Recap Recap: Watch Me Watch You Watch Me Watch Others Watch

Pardon my negligence of duty, but between the Olympics¹ and the hazard of this space becoming purely devoted to Lost², I've lost track of much of what I set out to do here. Fortunately for me and you, the rest of the internet has not been so hebetudinous. So here I am, passing the buck on the things I've missed, and using a crutch to get to the things I haven't yet:

The Present

• The Real World
  The Real World has been wayyy too postmodern for me. It seems like every wanton epithet I attached to each housemate is accurate to the point of insanity.  These people are not people; they are avatars³ of the darkest recesses of the human experience, and they all FUCKING LIVE TOGETHER. They continue to fight about things that make us sad, instead of fighting about ridiculous nonsense that makes us laugh. Dark secrets like physical abuse, depression/suicide/homelessness, or being a horrible singer seem to come out of the woodwork over seemingly innocent things like pizza, laser tag and being bisexual, and it's really bringing me down. At least no one's been carried out on a stretcher yet. That's next week. Can't somebody just get too drunk and make out with somebody else's crush?!
  
• Lost
  Three truths: John Locke episodes are always the best. Kate episodes are usually the worst. This season of Lost is shaping up to be a doozy.
  
  Instead of spelling everything out for us like I imagine a lot of people wanted them to, the writing staff has chosen to be as cryptic as ever, perhaps the most they've ever been since season one, and instead of infuriating me, I'm enthralled.⁴ New mysteries abound, mysteries that are have been steeping in old mysteries like darjeeling and go down just as sweetly, mysteries that I am still profoundly confident will tie together in the most elaborate bow the world has ever seen. The Glimpses get more and more intriguing as things get intertwined to Crash-like levels (for better or worse), and it's beyond even any hint of possibility that they don't know exactly what they're doing. How could they not?

The Past

• The Sopranos
  I sadly remain stalled at episode 4 of season 1 here, mostly because new television has dominated my attention too much to be reliving the past.⁵ I hope to continue on my inhuman quest to chronicle the chronicles of Tony Soprano, but only time will tell. Sadly, I sense that my initial hesitation toward the show is flaring up, because there's not much of an urge to jump back in just yet.
  
• Carnivàle
  The same cannot be said for Carnivàle however, but since the return of Lost, there's not much room in the metaphysical sections of my brain for another show whose answers are buried in mythology and symbolism. Plus the fact that I know I'll never actually get any answers for this show makes me reluctant to get involved when there's answers to be had on another show at the moment. But at the same time, I have been endlessly intrigued by this show, and its imagery is astoundingly evocative of the time it represents. I anxiously await the day after the Lost finale, when my brain can once again handle being perplexed on this kind of level.

The Future

• Caprica
  The pilot of the prequel series to Battlestar Galactica was surprisingly good, mostly because it actually managed to feel like a different show while maintaining the world already established by BSG. It's a testament to Ron D. Moore's world-building abilities that Caprica actually evokes a sense of the past of a fictional (sort of?) universe, and I'm excited to see what disturbingly close-to-home scenarios this series can give us like BSG was so good at doing. I've only seen the two hour pilot and the next episode, "Rebirth," but I'll be making sure to find time to catch up at some point soon. The acting is exceptional, especially for SyFy standards, and the themes are fascinating enough to keep me on the hook for a good while to come. Let's just hope it doesn't get canceled first.
  
• Archer
  The only reason I even wanted to watch Archer in the first place is because of H. Jon Benjamin. I would venture to call him a "voice acting legend" but only because of the memories of giggling to the point of pain at every line Coach McGuirk uttered on Home Movies. Also, can I just say: Assy McGee. The man is funny. So the voice alone was enough to get me to watch the first two episodes, and I wasn't entirely disappointed. While not quite up to the absurdity level of Space Ghost or any of the other various Adult Swim programming he's appeared in (and really, how could it be?), the show is consistently funny, and it's good to know Aisha Tyler still has work somewhere.⁶ Plus, Jessica Walter (aka Lucille Bluth). Is that enough for you? No? Okay, well Adam Reed, the creator, also happened to create Sealab 2021⁷, a show so far out there you might as well quit the race. It's got potential, and I want to see it through.
  

So there you have it, the quick and dirty Recap Recap. I would like to say I won't have to resort to this kind of skulduggery in the future, but let's be realistic: I watch way too much TV to feasibly cover by myself.⁸

Addenda

1. Any sport that requires a gun strapped to your back will be watched by me, every time. But NBC's so-called "coverage" of these Winter Games should and could be a topic here in its own right. ↑
2. Which is and always will be a danger here. ↑
3. No, not Avatars, though the jumps in what should be normal human logic are equally ridiculous. ↑
4. Relieving my fear that I was going down the dark and dangerous path of being a fanboy. Glad to see I'm not a fanboy^a, just a fan. ↑
5. Albeit for the first time. ↑
6. I guess. ↑
7. As well as Frisky Dingo, which I've never seen, but heard is similarly harebrained. ↑
8. Intern wanted -- unpaid, uncredited, unappreciated, but hey, maybe you'll get to watch TV with me. But only if you pay for the pizza and beer. ↑
Additional Addenda
1. Fanboy -- n. one who thinks that by merely committing unwarrented and exorbitant amounts of time to a product, brand, or work, one is somehow entitled to think that one knows better than the creators of said product/brand/work and how said p/b/w should be handled ↑

Watch Me Watch: Lost 6.1 -- "LA X"

I thought I was the good kind of Lost fan. The kind that was ready for the final season not with lofty expectations that had to be sated OR ELSE, but one that was ready to enjoy the story being told, no matter how differently I might have done it myself. So maybe I was wrong. As I watched the 2 hour premiere, "LA X," I felt just the slightest bit of let down. Perhaps it was remnants of The X-Files Conundrum, which I had thought I had purged from myself by writing that last post, but apparently not. Perhaps it was the moderate amount of spoilers I had caught in the 8 month hiatus, because as I read them I often found a longing in my heart that they turn out not to be true, that the rumors were just rumors, odd speculation by rabid fans that really have no insight into the inner workings of the show itself, but in reality, I should have just avoided the spoilers.¹

But as the 2 hours progressed, it became apparent that it was not actually a sense of disappointment, though there might have been a little, or of being spoiled, though I most definitely was in some thrust, but rather an unavoidable hazard of cliffhangers: The Momentum Killer. The season 5 finale, "The Incident," was the kind of finale that makes Lost fans Lost fans, and Lost haters Lost haters. Take the execution of the plan that's been building all season, throw in a couple of deaths, and cut us off right at the peak of the climax and there you have it. I can guarantee that when that screen went to white at the end of last season, the entire viewing audience yelled some variation of "AAAAAAGGHGHGHAAHGHGH!" at their TVs, and fell back against the couch, spent. We were almost literally blown away when the bomb went off (or did it??). And then we had to wait 8 months to find out what happened.

The writers have often said that their premieres are the 2nd half of their finales, which is a fantastic, if frustrating, strategy (like knowing how to write good transitions in term papers), but in this case I feel like it hurt them a little bit. This was the kind of finale that begged for a major sea change in the following premiere, something like the massive jump in time Battlestar managed to pull off, because by picking up exactly (EXACTLY) where they left off, they lost all sense of urgency and momentum they had built up so beautifully in "The Incident." So a lot of things I've read so far of the premiere are usually along the lines of, "The 'flash-sideways'² bits were so much more interesting than The Temple business." This in itself is "whaaaaa?"-worthy, since we've been waiting to see The Temple since way back when Ben obliquely mentioned it in Season 3-ish. But they're right. The Glimpses, which I'm assuming is the shadowy new "narrative device" that the writers have chosen for this season, were amazing, although I don't really see how much you could call them a "narrative device" yet.³

So they might have flubbed a bit on the continuation of the drama, but premieres aren't as important as finales on Lost, so my minor complaints here are even more minor in context. Quibbles like these can be overcome quickly, and as the 2 hours romped along, I found myself getting caught up in whole new momenta; now that the finale is behind us, and the immediate repercussions have been handled (for the most part), we're free to really get our hands dirty. The premiere was an epilogue--a season 5 postscript--that prepared us for the sequel of season 6, and for all my gripes here so far, I'm on board. Maybe I'm not as bad a fan as I thought.⁴

Addenda

1. Damn you io9! But that said, I could have done a lot worse in succumbing to spoiler temptation, because for a while there they were coming out with Brangelina-tabloid-rumor-like celerity. ↑
2. Which seems to be the term being kicked around so far, but I'm going to go out on a limb and christen them Glimpses, for my own clandestine purposes. ↑
3. But more on that later as the season develops. ↑
4. Yes, it took me a full week to compile my thoughts about the premiere, which may say more about it than anything I've said above. It was complex, exciting, surprising, and more, which looking back on it should be more than I could have ever asked for, but I guess I'm just spoiled. That's what film school does to you. ↑