Last week I wrote about Stanley Kubrick’s film 2001: A Space Odyssey, as well as the novel by Arthur C. Clarke!  I enjoyed both of those so much that I decided to continue onwards with the rest of the series of novels (as well as the film sequel).

2010: Odyssey Two is one of my very favorite science fiction novels.  It’s my favorite of Mr. Clarke’s Odyssey series, superior in my opinion even to the original novel 2001: A Space Odyssey.

The disastrous Discovery mission of 2001 gave mankind no answers about the mysterious Monoliths and the ancient extraterrestrial entities behind their creation.  So, after several long years of work, a new mission towards Jupiter is finally ready — a joint US/Russian endeavor aboard the Leonov (named after cosmonaut Alexei Leonov).  Their mission: find the Discovery, determine what went wrong with HAL 9000 and what happened to astronaut David Bowman, and find some answers about the enormous Monolith floating in space.

Aboard Leonov is a familiar character from 2001 (the novel and the film): Heywood Floyd.  As one of the architects behind the Discovery mission, Floyd has long felt responsible for the lives lost on that doomed expedition.  He hopes that his involvement in this follow-up mission will allow him to finally answer some of the questions that have been gnawing at him for a decade, since his first glimpse of TMA-1 on the moon, and to help in some way to set things right.

Leonov is crewed with an extraordinarily skilled mix of Russian and American officers, but their journey is complicated when they learn that the Chinese have also launched a mission to Jupiter, one that will beat them to Discovery by several weeks.  When the entity once known as Dave Bowman returns to Earth, and the Monolith in orbit of Jupiter begins to multiply, the successful completion of Leonov’s mission might take a back-seat to the preservation of their lives.

2010: Odyssey Two is a ripping yarn.  It is a much faster-paced tale than 2001, one filled with a lot more narrative twists and turns.  In addition, I enjoyed Mr. Clarke’s increased emphasis on character development in this installment.  The Leonov has a large, diverse crew, and over the course of the novel I felt that we got to know each member of the team better than pretty much any character in 2001.  Also, 2010 is, I think, superior to 2001 in that it has a central protagonist, Heywood Floyd, who readers can invest in and follow through the tale.  Now, 2010: Odyssey Two isn’t a character study, that’s for sure.  It’s clear that Mr. Clarke’s interest lies far more in the science fiction story being told than he is in delving deeply into the inner lives of his characters.  But I enjoyed getting to know the crew of the Leonov, and setting up Heywood Floyd as the main character was a smart decision.

But the great joy, of course, of 2010: Odyssey Two is the way it answers many of the intriguing questions left hanging by 2001.  Whereas 2001 was the set-up, 2010 is the follow-through.  We get to learn a great deal more about what exactly happened to Dave Bowman after his encounter with the Monolith.  Even more intriguingly, we learn the purpose of the enormous Monolith floating out by Jupiter.  (This is one of the novel’s biggest twists, and I still consider it a kicker even when re-reading the novel knowing what’s coming.)  After the monumental and famously cryptic 2001: A Space Odyssey, it would be all-too-easy for a sequel intended to answer some of those famously unanswered questions to be a let-down.  I am happy to report that that is not at all the case here.  No midichlorians to be found.

As with 2001, here in Odyssey Two Mr. Clarke puts his apparently extensive scientific knowledge to use in telling the story.  2010 takes the reader on what is essentially a tour of the solar system.  In particular, Mr. Clarke spends a great deal of time describing the environments on the various Jovian satellites, around which much of the major action of the story is set.  Written in 1982, much of this description is pure extrapolation — Mr. Clarke’s highly-educated guesswork based on the knowledge available at the time.  That he hit so close to the mark in so many places is astounding — and what few guesses have been proven wrong don’t detract in any way from the descriptions in the novel “feeling” right.

The only aspect of the novel that took me somewhat aback was its inconsistency with Mr. Clarke’s original 2001 novel.  In his introduction, Mr. Clarke writes that where 2001 the novel and the film differed, he decided to make 2010 consistent with 2001 the film.  I suppose that makes a certain amount of sense, as probably more people saw the film than read the novel.  But reading 2010 immediately after finishing reading 2001 was a weird experience because of those inconsistencies.

I mentioned in my review of 2001 the novel that one of the areas in which the novel and the film differed was that in the film, Discovery’s destination (and the location of the Monolith) was Jupiter, whereas in the novel it was Saturn.  Here in 2010, the Monolith is described as being located near Jupiter as seen in the film — and all references to the Discovery mission refer to Jupiter not Saturn.  Additionally, over the course of the Leonov crew’s investigations into what went wrong with the Discovery, there are a lot of references to Frank and Dave’s confrontations with HAL.  Many of these references describe events that occurred in the film but not the novel (such as Dave’s use of explosive decompression to re-enter Discovery when HAL refuses to open the pod bay doors).  This was a bit confusing for me, and I was surprised by Mr. Clarke’s choice to contradict his own novel in favor of the film version.

But this is a minor quibble overall.  2010: Odyssey Two is a towering work: big and bold and epic.  Mr. Clarke brings the wonders of our solar system, and the exciting potential of space exploration, to vivid life.  It makes me a little sad, frankly, that the world of interplanetary travel as described by Mr. Clarke is still, now that we’re living in the year 2010, quite a ways away.  Luckily, we still have our science fiction.

I’ll be back on Wednesday with my thoughts on Peter Hyams’ film adaptation of 2010, and next week I’ll be here to tell you about Arthur C. Clarke’s 2061: Odyssey Three!

I’ve been a fan of Lost since the beginning, and I have always been confident that the writers had a plan for the show, and that much of what seemed bizarre or unexplained at the time in the early seasons would ultimately be explained.  Even in the somewhat uncertain 2nd & 3rd seasons, I remained a “man of faith” (to borrow a common phrase from the show).  With the absolutely spectacular 4th & 5th seasons, I felt that my faith had been rewarded, and I entered the sixth (and final) season of the show with enormous enthusiasm.

Well, my friends, my faith is now wavering, and wavering big-time.

It seems to me that, so far, season six has been by far the most mediocre season of the show so far.  The problems are myriad.  The alternate-universe storyline, which seemed so intriguing in the season premiere, has started to feel more and more like a time-waster to me.  This is exacerbated by my frustration that the storyline on the island has been moving so slowly.  Of my enormous list of the show’s unanswered questions, what have we learned so far this season?  We now know the nature of the undead Locke/smoke monster/MIB, and we know Richard Alpert’s story.  Is there anything else that has been definitively answered for us?

This is extraordinarily disappointing, and it has caused me to begin to resent the time spent, each week, on the alternate-universe stories.  It seems to me that that is valuable episode-time that could be better spent paying off some of the many story-lines that the show has built up over its first five years.

As episode after episode ticks by, my hope that my many questions will be answered begins to fade, and this is really starting to honk me off.  And as the burden of these unanswered questions grows from week to week, the same thing is happening to me that happened as I watched the final run of Battlestar Galactica episodes — my growing frustration is impacting my enjoyment of episodes that, in previous years, I would have quite enjoyed — such as last week’s Richard Alpert installment.  Yes, it was phenomenal to see Richard finally get the spotlight!  But did that episode really tell us anything that attentive viewers hadn’t already guessed?  Had that episode aired during the 4th season I would have called it brilliant.  At this point in the final season, though, I’m just left scratching my head about issues like Jacob’s motivations.  (Why does his long-held commitment to non-involvement suddenly switch to his being willing to guide, through Richard, all the people he brings to the island?)  And if the wine-in-a-bottle metaphor is all the information that we get as to the true natures of Jacob and the MIB, then I am going to be very upset.

Let’s go, Lost!  Pick it up!  Only eight episodes to go!!

(For more info on this issue of what resolution we can/should expect from the writers of Lost, I encourage you to check out this terrific article, to which I posted a link earlier this month, called The Real Problem with Midichlorians.  It hits the nail square on the head.)

One of my earliest posts on this blog was a look back through the films of David Mamet.  One of the films I wasn’t able to review at the time was Homicide, because it was shockingly unavailable on DVD.  Late last year, though, the fine folks at the Criterion Collection thankfully stepped in to remedy that situation, releasing Homicide in a lovely new DVD set (which made my list of the Top 10 DVDs of 2009).

Joe Mantegna plays Jewish homicide detective Bobby Gold.  When the FBI screws up the manhunt for a suspect, Randolph (Ving Rhames), in whose case Bobby was originally involved, Bobby and his partner Tim Sullivan (William H. Macy) are tasked with finding the missing man.  But on the way to a key meeting in the investigation, Bobby stops to help two young beat cops who have found the body of a murdered woman in a convenience store.  It turns out that the elderly Jewish woman had owned the store in the tough neighborhood for decades, and the local kids think she was murdered because of rumors that she kept a fortune hidden in her basement.  When Bobby finds himself assigned to this new murder case, he is is frustrated by what he sees as a distraction from his priority: the pursuit of Randolph.  But quickly the case begins to get under his skin and leads Bobby to confront long-buried questions about his own Jewish identity.

Written and directed by David Mamet, Homicide stars many Mamet regulars (Mantegna and Macy, along with Ricky Jay, Rebecca Pidgeon, and many other familiar faces) and features his distinct, fast-paced, rough and tumble dialogue and a twisty-turny plot in which the story that you think is unfolding in the film’s opening minutes turns out to be merely a feint, as Mamet has other intentions with his tale.

For, despite its title, Homicide really isn’t a police procedural at all.  Yes, Bobby’s investigation into the murder of the elderly Mrs. Klein is the backbone of the story, but that’s not really what the film is about.  Rather, Homicide is a story about identity.  Over the course of the film, Bobby Gold is forced to address deep-rooted questions about how he defines himself.

According to The 50 Greatest Jewish Movies, by Kathryn Bernheimer (published by Birch Lane Press, 1998): “Mamet, who admits he has always felt like an outsider and acknowledges a great longing to belong, has said the story was inspired by his experience as an American Jew growing up not feeling sufficiently Jewish or American.  Like many of his previous films, Homicide deals with what Mamet calls ‘problems of reconciliation and self-worth’.”

When we first meet Bobby Gold, there’s little to indicate to us that he is Jewish, other than his name.  He’s one of the guys — a homicide detective first and foremost.  When he gets involved in the Klein murder case, he’s disinterested and dismissive of the Klein family’s claims that the murder was part of a larger wave of anti-semitism.  He clearly sees the family as passive and paranoid, and believes that Mrs. Klein brought her death upon herself by stubbornly continuing to work in her store in the inner city, despite her family’s wealth.

When Bobby realizes that the Klein’s granddaughter has overheard him saying nasty things about the “Jew broad” and her family on the phone to his partner, it’s an embarrassing mental slap in the face for him that causes him to, for a moment, drop his walls and start to take the case seriously.  Once he does, he begins to discover whole new aspects of the world around him that he thought he knew.  As Bobby learns of Mrs. Klein’s past in Palestine and the virulent anti-semitism in his city, and finally discovers a group of Jews who, far from being passive victims, have instead taken it upon themselves to defend their community, Bobby finds his conceptions of Judaism and his own identity turned upside down.  Of course, this is a David Mamet movie, so rather than leading to a joyful epiphany and a happy ending, Bobby’s personal upheaval leads him to more tumult than ever before.

There are aspects of Homicide that don’t work as well as they could.  While Mamet’s dialogue is gold in the hands of Joe Mantegna and William H. Macy, some of the supporting players don’t do quite as well.  There are also some of the least-convincing Jewish characters assembled on-screen that I have ever seen.  Joe Mantegna is, of course, not Jewish but Italian-American, and even though Ricky Jay IS Jewish, his attempts at speaking Hebrew with an Israeli accent leave much to be desired.  I also found the staging of some of the action sequences, particularly the film’s climactic shoot-out, to be weak in the extreme.

But these are minor quibbles.  While perhaps not as tense or gripping as some of Mamet’s other work, I love that Homicide has some serious issues to tackle above and beyond telling a simple murder mystery.  The film is complex and sophisticated, and has nary a hint of schmaltz.  It builds to its larger questions slowly and confidently, and avoids giving Bobby (and the audience) any easy answers or quick-fix solutions to the difficult problems presented.

Homicide is a difficult, challenging film, and every time I watch it I wrestle anew with the issues presented.  The Jewish characters who Bobby encounters over the course of the film are a complex bunch.  Some are sympathetic, such as the Klein granddaughter (Rebecca Pidgeon).  Then there’s the Orthodox scholar who Bobby encounters in a Jewish library.  When the man discovers that Bobby cannot read Hebrew, he is shockingly disdainful.  ”You say you’re a Jew, and you can’t read Hebrew,” he says.  ”What are you then?”  I’m not sure that Bobby is deserving of such contempt, and I don’t think such an attitude reflects all that well on the Jewish community being represented.

Then, of course, there’s the group of Jewish vigilantes that Bobby discovers towards the end of the film.  It’s a shocking moment, when we learn that this group of American Jews have taken the law into their own hands in an attempt to protect the Jewish community in their city.  On the one hand, for much of the film we, like Bobby, have been gradually shown the reality of terrible antisemitism, even today in the United States.  When Bobby discovers the hidden room behind a storefront where hate-filled bile is printed on pamphlets and signs, the moment is staggering to the audience and to him.  On the other hand, a group of Jews who go around blowing up buildings isn’t all that favorable an image, either!  A viewer must struggle with the questions this depiction of Jewish vigilantes raises: not only the issue of whether, within the narrative of this film, we feel their violent actions are justified — but also whether one feels that this fabrication on Mamet’s part (I don’t recall ever reading of Jewish cells blowing up buildings in American cities) affects one’s overall judgment of the film.

Heady issues.  Luckily they are paired with an eminently watchable, fast-paced tale.

I’m pleased to have had a chance to watch this film again.  Bravo, Criterion Collection!! The film looks phenomenal on the new DVD, and I’m happy to add Homicide to the David Mamet section of my DVD shelf.

On Monday I wrote about Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 film, 2001: A Space Odyssey.

After re-watching that film last month, I was driven to pick up Arthur C. Clarke’s novel 2001: A Space Odyssey off my book-shelf to re-read that as well.

I had read all four of Arthur C. Clarke’s Odyssey novels many years ago, back when I was in college.  After so thoroughly enjoying seeing 2001 the film again, I was excited to take another look at the novel.  As Mr. Clarke explains in the introduction (to the 25th anniversary edition, which is what I have), the novel and the film were created simultaneously.  Neither was an adaptation of the other, which is pretty unique.  Instead, Kubrick and Clarke developed the story together.  Then, while Mr. Kubrick assembled his film, Mr. Clarke crafted his novel.

2001: A Space Odyssey is a terrific read.  It succeeds as an engaging creation in its own right, and also as a fascinating companion to Mr. Kubrick’s film.

The novel and the film share many similarities.  Since they were created simultaneously and in partnership, the basic structure of both tales is identical.  There are none of the dramatic revisions found in even the best film adaptations of novels, which is refreshing.  The themes and “tone” of both works are remarkably similar.

The novel also shares some of the film’s, er, more challenging aspects.  There isn’t a whole heck of a lot of “plot” that actually happens over the course of the tale.  And the somewhat episodic structure (in which the story is divided into several distinct parts, set in different locations and wildly differing eras of human history) is unusual, to say the least, and provides something of an obstacle to the narrative building up a full head of steam.  (Just when we’re “settling in” to one setting and group of characters, the story moves away from that location, never to return.)

There are also a number of interesting differences between the novel and the film.  In the film, Discovery’s ultimate goal (and the location of Dave Bowman’s encounter with the Monolith) is Jupiter, whereas in the novel it is Saturn.  (Indeed, Mr. Clarke devotes a decent chunk of time towards describing the mechanics of Discovery’s journey through the solar system towards Saturn.)  One of the film’s most iconic sequences, in which Dave and Frank discuss their concern over HAL’s increasingly erratic behavior while hiding in one of Discovery’s small pods (in an attempt prevent HAL from hearing their discussion which proves fruitless when HAL reads their lips) never occurs in the novel.  There’s also a lengthy stretch of time, in the book, in between the final confrontation with HAL and Dave’s decision to leave the ship to investigate the Monolith.  In the novel, it seems, Discovery is still a ways away from its final destination when things go wrong with HAL, so several chapters are devoted to the next few months in which Dave must attempt to control Discovery on his own in order to arrive at their final destination.

What’s really interesting to me is the way the novel sheds light on some of the film’s more enigmatic aspects.  Whereas Kubrick used, for the most part, a combination of imagery and music to tell his story (and very little dialogue), Mr. Clarke, of course, must rely on his descriptive narration.  As a not-surprising result, Mr. Clarke’s telling of the story brings a lot of clarity to the elements left more mysteriously open-ended by the film.

In the “dawn of man” segment, for example, 2001 the novel makes clear that the Monolith was studying, and eventually influencing, the development of early man.  There’s an intriguing sequence in the novel in which we read of several stages of the Monolith’s experiments on these early apes.  In the chapter entitled “The New Rock,” we read: ”They could never guess that their minds were being probed, their bodies mapped, their reactions studied, their potentials evaluated.”  Thus what is implied in the movie is spelled out more specifically by the novel.

The enigmatic end sequence of the story is also significantly clarified by the novel.  First of all, the title of the novel’s final section, “Into the Star-Gate,” clarifies that what Dave Bowman encountered in orbit of Saturn (Jupiter in the film) was, in fact, a star-gate.  (The trippy lights Bowman witnesses in the film could be interpreted many different ways.)  In the novel, what Bowman encounters is much closer to what Elie Arroway encounters in Contact: a sort of Grand Central Station in deep space — a complex system of interstellar gates that shunt him indescribably far from his solar system of origin.

What happens next to Dave Bowman is elaborated significantly from the glimpses we were given in the film.  This elaboration is one of my favorite parts of the novel.  Not only do we get a more fully fleshed-out culmination of Dave’s journey, but also Mr. Clarke’s prose connects us more strongly to him and what he is thinking and feeling than did the film.  This provides a powerful grounding to the incredible things that happen to Dave once he travels through the star-gate.

I also enjoyed the novel’s brief, but tantalizing, glimpses into the nature of the powerful, ancient entities who created the monoliths.  The film leaves this entirely to our imaginations.  One could make a strong argument that that is a STRENGTH, rather than a weakness of the film.  I would probably agree.  Nevertheless, it is fun to get a little bit more information in the novel.  Chapter 37, “Experiment,” gives us some wonderful hints.  Here’s an excerpt, describing these entities: “And because, in all the galaxy, they had found nothing more precious than Mind, they encouraged its dawning everywhere.  They became farmers in the field of stars; they sowed, and sometimes they reaped.  And sometimes, dispassionately, they had to weed.”

In my review of 2001 the film, I discussed the significant portions of the film’s run-time that Stanley Kubrick devoted to immersing us in the realities of the world that he was creating (such as all the logistical ins-and-outs of Heywood Floyd’s journey from the Earth to the moon).  Arthur C. Clarke does that as well, and more.  Part of the fun of 2001, the novel, is the way in which Mr. Clarke delves deeply into the details of the extrapolated reality of the near-future.  Mr. Clarke’s scientific background and keep intellect allowed him to posit some very educated guesses about life in the future — from the nature of the Jovian satellites (and remember, the novel was written before man had set foot on the moon!!) to the technological advances that we would achieve by the end of the 20th century.

(Chapter 9 contains both a terrific example of Mr. Clarke’s educated guesswork as well as one of the few things that he guessed wrong about — well, other than our not having moon-bases by the year 2001!  He describes Heywood Floyd’s small “newspad,” an electronic device that Floyd uses to scan all of the world’s newspapers, even while traveling.  This newspad sounds remarkably similar to the many pocket-sized devices that we use today to access the internet from any place we choose.  So where did Mr. Clarke go wrong?  He writes that “the text was updated automatically on every hour” — whereas we all know that internet headlines can be updated every minute!)

It was a delight to dive back into Arthur C. Clarke’s novel 2001: A Space Odyssey.  It’s a quick, engrossing read — heady, cerebral sci-fi at its best.  I enjoyed re-reading the novel so much that I have decided to revisit Mr. Clarke’s three sequels as well.  I’ll be back next week with my thoughts on 2010: Odyssey Two!  (And I guess I’ll probably take another look at the film adaptation of that novel as well, while I’m at it!  Should be fun!)  See you soon…

Sorry for the somewhat sporadic schedule of new cartoons, lately, gang!!

My twin four-month-old daughters have been keeping me busy! I hope by next week to be back to our regular Monday-Thursday schedule.  I’ve got a lot more Star Wars: Episode II cartoons coming, and I can’t wait to share them with you all.

In the meantime, my schedule of blog-posts continue unabated.  Coming soon: we’ll continue my look through the novels and films in Arthur C. Clarke’s Odyssey saga, and I have reviews of a fun new book called Looking For Calvin & Hobbes, the new Criterion Collection DVD of David Mamet’s film Homicide, and lots more fun stuff.

Thanks for your patience, everyone.  See you back here tomorrow!

I well remember my reaction upon watching Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey for the first time, many years ago.  The star-child appeared, and the end credits rolled, and I turned to my brother and started laughing.  ”What the heck was THAT???”  I had no idea what to make of any of the ponderous weirdness that I had just seen, and I wondered what exactly I had missed.

But even during that first viewing it was clear that there was something special about 2001: A Space Odyssey, and it’s a film that stayed with me.  I found myself driven to revisit the film (several times, in fact, over the years), and to read the novel by Arthur C. Clarke (which, interestingly, was written concurrently with the production of the film).  I can think of few other films about which my opinion has so dramatically changed based on subsequent viewings.  Each time I watched 2001 I found myself enjoying it more and more.  As I peeled back the layers of the onion of the film, to use a familiar but handy analogy, what was once perplexing obtained profound meaning.

It is a challenge to provide a summary of 2001.  If you’ve seen the film, no summary is necessary, and if you haven’t, I’d hate to spoil anything.  I can tell you that the film is divided into several distinct sections.  The movie opens in primordial times (”the dawn of man”) and then jumps forward to the year 2001, when a strange object is discovered on the surface of the moon.  That discovery leads (for reasons I’ll not detail here) to an expedition towards Jupiter.  The experimental space-ship Discovery is crewed by Frank Poole and Dave Bowman, and the computer HAL 9000.  Things go awry.  The final segment of the film is the most perplexing, and the reason for the film’s tag-line “the ultimate trip.”

Right from its opening scenes, it is clear that 2001: A Space Odyssey is a science-fiction film unlike most other science-fiction films.  This is a cerebral undertaking, one that is concerned with posing some BIG QUESTIONS for the audience.  The film spans the entire history of human-kind — that should give you a good idea of Mr. Kubrick & Mr. Clarke’s ambitions!!

In terms of “plot,” there’s not too much that actually happens in 2001.  This, I think (along with the ending, which we’ll get to in a few moments) is one of the chief reasons that this film might not work for many casual viewers.  To say that the movie is leasurely paced would be an enormous understatement.  Events unfold very slowly, and the movie is filled with stately, long shots in which Mr. Kubrick’s camera moves languidly through the extraordinary environments that he and his team created.  There is no dialogue spoken until about 40 minutes in.  The film’s most famous, and most exciting, segment — in which something goes wrong aboard Discovery, causing the HAL 9000 to turn against Frank and Dave, only encompasses about 30 minutes of the film, and we don’t meet Frank and Dave and HAL until over an hour in.

But I have grown to really love precisely those challenging aspects of the film that I have just described.  Mr. Kubrick is not concerned with giving us an “action beat” every 10-15 minutes.  The film’s careful pace and slow build are designed to immerse us in the new worlds which Kubrick and his team painstakingly created (both in man’s ancient past and in our near future).  Mr. Kubrick expends an extraordinary amount of time to present to us all the details of these environments.  Floyd Heywood’s journey to the moon (our first extended sequence once the film’s story shifts to the year 2001) is a prime example.  Kubrick & co. present to us with a wealth of detail about Heywood’s journey: we see how food is served, we see how the flight attendants move through the aisles despite the lack of gravity, we even get a hint at how one might go to the bathroom in zero-g, etc. etc.  These details do nothing to advance the plot but are, it seems to me, meant to illustrate how space travel might, in the near future, become as commonplace as air-travel is to us today.

This might be boring to some, but personally I relish the sensation, when watching 2001, of allowing myself to sink into the world created before me.  Kubrick combines his magnificent imagery with gorgeous music to create sensations in the viewer of other places and other times.  2001 is a staggeringly beautiful film.  The special effects are top-notch and have aged remarkably well for a film made in 1968.  I am continually amazed by the breathtaking beauty of the outer-space effects shots.  They feel “real” to me in a way that many modern films are unable to capture, despite the advanced tools available today.  And the sets are magnificent, particularly the fully-realized environment that Kubrick & co. created aboard the Discovery.  Watching David Bowman jog all the way around the Discovery’s spinning central axis is still a show-stopper.

And the music.  I mentioned that there is no dialogue for the first 40-or-so minutes of the film… and frankly there is very little dialogue even after that!  Thus, it is the music that is required to do a lot of the heavy lifting necessary to move the film forward and keep the audience connected.  Kubrick’s innovative choice of using a variety of classical pieces of music to score his film is one of the elements that elevates 2001 towards the realm of genius.  His choices were impeccable — just think about how irrevocably attached On The Beautiful Blue Danube (by Johann Strauss II) and Also Sprach Zarathustra (by Richard Strauss) have become to 2001: A Space Odyssey!

One of the more difficult aspects of 2001 (and something that frustrated me to no end when I first watched the film) is the way that Kubrick refuses to give the audience a character to connect with, emotionally, during the film.  When we first meet Heywood Floyd, it seems that he is being set up as the film’s protagonist.  But after the encounter with the Monolith on the moon, Floyd vanishes from the film.  When we finally meet Dave and Frank on the Discovery, one might think that, OK, here at last are our heroes.  But we hardly get to know either one of them.  Keir Dullea’s performance as David Bowman is particularly striking by the flat affect that he gives Dave.  We see very little outward emotion from him.  This makes it very difficult for the audience to ever know what he’s thinking — and it provides a powerful impediment towards our being able to connect with his character.  As many reviewers have noted over the years, the most “human” character is the computer, HAL!  He’s the only character, really, in the entire film who expresses human emotions: anxiety, fear, curiosity, etc.

It is clear that this is intentional.  Not only to I find that very concept (that the computer is more “human” than any of the humans) to be compelling and thought-provoking, but I also find myself engaging more and more with Dullea’s Dave Bowman each time I watch the film.  Perhaps it is precisely because of his flat demeanor that he seems like a blank slate onto which I, as a viewer, can transpose my own feelings as the film unfolds — making Dave Bowman an effective “everyman” character to take us through the film’s climax.

Which brings us, of course, to the ending.  As I discuss the ending, it’s difficult to avoid spoilers so please beware if you’ve never seen this film before.  (It’s amusing to consider “spoilers” in connection with a film that is over 40 years old, but I want to be sensitive to potential “newbies” to 2001.)  Bowman discovers the Monolith floating in orbit of Saturn, and one might start to think “Aha!  Now we’re going to get some answers!”  Instead, what follows is one of the most gloriously enigmatic sequences in film history.

The first time I watched 2001 I had absolutely no idea what the heck to make of that totally unexpected (and seemingly disconnected) sequence of imagery.  But subsequent viewings have, I think, allowed me to draw out the meaning of this sequence.  As we witness the rapid aging of David Bowman, we see him ultimately reborn as something entirely new, and at last we can understand the meaning behind the film’s lengthy prologue set amongst the (damn dirty) apes.  2001: A Space Odyssey is a film that depicts the story of the evolution of man, from the primitive apes who knew nothing beyond pure animal instinct, to the cerebral men of a future century whose efforts to create technological tools eventually resulted in a sentient machine almost more human than they were themselves, to the next mysterious stage in human evolution: the star-child.  There’s a certain powerful symmetry to be found there.

This is an adult, complex film.  Mr, Kubrick does not spoon-feed the audience any easy answers.  To the contrary, over the course of this review I have attempted to describe the many way in which he subverts and confounds audience expectations at every step along the way.  This created a very frustrating initial viewing for me (and, I suspect, for many others!), but it has resulted in a film that has grown ever richer and more satisfying each time I see it.

There are so many other little details of 2001: A Space Odyssey that I find myself appreciating, more and more, upon my return visits to this film.  The astounding beauty of our first glimpse of the Monolith on the moon.  The masterfully edited sequence in which Dave uses explosive decompression to re-enter Discovery.  The fascinating detail of the way the ever-older versions of Dave are slowly revealed in the film’s climax, in which each version sees the next, older version, and then once that older version has been glimpsed, the younger one is never seen again, and we (and Dave) find ourselves inhabiting that new, more aged figure.  I could go on.

2001: A Space Odyssey is a milestone of science-fiction, and of film in general.  An accounting of all the sci-fi films that have been profoundly influenced by the aesthetics of 2001 (either emulating those aesthetics, or attempting to respond against them) would be a monumental task.  But 2001 is not simply an important film because of its influence.  It is an important film because it is every bit as compelling and effective as it was when it was first released in 1968.  In many ways I would argue it has actually improved.

If you’ve never seen it, go watch it now.

Then, go watch it again.

Today I’m continuing my look at Pocket Books’ series of Star Trek: Titan novels, chronicling the post-Nemesis adventures of newly-minted Captain William T. Riker and the starship Titan.  (Click here for my review of Book 1: Taking Wing, and here for my review of Book 2: The Red King.)  While authors Andy Mangels & Michael A. Martin wrote those first two books, with the third novel in the series, Orion’s Hounds, they hand things off to Christopher L. Bennett.

The basic premise of the Titan series is that, following the cataclysmic events of the Dominion War and the other crises that followed, Starfleet has decided to attempt to return to its basic principles of peaceful exploration.  As such, they have commissioned the creation of a new class of starships, the Luna class, designed for deep-space exploration.  Will Riker commands the Titan, one of those new Luna class vessels, and he and his crew have been sent on a mission beyond the boundaries of the Federation (specifically towards the Gum Nebula, one of the largest astronomical landmarks in the Orion Arm of the Milky Way galaxy) to attempt to seek out new life and new civilizations.

As they travel into unexplored space, Deanna Troi and the other telepaths on board Titan find their minds touched by powerful consciousnesses that, while alien, nevertheless, feel somehow familiar to Troi.  The reason for that familiarity is soon made clear as the Titan discovers that the telepathic contact originated from a school of “star-jellies” — the same type of beautiful (and enormous) space-faring creatures that the U.S.S. Enterprise-D first encountered in the pilot episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, “Encounter at Farpoint.”

However, along with the star-jellies in their natural habitat, Titan also encounters the Pa’haquel, a species that hunts the star-jellies as well as many of the other space-dwelling life-forms found in that part of the galaxy.  The Pa’haquel are actually able to manipulate the dead corpses of the jellies, turning them into their own ships in which they’re able to live and which they use as vehicles for their hunts.  Riker, along with many members of his crew, are horrified by the actions of the Pa’haquel, but as per Starfleet regulations they are reluctant to interfere in the culture of an alien race.

Of course, events (which I won’t spoil here) soon force their hand, and a member of the Titan crew commits an act that dramatically upsets the balance between the Pa’haquel and the star-jellies.  The repercussions of that event makes plain to the Titan crew that things aren’t quite so simple as Star-jellies=good and Pa’haquel=bad, and they discover that their actions have caused dramatic ripple effects that threaten to catastrophically disrupt the interconnected interplanetary ecosystem of this part of the Orion Arm.

Christopher L. Bennett’s Star Trek novels have all been marked by his efforts to infuse as much real science into the story as possible, and Orion’s Hounds is no exception.  In this novel, Mr. Benett asks (and extrapolates answers to) a number of questions that a consideration of the depiction of the star-jellies in “Encounter at Farpoint” suggest.  (How do these creatures live?  Where do they come from?  How do they breed?  Why do their interiors resemble the rooms and hallways found in inorganic starships?  Did they naturally evolve that way, or were they engineered?  Are these creatures sentient?)

But, most fascinatingly, Mr. Bennett goes further than that.  Over the course of the novel, Bennett makes reference to almost every space-faring organism ever depicted in the various Star Trek TV shows.  (There’s a particularly entertaining chapter early on, in which Mr. Tuvok discusses with Titan’s science officers all of the star-going creatures encountered by the U.S.S. Voyager over the seven seasons of that show.)  These creatures were the creation of many writers and special effects artists, separated by many years, who often had little to no thought about the scientific plausibility of their creations or, even less, how they fit together as a whole with the many other space-dwelling creatures depicted by other Star Trek episodes and shows.  But throughout Orion’s Hounds, Mr. Bennett attempts to provide some unifying scientific background for these creatures — how they live, and how they connect with one another in the larger galactic ecosystem.  This is fascinating stuff, and the careful thought that Mr. Bennett has given to these different creatures (often referred to in the novel as cosmozoans or astrocoelenterates) is almost as interesting as the main story being told.

As for that main story, I was delighted by its complexity.  This isn’t a simple tale with easily-defined heroes and villains.  At every turn, Riker and his crew learn that things are more complicated than they seem, and Mr. Bennett avoids allowing Riker any easy answers or simplistic solutions to his dilemmas.  On my first reading of the novel, I must admit to having been put off a bit by Riker’s indecision in the face of these complex challenges.  There are quite a number of pages of the novel that are devoted to the debates among the Titan crew as to the morality of their situation and the choices before them in terms of whether or not to get involved in the situation before them and, if they do get involved, what sort of action they should take.  But on a second reading, I quite enjoyed those philosophical debates.  In many ways, those portions of the novel hew most closely to classic Star Trek: The Next Generation types of stories, in which there was quite a lot of talking, amongst the Enterprise’s command crew, about the issues before them.

The Titan series’ greatest strength, or greatest weakness (depending on your point of view), is that these stories are all designed to be classic Star Trek stories of exploration, and that each novel is stand-alone.  Certainly there are character arcs that carry from one book to the next, but each novel presents an entirely new adventure, with new species and new phenomena.  This makes the Titan series rather different than the types of Star Trek novels that I have found myself most enjoying over the past few years.  I have written quite a lot about how much I have gotten into the increased interconnectivity amongst the last few years’ worth of Star Trek novels, now that there’s no new TV shows or movies that the books need to be careful not to contradict.  I’ve enjoyed that the novels have NOT been stand-alone adventures, but rather that each new book has moved forward the over-all story-line, often in dramatic and unexpected ways.

But the Titan series is different from all that.  As a result, I must admit that I have always found myself a bit less excited about each new Titan novel than I have been about a new DS9 novel, or a new post-Nemesis Next Gen novel.  That probably explains why the first Titan Novel, Taking Wing — which was very much a bout the complex political situation in the Alpha Quadrant following the events of Star Trek: Nemesis — has always been my favorite of the Titan series.  (We’ll see if that opinion holds when I have completed my journey back through the Titan novels.)  But upon re-reading the series so far, I have found myself pleasantly surprised by how much I have enjoyed the stand-alone exploration tales of novels like Orion’s Hounds.  When the character work is this solid (and represents solid continuity from book-to-book, even now that we’re venturing into the point in the Titan series in which each successive novel is written by a different author), and the adventure story is this interesting, consider me on-board.  I extend great praise to Mr. Bennett for his excellent work here.

Next up is Titan Book 4: Sword of Damocles.  I hope to be back here with my thoughts on that novel soon!

Previous Star Trek novel reviews:

Star Trek: Titan —  Book 1: Taking Wing, Book 2: The Red King

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine — The Never-Ending Sacrifice, The Soul Key, DS9 relaunch overview

Star Trek: The Next Generation — Losing the Peace, The Sky’s The Limit, A Singular Destiny, Destiny trilogy,

Star Trek: The Lost Era — Book 1: The Sundered

Star Trek: Voyager — Full Circle

Star Trek: Myriad Universes (Books 1 & 2) — Star Trek: Mirror Universe: Shards & Shadows — Star Trek: Mirror Universe (Books 1 & 2)

Beyond the Final Frontier — Josh’s favorite Star Trek novels

I consider Sean of the Dead to be a near-flawless work of comedic genius.  I’m not a fan of Zombie movies, but that didn’t stop me from falling head-over-heels in love with the bizarre, comedic creation of Simon Pegg & Edgar Wright.  Sean of the Dead lead me to seek out Pegg & Wright’s first collaboration: the 14-episode British TV series Spaced.  (Read my review here.)  Somehow, though, I had completely missed Pegg & Wright’s 2007 release: the feature film Hot Fuzz.  Oh, I knew of Hot Fuzz, and I had wanted to see it for some time.  I just hadn’t gotten around to it until now.

In Hot Fuzz, Simon Pegg plays the tough, no-nonsense London cop Nicholas Angel.  He takes his job extraordinarily seriously, and he’s extraordinarily good at what he does.  So good, in fact, that the rest of the London police department hates him, and so they arrange to have him transferred out of London and to the sleepy little British town of Sanford.  Poor Angel doesn’t know quite what to do with himself in his bucolic, crime-free new home.

As was the case in Sean of the Dead and Spaced, Pegg’s character is paired up with Nick Frost.  Mr. Frost plays Danny Butterman, the bumbling but well-meaning police officer with whom Angel is partnered in Sanford.  But while Pegg & Frost’s characters were, in their two prior collaborations, presented as life-long best-mates, here in Hot Fuzz the two take an immediate dislike to one another.  Well, Angel takes an immediate dislike to Butterman.  Butterman, though, idolizes Angel, who he looks up to as a “big city” tough-guy cop like he knows from the movies.  It’s a great pleasure to watch Pegg and Frost paired up yet again.  The two have a terrific chemistry, and they just dominate any scenes that they’re in together.  It’s fun to see them play characters who have, at first, a more antagonistic relationship towards one another.

Hot Fuzz is a very funny film.  Pegg and Frost are extraordinary natural comedians, and the film is filled with a number of other top-notch comedic actors.  There’s a great bit of business early on in the film in which we meet Angel’s supervisors in the London police department, played by Martin Freeman, Bill Nighy, and Steve Coogan.  Jim Broadbent is a lot of fun as the jolly inspector Frank Butterman, Danny’s father and the head of the police department in Sanford.  But my favorite performance belongs to former James Bond Timothy Dalton, who is absolutely hilarious as the dashingly good-looking, possibly sinister Sanford super-market owner.  What perfect casting, and Dalton absolutely knocks the role right out of the park.

Where Hot Fuzz falls down, for me, is in the storyline that eventually develops in Sanford, in which the sleepy town is stricken by a series of possibly connected murders.  There’s a lot of comedy to be had from the storyline of a tough, street-hardened big-city cop bringing his violent, take-no-prisoners ways to a peaceful small town.  But the film quickly abandons that idea.  Since we learn soon after Angel’s arrival that Sanford, despite outward appearances, is anything BUT peaceful, the wind is taken quite out of the sails of that particular joke.  It quickly becomes apparent that Angel’s big-city methods ARE needed in Sanford.  To be honest, that was a bit disappointing to me.  And when the film, in its climax, becomes a tongue-in-cheek version of the type of hyper-violent buddy-cop films that Danny Butterman loves to watch on DVD, I found myself somewhat disinterested in the goings-on.  For a film like this to really work, not only does the comedy have to hit home, but the viewer needs to connect to the more serious, high-stakes story that eventually develops.  (No film accomplishes that dual task better, in my mind, than Ghostbusters.)  Hot Fuzz has a lot going for it, but it’s no Ghostbusters.

Here we go — my final post giving you my thoughts on my Great Lost Rewatch Project!  Yesterday I began my analysis of season 5.  Let’s continue, shall we?

“What lies in the shadow of the statue?”

Favorite Episodes

5.2 “Jughead” — We open with Penny giving birth to her son with Desmond, who we learn at the end of the episode is named Charlie.  Nice.  Three years later, we follow Desmond’s efforts to find Daniel Faraday’s mother, Eloise, and we learn more about Daniel’s time-travel experiments that eventually got him thrown out of Oxford and that apparently left his former girlfriend in a vegetative state.  Back on the island, we see that our castaways have time-traveled back to the 1950’s.  There we meet a young Eloise Hawking and Charles Widmore, and discover that the U.S. Army had been using the island as a site for the testing of nuclear weapons.  Meanwhile, Locke meets Richard Alpert, and since this Alpert of the ’50s doesn’t know him yet, Locke tells Richard the exact date and place of his birth which will happen in 2 years.  Locke suggests that Richard come see him – thus explaining Richard’s interest in Locke throughout his youth that we learned of last season in “Cabin Fever.”  This is a dazzlingly dense episode, filled to the brim with dramatic revelations and fascinating connections.

5.6 “316″ —  This episode declares its awesomeness right from the opening seconds — a phenomenal re-creation of the opening scene in the pilot. Jack again wakes up alone in the jungle – but this time it’s after the crash of Ajira flight 316. He’s back.  In flashback, we see how this all went down. The episode is filled with amazing moments, from Hurley’s attempt to buy up all the empty seats on the plane to Lapidus’ perfectly-delivered comment of resignation (see the title of yesterday’s post) when he sees the Oceanic 6 on board.  You gotta feel for the guy!!

5.8 “LaFleur” – After Locke disappears down the well, Sawyer & co. see the enormous statue (of which we saw a four-toed fragment back in season 2’s finale and hadn’t been seen nor mentioned since). Guess they’re pretty far in the past. Then they flash again, more violently this time – and seem to settle in one time period. It seems Locke has succeeded in his efforts to stop the time-jumping.  For the rest of the episode, we cut back and forth between the next few days in 1974 and 3 years later, in 1977, at which point Sawyer and co. are completely ensconsced in the Dharma Initiative.  It’s a lot of fun to see how Sawyer, Juliet, and Miles have adapted to their new lives amongst the Dharma folk, and it’s great to see more of what life was like for the members of Dharma on the island.  We learn more about the tenuous truce that exists between Dharma and the Others (represented by Richard Alpert). We see Amy give birth (to Ethan!  But we’ll learn that later) — indicating that the issue on the island with women giving birth hasn’t started yet.  We also get to see Radzinsky (who we’d previously seen as a bloodstain on the ceiling of the hatch) and Horace (who we saw in “The Man Behind the Curtain”) — it’s really neat to see these Dharma folk brought to life in this episode, and throughout the rest of the season.  Ultimately, though, it’s just nice to see Sawyer so happy, though we know it’s all about to come crashing down when Jin radios in, at the end of the episode, that he’s found Jack, Hurley, and Kate…

5.12 “Dead is Dead” – This is a fantastic, mind-bending episode that gives us some major pieces of the Lost puzzle while, of course, also raising a lot of other interesting new questions!  We see the development of the Ben Linus/Charles Widmore feud, from Charles’ anger with Richard for saving young Ben, to their disagreement over Ben’s refusal to kill baby Alex, to the moment when Charles is exiled from the island, leaving Ben apparently in charge.  It’s chilling to hear Charles’ warning to Ben that if the island DOES want Alex dead, one day soon Ben will be forced to choose between the island and his adopted daughter.  On the island in 2007, Ben tells Locke that he came back to be judged by the monster (“we don’t even have a name for it”) for breaking the rules and leaving the island, though Locke says he thinks Ben really wants to be judged for allowing his daughter to die, and cheerfully agrees to help Ben find the monster to be judged.  When Ben tries to summon the monster from the Dharma barracks, as we’ve seen him do before, nothing happens.  So Locke leads Ben to the Temple, where we get our best look yet at the smoke monster as it surround Ben and displays for him moments of his life with Alex.  In the end, the monster takes Alex’s form and makes Ben swear to follow Locke’s orders no matter what.  This is a complex, fascinating episode, one that delves deep into the mythology of Lost.  It’s also an episode whose events must be seen in an entirely different light given the revelations about John Locke and the smoke monster in the season 5 finale, “The Incident,” and the season 6 premiere “LA X” (revelations that I’m proud to say I guessed, based on my careful study of this episode during my rewatch!).  Oh, and I haven’t even mentioned that the question of “What lies in the shadow of the statue?” is asked here for the very first time!

“Richard’s always been here.”

Least-Favorite Episodes

5.11 “Whatever Happened, Happened” — There really aren’t that many weak links in season 5!  But if I had to pick a least-favorite episode, it would be this one.  There’s some great stuff happening in the 1977 part of this episode, no question.  I love the drama of Jack and Kate’s arguments over saving young Ben’s life.  (When Kate angrily declares “I don’t like the new Jack,” it’s a little bit heartbreaking to hear Jack’s resigned reply, “You didn’t like the old one.”)  But what sinks this episode for me is all the stuff with Kate and Aaron.  I’m just not that invested in all of her indecision about what to do, and I found her supermarket freak-out to be pretty pathetic.  Then there’s the scene with Claire’s mom, in which Kate tearfully admits that Claire is still alive, the Oceanic Six lied about the crash, and, oh yeah, that Aaron is actually Claire’s son.  That scene is powerful emotionally but also absolutely ridiculous.  Kate tells Mrs. Littleton that her daughter is alive, and that the Oceanic Six left her (and others) on the island and then lied about it.  Wouldn’t any rational person ask: “WHY on Earth would you six have done that??”  That Claire’s mom doesn’t ask, and that Kate doesn’t provide any hint of an explanation is beyond weird.  OK, maybe Mrs. Littleton was just in shock by the revelations and not thinking clearly.  Well, then, next week when things have sunk in and Kate has gone never to return, wouldn’t she call the police and start trying to organize rescue missions for people to find her daughter and all these other survivors??  This is a key story point, and that it is handled so flimsily is very disappointing to me.

“You forgot your guitar!”  ”It’s not my guitar.”

Favorite moments from season 5:

5.1 “Because You Left” — The intriguing opening sequence, in which we see Pierre Chang on the island in the 1970’s, waking up and feeding his son (Miles!), recording a Dharma orientatiom video (for The Arrow, the station where the Tailies were living in season 2!), and then visiting the under-construction Orchid station where the workmen’s drills have come perilously close to puncturing a pocket of electromagnetic energy (where the frozen donkey-wheel is!).  Chang discusses the rules inherent to time-travel (rules which we’ll learn more about over the course of the season) and then, most intriguingly, bumps into Daniel Faraday!  At the time, viewers didn’t know whether Daniel had time-traveled from the 1970’s to the future (to come to the island on the freighter in seasons 3 & 4) or whether this scene indicated that at some point Daniel would time-travel from the present (2004) back to the past.  Either way, it was a hell of a way to kick off the season, and I love that we eventually circled back to this scene at the very end of the season.

5.2 “The Lie” — Hurley’s meeting with Ana Lucia.  The icing on the cake?  Ana Lucia’s parting comment: “Libby says hi.”

5.2 “The Lie” — Hurley’s frantic, stream-of consciousness attempt to summarize for his mother all the craziness that befell him during the first four seasons of the show.  Hilarious.

5.4 “The Little Prince” — Jin washes up on the beach (for the second time in the series!) and is rescued by a young French-woman: Danielle Rousseau!

5.9 “Namaste” – Amy reveals to Juliet that she and Horace have named their baby (that Juliet delivered in the last episode) Ethan. Nice.

5.11 “Whatever Happened, Happened”  – Hurley and Miles’ hilarious conversation in which Miles tries to explain to Hurley the rules of time travel.  I also love Hurley’s Back to the Future moment as he stares at his hand to see if it starts to disappear.

5.13 “Some Like it Hoth” — Hurley and Miles realize that they both have the ability to communicate with dead people.

5.15 “Follow the Leader” — The hysterically quick way that Pierre Chang is able to get Hurley to admit that he’s from the future.  (Chang: “What year were you born?”  Hurley: “Um…1931.”  Chang: “You’re 46?”  Hurley: “Yes I am.”  Chang: “That means you must have fought in the Korean War?”  Hurley: “There’s no such thing.”  Chang: “Who is the U.S. President?”  Hurley: “OK, we’re from the future.”)

“You asked what I remembered.  I remember dying.”

So that’s it, my friends!  Five seasons of Lost. It was GREAT fun rewatching the series from start to finish, and great fun sharing my thoughts with you all in these posts.  Needless to say, I’ve been attentively watching season 6.  Sadly, I’m a bit lukewarm on the season so far.  The show still has a LOT of questions that need answering before everything wraps up.  You can rest assured that I’ll be bringing you my thoughts on the conclusion of the series as things wrap up!

It’s time to begin wrapping up my post-game assessment of my Great Lost Rewatch Project by beginning my thoughts on season 5!  Click here for my thoughts on season 1, season 2, season 3, and season 4.  As always, folks, MAJOR SPOILERS lie ahead, so beware.

“OK, so what?  We’re gonna go back and kill Hitler?”  ”Don’t be absurd. There are rules. Rules that can’t be broken.”

Coming after the magnificent season 4, my favorite season of the show since the first year, I wasn’t sure if season 5 would be able to maintain that high level of quality and narrative momentum.  But I shouldn’t have doubted.  Season 5 is another home-run, one that deepens our understanding of the show’s characters and of the larger backstory of the island.

Here in season 5, Lost fully embraces the sci-fi aspects that have often been a peripheral element of the show, as the writers dove into a complex time-travel storyline to begin the season.  Lost has played tentatively with time-travel before, most notably in the two Desmond episodes “Flashes Before Your Eyes” (click here for my detailed thoughts on that critical episode) and “The Constant.”  Those episodes had allowed us to begin to get some sense of the “rules” of time-travel in the Lost universe.  This isn’t Back to the Future type time-travel, where one could alter the past and thus change the future.  Here in the world of Lost, it seems that “whatever happened, happened” — that making major changes to the timeline are impossible.  (Season 6 will tell us definitively, one hopes, whether that is indeed the case.)

After Ben moved the island in the season 4 finale, something goes wrong and our castaways find themselves unstuck in time, jumping around into the past and the future.  Over the course of these jumps, much of the secret history of the island and its inhabitants is peeled back for us to examine.  We travel back to the ’50s, meeting a young Eloise Hawking and Charles Widmore (I LOVE the revelation that he was once an Other!) and learning of the US Army’s use of the island as a test site for nuclear weapons.  We learn the reason for Richard Alpert’s interest in a young John Locke (see in last season’s “Cabin Fever”).  We see what befell Rousseau and her team.  We see how Ben came to raise Alex.  And we learn a LOT more about the Dharma Initiative.

The time-jumping storyline is great fun, but things get even more fascinating once Locke turns the frozen donkey wheel himself.  The castaways (Sawyer, Juliet, Miles, and Daniel) wind up back in 1977, and become members of the Dharma Initiative.  I did not see that plot twist coming.  It’s a brilliant way for us to have an opportunity to explore what things were like when the much-mentioned Dharma Initiative was on the island, conducting their experiments and building their hatches in the years before the Others’ Purge (which we saw in season 3’s “The Man Behind the Curtain”).  As always, though, the success of that storyline rests not just on our getting answers to some of our questions, but on the strong character arcs that center the stories.  The strong, stable relationship that Sawyer and Juliet are able to create for themselves, and Sawyer’s transformation from angry loner to the trusted, well-liked LaFleur, are wonderful.  It’s a credit to the writers and actors involved at how well they’re able to pull off those story-lines, and they bring great heart to the tale as it unfolds (and, upon rewatching, great tragedy, as well, since we know how this is all going to wind up in “The Incident”).

“Third day we were here I was on line in the cafeteria and my mother got in line behind me. That was my first clue.”

Things are every bit as fascinating off the island as well, as in the season’s early episodes we watch Jack and Ben’s efforts to reunite the Oceanic Six and find a way to return to the island.  As in season 4, what’s great is the intensity and energy these story-lines have (in contrast to some of the goings-on in seasons 2 & 3 that felt at times like we were treading water).  There’s a strong narrative thrust to these story-lines, as Jack and Ben have a clear goal (a return to the island), and we see them struggle with the many obstacles in their way.

On my initial viewing, I was quite shocked at just how quickly the Oceanic Six did manage to get back to the island (by the sixth episode, “316″), but pleasantly surprised, since this meant the show could focus on even more interesting story-lines — our characters’ lives amongst the Dharma Initiative in the 1970s.  This also upped the dramatic stakes even further, since while we could be pretty certain that the Oceanic Six would, eventually, find a way to return to the island, once they found themselves stranded in the ’70s viewers had no idea what was going to happen next.  Good stuff, and clever story-telling.

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

Then, of course, there’s the finale, “The Incident.”  The opening scene, in which we FINALLY meet Jacob, is a tour-de-force sequence that forces us to entirely reevaluate everything that we have seen so far in the show’s first five seasons.  For along with Jacob we also meet his mysterious enemy, the Man in Black.  We see that the Black Rock is about to arrive on the island, and the huge Egyptian statue is still standing.  The M.I.B. accuses Jacob of having brought the ship there, and says that he hates him and will one day find a loophole that will allow him to kill him.

Suddenly we are forced to completely reevaluate almost everything that has come before on the show.  For five seasons we’ve tried to puzzle out the meaning behind all the strange things that we’ve seen happen on the island, including the many visions our characters have seemingly been granted by the island (often in the form of dead friends or relatives).  Many of these visions have seemed to have been contradictory.  (An example that jumps to mind is the way, back in season 1, Locke’s visions of the drug-plane seemed to indicate that the island wanted him to find that plane — and yet when his legs mysteriously give out in the jungle it seems that the island DOESN’T in fact want him to find the plane.)  We’ve seen mysterious “apparitions” that may or may not have been real, such as the many appearances of Christian Shephard, and all the strangeness of the encounters with Jacob’s cabin.  We’ve tried to figure out what this all means, and what the island wants from our castaways.  But now we must consider the idea that there have been TWO forces attempting to influence the denizens of the island, and that these forces have been in OPPOSITION.  This puts a fascinating new spin on everything we have seen to this point (and perhaps helps explain some of the seeming contradictions).

Case in point: when I watched season 5 originally, I was bugged by the whole idea that the Oceanic Six had somehow damaged the island by leaving (causing the crazy time-jumping), and that somehow it was their destiny to return.  This was the position suggested by Locke.   Since he was able to stop the time-jumping when he left the island to bring the Oceanic Six back, it seemed to me that the show was suggesting that he was correct.  But I didn’t understand how the Oceanic Six’s leaving could have caused the island to go crazy, when we’d seen plenty of other people leave the island (Michael, Charles Widmore when he was exiled, Ben, Richard, Ethan, Tom Friendly, etc. etc.) before without causing similar problems.

But during my rewatch, it became clear to me that, in fact, Locke’s suggestion was entirely incorrect.  It was Ben turning the wheel that caused the island (and/or the castaways) to jump in time – the Oceanic 6 had nothing to do with it.  Once we learn in the finale that the M.I.B. has been inhabiting Locke’s body, it clarifies the scenes seen in the penultimate episode, “Follow the Leader,” and we can now understand that the whole idea that the Oceanic Six must return to the island was planted in Locke by the M.I.B. (when we see the M.I.B. in Locke’s body tell Richard Alpert exactly what he needs to say to the time-jumping Locke of the past, who Richard is about to help with his bullet wound).  The whole thing was a ruse to get dead Locke back to the island so the M.I.B. could take his place and get Ben to kill Jacob.

That is genius!!

It’s also fiendishly complicated, and we still have an extraordinary number of outstanding questions that I really hope season 6 will address.  But I applaud the Lost writers for their creativity and their cleverness.  It’s exciting that a show entering its final season still has so much creative energy and juice left in the proverbial tank.

Of all the seasons of the show, season 5 is the one that I most enjoyed during my rewatch.  It is so full of tiny little details and connections — many of which I missed when watching the show for the first time, week-to-week.  But it’s delightful to notice all of those little elements of the tapestry that the makers of Lost have cleverly woven into the fabric of the show, purely for the attentive fans.  (I’m going with a weaving metaphor here in honor of the scene that introduces us to Jacob in “The Incident.”)  This is bold, inventive television, and I sure hope that season 6 is able to stick the landing.

“When I was little, living here, there was this man, this crazy man. He really scared me. And he told me that I had to leave the island and never ever come back. He told me that if I came back to the island, I would die.”

See you back here tomorrow as my Great Lost Rewatch Project draws to a close, and I give you more in-depth comments on my favorite and least-favorite moments from season 5!

I have an extensive series of posts, that will be running over the course of the next month, in which I write about my revisitation of Arthur C. Clarke’s four-novel Odyssey series which began in 1968 with 2001: A Space Odyssey — as well as the two film adaptations (of 2001 and 2010).  On Wednesday of this past week, literally moments after I had typed the final words of my review of Mr. Clark’s fourth and final Odyssey novel, 3001: The Final Odyssey, I read the sad news that Mr. Clarke had passed away at the age of 90.  What sad news.  This detailed obituary from the New York Times is worth a look.  Mr. Clarke was a giant in the world of science fiction, and he will be sorely missed by all of his fans world-wide, including this one.

Some big trailers have hit the web recently.  Check out this terrific new trailer for Iron Man 2, as well as this intriguing glimpse at the I-can’t-believe-this-actually-got-made sequel to Tron.  How great is Bruce Boxleitner in that trailer?  How about that glimpse of (newly-minted Oscar winner) Jeff Bridges?  Both films look fantastic, and I fervently hope they both can deliver.

Speaking of Jeff Bridges, I wanted to direct your attention to this great recent piece from aintitcoolnews.com, in which Jeff Dowd, the inspiration for “the Dude” in The Big Lebowski, waxes poetic about Mr. Bridges.

And speaking of films I hope will deliver, here’s a sneak peek at Robert Rodriguez and Nimrod Antal’s upcoming movie Predators.  Is it possible that we might finally be getting a truly kick-ass Predator film that can hold its own with the Arnold Schwarzenegger original?  I am beginning to hope…  (At the very least, they have settled on a phenomenal title, one that echoes James Cameron’s Aliens, the sequel to Ridley Scott’s film Alien.)

Finally, all of the fans of Lost out there need to be sure to check out my favorite article of the month: The Real Problem with Midichlorians.  I COULDN’T AGREE MORE WITH THIS ARTICLE.

After being catapulted clear of the Milky Way galaxy at the end of Taking Wing (The first Star Trek Titan novel — read my review here), Captain William T. Riker and the crew of the U.S.S. Titan find themselves in the Small Magellanic Cloud, one of the Milky Way’s satellite galaxies.  This area of space also happens to be the home of the Neyel, the mysterious race of aliens with centuries-old ties to humanity first introduced in the novel The Sundered (read my review here).

While Taking Wing was focused on introducing Riker’s new ship and its extraordinarily varied interspecies crew, as well as wrapping up a number of dangling story-threads left by the end of Star Trek: Nemesis, The Red King (written by Andy Mangels & Michael A. Martin) is more of what the Titan series was billed to be: a story of exploration, in which Riker and his crew encounter strange new worlds and new life forms.  At the same time, The Red King is a direct sequel to both Taking Wing and The Sundered, as Riker and his crew work to locate Romulan commander Donatra’s missing fleet, figure out how to return to Federation space, and unravel the mystery of a terrible new threat to Neyel space.  (Readers, meanwhile, get to learn about what has happened to the Neyel since we last met them 100 years earlier during Captain Sulu’s time in The Sundered.)

My recollection was that The Red King was my least favorite of the Titan series, but in re-reading the novel I found quite a lot to enjoy.  Mangels & Martin have a nice, easy-to-read writing style that I always find very engaging.  The Red King is a fast-paced yarn, and it continues the exploration of the unique natures and backstories of the members of Titan’s diverse inter-species crew that was begun in the previous installment.  Most interestingly to me, we finally learn the details of the event that caused the thirty-years-and-counting rift between Starfleet Admiral Leonard James Akaar and Lt. Tuvok (who had been close friends aboard the Excelsior during the events of The Sundered).

But the novel does have some weaknesses.  Primarily, the emerging sentient protouniverse that is destabilizing space in the Small Magellanic Cloud doesn’t really present that compelling a scientific mystery (the Titan crew seem to figure out what’s going on pretty quickly) nor that compelling a challenge/adversary.  As a result, the novel sometimes seems to be without a central narrative thrust.  Riker’s crew comes up with a plan to contain the protouniverse about halfway through the novel, meaning that the whole second half of the book is without any real twists.  Oh, a lot happens, don’t get me wrong.  But all of the events seem very episodic.  Every few pages, Martin & Mangels take us to a different location and dramatic event.  Now we’re on the shuttlecraft Ellington as injured Titan security chief Ranul Keru attempts to rescue civilians from the doomed planet Oghen.  Now we’re aboard the Romulan warship Valdore, as Donatra finds herself challenged by her former uneasy partner Suran for command.  Now we’re aboard the Vanguard colony as a Neyel civilian flees from thugs convinced that the desperate situation means that the rule of law has gone out the airlock.  But each of those events (and the many others that transpire during the novel’s second half) are over and done with in the matter of just a few pages.  They’re all dramatic and well-written, but they don’t quite hang together as a suspenseful narrative.

Still, despite those flaws, I found myself enjoying The Red King far more than I remembered.  Mangels & Martin have done an excellent job in setting up the new Titan series.  They’ve created an engaging premise (a return to Starfleet’s original ideals of scientific exploration) and populated Riker’s ship with enough intriguing characters to give the series material for many novels to come.  I’m eager to move on to the next installment: Orion’s Hounds by Christopher L. Bennett.  I’ll be back with a report on that novel in a few weeks!

Last week I wrote about Moon, one of the 2009 films that I hasn’t succeeded in catching before the switch-over to the Year We Make Contact.  Today I’m here to write about another 2009 film that I’m glad I found a chance to see before getting too far into 2010: Crazy Heart.

Jeff Bridges plays “Bad” Blake, a once-great country singer who, through a combination of bad luck and his own hard-living, has been reduced to singing in bowling alleys.  Bad is a pretty pathetic figure when we first encounter him in the film, pulling up to his latest small-town gig in his battered old pick-up truck and dumping out a jug full of his urine.  But drunk and washed-up though he may be, when he starts to perform we can see the embers of his greatness.  Until he has to run outside to puke, that is.

It’s not too hard to guess that, over the course of the film, Bad will be able to claw his way up to some small form of redemption.  But the pleasures of Crazy Heart aren’t in any big dramatic plot twists or emotional epiphanies.  They’re in the way that, through a million small choices, Jeff Bridges brings this broken-down man to fully-realized life.  Bad isn’t really a cliched scoundrel-with-a-heart-of-gold.  He makes a lot of poor choices, and we see him fully live up to the name he has taken for himself.  But Mr. Bridges brings such humanity to the performance that one somehow can’t help rooting for Bad nonetheless.  Can anyone deny that Jeff Bridges is one of our finest actors working today?

Maggie Gyllenhaal is solid, as she always is.  But I was really pleasantly surprised by Colin Farrell’s excellent work as Bad’s former protege Tommy Sweet.  It’s a very well-written part.  Tommy is talked about a lot in the film before we ever see him on-screen.  While Bad has hit hard times, Tommy has become a country music super-star.  I was expecting fireworks when these two finally met up in the film, but I was really pleased that the film went in another direction.  There’s friction between the two, but also reservoirs of affection.  I was quite taken with Mr. Farrell’s work, giving Tommy the arrogance one might expect of an on-the-rise mega-talent, but also a deep core of loyalty to his former mentor.  I’ve always been a big fan of Colin Farrell (I even love him in Daredevil!), and between this and his role in The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus (read my review here), it’s nice to see him getting some decent roles these days.

Crazy Heart has a heck of a soundtrack, featuring an array of classic tunes by Waylon Jennings, Lucinda Williams, Buck Owens, and many more, along with a number of new songs written specifically for the film (such as Ryan Bingham’s song “The Weary Kind”).  Both Jeff Bridges and Colin Farrell do a lot of singing in the film, and they both acquit themselves rather well.

In his review of the film for the New York Times, A.O. Scott noted the strong resemblance between Crazy Heart and the 1983 film Tender Mercies, a resemblance only enhanced when Robert Duvall (who starred in Tender Mercies) makes an appearance in Crazy Heart late in the film.  My parents made the same observation.  I haven’t seen Tender Mercies (though I added it to my Netflix queue after seeing this film), so I can’t comment for myself.  But I tend to agree with Mr. Scott, who wrote: “There can never be too many songs about drinking, loving and feeling bad, and there is always room for another version of that old song about the guy who messed it all up and kept on going. Especially when that guy can play the tune as truly and as well as Mr. Bridges.”  Well said.

“She’s not my daughter. I stole her as a baby from an insane woman. She’s a pawn, nothing more. She means nothing to me.”

Yesterday I began analyzing Lost season 4.  Here are some of my favorite and least-favorite moments from that over-all terrific season!

“Is he talking about what I think he’s talking about?”  ”If you mean time-traveling bunnies, then yes.”

Favorite Episodes:

4.2 “Confirmed Dead” – A great episode that begins to introduce us to the “Freighter-Folk” and raises a whole heck of a lot of new mysteries.  We see Daniel Faraday watching the discovery of the Oceanic 815 wreckage and crying.  We see Charlotte investigating an archaeological dig in Tunisia, where the skeleton of a polar bear (with a Dharma collar!) has mysteriously been found in the middle of the desert.  We learn of Mile’s ability to communicate with the dead.  We see Laipdus, who was also watching footage of the Oceanic 815 recovery, at which point he becomes convinced that the bodies are not actually those of the survivors, and we learn that he was supposed to have been the pilot of 815 that day.  We see Naomi being recruited by the mysterious Abbadon.

4.5 “The Constant” – A phenomenal episode, without question one of the very best of the series. Leaving the island, Lapidus is forced by a storm to shift slightly off the precise bearing that Daniel gave him. As a result, Desmond’s mind is somehow thrown back in time and exchanged with that of his younger self, still serving as a soldier in the Scotts Royal Regiment. Over the course of this mind-bending hour, we are given an enormous amount of information about Daniel Faraday’s time-traveling experiments (information that will prove critical to our understanding of season 5).  We also see, in an intriguing scene, Charles Widmore at an auction, bidding on the first mate’s log from the Black Rock (the ship we know is beached on the island), which we learn had formerly been in the possession of Tovar Hanso (an apparent ancestor of the founder of the Dharma Initiative).  Suddenly we are forced to reconsider Mr. Widmore — he’s not just Desmond’s troublesome potential father-in-law, he’s a man with some sort of connection to the island.  But, of course, none of this fascinating back-story would matter at all if not for the episode’s emotional center: the star-crossed love story of Desmond and Penny.  Their tearful reunion, when Desmond calls her from the freighter’s radio room after having obtained her phone number in the past, is wonderfully powerful stuff, and a highlight of the season (and the series).

4.9 – The Shape of Things to Come – In one of my favorite flashforwards of the season, we see Ben appear (wearing a Dharma parka!) in the middle of Tunisia. (We’ll soon learn that this is where he went after turning the island’s wheel in the season 4 finale – and this explains how the Polar Bear skeleton that Charlotte found in Tunisia in “Confirmed Dead” wound up there.) Ben kicks the ass of some locals (using a weapon familiar to readers of Y The Last Man – a nice nod since this episode was written by Brian K. Vaughan), and then sets out to recruit Sayid’s help. It seems that poor Sayid finally found and married his love, Nadia, but that she was soon after killed when she was hit by a truck. Ben tells Sayid that Charles Widmore was responsible. Desperate for vengeance, Sayid agrees to work with Ben to kill all of Widmore’s men.  The story-line on the island is every bit as tragic and compelling.  The dead body of the freighter’s doctor washes up on the beach, an apparent result of more island-related time dilation, since when they radio in to the boat they learn that the doc hasn’t died yet!  Keamy and his men attack the barracks, killing most of the castaways hiding there,and blowing up Claire’s house. Keamy demands that Ben surrender or he’ll kill Alex. Ben refuses, and in a shocking moment Keamy shoots Alex in the head. A furious Ben enters a secret compartment in his house and summons the smoke monster, who decimates Keamy’s men.  At the episode’s end, we see Ben off the island, paying Widmore a visit in his bedroom and vowing to kill his daughter, Penny, in exchange for Widmore’s killing his.  Filled with I-can’t-believe-that-just-happened moments, this episode is a great example of season 4’s renewed narrative intensity.

“You’re more lost than you ever were.”

Least-Favorite Episodes

4.6 “The Other Woman” — In flashback, we meet Harper Stanhope, the Others’ psychiatrist, assigned soon after Juliet’s arrival on the island to meet with her regularly. The two women seem to take an instant dislike to one another, exacerbated when Juliet begins an affair with Goodwin, Harper’s husband.While the humanization of Goodwin is interesting, Juliet comes off looking pretty poor here (sleeping with a married man).  I also found this episode’s depiction of the cruel love-sick Ben (who declares to Juliet “you’re mine”) to venture too far into over-the-top moustache-twirling villainy, far less interesting than the more subtly manipulative Ben we have previously seen.

4.8 “Meet Kevin Johnson” – This is a fun episode, and it’s great to have Michael back on the show. But I have serious problems with the events portrayed in Michael’s flashbacks. It seems to me that the events depicted would have had to have taken place over MONTHS. When we first meet up with Michael in this episode, he is already suicidal over his guilt and his split from Walt – the implication is that Michael has already been home for a while. And it must have taken additional weeks for Michael to prepare for his task of infiltrating the freighter and then travel to the port in Fiji, and then we must consider the time it would have taken for the freighter to find the island. As I wrote, all of that seems like it would have taken MONTHS. But if you think about it, Michael left the island during the season 2 finale. The freighter has already found the island two-thirds of the way through season 3 (when Naomi parachutes onto the island). Since every episode of Lost pretty much takes place during a single day, that means that only 2-3 weeks, maximum, elapsed from the time that Michael left the island until the time that he returned, disguised as Kevin Johnson on the freighter. I don’t think that tome-line works at all, and it really undermines this episode. I also hate the ending, in which Rousseau and Karl are gunned down in the jungle (by Keamy’s men, which we’ll learn later) and Alex is taken prisoner. I can’t believe how easily the tough, cunning Rousseau – who survived all by herself on the island for 16 YEARS – walks right into the trap set by Keamy’s men. That’s pretty weak.

“Those things had to happen to me. That was my destiny. But you’ll understand soon that there are consequences to being chosen. Because destiny, John? Destiny is a fickle bitch.”

Favorite moments from the season:

4.3 “The Economist” — Daniel Faraday’s rocket experiment that clues us in on the mysterious bubble of time-dilation surrounding the island.

4.4 “Eggtown” — Hurley’s response when he realizes that Kate has tricked him into revealing where Miles is being kept: “You just totally Scooby Doo’ed me, didn’t you?”

4.8 “Meet Kevin Johnson” — Libby’s blink-and-you’ll-miss-her split-second appearance in Michael’s nightmare!

4.9 “The Shape of Things to Come” —  Keamy forces Alex to deactivate the sonic pylons, which causes a phone to ring in Ben’s house, something which really perplexes Locke & the gang! They ask Ben about it, and Ben immediately realizes what has happened – so, in another great moment, Ben quickly whips out the gun he’d apparently been keeping hidden in the seat at his piano!

4.11 “Cabin Fever” — Richard Alpert’s enigmatic visit to the home of a young John Locke.  (Eagle-eyed Lost viewers couldn’t have missed the young Locke’s drawing hanging on the wall, of what appears to be the smoke monster!)

4.12 “There’s No Place Like Home” Pt. 1 — At the memorial service for his father, Jack meets Claire’s mother and learns a staggering secret: that Claire was his half-sister.

“I’m here to tell you that the island won’t let you come alone. All of you have to go back.”

I’ll see you back here next week for my thoughts on Lost: Season 5!

My season-by-season analysis of Lost continues!  Click here for my thoughts on season 1, here for my thoughts on season 2, and here for my thoughts on season 3.  SPOILERS ARE AHEAD, gang, so beware!

“Rescuing you and your people… I can’t really say it’s our primary objective.”

There were times, watching seasons 2 and 3 of Lost when they originally aired, when I must admit that my faith in the show wavered.  There were so many mysteries raised but not answered, and after the terrific first season there seemed to be many times when the show was spinning in circles, narratively.  But season 4 firmly established Lost, in my mind, as one of the greatest TV series of our time, as opposed to a show that started off brilliantly but then slowly settled into mediocrity (cough 24 cough).

The writers brilliantly reinvigorated the show by abandoning their signature story-telling device, the use of flashbacks.  Instead they began presenting us with tantalizing flash-FORWARDS that hinted at what would befall to our castaways in the time between the on-island events of 2004 and what we glimpsed of 2007, when we met the desperate, suicidal off-island Jack in the season 3 finale.  That finale set up all sorts of questions: How did the castaways get off the island?  Why did only SOME of the castaways leave?  What happened to everyone else — were they dead, or did they decide to stay for some reason?  What happened to Jack (and the other Oceanic Six) in their three years off the island?  What drove Jack to become the destroyed, shell of a man that we saw in the season 3 finale?  Whose body was in that coffin??

One of the great strengths of season 4 is that way that, in decidedy un-Lost fashion, every one of those above questions were answered by the end of the season.  Season 4 feels like the most complete of all the seasons of Lost, with a distinct beginning, middle, and end, and in which all of the major questions raised at the beginning of the season (well, really by the finale of season 3) were answered by the end of the season.  That all this was accomplished despite the fact that the season was truncated due to the lengthy writers strike is quite astounding.  (Season 4 was scheduled to be 16 episodes long — much shorter than the 24 episodes-per-season that seasons 1-3 were — but it was shortened to only 13 episodes because of the strike.)  In many ways, I suspect the shortened length of the season turned into one of its greatest strengths.  There’s no flab in season 4 — with only 13 episodes to play with, the writers didn’t have a moment to waste.  As a result, every single episode of the season seems critical to the narrative, and the story rushes forward like a freight train from start-to-finish.

“I’m here, Charles, to tell you that I’m going to kill your daughter. Penelope, is it? And once she’s gone, once she’s dead, then you’ll understand how I feel, and you’ll wish you hadn’t changed the rules.”

I love that, in a surprising change of pace, the first episode of season 4 gives us a spotlight on Hurley!  I enjoyed meeting Matthew Abbadon (played by Lance Reddick, who played Cedric Daniels from The Wire!), though I wish we’d seen more of him during the year.

While season 2 introduced us to the Tailies, and season 3 spotlighted the Others, here in season 4 we meet the “Freighter-Folk.”  Looking back, it’s interesting to contemplate just how critical these characters (Daniel Faraday, Miles, Charlotte, Lapidus) have become to the show.  (This is in contrast to the Tailies, who were pretty much all dead — except for Bernard — by the time season 2 ended.)  Lost’s writers have repeatedly noted how the Freighter-Folk were the ones most impacted by the writers’ strike shortened season — we’d have to wait until season 5 to have many of our questions about them answered.  But this doesn’t weaken their story-lines in season 4 for me at all.  If anything, now having seen season 5, during my Lost rewatch project I found myself even more hooked by the intriguing glimpses we got into these enigmatic Freighter-Folk (such as the weird scene when Charlotte tests Daniel’s memory with playing cards in “Eggtown”).

“You people had therapists?”  ”It’s very stressful being an Other, Jack.”

As the season progresses, there is great fun to be had in watching all the pieces fall into place on the island for the events that we know, from the flashforwards, will be happening to our castaways.  Much of season 4 has a tragic inevitability, and watching Jack & co. struggle mightily to get off the island while we know of the misery that awaits them makes for powerful, compelling viewing.  In the two-part finale, “There’s No Place Like Home,” we see the moment we’ve been anticipating for 4 years – the castaways (some of ‘em, anyways), disembark from their rescue plane and are joyfully reunited with their families (some of ‘em, anyways).  We see the press conference in which they tell their (made-up) story.  (Note that in the cover story, the castaways left the uncharted island on which they had been stranded 108 days after the crash.  That’s a familiar number!!)  Then we get a fascinating series of glimpses into how the Oceanic Six spent their 3 years off the island, scenes that help put into context many of the flash-forwards we’d seen all season long.

Then, finally, we circle back to the Jack/Kate “we have to go back!” scene from the end of season 3. Kate angrily tells Jack that she’s spent the last 3 years trying to forget all the horrible things that happened to them the day they left the island. Jack returns to the funeral parlor, where he meets Ben and we see that the “Jeremy Bentham” in the casket is actually John Locke. Ben tells Jack that they ALL must go back to the island.  Bring on season 5!

“I’ve heard you tell that story so many times I’m starting to think you believe it.”

I’ll see you back here tomorrow, for more specific thoughts on my favorite & least-favorite moments from season 4.