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.
Volume 2 of my Netflix reviews is the scariest one yet - The Descent. Another of the new breed of horror movies, The Descent focuses on a trip that a bunch of girls make into the caves of North Carolina and the lovable sub-humans that they befriend while in said caverns. Well, not "befriend," but "are eaten by."
The movie opens to three friends white water rafting in an eight-man raft. Immediately I was terrified. "That is not safe," I said aloud. Luckily, the friends made it through the opening credits alive and I was relieved. What turned out not to be safe was the drive home, because the heroine's husband and daughter are killed in yet another tragic car accident that involves copper piping through the windshield.
After a lame nightmare/waking in the hospital sequence we flash to a year later, when the three women around last year are in the Appalachians ready to do some good old spelunking to, you know, wash away the tragedy of last year's extreme adventure. I do it all the time. Like my Grandpa Morales used to say, "Nothing like spelunking to stop you from feeling funky." Or something.
OK, so once we get into this cave and start taking bets on who's going to get mauled by the moleman first it's actually pretty nerve-wracking. Neil Marshall does a great job of capturing the claustrophobic atmosphere of crawling through caves miles under ground and the paranoia involved with operating in a pitch black setting. Once the morlocks come in to play it gets pretty mediocre. Thank God that standard caverning equipment involves so many ice picks or they would have been totally fucked.
I'll give this movie 2 out of 5 stars. It worked best when the focus of the viewer's terror wasn't the carnivorous Gollums running around but instead their own fear of tight places and the dark. It started to get pretty typical and un-scary when the scary monsters were introduced. That being said, I can't wait for The Descent 2: Molemen take Manhattan.
Friends, it's my sad duty to inform you (all three of you) that the greatest Twins blog ever is done. Batgirl is retiring to spend more time with her brand new baby, plus she doesn't live in the Cities anymore and it's tough to get the Twinks on TV without a sizable investment.
Batgirl was my favorite way to catch up on the Twins if I missed a game or a series and could always be counted on to make me laugh if I was super pissed because Carlos Silva ate hole for five innings or because Travis Hafner lives to destroy the Twins.
I'm forever stuck calling Johan "The President," and Lew "Lew Fordwalker," and Mauer "The Chairman," and Nick Punto "Little Nicky Punto/LNP" and Mike Redmond "NBP (Naked Batting Practice)" and there are so many names for Morneau like "Dr. Neau" and you can always make reference to the Island of Dr. Morneau, and... damn that was a good blog.
If you've got nothing to do please browse the entries from key times last season, especially September and October (near the bottom) and understand how freaking great this blog was and marvel at how one woman with a career and a baby could have kept it up if it weren't for a deep-seeded love of the game of baseball. I said marvel, dammit!
I'm inspired by Batgirl's retirement. Look for more Twins posts here at Pumaspeed. Look for more posts in general. Honest.
Even though they go the opposite of Puma Speed, these sloths kick ass. While you're at it, check out The Lonely Island, the site of Andy Samberg and the guys who do all of the digital shorts for SNL, one of which I've already posted. They've got a movie coming out this summer and everything! It looks hil-goddamed-ass-bastard-larious!
Last week Marvel did some ridiculous shit and killed Captain America. He was nailed by a sniper. I've been meaning to write about this but haven't had any time. This is why I'm kinda pissed at Marvel right now.
So here's the deal - for the last year or so there's been an ongoing, universe-spanning storyline involving in fighting between two factions of Marvel superheroes. A "Civil War," if you will. This was an awesome idea that really could have had a serious impact on every character in the Marvel Universe. Basically, heroes were forced to either register their identities or be arrested after some younger heroes filming a reality show botched a villain fight and blew up a school.
This was great because some heroes you'd expect to stay straight went rogue, Captain America being one of them, and there was this cool showdown that was set up - Iron Man and his peeps vs. Cap and the rebels, who included Spider-Man, Daredevil, the Punisher, and pretty much every other marketable character, except the X-Men, who they wrote out because it's clear that the X-line of books is now almost completely autonomous save Wolverine's appearance in every title Marvel publishes. Well, they didn't write them out completely, but their storyline was so marginal and unnecessary that they should have. So it was clear which side the audience was supposed to root for. It was made interesting when Iron Man recruited villains to capture the rebel superheros, like Venom, Green Goblin, Bullseye, etc.
Well, the series played out and the climactic battle ended with Cap's side winning the fight against the pussy heroes and the villains, but then Cap realized that Oh my God, look and all the damage we're doing, we're not helping people, blah blah blah, and then he surrenders, basically throwing away a year's worth of posturing and drama in a matter of two panels. Oh, and all of those heroes that were fighting with Cap? Pardoned. Amnesty. Gay.
After all of these publishing delays and huge publicity and some really great scripts and art, we're left with everything pretty much the same except a little different. Now every state has it's own government sponsored hero team, which will be brought up only when convenient since the teams are made up up with brand new no-names or D-listers.
Follow me over here. There are two character rules that Marvel seems to have been adhering to since the Modern Age began. 1) Magneto is never really dead, and 2) Bucky is dead for real. Now Ed Brubaker, the writer who is on the Captain America book right now, has done some great things with it. He's turned Captain America around from cheeseball to ball-crushingly cool. He also broke what I thought was the cardinal rule of Marvel and destroyed any faith in the permanency of any storyline decision that Joe Quesada (Editor-In-Chief) allows. He brought back Bucky - Captain America's dead sidekick from WWII - as the Winter Soldier, an ex-KBG genetically enhanced cyborg amnesia victim who Cap had to rescue from the brink of evil and madness. This is a very cool way to bring back the only character who nobody has touched in over fifty years, but still a controversial decision and one I was willing to live with.
But now, NOW! two years later he decides to kill Marvel's flagship character and they say it's for real but they lost all credibility when they brought back Bucky and don't you see!? It's going to happen again. They're saying "Steve Rogers is dead," and they've already got teaser panels on their website that say "Is this the new Captain America?" and in another year or two when the new Captain America bombs and everyone hates him then Holy Shit! here comes Steve Rogers again to save the day and it's ok everyone I was just um... in stasis or frozen in ice again or in Jamaica or whatever.
This is all just crap filler to keep readership between the pathetic anticlimactic end to what could have been an industry changing event and World War Hulk, what should be just a gruesome bloodbath but will probably be a year-long fist fight between the Hulk and a bunch of pussies I'm not interested in anymore. And when all the dust settles and the Hulk gives everyone a big hug on Oprah and everything is the same as it was except maybe the Hulk is, I don't know... blue now, don't say I didn't warn you.
UPDATE: I can understand why nobody's commented on this. Jamie's statement tonight summed it up -
"Captain America died? When?"
...
"Who's Captain America?"
DOUBLE KICKASS UPDATE: HE'S RED! THE HULK IS FUCKING RED! AHAHAHA I CALLED IT, JOE QUESADA, YOU FUCKING CHUMP! GET SOME TALENT!
Well, I've had a good couple of weeks, mostly because of my new shameless addiction - Guitar Hero. Jamie and I picked up Guitar Hero II (w/ guitar controller, $79.99 @ Best Buy) and I proceeded to play almost non-stop for weeks. I've gotten through Hard, but can't beat a lot of the songs on Expert yet, so I've got some practicing to do.
The neat thing is that I've been talking about it constantly and my boss decided that it would be a great promo, so thanks to my Guitar Hero madness Majors is holding a contest every Wednesday at every store. I thought that I was pretty good but I am wrong! There are people out there who are just sick with the skills. They're like the stereotypical little Japanese kid who schools everyone at Dance Dance Revolution. It's crazy. I can only hope to rock as hard one day...
