Episode Reviews

There’s a curious feeling that things are getting better and better in 2007, and worse and worse in 1977, a feeling that while Locke may be on the edge of saving the world in the present (or close to the present), Jack and company are on the edge of destroying not only the world, but time itself thirty years before. It’s uneasy, and I have to think deliberately off-balance. As usual, there’s more going on here than anyone is telling, but here’s what we do know:

In 1977:

As we know, origin stories always suck, and last week wasn’t really any exception. In fact, not only were they saddled with an origin story for Iron Man, they were also saddled with having to retcon/reboot war profiteer/womanizer/drunken Tony Stark in to a Peter Parker-esque teen with a heart of gold. To be honest, they didn’t fail nearly as bad as I’d anticipated, even if the whole plot felt artificial and silly.

This week was much better, shorter on the action, longer on the character-based story. Still not great by a long shot, but not terrible, and better than last week.

There is a not-very-narrow line between ‘acting’ and ‘putting on a show.’ It’s fairly broad, but it’s also occasionally hard to delineate exactly, and dependent somewhat upon culture, period, and venue. On the one hand, acting is acting is acting, right? But on the other hand consider Noh drama in Japan which moves at a speed that makes glaciers seem freakin’ sonic, and uses this staid unreality to emphasize the emotional elements of the story in a sort of hyper realized fashion. To a student of Japanese drama, a particularly slow performance can be moving, brilliant, more real than real.

The sole purpose of this episode was to put the last season or so in (subjective) chronological order.

It succeeded.

No real insights, except an awful lot happened in about 48 hours or so.

Still depressed about Kings.