A fangirl's review projects

LOST 1x06 – House of the Rising Sun

This was a much better episode than the last one, which does nothing to refute my opinion that it’s bad when the show focuses on Jack. This has decent work for a fair amount of the cast, although – oddly for how much I know they dominate the fandom – I feel like Sawyer and Kate are just blobs of mostly nothing. Not in an annoying way like Jack, who is a nothing that the show expects us to invest in anyway, but in a way that could get annoying if they start taking up space in the narrative without giving me more reason to care.

I realize now that the episode title is a pun, though I’m not sure it’s a pun that actually works. Sun isn’t really on the rise throughout this episode; I’d go so far as to say it’s Sun being eclipsed in much of the story. I approve of puns generally, but the pun work here is weak.

This is a much better use of the show’s flashbacks. It skims over a lot of time, but it does form a solid arc that both shows how Sun and…husband-of-Sun (I think Jin, but I can’t swear to it) came to be on that flight and informs the current issues they’re dealing with. Mostly Sun, but it gives us some look into possibly-Jin.

This is totally a me problem, I cannot blame these writers/producers for it at all, but because the role I most associate with Daniel Dae Kim in sweet puppy boy Matheson on Crusade, I may be a touch more sympathetic to him than I probably should be from what we’ve seen so far. But in a way, that works; I’m sort of like Sun, I’m seeing him as someone who’s supposed to be a good man but is clearly doing bad things, and wanting him to be better, wanting him to break out of the situation he’s in and be the better man I believe he can be.

I’m not sure whether I think they should have used sci-fi rules for the flashbacks or not. Having the language barrier in the island scenes is effective, and it might have been undercut if they’d used SF logic and had the actors speaking English when the characters would have been speaking Korean, and it’s not like we’re watching that many long stretches of subtitled scenes, so I’m not complaining; I just…expect sci-fi rules.

So, should we assume Sun’s friend thinks she got in the car and so wasn’t in the plane crash? At least we know arrangements were made to have the dog taken care of. Also the sequence of events is potentially awkward. If Sun and Jin had been in Sydney for a bit and were now taking their trip to the US, it all works fine. But if they were just changing planes in Sydney, why would they be out near the airport entrance?

In some ways I think this episode is affected by how muddled the last one was. Because I can’t tell if I’m supposed to see Jack as a terrible leader. They could be setting up a long arc of Jack letting others make him be the leader, only he doesn’t know how to lead so he tries to act like people who are leaders and he does it badly. I don’t think that’s what they’re going for, but it’s not out of the realm of possibility. I don’t mean this in the sense that his plan is a bad one, I mean he’s a bad leader making snap decisions and expecting people to just follow now that he’s been turned into a leader.

I don’t know how much it’s true about Korean people not liking black people; I don’t really doubt it, it seems like a racial divide that could exist, but I’m also hesitant to take a statement like that and just go with it. But, taking it as true-ish at least, I do agree that Walt wouldn’t necessarily know it; he’s young enough that his community doesn’t make him aware of all standing prejudices, and he also presumably grew up in Australia (barring the absence of accent) where the racial prejudices are different from the ones Michael (I picked that one up) is familiar with in the USA.

(I kind of think I had a larger point about the ideas underpinning that aspect of the plot; about how prejudices get passed down and along or something, but it refuses to come together into a coherent point. I think it mostly worked for me, in spite of not entirely being sold on the initial proposed prejudice. Maybe if there is more to this point down the road it will be something I find the words for better.)



LOST 1x07 – The Moth

I’m kind of all over the place with my view of this episode. I think I like it, but I’m not entirely sure it deserves much praise. It has some pretty serious flaws in construction, and some of it does probably go down to the bones of the story, but it makes some choices that I really appreciate and manages to make things I’m normally annoyed by work.

The most impressive feat is that I almost like Locke in this one. Instead of seeming like the writers’ designated voice of faith and mysticism, he just seems like a guy who’s trying to dad people. I can’t say I get him or care about him as a character, but I prefer this slight variation on the archetype he’s been filling. When the ‘wisdom’ he’s trying to impart is more grounded and less about The Island being a magic woo land, I can handle that better.

He’s still not well written, as he gets the lion’s share of the overwrought moth metaphor, but again I can almost convince myself the character knows it’s an overwrought metaphor but it seems useful on Charlie while he’s detoxing.

I did not like the flashbacks in this one. They didn’t illustrate anything we couldn’t guess about Charlie’s character, and it might have actually been more meaningful if what nuggets there are had been revealed in dialog as he opened up (moth-like) to people in the present. And now that I’m thinking about it, I almost feel that way about the flashbacks last episode, even though I at least liked them better and do think they served a point. But would it not be just as effective to watch the present scenes without the flashbacks, not knowing if what we’re told about the characters is always true, instead of having the backstory on screen? On the other hand, it probably does help the actors lock into their characters, so that’s a benefit.

Charlie fulfills his destiny as a Hobbit and crawls through a hole and camps underground.

And I think the fact that I have nothing else to comment on about Charlie’s journey this episode is telling. It’s an essential step in getting his character to a better place, but I don’t think it tells us much about his inner life and struggles. I don’t track his journey through the flashbacks, and the fact there’s no clear timeline doesn’t help; it really doesn’t portray him struggling with temptation to start using drugs, nor do we see what ‘improves’ for him when he’s on them. It portrays mostly the physical aspects of going through withdrawal without giving us insight into what he’s thinking or feeling that the drugs usually make him able to avoid dealing with. And as such I don’t feel all that connected to what he’s overcome or learned/accepted about himself at the end, just that he’s willing to tough out the side effects of going off the drugs.

To go along with my bettered opinion of Locke this ep, I almost care about Jack. Again, having him not be the hero, or in any leadership role, in the episode probably does wonders for my opinion. He seems more like a real person than a ‘heroic’ TV character. I was saying early in the episode that Jack should probably be able to tell that Charlie was going through withdrawals, so I’m glad that was confirmed.

The character I’m kind of most bothered by this episode is Kate. I don’t dislike her, but she’s kind of accumulating a lot of negative aspects of being the female lead without the positive ones I can find in most. She’s not even a designated hero, she’s just way too defined by the men around her. To the point where what little there is to say about her part in this episode is really more interesting about Sawyer (who I do dislike, but at least inspired some thoughts this time).

Because Sayid had chosen Kate and not-Damon as his partners in this mission, and both of them leave other – expected to be less reliable and certainly less fully briefed – people to do their part in the plan. But both Sawyer and Shannon (that one I do remember) come through; Sayid’s plan succeeds in spite of Jack’s trouble taking away the people he thought he could rely on. That while not-Damon and Kate are on team getting off the island, they do put the needs of the island community before that mission; both leaving their part to more selfish/self-centered characters (as far as we’re so far shown). And I kind of think that’s an interesting turn of events.

I am sort of getting to a point where I’d rather just watch a few episodes in a row without stopping to review them. But I do still think this is helping me get my thoughts in order about how I’m seeing the show, so for now I’ll stick with it. The reviews probably are going to stay on the shorter side for now though.