TV: Lost

Spoilers ahoy!

"Dude... Nikki's dead."

"Who the hell is Nikki?"

THANK YOU for that, Sawyer. Thank you for speaking for the audience on that one. The addition of Paolo and Nikki has been one of the worst ideas of this overall far-below-par third season of Lost. I appreciate the writers acknowledging the frustration of the audience with these useless, do-nothing characters, who have only appeared a few times, and have stunk up the screen every time. We don't know who these people are, and we don't CARE who these people are. Why, oh why have you been wasting precious screentime with these two nobodies?

That said, this was a great episode. It was tremendous fun to flash back to previous episodes of the series, and see events through the eyes of some of the lesser characters. Such as the killed-off Shannon and Boone (whose reappearance didn't add much to their backstories, but made the episode as a whole more thrilling). Or Daniel Roebuck as Arzt, my favorite guest character, whose explosive demise is still one of the best shocks this show has ever generated, and whose return in this episode was highly entertaining. When Sawyer threw out Michael's name at one point, it took me a long time to remember who he was even talking about -- and then, when I remembered, and realized that he wasn't appearing in any flashbacks, I was bitterly disappointed. I wonder if Harold Perrineau left the show on more sour terms than Maggie Grace (Shannon) and Ian Somerhalder (Boone).

The producers have been promising for a while now that, when they finally got to the backstory of Nikki and Paolo, it would make their presence from the beginning of the season feel worthwhile. I will admit it was a damn good episode, but I still don't feel like Nikki and Paolo added anything to the show; I acknowledge that using them as the basis for revisiting several important moments in Lost history was clever, but I still don't think that they, specifically, were worthwhile characters. Especially if they're really dead, in which case they have been a complete waste of time. (I kind of suspect that next week we'll see them clawing their way out of their grave, fully recovered from their spider-induced paralysis.)

I was sorely disappointed with the first fragment of this season of Lost, in which a whole lot of nothing happened, and it happened primarily to a very few characters, leaving most of the huge cast that we've come to know and love from the beginning stranded. Ooooh, here's how Jack got his tattoo. Screw you, Jack! Where's Hurley?

The last few episodes of this second part of the season have gotten things back on track. It was just three weeks ago that I was complaining about Locke's idiocy in blowing up the communications station; last week's episode redeemed that moment by revealing it was an intentional action on Locke's part, a piece of his plan (stupid and selfish though his plan may be) to keep all of the castaways stranded on the island forever. Things like that, and the moment in tonight's episode when we saw why Paolo's bathroom moment in the Pearl station months ago seemed so suspicious, make me believe that maybe the writers of this show actually do have an idea of where they're going. I lost a lot of faith in this show during the Fall 2006 episodes. These 2007 episodes are winning my trust back, a little bit at a time -- though, as I said before, no matter what, I'm with it to the end.

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I'll be driving up to San Francisco tomorrow. Thank you to those of you who have suggested places to visit. I'll be able to check the internet from up there, so if you want to add more suggestions to the last post, please do. However, I don't think I'll be updating the blog until I get back, which means either Tuesday night or sometime Wednesday. Try not to miss me. No, wait, I take that back: miss me terribly!