Lost

[Dawn Coyote]

Last night it seemed like a lot of filling in the back-stories. Fast.

Danielle Rousseau killing her companions was interesting. I wonder if there was anything to her suspicion that they'd been "changed" by their trip underground?

I loved the smoke-monster dragging that guy underground. And Jack's father seems to be getting more ominous.

"The island is dead" was what's-her-name (Stacy?). Perhaps Jacob is an entity that is able to co-opt the identities of the dead. Very Stephen King-esque, if so (Tak?).

Also, something about Jacob's ladder, and exiled souls...

[Edward]

I had to look Eloise up.  What I found most intriguing was the idea that the smoke monster was guarding the temple...a temple?  That and the old "well" and I are happy.  The seemingly ancient stuff really excites my imagination for some reason.  My pet theory is the island is the ancient crash site of a faster than light alien ship.  But I have no hope that's the case.

And I want this explained.

[Dawn Coyote]

The underground gear is interesting. The foot reminds me of the Colossi at Memnon, or the statues at Abu Simbel:
 


And there were Egyptian hieroglyphs on the temple, weren't there? Tunisia and Egypt aren't that far apart.

Eloise! Now I remember her from The Others, where she played a ghost trying to alert Nicole Kidman to the fact that she was dead. That doesn't seem like coincidental casting, to me.

Alien ship: Stacy saying she speaks Klingon. Seemed like a red-herring, though - playing with the fans.

[Schadenfreude]

Where's the rest of me?

[largo]

Ben gets the snot beat out of him, again, today (I think, based on a preview snippet I saw yesterday).

Who gets the honours?

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Maybe they did this just for me. I still think he's horribly miscast.

[Dawn Coyote]

I hope it's Sun.

Why do you think he's miscast, again?

Poor guy -- he's spent most of the series with his face covered in bruises.

[largo]

He just looks like a weasely wimp.

Most tough guys, evil guys, I mean guys who would hurt you without giving it a second thought .. look the part. It's not a menacing look, it's a vacant look. Let's face it, this guy looks like he's sat behind a desk for the last 15 years. His whole thing doesn't work for me. Ben's little tight-lipped cross-eyed look is the look of a guy who's pissed off because the photocopier is jammed.

p.s. not saying I have a lot of experience with this, and most of what I do have is from the hockey arena oh those decades ago, so take this with a grain of "just sayin' is all" and all that ..

also, that DarkUFO guy, they really do gotta get him working on the economy or something ..  (he's good)

[Edward]

Gonna have to disagree with you about Ben.  I know what you're saying, but Ben isn't tough guy kind of mean.  He's weasely kind of evil and he plays it perfectly.

[largo]

But that's what they do with him, no? I vaguely remember him showing up in the desert in his parka, didn't have have to kill a couple of Arab terrorists with his bare hands or something? (Exaggeration, I'm sure he did it McGiver-style.)

Really though, I know it's just me. The kid they chose to play the young Ben was pretty good.

So, if indeed he's pummeled tonight, would be fun if it were some "Widmore toughs."

[Edward]

No, you're right.  He got the upper hand on two locals.  Funny I don't recall that incident when thinking about him.  So it bothered you when you saw it, so you remember it well, and as a consequence it factors significantly in how you define his character.  But because it didn't bother me, I forget about it, and the incident doesn't factor at all in how I define his character.  Not sure where that leaves us.

But since we're on the topic of stuff that bothers, I'm really beginning to be bothered by the way the survivors have taken to keeping secrets from one another.  It was one thing when the Others kept secrets from all of us (survivors and audience), but now that we know what the secrets are, the reasons for them being kept are looking pretty thin.

[Dawn Coyote]

Ben is evil in a way that does not require the use of force. He manipulates everyone, and when that isn't going to work, he gets others to do the wet work for him (Sayid).

I love the him in the role because he plays the malevolent rodent so well. He's currently my favorite character. He reminds me of Urq.

I must go read more of darkUFO guy.

[Dawn Coyote]

Interesting. Thinking about that, I bet the "Live together, die alone" credo is what gets them to all go back.

[largo]

Yeah, I think it has to do with how you meet someone too. I think he showed up in Season 2, I'm almost sure I missed or wasn't paying attention to the early Ben episodes. So I when I tuned back in, he was settled in, but was a stranger to me. If you're on the ground floor with these guys, it's somehow different. He was like an interloper. Kind of like you leave town for a holiday, and come back and your best friends are hanging around some new guy in town. Gonna take you awhile. (Shit, all this for a tv show!)

p.s. I thought of your Fringe blogging when I heard the item about Torv getting married to one of her co-stars.

Dawn: who does Ben remind me of? To me he's like a computer nerd from the 70's, one of those guys sorting his punch cards getting ready for the next compile.

[Edward]

The Fringe blog is a super success, top* site for the show. It's what I wanted for it.  But chasing someone else's tail--which is how I see that kind of blogging--proved to wear on me.  I just couldn't justify it, waiting for someone else to do something so you could blog about it.  Nevertheless, the project served as a great testbed for much of the tech that I'm using to build FOS, and it, along with the whole experience of blogging Bad Robot really was key to getting to this point (read: knowing what I want to do online).

*It was a surreal shift, moving from the ranks of the little guys to the big boys.

[largo]

Interesting. The darkUFO guys (or one of the other big Lost blogs) suggest that they (the bloggers) get, i.e. are privy to, advance info, tips, clips and such. Makes sense. Read an interesting article (maybe Slate, apologies if it's a rehash) that the producers and marketers use the long hiatus between seasons to try in various ways to get people 'caught' up, i.e. feel that they can effectively rejoin the show even if they missed a season or two.

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Degrees of separation: Taken (Liam Neeson movie just out) and Alias. Taken, like so many others, tries for the Bourne formula, rapid action, rapid story-telling, story-telling embedded in the action, in-close fighting, intelligent use of found materials during the fight, etc. But Bourne got its idea at least partly from Alias, that's what started it all.

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apology for it's / its confusion elsewhere

[Dawn Coyote]

Likewise, doing the So You Think You Can Dance blog (which was started on something of a lark) taught me how to stay on top of breaking news, and the rhythms of blogging. This has really come in handy on other projects.

I heard about Taken - the virginity thing. Why is virginity so damn valuable, anyway? And to whom?

[Edward]

In reverse order:

Gotta disagree.  Alias came out in Sept. 2001 and Bourne in June 2002, meaning filming for Bourne was happening at the same time Alias was airing, and possibly before.  Maybe, maybe not.  But I think the guys who did Bourne deserve all the credit for getting it right.  And if I recall, fandom of Alias required a certain happy suspension of disbelief.

The inner sanctum thing is more in line with getting a press pass.  You're running a site that, for better or worse, is prime advertising real estate for the show, so it serves their purposes--makes the show look good--to help out the guys who came out on top of the competition.  But it's all still well above board, just that you're being treated as equals is all.  They respect what you do.  But the other side of it too, the people coming out of the woodwork, emailing wanting favors, etc.  You used to be the ones doing that.

[largo]

Good point, nice ref, and I clicked the link even though I knew it wouldn't work.

Also, one ep ahead of you for the next couple of hours, I imagine darkUFO is already working up his take on the show.

[Dawn Coyote]

Just watched (well, listened and sorta watched while I was cooking) the replay of last week, and the recurrent theme was "we won't leave anyone behind." With Rousseau's people, and Farraday and Charlotte, and the survivors - same thing over and over.

[Dawn Coyote]

No. Just no. The whole Eloise-something of your father’s for Locke-granddad with shoes thing was deeply, deeply wrong.

Kate in Jack’s room and “never ask me about Aaron again” was also pretty stinky. What happened to the writers? Did they call in some pastiche specialist to pull it all together?

Loved the pendulum. That was some nice production design. And the carcass of indeterminate species behind the plastic curtain in the butcher shop.

Other than that, it was maybe my least-favorite Lost episode ever. I’ve been loving Season 5 up until now.