The first round of Yo-Jo Cola is on me.

The 1980s were a golden era for toy/television synergistic marketing crossovers like He-Man and the Masters of the Universe or Thundercats. And the granddaddy of them all was G.I. Joe.
It started as a Hasbro toy line of 12-inch action figures in 1964. (I remember having one in the late 1970s with a bristly sort of beard, though in terms of toy technology it was primitive compared to my Steve Austin with a small crummy magnifying glass built into his skull you looked into a small hole at the back of his head through the magnifying glass and out his bionic freakin' eye.)
And then in 1982 Hasbro rebooted the line with 3.75-inch action figures, playsets and vehicles and put the characters in these garish proto-military costumes and gave each one of them funky nicknames and a weird terrorist-like enemy called Cobra whose members had their own nicknames and '70s Studio 54 looks (I mean, Destro had a shiny metal headcovering mask and wore this leather outfit open to the navel, what was that all about aside from partying with Kristy McNichol and Norman Mailer) and the whole thing was obviously very superhero influenced. And thus was born the modern G.I. Joe line It was popular enough that in 1985 came the cartoon series. That reboot also spawned a Marvel Comics series.
And sales of that were good enough that in 1986, Hasbro and Mavel put together a second G.I. Joe title (the same kind of marketing notions behind the multiple Batman, Superman and Spiderman titles that are forever on the shelves at your local comic store, which is probably not all that local as they are fewer and farer between). G.I. Joe Special Missions was billed as telling the stories of "some missions so secret, so sensitive that even the Joes who go on them are told only the bare minimum."
Which brings us to G.I. Joe Special Missions vol. 1 (2010, 182 pages, $19.99, IDW), which reprints the first seven issues of the series and a prequel that was part of G.I. Joe issue 50.
First, the pluses. Writer Larry Hama is insane. A Vietnam vet, martial artist and longtime writer/editor in the comics world, he's been attached to numerous G.I. Joe products for years. And he clearly has a ball with this stuff, with most every story in the collection focusing on a small team of Joes on some kind of mission, some of which are amazing in their outlandishness - like disabling a toxic payload in an old Nazi bomber that never made it on its original mission to NYC and ended up frozen in a Greenland glacier but now is about to fall out of the glacier and into the sea and maybe kill millions and meanwhile Cobra troops also are after the bomber and meanwhile a SEPARATE Joe team is in Brazil to secure the help of an old Nazi who can disarm the toxic gunk bomb in the bomber but he's also being pursued by a squad of Israeli intelligence, oh and by the way one of the Joes is descended from Holocaust survivors and do you see what fantastic melodramatic fun this guy is having with all these plates going at once? Or there's this piece of primo dialogue from a group of terrorists who take over Cobra's consulate (!!!) in NYC - an incident the Joes use as a distraction to also break in: "Cobra must withdraw all support from the neo-conservative party hardliners that have turned Sierra Gordo over to the illiterate peasantry so that a Menshevikista intermediate regime can take custodianship of power until the masses can be elevated to the level at which they can rule themselves ..." I mean, even Joe leader Duke would sympathize with the Baroness as she slaps her forehead in tired exasperation at that moment.
And alongside Cobra, there's also a constant Soviet threat that creates either antagonists or the plot device that gets many of the stories going.
Artist Herb Trimpe - whose work with Marvel dates back to the Silver Age - does a decent job capturing the sort of cartoon nature of what is going on in this universe where a Joe hides in bushes in a snowy Eastern European mountain range wearing only his boots and boxer shorts as he uses his clothes and chicken blood as a decoy for the helicopter of Soviet bloc thugs chasing him.
And the Mike Zeck covers reprinted in the collection are, like everything Mike Zeck has ever done, a comic art wonder to just study and stare at, with his lines really capturing great splashes of action as well as intensity on the faces on the cover. He might be the master of guns blazing.
Some issues are stronger than others. "Burn Out," featuring the Joes in some Middle Eastern nation with a parallel story of an American pilot working for the regime there falls flat, and the artwork at one point becomes confusing in terms how one of the main characters actually looks, thus creating a speedbump in the reading enjoyment.
And the $19.99 price tag is a bit hefty (though obviously there are places like instocktrades.com where pricing is less withering.)
To be sure, Special Missions is not a place to look for character development or messages or insight into anything. It's over the topness can be draining after a few issues in a row, kind of like eating too much chocolate. But for big stupid fun, it's a good read.

From the library: The Unwritten tpb. vol. 1

Tom Taylor is kind of a loser. The son of a famous writer who disappeared when Tom was a child, Tom tried such routes as acting, writing and music, but never amounted to anything. He makes his living as Tom Taylor, son of the famous writer who wrote a huge YA series about a young wizard named Tommy Taylor (a sort of Harry Potter-esque thing), by appearing at book signings and promotional events.

Except now Tom has questions about whether he really might not be the son of Wilson Taylor, increasing numbers of people think he's either a fraud or actually Tommy Taylor made flesh, and his life is taking on weird parallels to the Tommy Taylor series.
That's the basic premise of The Unwritten, a Vertigo series written and arted by Mike Carey and Peter Gross. The monthly series launched in July 2009. The first trade paperback ($9.99, 144 pages) collects issues 1-5.
This series has gotten a lot of love in critical circles. And the premise - about the importance and power of stories - is intriguing. The highpoint is issue 5, which takes a slight digression from the main Tommy Taylor story to give us some background on the shadowy conspiracy/supernatural group that tries to control storytelling, focusing on Rudyard Kipling's interactions with them and manipulation by them. It's a smart series, with references to everything from Milton to Frankenstein, with Carey obviously being well read and doing his homework and this putting him perhaps on the same level as Neil Gaiman in terms of sheer amount of intellectual content.
The main storyline, with Tom Taylor, is not disappointing. But it's obviously a slow build. After four issues, a lot has happened, seemingly, but you don't quite know what yet.
Am looking to seeing the second and third trades of this, as it builds and as you get a better sense of what exactly is going on.

Going through the cassette crate: "Grave Dancers Union" reconsidered

In which a cassette from 1992 evokes mix of wistful nostalgia and slight disappointment at one's younger self.
Is that normal for everyone, that you slightly kick yourself for years of wasted popular culture consumption when you could have been filling your eyes and ears with a better caliber of pop culture? I don't regret my metalhead days of being glued to "Headbangers Ball" in the Treadway third floor lounge, but I wish I also could have appreciated at the time music like the Clash (too reggaeish for my tastes then) or the Cure's "Disintegration" (too goth emo, though I didn't yet have that vocabulary).
At the opposite end of the spectrum, how much listening did I give to the Goo Goo Dolls, Live, and Soul Asylum's big commercial breakout, 1992's "Grave Dancers Union." True, this thing churned out adult-alternative hit after hit - "Without a Trace," "Runaway Train," "Somebody to Shove." The album sold more than 3 million copies, "Runaway Train" won them a Grammy, and the band even played at Clinton's 1993 inauguration.
At the time, I disliked this album heavily. If it wasn't Dinosaur Jr., Swervedriver or Nirvana's "Nevermind," I was having none of that.
But it's not bad. Opening track "Somebody to Shove" has an aggressive guitar riff and urgency in singer Dave Pirner's vocals that are stroner than the jam-band-lite grooves that mark many of the tracks. "Keep It Up" could've been an '80s guitar pop hit straight from Triumph or Foreigner, down to the "na na na na na na" refrain.
But there are misses too."I want to live with you in the fifth dimension, in a dream I've never had." Really, "Homesick"? Really?
Soul Asylum, like Live and Goo Good Dolls, should be categorized together - the Luckiest Damn Bar Bands in the World as acts that scaled far bigger heights than I'd ever expect if I was listening to them now for the first time.

From the longbox: Jonah Hex issue 50

It's a tricky tightrope to mix dark, heavy story with bright, cartoony art in comics. Series like The 'Nam and Queen and Country - about Vietnam and British espionage, respectively - are still debated in fanboy circles as to whether the art complimented the story or was a speedbump to its enjoyment. And Queen and Country personally took me a little effort before I came to appreciate the various pencillers and the almost Disneyesque art approach the book took even as it told stories of spies and the ruins of their personal lives.
In the same vein, I can see some people having trouble with the art of Darwyn Cooke in Jonah Hex #50 (DC Comics, Dec. 2009, $3.99). Cooke, whose work looks like a cross between Ditko and Harvey Comics, is best known for his retro projects like New Frontier (which retells the DC universe story in the 1950s) and his mid 2000s relaunch of the classic Spirit character, also for DC. Cooke's art has a decidedly Silver Age feel, with clean lines, little shading and eyes a little bigger than life. All of which makes it an interesting choice for the 50th issue of the latest Hex series. The Old West bounty hunter antihero - known for his horribly scarred face and always wearing remnants of a Confederate uniform - dates back to the early 1970s. The 21st century relaunch of the book by DC, written by Justin Gray and Jimmy Palmiotti, is notable for its constant bleakness and refusal to give Hex any redeeming qualities. He's a humorless, remorseless killing machine. In issue 50, we see the story of Hex and Tallulah, a female bounty hunter who similarly is facially scarred (she also has an eye patch), with whom he had a child. And in the course of the story, we see several dozen killings, one dog kicking, a baby cut out of a pregnant woman - Tallulah - and a final image of an infant-sized coffin. Fun for the whole family. If your family watches Leaving Las Vegas together.
A saving grace of the book is the levity in amidst all the darkness. The single panel of Hex with a lit cannon pointed at an occupied outhouse like some kind of weird Roadrunner cartoon bit, an arched "are you kidding me?" eyebrow of a prostitute Hex gives to a grizzled prospector type for information. All those moments come in the first half of the book, the second being about the collapse of the domestic idyll Tallulah had tried to create and then Hex's search for their infant kid and the climactic gunning down of a huge collection of fugitives for whom he was searching.
Another saving grace is the fact Hex is always fascinating to watch, just like any skilled tradesman. His trade in this case being riding and shooting and chasing down people roughly as bad as him (though history is written by the winners). While there's no easy simplistic "good guys winning" motif here, the book would quickly become unreadable if not for the audience's realization that. as horrible as life is in this largely lawless universe where the good men and women who make up the background characters routinely suffer and die miserably, at least the villains regularly get the comeuppance. I need to get some trades of the Gray/Palmiotti run. I imagine they will become well thumbed.

From the longbox: Star Brand

The best comic book characters - the ones carrying with them classic Greek tragedy levels of suffering - don't want to be comic book characters. Batman would have been much happier and more content if his parents had lived. The Hulk and the Thing don't want to be superstrong-yet-misshapen freaks. Spiderman's great power comes with great responsibility that's always messing up his life. Being a superhero in the real world would probably suck.
Which brings us to the tragedy that is Star Brand. The 19-issue series, which ran from 1986-1989 in Marvel Comics' New Universe imprint, was created by writer Jim Shooter and artist John Romita Jr. It told the story of Ken Connell, a Pittsburgh-area guy in his 20s who works for an auto detail shop, rides his dirtbike on weekends, and one day was handed the Star Brand - essentially this unlimited power to do anything - fly, invulnerability, strength, bring back the dead, etc. etc.
Star Brand started with an interesting concept as it blended some real world situations (people like the Libyan government start trying to track down Connell to use his power) with a weird mystery (who was the old guy who just handed this d-bag unlimited power and then tried to get it back?) with always-strong Romita Jr. art. Add to that the fact that Connell turned out to be not all that noble a guy, as he screwed around on his girlfriend and turned out to be sort of a self-pitying loser.
Unfortunately, the wheels came off the cart pretty quickly on this one as a succession of writers caused and artists vast unevenness.
And even when Star Brand went for broke, with Connell accidentally destroying the city of Pittsburgh and killing a million or so people, it made the mistake of going overboard and too far into the comic book world (with mutated creatures coming out of the pit that was Pitt) instead of maybe evaluating more what would the world be like with a true Superman. Writer/artist John Byrne came aboard for the last third of the series and was given the unenviable task of trying to wrap it all up. And issue 19 in fact did tie everything together and semi-solve all the questions, but in a rushed way.
Interesting side note: in the Legends miniseries for DC that Byrne did around the same time, Byrne had a Star Brand-like character caught by Green Lantern who accidentally zapped his own foot off, probably a thinly veiled jab at Shooter, who was well known in the comics world for being the tight manager Marvel needed at the time (getting books out on time, bringing in people like Frank Miller) who also happened to have no people skills and alienated vast numbers of writers and artists.

Half-eaten Apollo Bar, going once, going twice ...

A-hem. My birthday is coming up next week. JUST in time for the auctioning of props from 'Lost.' From the press release from the auctioneer:

Profiles in History, the world's largest auctioneer of Hollywood memorabilia, in partnership with ABC Studios, will be auctioning the props, costumes and set pieces from the hit ABC television series, LOST August 21-22 live from Barker Hanger in Santa Monica, CA. WORLDWIDE bidding begins at 1pm PDT both days. Bids can be placed in person, via mail, phone, fax or live on the Internet by visiting www.profilesinhistory.com or www.liveauctioneers.com.

Included in this auction will be the Swan Station Computer, which is an Apple-II Plus system running an Apple-III monitor, with a Disk II floppy drive, each featuring DHARMA logo.

Here is the complete catalog description of the computer:

This configuration is an Apple-II Plus system running an Apple-III monitor, with a Disk II floppy drive, each featuring DHARMA logo. This prop computer was used at the Swan station and by Desmond, Locke and other cast members to enter "The Numbers" every 108 minutes. It is the destruction of the Swan station computer that prevented "The Numbers" from being entered, leading Desmond to trigger the fail safe mechanism, causing the Swan station to implode. (Of trivial interest is a 1980s film, entitled "The Self," employed in some psychology classes today, which features an Apple-III computer monitor that is used to test the effect of positive personalities. Incidentally, the numbers 4, 8, 16, and 23 appear frequently in these tests.) The monitor currently exhibits the DHARMA Tempest station logo, indicating its subsequent use in the Season Four episode, "The Other Woman."

For more information and to download the free LOST: The Official Show Auction catalog, please visit www.profilesinhistory.com/lost-the-auction.html


Highlights include Hurley's Camaro, a DHARMA van and Jeep, a large section of Oceanic Flight 815 wreckage, Dogen's hour glass from the Temple, Sawyer's improvised reading glasses from Season One, polar bear collar with DHARMA Hydra station insignia, Pearl station printer with "System Failure" printout, Swan station turntable, Man in Black's ancient dagger, two crates with six Virgin Mary statues, Ben's orders to commute Juliet's execution, dial mechanism and mirror array from the Lighthouse, a row of Oceanic Airlines plane seats, Desmond's fail-safe key with "Joe Inman" dog tag, Jin's wedding ring, Swan station Hatch door, Eko's signature staff with Bible scripture carvings, Daniel Faraday's journal with extensive handwritten notes from his time travel experiments, nuclear bomb core detonated in Season Five finale, Hurley's winning Mega Lotto Jackpot ticket, and Sawyer's letter to the man who murdered his parents.

From the longbox; Namor the Sub-mariner

Moreso than Neil Young, Canadian John Byrne (technically a British-born immigrant and now naturalized American) made me who I am today.
At the peak of my comic-reading life, in the 1980s, Byrne's involvement was all I needed to pick up a book. From the clean lines of pencils to his writing, I was a sucker for his run on Fantastic Four and his work on Alpha Flight. And I thought his revamp of Superman in 1986, toning down the power level, was exactly what that character needed.
So digging through comics brought back from Dayton, I was intrigued to find issues 15-29 of Namor the Sub-Mariner with art and story (for most of the run) by Byrne. ($1 cover, until $1.25 with issue 23).
Byrne started the series, which recast Namor as a corporate titan whose company, Oracle, was never quite clearly defined but had something to do with environmental protection. And Namor, like Tony Stark, Bruce Wayne and Danny Rand, joined a line of superheroes who walked around in business suits until they had to go on some mission and would turn the reins of the company over to someone else.
On the plus side, Byrne's art was as solid as ever during the 1991-'92 run of the seris that I own. And his love of Marvel is evident by the cameros galore - Capt. America, Dr. Strange, Iron Fist, the Super Skrull, the Punisher, Savage Land, Ka-Zar and Shanna, and WOlverine. There are some charming bits in the run, like the two pages of Phoebe Marrs celebrating the death of her brother (another corporate titan type involved in some corporate chicanery against Oracle or some such).
And the story brought back Iron Fist, who had been killed off a couple years earlier.
I still have a sort of love for Byrne's purple prose. (Like when he tells Cap in issue 15 "It is not permission I seek, old friend. i am called back to Atlantis on a mission most urgent. I am here to tell you i am going and the petty laws of surface humans are not sufficient to restrain me." Or this narration in issue 20: Within the space of a single heartbeat, Namorita's lithe form was gone, vanished into the darkness of the angry waters.)
Really the series dropped off a cliff with issue 27 and artist Jae Lee and with Byrne only doing the story but scripting left to others. The tone changed heavily, the art wasn't nearly as appealing and the writing somehow became even more overwraught and ungainly. That proved to be a good quitting time.

From the longbox: The Psycho

It's taken literally 18 years, but the entire comic collection is out of mom's basement and now is cluttering up the wife's and my apartment. I've been culling out some to give away here and there. And some I've been re-reading and, to varying degrees, enjoying.
Case in point, issues 2-3 of 'The Psycho' (DC, 1991, $4.95).
A three-part miniseries on high-quality paper (thus the premium price), 'The Psycho' was the work of writer James Hudnall and artist Dan Brereton.
I have no recollection of buying this back in the day, so it was like reading it for the first time. I'm presuming that it was either the art or Hudnall's presence (he being involved in one of my fave works, Strikeforce Morituri) that got me to pick it up and shell out that premium cash at a time (college) when money was somewhat at a premium. (Or so it seemed - I never imagined the tightness of cash that would come a couple years later living off $16K in Ashland, Ohio). Brererton, meanwhile, is one of the few painters who works pretty much solely in the comics art field. He's best known for the mid '90s book The Nocturnals.
The Psycho premise is a sort of Captain America/Martial Law offspring. The U.S. back before WW2 discovered a drug that creates superpowers, and the second half of the 20th century became in essence a Cold War over superpowers instead of nuclear weapons. The U.S. president is a former U.S. operative who killed Hitler and later Castro. The Soviets have their own army of superbeings. And there's a small island nation that offers tax-free residency to these 'psychos' so it has a booming population. (You and I without powers are 'norms.')
Against that backdrop, Jake Riley, a U.S. govt. agent assigned to monitor psychos, ends up in a Bourne-like thing on the run and being chased by the government and ending up having to get psycho powers himself. Thus he becomes this Hawaiian-shirt and mask wearking guy, The Psycho, who is - of course - the baddest of the bad asses out to uncover the conspiracy that set him up or something.
The whole thing is on the clunky side. The subplot with the Soviets developing the atomic bomb never gets developed well. Same with the issue 3 twist involving Riley's girlfriend. And the book seems gratuitously violent for violence's sake. While the initial premise is interesting, you've read this sort of thing done better in Martial Law or The American.

You are the new number two

So when the big Lost six-season complete DVD set comes out, and there surely will be one, one added bonus will be a few minutes of extra footage showing some of Hurley and Ben's interactions as the new Jacob/Richard dynamic duo.
That according to an interview with Michael (Ben) Emmerson.
Whoever picks up that set, you have to throw a viewing party.

It's Bob $*&@^ing Newhart

I gotta admit, I chuckled aloud at these. Especially the thought of Jin completely unable to parallel park. I mean, that space is huge.

More analysis of Earth 2

The Definitive Guide to WTF Just Happened on ‘Lost’ - Film School Rejects

Who's Who

This is a great, fun resource of who's who on and off the island. And the caricatures are nice too.

But is it art?

The serial TV drama as serious art, more than just entertainment? And LOST as part of that pantheon? Discuss.

Personally, I think there's something valid in the argument. Art comes when we look at some of the fundamental questions of human existence. FRIENDS was often a hoot, but I don't know that I'd call it art. It was entertainment, a distraction. LOST on the other hand made one contemplate issues of fate vs. free will and the nature of good and evil.

So what do I do with my time now?

I knew that on some level it'd be disappointing.
You can't build up and build up layer upon layer of mystery and character development with all these quirky twists ("waitaminute, waitaminute ... after flash forwards and flash backs, we're flashing sideways?") without at some point hitting a wall.
And it's not as if last night's series finale of 'Lost' - and man, I wear my nerd badge proudly to say those six words make me a bit sad - was without merit. I appreciated the Jack/Flocke knife fight climax. While I call bull**** on his survival, it was cool to see fan fave Lapidus bobbing there in the ocean. And I'm always going to be a sucker for jerky camerawork and styrofoam boulders falling.
But c'mon. It literally came down to pulling a big rock out of a hole and then putting it back into a hole while bright light was shining everywhere and when the act of doing so was sure to kill you? Did the writers have a slumber party and watch 'Wrath of Khan' at some point?
And I'm still digesting how I feel about the realization that Earth 2 was Purgatory. And thus everything we've been watching there in terms of plot really had nothing to do with anything. And thus half of season 6 really hasn't had a point or a purpose, as it was completely disconnected from the plot of the show. And Jack's kid was imaginary. And the atomic bomb set off on the island years ago apparently had no effect except maybe bouncing the Losties back through time to now. And the whole Earth 2 thing was apparently cribbed from the movie Jacob's Ladder.
Jimmy Kimmel apparently had a good observation, that in the first ep. of this season, during the plane turbulence, Rose told Jack "You can let go," which wasn't about his death grip on his armrest at all.
And ultimately I'm a little disappointed to find out the series was all about Jack's journey. He's been a good character, mind you, but not any more compelling than Locke or Ben. (In a side Jack note, the overt Christian imagery around him came by the bucketload last night, didn't it? From the church ending to the wound in his side?)
There were some fine moments - Ben and Hurley briefly reminiscing about the time spent together as the Jacob and Richard. And Vincent got some screen time, to satisfy the animal lovers among us.
I don't think the finale was a failure by any means. I think not every mystery needed to be wrapped up nice and neat. So we don't know what the deal was with Walt or the Dharma Initiative or why it is Juliet and Desmond on Earth 1 could seemingly briefly see into Purgatory or what the deal is with Hurley being able to commune with the dead the way islanders Miles and Man in Black could. OK, I can live with that. But at the same time, the way the producers have almost been proudly talking about the way they're not going to reveal everything, that that is part and parcel for the show, seems like a convenient cop-out too.
In the end, I was a little more emotionally touched than I thought I'd be with that scene of dying Jack on the jungle floor, watching the jet take off overhead and his eye slowly closing in a nice little bookend to what we saw six years and countless debates ago.

Because every cop is a criminal and all the sinners saints

Among the cameos as we head toward home plate, I never expected to see Rousseau or Ana Lucia. So their brief appearances in "What They Died For," the penultimate ep. of the rapidly winding down Lost was a hoot.
So too was the ep. as a whole. We got a boatload of answers. We got some more major character deaths (Widmore and Zoe and presumably that's the last we see of Jacob). We got the storyline winnowed down to its climactic fundamentals, at least on Earth 1 (Jack and crew vs. Smokey over the light at the heart of the tunnel). And we got the pleasure of seeing more threads tied together on Earth 2 with characters bumping into each other all over the place and the fun of trying to figure out what Earth 2 Desmond actually is up to. (Presumably it has something to do with getting our characters back on an Oceanic flight, seeing as how he punk'd Jack with a phone call seemingly to get him back to the airport).
After seasons worth of speculation, it was good to finally see a clear cut, voice of God explainer of some of the major questions we've had. Yes, the chosen Losties all are there because they were flawed people ripe for some sort of redemption (sucks to be you, Rose, Bernard, Frogurt and everyone else who just happened to be on the flight). And the reasons why Kate is now off the list - actually having something to live for off the island - fits into that well.
And we got far too little Miles and Richard, though it was nice to see a return to form for Ben on Earth 1 (and indications of an interestingly creepy potential future for Rousseau and Earth 2 Ben).
We also got some annoyances. Ben is just able to gun down Widmore when previously there were some kind of never-explained rules that kept them from killing each other? Widmore turned from baddie to redeemed guy because Jacob enlightened him to the error of his ways? The character Zoe ended up being killed off without ever fulfilling any kind of role? Is Richard dead? That's what passes for instructions on how to safeguard this island - a few mumbled words, a swig of water and a "son, you're on your own" sendoff? Even the Greatest American Hero got an instruction manual.
And how is it that Jacob was able to go off island to the Losties to begin with? As we saw last week, the whole issue boils down to he and bro being unable to leave.
I imagine that a lot of these questions never are really going to get answered in a sort of 'leave that to the imagination' kind of way. And frankly, entertainment is rife with creations that had great buildups that didn't hold together under the light of day (I'm lookin' at you X-Files, Battlestar Galactica, numerous Stephen King and Dean Koontz novels), so having not everything spelled out from a storytelling standpoint is perhaps better, despite the inevitable howls of viewers who've been watching this as a puzzle to be solved.

Don't get into a bidding war with me for that Apollo Bar wrapper

Eagle-eyed blog reader Frank E. sent in this nugget. ABC is auctioning off some props from the show.

Monkey chicken duck

Nothing at all to do with Lost. I just like it.

Go start your own blog, Lost purist. See if I care.

Adam raised a Cain

"You're born into this life paying for the sins of somebody else's past." - Bruce Springsteen.
So mad props to actor Titus Welliver, he playing the Man in Black in our most recent installment of Lost. His frustration, his rage and ultimately his hurt at the dang unfairness of it all, it really swung for the fences.
"Across the Sea" is going to be a polarizing episode. It didn't actually give us a lot of meat to chew on and instead went all mystical/magical/ill defined. And CJ from 'West Wing' left us with just as many new questions - these unfortunately will never be answered - as answers about what the heck at the end of the day is going on. And even a Lost apologist like me who even like the Nikki and Paolo episode, I'm mixed on what we were given.
It would've been nice to get a better sense of what exactly the Jacob vs Smoke Monster conflict actually boils down to. Presumably Smokey is some kind of primal evil. But is protecting the island the same as keeping Smokey on island?
So Smoke Locke wants off the island because that's what was motivating Man in Black when the smoke monster imprinted on him. Also hardwired into Smoke Monster from Man in Black is apparently the dislike of humanity, seeing them as venal and corrupted.
And apparently Jacob is immortal because he drank from the same hooch that Allison Janey's character did at some point seemingly looong ago. But how did she kill off those people on the other side of the island, Man in Black's cohorts?
And why isn't Smoke Monster now wanting to stay on the island, since that also was Locke's desire?
And finally I was a little annoyed at the season 1 flashback spoon feeding me the reminder about the Adam and Eve skeletons. THat's been one of the pleasures of the show, someone not giving exposition explaining everything to me. And yes I realize that seems to contradict what I was just carping about in terms of not having the Jacobian conflict better spelled out. Bite me.
Your thoughts?

My heart will go on

Go ahead, hate me for the lateness of this week's post. Lack of Internet access will do that.
Anyway, to the heart of the matter ...
Wow. Just wow. Obviously we're picking up momentum as we hit the final stretch of the series, so the writers feel liberated enough to take a few chances. Like kill 3.5 major characters, just wipe them off the face of the map. (Lapidus, with his awesome Beastmaster hair, I count as half a character, though he was one of my favorite tier two folks).
"The Candidate" was far more on action than answers - though a big one was solved with the realization Locke doesn't need all the candidates, he needs them dead. And even though there are only three eps. left, I still see it pretty shocking to kill off Sayid, Sun and Jin like that. And for even Hurley to break down like that was nice evidence that this show still has some great ability to tug at viewer heartstrings.
An interesting twist to show how very different Locke's life on Earth 2 was sans island - still in the chair, still a heaping dose of self loathing, but this time for turning his beloved poppy into a vegetable instead of being the perennial sucker who gets hosved out of a highrise window by dada.
I also like how even with Desmond's interference, Jack is getting this weird sense that something is amiss in Earth 2 just because every third person he meets was on the same flight as him (and speaking of Desmond, I'm now of the 'Desmond is to become the new Jacob' camp because what has Earth 2 Des been doing? Going around influence Losties lives just the same way Jacob did to get them on the island. Nice parallel there).
So why did Locke take the explosive off the plane only to plant it on the sub? Why not jst let everyone on the jet? Was he counting on a gunfight with Widmore's people to force Jack on the sub? I'll chalk that up to TV drama. Meanwhile, where was Widmore during all this gunplay? And was it Widmore who wired the plane or Ben/Richard/Miles, who set off to do just that? And who here like me is feeling increasingly bad for Claire, who is getting ditched left and right like the unwanted younger sister when you and your friends just want to go to the mall (the mall in this case being a submarine)?

A Primer/Recap of Season 1-5 if you need it.

This made me laugh.