A Blog
Things on TV
…I’ve got something else tonight.
I’m watching Lost, but there’s a little girl in a hospital and her mother that I have to hang out with. I’m giving up blogging tonight, but I’ll be back to it next week.
Until then, J-Dog says he’ll be doing some blogging tonight. Stop by his place and see what he has to say.
Because The Civee is going to give birth tonight (or early tomorrow morning), there won’t be a timely 24 recap this week.
Also, I’ve been unable to convince The Civee to name our daughter Chlöe. You win some and you lose some. I hope everyone out there has a good night and enjoys the episode.
In any Lost universe, Desmond Hume is special.
We’ve heard characters who are familiar with the intricacies of time and space tell Desmond he’s special. We’ve seen Desmond’s consciousness go back and forth in time. And now, we’ve seen Desmond serve as a one-man link between the on-Island reality we’ve come to know over the past six years and the Sideways reality Lost’s final season has been based around. Continue reading “Desmond: Making Sure Everyone Lives Happily Ever After”
Well that was surprising.
First off, I didn’t realize until late this afternoon that tonight’s episode of 24 was to be two hours. But the clock is winding down, and with May a handful of weeks away, I guess FOX decided to speed up the final hours of the last longest day of Jack Bauer’s life.
As for surprising, well, (and this is something we’ve seen on 24 before), sometimes you (and in this case, Jack, President Taylor and the rest of CTU) have one of those days where you do everything right, hit all your marks, but everything goes wrong. Well for Jack, it went very wrong…
Lost’s dynamic duo of Jin and Sun have served an interesting purpose throughout the series. During the first two seasons, they were frequently at odds thanks to Jin’s overbearing nature and Sun’s propensity to lie. In seasons three and four, they were together mostly, but never really factored into one of the main Island storylines or mythology.
Over the last season and a half, however, Jin and Sun have been apart, but both have the same goal: to reunite. They’ve been off-island and back in time. Now, one is with Team Jacob and the other was with Team fLocke before being abducted by Widmore’s crew. One of them is a candidate and fLocke is so certain of their importance that he’s willing to go to war with Widmore to get them back together.
So despite their not being part of the inner circle of main characters, Jin and Sun are important.
In tonight’s episode of Lost, “The Package,” we learned that in the Sideways universe, Jin and Sun are still together. But there are (as usual) a few sideways wrinkles…
Continue reading “The Package and The Secret Room on the Submarine”
Over the weekend, the FOX network announced this would be the last season of 24 on television. I have to be honest- while I’m a huge fan of Jack Bauer and his continuing struggle against terrorists, evildoers and ne’er-do-wells, I’m relieved that the show’s end is in sight.
In it’s early seasons, 24 was a revolutionary show. Everything came together in the show’s fifth season, which represented the peak of the story of Jack Bauer. But after that, the show suffered a sharp decline. Season Six was easily the show’s worst. But in the past two seasons, the show has rebounded somewhat, becoming interesting (although no longer groundbreaking) once again.
I’m looking forward to the end of the series because Jack Bauer the character will (hopefully) get closure and peace. I also think that ending the series will be a good thing because while the stories of Days Seven and Eight have been entertaining (or at least better than Day Six), many of the story devices seem (to a long time fan with a good memory) like we’ve seen them before. Two weeks ago, I bemoaned the terrorist’s use of a tunnel to hide a getaway and an EMP device. Well, story elements once again seem familiar as Jack has to put up with members of the president’s cabinet working against her and a (quasi) major character suffering a heart attack.
Every time I write an entry about the night’s episode of Lost, I like to try and work in the episode’s title cleverly in the headline. But because tonight’s episode of Lost, Ab Aeterno is a Latin phrase meaning something along the lines of “from the beginning of time,” I’ve got little to work with.
Hence, the titular line of this entry is more a description of what happened tonight. Although for Lost viewers, it was much more than a job interview. Not only did we get the backstory four years in the making, Ab Aeterno was chock full of Island mythology, the struggle between good and evil and possibly foreshadowing where the overall story is going.
Besides Jack, Chloe is the one constant in 24. Since Day 3, her character has always been loyal (to Jack, at least), competent and involved in the action with very little personal drama or wasted subplots getting in the way.
However, during the last two days, Chloe was always treated as a sideshow- forced to withstand the mendacity of the intellectually challenged Agents Janis, Arlo and Dana. But tonight, that all changed. 24 may be the story of the longest days in Jack Bauer’s life, but tonight’s episode was all Chloe.
It would be an understatement to say that Chloe has been underused this season. Just like last season, Chloe has played the part of a fish out of water in the new CTU (although last year, it was the FBI). But in her actions tonight to get CTU back up and running after an EMP attack, Chloe’s story brought me back to simpler times when she stopped a terrorist’s runaway car with an automatic weapon. Or that time she put down a lecherous barfly with a taser.
Perhaps the biggest surprise during the last season of Lost was the transformation of Island conman Sawyer into an authority figure.
It’s been quite a character journey for Sawyer, starting out as the guy who gave away snappy nicknames and pretended to hoard asthma medication to the guy who enforced the law for the DHARMA Initiative. While still giving out snappy nicknames.
As the Oceanic Six returned to the 1977 version of the Island, Sawyer’s LaFleur’s carefully constructed lie of a life came crumbling down. Sawyer had to cover for simple things like assimilating Jack, Hurley and Kate into the DI and much more complex ones, like figuring out how to save Sayid. As events unfurled, Sawyer lost everything, including the love of his life, Juliet, who sacrificed herself to cap off Jack and Faraday’s plan to change the timeline.
Now, in Lost’s final season, Sawyer is back to being the resident Island conman. With nothing but bad memories of his three years in the seventies, Sawyer wants off the island. Sawyer has no allegiance to anybody but himself and has made deals with both sides to get what he wants.
Continue reading “On the Beat With Officers Ford and Straume”
The Old Car in the Tunnel Trick – 2
Jack Bauer – 0
It’s not often that Jack Bauer has a losing record, but the guy who has beaten back terrorists, goons and other ne’er-do-wells time and time again can’t seem to figure out that when a bad guy drives down a tunnel, he isn’t coming out the other end.
It first happened way back on Day Four, where some professor who CTU was trying to track for some reason or another evaded the watchful eyes of CTU by ducking into a tunnel to pick up a bomb with which to blow himself up. And we saw the trick used again tonight, where Tarin, holding the IRKian President’s daughter hostage drove into a tunnel to escape with his catch.
At least tonight, the situation resolved itself in a manner that isn’t as prominent as driving into a tunnel: the old let the hostage escape trick.
Although, to be honest, I saw that one coming too.
Continue reading “Jack Bauer Vs. The Old Car In The Tunnel Trick”