nixsight

I’m a little behind the curve with my TV watching, which is why, at least a couple of weeks after everybody else, I’m sharing my thoughts about the first few episodes – the double-sized first ep and the one that followed it – of the final season of Lost.

I watched the shows last night, and wrote out my thoughts as I went, which is why what follows starts off reading a little like a running commentary, and ends up becoming a more general Lost-centric ramble.

It’s worth noting that there are spoilers following, if like me, you’ve been tardy when it comes to catching up!

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There was a mysterious statue. Then the mysterious, grumpy dude tells Jacob:

“They come. Fight. They destroy. They corrupt. It always ends the same.”

“It only ends once. Anything that happens before that is just progress.” Says Jacob, in a blunt contradiction of Battlestar Galactica’s assertion that history and reality are cyclical, the bounder.

Then there’s Locke, looking serious, and telling Benry that “I’m not going to kill Jacob, Ben. You are.” Except it isn’t Locke, it’s whatever is disguised as Locke. Whatever is disguised as Locke, it doesn’t take kindly to people trying to erode BSG’s philosophical foundations.

Course, then Jacob only wants Ben to understand one thing.

“I only want you to understand one thing.” Jacob says. “You have a choice.”

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Two minor TV obsessions this week. I promised someone that I’d watch “Stargate: Universe” so that they didn’t have to, and we’ve been sitting on the first season of Canadian drama “Durham County” for months, and finally got round to that this week, too.

Durham County Season 1

We picked up “Durham County” largely because it stars Hugh Dillon, who impressed the hell out of us with a nuanced and oddly sweet portrayal of the head muscle in SWAT show “Flashpoint”. As it stands, we got into “Flashpoint” largely because it had Veronica Mars’ dad in it. So you start to get a sense of how this works.

The show is notionally a murder mystery. Hugh Dillon is homicide detective Mike Sweeney, who moves his family – including eccentric young daughter in a mask Maddie, morbid teen daughter who wants to follow in her father’s footsteps Sadie, and his wife Audrey, who is trying to come to terms with having barely survived breast cancer – away from the city, and back to the place where he grew up, the titular Durham County. The place itself is billed as a small town, but it presents more like a suburb of the oft mentioned “downtown”, albeit an insular one.

The family move into the area amid a search for two schoolgirls, and Sweeney is eager to start working the case, but then the body of locally beloved English teacher Nathalie Lacroix is found, and when Sweeney sees the body he becomes obsessed, because he has a hidden connection to this new victim.

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… as I was writing an earlier post about “Stargate Universe”, I got major league sidetracked into discussing the notion that it is somehow similar to “Lost” or “Battlestar Galactica”.

It basically muddied the issue on what I thought about the show, so I’m copy/pasting my points right here into a brand-new post. As if this shit wasn’t confusing enough already.

…The comparisons with “Lost” seem to come from the fact that some of the characters have secrets, or at least things about them that we don’t know at the beginning of the pilot, and occasionally, in a sort of non-committal, unstructured way, bits of their past are played out in flashback – though mainly in that first episode. The techniques, very similar to the way most characters in most shows are written, and flashbacks are traditionally used, actually serves to distance the show from “Lost”, which is always rigid about the way it uses the flashbacks – and later flashforwards – within a particular episode, and also goes to great lengths to subvert traditional narratives with them.

(Actually, one of the few things that distract from the simple, uncomplicated pleasure of the pilot episode was the lack of an audio or visual cue when the show was shifting into flashback. It was a little disorienting, and not in an obviously deliberate way.)

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So yes, we’ve already established that I’ve been lame as hell at blogging recently. I have my excuses. None of them are good.

I mean, look at Rol: He had the perfect excuse to get behind, and he keeps plugging away. Me, I’ve just got a bit distracted and put on a bit of weight. Not even, you know, Marlon Brando weight. LAME!

So, anyway, I’ll try and be quick with these… there were a lot of shows watched in the last couple of months, so as always, skip to the ones you’re interested in, and I’d love to hear your comments…

(We’re still watching “Criminal Minds”, “24″ and “CSI NY”, and those shows are all still worth watching, but I’m missing them out this time round because there’s not much new to say without a deeper examination of individual episodes than I’m able to give today.)

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Lost Season 04: 09-13

I felt a little ambivalent watching these episodes – mainly because I had to watch them before the new season aired, and I kind of already had some idea of where it was going to end up.

In some ways, that’s fitting, because inevitability and impatience is what really marked this season for me.

It’s been interesting seeing how this show has changed approach to episode structure with each season.

The first season stuck strictly to character specific flashbacks till the finale.

The second season dealt, to almost widespread criticism, mainly with establishing past histories for newer or previously unseen characters, though it started the season trying to reconcile the fact that the series regulars aren’t together any more.

The third brings in The Others, and though there are still flashbacks for our original survivors, this is where the focus starts to shift, from the past to the future, with predictions, plans, and an eye to what might be happening off the island, with the final episode of the season making this focus literal with a flash-forward to how badly things have gone wrong – or at least seem to have – once the survivors – at least some of them – make it off the island.

Season four was pretty much all flash-forwards. And catching up on these episodes all at once, I realised what the basic problem I had with that was, and why I wasn’t really in any hurry to watch them when they broadcast – once it became apparent that this was how the season was going to run, that made the whole season about treading water until it caught up with itself – like those first few odd episodes of season two.

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Let’s go quickfire rounds, yeah? Trying to catch up with “Lost” before the internet turns into spoiler city in a couple of days… It’s already happened with “BSG”!

Got two weeks to get through, though… I have been a bad blogger!

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