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Last Night's Lost (Spoiler Alert)

Seriously, if you're behind in watching Lost, this is like the ultimate spoiler alert. So stop reading. Step away from the browser...

Okay, are we all cool?

That was a pretty brilliant episode last night, and brilliant in a way that is unique to Lost, as a television show at least. What made that ending so shocking was not just the information revealed, but the incredibly clever way in which the information reversed two fundamental expectations about the basic rules of the genre. First, they confounded all our temporal expectations by revealing that it was a flashforward, not flashback, which was itself a subtle nod to all the controversy about the prominence of flashbacks in the show. (When the episode started, my wife said to me, "No, not another flashback...") And then of course choosing to answer the ultimate question that has driven the narrative from the beginning: will they get off the island?

This sets up a marvelous symmetry for the remaining three seasons. The first three  were built around a  basic structure where you had a present tense story on the island, with multiple events in the past slowly revealed to you, and part of the intrigue of the show came from slowly filling in the blank spots that connect those past events with the present storyline. Now, for the final three seasons, we're potentially going to have future events doled out to us as well -- or at least the one big future event that we saw last night -- and the intrigue will come from figuring out all the chains that connect past, present, and future.

I can't wait.

Lost Is The New White Album

You gotta love that they're now putting backwards messages into the audio tracks on Lost.

Studio 60

I have a weak spot for narratives about male friendship that aren't conventional buddy films (I still think about the slowly evolving friendship between the two brothers in Six Feet Under season one), and so I'm naturally predisposed to like Aaron Sorkin's new series, Studio 60 On The Sunset Strip, given its focus on the working friendship of Matthew Perry and Bradley Whitford. For the most part, I was completely delighted with the premiere last night; it's stylized and not entirely believable of course, just like The West Wing: everyone is just a tad too clever, and of course everyone talks too fast. But if we're going to have fictions in our fictions, I'd rather they revolve around people being too clever, rather than, say, being genetic mutants with superpowers. (Paddy Chayefsky's Network, which gets several explicit nods in Studio 60's premiere, suffered from the same problem, if it is indeed a problem.)

But I do think there was some irony in the rampant television-bashing that ran through the episode, and presumably will continue through the season. Alessandra Stanley got it exactly right in her review in yesterday's Times:

“Studio 60” is a polemic about television as a cultural wasteland at the very moment the industry is entering a new golden age. There is a lot more television than ever before, much of it bad, but it is hard to remember a time when there were so many good shows pushing up against the worst. Dramas especially, whether on cable or on broadcast networks, have never been as beautifully or thoughtfully made; few Hollywood movies come close. And “Studio 60” serves as exhibit A...

Lost Does Dickens

What did everyone end up thinking about this season of Lost? My wife and I have been bouncing around on TiVo time with the show for most of the year, which meant we were usually an episode or so behind the rest of the world, and thus I spent most of the year studiously avoiding any conversations about the show, for fear of spoilers. (Of which, more to come in this post, so consider yourself warned.) I thought the season started brilliantly, sagged in the middle (weighed down in part by the sheer number of characters) and then was quite brilliant at the end. The whole "I think I crashed your plane" bit with Desmond in the final episode was right up there with my two other favorite Lost moments: the decoding of the French woman's looping help message; and Locke's expression and line after watching the first Dharma film -- "We're going to have to watch that again!" (Which, by the way, might as well have been the title for the second half of Everything Bad Is Good For You.)

I've been joking about the lack of apparent connection between Everything Bad and The Ghost Map, my new book about cholera in 19th-century London. But Lost neatly supplied the missing link with the season finale: the copy of Dickens' Our Mutual Friend that plays such a crucial role in the episode. Our Mutual Friend is the first book quoted in The Ghost Map -- on the very first page, as it happens. Dickens' narrative interweaves with the themes of my cholera book in a number of ways: for starters, they're both obsessed with London's epic waste removal problem in the middle of the nineteenth century. The novel was also going to be central to the dissertation I never got around to writing at Columbia, in my English Lit grad school days. When it flashed on the screen during Lost this week, I thought: "Hey, I'm an expert on that book! Someone should get me to a Lost fan forum pronto."

It'll be interesting to see if they actually try to build some kind of extended meaningful connection to the book's plot next season. Beyond the trash theme, the most striking thing about the plot is (VIctorian spoiler alert!) the assumed identity of the protagonist, who, after his long-estranged father dies, fakes his own death in order to spy on 1) the people who ended up inheriting his father's fortune, and 2) the woman his father intended him to marry. (At least, I think that's right -- those Dickens plots are complicated.) I could imagine the narrative of Lost somehow mimicking that structure in season three, though I'm not exactly sure how. They certainly have the estranged dead fathers, the sudden fortunes, the spying, the arranged marriages. Maybe I'll have to watch that last episode again....

Dan Hill has a fantastic post called "Why Lost is genuinely new media". It has a few very nice shout-outs to some of my work, but you can skip those and get to the good bits:

On the form itself, Lost episodes are famously laden with arcana to pore over, deconstruct and even construct in the first place, such is the collective-imagination-run-wild of the show's fans. For instance, this site which supplies transcripts of the eery 'whispers'; character names are opportunities for anagrams ('Ethan Rom' = 'Other Man'); there are numbers, codes everywhere; hieroglyphics; mystical allusions; references to philosophy (Locke, Rousseau); the constant casual appearance of literary works etc. The embedded puzzles involved will remind some of a certain age of the Masquerade phenomenon ...

Many of these links above go to the Lostpedia wiki - an entire clone of Wikipedia devoted to the Lost universe. Wikipedia has entries too, of course. These are both 'unofficial' offerings around the show, but the show's creators haven't exactly been tardy with official offerings. The ABC site has everything you'd expect: trails, profiles, recaps, podcasts etc. They've also created a whole series of fake sites around the show, such as Oceanic Flight 815 or for the fictional band Driveshaft.

Finally. The Daily Show makes it onto iTunes. (Plus Colbert Report.) Call me a purist, but people should not be allowed to watch shows with production values as high as Lost's on the Video iPod. But it's brilliant for programming like TDS. I wonder if they'll have my appearance in the archives.

The IT Crowd

Thanks in part to Cory's evangelizing, I've become completely obsessed with the UK geekcom "The IT Crowd", which apparently has now finished its (rather short) first season after six hilarious episodes. As much as I enjoy all the low-key, laugh-trackless, pseudo-documentary cool of most recent smart sitcoms (both Offices, Curbed, etc.) it's refreshing that The IT Crowd's creators went in the other direction with this show, bringing in all sorts of Pythonesque absurdisms and broad comedy. (Even the laugh track doesn't bother me here, for some reason.) My favorite moments from season one: the iPhoto slideshow at the end of episode one; the fire in episode two; the former-rising-business-star-turned-goth discovered living in the basement in episode four; and Jen's back-from-the-dead haunting of her would-be boyfriend in episode five.

My interest in the show is a bit of a personal threshold point in terms of television distribution. This is the first time I've been able to have an early adopter relationship with a TV series from another country while it's still airing new episodes of season one. (I remember hearing about The Office second-hand on and off for about a year or two before I actually watched it.) I'm curious if the show is perceived to have been a success over in the UK, and if so, how much the international success online has been factor. And why isn't it on iTunes? Why is anything not on iTunes by this point? This is one of those products that I'm genuinely eager to pay for, not just because I think it's easily worth a couple bucks, but mostly because I want to fund more episodes. Six is not nearly enough.

Update 9:30 PM EST: Cory correctly writes in to point out in the comments that it is not a laugh track you're hearing on the show, but in fact a "live studio audience." (Though most of the scenes shot outside the actual IT headquarters in the basement presumably don't have a live studio audience, since they seem to be location shots of some kind.) I generally find both forms of background laughter distracting and overly choreographed, but it's true that canned laughter is more annoying.

Secondly, according to Wikipedia, another eight episodes have been commissioned for season two. Excellent.

I confess I haven't seen Crash, but more than a few people have mentioned to me that the film echoes all the Sleeper Curve values of complex, multithreaded storytelling that I talked about in Everything Bad Is Good For You. Though of course, my emphasis in that book was on the new complexity of television programming -- 24, Sopranos, Alias, The Wire, etc. I actually made the point that film was lagging behind TV where the Sleeper Curve was concerned. But this year's Best Picture nominees make me wonder if the tide is turning in film as well, particularly as the underlying economics shifts towards DVD sales and away from theatrical release. We'll see...

Promising analysis of the otherwise unimpressive announcements from Apple yesterday:

Clearly, the Mac Mini is not intended to deliver 3D gaming performance comparable to the iMac or MacBook Pro. It is, however, designed to deliver absolutely smokin' video playback to displays more traditionally found in the home; TVs, home theaters, etc... The chipset includes support for regular and HD playback, with the ability to up/down scale video content, as necessary. And it isn't limited to a single stream of HD as it can simultaneously decode and display two streams. It can also handle pretty much any standard HD resolution in both interlaced and progressive scan mode (including 1080p) and it also natively supports both 16:9 and 16:10 aspect ratio displays.

Add some PVR software to Front Row and I'm buying one of those.

Maybe Lost could start its own little book club:

Seen briefly on the ABC hit series "Lost," a surreal comic novel by an Irish author who died 40 years ago has been rescued from obscurity, Reuters reported. The novel, "The Third Policeman," was written by Flann O'Brien (1911-66), who was influenced by James Joyce, and fans of "Lost" are apparently scouring it for clues to the mysterious island where passengers from a downed airliner are marooned. Craig Wright, a supervising producer and scriptwriter for "Lost," said the book, seen on an episode first broadcast in the United States in October, was chosen "very specifically for a reason." Within two days of the broadcast, 10,000 copies were sold.