The Week In TV...

I watched a lot of TV this week.  Between the final episodes of Battlestar, the season premiers of Big Love, Flight of the Conchords and Lost, the Innauguation and the shows I already watch like Top Chef I have had little time to spare doing important stuff like working or going to class.  Let's recap, shall we?

In BSG, Earth turns out to be a nuclear wasteland and everyone is totally bummed.  Especially D.  Answers better come quickly because they're still revealing new questions.  Like what's Starbuck's deal - is she dead or another ancient Cylon or some third option I don't even know about but is really cool?  Is that really the final Cylon?  I hate that character.  When's Gaeta going to be cool again?  I used to like him so much but now he's a sweaty one-legged bitch.

Big Love gave us some glimpses at what's going on with Roman and seeing Albie get his ass beat is always a pleasure.  All I could think about the whole episode was that Bill Paxton looks really old this year.

Flight of the Conchords started out strong with a nice Greg Proops cameo and the fall of the Crazy Dogs.  Brit's hand-woven pants were classic.

Leah needs to get her ass off Top Chef.  Radhika blew it so I wasn't sorry to see her go but we really need to keep weeding out these crappy chefs from this season faster.  My ever-changing final four prediction is Fabio, Stephan, Jeff and Jamie.  Carla can only do desserts, Leah is a hack and Hosea is probably interchangable with Jeff but I think Jeff is better in quickfires and it'll give him an advantage.

And oh boy, Lost... I love that they're jumping through time.  I think, though, that I am going to be totally bored with the goings on in L.A. thanks to how intrigued I am with the island antics.  This time jumping is a great way to show us the origins of the Dharma Initiative, give us some insight into everyone first known as "The Hostiles" and then "The Others," and even might let us catch a glimpse of an early smoke monster.

Ever since Alex was killed I'm liking Ben more and more, and I really like how Locke's journey  could position him to be the next Ben.  I feel like Richard is a more open Jacob-like island manifestation that is charged with choosing protectors for the island.  I think it's interesting that he gave Locke a compass, one of the items Locke chose as his own when Richard visited him as a child.

Tonight is the next Battlestar episode, which I will be DVRing.  More updates next week...

So Anxious...

Lost season 5 premiers to night and there are still so many questions to answer!  It looks like this is the season where everyone tries to get back to the island to save everyone.  Is Locke really dead?  Does Jin find his way back to our time?  How much ass can Sayid kick?!  Only time will tell!  I'll be rewatching the last half of the last season to formulate some pre-premiere theories this afternoon.

Jeremy BanthamwhAT THEF**KISGOINGON!

My mind is melting.

The season finale blows open everyone's theories about Lost and, guess what? validates some of mine. Here we go...

1) Please refer to my earlier post. I was half right. Starts with J and ends in -antham. I said we hadn't met him yet and I guess we could have never expected an alias. I was wrong about the character of the person in the coffin. Really, the only thing I was right about was that it wasn't Micheal.

2) Jack is a wreck. I was right about needing to get back to the island.

Let's look at my Hail Mary predictions...

1) Life sucks for MOST people off the island. Kate feels it's best for Aaron but everyone else is not cool with it.
2) Only Sun is back but she is definitely using her dad's company and his connections with Widmore (which were never shown but somehow I inferred) to find Jin and the rest of the survivors.
3) Dead on. Penny found Desmond thanks to his time-traveling call and her subsequent search for him using her father's boat. Word.

So we've learned that immediate predictions are stupid to make and the only way to get a handle on Lost is some long-term thinking. Which I rule at!

Everyone is Lost. Especially Me.

To sum up:

So now Ben controls the smoke monster, the island has been both behind and ahead of "real world" (boat) time, Jack and Claire's dad is alive (or at least in the picture... called it!), and the island can be moved. Also, Mittelos Bioscience is definitely an Others front and apparently has been for at least 50 years. Richard clearly doesn't age.

BOLD PREDICTION:

Jacob is Jack's dad, Christian. Check these screen caps and tell me they don't jive with a script that calls for someone of Christian's description without actually using the actor and blowing the secret early.

Some questions:

What is the significance of the pebbles, the compass and the knife that young Locke chose?

If most of The Others were chosen to be on the island, are most of the main survivors also chosen to be there? Jack's father faked his death, Locke went on walkabout as suggested by the tall dude that Hurley is afraid of in the mental hospital... there must be other connections...

Lost: My Brain is Going to Explode

OK. I never posted a follow up to the Lost season premier a few weeks ago, mostly because I'm busy, but also because I've been trying to formulate a counter-point to my friend Dave's theory that the secret of the island involves a parallel Earth.

Basically, I thought that it's the electromagnetic properties that make the island special. Everything going on is tied to the island's extraordinary physical properties. From super fast healing to an inability of people to find it or leave it, to the primary reason of the Dharma Initiative - they're all tied to the island's off-the-charts activity.

Tonight's episode seemed to be a convergence of our two theories with quantum physics as the link. While I'm still not convinced that the island exists on a totally different planet or plane I think that our two theories moved one step towards each other during Desmond's adventure. It seems to me that the properties of the island are so powerful that they can really mess you up on a quantum level if you don't use the right channels to come and go - it's worse to just get the bearing wrong a little and be able to get off the island than it is to sail or fly aimlessly around and never be able to escape the magnetic effects on instruments. People's consciousnesses bounce back and forth between spaces in time like quantum particles and would probably do so indefinitely if the human brain could handle the strain. The quantum explanation is solidified by Faraday, the physicist, being the go to guy to solve Desmond's problem.

I have some more general predictions regarding some things we've seen.

1. Dharma has set up other facilities around the world to try and harness this type of phenomenon in the past. This is what I think they were showing with the polar bear fossil in the desert.

2. The Others are a counter-foundation/conglomerate dedicated to the preservation of these spots. Remember that Hanso, Paik and Widmore formed Dharma. Just who formed the group that Ben works for is unclear but the conflict between the two that exists below the public consciousness is clear from Sayid's episode last week. A good place to start is to figure out exactly who Richard, the guy that recruited Ben as a child, is and look out for his company, Mittelos Bioscience (the company that recruited Juliet).

I'll think of more I'm sure - we're watching tons of old episodes to pick up stuff we missed. Whatever happens, however the season turns out, we're going to be fucking blown away and no one will have seen it coming.

UPDATE: I must be totally addled - Dave is right. Widmore and Paik so far have nothing to do (that we know of) with Dharma. I have no idea what episode I thought I saw that in. If I could do one of those strikethroughs I would, but I don't know how. Crap.

DOUBLE UPDATE: In your face, Dave! Did you see last night's episode? Widmore! Boo-ya!

The Moment of Truth

Last year I posted a little recap and some predictions about the next season of Lost. Finally, in 20 minutes, we'll see how accurate I was. Tomorrow I'll post a recap of the first episode of the fourth season and some adjusted predictions and we'll agree that yes, I am the coolest person you know.

Cooler Than Lost? Yes.

I only say the above because movies, you know, end. If you guys haven't seen this trailer for the super-secret J.J. Abrams project codenamed Cloverfield your lives are apparently empty of the unfounded yet inexplicably real and newfound terror that a monster is probably one day going to destroy New York. Really, it could happen to any of us. Just look how the monster ruined that nice guy's going away party...

Lost: WTF.

My friend Dave recently beat me to the punch a wrote a post about the season finale of Lost. I've got my own thoughts on what I think has happened and will happen next year. If you haven't seen the last episode, you suck, but you might want to spend a quick two hours on ABC.com and catch up.

The craziest moment in TV history was when Jack met Kate near the airport and we realized that all of the flashbacks from this episode were "flashforwards" as the peeps have been calling them. I think that this is the time frame that the next season will take place in. As far as I can tell, here's some interesting shit that's gone down and some predictions:

1. Oceanic Airlines has given each of the passengers on 815 a golden ticket - unlimited flights anywhere at anytime. Jack uses this every week to fly across the Pacific hoping that his plane will crash back onto the island. He also is obsessed with mapping out the journeys - anything to help him figure out where the island is.


2. Jack is a wreck, feeling guilty about making the wrong choice to leave the island. This implies that between the phone call and the rescue we'll find out some sinister shit about the people that sent Naomi and that Ben was most likely right - they mean the island harm. Jack is guilty about leaving the island and the remaining inhabitants to a terrible fate.

3. Jack's dad is alive. This took a while to sink in, but while Jack was having his breakdown at the hospital he yelled at the chief of surgery to "go upstairs, get my dad, and if I'm drunker than him you can fire me." This jives with the scene where Jack finds his dad's coffin - empty.


4. We have not been introduced to who's in the coffin at the funeral parlor - yet. A new character will emerge that does something either incredibly stupid or totally vicious and pisses off the main characters. I think that it'll come at the moment when they realize that maybe leaving the island is a bad call, but this guy does something to seal the deal and off they go. Thanks to Lost Easter Eggs and Screen Caps for the ultra HD pic of the obituary that Jack's holding. Notice the the person's name starts with a J and ends with "antham," and that he was from New York.


When we see flashbacks of their last days on the island the picture will become clearer as to why it was so bad that they left. We'll also find out a little more about Jacob, focus a lot on Locke's point of view as he tries to save the island from corruption, and find out what's up with Walt showing up. I feel like there will be a new alliance of Ben, Locke, Walt and maybe Alex, Carl and Danielle to stop the damage to the island that these new people will cause.

Some way far out predictions. Hail Marys.

1) Life will suck for everyone now that they're off the island, driving them to go back and fix what they did by leaving and alerting some presumably evil dudes to it's presence.

2) Sun and Jin will be back in Korea, valuable to her father as he's an investor in the Dharma Initiative and they've finally found their island again after losing control of it so many years ago. They will be a driving force in uniting the survivors of 815 to get back and undo what's been going on.

3) Penny was just using her father's technology to find Desmond and it was a coincidence that her father also funded Dharma and therefore his equipment was tapped into it's systems. Her and Desmond will also play a part in getting people back.

It just sucks we'll have to wait until October to see if any of this is even close.

The New Heroin

I have a horrible addiction. It's not destroying my life yet, but I'm sure it will. It's Lost. It rules. Jamie and I have knocked out the first season on Netflix and we're in trouble. We don't want to do anything else except sit on my new Lovesac (A Christmas present. So, so great.) and eat Jimmy Johns and drink wine and watch Lost and look at each other and go "What the hell's going on?"

What the hell IS going on? What's the deal with the polar bears? What's up with Ethan and how did he get that superhuman strength? How did Claire escape? What's down that hatch? But most of all, what in the hell is that "security system?" AND WHO WERE THOSE ASSHOLES THAT TOOK WALT?!!!

Don't answer any of that. Season Two comes in the mail today.