Tuesday, April 27, 2010

LOST FINAL SEASON--EPISODE #13 "THE LAST RECRUIT"

*My least favorite episode this season. I’m thinking it’s a side effect of having to hurry up and fit everything into a much smaller amount of time than initially planned. There was a lot of hi-there-long-time-no-see and let’s-suddenly-go-over-here. When BadLocke reunites with Jack, he says, “Let’s catch up.” Shortly after that when Jack is reunited with Claire, BadLocke says “Looks like you have a lot of catching up to do.” The whole episode was full of clumsy motivations and rushed encounters.
My own personal pet peeve in any plot (which I have tried to ignore in LOST), is when characters become determined to do something for no logical reason. When they are asked to give some explanation, they simply say, “I just know I need to do this thing.” For example when Jack tells Sawyer, “This doesn’t feel right.” There’s only so much you can chalk up to supernatural vibes or fate or ESP. What is really going on is bad writing.
The lowest point unfortunately was the reunion of Jen and Sun. What could have been a resonating moment for the whole series ended up being a burst of cheese and clichés. Here we have an extended rift between two people who are deeply in love and in which one thought the other was dead—and this is the climactic dialogue we get when they finally embrace:
Sun: “I love you.”
Jen: “I love you, too. We’ll never be apart again. I promise.”
And if that wasn’t bad enough, we have Lepidus on the sidelines acting as narrator: “Looks like someone got their voice back.” Hopefully this episode was just a glitch and not foreshadowing of worse things to come. But right now the seams are showing.
*With all that said, I was thrilled to have a theory confirmed. Dead Christian was BadLocke (a.k.a. Smoke Monster). There were also some interesting stipulations revealed. The Smoke Monster can only take the form of someone who is dead. But the primary factor that was of interest to me is that the Smoke Monster can only take the form of someone who is dead as long as the physical dead body is present. This apparently means there are clear physical parameters restricting the nature of the Smoke Monster.

1 comment:

Erik said...

I don't the the body has to be present, otherwise, how could the monster have impersonated Richard's wife or Ben's mom?

I think the reason the body has to be present is when the smoke monster wants people to think a dead person is alive again, like Locke and Christian.

When he just wants to seem like a ghost, like with Ben's mom or Richard's wife, he can just do it as long as they're dead.

----

Also, about this being the worst episode: I agree. Jim Lileks said if that episode got any worse, Locke would have ripped off his mask and revealed himself to be Jar-Jar Binks.

And the biggest miss, like you said, was the reuniting of Sun and Jin. How could they blow THAT, I thought.

So I started researching and apparently the director of that episode is one of the editors who has only directed like two things in his life. I have no idea why they handed him the reins during the all-important final season, but they did, and he kind of stepped on the ball.

I know John Cassar (from 24) was originally supposed to direct the "Everybody Loves Hugo" episode, but wasn't able to. This might be why they pulled the other guy in last minute.

Which means I can blame the worst episodes of both Lost and 24 this season on John Cassar not being around.