Y’know, the ol’ cowboy isn’t exactly sure WHY you guys are so anxious to know what he thinks of TV shows. In fact, when he used to do this regularly, people complained, “Gee, all he talks about are TV shows.” Sometimes the cowboy thinks that what fans want is whatever they don’t have at the moment.
And since we don’t have LOST or ALIAS ‘cept in reruns right now, lessee what we had for the season enders.
LOST: Okay, here’s the thing. The joy of “Lost” is that it’s the series that has most often been able to surprise me. They do stuff that is just impossible to see coming, but once it happens, you go, “Of course! How could I NOT have seen that coming!”
That didn’t happen here.
Before the show even started, I was convinced that they wouldn’t get the hatch open until the very, very end. And I’m sorry, but I’ve been an original “Trek” fan for far too long to be remotely surprised at the abrupt demise of Professor Redshirt, although his “extras are people too” speech was a nice touch. Still, the “Lost” I’m accustomed to would have confounded my expectations by having the hatch open in the first ten minutes, or had Professor Redshirt play a major part in the proceedings and survive.
The other major twist was the abduction of the kid, and although I didn’t see it coming immediately, Kathleen figured it out the instant that Delenn realized that the stolen baby wasn’t going to do her any good. So when the guys from “Deliverance” came cruising up, the shocking twist was well telegraphed in Casa Cowboy. The only development we didn’t nail going in was watching Hurly sprint across the airport, and perhaps there was some point to it other than padding out the episode, but dámņëd if I know or care what it was. If I want to see a fat guy dash headlong through terminals, I’ll arrange for a connecting flight at O’Hare and bring a hand mirror.
Understand, I’m not howling for answers to the show’s secrets. I’m perfectly happy to watch it unfold at its leisurely pace, for the character stories have remained sufficiently engaging to keep me aboard. What torqued me here is not that not a single one of the questions was definitively answered. What torqued me was that I was certain none of them would be definitively answered, and that was the case. LOST is the first show in years to keep surprising me, and I just hated that the big two hour season finale failed to do so.
ALIAS: I think I speak for a great many ALIAS fans when I say…WTF?!?
I mean, I know this program has had its occasional dalliance with science fiction/fantasy elements through the incessant obession with Rimbaldi, the combination Da Vinci and Nostradamus about whom we’ve learned little and–ultimately–cared less. And yes, I suppose you can say I was surprised, which in the case of LOST is a good thing. Surprise is good. The unexpected is good.
But I absolutely cannot parse what was going on. Now I admit, I missed an episode here and there, so there may be key pieces of information that I don’t have. But as near as I can tell, Rimbaldi’s endgame was to transform the entire world into zombies? Again, I say WTF? A giant red corona of energy hanging over the city transforms the finale into Night of the Living Syd? It was like watching somebody else’s finale. I kept waiting for Sydney to run around a corner and crash headlong into Buffy or Angel.
Were there good moments? Yes, some, scattered through, the high point being, “Cut the white wire!” BLAM! “Syd, cut the blue wire.” But overall, maybe this was why I was saying months ago that if we never heard from Rimbaldi again, it would be too soon. I had a feeling that if the whole thing was really followed through upon, we’d end up with a B-movie mishmash as we had here.
And I was sitting there thinking, “There’s no way Vaughn makes it out of this episode in one piece.” And then I was pleasantly surprised to find that, No, he did make it through. And they’re driving, and suddenly I’m thinking, “Okay…things are too quiet. This is not good.” And bam.
Who knows? Maybe Sydney will wake up and discover that it’s all been a double fake-out since she suddenly got her life back, that all the episodes that happened since that point never actually occurred, and the two years she thought she lost are now back again. Or maybe Vaughn will wake up and discover himself at the bottom of a large shaft, and he looks up and Locke is there looking down, both of them saying, “Who the hëll are you?”
Will I be back next season? Probably, because let’s face it, no one does a cliffhanger like JJ Abrams. And I’ll be very curious to see if partway through the season, Syd is put into a coma by a bad guy so that Jennifer Garner can gestate while Nadia takes on the heavy lifting to avenge her fallen sister. But so help me, I may bail if the name “Rimbaldi” is mentioned even once, unless it’s preceded by the words, “Hello, my name is…”
PAD
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Regarding Walt, everything we’ve seen suggests that whatever his power/abilities are, they aren’t under his conscious control. He didn’t summon a polar bear — he was reading a comic book with one, his dad got upset and destroyed it, and a polar bear appeared. In his flashback, he didn’t will a bird to crash into the window; he was being ignored when trying to tell his family about birds, and a bird flew into the window. And just because he sensed danger from inside the hatch when he touched Locke (Holy Johnny Smith, Batman!) doesn’t mean he could see all futures, or sense all danger.
I enjoyed the “Lost” season finale, though I agree it wasn’t as surprising as some episodes. I actually was somewhat surprised by the teacher blowing up, even though I expected it at the start of the scene. I found, for me anyway, they went along long enough that I thought “Okay, I guess they WON’T blow him up, after all” – right before they very suddenly did.
I’m not sure when the notion occurred to me that “the boy” could be Walt, but I was certain that he was when it was revealed “they” hadn’t been interested in the baby. (By the way, John C., I’m not a “writer” by trade [:(], but my bachelor’s is in English Writing Arts, and I have found that my experience with constructing stories maybe does give me a different perspective than some people in anticipating story twists and such.)
And Iowa Jim, your post reminded me of something which I liked in the episode but had slipped my mind, namely Sawyer revealing to Jack that he had met Jack’s father, and the conversation they’d had. That was probably one of my favorite parts of the episode.
Thanks for the Cowboy Pete-ing, PAD!
1>>I enjoyed the “Lost” season finale, though I agree it wasn’t as surprising as some episodes. I actually was somewhat surprised by the teacher blowing up, even though I expected it at the start of the scene. I found, for me anyway, they went along long enough that I thought “Okay, I guess they WON’T blow him up, after all” – right before they very suddenly did
–I was soooooo looking forward to that guy getting blown up. Given how much he was going on and on about how dangerous the dynamite was, I *knew* some of it was going to explode. He was easily one of the most annoying characters out of all the tv shows I watch and I was quite happy to see him go boom. Especially when it gave Hurley the chance to make the comment about someone wearing Ernst.
Tony
Luke:
I *am* a writer by trade (business writer, albeit) and while my BA is in Theater Arts, my MA is in English, with a writing concentration–I wrote a novella for my master’s thesis. I guess I’m just not very good at it, because I’m *horrible* at anticipating plot twists. 😉
I felt the same way with the Lost finale. Especially since a couple of days before I had watched the Desperate Housewives finale. With DH, a lot got explained and a lot was left unanswered and to me, that made for an excellent season finale.
With Lost, nothing got answered and you got more questions. I know different writers/producers will take different tacks, but I really was hoping lost would at least give us a tidbit. As it was, it was a pretty good episode, but a terrible finale.
On the same line of thinking, I had told myself if those three pieces didn’t come together in the finale of Smallville, I wasn’t going to watch it anymore and they tied that up and found a new cliffhanger.
John C. –
Whoops. So much for that theory, I guess ;)Congratulations on making a living at writing!
Like you, I hope this is the last we’ll ever hear from Rambaldi again (by the way that’s the correct spelling, not Rimbaldi). I have watched the show all season and the comment Irina Darevko made to Vaughn, “Tell her the truth,” came out of nowhere. This is the first season I’ve watched Alias — I’m actually catching up on the previous season DVDs — and I thought it was excellent. I especially liked Mia Maestro and hope they find a cure for this Rambaldi zombie disease. It will be interesting to see how they play out this whole Vaughn-is-not-really-Vaughn storyline.