It's my last network tv regular show, i think (Bionic Woman's not coming back, right?).

I really can't decide on this show. I mainly think it's really really good. And yet ..

Well, there's bad-ass super-brained Ben. Like yesterday, Ben to his kid. "Don't worry, I've got things under control", where control means let the bad guys kill her so he can live to maybe sometime kill the bad guy's daughter.

I don't know ...

The first season was must-see TV for me.

You gottta, make yer own kinda music....sing yer own special song.....

Second season OK.

Lost a little interest last year. Thought the whole Desmond seeing the future thing was a little too out there.

One of the most amazing things about the show so far for me was....Robin Weigert as Rachel, the cancer stricken sister of Juliet....despite the scarf she wore to cover her chemo-therapy caused baldness, I knew she looked familiar....

The it dawned on me.....I knew I'd seen her somewhere before.....

Little bit of acting range would you say? I like her better all cleaned up, but she kicked ass as Calamity Jane. One of my favorite Deadwood characters.

Now, I watch it mainly for the sweaty tank tops on both Kate and Juliet. (Dawn, I thought Evangeline couldn't get any hotter, but that flipping the bird pic bumps her up a notch.) I'd gladly move to Canada if that's what Evangeline wanted me to do.

mmmm. sayid.

i haven't seen LoST since I got rid of my TV, but god, I loved Sayid. Those eyes. I would do anything he asked.

mm. mm. mm. mm. mm.

Dave~

At first I was drawn to the song.

Reminded me of my childhood.

The 60s.

Then I caught the tie-in between the name of the band and the theme of the show.

Mama, ...Papa. ....Ahh.

And I was SO ready for them to play on that.

They've gone in a different direction than I expected but it's still pretty good comapred to the rest of the network crap. (And since one can never get enough of Petula Clark, the greatest voice the world has ever known...)

I hope they sew this thing up in a nice tight little package, but even if they don't,,,,best show since Deadwood.

I was up in the wee hours last night and wrote a long, meandering reply that I somehow lost with an accidental click. So I went to bed.

Shorter:

1/2 vs. 3/4 = character-driven vs. plot-driven. Sad, really, because the tension in the first two seasons was all about the way the characters interacted. It can be oddly jarring to watch actors in a series "acting" their roles once you've taken in enough reality tv. Lost transcended that, somehow. I think Abrams et al cast Lost like they might cast a reality-tv show, and then they wove elements from the real lives of the characters into the writing (see dvd extras). The first couple of seasons had the intensity of reality tv, with a great storyline as a foundation, which reality tv always lacks, because the cast is in an artificially constructed situation. Lost captured the best of both worlds.

In seasons 3 and 4 it's become more action-oriented and the characters have lost their intensity. I don't know that it would have worked to try to sustain the intensity of the first two seasons, but with the department heads all going to Heroes, a new aesthetic took over, and the psuedo-reality was diminished.

Those are just my thoughts on it. I'm open to other points of view. Of course, who else thinks about it that much? Well, there's that guy (click on the link).

Kate is a lot more palatable to me as a character than Sydney Bristow, who was written as a moist-eyed ninja-girl-in-distress surrounded by three men with questionable intentions towards her. The incongruous vulnerablilty of her character annoyed me, as did her constant placement in compromising positions from which those men might or might not liberate her. I could draw a lurid parallel, but I'll just imply it, instead.

And not just Trixie and Calamity Jane - Joanie Stubbs (Kim Dickens) also showed up as Sawyer's girlfriend in his pre-island life.

I read some time ago that there were a couple of Deadwood films in the works, but I haven't seen anything recently about the untimely demise of that series.

Dawn, I feel like the guy claiming to read Playboy for the artibles (that Jimmy Carter ...) but I think the show basically changed the action genre. Maybe it was a Slate article that linked Bourne Identity etc to Alias, and then Daniel Craig's Casino Royale to Bourne. Standing on the shoulders, sort of thing. It was just (at its best) really smart (taut-smart). And there's what you said too, and believe me I've heard it more than a few times. Also, forgot about (poor) Joanie, the Long Con. And it just hit me about Saywer's father .. weird. You know how somebody put a Godfather thing together, excerpting from the movies to make a single chronological movie .... hmmmm, re Lost. I gotta admit too, I've found a couple web sites that analyze the thing to death (checking to see if I bookmarked any .. wire, wire, lost [nope], lost [nope], battlestar), but none of it seems to sink in. Anyway, I thought Season 2 was a step back because in introducing others they lost that intensity of which you spoke, and Season 3 after a slow start got some of it back. I guess it depends on a bunch of stuff. Also, re Deadwood, here's what I recall: they were going to do 5 seasons, but after 3 because if the expense they had to choose between Rome and Deadwood and Deadwood lost, so instead they were going to tack on a couple of movies (like you said) to wrap things up.

Michael: Hurt will join Hakeem Olajuwan as famous ex-Toronto ballers, they did nothing wrong but sig a big fat contract and not live up to our unrealistic expectations. Can you imagine, Hakeem as a Raptor. You know what they should do, make guys go into the Hall of Fame for the last team that paid them a full year's salary, that would shut some of them down a bit sooner I think (no .. not really.).

Brief fray sighting of swit with his "Hillary saves Israel" post. I assume he's dealing with his mom's situation or writing a revised Roger Clemens bio. No way he's already living in the woods. He hasn't taken me up on my offer of building material at dealer cost ...yet.

...sounds horribly incomplete without the internet.  Hope all's okay, of course.

Lost: I was thinking of asking for a one-paragraph pitch telling me why I should watch this show, and why I should believe the writers aren't making it up as they go along.  I'd ask, but (1) I don't think anyone can, and (2) it probably wouldn't convince me to sit for 20 hours straight of dvd viewing anyway. 

keifus, you can't watch it now, because your only option now is watching the whole thing on dvd (sometime) and watching now would be mucking things up (well, that's if you have a memory, and I can say that because I don't have much of one). like i just picked up wire season 5 on dvd, and even though i read the whole slate discussion, i don't think it ruined much (just know a couple guys who died, that's about it).

snolly, what do we know about the island in season 4 that we didn't at the end of season 1? not much. what's the news, really? there really is something special about the island, some of the dudes get off, a lot of them get dead, there's always a badder guy than the guy you think is the bad guy (wait, that's just a general rule). yeah, not much.

dawn, this is the thing with a puzzle. if you know it's a decent puzzle you can say, okay, that may be worth my time. if the puzzle is that you don't know whether there is a puzzle (to ender: that was the thing with cloverfield), then it's just not worth much, is it.

-----

Vozzek69