TIPS FOR ARCH VILLAINS #88

LOST IN LOST

Lost's title is not about being Lost on an island, it's about being Lost in a story. To get anything out of Lost, you had to give in to Lost. And, yeah...fuckin' spoiler alert. This was written in the few minutes right after the finale ended.

This series had an amazing depth in every sense of the word. And if you so desire, you never have to reach the bottom. Lost is not about answers. It was nice to have some, but it's brilliant to have the open questions too. In that way Lost is never quite over.

Lost is, first and foremost, about people. And in that sense, I found the finale to be very satisfying, though bittersweet. Yeah, it was sad watching Jack find his way back to that spot where it all began, knowing full well he was going there to die alone...yeah, live together, die alone. What fucking broke me, was when Vincent showed up, just as he did in 2004, so that Jack would not die alone.

Already (being seven minutes after the end of the show) there is debate about what the end meant or what it was(which is awesome), but I know what it meant to me and that's all that matters to me. Though I thought it was fairly clear within the show itself.

Whatever problems one might have had with Lost, it was an immersive experience unlike any other show. It had layers of mythology, some of it important to the over all story arc of the series, some it - not at all. Who built Tawaret doesn't matter. How the Black Rock ledger got off the island doesn't matter. Lots of things don't matter and are lots of fun to theorize about. You can devise your own answers, and in that way - Lost is truly interactive. Other answers are there, you just haven't found them yet. Again - truly interactive.

So now you have the finale, and many questions were left unanswered. If that pisses you off, then I just don't think you were ever truly lost. In fact, in a flash of utter awesomeness, I think they left me with one more question that will never be answered. When Desmond got down there, there was a skeleton already there? Who the fuck was that?

Answers are cheap.

I want to thank Lindelof, Cuse, and the entire cast and crew of Lost for firing up my brain over and over again. It didn't just tell a story, it challenged me to create part of the story as well.

A Very Important Person is, right now, going through the entire series of Lost from the beginning for the first time - having just completed the first season - and that VIP is, I think, going to miss maybe the best part of of what Lost has give for the last six years. That wait between episodes. Usually just a week, sometimes many months. In that time, the characters dwell in the mind and so do the questions.

Nothing was better among Lost fans that debating, comparing, and beating the hell out of theory after theory after theory. I'm going to miss that the most.

But after six seasons, say what you will about the pacing of the last two-and-a-half hours, or the cheesiness of some scenes or the fates of some characters. Say what you will about what the Sideways Lostverse was, I found the finale to be satisfying for everything it was. It wasn't my story to tell, after all. But right to the last minute, I felt a part of it.

And I'm so happy with how Ben turned out. He's been my favorite for some time and, honestly, it was pitch perfect.

I'm going to enjoy the hell out rewatching this series start-to-finish several times.

"If you were expecting it all to get wrapped tonight,
you probably missed the point of the show."

-Jimmy Kimmel.

OMG, I just quoted Jimmy-fucking-Kimmel.

LUTHER

I miss The Box.

You know the one (or rather you damn well should). The one on Homicide: Life on the Street in which Detective Frank Pembleton routinely bitchslapped criminal minds until they cracked like a china plate beneath a quickly descending ball peen hammer.

John Luther is not Frank. He's so much more broken and disturbed, but he's got the goods in The Box.

Luther is a new procedural with a strong character component that's currently airing* on BBC One. As I first gave it a whirl, I was kinda of looking for what will make this different from the average cop show. I was looking for the opportunities the writer (Neil Cross from Spooks) had to subvert my expectations and then began to expect those subversions, yet there will able to do something a little different. In the teaser, he lets a perp hang by his fingertips over a big hole while he waits on the phone to find out if his kidnap victim is still alive. You expect him to step on the guys fingers or something when she's not, but she is. So, does he pull him up to send him to the pokey. No. Nor does he step on the fingers. He just watches him fail to hang on.

Following an investigation and some "sick" time, Luther comes back to the job and his first case is a challenge. Meanwhile, his marriage has fallen apart and he's not handling it all well. Or even reasonably at at times. Well his wife (Indira Varma is running around with the Eight Doctor).

However, a good hero needs a great villain, and he gets one in this first episode as he faces off against a young woman (Ruth Wilson is delightfully creepy as Alice), a former scientific prodigy, not that much older now, but old enough that she plies both her massive IQ and her sexuality against John as they mentally dance around the fact that they both know she killed her parents, but she may be too smart for him to actually prove it.

And the end is, actually, a bit surprising. Way to subvert.

I rather like it. It's a solid, serious drama that covers all the bases. And what's it's connection to Homicide? Well, The Wire is a spiritual sequel to H:LOTS. Created by David Simon, who wrote the book on which H:LOTS is based and cut his teleplay teeth there as well. One of it's stars was Idris Elba, who plays...yes, John Luther.

*My fellow Americans, I won't tell you how to watch this, but you can probably figure it out. Or you can wait. BBC America would be foolish not to give this a run.

DAY NONE

Television casualties come in many forms. Cancellations being the most obvious and common. Then there's the show's that don't get picked up after pilot season. Cast and shot but the network just saw more reason to leave it wither and die then to put it on the air. It happens.

What doesn't happen so much is that a show gets cast and shot, then picked up, given a standard starting order and staffed. It gets put on the schedule as a midseason show, then gets it's order reduced, reduced again and eventually disappears from schedules and radar, all without airing a single episode.

That would be Day One. It was one of many shows last pilot season that seemed to poised to ramp up and take over for Lost once the story of the Island came to a close. It was serialized, had strong character story potential and a sci-fi bent with it's weird alien-ish invasion premise.

Castwise, it had some fun choices. Catherine Dent, Julie Gonzalo, Carly Pope and Xander Berkley to start. And it had a solid writing staff. Jesse Alexander is a veteran of serialized shows, having been on Alias, Lost and Heroes and all at times when they were working. He'd picked fellow Lostie and ex EP/creator of the ridiculously fun show The Middleman, Javier Grillo-Marxuach and Christine Boylan from Leverage, among others.

Day One stood a good chance. Except that it never had a chance. First it was cut down to a four-hour mini-series, would would then serve as a launching pad for a series...or another mini. Then it got cut down to a two-hour MOW which would serve a backdoor pilot for a series. Never mind that it already had a pilot and was picked up once already.

Its page at nbc.com is still there, but in an abandoned-Detroit-building kinda way.

I don't know why any of this happened. Maybe there's a good reason, maybe there isn't. However it's a shame this one got so close and remained so far away.

If you look around, you may find the pilot script on the intertron webulator. It's a fun read full of potential.

FOX 2010-11

There's one show here for me. It speaks to me personally and it was probably my favorite script of pilot season and I was joyed to no end that it got picked up.

Ride Along may, at first glance, be a cop show, but it's not. It's a Chicago show. It's about the Windy City and the cops are the vehicles to explore it like no other show has. And with Shawn Ryan behind it, himself an Illinois boy, you know the writing and production quality is going to be there. The Shield always had a verisimilitude about the seedy bits of LA, especially since they shot it there and Ride Along's Chicago will surely be the same way (unlike, say, The Good Wife's).

Once this show gets underway, head down to Buena Park, grab some Portillo's (so worth the trip) and get my Ride Along on.

NBC 2010-11

Upfronts were today, and here are my favorites from the Peacock network, who look to be capitalizing on the post-primetime-Leno opportunity to rebrand themselves some. Monday action night anyone?

THE CAPE

Screw Edna Mode. Best use of a cape since the guy with the pointy ears and the serious psychological issues. This was one of my favorite reads from pilot season and Keith David, though an unexpected casting decision is decidedly owning the role of Max Malini, mentor to The Cape. I have high hopes for this one.

THE EVENT

At first, it appears to be the heir-apparent to 24, but skewing more liberal, but there's a twist when you watch the pilot that will hopefully stay secret-ish. This looks like it's solid.

UNDERCOVERS

Spies and J.J. Abrams. A proven thing. And this looks likely it delightfully mixes in a little of the classic eighties crime and romance formula (a la Moonlighting, Remington Steele, Scarecrow & Mrs. King). Hoping it stays fairly grounded, as opposed to Alias.

PSA...OF EVIL

Meanwhile, word is awaited from esteemed director Susan Lee on the first film festival submission of Mastermind.

BENGAL TIGER AT THE MARK TAPER FORUM

It unfolds in a peculiar spiral of death and ghosts. And one of the characters is a fucking tiger! A tiger that uses words like "fucking'."

Bengal Tiger a the Baghdad Zoo by Rajiv Joseph and directed by Moises Kaufman, once again defies the conventional wisdom that no one wants to see things about the War in Iraq (having initially premiered in LA last year. However, like The Hurt Locker, it's really less about the war than about the people in it, though Tiger does indulge in a little commentary, though the most direct of it is relayed in the bites of wisdom offered by its titular character. And most of it, not so much directly about the war, largely owing to the fact that he is...well, a tiger.

The tiger in question, while the center of the play is not really the central character of the play. However, as portrayed by Kevin (Emergency, Lost) Tighe, he rocks the house and is deft in manipulating the audience, especially when it comes to making them laugh at otherwise inappropriate times. At one point, you can actually hear the audience admonish themselves for wanting to laugh at one of the tiger's wisecracks.

The central character is Musa, former gardener to Saddam's vile issue Uday Hussein, now serving as a translator to the U.S. Military. Said Charles McNulty in the LA Times review, "This is a play in which death....has absolutely no effect on an actor’s stage time." Important to note as everyone in this play haunts, is haunted by or both by and to someone (whatnow?). Arian Moayed's Musa (or Habib, as he is called by the two fairly ignorant young Marines featured in the play) is haunted by Uday, whose cruelty was visited upon his own life at one point and who connects many character threads though the production. In fact, it's is Uday's topiary garden, ravaged by "liberation" that makes much of the stage though the show.

The Tiger lays bare a central theme as he opines his way across the stage, that being "why am I here?" and then "Why am I still here?" Musa's journey, however, rolls around in one's head fro a while after the lights go down. He experiences great change, brought on by his ghosts, but ultimately facilitated by hos own hand. And those action leave him broken, and aware of it.

As the tiger questions his (continuing) existence and what God means by it (and everything else) he finds Musa, a creator himself in his damaged garden (that was never really his), having truly lost his way. God in micro? There's plenty of room for interpretation. May need to see it again.

GLEE IS LIKE BAD PORN

Recently, Shawna had some criticisms of Glee, all of which I think are pretty much spot on. Except for one. She'd commented that there were too many songs.

I disagree. In fact, I think maybe there should be more songs. The songs are the only decent part of the show (and that's if you overlook the heavy and undeft use of autotune to force the actor's voices to actually work in the context of something like - I dunno - a song).

Glee is just cover-version-porn. Something I can appreciate. I'm a total whore for song covers. Even if it's a song I don't especially like covered by a singer or band I'm not especially fond of, as long as they've clearly stamped it with their own style or take on it. And after the initial inconsistent characterizations, plot gaps, repetitious stakes and over reliance Jane Lynch, now they've got the A/V club and other contrivances do music videos (not just musical sequences).

I wince at some of the things they come up with to get to a song or video. I find myself thinking that Glee is just bad porn. Too much crappy plot between the action we're really there for. I don't need to see the crappy, wooded acting and I know damn well what's in that pizza box, so just get it on (bang a gong, get it on).*

*Original by T.Rex, cover version by Power Station.

DHARMA FOOD

Hey look, corporate synergy!

SPOILERS FOR "THE CANDIDATE" FOLLOW...

Yeah, so my theory about the Kwons, mostly blown out of the water. No pun intended.

The identity of 42-Kwon could still be right, and there is the possibility of sideways shenanigans, but not bloody likely.

And it seems very much to me like Sideways-Bernard is aware of what's going on.

SONIC SCREWDRIVER

I've always been fascinated by the sonic screwdriver on Doctor Who. When I was a kid watching Doctor Who on PBS, I just thought it was a cool thingy and I really wanted one. Especially given my fascination with lockpicking.

Now I'm fascinated with it as a plot device. It is totally overpowered, has flexible rules of existence and allows massive cheats to get the story rolling forward. And in any other show, it would be total bullshit. In Doctor Who it becomes something else. It, to me, is a symbol of how this show creates itself and its own rules and in doing so becomes a television show so unlike any other. Chuck couldn't do this. Nor Fringe.

Terry Pratchett is right, Doctor Who isn't science fiction. It's science fantasy. He also doesn't understand why the show's ludicrous tone is so brilliant so ultimately, I disregard his criticisms.

The sonic screwdriver never saves the day or is the deus ex machina that solves the problem of the week. Christopher Bidmead, who was the head writer back in the Fifth Doctor days hated it He considered lazy writing. He destroyed it in "The Visitation" it wasn't seen again until the Eighth Doctor. He as right and wrong. And looking back, I don't think he really got what his show was and could be.

We know the Doctor is clever enough to open that locked door or what not, but we don't want to see him do that. We want to see him move the fucking universe.

Same goes for the psychic paper.