Wednesday, March 10, 2010

SO ARE YOU, LIKE, AN ANDROID? VAMPIRE? Apparently there was something wrong with my satellite dish, because tonight I sat down to watch Lost, but it kept switching to the sledgehammery serious parts of Glee.

Look, I haven't complained at all about the flash-sidewayses. But now I'm going to start. Whether the show is giving us alternative stories of redemption or failure, the show lets us calculate their vectors only by reference to the doings on the island. And I'm beginning to wonder, do those moments in the alternative 2004 even count if the characters don't know that they're righting wrongs or betraying trusts? The flash-sidewayses are starting to feel hermetically sealed from all of the hard decisions, the loyalties forged and broken, the opportunities squandered on the island, and without something to span both sets of stories, the mainland tales feel like they're shrinking. Tonight's Lost was not a tale of two Bens -- it was about Ben on the island and some unrelated small man with a comparatively small dilemma on the mainland.

Meanwhile, I admire the virtuoso stupidity of Jack's interrogation technique.