Lost Lays an Egg[town]

Compared to the utter awesomeness of the first three episodes of Lost Season Four, episode four, a.k.a. Eggtown, was merely pedestrian.

That’s not to say it didn’t have its moments. But the person who the story was centered around is, in my opinion, the least interesting character on Lost. I think Lost has some great characters with great storylines. But for some reason Kate, and her storylines and relationships, just bores me.
Continue reading “Lost Lays an Egg[town]”

Meanwhile, Back on the Island

After eight months, Lost is back and the King is content.

My mind is still buzzing from this episode (not to mention the drink or two I had with dinner prior to the clip show) and that’s a good thing. Tonight’s episode of Lost, The Beginning of the End brought multiple storylines together, advanced the occurences on the Island and went back to the future to show us the reprecussions of the choices made during tonight’s events.

The only thing The Beginning of the End didn’t do was answer questions about the mythology of the show, which I didn’t mind too much because of (a) my state of mind and (b) the fact that Lost is back on the air. Continue reading “Meanwhile, Back on the Island”

T-Minus One Day and Counting

The long-awaited season four premiere of Lost is tomorrow. Naturally, the King is excited.

Lately, I’ve been doing a lot of reading about the show- not so much spoilers, but there’s been a lot of press about the show itself. Partly because the season three finale left everyone wanting more, partly because of the writers strike and partly because ABC is marketing the show smartly for once. My point is, there’s been a lot written lately about Lost. And one particular blog entry has addressed a long-standing pet peeve of mine. Alan Sepinwall, TV critic for the Star-Ledger writes about a Q-n-A session with Lost co-creator Damon Lindelof:

QUESTION: Question for the producers and I guess maybe for Matthew [Fox]. I’m wondering why whenever Jack is placed in a position where he can ask things of The Others, he always asks such terrible questions? I mean asking Juliet what she and Ben talked about doesn’t seem that useful either to him or to us.

DAMON LINDELOF: Since Matthew is not responsible for what Jack says, he has to unfortunately in some cases execute our best version of it. As writers, the questions that the characters are asking on the show is always a slippery slope. We find ourselves saying, “We’d be asking much better questions, too.” Unfortunately, if Jack asked the questions that we wanted him to, The Others would answer none of them. So you would just have him asking a string of questions with Michael [Emerson] sort of looking back at him stoically, which probably would not be that interesting to watch. He asks the questions that at least he has an opportunity of getting an answer out of them.

That was precisely the issue that bothered me most about the first three-quarters of last season. Too many Lostie and Other moments with zero questioning or information sharing. I understand what Damon’s saying- that Ben wouldn’t tell Jack anything. But even if they had set that up early on, with Ben telling Jack that he’s not going to answer his questions, that would have helped a lot.

And one other thing–I watched the re-run of last year’s season finale and realized something. I wasn’t a fan of the ‘how Jack got his tatoos’ episode. But in a way, that flashback set up the premise of the season finale. Because we were shown that Jack went to Thailand and didn’t have a good time, the opening shot of a dissheveled Jack on an airplane seemed plausible. And therefore, made (me at least think) it possible that the rest of the episode’s flash—-s were after the Jack in Thailand episode.

Oh well, enough talk about the past. The future is tomorrow.

It begins again

Over the past few weeks, ABC has released specially-produced LOST clips, or Missing Pieces, to maintain excitement about the show, despite the most unreasonable hiatus in TV history. The clips have shown parts of the series storyline that, to this point, have remained unexplored.

With Season Four of Lost starting this Thursday, today’s release was the last of the series. And it’s pretty damn good. Don’t worry- there aren’t any spoilers about the new season. Linkage courtesy of DarkUFO:

Thursday can’t get here fast enough.

Network Monkeys Do Good

This will hurt my credibility as a Lost fan, but I haven’t been a fan of the show since the beginning.

I started watching in the summer of ’05- before the second season, when djl made me a dvd of the first season. The reason I didn’t watch from the beginning was because I thought Lost would just be an updated version of Gilligan’s Island.

Well, according to a new article in Chicago Magazine, that’s almost what it was.

To summarize the article, in the summer of ’03, the real Lloyd Braun (head of the ABC network, not the aide to David Dinkins, gum middleman and computer salesman) came up with an idea about a show that was basically “Cast Away: the Series.” The show ended up in the hands of Aaron Spelling’s production company, where it was given to a writer named Jeffrey Leiber.

Lieber imagined something like Lord of the Flies—a “realistic show about a society putting itself back together after a catastrophe.” In roughly a week’s time, he concocted a general story line centered on what happens to a few dozen plane-crash survivors when they are stuck on a far-off Pacific island. The show, as Lieber saw it, would focus heavily on eight to ten main characters.

To give you more of an idea what the show involved, from a documentary on the Lost S1 DVD:

And in the initial pilot script, the time period, in the pilot alone, went over like six weeks or something. So, kind of by the end of the pilot, they were already like coconut-bowling and living in hutches and that kind of thing.

The show went through development, but Lloyd (Serenity Now!) Braun didn’t like the angle the show was taking.

Braun decided to give the project J. J. Abrams … [and Damon Lindelof] came back with a far-out idea to get around the show’s limitations: What if the island were a character—a supernatural place where strange things happened? Braun loved it.

And things took off from there. The Chicago Magazine article explains that Leiber still receives royalties from ‘creating’ the original script. And after the expensive pilot was filmed, Braun was fired from his post at ABC.

But at least the show wasn’t about cast aways going cocount bowling.