The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers

Though Peter Jackson shot the three Lord of the Rings films simultaneously, the technical progress from Fellowship to The Two Towers is immediately evident: the CGI is more detailed even as it expands to absurd dimensions, Jackson's more direct camerawork no longer clashes so garishly with the poetry of the location shooting and set design, which looks even better than it did in the previous film. Indeed, for better or worse, the massive expansion of scope in The Two Towers paved the way for the swords and sandals epic that became a brief fad in the middle of the decade after Gladiator set up the foundation. (The genre eventually fizzled out after most of its entries lost money, with audiences just smart enough to realize they were paying money simply to see LOTR again; still, while we had to suffer mediocrities like Kingdom of Heaven, we also got some fantastic works like... the director's cut of Kingdom of Heaven).

The enlarged scope of the action, however, almost entirely eliminates the personal feel of its predecessor. Bifurcated into separate plots involving Sam and Frodo's suicide mission to Mordor and the remaining Fellowship members' fight against corrupt wizard Saruman (Christopher Lee), the story must leap great distances to follow its characters. Indeed, compared to the endless close-ups of Fellowship, Two Towers tends to track movement through extreme long shots in bird's-eye views, dwarfing characters against the beautiful New Zealand, and where I complained last time that Jackson kept cutting to close-ups when I wanted to see more of the world around the characters, these long shots often prevent an emotional connection with the characters. If it seems at this point that I simply cannot be pleased, know that I am wondering that myself.

Yet one must acknowledge that, compared to the first film, Two Towers zips along with vigor: Fellowship spent a notable chunk of time (particularly in the extended cut) simply roaming the idyllic Shire, giving some time to characters who have no impact on the rest of the story. Following an eight-minute montage of Middle-Earth's past and the history of the One Ring, Jackson never cut away from the Shire until the 32-minute mark and only moved away to other locations once or twice for the rest of the first hour. Within the first 32 minutes of The Two Towers: we see a longer version of the fight between Gandalf and the Balrog that continues after he falls; Frodo and Sam making their way to Mordor, meeting, capturing and "taming" Sméagol/Gollum (Andy Serkis); Saruman's Uruk-hai and Orcs march captured Hobbits Pippin (Billy Boyd) and Merry (Dominic Monaghan) until the reach the edges of Fangorn forest and the two factions begin killing each other before Men arrive to slay the stragglers; another contingent of evil creatures terrorizes and burns the homes of the people of Rohan; Saruman converts his home, Isengard, from a lush garden into an industrial nightmare to breed (literally) an army; Legolas, Gimli and Aragorn chase after the Uruk-hai who captured Merry and Pippin; Théoden, King of Rohan, is so poisoned by the spell of Saruman that he banishes his brave and loyal nephew Éomer and does not even acknowledge the death of his own son; then, finally, the three Fellowship members chasing the Uruk-hai stumble upon Éomer and other banished soldiers.

Phew. To Jackson's credit, he never flags when jumping across different perspectives and huge physical distances, but here he's missed the point that he understood with Fellowship: The Lord of the Rings isn't about the plot -- which is ultimately no more complicated than a journey from point A to B -- but the finely detailed minutiae that turned the simple act of a long-as-hell hike into one of the great works of 20th century literature. Jackson barrels ahead in such an action-oriented mindset that character and atmosphere falls to the wayside:Legolas and Gimli become nothing more than comic relief, more so even than Merry and Pippin: Tolkien wrote the characters to comment upon intolerance and xenophobia, but they bond here only through light insults and fascistic displays of murderous violence (this existed in the book, but it was never a true competition between the two). Compare their tedious boasting to the bit in the extended cut of Fellowship in which Gimli is so overwhelmed by Lady Galadriel's beauty that he can ask her for nothing but a single hair from her head, and the deference he feels for Elves afterward. Éowyn (Miranda Otto) and Éomer have nothing to except pine for Aragorn and be surly, respectively.

The most troubling development is the massive rewrite of Faramir's story: in the book, Faramir (David Wenham) and his Gondorian Rangers stumble across Frodo, Sam and Sméagol, he questions Frodo and Sam about the Ring and his slain brother Boromir and then releases them, aware of the danger of the Ring and unwilling to risk its corruption to wield its power. Jackson and co. completely rewrote the character into someone scarcely different from his brother: "Filmamir" manhandles the Hobbits and tacitly condones the beating of Gollum, even choking the creature twice in rapid succession in their last moments together. Faramir does not release the Hobbits at first but drags them to the besieged city of Osgiliath, sure that the Ring will somehow help Gondor's fortunes. By the time he does display the nobility and wisdom that separated him from his brother, it's impossible to distinguish between the two. A flashback (deleted in the theatrical cut but available in the longer edition) helps explain the Faramir's motives for attempting to seize the Ring, but it's simply not enough justification. Jackson added such a massive deviation because he moved the book's climax to the third film (rightly so, to correspond with the actual chronology of events), but he ruins a great character in the process, undercutting Faramir's moral fortitude to stress the necessity of Aragorn's return to the throne. Jackson would have served himself better by simply making the more epic Helm's Deep sequence the full climax and using the time allotted by cutting this stuff out by fleshing out the world to the degree he did in Fellowship.

Of course, when Jackson deigns to let us wander a bit, Two Towers has the same epic poetry that its predecessor contained in greater abundance: Rohan is a nondescript, wide-open plain -- the Kansas of Middle Earth -- but Helm's Deep is a masterpiece of miniature construction. A stone behemoth carved from the mountain it's connected to, Helm's Deep promises a hell of a fight before anything happens; for my money, the battle sequence that takes place here trumps the larger one in Return of the King. It lacks some of the dodgy CGI of the later sequence, and it's epic without brushing up against the border of absurdity (oh, that Oliphaunt riding thing continues to grate, doesn't it?). For that matter, Isengard is also a terrific creation, nicely juxtaposing the furnaces of industrialism with the hellfire of Mordor. The real treat of the film, though, is simply following Sam and Frodo on their quest to Mordor: the Dead Marshes, Emyn Muil, the Black Gate of Mordor. All of them look fantastic and suitably unsettling and unwelcoming, offering the only true ambiance of the film.

And, behold, great character development exists, in the form of a completely animated character. Looking back, if Two Towers' animated battle sequences paved the way for mass epics, then Gollum revealed that heavy animation in live-action films could carry emotional weight. He's a masterpiece, owing both to the incredible work by Weta Digital (only occasionally can you spot moments where the technology used on him has dated) and the exceptional, award-worthy performance by Andy Serkis. He captures the character(s) perfectly, imbuing the split personalities of Sméagol and Gollum with such depth and distinctive originality that one can always tell "who" is speaking at any moment -- to find a similarly bravura performance, one would have to turn to Nicolas Cage's performance as the twin Kaufman brothers in Adaptation. He could have been nothing more than a set piece, a bit of technology to be ogled at but never explored (like, say, the magnificently rendered creatures of Avatar), but Serkis and the writers give him pathos and empathetic qualities. Nothing else in the rest of the trilogy is as brilliant as the shot/reverse shot conversation between Sméagol and himself: initially funny, it morphs into a heartbreaking portrait of a wretched creature tortured by a curse that destroyed far stronger people.

So, for all of The Two Towers' flaws, it's still incredibly entertaining, indeed probably the most viscerally and immediately enjoyable of the three. For that reason, it has its ardent defenders, but I can't help but view it as the odd one out; the pendulum simply swung too far from "overly intimate" to "epic but impersonal." Furthermore, where the additions in the extended cut of Fellowship let us languish a bit more in this beautiful world, the deleted scenes of Two Towers interrupt its narrative momentum, breaking up its breezy pace with moments of limp comic relief -- yes, I suppose that Éowyn's lack of cooking skills reflects upon her predisposition to fighting and not "woman's work," but the way this is used to signify her masculine outlook on life is just sexist. Besides, they don't make a convincing case for her warrior spirit (save for a few tough-talking lines here and there) when she spends nearly all of her screen time staring atAragorn with longing eyes. Yet even if The Two Towers is the only one of the trilogy to be hampered by its additional scenes, it has enough breathtaking action scenes and moments of quieter beauty to make the task of sitting through its hefty length an easy one.

The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring

[Over the last few months I've been reviewing some of the more noteworthy releases of the decade in preparation for a best of the decade list. In some cases, I've been watching films for the first time and gauging them against established favorites, and for those older films I'm revisiting them to see how I still feel about them and whether they would indeed remain on any list of the films that most affected me. As The Lord of the Rings trilogy had a great deal of impact on my formative years, so, as I have never known the touch of a woman nor gone outside since we built that bomb shelter for Y2K, I have decided to run through the extended versions of the trilogy to decide if one or all of them still catch my fancy. Be excited.]

In 1995, Peter Jackson, Kiwi horror/comedy maestro, approached American studios with the idea of adapting J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, wondering why no one else seemed to care about the beloved fantasy epic. It was a fair point: at the time, Tolkien's work had only found its way on-screen with a generally well-received 1978 cartoon and a Rankin-Bass version of Return of the King that featured, among other things, singing goblins (oy). That Jackson ultimately secured the keys to what would seem a sure-fire hit only demonstrates how little the studios cared about Middle-Earth and its inhabitants: at the time, Jackson's only critical hit was the coming-of-age thriller Heavenly Creatures, a lovely film that introduced the world to Kate Winslet but hardly gave the impression that the creator of Braindead and The Frighteners was ready for his shot at the big time. Miramax decided to give him a two-picture deal to tell the story of the three books, and was later urged to cut it down into one. Understandably upset, Jackson took his two scripts and some test footage around town until he got to New Line Cinema CEO Robert Shaye, who, in one of life's little moments, asked why they were making two films when there were three books.

Therefore, The Lord of the Rings has "labor of love" etched in every frame, its synchronous production of all three chapters bewildering in its innovation and the work ethic it required. You can see it when the prologue, depicting and swiftly summarizing the the history of Middle-Earth and the One Ring, gives way to the lush shots of the Shire, enhanced by the extended version with Bilbo's (the always entertaining Ian Holm) loving voiceover describing this quaint little community for little people, all of whom have big feet and big stomachs and green thumbs. Jackson moves his camera through this hilly, mole-like suburb with a wistfulness befitting a Cameron Crowe film. Looking back, Jackson so marvelously and lovingly captures the Shire that it's actually a comedown when Gandalf (Ian McKellen, who spends all of his time in this idyllic location chewing the scenery to test if he's actually there or on a set) rides into town and starts setting off fireworks like a jackass.

I wonder if there is any point in plot summary, even as the basis of further analysis and not as a means to its own end: the books are the highest selling work of fiction of all time, and the films made a cubic ass-ton of cash, so why waste everyone's time with a recap? There's a Ring, it's bad, time to go on a hike to a volcano. Boom. What makes Fellowship, compared to its grander sequels, interesting is not its plot but its impressive evocation of another world. With on-location shooting around New Zealand, Fellowship naturally anchors itself in reality, but Jackson and his design team craft beautiful sets that fit in so perfectly with the landscapes one might easily assume them to be genuine relics, and that all the behind-the-scenes features revealing them to be nothing more than foam and plastic are filthy lies.

The primary joy of the extended edition of the film, happily treated with severity by Jackson and not as a simple DVD gimmick with sloppily reinserted deleted scenes, is that the added footage allows us to roam this world a bit longer, through foggy, grimy marshes and impossibly green and inviting meadows and craggy, treacherous mountains. It also abets (though not entirely) one of the major problems of the film, indeed the entire franchise: a loose grasp on temporal relations. Many complained about the films' lengths, but Jackson powers through The Lord of the Rings. When Gandalf returns to the Shire to warn Frodo (Elijah Wood) of the impending danger of the Ringwraiths, what in the book was the passage of decades is presented as maybe a week or two, a month tops. The longer cut allows us to see Aragorn leading the Hobbits from Bree to Weathertop, and the simple addition of a single scene adds so much more entertainment value because we're stopping occasionally so see the sights instead of being stuck on the Middle Earth bus tour that was the theatrical version.

Not until the characters reach Rivendell and the larger arc of the trilogy is forged does the story mesh with the visual splendor in an entertaining way. Compared to the fractured perspectives of the sequels, Fellowship plays as an ensemble piece, allowing us to spend yet more time with the backgrounds before the sequels personalized the story. A number of the actors, chiefly those playing the Hobbits and Orlando Bloom, don't have full grasps on their characters yet, but working within a group dynamic allows them to soften their weaknesses, and even McKellen dampens his OTT theatrics and turns Gandalf into an interesting team player instead of a demigod who cannot relate or be related to any of the other characters -- this might explain why the character so rarely used his supposedly powerful magic over the course of the three films.

In retrospect, it's easy to see that Jackson was out of his element with the scope required for the story. His direction in the battle sequences is overwhelming and viscerally disjointed (at least in this installment, which lacks the epic action pieces of its successors), but occasionally he carries that frantic style into the calmer moments, haphazardly editing from one action to another that is linked to the previous one but entirely separate from the last scene, traveling impossible distance for what is meant to be a quick cut. When Frodo announces among the squabbling Elves, Dwarves and Men that he will take the Ring to Mordor, he can barely be heard over the din, yet Jackson immediately cuts to a close-up of Gandalf wearily closing his eyes with regret and turning as the crowd silences to face his wee chum. The wizard was shouting alongside the rest a split-second earlier, and for him to immediately become calm and somber is such a jarring example of bad editing that it continues to baffle me each time I visit these films. That brings us nicely to another problem: the endless close-ups. Jackson must have spent his free time in pre-production vegging with Eisenstein's filmography because he adds so many emotional counterpoints of close-up reactions to nearly every action that I expected an open political message to pour out of these characters' mouths.

He overcomes these shortcomings, however, out of sheer enthusiasm. He has a steady grasp of Tolkien's themes -- environmental concerns, distrust and xenophobia, the typical battle between good and evil -- and he's smart enough to recognize that, when shooting in a country like New Zealand, one need not ignore the scenery. Furthermore, some of his visual choices, such as the distorted haze that blurs the screen when Frodo wears the Ring, are wonderful touches. He also perfectly captures the inexplicable lure of the Ring, though I find it somewhat amusing to watch the film now and find a certain link between the Ring's, a suggestive object (especially when pierced with a finger), maddening effect on people and the equally hysterical reactions that the sexual metaphor of Twilight extracts from its characters*. As for the design, well, do I really need to explain the magnificent costume and makeup? The Orcs and Uruk-hai look absolutely perfect, all oily skin and twisted visages and gnarly teeth. The Elves, illuminated with an aura and donned in light clothing, resemble angels and inspire a serene calm even when engaged in battle. The only one who doesn't look the part, hilariously enough, is Orlando Bloom. My only complaint regarding the costumes is that the outfits look too pristine here, too clean despite the rough journey through various terrains, but that would fortunately change later.

When I first saw The Fellowship of the Ring back in 2001, I was 12 years old, unconcerned with technique or acting and caring only for that most dubious of adaptive goals: faithfulness. I had read the books for the first time in anticipation of the release and loved them, and like the fool that I was I just wanted this Peter Jackson fellow to put all of the novel's good stuff in the movie. And while I loved the film, I bemoaned the lack of Tom Bombadil , a character I didn't even fully understand, all the while missing how Jackson and his writing partners Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens made much subtler changes to the main characters that proved vastly more important and distinctive. He, Walsh and Boyens give a reasonable motive to Boromir where his character originally received a rounded appraisal only in the final volume, while Sam (Sean Astin) is slowly reshaped into a model of loyalty and Platonic love, a change that would become evident over the next two films. Of greatest interest is Aragorn (Viggo Mortensen ), altered from a consummate hero into a sort of Christ figure (or more so, at least), technically human but something else entirely, filled with self-doubt but ultimately committed to his destiny. The only unwelcome change involves the simplification of Gimli (Jonathan Rhys-Davies) and Legolas , who scarcely have anything to do save lob semi-racist digs at each other, insofar as insulting fictional species constitutes "racism."

So, while my enjoyment of the film has been tempered by the realization of its shortcomings, to say nothing of some dated special effects -- I wouldn't call them weak, but it's easy to discern the real actors from the CG models even in the waves of clashing armies, and green-screen backgrounds are identifiable from natural backdrops -- it's also been enhanced by how much more I appreciate the beauty and passion of the project. Jackson establishes a dialectic with this film, between personal, emotionally identifiable intimacy and epic storytelling, that would define the franchise. Fellowship, as the first of the franchise and thus the one that must introduce and establish the characters, swings more to the "personal" side of the balance, its endless close-ups stressing the importance of the group even as I try to crane around their big heads to see all the pretty stuff behind them. Howard Shore understands Fellowship's more subdued focus, and his excellent score, while properly boisterous and swelling at times, is often reserved and trusts the visuals to impart the film's beauty without imposing an overbearing score. So, while the film's lost some of its luster, I have to admit that I still find it a glorious, all-encompassing fantasy world that remains ever so inviting and enjoyable; here is a film that makes me care even about locations we do not see, places with long-winded titles that crumbled long ago and took some piece of this expertly defined world with them forever.



*Forgive me for comparing The Lord of the Rings to Twilight.

Lost — Season 3

[Warning – contains spoilers]

Every pre-conceived notion I had of JJ Abrams' and Damon Lindelof's Lost -- that it was rambling, unfocused and so (forgive me) lost in its own mythology that it simply made up the rules as it went along -- was dispelled with the solid first season. While the dialogue was somewhat stilted and the writers relied too much on distracting flashbacks to give insight to the characters instead of mixing development with action like the best of them, it was a compelling paranormal mystery with great twists that worked.

The second season was a noticeable step down, as the sudden imbalance between narrative and character only exposed the weaknesses in writing. It expanded the scope of the series, but too often we were subjected to long stretches of inactivity with flashbacks that mostly served as filler. Nevertheless, when it hit the second half it started tying together all the new threads of the tail section survivors and really showed how big a threat the Others posed, and the result was gripping even if its foundation was built on sand.

But as soon as I got into the third season, all those initial reservations were at last proved correct: where the second season sacrificed narrative for the sake of character development (most of which was redundant anyway), this season cranked the madness up to 11. Character development now takes a backseat to an incessant barrage of new mysteries and answers to old mysteries that are often more bewildering than satisfying.

The Others have been a force on the island since the first season, but we got our first glimpse of them in S2: we didn't learn how they came to live on the island, but they looked like survivors of some other catastrophe who'd simply gone mad -- understandable, given the strange horror of the island. Apart from a rusty old boat that they ended up giving to Michael for betraying his friends, they seemed to have nothing but the clothes on their backs even though they knew practically everything about the Flight 815 survivors. Well, just go ahead and kick those notions to the curb, because the very first reveal of the season changes everything you think you know about this strange, psychotic group.


The revelations of the Others and their living conditions pose a slew of interesting questions, all of which are immediately buried under even more questions with each passing episode. The season ran for six episodes before going on hiatus, and these six episodes make the wheel-spinning of the middle of S2 look like visceral and masterful storytelling in comparison. For one thing, the flashbacks are at an all-time low: Sun and Jin's is utterly useless, Locke's simply shows that even people who aren't related to him betrayed him and Kate's, well, it's a flashback for Kate. They're all the damn same. Even worse, everyone who didn't already have father issues -- Hurley, Claire, even Ben -- now have them. God, is that the only thing they could think of to give these characters "depth"?

Lost has always raised a lot of questions, but many this season are of the sort the writers don't want people to ask: why would Linus do his best to antagonize the survivors if he was trying to get Jack, a noble doctor through and through, to operate on him? How many times are they going to give us the same flashback and expect us to care? Why are the scenes of Kate, Sawyer and Jack in captivity so boring instead of tense?

Hey look! They actually killed off a character people liked! (But only because he asked to be let go.)

Worst of all is the addition of two characters named Nikki and Paulo. A common complaint of the show is that we only see the actions of 15 or so survivors while the other 40 only show up when a few people need to die, but whatever the proper way to address this flaw was, Nikki and Paulo are pretty much the polar opposite. They act as though they've been a part of the action since the first episode, and their backgrounds as con-artists only stress the redundancy of character writing on Lost. The writers were at least cogent enough to understand how terrible these two were and killed them off, though even the episode that dumps them is incredibly weak because of their increased presence.

Things pick up with the post-hiatus episode "Not in Portland," as we see Juliet's flashbacks, which begin to answer questions about the Others and puts to rest the lingering questions over why they're so obsessed with taking children. Juliet's arc is one of the finest of the series so far, as it not only fleshes out her character and the Others' connection to the outside world but that there are factions of Others that don't necessarily like Ben's leadership.

Nestor Carbonell's never-aging Richard Alpert is one of the more interesting of the Others.

There's also an interesting subplot involving Desmond, who survived the hatch explosion sans clothes and can now see visions of the future. "Flashes Before Your Eyes" sustains the momentum of "Not in Portland" as Desmond learns that Charlie will die and tries desperately to prolong the inevitable. Charlie fell victim to some truly shoddy writing in the second season, going from a noble addict who had no real reason to stay alive but was charming and interesting enough to stay to an annoying, stagnant brat whose attempts to use humor as a coping device made him seem callous and flippant. But with the knowledge of his impending death hanging over him for over half the season, we see his paranoid side as well as the kindness that won me over in the first season. His attempts to maintain a relationship with Claire just long enough to say goodbye are touching and, inverse to the previous season, some of the best character writing the show has ever offered.

Even as a kid, Ben was kind of creepy.

Sadly, the show dips south again, with a particularly bright exception being "The Man From Tennessee," in which Locke -- having bought Ben's rhetoric since he himself has tried to stay on the island since the start -- slowly ingratiates himself with the Others and must prove himself to them. It's an instant classic that demonstrates Ben's ability to manipulate others on multiple levels so he's still pulling the strings even when they think they've figured him out, as well as Locke's growing alienation from the survivors as the prospect of rescue becomes less a pipe dream and more a solid possibility. Finally, it shows just how powerful the Others are, on or off the island, as they deliver a special surprise to Locke as a last test of loyalty.

The season does not kick into a consistently high gear, sadly, until the survivors brace for open conflict with the Others. Last season, Jack secretly asked Ana Lucia what it would take to mobilize the survivors into an army to to fight the Others, and he starts laying out plans for a war the second he returns from the Barracks. While he cannot outsmart Ben, he realized what a monster Ben really was, something that Locke hasn't yet. Indeed, as redundant as several of his flashbacks are this season, they are effective in establishing Locke as someone so desperate for love after being denied it all his life that he's one of the most gullible men on the planet. The island offers him the only spiritual connection he's ever felt in his life that's actually reciprocated, so he's more than willing to believe Ben's rants about protecting the island even as his actions solidify his own power over allying the Others and the survivors against those who might do them harm.

Jack's preparations play out in the (literally) explosive finale, "Through the Looking Glass," the best episode of the series since its pilot, if it is not the pinnacle of the first three seasons period. After a season of big questions, bigger plot holes, possible time travel and a lack of big character moments outside the flashbacks of Ben and Juliet, nothing less than a masterpiece would offer a satisfying conclusion, and that's exactly what this is. The booby-trapped beach offers some thrilling action scenes, while Charlie's dive to meet his doom is one of the most tragic moments of any show I can think, and when his efforts to break the jamming signals reveals the horrible truth of the newly arrived boat that promises rescue, Charlie must spend his final moments essentially telling Desmond that he died in vain.

This season showed the Others on the verge of splintering under Ben's leadership, and what Charlie and Desmond uncover in the Looking Glass sets up a schism between the survivors. Everything about the episode, from Charlie's death to the mini-war with the Others to the revelation that casts the imminent rescue in uncertain light to the introduction of mysteries that are genuinely intriguing, shows a level of sophistication in the writing that was all too rare this season. But the greatest aspect of the episode was the abandonment of the flashbacks in favor of flash-forwards, which show that some people indeed made it off the island, and that Jack now wants desperately to return.

Oh sure, now you want to go back.

Regardless of the patchy writing of the rest of the season, the acting is still top-notch from the people you'd expect: Matthew Fox maintains his ability to match Jack's firm leadership with his insecurity and his need to fix things, while O'Quinn continues to make Locke fascinating no matter how many times the writers back him into a corner. But it is Michael Emerson who completely walks away with the third season and will keep you watching even when you're tempted to stop giving the writers chances: a bug-eyed, unassuming sort of chap, his psychological warfare makes the Joker's seem like child's play. What initially seems like the odd moment of honesty and empathy is soon revealed to be yet another facet of his mind games with the survivors. Emerson makes Linus one of the most terrifying villains in TV history, and he rarely lays a hand on anyone.

All in all, the third season of Lost took all the flaws of the first two seasons and magnified them to the point that they now drowned out the positive aspects of the show. The usual unwillingness to kill major characters while Others drop by the handfuls has gotten ridiculous, and at this point there's hardly a survival element to the series at all. And the writers seem to know about these flaws, because characters will often make light of them. But Nikki and Paulo, the never-dwindling survivor count, the inanity of the love triangle, these are major issues that should be addressed instead of just accepted like nothing can be done about them.

The writers set a definite end-date for the series before the season finale, which might explain why it so effectively propelled the story forward for the first time in ages. The final few episodes -- among them "One of Us," which showed that Juliet could be as fearsome as her boss, the moving "Greatest Hits" and the Ben-centric "The Man Behind the Curtain" -- surpassed just about anything in S2 short of "Man of Science, Man of Faith" and "The 23rd Psalm." After nearly tuning out, I suddenly found myself more eager to keep going than ever. Let's hope the fourth season delivers.

Lost — Season 2

[Warning - contains major spoilers]

The first season of Lost exceeded my expectations, mixing suspense with character development without getting too loopy nor too dense. While the flashbacks started to get repetitive near the end, and the decision to keep ever major character but one alive through the entire season not only prevented some characters from getting the development they needed but was just ridiculous, period: how, on an island full of polar bears, mysterious and hostile inhabitants and some sort of monster, could they all survive? Nevertheless, it maintained a high quality throughout the season, warts 'n' all.

The first season finale ended in disaster, with the raft expedition running into a boat full of Others, who shot Sawyer, took Walt, then blew up the impossibly well-crafted vessel, leaving the men to die. Meanwhile, Locke secured some dynamite from an old shipwreck to blow up the hatch, at the expense of poor Dr. Arzt (played by Daniel Roebuck, which made me wistfully imagine Jay Leno when he exploded). Despite the mishap, Locke got the TNT back to the hatch and successfully blew it up, leading to what I would learn be the first of many major teases as the episode ended with the gang looking down into opened hatch to see only darkness.

Before I move into the second season, I have to warn you: as much as I tried to avoid the more major spoilers (save a few) of the first season, the second is such a dense web of interconnecting plots and endless cliffhangers and reveals, so I'm just going to discuss everything that pops into my head.

After ending on such a cheap cliffhanger, the season premiere needed to prove to fans that the wait was worth it as well as moving the characters forward. Fortunately, that's exactly what it does: Locke makes his way down the vast access tube of the hatch and finds a man inside named Desmond whom, we learn in a flashback, once met Jack back in the "real world." Desmond guards a dilapidated computer, on which he must enter the ubiquitous "numbers" that keep popping up everywhere every 108 minutes (the sum of the numbers) or else. Or else what? The world ends, Desmond claims. Okey-dokey. Obviously, the stress of having to be awake every 108 minutes to input a code to prevent the world from caving in on itself or some such has taken its toll on the man, and he sticks around just long enough to foist responsibility for the situation onto Locke before high-tailing it for his schooner. Aside from the computer, the survivors find an orientation film made by something called the "DHARMA Initiative" – who apparently funded the hatch for the purposes of research free of restrictive laws – as well as a trove of food.

But the most interesting aspect of the first part of the season is surprisingly not the reveal of the insides of the hatch but of the discovery of other Oceanic 815 survivors on the far side of the island. We meet them when Michael, Sawyer and Jin wash up on shore and we assume that they're the Others, but recall a radio communication Boone made right before his death last season, where he told an unidentified voice, "We are the survivors of Oceanic Flight 815," only to hear in response, "No, we are the survivors of Oceanic Flight 815." These survivors were located in the tail section and, we learn, have had a much more difficult time than the group we spent a whole season with already.

The Tailies' story feels more believable than the other survivors', and they've got a hatch too.

Sadly, the introduction of these survivors is handled somewhat haphazardly. The first five episodes tease us at first with the idea that these people might be Others, as they are notably hardened and their leader, Ana Lucia Cortez (Michelle Rodriguez) is downright violent and cruel. When we do find out, they don't tell us anything about the "Tailies" for another few episodes. Back with the main survivors, we get the same old flashbacks that really just flesh out other flashbacks and not the characters themselves. They also start setting up strands that loosely tie characters into others' arcs for seemingly no other purpose than to make the audience say, "Wow! Would ya look at that?"

Things come together when the two factions meet, and tragedy immediately ensues. Shannon was always a terrible character who was useful in the pilot and only grated from then on, so I confess I was overjoyed to see her go. However, when my emotions cooled and I approached the situation with a slightly more level head, I must say I think it's weak writing: Boone's death naturally shook her up, and, even though most of her subsequent scenes simply featured her stone-faced and mourning, she had the potential to become a better person and a more interesting character.

But rather than flesh out her character and make her someone you might care about, the writers kill her off after a pathetic attempt to get us to sympathize with her: not only is she finding comfort in Sayid but her flashbacks reveal that she had an evil stepmother who ruined her dreams and left her with nothing after daddy died. That's just lazy, people. For the writers to have only killed off two major characters in a cast in the dozens and a lead cast of 14 – and for them to have been the only two that were widely disliked – shows how deep a hole they're digging for themselves.

Shannon dies when Ana Lucia mistakes her for an Other and shoots her, cementing that character as someone we're meant to hate even though it makes perfect sense that she would shoot first and ask questions later, especially when we finally get to see the Tailies side of the story. Oh, but they only get one episode to cram in their experiences over the last 48 days, even though they've clearly had a more interesting time. Whereas the fuselage survivors spent 48 days worrying about the unknowns of the island, the Tailies faced them head-on. They immediately fall under attack from the Others, who eventually seize several adults as well as all the children of the group and kill all those who try and stop them.


"The Other 48 Days" does an excellent job of showing how good the fuselage passengers have it, as well as introducing some interesting characters, presumably because the writers were afraid that the loss of a whopping two leads in such a large cast needed to be filled; nay, it needed even more people. What I liked about the episode is, frankly, that we see the Tailies' numbers significantly thinned after the crash. Nevertheless, if they're not going to start killing off main characters for reasons other than being useless (sometimes you just have to break our hearts, Lindelof), at least adding more characters gives us the chance to see some new flashbacks instead of retreading the other characters'.

For example, we finally see what crime Kate committed in the episode called, wait for it, "What Kate Did," but the writers do everything to soften a crime that you'd be willing to forgive anyway – Kate killing her abusive father to protect her submissive mother – that I just didn't care. It didn't shock me, it didn't give me pause; I just sat there bored stiff waiting to get to the next episode.

Eko and Ana, on the other hand, have some of the most intriguing backstories of the series so far, even if Ana's is so transparently meant to win some sympathy. A cop for the LAPD, Ana was shot on duty while pregnant and lost her baby. This helps explain her harshness towards Michael, Jin and Sawyer and her hatred of the Others, as she lost not only her own child before the crash but failed to protect those surrogates on the island. Lost really starts to get too on-the-nose with the character stuff this season, but this is a wonderfully understated development that actually makes a character more engaging without begging us to care. As for Mr. Eko, well, the more you learn about him, the more he becomes the most fascinating character since Locke wiggled his toes on the beach.

The first season was all about the fear of the unknown, and that's true to an extent this season as well; yet the introduction of these new, toughened, paranoid characters as well as the emergence of the Others narrows the scope of that fear. It's still not, thankfully, a post-9/11 commentary, and the more we learn about the hatches and the DHARMA Initiative the more the vastness of the actual island and its machinations increase, but now mistrust is at a fever pitch.

The show bogs down in the middle, seemingly going out of its way to make Claire, who should be given some leeway as a mother to a newborn she never even wanted, and Charlie two-dimensional and annoying (Boone and Shannon's shoes must be filled, people!). Charlie takes some Virgin Mary statues from a crashed plane full of heroin –which also has the corpse Eko's brother; yeah, it's like that during this stretch – leading to what is meant to an agonizing self-conflict but instead plays out like the most unintentionally hilarious "will they won't they?" relationship on television. And Claire just whines and gets easily outraged, and when she finds out about the heroin she stops associating with Charlie even though he's the only one who ever speaks to her – though Locke steps in for this, because someone has to humor her.

Things pick up in the end run, however, when Henry Gale arrives on the scene. Danielle finds him in the jungle and alerts the survivors, who take him back to the hatch for interrogation. Gale claims to be a wealthy balloonist who crashed several months ago, but Sayid sees the holes in the story immediately. Michael Emerson is wonderful as the increasingly unsettling Gale, mixing a certain doe-eyed innocence with the sort of look in his eye that suggests sociopathy. His best moment is his not-so-subtle confession to Jack and Locke when he hypothesizes that an Other might use Sayid's expedition to confirm his story to lead survivors to capture in order for a prisoner exchange, all before asking if they have any milk to go with his cereal.


Gale is indeed an Other, and he mainly tries to get under Locke's skin by claiming not to have entered the numbers into the computer when Locke was trapped by a blast door that came out of nowhere; this causes Locke to doubt his faith in the island for the first time. When Locke and Eko discover another hatch that was built to monitor the other hatches on the island, he doubts the importance of the button even more, and Locke angrily pledges to let the timer run out to see if his belief was manipulated.

There are many loose threads in the season, and I must say that the finale does an excellent job of consolidating them and addressing many of the more glaring questions. We see in a brilliant, gut-twisting moment that it is the monitor hatch that's the ringer, not the Swan. Desmond, who initially agrees to help Locke with his plan to run down the clock, discovers with horror that the logs Locke holds as proof of the hatch's lies actually prove that there is a massive patch of electromagnetic energy and that, the one time Desmond didn't press the button, the release of energy is what forced Oceanic Flight 815 to crash. We also see Michael further betray his friends after killing Ana Lucia and Libby, who was forming a relationship with Hurley, to free Gale. His treachery earns him back his son as well as a boat off the island, but you can see in his eyes that Michael will never really be saved for what he's done.

Yeah, I have no clue what all of this is supposed to mean.

Yet for every thread tied up, the finale asks us several more, deeply intriguing questions: if there really is that level of energy on the island, what do the other hatches contain? If the DHARMA Initiative isn't receiving the logs from the Pearl, are the monitoring these things at all? If so, how? Either way, their purpose remains a mystery. And what's up with Desmond's love appearing in the final shot being informed of the energy discharge. is she monitoring the island because she heads the initiative? Is this her way of tracking down Desmond? Who knows, but I'm eager to find out.

The second season of Lost is, unfortunately, a step down from the first: the flashbacks, already a cheap tool for character insight, become little more than an excuse to try and surprise us and to hammer home the idea that these people were destined to end up here. There are also some big plot holes, notably: if Desmond knew that not pressing the button resulted in some terrible stuff happening (even if he doesn't find out about the plane until the 11th hour), why would he go along with Locke's plan? Why didn't he tell Locke about it earlier? It also thins the Tailies to manageable numbers, only to focus on about 4 of them for any appreciable length of time while we still have to put up with a cast the writers already can't keep track of.

Nevertheless, it is a captivating season, if for no other reason than the producers and writers are shamelessly manipulating us into caring more than we should. Eko and Ana Lucia are great characters for entirely different reasons, and Locke and Hurley benefit from their flashbacks. Ana Lucia's death shows the writers are willing to be a bit bolder with the characters, even if most people would be glad to see her go, and Libby's death was the only genuinely emotional one of the show so far. Gale is a great villain already despite doing very little that could be described as "villainous." And when the show deigns to reward your patience with an explanation (usually found in a hatch), it feels satisfactory, unlike that damn smoke thing that's supposed to be the island's monster.

In the end, it may not live up to the first season, but it's almost as good in its own way. It can't find the right balance between character and mystery, which makes some episodes feel plodding and others full of empty thrills. It's also getting ahead of itself with some of its loose ends, several of which need to be addressed quickly in the next season. But, hey, I still liked it, so what can I say?

Lost — Season 1

I must admit, I'm not the biggest fan of J.J. Abrams. Odd, since I'm always game for geeky, cult television and, though I've not seen many episodes, I adore Alias. In fact, I seem to be split right down the middle when it comes to his projects, liking about half of them and detesting the rest. One of the items in the latter was actually Lost, Abrams' biggest hit and the cult show of the new millennium. I only saw a few episodes, smack in the middle of either its second or third season. Naturally, this gave me an unfairly biased opinion, but what little I watched smacked uncomfortably of the sort of thing I detest about Abrams' more out-there work: the incessant build-up with no payoff, with a mythology that's admirably huge but too big to fit in the medium, resulting in canonical comic books and whatnot that I simply refuse to read -- seriously, if I have to read something to understand the point of Cloverfield, it's a crap film.

But I resolved to give the series a fair chance, and start from the beginning, if for no other reason than to have something to talk about with my friends on Wednesday nights. I also liked the idea of such a simple premise going in such bizarre directions, and maybe if I stuck with a whole season I wouldn't be so damn baffled by it. I also genuinely like Abrams' weirder side, even if that's usually the part that undoes his best efforts. So, I bummed the seasons off a friend, and sat down to follow the survivors of Oceanic Flight 815.


As it turns out, the first season of Lost is truly captivating. It's bursting at the seams with character development, with the kind of trippy horror/mystery that made Twin Peaks so engrossing (I wouldn't call it Lynchian, mind you). Supposedly the series was originally planned as a fairly straightforward drama that the network essentially wanted to play like a dramatized version of Survivor. Mercifully, someone realized what a terrible notion this was, and they brought aboard J.J. Now, with a show this strange, and with such visual and verbal symbolism and foreshadowing, I cannot be sure if some things I mention might end up spoilers for the next season, so I'm just throwing up my hands and discussing the show; while I will try to avoid as many major surprises as I can, I will at the very least explicitly mention spoilers in the first few episodes.. You've been warned.

Now, I've always been critical of Abrams' direction, and I knew he was the man behind the camera of the pilot immediately because of its clumsy style. Nevertheless, I would be lying just to look cynical and iconoclastic if I didn't say that the pilot is reason enough to stick with the show for at least its entire first season. Even if the camera movement and placement is borderline terrible, the lighting and location look magnificent, and many of the characters are instantlyintriguing . The first character we meet is Jack (Matthew Fox), a surgeon who stirs from unconsciousness to find himself on an island as plane wreckage burns around him. As soon as he gets his bearings, he sets about helping the wounded. As he moves along the beach, we meet more characters.

The plane in question had been traveling to America from Sydney before crashing. Jack, along with a woman named Kate (Evangeline Lilly) and Charlie (DominicMonaghan ), a bassist in a little-known rock band, search the cockpit to find the pilot still alive. Before they can get much information out of him, however, an unseen monster rips him out of the cockpit and a spurt of blood splashes across the windows. Later, they find his mangled corpse hanging from a tree. A group of survivors go exploring and must fight off a polar bear(!), eventually picking up a radio message in French that's been broadcast for 16 years. Someone translates it as an SOS from the last of her group.

Of the characters who receive any substantive screen time, a few leads emerge: besides Jack and Kate, whom a U.S. Marshal warns Jack not to trust, there's Sawyer (Josh Holloway), a selfish pig who hoards supplies simply to play games with people, and Hurley (Jorge Garcia), clearly serving as the fat comic relief, at least for the time being.Sayid (Naveen Andrews), a former communications officer in the Saddam Hussein's Republican Guard, is also established as a prominent figure.But the most interesting of the characters in the early episodes, and indeed the season as a whole, is John Locke (TerryO'Quinn ). Locke makes passing references to having experienced a miracle in the crash, and immediately forms a bond with the island. In the early highlight "Walkabout," we discover what he meant by "miracle:" in some of the first of many, many flashbacks, we see how and why Locke came to Australia, with the shocking reveal that he was a paraplegic who regained his ability to walk after the crash.


Locke forms a nice foil to de facto leader Jack, a man of science and reason. Locke, though not specifically religious, offers the survivors a spiritual leader, and his knowledge of hunting and wilderness survival makes him an invaluable asset. There is no schism between the two, at least at first, but some characters align with each leader more than the other. In a conversation with Jack, Charlie says that Locke is completely mad, but that he'd trust him with his life. But when Locke uncovers a mysterious hatch that cannot be opened with the help of fellow survivor Boone, things begin to take a turn. Locke's efforts to open the hatch grow increasingly obsessive and eventually lead to the death of the first major character, which drives a wedge in his previously harmonious relationship with Jack.

It all leads to a thrilling conclusion in which several of the survivors attempt to launch a raft to seek out the rescue that's yet to come for them, while the rest prepare for the arrival of a group that Danielle Rousseau, the lone survivor of an expedition 16 years ago and the person behind the SOS signal, refers to only as "The Others." Despite the utter letdown/"are they kidding?"-inspiring reveal of the dreaded monster and the cheap cliffhanger, it's a gripping finale with a load of revealing flashbacks that leaves you more than anxious to see where it all goes from here.


As much as Lost owes its success to J.J. Abrams' annoying tendency to over-hype his projects to the point that you watch his stuff just to feel in the loop, it very much earned itself a second season with this exceptionally strong offering. It mixes the mystery and intrigue of the island with an impressive level of character development and only rarely has to drastically shift gears to do so. Even when an episode doesn't excel it makes you want to know what happens next immediately. The flashbacks offer interesting juxtapositions between the "past lives" of these characters and the people they've become under these extraordinary conditions, particularly Locke,Sayid and Sawyer. And as dark and ominous as the show's tone is, it's not without humor: Hurley offers constant comic relief, and there's a great moment late in the season where Charlie and Hurley attempt to calm Claire's newborn baby, only to find that the only that soothes it is Sawyer's accent.

Abrams also has an eye for casting, and many of the actors are perfect for their parts. Harold Perrineau is believable as a father who wanted so badly to see his son that, when he finally received full custody years later, didn't know what to do with the kid. Reyes makes the most of his fairly static character with his formidable yet lovable frame. The two best actors are, naturally, the ones at the center of it all: Terry O'Quinn, no stranger to cult shows (Millennium), is completely absorbing and compelling as the faith-based Locke, while Matthew Fox deftly mixes Jack's capacity for leadership and stoic heroism with his humanistic side that just can't take it when he loses a patient.


Yet as engaging as Lost is, this first season is not without flaws. Though it's a great deal more straightforward than I would have guessed -- no doubt because it had the Herculean task of setting up such a strange story with such a large main cast -- it still opens up a great many mysteries simply to string us along. While some of them (the numbers, the hatch, the skeletons in the cave) deservedly remain unanswered by the season's end, others (Kate's past, the inexplicable damn polar bears) are just there to keep up interest.

Also, despite the high level of character development, the show relies too much on its flashbacks to tell us about these people when we should learn about them through their actions on the island. They also create the illusion that some characters are layered, when really all they do is add some fluff to otherwise two-dimensional people. Take Kate: all she seems to do this season is flirt with Sawyer and lead Jack on, but because we see her rob some banks in the past suddenly we're supposed to give a damn about her. For such a central character, we really learn nothing about her that applies to her island life in any meaningful way.

It also doesn't help that some characters don't get the time that others do, and they appear flat in comparison. While Hurley works as a two-dimensional piece of comic relief, the barely-evolving relationship between Michael and his estranged son Walt (though it does have its moments) could have been more interesting with a bit more time to shine. Sun andJin Kwoon , on the other hand, work better for their lack of screen time, as they have a mysterious edge that slowly erodes into a level of uneasy trust with the others. But there's no salvaging Boone and Shannon, the self-important, never-growing siblings with a disturbing hint of incest. Boone isn't completely horrible, but Shannon is a flat-out bad character; even when she seeks revenge in one episode she can't manage to be interesting.

Frankly, the show needed to kill off more than one major character, and sooner, to devote more time to the rest. And with the arrival of The Others seemingly on the horizon for the next season, the writers better do something quick that will allow them to handle all these characters. There's also the problem that there are over 40 survivors and only 14 main characters, which means a whole bunch of people show up every now and then and know about the other characters even though we have no clue who they are; it's hard to tell if a fresh face is supposed to be villainous or just another survivor who apparently contributes nothing as the 14 leads do everything. They point this out in the finale, but they joke about it rather than do anything to address it. Now, I love it when writers are willing to identify their mistakes and joke about them, but this is a serious flaw; the people at Mutant Enemy, by contrast, tend to find their major weak spots and do something to fix them, and only joke about the small stuff. And every time something bad happens on the island: the same three people (Sawyer,Jin , Kate) are always suspected. It gets tiresome quickly, to the point that, when it actually is one of these characters is responsible, it's less a shocking moment and more a "'bout time!" one.

Nevertheless, Lost could have so easily been some god-awful forced commentary on a post-9/11 world, but Abrams, Jeffrey Lieber, Damon Lindelof and their team of excellent writers are more concerned with crafting a sort of makeshift civilization and a whole heap of mythology. They seem to realize how close they might have come to taking such a direction and let a few characters briefly blameSayid for the crash, only to set him up quickly as one of the most trustworthy characters on the show. I like to bandy about the term 'ambitious' when describing the scope and scale of a television series (i.e. the all-encompassing grandness of Firefly and The Wire, the risk-taking of Dollhouse), but Lost puts them all to shame. For once, Abrams' hype machine is necessary, because the show needs its impressive viewing figures to balance out what must be an astronomical budget.

When you get right down to it, Lost, at least at this junction, is not the masterful piece of television so many assure it to be. It is, however, damn good, at that's all you can ever really ask of a program. It's deep but not self-absorbed, and one hell of a ride. I am not ready to full recant my earlier position that the show was a bunch of garbled nonsense, as I have yet to move with the series past its foundations and into uncharted territory, but I am happy to recommend this season to anyone with a taste for the unexpected and a desire for bold dramatic programming.