Registered Weapon

Awesome portrait of FELIX and John Locke by Rob, in honor of tonight’s premiere of the sixth and final season of Lost.

For more great Lost art, check out Vera Brosgol’s Twitpic page. Via Fluxtumblr.

Probable spoilers for Lost Seasons 1-5 ahead.

Here, look at this (skip ahead to 1:30 for the important part):

This is from the eighth episode of season 1 of Lost. Shannon’s asthma is getting worse and she’s lost her inhalers; everyone thinks Sawyer has them because he’s been hoarding stuff since they crashed on the island. Sawyer doesn’t dispute this hypothesis, but refuses to give up the inhalers. Finally, Jack and Sayid get so fed up with him that they tie him to a tree and Sayid sticks bamboo spikes underneath his fingernails to get him to tell them where his stash is. Sawyer relents, but says he’ll only tell Kate. And the price Kate has to pay for the information is a kiss.

If you click through to YouTube, you’ll see a bunch of comments from users, presumably women, along the lines of “OMG that’s so hot!! I wish my bf would kiss me like that!!” Feel free to ignore those–but on second thought, don’t. Did you watch it? That scene is sexy as hell. That’s one of the sexiest things that’s ever been on TV, and I’m counting cable in that assessment.

There’s a certain subset of Lost fandom that will tell you that the Sawyer/Kate/Jack love triangle is their least favorite thing about the show, it’s boring, it’s passe, that nobody cares about it except the sad Midwestern housewives who wish they could play tonsil hockey with Sawyer, that it actively detracts from their enjoyment of the cool stuff about the show, i.e. the Statue, the Numbers, the Dharma Initiative, Jacob, etc. “Kate ruins everything” is a popular mantra on a message board I frequent, and it doesn’t just mean that Kate tends to screw up every other character’s plans with her meddling (which she does); it means that the very presence of Kate in a scene or an episode makes it worse. A Kate episode tends to focus on her conflicted feelings for Jack and/or Sawyer. For some fans, this will not stand–the petty concerns of the heart are small potatoes compared to the ultimate goals of the Dharma Initiative or the power struggle between Ben and Widmore. You can think of the narrative content of Lost as lying along a continuum, with Romantic Bullshit at one end and Cool Shit at the other end. Fan-favorite characters like Locke and Ben tend to be involved with the Cool Shit. Kate’s all the way at the other end of the continuum, unable to extricate herself from the Romantic Bullshit.

Well, that’s one way of looking at it. Another way, which has become more and more clear to me as I’ve rewatched the first five seasons in preparation for tonight’s premiere (as of this writing, I’m two episodes into Season 4; I don’t think I’m going to make it), is that the Cool Shit and the Romantic Bullshit (if you extend that out to also include Dramatic Bullshit) are inextricably linked–that if you take away one, the other ceases to matter. Lost is a success–and from where I’m sitting, it’s a huge success–because it offers such a strong mix of every element along that imagined continuum. The human drama grounds the far-fetched, fanastic elements, while those elements imbue often mundane or even banal drama with greater tension and meaning. The numerous–some might say tedious–flashbacks to Jack’s relationship with his father give real emotional weight to the sight of his dead father walking around the island. Conversely, the fact that Jack’s dead father is literally walking around the island doing mysterious creepy shit makes the viewer more invested in the umpteenth examination of Jack’s daddy issues. It’s a loop, and if you cut it, the whole thing falls apart. (For an example of said falling apart, look at Heroes. That show was initially praised for moving faster than Lost, for actually answering questions instead of piling mystery upon mystery. But Heroes couldn’t maintain itself on shocking cliffhangers forever, and it doesn’t matter how many questions you answer if no one cares about the characters. Lost may have moved slowly at times throughout the first three seasons, but it was that deliberate pace–that choice to focus so intently on the characters at the occasional expense of Cool Shit–that allowed the show to speed up and get wilder in seasons 4 and 5. By doing the heavy character lifting in the first three seasons, the show’s creators had earned the right to take the risky narrative leaps of 4 and 5, and trust that the emotional investment would still be there.)

As I’ve rewatched the first three seasons, what’s struck me the most is that emotional investment. When I watch new episodes of Lost as they air, I’m mostly concerned with What Happens Next? There is a very physical feeling of anticipation that I get when I watch a new episode of Lost, and every new twist or reveal is a little jolt to the system. No other show has that effect on me. But when I’ve rewatched it, that feeling goes away, replaced by a deeper connection to the characters. The surprises and OMG moments don’t have that same immediate physical effect, but the decisions the characters make, and the paths their relationships take, have a much greater impact. I’m thinking specifically of things like the reunion of Rose and Bernard, or Charlie’s goodbye to Hurley near the end of Season 3, or the flashback to Desmond’s introduction to Penny, or the really amazing combo of editing and music at the end of Season 1 that juxtaposes the passengers all getting onto the fateful Flight 815 with Jack, Locke and Kate blowing open the hatch. (Speaking of music, Jesus Christ Michael Giacchino has just consistently killed it throughout the whole series.) There are dozens and dozens of moments like those, and without those moments of genuine human connection, all the smoke monsters and hatches in the world wouldn’t mean a thing. The four-toed statue makes you say “Awesome!”; that kiss between Kate and Sawyer–raw, passionate and above all real–is what makes you give a damn.

*****

One thing I’m looking forward to almost as much as new Lost is new Lost Thoughts from blogger Sean T. Collins. Collins did really great episode reviews for season 5, and I’m hoping/expecting he continues for the final season. Definitely worth checking out for smart criticism (and geeking out) that goes far beyond “Kate ruins everything.”

I’ve probably got some more Lost thoughts of my own on the way in the days ahead. In the meantime, if you haven’t heard it, enjoy this musical tribute to the Hatch, the Numbers, and all the other Cool Shit, by my alter ego The Grassy Beast:

“In the Swan”
Right-click, Save As for mp3, or listen here:

Or here’s the Beast performing it live back in December:

–Gardner

A kind soul has linked to us on Reddit, so if you came from there, welcome! Frank and FELIX are currently in the middle of their third case. If you want to get caught up, here’s the archive and here’s the very first episode. Whether you’re a new reader or a regular, if you like what you see, it’d be awesome if you went to the Reddit post and vote us up or leave a comment. It’d be the best first birthday present we could get! Well, not the best, obviously, but still pretty good. (Oh yeah, RW’s first birthday is tomorrow. Come back then for a birthday surprise!)

In other news Rob twittered about rewatching all of Lost in preparation for the season 6 premiere, and Gardner thought that was a great idea and watched the first five episodes of season 1 yesterday. Holy crap, John Locke. John Locke, people.

Being the first in a potential series of theoretical posts about good stuff from the 00s.

Over the past year I’ve developed something of a love/hate relationship with Matthew Perpetua’s Fluxblog, which I think is based more on familiarity than anything else–when you see something/someone nearly every day for six years, little irritations are bound to grate more and more–but there’s no denying that, for the greater part of this past decade, Fluxblog has been my favorite radio station, and Perpetua my favorite DJ, by a wide margin. I’d say Fluxblog is responsible for introducing me to 90% of the best new music and artists I’ve heard in the last decade, from M.I.A. to Sleigh Bells; it was Fluxblog that (re)introduced me to the joys of Pop after ten years of being mainly a Rock Dude. (But it’s always nice to be reminded that, like yours truly, Perpetua is a child of the alt-rock 90s: a Pavement fanatic, a wonderful explicator of what made Pearl Jam special to those of us who were 15 at the time, and the author of maybe the all-time greatest critical work on R.E.M.) In a lot of ways, Perpetua’s taste has become my taste.

One thing that’s kind of interesting, though, is that though Fluxblog has introduced me to dozens, if not hundreds, of songs that I love, the number of albums that I’ve bought because of a Fluxblog recommendation could probably be counted on two hands. (Yes, I’m aware that this is in direct violation of the mp3 blog golden rule, as stated plainly on Fluxblog: “Please buy the records from the artist if you like what you hear.”) I’m sure part of this has to do with my introduction to Fluxblog coinciding with my embrace of an iTunes-equipped PC as my music delivery method of choice, not to mention the general trend in the music industry of no one buying any albums at all, ever again. But part of it is also the songs themselves. Though Fluxblog reflects Perpetua’s wide-ranging tastes, it specializes in concise, joyful bursts of pop, overflowing with energy and excitement. This checklist of elements in U.S.E. songs also describes the Fluxblog aesthetic pretty well, though usually the songs that Perpetua features have darker undercurrents, whether lyrically or musically, to keep things more bittersweet than saccharine. The upshot to all this is that many of the songs featured on the site are these super-dense, super-intense little things, like amazingly rich chocolate truffles; maybe you’d like to eat a whole box of them, but one is more than enough. The joy that you get from the one song might be diminished if it was just a component of an album. Sometimes it’s more fun to let that one song stand on its own, to know that there might be more like it waiting out there if you feel the need, but for now you just want to hit repeat on this one track until it’s all you can remember.

*****

Those of you who haven’t been obsessively reading Fluxblog over the past six years are in for a treat today, as Perpetua has compiled a mix of some of the best “lost” Fluxblog tracks for your listening pleasure. Many of these songs are of the “one is all you need” variety I was talking about. Though Perpetua notes that these are songs and artists that never caught on with the public, for me (and I’m sure many others) this is pretty much a Top 40 Countdown. Worth the download for David Wrench’s mighty, towering “World War IV” alone, though I could say the same thing about half these tracks. “Youth Alcoholic!” I need to go listen to that right now.

–Gardner