Archive for March, 2007

I was done with “Lost”, I was tired of it and never wanted to watch it again, and then what did Carl­ton Cuse and Damon Lin­de­lof go and do?

Make me care again.

You bas­tards!

The peo­ple behind “Lost” must have noticed that our house­hold was get­ting tired of their lit­tle tele­vised social exper­i­ment, because out of the blue they’ve started putting on far bet­ter shows than we were used to see­ing on ABC on Wednes­day nights. Except for a few glitches this sea­son (like the horr-i-ble Jack-centric “Stranger in a Strange Land”) the sec­ond half of sea­son 3 hasn’t been too shabby, with episodes like the Desmond-centric episode “Flashes Before Your Eyes” being the stand out for me this sea­son, fol­lowed by “The Man from Tal­la­has­see” and last week’s fun (for me, at least) “Expose” where they killed off the lat­est clum­sily intro­duced mem­bers of the Losties.

The pro­duc­ers def­i­nitely were yank­ing our chains when the sea­son started, what with the down­beat episodes of Jack, Sawyer and Kate’s cap­tiv­ity and Jack’s grow­ing rela­tion­ships with Ben and Juliet. I love Ben now, he’s just so creepy/weird and you really (up until “Expose”) didn’t know where he was com­ing from, but he’s either manip­u­lat­ing peo­ple to do what they wouldn’t nor­mally do and he’s a mas­ter­mind of sorts, or he’s delu­sional and thinks he’s some amaz­ing pup­pet mas­ter. And Juliet has evil writ­ten all over her. Just a feel­ing I get.

John Locke has been infu­ri­at­ing this sea­son though. You can’t stop play­ing with com­put­ers, can you John? First Mikhail escapes because you want to play chess on the Fire Station’s com­puter, then you blow up the Fire Sta­tion out of stu­pid­ity, and then you kill Mikhail because he knows you were a para­plegic, and to top it all off you go and take that C4 that you found and blow up the one reli­able mode of trans­porta­tion off of the island? What’s your angle, John? You bet­ter pray that Penny Wid­more res­cues your ass, or at least your com­pa­tri­ots, since you’ll never want to leave the island now that you can walk.

Char­lie can die any­time he wants now. After the drug sto­ry­line was done with he started feel­ing extra­ne­ous, like Shan­non. Hey Desmond, don’t tell Char­lie when he’s going to die so he won’t know you didn’t save him, okay?

Where did Rose and Bern­hard go? I liked both of them and they’ve just dis­ap­peared, but of course, in “Lost” time, they’ve been gone for prob­a­bly 5 days.

I keep hop­ing we’ll see Michael and Walt again some­day. I like to think that the coor­di­nates that Ben gave Michael when he left at the end of last sea­son took him straight to the sec­ond island and that they’re both there. They’re prob­a­bly locked up some­where, but I wish they’d explained Walt’s weird gift with ani­mals and draw­ing them to him. Guess that’ll go straight into the toi­let, won’t it? Along with so many other mysteries.

And I don’t miss Eko. He had the abil­ity to become cool, like Locke, but he used all of his street cred up with me. RIP, Eko.

Bat­tlestar Galac­tica Sea­son 3 is offi­cially done and I have mixed feel­ings about it. It started off with a real bang and I just loved the occu­pa­tion of New Caprica by the Cylons and the ensu­ing struggle/escape from the planet, but once they got off-planet the show started to waver. It started off great with “Col­lab­o­ra­tors”, which was amaz­ing and hard to watch and was prob­a­bly my favorite episode of the year, but then they started throw­ing in the “story of the week” episodes, like “Hero”, “The Pas­sage” and “The Woman King”. And yeah there were some excep­tional episodes thrown in the mix in between the val­leys (like the soon to be clas­sic “Tak­ing a Break From All Your Wor­ries”), but the sea­son just didn’t have the tight feel that the major­ity of sea­son 2 had. From lis­ten­ing to the Ron Moore Pod­casts, you can tell that the season’s sto­ry­line went through a large meta­mor­pho­sis con­cern­ing the presidency/legacy of Gaius Bal­tar and his rela­tion­ship to that sub-genus of humans, the Sag­i­tarans. There was sup­posed to be a big hul­la­baloo in regards to Bal­tar shoot­ing Sag­i­tarans dur­ing the Occu­pa­tion and how it was filmed and how Lee was sup­posed to sud­denly come into pos­ses­sion of this film and how there was more to in that it seemed, but that all got sgarbageped when they real­ized that no one really cared about the Sag­i­tarans (my opin­ion). The film was going to fea­ture heav­ily into the trial of Bal­tar but that was also sgarbageped.

This is more just ram­bling, isn’t it?

The infected bases­tar episodes (“Torn”, “A Mea­sure of Sal­va­tion”)were excel­lent in exe­cu­tion but made me furi­ous when a poten­tially huge new plot line was dis­carded just because Helo had a con­science. Adama should have shot him him­self. Or else Tigh could have eaten him, which I think he would have gladly done.

Tigh con­tin­ues to be my favorite char­ac­ter of the series, and when he isn’t on screen for long peri­ods of time I miss him. He’s a com­plete jerk and a drunk, but it’s price­less lines like “It’s in the frakkin’ ship!” and that lit­tle laugh he gave Helo in “The Woman King” that make me wish some­one would rec­og­nize how great an actor Michael Hogan really is. But he’s Cana­dian and a recluse, from what it sounds like, so he may never get the recog­ni­tion that I think he deserves.

Next favorite is Chief, Galen Tyrol. Every­time they want to have a heavy mythos-centric episode they seem to allow him to shine. Whether he’s com­ing to grips with the idea that he may be a Cylon, or try­ing to deci­pher the Eye of Jupiter, or even in Cross­roads, where he and oth­ers, for some rea­son, keep hear­ing “All Along the Watch­tower”, Aaron Dou­glas as Tyrol is great, and he plays the tor­tured part well.

Is it okay to think that Grace Park (Sharon/Boomer/Athena) isn’t that great an actress? Yes, it is okay. Because she’s not.

And I miss Brother Cav­ill (Dean Stock­well). We need more of him next sea­son. He’s just so slimy.