TV Review: Lost, "Some Like It Hoth"

"Let's face it... the Ewoks suck, dude."

Ok, I have a confession to make. When it was revealed that the main characters on ABC’s Lost were sent back in time to 1977, one of the first thoughts that came to my mind was, “Hey! That’s the year Star Wars came out in the theaters!” So tonight's scenes that featured Hurley (Jorge Garcia) scribbling in his Dharma Initiative composition notebook his own script for George Lucas’ next cinematic epic, The Empire Strikes Back, were some of best fun I’ve had watching TV for a while. I figured out what he was doing when he asked Miles (Ken Leung) how to spell Bounty Hunter in the beginning of a van ride they were taking together. Since the title of tonight’s episode was, “Some Like It Hoth,” it probably wasn’t much of an investigative feat on my part.


In tonight’s episode we got to learn a lot about Miles who is one of my favorite minor characters. I’m really interested in his ability to speak with dead people and I’ve wished for a long time that they’d do more with him. I like the actor who plays him too. Ken Leung has had minor parts in a few movies that I’ve really enjoyed—mostly the Brett Ratner productions Rush Hour, The Family Man, and X-Men: The Last Stand.


We learned from the flashbacks that Miles discovered that he had the ability to speak to dead people at a very young age as his mother was trying to make a life for herself and him in the absence of his father whom he never knew. With all of his emotional baggage being left unresolved by his mother who wasn’t forthcoming about his father and their past, he attempted to fill the empty spaces in his life with money that he could earn by hiring out his services as someone who speaks to dead people for profit… whether or not he actually makes contact with the deceased.

By the end of the flashback, we see Naomi Dorritt (Marsha Thomason), recruiting him to be part of the freighter team being put together by Charles Widmore in an attempt to find the island and remove Benjamin Linus from power. You’ll remember Naomi as the first member of the freighter who was found by the Losties who fooled them into thinking that she was there to rescue them.


Before embarking on his journey to the island on the freighter, Miles was kidnapped whilst eating a fish taco by a group of guys offering him an alternative to working for Charles Widmore. I can only assume that these guys were actually working for Benjamin Linus, but who knows what Ben's motives would have been for trying to recruit Miles other than to keep him from helping Widmore. It could be that the information that Miles can get from the dead bodies on the island will actually be very important in the grand scheme of things.

Back to the main timeline in 1977, Miles is asked to fill in for Sawyer (Josh Holloway) who is busy trying to cover up what he and Kate (Evangeline Lily) did with the recently shot, young Benjamin Linus. As we see Miles and Hurley on a top secret mission to transport a mysteriously killed person, we discover that Dr. Pierre Chang (François Chau) is none other than Miles’ long lost father who is the leading scientist on the island and is living there with his wife and 3-year-old son who is, of course, Miles. Miles now has the opportunity to get to know his long lost father who appears to be very different from someone who would abandon his wife and child the way his mother had depicted him. It’ll be interesting to see where this storyline takes us.


I realized tonight what a genius move it is to have the main characters go back in time like they have in this season. What better way to show a large amount of the history of the island than to have the main characters travel back to that period and live when that history happened? It’s interesting to see the main characters involves as the history of Dharma unfolds and it’s making me wonder if they’ll even travel farther back in time to see the history of the island during the period when the four-toed statue was in its prime. I'm guessing probably not as much as what they're doing with Dharma, but it was interesting that one of the guys who abducted Miles in his flashback asked the question, “do you know what lies in the shadow of the statue?” as a test of whether or not he was prepared to make the journey to the island. Perhaps the history of the statue will turn out to be an important element in the grand scheme of things.


One final note, I'm very intrigued by the reappearance of Daniel Faraday at the end of tonight's episode. They were never very clear about what happened to him, only that he wasn't with them anymore, so we'll see!

TV Review: Lost, "Dead is Dead"

“As long as the dead guy says there’s a reason, then I guess everything’s gonna be just peachy.”

In last night’s episode of ABC’s Lost, “Dead is Dead,” we abandoned the story of the Oceanic survivor’s escapades in the Dharma of the past, and focused on Ben’s story where he professed to be on a mission to pay the Smoke Monster a visit to atone for his sins. I say “professed” because I never had the impression that he was sincere about what he was telling John Locke regarding his intensions on the main island.


As Ben and Locke were interacting, I really enjoyed watching how Locke treated Ben. It was like a parent asking a child if they took a cookie when the parent already knows the answer to the question, but is testing the child to see if he’s going to tell the truth or not. Obviously Ben is a huge liar who is very much interested in preserving his own self-interests, so there were many opportunities for Locke to test him like that.


It was interesting to see a little into Ben’s history from the flashbacks in tonight’s episode, which actually make me feel a little more sympathetic towards him and his ability to have compassion on helpless babies and children. This, of course, informed his actions when they showed him confronting Penny Widmore in his effort to take out his revenge on his nemesis Charles Widmore for killing Ben’s daughter. Upon seeing Desmond and Penny’s son, Charlie come on deck of the ship Ben had a change of heart and couldn’t kill Penny like he intended to. But since he had already non-fatally shot Desmond, Desmond proceeded to beat the living snot out of him. Good boy!


Later in the episode we got to see Ben’s final confrontation with the Smoke Monster who showed Ben his history with his daughter Alex and the reasons he sought revenge on Charles Widmore. I’ve heard the producers of the Lost, Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse, say that each time they show the monster, they want to reveal a little more about it. Well, I’m not sure that I learned anything more about it this time, but it was interesting to see more and to wonder if the manifestation of Alex immediately afterward was a form that the monster was taking or if it was actually a re-embodied Alex who had come back to warn him not to follow through with his intentions to kill John Locke again.


I am believing more and more that the island definitely does have mystical qualities about it and isn't just some scientific magnetic phenomenon. It'll be interesting to see how satisfying the final explanations about the island are when all is said and done.


So now we see that Benjamin Linus is fated (or doomed) to play second fiddle to the seemingly well-intentioned John Locke, whom it seems that the island has chosen as its new human leader. So, will Ben go against the wishes of Alex and try to kill Locke and regain his leadership position over the others? I guess only time will tell.

TV Review: Lost, "Whatever Happened, Happened"

Being a fan of Science Fiction, you’d think that I’d love stories about time travel, when actually the opposite is true. I’m frequently frustrated when I’m brought through a series challenges and triumphs that the characters are experiencing and something happens to the timeline and everything they had experienced is suddenly wiped away and nobody’s the wiser.

You often see stories like that in Star Trek. I remember one particularly painful episode of Star Trek: Voyager where the ship goes through what was called, “The Year of Hell.” In this year they go through a challenging series of battles and struggles and right up to the brink of destruction when the timeline is changed and everything is reset back to normal and nobody remembers anything about it.

Why this is so frustrating is because one of the reasons to watch a continuing story is to share by proxy the experiences the characters are having. It’s nice to see them grow and change from the beginning of their challenges into different people who become almost like family to us.

This may all seem like a long detour around a short point, but this is one of the reasons I’m loving this season of Lost on ABC. I was initially leery of the introduction of time travel into the story, but I’m a big fan of the theory that they seem to be following that whatever might have happened in the past, actually happened—whether or not they knew they were involved in it—that’s how their present became to be the way it was. Which, by the way, is where this episode got its name, “Whatever Happened, Happened.”


In tonight’s episode we see the immediate after affects of Sayid's shooting of young Ben at the end of last week’s episode. Apparently Sayid had also watched too much Star Trek and thought that he’d be able to kill Ben and erase all of the terrible things that Ben had him do. Not so.

We see too that Jack had also subscribed to the belief that he could allow young Ben to die and that would have prevented his problems as well. It seems to me that in reality, Jack’s refusal to help Ben is exactly what turned him into the heartless person that they all grew to hate. If Jack had done his surgical magic and saved Ben’s life, then Kate and Sawyer never would have taken him to the others for their special brand of voodoo help. Interesting.


Also in this episode’s flashbacks, we see what happened to Kate and what caused her sudden change of heart from refusing to consider returning to the island into another happy passenger on flight 316. It all revolved around Aaron and her decision that he needed to return so she could try to save Claire. That her relationship with Aaron could never be long lasting since there was so much unfinished business left on the island.

I was especially moved during her farewell scene with Aaron. During that scene I grew to respect the writers even more, not just for her character’s growth, bur for the growth of all the characters. It would have been so easy for them to have Sawyer bounce back into pining over Kate and leave Juliet and it would have been easy for Juliet to go back to being the other woman with either Sawyer or Jack, but instead the writers are allowing those 3 years that they spent apart from each other to actually mean something to the characters and to the storyline. It’s a brave thing to do, especially because it’s not looking like we’re going to be liking Jack very much after a while.

This episode left me asking the question, “why had they come back?” According to Kate, she came back to try and save Claire. Sayid thinks that the reason he was there was to kill Ben—which backfired pretty spectacularly—but is there a different reason that we’ll learn soon? I’m sure there is. What about Hurley? I'm sure these are all questions that will be answered in the weeks to come, and as always, there will be more questions presented in the process. I’m confident that this show is only going to continue to get better.

TV Review: Lost, "He's Our You"

“A 12-year-old Ben Linus brought me a chicken salad sandwich. How do you think I’m doing?”

Beware of Spoilers!

Tonight’s episode of Lost on ABC started with a flashback that showed Sayid when he was a child doing what his older brother was unwilling to do—kill a chicken. It seems like the message we were to get from this was that he is willing to do what it takes to get things done no matter how cruel it might seem. The next flashback seemed to confirm this because we see an adult Sayid Jarrah (Naveen Andrews) hunting down a man and killing him with no more hesitation than he had when he killed the chicken when he was a kid. But in this case he was working for Benjamin Linus (Michael Emerson) and we come to learn that Ben sees Sayid as a useful killer, plain and simple. We also learn that Sayid wishes for something different out of life and resents Ben for using him to do his dirty work.

While there were minor brushes with the stories of Jack, Kate, Hurley, and Juliet, most of tonight’s episode, “He’s Our You,” revolved around the interrogation of Sayid by the Dharma Initiative. It’s was funny to see Sayid given a truth serum by the Dharma initiative’s scary interrogator (their version of Sayid—where this episode got it’s name). Funny because, when the true story that the serum brought out was as fantastic as Sayid's was, the only conclusion the interrogator could come to was that he had given Sayid too much of it and it’s making him crazy.


The main dillema presented by this episode was what would Sayid do with young Benjamin Linus once he realized that he was in the past and could possibly have a chance to change the future, and in doing so stop some of the horrible things that he perceives were caused by Ben once he got older.

Would someone who knew what was going on in Germany during World War II, if they were able to go back in time to when Adolf Hitler was a child, would they kill him before he could do the terrible things he did? I believe that the honest answer has to be yes, and I think that it was honest storytelling on the part of the writers to have Sayid, when given the opportunity, pull the trigger and attempt to kill Ben—even though he’s still a young boy. In Sayid’s eyes, this is his “reason” for returning to the island and is an attempt to free himself from the hellish life he’s made for himself.

I said “attempt to kill” because I’m thinking that Ben isn’t really going to be dead and that this event won’t really change anything at all. It’ll be interesting to see what would happen, though, if Ben actually did die. How would that change the circumstances that got them off of the island? Would they have made it back? Will Ben suddenly phase out of existence only to be replaced by Ethan who ends up being the one who does the exact same things?


To answer some of these questions, it’s helpful to look ahead to some of the names of future episodes for clues. Next week’s episode is called, “Whatever Happened, Happened.” This sounds like something Daniel Faraday would say and it makes me think that the creators of the show may be sticking to the premise that, although the characters have traveled back into their own past, they will ultimately be unable to change it.

The following week’s episode, however, is called “Dead is Dead,” which makes me wonder if that’s referring to Ben’s mortal state after Sayid shot him.

3 weeks from now is where looking forward to future episodes stops giving useful clues because that episode is named, “Some Like it Hoth.” Well, we all know that Hoth is the snow planet in Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back where the rebellion suffers a terrible defeat at the hands of the Empire. How this refers to the Lost storyline is anyone’s guess. Could it mean another visit to the frozen donkey wheel? Is there going to be an uprising of some kind that will be quickly thwarted? Is this where Jacob, A.K.A. Christian Shepard appears to Jack and says, “I am your father!” Who knows?

For me, all of these questions are why I love this show. So far I’ve been intrigued enough by the questions to keep tuning in and satisfied enough with the answers to be patient and let the show run it’s course naturally. I’m excited to see how all of this plays out!

TV Review: ABC's Lost, "Namaste"

To start things off on tonight's episode of ABC's Lost, we see the crash of Flight 316 from the point of view of the pilot, Frank Lapidus (Jeff Fahey). Through the course of events we see that the Oceanic Survivors that were on the plane all disappeared except for Sun (Yunjin Kim), and went back in time 30 years to be synched up with Sawyer (Josh Holloway), Jin (Daniel Dae Kim) and the others who are now fully integrated into the Dharma Initiative.


The big question that came out of this opening sequence is why did all of the Oceanic 6 that were on the plane go back in time except for Sun (Yunjin Kim)? Could it be because she wasn’t supposed to return to the island according to John Locke and somehow what Locke wants makes some kind of cosmic difference?


For a while we believe that Sun is going to trust Ben (Michael Emerson) and go with him to the main island until Sun suddenly brains him with an oar from a boat. This is apparently how Ben came to be in the injured state that John Locke found him in at the end of the episode “The Life and Death of Jeremy Bentham.”


Sun and Lapidus make their way to the main island where they see some rustling in the trees shortly after getting out of their boat. They soon come across Jack’s alive-again father, Christian Shephard (John Terry), who tells Sun that she has quite a journey ahead of her because Jin and the rest of her friends are in 1977—hinting that he’s going to set her on a journey to reunite them. What came to my mind after seeing this scene is that perhaps the smoke monster and Christian Shephard are one and the same. It appeared that they found him very shortly after seeing the movement in the trees, and that it might not have been just a coincidence. Just a thought.


In previous seasons of Lost I was getting a little impatient with all of the flashbacks to the character’s past. Now that the series is progressing, we’re not seeing glimpses into their backstories, but instead we’re jumping back and forth in time within the main storyline. For me, this is much more satisfying because they all serve to move the story of their adventures on the island forward. Tonight the flashback was 30 years ago where Jack (Matthew Fox), Kate (Evangeline Lilly) and Hurley (Jorge Garcia) must put their trust in Sawyer as he successfully integrates them into the Dharma community.


All of Sawyer’s plans go almost exactly how he hopes except for a small hiccup where Kate is almost revealed as an outsider when her name isn’t on the new arrival manifest. She is supposedly “saved” at the last minute by Juliet (Elizabeth Mitchell), but I think that it was the first sign of hostility that Juliet is going to have for Kate out of protectiveness of her 3 year-old relationship with Sawyer. It’ll be interesting to see if we can continue to trust Juliet now that they’re all back together again.


Probably the least interesting storyline for me tonight was the capture of Sayid (Naveen Andrews). It was impressive to see Sawyer so on top of things and handling all of the situations so well, but I’m afraid that his incarceration is going to last a while and might get kind of tiring.


One interesting revelation from tonight was that Ethan, the Other who worked with Juliet trying to help women give birth on the island, who kidnapped Claire and who was ultimately shot and killed by Charlie Pace was actually the baby that Juliet successfully delivered in the last episode, “LaFleur.”

An interesting new mystery introduced to night is where in the world is Daniel Faraday? During the van ride to the Dharma compound Sawyer reveals that for some reason, Daniel isn’t with them anymore. The only time we saw him in what we think would be this time period is at the beginning of this season where he briefly showed up during the excavation of the “frozen donkey wheel” at the construction of the Orchid Station. Did something happen there that either killed him or removed him from this timeline? I guess only time will tell, eh?

The final scene in tonight’s episode was the inevitable meeting between one of the time-displaced survivors and a young Benjamin Linus (Sterling Beaumon). The lucky survivor who had the joy of his acquaintance is Sayid who ironically was the beneficiary of Ben’s kindness as the 14 (or so) year-old brought him a sandwich. It’ll be interesting to see if this pairing of characters develops into anything in the future.


The episode was named, “Namaste,” which literally means, “I bow to you” in Hindi. It seems like this could inform the future of the relationship between Sawyer and the rest of the Oceanic 815 survivors where it appears that he has found a leadership position for himself where he can make great use of his con artist’s ability to think on his feet.

Lost is a rare show that, at least for me, keeps getting more interesting as they continue to reveal secrets while introducing new mysteries. It has already proven that it’s a very difficult show to predict and I’m looking forward to see what happens next!

Castle: Flowers for Your Grave

*Caution spoilers Ahead*

"Tell me you saw that!" -Richard Castle

I must admit up front that I am a fan of Nathan Fillion. I have liked him ever since I first saw him in the sitcom “Two Guys, a Girl and a Pizza Place.” I further came to appreciate his talents in Firefly, a short-lived comedy/drama, which in my opinion, was drowned by the bungling maneuvers of the Fox network. It has since become one of my all-time favorite series.

Castle is not a fortress, but an individual. In a new dramedy from ABC called Castle, Richard Castle is played by Nathan Fillion and is somewhat akin to his character Malcolm Reynolds in Firefly. Castle is a cocky, handsome, novelist who trades quipy lines and flirts with most every girl. Fillion’s character is played almost to the point of being over the top; almost. The series is in the tradition of recent comedic dramas such as Psych and Life that deal with murder and other serious subjects, but on the lighter side. They don’t take themselves too seriously.

The show opens at Richard Castle’s latest book launching party, where his ex-wife/publisher questions his wisdom of killing off the successful main character of his murder/mystery books. Castle answers by saying that he killed off the main character because he got too predictable.

Enter unpredictability. A killer has staged 3 murders that mirror scenes from Castle’s books. Castle is then paired with an attractive, pseudo-hardnosed, female detective Kate Beckett (Stana Katic) to help solve the crime. Beckett just happens to be a fan of Castle’s books and is the one who first makes the connection. This is where one of my few complaints comes about the series. In my experience, most professionals do not enjoy entertainment that deals with their profession. My brother-in-law doctor, for instance cannot stand to watch shows that deal with medicine. So, I find her interest unlikely, but I guess not impossible.

For that matter, Castle seems a little too perfect to be real. Almost a genius when it comes to his powers of observation and conclusion. It is the old; the cops can’t solve this on their own and need the help of a smarter outsider to solve the crime. But in my opinion, Fillion pulls off the roll successfully and will probably be the make-or-break element of the show. If you enjoy him, you will enjoy the show. Most likely, the show will do well with the female audience, if you know what I mean.

Castle soon becomes enthralled with detective Beckett and uses every excuse to come back and see her. But when the murder mystery was solved, I wondered what could bring the two back together again. After all, the copycat murderer was caught. In a somewhat cliché, but believable turn of events, the series takes a page out of Michael J. Fox’s playbook from the movie The Hard Way. Castle creates a new character for his new detective series, a character based upon, you guessed it, Becket. Pulling a few strings at the mayor’s office and Castle gets himself a ticket to a ride-along partnership for “research.”

The chemistry between Fillion and Katic is not quite effortless or polished yet, but it is there. In the end, it was a fun show that promises to entertain with interesting mysteries and strings of one-liners. I plan to give it a shot and see where it goes.

TV Review: Lost, "LaFleur"

“The record is spinning again, we’re just not on the song we want to be on.”

How a show can keep changing up the circumstances so much and yet remain the most engaging storyline on TV I’ll never know, but such is the case with ABC's Lost. I really like the fact that they are now in a different era on the island and we’re just picking up the story from here and running with it. The quote above from Daniel Faraday definitely does not reflect my sentiments. This is definitely the song I want to be on!



When tonight’s episode of Lost started and we caught a glimpse of the giant statue which we presume has 4 toes, all I could say was, “holy crap!” Unfortunately John Jocke’s fixing of the frozen donkey wheel shot the castaways forward to a different time so we aren’t going to learn any more about the statue, for now. Where that flash did place them was into a period when the Dharma Initiative was in full thrust in the mid 1970s. Skip 3 years later and we see that our little group of Oceanic survivors has integrated quite well into the organization and Sawyer is in a position of authority and is know by the name LaFleur.

Through a series of flashes back and forth in time, we learn that Sawyer and Juliet develop a love for each other. The guy that Locke saw in the woods building the cabin that he would later find Jacob in, was the leader of the Dharma initiative, and that something must have happened on the island to make it impossible for women to survive childbirth.

I’m starting to feel bad for Juliet who seems doomed to play the part of “The Other Woman”—which, incidentally, was actually the title of an episode about her from last season—especially because at the end of tonight’s episode, we see the reunion of Jack, Hurley and Kate with Sawyer and Jin and it appears that Sawyer still has eyes for Kate.

Lost has once again established itself as my favorite drama on television. No other show is brave enough to introduce as many twists and turns as this one, or smart enough to pull them off and not make it look like they’re loosing focus or grasping at straws. This is truly a one of a kind show.

Lost Review - "The Life and Death of Jeremy Bentham"

"There's a war coming, John. And if you're not back on the island when that happens, the wrong side is going to win."

In reality, tonight’s episode of ABC’s Lost probably should have been called the “Death and Life of Jeremy Bentham”. It’s unusual, on Lost, to see someone die and then come back to life (unlike what usually happens on NBC’s Heroes) so when they revealed in the opening of the show that John Locke is not only alive, but on the island with the other survivors of flight 316 (the kind of revelation that’s usually reserved for the end of an episode), I thought that the remainder of the episode would be pretty exciting.


Well, I can’t say that I was blown away by anything else this episode showed, but I am intrigued by the notion that Charles Widmore might not be the bad guy after all. You have to admit, his tactics tonight were much less heavy-handed than Ben’s. Plus, we did see a younger Widmore closely associated with Richard Alpert when Locke, Kate, Sawyer and the others were time jumping, so we know that he did have quite a long history with the island. It’s just so hard to know whom to believe and it’s one of the things that makes Lost something that’s worth returning to every week.

We also got to know a little more about Matthew Abaddon, who was the creepy orderly who guided Locke into taking the Australian walkabout that made him end up on the island. This reveal leads me to wonder if we’re going to see him in everyone else’s back-story at some point in time encouraging them to be on the ill-fated Oceanic flight that brought them to the island in the first place. It would make sense if Eloise Hawking is working for Charles Widmore’s group and would have been able to predict that Oceanic 815 would have brought them into the path of the island. She sure didn’t seem to care enough for Ben to be working for him.

In recent weeks, I had a feeling when Ben showed up with Jin’s ring and used it as a tool to convince Sun to return to the island, that Ben had in reality killed John Locke because of Locke’s desire to be true to the word he gave Jin that he wouldn’t bring Sun back. I knew Ben wouldn’t allow that so I just figured that Ben was the one who killed Locke. Looks like this is one of those rare moments when I was right.

I don’t really have all that much more to say about “The Life and Death of Jeremy Bentham” other than that it was nice to see Locke’s interactions with the Oceanic 6 that we had only heard them tell of in previous episodes, but I can’t say we learned anything by it.

One more thing I can say is that it’s nice that we’re finally into the stage of this series where there are more questions being answered than asked. The creators of this show have an end date and a plan to get us there, and it’ll be nice when it’s over to look at this series as a completed work and finally understand what it’s all about.