"Lost"

No spoilers! Feel free to read if you've never seen "Lost."

I wasn’t watching “Lost” when it started in 2004. It was still baseball season. And while the Tigers weren’t in the race, I was just getting back into baseball after a long absence and I couldn’t get enough. My wife kept telling me about this great new show, and while it sounded interesting, I couldn’t tear myself away from the Tigers. So, I missed the first few episodes and figured that I’d just have to watch it later. When they started rerunning the show on Saturdays, I was still watching baseball but it started to occur to me that the show must be pretty good. Then, in December, when baseball was long over they started showing the first season over again on Wednesday nights. I was hooked.

I’m not going to try to convert anyone into becoming a fan of this show. Like my reaction to “Watchmen” last year, I loved it and I don’t really care who else does or doesn’t. I don’t care what the ratings were, how many people watched the finale Sunday night, or what anyone else thinks about it. For me, “Lost” was the ultimate TV experience. Like “Twin Peaks” before it, “Lost” kept you guessing. It was non-formulaic. The one thing I hate about TV series is how they repeat the same formula, over and over again. I don’t understand how anyone likes “Law & Order,” “NCIS,” all of the “CSI” shows, or even “House,” although the latter has been surprising lately. I like shows such as “Hill Street Blues” and “The Wire,” which were episodic, yet told a very long story with ongoing subplots, like televised novels.

“Lost” was the ultimate water cooler show. Scenes and events were open to interpretation. Where the show looked initially to be just another version of “Cast Away,” (the producers did use the Tom Hanks movie as inspiration), that notion was quickly dispelled in the first two hours when Sawyer killed a polar bear. But when the pilot of the crashed plane was yanked bodily from the cockpit (which was suspended high in a tree) by some unseen monster and slaughtered, it was abundantly clear that the survivors of Oceanic flight 815 were not on a typical tropical island.

People who weren’t familiar with the show have asked me over the years, “Isn’t that the show about the plane crash?” I always responded sarcastically and said something like, “Yeah, and the Star Wars trilogy is about two robots that crash in the desert.” It’s hard to describe the show, though, to someone who hasn’t experienced it. The first season was primarily about survival on the island, but it’s so much more I don’t know where to begin. The show is about survival, yes. But it’s more about faith. It’s about destiny. It’s about redemption. It’s about purpose, greed, leadership, guilt, love, hate, fear, revenge, compassion, perseverance, jealousy, protection. It’s about people.

“Lost” was a great show partially because of storytelling techniques. When we first meet the survivors of Oceanic flight 815 they have already crashed. We see how they act under the worst conditions imaginable. Through flashbacks, though, each character in turn is fleshed out, their motivations examined, their previous interactions with the world and even the other characters revealed. Through the looking glass into the past, the viewer finds that each character has his or her own flaws, and more than a few secrets.

Over time, “Lost” became a show that Magi and I watched together. We found ourselves having conversation after conversation after each show about the mythology surrounding the island and the interactions of the characters. Then, when that wasn’t enough, we started watching it together. We’d have conversations during the commercials. Sometimes the commercials came so abruptly that we were upset by the interruption, but other times we appreciated the chance to reflect together on what had just occurred. I don’t know how many times we both said, when an episode ended, that it was the best show ever. It was dozens of times, at least. We often found performances that we thought should earn Emmy awards. Josh Holloway, who played Sawyer, had a number of scenes last season that should have made him a shoo-in. Sadly, when any kind of science fiction or fantasy element is added to a show, your Emmy chances drop like a hot potato, and “Lost” has its share of those. Actors of the highest quality are often relegated to other science fiction shows of decidedly lesser quality when their shows go off the air. I hope that doesn’t happen with these people. They deserve better.

I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the music, here. It’s so important to the pure emotion of the story. Michael Giacchino, whom I’ve mentioned before, is one of the real stars of the show. His Academy Award-winning score for “Up” is really a spinoff of his work on “Lost.” The montage that introduced us to Carl Fredrickson is indicative of his previous work on this show. Often, the directors would just shoot a montage of the interactions of the cast of characters with Giacchino’s score over it to close an episode. There was no need for dialogue. And in the series finale Sunday night, his Oscar win was shown to be entirely justified.

If the music wasn’t beautiful enough, the setting of “Lost” certainly was. Filmed almost entirely in Hawaii, we were treated week after week to lush, gorgeous scenery that I had not fully appreciated until I saw it in high definition. I typically watched the first several seasons in standard definition, often on my 20” television in my basement office. With Netflix streaming the show in HD to our newer television, we are gaining a new appreciation for the way this show was meant to be seen. We always noticed that the credits were half on the screen and half off, when we watched those first seasons. “Lost” was working ahead of its time, with the full intention of being seen on higher-quality screens, much like “Firefly” was, three years previously. Sometimes we need to be dragged kicking and screaming into a new, more enjoyable experience. I can hardly wait until the series is released on Blu-Ray in August. I have never purchased “Lost” on DVD, so I won’t feel cheated for having waited.

Another amazing quality of the show was the fan following. Like Star Trek before it, “Lost” has a cult following. Scads of websites exist in support of the show, cross-referencing character appearances, settings, objects, and events. There are blogs aplenty about it. People comment on Doc Jensen’s blog by the thousands. I have to wonder now what Star Trek would have been like in the 60s if the Internet had existed! I bet it would have looked a lot like this.

I do marvel, though, at the way some of the reviews of the finale have been written. I don’t know how many times I have read something to the effect of, “I haven’t watched ‘Lost’ since the first season but the finale stunk.” People who have hated the show since the beginning have decided to pop by different websites to express their sympathy or disgust for those of us who have watched it for six years. I’m not sure of their motivation for doing so, and I never quite understand the loathing that geeks like us seem to attract, but there’s one thing of which I am sure. These snobs could really learn some lessons in humanity from actually watching the show. The messages sent and the lessons taught therein could benefit them far more than they have benefitted those of us who have seen it through. They shouldn’t feel sorry for us. It is we who should feel sorry for them. On those people, the irony is lost.

To Infinity...and Beyond!

I would totally see this movie.

The "LOST" Premiere is Finally Here!

Was it really that far back that I posted this? "Lost" gives me a reason to make it through the day!

Avatar

I usually don’t like to write reviews of a movie until after a second viewing, but in the case of Avatar, I think I should have written one immediately afterward. I don’t have any unique insights to add about the plot of the film or the perceived weakness of the storyline. Yes, it’s the story of Pocahontas or Dances with Wolves. There really aren’t that many new plot ideas under the sun. But what I do want to talk about is something that I have never seen done so well before and was the highlight of the film for me. Never before have I been so thoroughly convinced that I was seeing an alien world.

The weakness of creating good science fiction has always been that budgets and technology limit how alien a setting can be. The original Star Wars trilogy featured desert-like Tattooine, shot on location in Tunisia; Hoth, an ice planet that could have been at our own poles; Dagobah, a swamp; the cloud city of Bespin; and the forest moon of Endor, which has the same redwoods I’ve seen near San Francisco. Even the new trilogy gave us but glances at truly alien landscapes, and most of them had entirely earthlike appearances. A few of them, only seen in glimpses, looked truly alien, and they looked like the setting in Willy Wonka. But in Avatar, we see a truly alien environment and it’s entirely believable.

Upon arrival on Pandora our anchor, Jake Sully, sees a vast jungle that looks entirely earthly. But when his avatar starts exploring the place, we are introduced quickly to the unique plant life, as well as a few of the predators that roam freely. The dangers of the planet become all too clear. Everything is different. The trees have a bioelectrical network that rivals the human brain. The tendrils that come out of the Na’vi’s hair interact with the tendrils of the animals they use for travel and hunting. They live with a spiritual connection to their environment that is (I loved this line) “measurable.”

I think that no matter the weakness in the story, the setting gives us a sense of immersion that gives the story more credibility. The viewer more easily identifies with the Na’vi because the nine-foot tall blue people seem to really belong to the world that they defend. It’s not just another Earthlike environment that harkens back to Civil War-era America with Native American allegories. There’s only so much suspension of disbelief I can muster when I see a famous actor like Kevin Costner running around with Graham Greene. I know their faces too well and know that they don’t belong in the 19th century old west. But in Avatar, Pandora really feels like it belongs to the Na’vi. And so it does.

Curmudgeon?

As I grow older, I fear becoming the curmudgeon my dad was later in life. Heck, what am I saying? All the time I knew him he was a curmudgeon. When we went to see what I still consider the finest superhero movie of all time, Superman the Movie, he left the theater grumbling, "Well I still don't believe a man can fly." This, from a guy who thought that George Reeves hanging on wires was perfectly fine in the 1950s!

At this stage in my life, I begin to question whether my age is beginning to make me equally grumpy. There are many comic books I've given up on, including my favorite character, Batman. I was watching a History Channel show on comic book superheroes today, and when Frank Miller was describing how former Batman writers claimed that for them, he had ruined their character with his popular work, The Dark Knight, I literally shouted at the screen, "They were right, Frank!" Maybe it's that Batman has evolved past the point where I really liked the character or maybe I consider my childhood memories of the character sacred. But whatever Batman is now, he ain't my Batman. People who know that I love the Batman character can't help but ask me about what I think about Batman movies when they come out. I always have to say that I don't care for them. When they make the mistake of asking why, I trot out a laundry list. I don't think that makes me a curmudgeon, but someone who has a strong idea of what a hero is, and knows that the character as portrayed in the movies is not that guy.

This hits me especially hard at the comic book store, too. I see my childhood heroes acting completely out of character from how I know them. I understand that the target audience is much older than it was when I really enjoyed comics, but I would argue that sophisticated stories don't necessarily have to include rape, on-panel eviscerations, and psychotic, amoral behavior. I can accept those things more easily from creator-owned characters, but not from characters whose moral standards I looked up to as a kid.

Besides the Batman movies, I have lately had difficulty accepting some other film adapations. The Spirit was absolutely offensive to me. Director Frank Miller put some elements from Will Eisner's seminal work in his film, but trampled over the entire story with what we could call Millerisms. There was Nazi fetishism that he previously used in the Dark Knight, and he even stole one of his own lines from Daredevil. The style of cinematography was straight off the pages of Sin City, which he created. The Millerisms overpowered the classic and original storytelling techniques that made Will Eisner a true master of the visual form.

Last year's Star Trek movie had lots of stuff I liked and even some stuff I loved (Michael Giacchino's score, for example) but I still have a lot of problems with it. Does that make me a curmudgeon or just someone who loves the original Star Trek series so much that nothing would have been good enough?

When I start to think that I just hate everything, I have to remind myself that I absolutely adored the Watchmen movie. I didn't expect to, but I thought the makers of that film not only did the graphic novel justice, but improved the ending considerably by not teleporting a giant, telepathic squid into New York City.

So what is it that is making me fear being a curmudgeon? I sure don't want to be. I really wanted to love the Dark Knight, especially when I saw the reviews, but I thought it was horrible. I even bought it on Blu-Ray (on sale) and gave it another chance today. I got to the first scene where Batman drives the tank--sorry, Batmobile through the parking garage barrier, then explodes the corner stairwell, which one would assume is next to the elevator, and causes more property damage than he needs to, and I just have to think that if this is our hero, we deserve better.

I guess what I'm going to have to do is start writing something of my own, and see if I can do better. I'll have to see if I can make a story with internal consistency. I want a story that would appeal to my students and give those who are like I was at that age something to look up to, and ideals that they can respect. If I can do something like that, then I will feel justified in being a little cranky when I see Superman leaving thugs to die in Superman Returns.

We can only hope.

Logan's Run

Great article about one of my favorite novels, Logan's Run, over here. Lots of information about the movie, TV show and comic book, too.

"Lost" in Space

My buddies are big "Stargate" fans. I hated the movie so I never watched the TV show. They have followed all of them, so there must be something to them. Having recently switched to Comcast for my television service, I started checking out the On Demand feature when I needed something to watch during my daily exercise yesterday. Since the newest Stargate TV show had been a topic of conversation at dinner the other night (I thought it would be an appropriate time to use the restroom since I hadn't seen it) I gave the pilot episode of "Stargate: Universe" a shot.

I liked the show well enough. It's just that I'd seen it before. The premise is simple: There are stargates that go to various places and planets and people on Earth have figured out how they work...mostly. The stargate in this show is on a planet that has unique properties seemingly designed to operate the mysterious "ninth chevron." I'm guessing that the other eight have been solved in previous incarnations of the show. Young Eli Wallace, a normal civilian video gamer, solves a puzzle in a game. Of course, it turns out to be the key to an alien code that the smartest guys on Earth couldn't figure out, so they embedded it in a video game to find someone smarter than they are. Eli is recruited to join the Stargate folks on the alien planet in exchange for health care for his mother. If that doesn't say something about our health care system, I don't know what does. This is just a little bit like "The Last Starfighter." Eli is played by a previously undiscovered clone of Jonah Hill, because he is most definitely a Jonah Hill character. He is the awkward smart guy with no confidence, formerly known as the comic relief.

Eli finds himself on the alien planet, consulting with Dr. Smith--I mean, Dr. Rush. Dr. Rush is the scientific genius who twists the stargate experiment to his own ends and no one knows whose side he is on. I fully expect he will call someone a "bubble-headed boobie" before all is said and done. Dr. Rush is also a retread of Baltar, from the newer version of Battlestar Galactica, with his hairstyle, sideburns, and British accent.

The stargate experiment is interrupted by an alien attack. It's probably not relevant who is attacking, but it is critical to the plot that the planet is attacked, and so it is. Dr. Rush is ordered to set the Stargate to return the people on the base to Earth, but he decides to push forward and sets the Stargate to go to wherever the ninth chevron is supposed to take them. So, the ragtag assembly of military personnel, scientists, politicians, and bureaucrats escape into the Stargate and end up on an ancient space ship. The ship is travelling at faster-than-light speeds, and in short order our heroes find that they are several galaxies away from Earth on a course away from it. And their doctor is dead. It's too bad they couldn't have borrowed an Emergency Medical Hologram as long as they were borrowing "Star Trek: Voyager"'s (formerly "Lost in Space's) plot anyway.

The story is told in clips alternating between the present and flashbacks to the past, not unlike "Lost." The only difference is that the flashbacks on this show serve no other purpose than to tell us where the characters came from. They do not, upon first viewing, reveal anything about the characters that would advance the plot.

I'm going to watch this show because a few of the characters intrigued me, even though we've met before. I'll be interested to see if they move further away from their archetypical doppelgangers or closer to them as the plot advances and the characters grow.

I am not naive enough to think that borrowing doesn't occur between television shows. I guess, though, that I am too familiar with the source material and too cynical because I recognize the source of so many plot structures and character types. I hope more episodes will change my mind about it because the real "Lost" doesn't start until January.

Hot Serial

In the late 70s, I used to watch a show on WGTU channel 29 called "Hot Serial." Shown at 11:00 each night, "Hot Serial" featured a nightly chapter in an old movie serial, like Flash Gordon Conquers the Universe, or Radar Men from the Moon, featuring Commando Cody. It was a great show to watch when you only had a 9" black and white television, since the serials were filmed in black and white anyway! The titles for the syndicated program always started with a bowl of steaming cereal suspended by wires, flying around the screen.

I received a set of Flash Gordon serials that I had purchased for my dad, and I'm watching them now, thinking back to when we lived in my grandparents' basement. Good times, hot serial.

Battlestar Galactica: The Second Coming

This would have been cool. I would have enjoyed it much more than the piece of felgercarb that's on now. Don't get me wrong, I loved the reimagined BSG until they jumped the shark when half the main characters were revealed as Cylons.

Dusty Abell Does it Again!

If you're over 35, this picture is worth a billion words! Go here for the truly awesome full-sized picture.

The Six Million Dollar Man

"Steve Austin, astronaut: A man barely alive.
We can rebuild him. We can make him better than he was before.
Better...stronger...faster."

The Six Million Dollar Man was my childhood idol. When my stepfather took away all of my comic books and burned them in front of me ("They'll give you bad dreams.") I needed a hero. Steve Austin was that hero.

For those of you who don't remember or are not old enough to remember, the Six Million Dollar Man from the TV show was an astronaut who was severely maimed from the crash of an experimental spacecraft. The Office of Scientific Intelligence (OSI) replaced both legs, his right arm and his left eye with bionic (cybernetic) parts. Steve Austin then had tremendous strength, could run at 60+ miles per hour tirelessly, and could see great distances and in the dark. In short, he became a secret agent with super powers.

The television show was clearly made for kids. Steve refused to kill people, and usually only hit people with an open hand. The physics of the show were often questionable. There was no explanation given how when his non-bionic hand was handcuffed to his bionic one, he could simply pull his arms apart and the handcuffs would snap.

Eventually the TV show would spin off The Bionic Woman, featuring Steve's girlfriend Jamie Sommers, a tennis pro who just coincidentally fell victim to nearly the same kind of injuries while skydiving. She got a bionic ear instead of an eye. There was also a Seven Million Dollar Man, who went bad, a Bionic Boy, with leg implants that compensated for his paralysis, and of course who could forget Max, the Bionic Dog?

During the summer when I was 10 years old, my grandmother took my brother and me to a bookstore in Traverse City, Michigan. Horizon Books was just a hole in the wall on the south side of Front Street then. When we asked if they had any Six Million Dollar Man books, the clerk showed us the original novel upon which the Six Million Dollar Man was based: Cyborg, by Martin Caidin. My grandmother asked if it was appropriate for my age and the clerk replied that it was. I was so excited to see this book that I couldn't even wait to get back to her house to start reading it.

To my dismay, I found a mistake. The book claimed that Steve Austin had lost his left arm, not his right! I immediately took a pen to the book, crossing out "left" and writing "right" in the margin above the line. And Steve didn't work for the OSI, he worked for the OSO (Office of Special Operations). What was this?? My grandmother calmly explained that when books were made into movies or television shows, details could be changed like that. Satisfied with (and more than a little surprised by) that knowledge, I went back to reading.

The Steve Austin of the novel was a whole different character from the one in the TV show. This Steve Austin could not see out of his bionic eye, but it did hold a camera that could take up to 20 frames of film. The camera was activated by a button just under the plastiskin at Austin's temple. His arm could not lift great weights because it was still attached to muscles and ligaments in his shoulder. He used it primarily as a bludgeon. But one huge difference in the arm was the CO2 airgun in his finger that shot cyanide-tipped darts. They definitely never had that little contraption in the television show! He also had a supply of flares that he kept in his wrist joint. There was a plug he could pull out to gain access to them. Austin's legs were also far different. He couldn't run 60 miles per hour, but he could run without tiring, since his respiratory and circulatory systems were only working to supply oxygen and blood to one limb.
His feet had swim fins that could deploy from the underside, just behind his toes.

Austin was much more ruthless in the novel to say the least. He undertook two missions, one to steal a Soviet MiG and one to infiltrate a Central American military complex. He was basically James Bond with built-in gadgets.

I've been thinking for a couple of years how an updated version of this character could be great if done correctly. When it was announced that there would be a comedy version of the Six Million Dollar Man featuring Jim Carrey, I cringed. Fortunately this project seems to be dead. This fall, though, one of NBC's new shows is called, "Bionic Woman." It's being produced by some of the same people who re-imagined "Battlestar Galactica," so I have very high hopes. With the right approach, this show could really work well, and the guys who produce BSG haven't let me down yet.

Wouldn't it be cool if the Six Million Dollar Man was the spinoff this time?

Welcome to the Future!

In my last post, I mentioned that my daughter will be 14 in 2020. When I was a little boy in 1972, there was a cartoon called Sealab 2020. I remember thinking, wow, they will have undersea laboratories in the future! Well, the future is not far away, and some of the science fiction genre's future is in our past.

It's always guesswork to try to anticipate what technology will exist by a future date and some movies and TV shows have been closer than others. George Orwell is said to have chosen 1984 as the setting of his famous novel simply by transposing the last two digits of the year of its publication, 1948. Some movies, like the popular X-Men franchise, wimp out by setting their films in "the not-so-distant future."

The 1979 Buck Rogers TV series always started with this narrative: "The year is 1987 and NASA launches the last of America's deep space probes. In a freak mishap Ranger 3 and its pilot Captain William 'Buck' Rogers are blown out of their trajectory into an orbit which freezes his life support systems and returns Buck Rogers to Earth 500 years later." Strangely enough, the deep space probe looked just like the Orbiter. And I've yet to see a manned deep space mission, so perhaps that was a bit optimistic, especially since the beginning of the show was only set eight yeares into the future.

In the Star Trek (original series, of course) episode Space Seed, the Eugenics Wars of the mid-1990s is mentioned. As far as I know, Khan Noonian Singh didn't take over 25% of Earth, so we're good. Star Wars had the Clone Wars, though, and that's just another example of George Lucas "borrowing" from TOS.

Lost in Space, set in 1997, sends the Robinson family in search of a habitable planet in the nearby Alpha Centauri system suitable for human colonization. I'm glad things aren't that bad just yet. I do want a B-9 Robot, though. They only cost $24,500!

In Space:1999, Moonbase Alpha is torn from its orbit by an explosion of nuclear waste and hurled across the cosmos. I always thought this show had the most realistic-looking ships of all the science fiction genre, taking elements from the actual Apollo spacecraft with bell-shaped thrusters, but in reality, we would be years away from establishing a permanent moon base even if we started the program today. Still, it was a pretty cool show.

2001: A Space Odyssey is a classic of science fiction and the technology depicted was generally considered to be attainable. Some of it was. I still want to ride the Pan Am space plane. Unfortunately, Pan Am went out of business in 1991.

I wonder how many more science fiction shows there were that were set in a future that has now come to pass. I have to think that they had no idea that they would be remembered now.