Some Thoughts About the Season Premiere of ‘Lost’

Honestly, I’m not even going to try and parse what’s going on in “LA X” (the sixth and final season premiere of Lost) at a deeper level, both because I’m exhausted and because I know that other people are doing it for me right as I speak, and then their thoughts will be delivered directly to my Google Reader because that is the magic of the world we live in today. Due to several horrible circumstances (having to work until 11:00 PM, my motherfrakking DVR not recording it) I had to get up bright and early, greeting the buttcrack of dawn, in order to watch the two hour premiere via Hulu. I haven’t gotten out of bed that easily in a very long time.

Anyway, the main thing that I wanted to share unnecessarily with you this afternoon is my surprise at being surprised. Lost is a show that has basically trademarked the “WHAT THE FUCK?” reaction and every time they do it something inside of me goes, well, that was it! They will never surprise me again! And then they do, over and over and over again. And every single time my reaction is the same: “What the FUCK!?” I’m sorry if that is just too much “fuck” for you, but I’m trying to be honest here and this show makes me CRAZY. Practically everyone I know who watches Lost has spent the last year asking themselves one question: Did it work? “It” of course refers to Daniel Faraday’s nutty plan, enacted by Jack and Juliet, to explode a nuclear bomb on the island in 1977, thus preventing The Swan station from ever being built which in turn would prevent Oceanic 315 from ever crashing on the island. I was of the opinion that it wouldn’t work, or at least wouldn’t work in the way that the Lostaways wanted it to (as an honest to God do-over), but I know a lot of people who thought it would work and that Season Six would just be a great big re-visit to Season One. The show coming full circle if you will.

Farscape Rewatch! — “Till the Blood Runs Clear,” “Rhapsody in Blue”

WEEK SIX
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With these two episodes under my belt, we’re officially halfway through with Farscape Season One, so everyone give yourself a big round of applause. You sat on your asses and watched TV and it was awesome while I did all the work. JUST KIDDING. (Only kind of. I’m not bitter.) And this week I’m giving you a homework assignment, and your homework is this: I want you to force at least one person in your life to watch “Premiere” and if they try to tell you “No,” you just tell them to suck it. Then tell them to come here.

I wasn’t looking forward to these two episodes at all, by the way. In fact, I was kind of dreading them. My memories of “Till the Blood Runs Clear” were pretty neutral, but my memories of watching “Rhapsody in Blue” were positively vitriolic, even worse than for “That Old Black Magic.” And don’t get me wrong, it’s still not my favorite and I still kind of hate those damn Delvians, but this time through I couldn’t deny that there was an intelligence and awareness to the script that kind of lifted it out of the Delvian shithole it was playing around in.

Mid-Season Round-Up

Mid-season television can be confusing, especially nowadays when it’s becoming ever more common for networks to break seasons of shows in two parts or for them to wait to premiere a show until January or February so as to assure a straight run. At mid-season you’ve got wacky stuff happening all over the place: new shows premiering, old shows coming back, new and old shows disappearing, the Olympics, shows getting canceled . . . It’s all very stressful. What I’m saying is if I’ve missed one, it’s not my fault. I don’t get paid for this crap. So, with that in mind, here are my thoughts:

MID-SEASON PREMIERES

Caprica, Fridays on SyFy — I’m working on a more detailed post about Caprica, but for now I’m going to say that the jury is out on this one. It’s lavishly produced with all the production values of its predecessor, Battlestar Galactica, but as you don’t need to have seen BSG to watch Caprica, it carries over almost none of that show’s emotional imperative, which is my favorite part of anything. I’m going to continue watching, but I think I can safely say that it will never take it’s predecessor’s place in my heart.

Farscape Rewatch! — “DNA Mad Scientist,” “They’ve Got a Secret”

WEEK FIVE
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Well, that was a fun little accidental break. You guys are still reading, right? It doesn’t really matter to me. I’m gonna write this crap no matter what, so there’s that. But it would be nice to know. Anyway, apparently I lose all will to write when I visit my mother. All I did was read, eat, go to the movies (Avatar, three times for instance), and watch DVRed episodes of Cold Case and Law & Order: SVU with my sister, who is obsessed. Anyway, in the future I plan to take two week breaks in between each season and that should be it. Hopefully. (I’m also trying to work out a way to make the episode summaries shorter; we’ll see how that goes. Do you guys like reading my cracked out recaps or not? And I’m especially sorry for the length of this week’s writing, but I just couldn’t seem to help myself. Things needed to be said.)

So on to Farscape. This week we’re in for not one, but two, excellent episodes, which makes for a nice change. At this point, the show is really starting to figure out what kind of stories it wants to tell, and “DNA Mad Scientist” is a huge step in that direction. In fact, if you listen to the commentary, you can hear the creators tell the story about how this episode single-handedly saved the show from premature cancellation. Thank God. And of course, “They’ve Got a Secret” introduces a plot element that will be around until the end of the series.

White Collar is back tonight on USA!

If you’re a fan of good times and also Matt Bomer (also known as Bryce Larkin) (and with a face like that who isn’t) then I really recommend checking out his show on USA, White Collar. It’s coming back tonight (1o/9c) after a winter break and cliffhanger that drove me to finding the White Collar forums and reading pages of speculation.

Link Love: Chuck Soars

BDH’s own Heather Anne has a post up at The Torch Online!

Head on over to read about BDH favorite Chuck (don’t forget to watch tonight!) and Heroes.

Bones 5X11 Mini-Cap: “The X in the File”

“You just basically said that aliens are nice anthropologists. You think . . . aliens are you!”
Seeley Booth

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I don’t have time tonight for a full recap, nor does the episode much merit it, but a little something needed to be said. It’s not to say that “The X in the File” wasn’t a solid episode, because it was, but I’ve come to realize that Bones only does a handful of episodes each season that stand out from one another. In fact, those are the episodes that elevate it from being a simple procedural to something unique; episodes like “The Man in the Fallout Shelter” and “Two Bodies in the Lab” from season one, “Aliens in a Spaceship” from season two, “The Verdict in the Story” from season three, and “Mayhem on a Cross” and “The End in the Beginning” (yes, I said it) from season four. But placeholders like “The X in the File,” while fun, do not advance the ongoing story so much as play around in it, and so don’t really need to be written about in such depth.

What this episode did do, however, was pay homage in a major way to one of the greatest television shows ever made: The X-Files. I didn’t know this before tonight, but according to Hart Hanson’s Twitter feed, Bones is filmed on the same lot as The X-Files once was: Stage Six. Bones has made X-Files callbacks before, actually. The instance in the pilot where Booth calls Bones “Scully” and she “doesn’t know what that means,” and Hodgins with his conspiracy theories, not to mention the entire whole episode back in season two that was directed by David Duchovny.

While the case was interesting, and I thought the whole Angela/Hodgins/Wendell triangle could have come off a lot more awkward, and the Bones/Booth interaction was bordering on overwhelmingly adorable, what I really have to comment on was just how many times in the episode I had to pause my DVR and shout “NO WAY!” Of course I was shouting at X-Files references.

First, the entire opening sequence was a complete parody of every single teaser The X-Files ever did, right down to the last detail: dim lighting, creepy landscape, glowing eyes . . . even the music. I distinctly heard variations on the “alien discovery” theme at least twice. And then the dude finds an alien, but that’s the obvious part. There were subtle little references like that all over the place: The X-Files theme song being the guy’s ringtone, the setting of Roswell, etc. Bones and Booth acted more like Mulder and Scully in this episode than their normal selves, Booth playing the part of the believer, Brennan the skeptic, but managing to come to a meaningful compromise in the end (which also reminded me distinctly of Mulder and Scully, looking up at the stars and wondering). And then there’s stuff that probably only a die-hard fan would notice, like the appearance of Dale Dickey, who famously got boiled water thrown right in her face as Scully was giving birth to the lovebaby in Season Eight. The biggest reference, though, is the appearance of Dean Haglund (minus the pony tail), who is most famous for his role as Richard Langly, Ramone lover and 1/3 of the Lone Gunmen.

Perhaps my favorite part of the episode, though, was how it managed to integrate both traditional Bones themes and ones that could have come right out of The X-Files itself back in its heyday. Actually, now that I think about it, it couldn’t have been all that difficult. The X-Files was often a show about belief against all odds and it featured two lead characters that both had something to learn from one another. Scully, like Brennan, was the scientist, and she had notorious difficulty accepting things that couldn’t be quantified or proved. Mulder, like Booth, was a man of faith, who ran mostly on instinct and taught his stiffer partner how to believe. All in all, it was a good episode that managed to remind me of one of the reasons I fell in love with TV in the first place. It was fun to remember a time when I thought there would never be a show as good as The X-Files, or a man as sexy and wonderful as Fox Mulder. Sometimes it’s nice to be proved wrong.

Heather’s Christmas Favorites

Home Alone
This is my house; I have to defend it.

When I was a little kid I loved going to the theater to see movies more than any person I knew. Usually my whole family would go together, and on the ride home I would make everyone go around and say what they liked about the movie, what they didn’t like about the movie, what were their favorite lines, etc. (God created the Internet for people like me.) The point is, I saw a lot of movies growing up, and the only one I ever remember my whole family just loving was Home Alone.

Ashley’s Christmas Favorites

It was pretty tough in the end, trying to decide whether or not I should write about Elf as my favorite Christmas movie, but in the end it wasn’t really a contest. Elf is a fabulous movie (“I love smiling! Smiling’s my favorite!”) and every time it’s on I can’t stop myself from watching, but it’s on a LOT. Plus, it’s a youngster in comparison to Mr. Grinch, who this year is celebrating his 43rd birthday. Because of course that’s my favorite, How the Grinch Stole Christmas! (1966). Not that damn Jim Carrey one, which I refuse to see, but the one directed by Chuck Jones, written by Dr. Seuss and with music composed by Albert Hague.

How the Grinch Stole Christmas! is a twenty-five minute masterpiece. The music and the animation are simple and effective. The classic moments, like when the Grinch’s heart grows three sizes, or when he carves the roast beast, are permanently etched in the zeitgeist. As an added bonus, it rhymes and it’s narrated by Boris Karloff, who is a bad ass.

Abigail’s Christmas Favorites

Christmas is nearly upon us which means I should probably get around to doing Christmas things like buying presents and drinking cocoa and meditating on the birth of Christ. I’m a procrastinator, which means I haven’t gotten around to even watching my favsies Christmas movies. Which is a shame, since my favorite Christmas movie is also my all-time favorite movie AND one of the best movies in the world.

Love Actually