be precisely the thing that kicks off this incident? And, even if the plan goes ahead as planned, that would mean essentially killing the people that they are, and choosing to revert to the people they were before the island. I don’t think that’s something that most of them would want, considering how miserable they all seem in their flashbacks.

From Jack’s point of view, his motivations are unclear. He’s already seen that going back to the mainland doesn’t solve anything, the memory of the island haunts him. I suppose his thought is that once you go to the island, it has such a hold on you that you can never return and have a happy life on the mainland. So, he has to go back and prevent himself from ever going to the island in the first place, thus ensuring that he remains in his regular life, and never has the deviation to adventure that the island represents. Essentially, if you’ve never had excitement in your life, you don’t notice when you’re bored.

And, ultimately it all comes down to hinge on Jack’s belief that he messed things up so badly with Kate that he has to reset all of spacetime to get another chance with her. This is obviously illogical, since she’ll go to jail, and he’ll never even meet her, but he’s not thinking logically. Why everyone goes along with it is the bigger question. No matter how bad some of their time on the island was, how could they be complicit in trying to wipe away many years of their life? It seems particularly odd for Sawyer to go along with this.

In a show like Buffy, we see small scale personal emotional conflicts played out as grand scale battles for the fate of the universe, and it works because of the way that they choose to frame the metaphorical battles. I could see a story like this work on Buffy, using the bomb and time erasure as metaphor for lost love and the desire for another chance, but it doesn’t make as much sense in this show, which is ostensibly reality based.

So, that’s my major issue with the finale. I don’t buy the rapidly shifting character motivations, or everyone’s decision to just detonate a nuclear bomb, which is much more likely to just kill them all than reset space time.

But, it did lead to some great moments of action spectacle, as they all storm the Swan station and have a big shoot out. The high point though was definitely the activation of the electromagnet, which echoed the season two finale’s similar onrush of metal objects.

It also made for an emotional peak that made up for at least some of the shifting character motivations. After telling Sawyer she didn’t believe he loved her the most, Sawyer does everything he can to save Juliet from being pulled down into the magnetic field. It’s an awesome scene, hitting really strong on an emotional level, thanks to the epic visual context. It gets closer to some of those Buffy moments I mentioned earlier, where the nuclear bomb detonation plan just has too many real world logic gaps, this moment married the visual spectacle and action tension to a huge emotional payoff. The actors are really raw, and it pays off the entire relationship that developed between Sawyer and Juliet over the course of the season.

That said, losing Juliet from the series, very troubling. I’m sure she’ll be back a few times thanks to the trippy time aspects, but in detonating the bomb, present day Juliet is presumably dead, or perhaps zapped somewhere else in time where she and Sawyer won’t be together. Elizabeth Mitchell was a standout in the cast, and pretty much the only effective female character left on the show. So, if anyone had to die, it shouldn’t have been her.

The way this story plays out raises some interesting questions about the seeming disconnect between what I’m guessing is the creators’ intended or perceived perception of the character dynamics and my own emotional response. They seem to still believe that people have a strong interest in Kate and Sawyer being together, or at least in this triangle being perpetuated. At this point, Kate is like Riley from Buffy, a really annoying character who just keeps sticking around and getting a prominent place in the show. The relationship between Juliet and Sawyer was much more real and emotionally engaging than the constant drama of anything involving Kate.

But, I do love the audacity of igniting the nuclear bomb, leaving pretty much everything up for grabs in the sixth season. I’m assuming that the timestream hasn’t been altered, and this bomb might be what propels everyone back to 2007. But there’s a lot of different options, and even though nothing was specifically resolved, it felt emotionally satisfying in a way that the previous two season finales didn’t quite achieve.

Jumping across time and space, all this stuff probably wasn’t even the high point of the finale. Right from the first scene, this episode was expanding the series’ scope and clarifying what the essential conflict of the series is. We thought that it was Widmore vs. Ben, or Dharma vs. hostiles, a sort of society vs. nature conflict, as the hostiles continually repel invaders, or integrate them into their group.

But, it turns out that the conflict is actually part of a much longer, ongoing struggle between Jacob and another man, who have a sort of bet going on another the exact nature of humanity. Jacob seems to continually bring new groups of people to the island, as a way of exploring whether they can overcome their interpersonal conflicts, and stop being violent and live in harmony. Meanwhile, his associate, who doesn’t seem to have an official name, but I’ll call him Esau, based on what other people online seem to call him, schemes to undermine Jacob and sow conflict within the groups.

This clarifies much of what we’ve seen over the course of the series, by framing the individual conflicts within the context of a much larger conflict. The island has some wonderful healing powers, but it also shows people things that threaten them and incite them to violence. Jacob has a very Christlike demeanor, he’s the one who seems able to heal people, the good at the heart of the island. While Esau is more like Satan, showing people what they want to see in order to manipulate them into his service.

As we find out at the end of the episode, Esau manifests himself in the form of Locke when Locke returns to the island, enlisting Ben into his service, and playing on Ben’s weakness and guilt to ultimately get Jacob killed. Esau presumably is the Smoke Monster, and is also able to manifest in many different forms on the island, appearing to Jack as his dad, and Ben as his mom, so many years earlier, as a way of getting Ben to join the Others and set in motion the lengthy chain of events that led to this moment. Esau also manipulated Rousseau, getting the rest of her group killed, so that her baby would be in a position for Ben to take her, raise her, and ultimately allow her to get killed.

The potential problem with any story like this is that it reduces our heroes to pawns of much larger forces, merely playing out an endless war. But, I think this works well in the context of this season because we’ve already been dealing with the notion of characters unable to change their paths within the timestream. The timestream is predetermined, but are our actions within it predetermined? The story takes on a mythic resonance, tying back to Greek mythology, where humans struggled to assert their authority in the face of gods who sought to direct their destiny. It also feels very Invisibles, in the notion of this grand conflict between the force of darkness and the force of light. Jacob functions as Barbelith, seeking to move people to the island so they can evolve beyond war, while Esau is like the Outer Church, seeking to perpetuate the endless conflict between humans.

This put the series in a much larger context. Every conflict over the course of the entire timeline can be integrated in to the larger conflict between Jacob and Esau. As we see in the episode’s flashbacks, Jacob travels through the world, subtly influencing people so that they wind up on the island, where they are “supposed to be.” At first, I thought that Jacob was being portrayed as a sinister force, helping Kate get away with her shoplifting, and assisting Sawyer in writing the letter that would ultimately lead to him spending his entire life committed to vengeance.

But, it seems more like Jacob is there, subtly working to ensure that everyone makes the choices they need to to wind up on the island, and in the position to overcome their past failures and make themselves better. It’s essentially a conflict between optimist and pessimist, Jacob believes that people can better themselves, while Esau believes they will always devolve into war and violence.

The Sawyer and Kate scenes obviously direct the two of them down a set path, but the Jin/Sun and Jack scenes are subtler. In the case of Jin/Sun, the flaw that brings them to the island is Sun’s desire for escape from Jin, and during their time on the island, they are able to work through that issue, to overcome the conflict, and be together. Similarly, even though Jacob ostensibly encourages Sawyer’s vengance, he is really putting him in a position where he can finally confront his problem and overcome it. The island gives everyone what they need, the chance to confront the issues that dominate their civilian life, and Jacob gives them all a subtle nudge, an encouragement to persevere and get to the island where they can change and get better.

The question arises, why didn’t Jacob appear to Ben, why is he so secretive? I’m not really sure why, other than perhaps the idea that in the conflict that Jacob and Esau have, Jacob can only set people on their path, he can’t step in to help them until they’ve reached some kind of personal enlightenment, at which point he will finally appear to them. It would seem that Richard is the only one who’s actually be in contact with Jacob, though Locke presumably actually did see/hear him when he went to the cabin in “The Man Behind the Curtain.”

Jacob tells Locke “Help me” there. The fact that Jacob did appear to him implies that Locke was closer to being on his path than Ben was, and perhaps Jacob was reflecting on how close Locke was to achieving his destiny and being the leader that the island needed.

What is Richard’s role in all of this though? He was granted immortality by Jacob many years ago. Perhaps the price of that was that it took him “out of the game” to some extent, so that he can listen to what the leaders on the island want to do, but can’t actually direct them himself. He seems to function as Jacob’s custodian of the island, directing things, but not actively interfering. It’s likely that Richard was on the Black Rock and arrived in the opening scene. Hopefully next season will bring us the long awaited Richard flashback.

One of the interesting things about the show at this point is that it feels like there’s so much story left to tell. In the early days, story points were doled out at snail’s pace, intercut with seemingly endless flashbacks retreating the same territory. At this point, I’d love to see more of the Dharma Initiative, more of the foundation of the Dharma, more of the early days of the island. There’s so much stuff out there to explore, and I’m not sure how much of it we’ll actually get to. It makes me wish that the show was paced a bit faster in the early days, leaving more time to hang out at Dharma here and get further insight into their world. Obviously the show has made a quantum leap in these last couple of seasons, but considering how much story there is, I’m not sure why it was doled out so slowly in the first place.

The Jacob/Esau conflict echoes the stated motivations of the Dharma Initiative, to form a better world, a utopian place where world peace can be achieved. So, Jacob was presumably influential in drawing Dharma to the island. He keeps bringing different types of people to the island, seeing how previous groups failed and then trying things again. The island’s good and bad elements become representative of the larger good and bad within humanity. We all have the capacity for good and evil, and each personal battle becomes representative of the larger struggle.

But, if Jacob has such a large reach, why is it that the island, with Jacob as proxy would “punish” people for leaving? Perhaps devotion to the island is a manifestation of devotion to Jacob’s mission of making a better world outside the presumably fallen place that is the real world. So, the more the real world infects the island, the less chance there is to make it better. In general, the people who abandoned their real world incarnations and grew and changed have succeeded the most on the island, while people like Jack, who remained wrapped up in their old selves failed to fulfill Jacob’s will.

Time is relative, but we’re presented with Jacob dying at the same time the nuclear bomb goes off, which implies that Jack’s desire to erase his time on the island is the ultimate affront to Jacob. To be on the island is to be in harmony with Jacob, so to try to erase that harmony from time entirely would lead to Jacob’s death, or at least the seeming death of the physical form he currently embodies, and perhaps a victory in the war for Esau, the definitive proof that people can always be manipulated through their weaknesses to do bad things, to even kill the people who they saw as god. That’s essentially what it is when Ben kills Jacob, a revenge against God for bringing so much pain into his life.

The visual design of Jacob’s temple was fantastic, and the whole scene, particularly intercut with the electromagnetic event, echoed really nicely the similar test of faith in the season two finale, when Locke had his faith in the island/Jacob vindicated through the electromagnetic event. In this case, Ben’s faith is rendered invalid, as he follows the lead of a false prophet, and kills the person who may have allowed some things to be taken away, but also gave him everything he had.

As I’ve said before, Ben is always a more interesting character when he’s out of power. So, the idea that he has to do everything that Locke says makes him very compelling. It’s also interesting to see Ben, who believes that he always has the answers, put in a situation where he’s totally out of his depth, caught in a war between two gods.

The escalation of events at the finale was particularly well done, as we find out that Ilana and her crew seem to have a very deep connection to the island, going back to the days when Richard was Ricardos. Perhaps they’re the ones who really are trying to save it. They knew where Jacob was, and also know that the cabin has been corrupted after he let it, as it was inhabited by Esau in the guise of Christian Shepard. That raises questions about what exactly happened to Claire, why did Esau lure her away, and where is she now? Was it all part of getting Kate to take the baby, and split up her and Jack to set the nuclear bomb plan in motion? Aaron was the divisive thing between them, and the detonation of the bomb in 1977 may have aided in killing Jacob in the present, or at least set in motion the events that led everything to happen.

In a season about the immutability of time, it’s great that the final conflict comes down to beings who can move through time and space, creating chains of events to play out their wills on a lower human level. It’s the exact same thing as John a Dreams or the Harlequinade in The Invisibles.

It would seem now that Locke actually was killed by Ben in the hotel room. The thing that led him there, that led him to bring all the Oceanic Six back was actually Esau’s manipulation. He told Richard what to tell the real Locke, thus setting in motion the path that would lead to the death of Locke and the creation of Fake Locke. Esau has co-opted the image of Jacob’s leader and used him to bring about Jacob’s destruction. Will the real Locke ever return? It’s not looking likely, but his body is still kicking around, so who knows.

Well, this was easily the show’s best season on the whole, doing so many fun and inventive stories, and hitting some really strong emotional beats along the way. The Sawyer/Juliet and Dharma stuff was fantastic, and this season finale was top notch all around. I found some of the mainland stuff early on a bit lacking, but everything picked up eventually and we got a wide variety of story. Particualrly notable was the Jacob/Esau stuff at the end, which seemingly comes out of nowhere, but actually clarifies so much of the thematic development of what came before. And, kudos to the production and Mark Pellegrino for making Jacob feel like such a key character even though we’d never seen him before.

Where does the show go from here? There’s a lot of options, they could parallel the detonation of the bomb and Jacob’s death to say that the timestream is now open and everyone can do whatever they want to do, unbound by what’s happened before. I’m guessing we’ll see a bit more island history, before getting into a final battle that will answer the question of whether everyone can move beyond conflict or if they’re doomed to repeat it.

Going into Dark Tower spoilers a bit, the Jacob stuff reminded me a lot of the very end of the last book, or the end of The Stand. In The Dark Tower, Roland ends his quest and is told that he did things wrong, and has to go back and do it all again, only after that can he ascend up another rung of karma, and get closer to leaving his mission behind. It becomes about evolution, and in this case, rather than one man struggling to change things, it’s an ongoing series of visitors, each trying to get it right.

In the context of The Stand, we saw all our characters defeat the dark man, Randall Flagg, but he turned up elsewhere at the end, setting the whole thing in motion. That’s the same core conflict as Jacob/Esau, and the question here is whether the show will let everyone triumph and end the cycle of violence, or just allude to a possible ending in the future, once they finally get things right. Either way, it’s rich thematic material, and does a great job of synthesizing so many seemingly random elements into something resembling a cohesive mythology. Well done.

My next Lost experience will be the Lost comicon panel a week from today. It’s great to be caught up on the show and not have to worry about getting spoilers for anything that’s already aired. After that, it’s the long wait until season six debuts. But, I’m definitely excited to see it happen.

I started out this rewatch with the promise that I’d give Lost one more chance to impress me, and though there were some ups and downs, I’m totally on board. I still think the first three seasons have colossal structural issues, and the first season in particular feels very basic and underdeveloped compared to what comes later. But, once the endpoint was set, the show became remarkably consistent, and continuously entertaining and thought provoking. The first three seasons will probably keep it out of the pantheon of greatest series for me, but I could easily see it moving in to my top 15 all time when I make the list, particularly if they stick the landing next season.

Going to San Diego

Today, I’m leaving the East coast to head out to California to do some filming for our Grant Morrison documentary at the San Diego Comicon. As a long time comics/film/TV fan, this is essentially the biggest event I could ever attend. I’d always wanted to get to San Diego at some point, and this year it just happened.

I’ve got a pretty busy schedule of interviews set up, with some really cool people, for the Grant project. Beyond that, I’m hoping to get to the Lost panel, the Joss panel and the Dr. Who panel, and see if the biggest con in the world means the biggest values in the world when it comes to buying some trades. I’ve heard that San Diego is so huge you can’t even comprehend it, so I’ll see if it lives up to that reputation. Either way, I’ll be out in California for ten days, after the ultra crappy weather here for the past few months, that’ll be nice.

So, look for reports out of San Diego, during if I’ve got time, or a big compilation after. And, also hopefully my computer battery will be strong enough that I can do my writeup of the last Lost episodes on the plane. Short take is the finale was amazing, probably the series’ second best episode behind “Live Together, Die Alone,” but with one glaring error, the inexplicable motivations of Juliet. More on that soon.

And, if you’re at San Diego and have something to say about Grant Morrison, shoot me an e-mail and we can schedule a time to shoot with you.

Lost: 5x05-5x13

This batch of Lost episodes takes us through some of my favorite material the show has ever done, as well as some slightly frustrating stuff. But, in general I’m loving the 70s era stuff, and the turns that the show has taken in this season.

There’s two primary threads in this batch of episodes, one is the tracking of how the Oceanic Six make it back to the island, and the other follows the island based characters as they join up with the Dharma Initiative. I’ll start out with the mainland stuff, since I found that much more poorly executed, and a generally lackluster end to the Oceanic Six arc.

The mainland stuff that worked best was Locke’s journey around the globe in “The Life and Death of Jeremy Bentham.” After turning the wheel of time, in a really cool scene, he met up with Widmore, who once again casts doubt on who’s the “good guy” and who’s the “bad guy” in his ongoing feud with Ben. We’re inclined to side with Ben, simply because we’ve spent so much more time with him, but ultimately neither of them seems particularly reputable. The introduction of the third group of people, the new crash survivors raises even more questions.

But, that stuff is all so hypothetical, it’s hard to say anything definitive about it. The factions battle over the island, almost like gods, while our characters suffer or prosper at their hands in the middle of it. The Locke episode was one of the most downbeat and atmospheric episodes the show has ever done. I don’t think it’s one of the series’ strongest episodes, but it worked well as a trial for Locke, he passed through suffering on the mainland and is now reborn on the island, his quest vindicated.

The problem with the episode for me was more in how it relates to “316.” “Bentham” seemed entirely about the characters telling Locke he’s insane to want to go back to the island, but in “316” they all go back, seemingly of their own volition. I get why Jack is going back, his life has gone to hell and he blames it all on leaving the island. But, even after her spotlight episode, I don’t get why Kate went back. What is her plan for rescuing Claire, and if she did go back for Claire, why isn’t she looking for her at all?

The structural decision to not say why anyone went back to the island doesn’t make much sense, and I doubt we’ll get a full explanation for why Hurley chose to go back before the season ends. It makes particularly little sense for them all to have such a turnabout after utterly rejecting Locke’s entreaty. It felt like the writers decided this mainland stuff was over, so everyone just went back all of a sudden, logic be damned. Maybe more attempts to clarify the motivation will happen in the next few episodes, but after so much stuff with the Six, it didn’t feel totally motivated for them to return. There’s a lot of playing with “destiny” and what the island wants, and in this case that feels like a shortcut replacing real character motivation.

“316” did have a really downbeat, palpable atmosphere, but the illogical character beats were what I ultimately took away from the episode.

But, part of my frustration with going back to the six, and particularly Jack and Kate, is that it means time away from the people on the island, who are by far the most interesting characters at this point, and their entry in to the Dharma Initiative is one of the most fun episodes in the series’ history. As longtime readers probably noticed, I have a massive affection for the Dharma material, going back to the very first Pierre Chang video, which I still think is the best three minutes in the entire series. So, to see the full operation in its glory days is great.

“LaFleur” features many great moments, as we see Sawyer’s continued rise to leader, alongside his co-pilot Juliet. I love the dynamic that’s developed between the two of them, which comes to fruition in the great scene on the dock, where Sawyer sells her on staying on the island for a while, even though she’s wanted to do nothing but leave for the past three years. He and Juliet are great because there’s very little of the will they, won’t they drama of the Jack/Kate/Sawyer triangle. There’s not the constant posturing for position. Without Jack on the island, Sawyer is the undisputed alpha male, and that means he doesn’t have to be as over the top as Jack was, he knows that Juliet will support him, and they can run things together.

This leads to the seamless jump from Sawyer selling her on staying on the island, to three years later, where everyone is living a basically happy life. I found myself wanting to see even more of that three year gap, to just stay in this world forever, where LaFleur runs things, and lives with Juliet and everyone’s happy. There’s that old adage that happy people is boring, but I just love the world of Dharma so much, and it’d be great to discover it through the eyes of our characters. Thankfully, it looks like we’ll get a glimpse into upper management through the eyes of Farraday in an upcoming episode.

Hanging out in the world of Dharma, everything’s chill and times are good, so it didn’t please me much to see Jack and Kate turn up, to mess with the perfect setup and domestic bliss of Sawyer and Juliet. It’s weird how you find yourself invested in certain characters and couples on a TV show. Why do I care so much about Sawyer and Juliet together? What makes that important to me as a viewer of the show? A lot of it is the maturity of the characters, and the quiet dynamic between them. Juliet is easily the most interesting female character on the series, carrying a moral complexity and demeanor that Sun and Kate can’t match. And her being with Sawyer calms him down and makes him grow a lot, as he tells Kate later on.

So, with my affection for them, I was glad to see that Jack and Kate’s return to the island didn’t ruin their relationship, or lead to a lot of adolescent bickering. Jack and Kate seem totally out of their depth, and wind up essentially ruining the life that everyone has here. It’s interesting to consider that this show is called Lost, but now that the Six have chosen to come back to the island, what does the endgame become? Getting ‘rescued’ isn’t enough, the search for happiness ceases to be connected to a specific end, and becomes a more general existential journey. So, maybe in the Dharma Initiative Juliet and Sawyer were rescued. Juliet got the kind of community she was originally promised, while Sawyer was able to reinvent himself and become a better man, unencumbered by his past. He’s left behind the Sawyer name, the mark of the man who shaped him into a con artist who couldn’t show his real feelings, and became someone else.

That makes the discussion between Kate and Cassidy on the mainland feel so off. The Sawyer they talk about isn’t the character we’re watching now, and I don’t think that he jumped off the plane because he couldn’t face being with her. Cassidy in particular seems to cast her own, justifiably negative, view of Sawyer on to Kate.

I’ve talked a lot about the divide in complexity between characters who were added later in the series and ones who were there from the beginning. At this point, Sawyer and Locke have been reinvented and grown into characters just as complex as the new batch, while we’ve shed Lost 1.0 characters like Charlie and Claire, but pretty much all the Oceanic Six still feel tied to the archetypal roles they had in the show’s original conception. Sayid and Sun have suffered from some inconsistent development, and the lack of a long enough focus to really propel their own narrative forward. Sun smacking Ben with the oar is a fun moment, but beyond getting Jin back, it’s hard to say what her agenda is. Sayid gets put through the same torture beats again and again, though I did love the tripped out truth serum scene where he reveals that he’s from the future. That leaves Jack and Kate as the most frustrating characters because they still suck up so much screen time, but just don’t feel as real as the best characters on the show.

Anyway, the reappearance of young Ben kicks the narrative back into forward motion after the sojourn at Dharma town. These episodes, particularly “Dead is Dead” give us a lot of insight into the history of the Others and the development of Ben into the person he became. I’m curious about the idea that he lost his “innocence” by being healed in the temple. Locke tells Ben that they’re going under the temple, not into it, which is where the smoke monster resides. What resides in the temple itself? Perhaps the island demands a sacrifice in order to heal Ben, in the same way that Locke had to sacrifice Boone to continue his ascend to ruler of the island status.

That episode followed up on the interesting stuff with Sun and Lapidus meeting Jack’s dad in the abandoned Dharma cabins. What is Jack’s dad at this point? Is he actually reborn, or is he just a manifestation of the island’s will, in the same way that Alex is for Ben? The stuff with Sun looking at the picture of all the contemporary characters at the Dharma camp reminded me a lot of the end of The Shining, raising the question of the island as a mystical space that requires people to fulfill specific roles.

Ben forces Widmore to leave the island because Widmore spent too much time on the mainland. The island has specific rules, and those who believe in it most seem to get the most out of it. You could argue that the reason Sawyer, Miles and Juliet and are so happy for three years is because they chose to stay on the island and follow its will. By leaving the island often, Widmore broke the covenant with the island, and could no longer be its leader.

Has Ben broken his covenant by moving the island? Perhaps, rather than rule the island, Ben must now serve Locke. I think there were some effects issues with the incorporation of old clips inside the smoke monster, but I loved Alex appearing and yelling at Ben, telling him to follow Locke. And the Smoke Monster’s lair raises questions about just how long this island has been around, and how many regime changes it’s had.

I’m guessing that at least some of next season will delve even deeper into the history of the island, perhaps finally showing us the origin of Richard Alpert, and where this statue comes from. The statue seems to have major significance to the new group of people on the island, who seem to have come there by design, in the same way that the Oceanic Six did. How did they know that all the Six would be on the plane? Are they in cahoots with Ben, or an independent group?

So, there’s many questions out there, and the happy days of Dharma for Juliet and Sawyer seem on the verge of crumbling. But, at least we got one more comparatively light episode there, “Some Like it Hoth,” which featured some funny time travel material, and at last, an extended spotlight on Pierre Chang, who’s confirmed to be Miles’s father. I think Miles is one of the most fun and interesting characters on the show, so it was great to see him get the chance to do a bit more than usual. Some of the flashback stuff fell into the contrived beats that old flashbacks did, but I loved the scene with him, Hurley and Chang driving around, and the promise of a possible beer together. Chang has become such an iconic figure through the movies that pretty much anything he does is of interest to me.

I’d have loved to spend even more time in the world of Dharma, but it looks like it’s almost at an end. I’ve got four episodes left to go, then I’ll be all caught up and looking at a six month wait for the final season. I’ll probably wrap the season tomorrow, then write up those last episodes, stay tuned.

Lost: 5x01-5x04

Lost’s fifth season throws off the last shackles of the series’ strictly divided flashback or flashforward structure and establishes a two pronged narrative, partially on the mainland, partially on the island, with the island half doing its own journey through time, sending the characters backwards and forward through the island’s own history. It’s a fantastic device, giving us the opportunity to explore a lot more of the island’s own history, and give the characters still on the island something new to deal with. However, the series is once again suffering to some extent from the problem it had during the first three seasons, and that’s a disparity of interest between the two narratives. In the past, it was the flashbacks that didn’t work so well, now it’s the 2007 mainland stuff that’s got me wanting to jump out and over the other storyline.

More on that later, for now let me just praise the dizzying journey that was the season premiere. The opening sequence is a great riff on the now iconic “Make Your Own Kind of Music” Desmond introduction, finally bringing legendary Dharma video host Marvin Candle/Pierre Chang out of the confines of old VHS tapes and 16mm film and into the glorious clarity of the show’s reality. I still think the first orientation film in “Orientation” is the series’ finest moment, raising possibilities I’m still waiting to be fully realized three seasons later.

What that video sketched out was a vision of the Dharma Initiative as a utopian, forward thinking organization that also had a strong undertone of menace. I’m still waiting to see the full story of the Dharma group, to see the people depicted in that video, and understand what went into the creation of the Initiative in the first place. The teaser here in the first episode indicates that our characters will soon find their way there, and we’ll get greater insight into the glory days of the Dharma Initiative. But, not so much yet.

The island story so far this season is easily the strongest the show has ever been. After teasing so many events in the island’s past, it’s really exciting to travel back through all these eras. The Dharma era is the one that interests me most, but the stop in the 50s, to see the Others in conflict with the US army has a lot of good stuff as well. It’s a great structural device to allow us to simultaneously get background history/exposition filled in, and keep our present day characters moving forward in their own stories.

I’ve always enjoyed time travel stories, and it seems that the series is sticking to the Invisibles model of time travel, which is that every movement through time has already happened, so you can’t actually change anything, you do things that you do because you already did them in the past. It’s a view of time which essentially denies the idea of any kind of present, all time exists as what Morrison in The Invisibles called the “allnow.” So, Richard can send his own compass from the future back to the past with Locke so that Richard from the 50s can show it to young Locke in the 60s. I like seeing how seemingly random elements like Richard’s appearance in Locke’s past now becomes something motivated and more significant.

This season flows seamlessly out of season four, a contrast to the semi-reboot feel of seasons two and three. Each season has its own distinct feel, but the narrative link between this and season four feels tighter than say the jump to the world of the Others in season three, or the structural switch in season four. It gives the impression that the creators had a much tighter plan when building these last three seasons, so scenes from Locke’s flashback last season can link together in a way that we can’t expect the glimpsed Claire giving birth scene to tie with the present.

It’s become more apparent as the show goes on that the real core character is the Island itself. I thought that the flashbacks felt pointless because of their narrative disconnect from the rest of the show, but seeing the off island stuff here, I felt a similar disinterest next to the island action. The Island not only serves as the narrative hub, it’s what makes characters more interesting. The closer a character gets to the mysterious force that is the Island, the more interesting they become, though I suppose that could simply be a function of my love for the quasi-religious force that the Island exerts over the characters.

The reason that people like Claire and Charlie, or even Sayid or Jin never felt essential to the show is that they had no real role to play in the drama of the Island itself, which in the wake of the Widmore/Linus revelations, has become increasingly the main focus of the series. Those characters didn’t have the mystical revelations that Locke, Ben or Desmond did, so even when they’re at the center of the narrative, they don’t feel as central to the show as even someone like Faraday or Miles does here. The characters had some strong moments, but they’re not what makes the show so distinct.

It’s widely acknowledged that most of the show’s best characters were introduced in the show’s later seasons, and that makes sense since the real narrative of the show only came to the fore in the later days. The show isn’t about wanting to leave the island now, it’s about controlling the island, or understanding the Island, with the Island itself functioning as an all purpose metaphor for that which beyond traditional human understanding, be it God or some other divine force. So, characters like Ben, Richard or Desmond are all more attuned to that understanding of the show than the earlier conception of an island filled with a myriad of horrors.

The off island action here isn’t anywhere near as bad as the flashbacks of yore, but it focuses on two characters who have become increasingly frustrating to watch, Jack and Kate. The ostensible stars of the show, I find them far less compelling than pretty much anyone else on the show. Jack is interesting sometimes, as when he came into conflict with Locke in last year’s finale, but the stuff here feels like plot mechanics playing to move the story along, and I’m not looking forward to Jack’s return to the island, simply because I think the character dynamics there are much more interesting without him.

Kate is another character the writers have struggled with over the years, they never can seem to agree on whether she’s a damsel in distress or a totally capable fighter. Here, she’s stuck with the most boring female plot line possible, the transformation into a mother. Wouldn’t it have been much more interesting to see Hurley or Jack struggling to raise a kid, and Kate just slipping away on the boat, never turning herself in and facing prosecution? It just seems like the most obvious way to spin the character, and I’ve got no emotional investment in her connection to Aaron, who she never really dealt with on the island. I also don’t buy the woman who burned every bridge she ever had deciding all of a sudden to settle down and become a suburban mom. It doesn’t make much sense, and was never given any real motivation. There seems to be a big deal being made about Kate wanting to keep Aaron despite the fact that he’s not really her son, but I just don’t have any investment in it.

The other vexing thing about the off island stuff is that hanging around with this batch of characters has taken away a lot of the evangelical fervor that made Ben so compelling last season and turned him into more of a generic trickster manipulator bad guy. I loved him and Locke competing for the affection of Jacob last year, but the more power he has, the less interesting he is. In season two, imprisoned in a room, or season four, subject to Locke’s leadership, he’s easily the most interesting character on the series. But, as here, or at the start of season three, when he’s already in total control, his manipulation has no real end. There’s some interesting stuff with him, particularly the meeting with Ms. Hawking, but I want to see him get back to the island, or at least perhaps interact with Locke after Locke gets off the island and becomes ‘Jeremy Bentham.’

But, there’s some good stuff on the mainland too. I really liked the stuff with Hurley and his parents, and his crumbling belief in the effectiveness of the Oceanic Six lie. He’s the only character to actually have supportive parents, even if it means a recasting of his dad from child abandoner to nice guy. I don’t necessarily mind that since it seems like a natural growth of the events we saw in “Tricia Tanaka is Dead,” and it’s a lot more interesting than hitting the same bad dad beats again. But, in general, the on island action is more interesting.

At this point, the on island characters are all much more engaging than the people on the mainland. Sawyer continues his growth, and his grief over surviving while he believes Kate died is sublimated by some extent to his and Juliet’s ascension as the alpha leaders of the remaining survivors. Sawyer is a much more compelling leader than Jack, and I really like the interaction between him and Juliet. Juliet knows the sacrifice he made so that the others could escape, and she respects him for that, she’s willing to comfort him as he suffers through his pain. Juliet remains the most fascinating female character on the show, still carrying a bit of mystery, but also a strong, independent leader. I forsee a relationship between her and Sawyer, which makes sense, both of them feel so much more mature and centered than Kate or Jack, and I’d be glad to see them end the quadrangle once and for all.

The freighter people have also become some of the most interesting characters on the show. We get hints that both Charlotte and Miles have been on the island a lot longer than previously expected. Daniel is definitely the center, particularly in the episode where he negotiates the burial of the hydrogen bomb in the 50s, but Miles adds good color. They’re all pretty compelling characters.

The revelation that Widmore was on the island as a younger man is perhaps the key piece of information revealed by the trips through time. It sets up why he’s in such conflict with Ben over the island, and also makes clear the central conflict that’s raged throughout time, between the Others and invaders to the Island. In this case, those invaders are British and American armed forces, later on it will be the Dharma Initiative, and even later, the castaways.

The conflict invariably seems to end in the absorption of some of the invaders into the group of Others, while the rest are destroyed. That’s how it went with these army people, and later with the Dharma group. The wheels are moving to set up the return of Jack, and all the characters forming a unified front against a grand invasion by Widmore, and perhaps a series finale that has them take up permanent residence as the new Others.

But, we’re not there yet. For now, the show is rolling along. On the whole, this season has been top notch, really expansive and mind bending in ways the show has only hinted at before.