As far as telling stories goes, there’s certain things video games can do that movies can’t. Because video games are a relatively new medium, however, we rarely see these things. Video games tend to copy movies in their way of telling stories: a straightforward plot that shows us everything – little to no room for internal dialogue, for example. Only recently, with the release of BioShock (which bases its succes on Half-Life, Deus ex and the likes – shooters kind of got the point sooner), the way storydriven video games told their stories changed. Alan Wake gets this point. It gets it in an entirely different way the shoot-em-ups seemed to have gotten it lately. But it gets it brilliantly.

Alan, Wake Up

BioShock enabled us to collect Audio Diaries, which were basically side stories that played while you were out there, killing baddies. But it didn’t stop there: these Diaries also commented on the events in the game, or society as a whole. Now, I must admit, that even I find the idea slightly silly: it’s only a video game, it’s only entertainment after all. But what if it wasn’t?

Alan Wake builds upon the concept of these audio diaries. Only they’re not a side track in your story anymore. They are the story. Alan Wake, a successful writer with writer’s block, goes on a holiday in Bright Falls, a quiet mountain town. That’s where shit starts hitting the fan, as his wife disappears and he starts finding pages of a horror story he has written – but can’t remember doing so.

These pages are where the above point sets in: they describe the action in the game. You read about Alan getting attacked by a chainsaw-wielding monster? You bet you’ll get one on your tail a minute later. But they’re not just used as premonition tools. They’re also there to help you understand the sub text and motivations of side characters – which is a pretty nifty feat, seeing how you play ninety percent of the game only accompanied by your trusty flash light. On your first play-through, you might wonder if all these people are insane. But once you spend your time collecting the manuscript pages (80 percent of which are findable as you go along – but it’s the 20 percent of hidden ones that make it interesting), you might find out that the world created in this game is not as harebrained and flat as you first thought it was.

Episodic Flashlight Action!

If you would ask me – from a gameplay perspective – to compare this game to another one, it would have to be the latest iteration of the Alone in the Dark series. The game was a mixed bag, with truly great ideas but terrible execution. In Alan Wake, the former is true. The latter isn’t. The game is polished beyond belief, with only a few gripes to make.

Like Alone in the Dark, Alan Wake adopts an episodic storytelling mechanism. There’s six episodes which last about an hour to ninety minutes each. Each episode starts with a “previously on…” summary, so you can play at leasure and not get lost in the tangled web that is the plot (okay, you will get lost, but you’re supposed to). Every episode has a theme and a location in which the action takes place – or, usually a place for you to get to. There isn’t a single episode that doesn’t advance the plot, but you can feel the seams of the genre ripping at times: due to gameplay mechanics, the bogies only come out at night, so you know the story will set you up to be alone in the dark. The fun part is: our protagonist pokes fun of it himself, so it’s fair game. The developers know – just like people writing a horror movie know there’s certain conventions to adhere.

The plot is strikingly similar to Alone in the Dark: it involves light, darkness, love and monsters. As opposed to Alone in the Dark, this game actually has a clear idea how to handle the themes and turn them into a gripping experience. The story takes more twists and turns than a Stephen King novel (there’s a reason they quote him several times throughout the game) but still manages to remain interesting. It causes an irritation which left me wanting to know more. The story leaves the door open – it deliberately doesn’t tell you everything. As with any story doing this, though, it requires a bit of good-will from those experiencing it.

Gathering this good will is easy, though, because the gameplay is simply amazing. The premise is this: you can’t hurt the baddies without burning away their darkness with the flashlight. Once their darkness is gone, they become vulnerable. It’s a simple trick, but once again thought over nicely: you can use the flashlight, but there’s also flares and light grenades to be had. It’s a tough concept to pull off, but Alan Wake keeps things interesting for the duration of the game. And beyond.

In All…

It does sound like I have nothing but praise for this game. That’s almost true – but there are some gripes. Unfortunately, the cut scenes look like zombies looking for brains. The characters never seem to look at each other directly, and their mouth movement… not so great. But the voice acting is great (expect to hear at least two familiar voices from Max Payne), so it makes up for it. It’s just a shame for a storydriven game that’s had so much time for polish.

But other than that, I’d have a hard time coming up with anything bad to say. Some would say it’s boring, probably. It’s true: no one gets chopped to bits. But those are the people who prefer Saw over Shining: people who want to see a lot of blood and gore are not in the right place to be playing Alan Wake. What Alan Wake does convey, is the nagging, irrational sense of nightmare that a lot of Hollywood horror stories seem to forget about. Horror is not about blood or gore. It’s about foreshadowing, and that feeling you just can’t grasp your surroundings or understand what’s going on.

Alan Wake might not be a game for everyone, but it is a game made especially for me.

A whole new world

Oh, how little has changed in 12 years. Or has it? I grew zits and I lost them. And Starcraft? It became a phenomenon that swept the entire world and especially South Korea. People started playing a video game as competition, and made money doing so. Terms like micro, macro and APM became common knowledge. And me? I have found something new to suck at.

The campaign picks up four years after the events in Brood War. Jim Raynor is our tragic hero, still struck by the loss of Sarah Kerrigan, a ghost sent into an unwinnable war and turned into the Queen of Blades – the heroin of the Zerg. To be frank, the story isn’t all that exciting, but it’s executed well enough to keep you going. You only get the Terran part of it, and certain things you do have negative outcomes for the other races… which will probably come to play in the two race-specific expansions yet to come.

It’s the gameplay where the campaign shines, though. There’s some a few side plots which you can advance at your own leasure, and you can spend money on unit and building upgrades. It’s a pretty nifty feature that makes every playthrough slightly different. Yes, the story’s not much of a looker (compare it to a franchise reboot: it’s perfectly executed, but somehow you get the impression the writers are just a tad too much in love with their own characters). The gameplay though? More than just awesome.

Fight it out

But, obviously, it’s the multiplayer where this game truly shines. Starcraft has always been a competitive game by nature and Starcraft II is no different. In fact, so little has changed that you might even suspect the game of just being a graphical overhaul of its predecessor. And that’s just great: Starcraft (and especially Brood Wars) was such a tight piece of work that there was so little to improve.

But once again, it’s in the little things. They’ve streamlined certain aspects (group management, harvesting management). If you think this makes the game easier, think again. Blizzard has used the freed space to let you focus on different aspects. Every race has received some new abilities that need your attention. For example, Terrans can summon MULES to harvest faster, while the Zerg can spawn more larvae at their hatchery. If you don’t understand what I’m saying, just know this: if you want to get the most out of your game, you’ll need to use these abilities as often as possible to get that edge you need in a game. You spend less time on trivial tasks. It’s great!

In All…

There’s so much to say about Starcraft II. But I’d rather not: it’s a tight experience and the production values are over the roof. If you buy this, you’ll not just be playing it for a month. You’ll get your money’s value for years to come!

And don’t worry. I suck at it too.

Sometimes, I can’t help but wonder whether Christopher Nolan will ever make a bad movie. It’s only been a month since I first heard about Inception, but when reading through the list of people involved with it, it had me psyched from that day until I saw it. Inception is a return to the roots, to Memento-style storytelling (very much so, in fact) – but the “hey-look-at-me-I’m-crashing-an-IMAX-cam-into-a-car” Nolan seems to have tagged along.

A Concept

The concept is deviously easy, but incredibly smart: dreams. And not just dreams, but dreams within dreams. Within dreams. Within dreams. Right off the bat, you’re dropped into a insane, multilayered world existing solely in someone’s mind. You’re given a complicated set of rules in a very short time, and how well you understand them will enhance the movie. If you understand nothing, at least the characters will be cool; if you understand it all (highly unlikely on your first viewing, I think), then… just get out.

The story clearly shows the amount of polish and creativity involved in the project. A normal author would be telling the following: a man learns how to enter people’s dreams, then finds out you can make a dream within a dream. Something along those lines. In Inception, this is backstory. It doesn’t matter. What you get is what the third part of the trilogy would bring. The third part which is bound to fail because the first and second already established everything there is to know, making the third part just silly (Back to the future? The Matrix?). Because everything what happened before Inception (the development of entering dreams, for example) is unknown to us… the silliness is not silliness it all – it’s unbelievable.

An Execution

But that’s not all. It has to be said: a lot of it is in the execution. Stuff moves: explosions, people getting shot at, cities crumbling… Inception is a roller coaster ride: it clocks at 148 minutes, yet I didn’t discover a single boring or empty moment. Something is happening at all times – even if it’s only a van falling off a bridge and taking 20 minutes to reach the water.

But there’s not just moving stuff. Marion Cautillard is in there somewhere too. That’s pretty much enough said: on an emotional level, Inception keeps it simple and clean. Nolan borrowed heavily from Memento here, using the concept of inception like he used Insulin: to explain the concept he wants to talk about (memory loss versus, well, inception), and then to explain the hero’s backstory wound. One of them, at least. It’s pretty simple, and I saw it coming, but if you say you’re watching this movie for the character drama, you’re in the wrong film.

In All…

These are the movies I like. I don’t care about whether or not stuff moves. I just want to see interesting characters in an unbelievable world where the sky (aka our imagination) is the limit. Inception is oozing with mathematical creativity. Everything’s been polished to a high degree and there’s a lot of food left for a second viewing. The characters might be pretty bland, but the great performances make them memorable nonetheless. And hey, surely you don’t want the characters taking precious time away from your splosions, right?

Little Orange Big Bum Star

It’s like they took the concept of the first game and upped the ante. The levels are better, the level select is slicker, the music is crazier, the game is longer, the awesome moments are more epic and the multiplayer is… well, I’ll use the word perfecter just because I want to.

I’m now entirely sure that Super Mario Galaxy 2 is a game best enjoyed with two people – the second player will want to keep on playing the game as bad as you. Now, he or she has an avatar (an orange star following Mario around) and can not only collect star bits, but coins, lives, upgrades… as well as kill baddies. If that makes you think of game balance, you’re antisocial and need to live a little. The excrutiatingly frustrating game (well, later on) becomes tension relieving when someone sits next to you. Because you need him or her, and he or she needs you. Multiplayer at its finest, and I’m not sure why it took twenty years of trying around to come up with this.

Bigger, badder, bester

As I already said, the levels are breathtaking. Obviously, we’re used to that: this is a Mario game after all. But I was amazed at the tricks Nintendo still had up their sleeves. In the last game, the whole gravity concept was being introduced – in this game, they just go all-out, saying that if you don’t know this shit by now, this will not be a game for you. Galaxy 2 is certainly harder than the first one, but its creativity makes it a lot more fun.

Remember in Mario Galaxy, how you could replay the game as Luigi after getting 120 stars? Forget that stuff. Luigi is available starting about midway through the first playthrough. There’s no second playthrough – instead, green stars have been hidden throughout the levels. There’s no time limit, no pressure, you can search for hours on end if you want. But finding these stars will force you to think outside the box, to do things that even look like they are breaking the game. So great.

In all…

Hey, if you haven’t played Galaxy, don’t bother with the second one yet. Better take your time and get introduced to the gravity concept, then switch to number two. You’ll enjoy all those nifty features they threw in there a lot more.

People who want to be cynical criticize it and call it an expansion pack – and it is. It expands upon the concept. It’s not just new levels. It’s a lot more. Fun.

A breath of fresh air

It was obvious, right off the bat, that the second Bioshock installment could never live up to the first one – the twist was just too much, too defining – so they don’t even try to do that. Instead, what they offer you is this: a small scale story with a deviously closed narration.

The entire thing features around the little sister – big daddy connection, and tries to get as much symbolism in the plot as possible. In doing this, it becomes a Freudian homage to the Oedipus complex, in which little boys kill their fathers to be with their mothers. The game does the exact opposite and in doing so, it doesn’t try to copy the analogy but just comments it.

Drill!

To do this, the game drops you in the suit of a Big Daddy – drill inclusive. It boils down to this: you’re trying to find your little sister, who’s been captured by her real, biological mother. This leads to a small, emotional story, in which Sophia Lamb – the child’s mother – plays an unbelievably satisfying role, only helped by the fact that she’s a psychoanalyst.

The Big Daddy controls just like you would think it would – huge and massive, but still quick and nimble. This means no more wrench. Instead, you get the drill, which – when pimped to the max using the tonics and weapon stations – is simply breathtaking to use. It makes the game less a shooter and more of a first person adventure game. Which I simply love.

In all…

Everything that made the first game great is still in place in the sequel: a gripping story, the Rapture atmosphere, a history of audio diaries and moral choices that affect the outcome of the game (which, in my opinion, is handled a lot better in this one). Sure, storywise, it can never overshadow the first game. But they’re humble and down to earth: they don’t try, and were only mildly damned by the almighty internet.

Everyone can see that Bioshock 2, as a game, is better than the first. There’s so many more things to do (protecting Little Sisters! Killing Big Sisters! Traps! Underwater sequences!). So please, play the first one before you play the second. Because it’ll be pretty hard to go back.

I love Wes Anderson. Even though I haven’t seen enough of his movies (a fact that’ll change soon, no doubt), it always strikes me how much I adore everything he makes. I guess he makes it seem so easy, so natural, so playful. When I heard he was doing a Roald Dahl movie (one of my favourite authors, but once again I feel haven’t read enough to say), I figured this couldn’t go wrong. And I love being right.

Fantastic

I wasn’t too sure about The Fantastic Mr Fox, though. I was a virgin in seeing stop-motion on the big screen, and it struck me how every little imperfection (that gets built in on purpose nowadays) was enlarged twenty thousand times. Call me a stop-motion nonsavant, but it took some time for my eyes to adjust. The only movie I remember doing that was Cloverfield – and I liked that one too. For entirely different reasons, obviously.

It appears I’m not the only one who believes in Wes Anderson’s genious: the movie sports an impressive cast, featuring George Clooney, Meryl Streep, Bill Murray, Willem Dafoe and many others. Whether you like them or not, they are all more than capable to deliver a wonderful performance, using just the right amount of irony to make this thing works.

Dahl and Anderson

I think I’ve seen just about any recent Dahl movie. I remember seeing Mathilda (garbage), James and the Giant Peach (even worse), Burton’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (awful) and I think I know the soundtrack of the 1970s Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory by heart (Dahl obviously hated it and he’s right, but oddly enough, I like it with a spoonful of irony).

I think making a movie out of a Dahl book is not easy. Technically, Dahl mainly wrote for children. But then again, he didn’t. To get the point accross, here’s a quote from Mathilda’s first pages:

School teachers suffer a good deal from having to listen to this sort of twaddle from proud parents, but they usually get their own back when the time comes to write the end-of-term reports. If I were a teacher I would cook up some real scorchers for the children of doting parents. “Your son Maxiliam”, I would write, “is a total wash-out. I hope you have a family business you can push him into when he leaves school because he sure as heck won’t get a job anywhere else.”

Dahl had a pretty gnarly idea about children these days, and would – like the Grimm Brothers – often resort to cruelty to put them (and their parents) in their place. But – and this is the key and the main difference to the Grimm Brothers – he does it in a very playful manner. This is exactly where Wes Anderson’s The Fantastic Mr. Fox comes in. The movie feels more like watching a video game – Wes Anderson is playing through a game and we’re watching the outcome of it. But, in its own playful way, it is pretty cruel: foxes are foxes, farmers are farmers. They eat, they kill, they destroy.

In All…

It’s very hard to capture the essence of why this movie works for me. On the other hand, Anderson seems to know it, and for him, it all seems so easy. I wouldn’t necessarily say this is a cinema experience for the masses: the theatre was nearly empty, but the handful of the people that were there, laughed their asses off.

It’s playful, it’s funny, it’s entertaining. It’s well-written, it’s witty, and it’s got a nice soundtrack to boot. Go see it – and if you’re unsure about whether or not you will get into the stop-motion: wait for the DVD. But not a second longer. And if you’re not rooting for Foxie by the start of the final act, you’re a stone-cold bastard.

The Episode…

I love LOST finales. What they tend to do is set up something exciting, watch that situation play out in the first half of the episode and then switch to an entirely different, more complex problem. In Season 1 we had to hide from the others but ended up blowing up the hatch door, in Season 2 we wondered what information Desmond would bring and saw the hatch blow up, in Season 3 there was the fight with the others succeeded by the rescue, in Season 4 we wanted everyone on the boat but not on the boat. Season five appears to be the only exception: everything was in place right off the bat. Season six continues the trend set by the first seasons: smokey dies about halfway through the episode. But saving the island is what needs to be done next. It’s great – it always leaves you wondering what’s next and keeps you on the edge of your seat.

It turns out the cave with the light is a metaphor for the island – and the thing actually has a fail-safe key. It’s a cork. For those who don’t remember: Jacob told us the island was a cork. So now we know how literal we have to take that. Very, apparently. I like the symbolism – even if the presence of a crafted chamber inside a cave was a bit weird. Where does it come from? Obviously, this is one of those questions leading to another question and can be answered when you consider things for a second, but still. Then again, it’s those little moments that make LOST’s mysteries into LOST’s mysteries.

The Flash Sideways…

They were the obvious question going into the finale – and the segments that showed us the emotional end to this saga. The revelation – that they shared a subconscious space in which they were waiting to move on together – is nothing short of breathtaking. Obviously, it seems corny at first. But imagining being together in death is just such a wonderful though, in my opinion. So peaceful. It works even better on a second viewing: you can sense that these people are finding each other again, but that rediscovery is also final, and as they are doing so, they are actually already saying goodbye.

So, for me, the flash sideways make perfect sense. Things that seem strange and illogical finally seem right. Jack has no son. He created him to let go of his daddy issues. And him being a “dural sack expert” is just another way of him being told to quit counting to five – he can do it. It’s nothing short of brilliant, and it delivered such an emotionally gripping final episode that it sends shivers down my spine when I even think about it.

There were so many little things. The flash sideways noise being the noise of the Ajira plane taking off. Jack’s wounds. Sayid leaving Nadia. Locke getting his back fixed. Rose telling Jack “You can let go now” right after the turbulence hit. The final piece of the puzzle is so pretty you can just stare at the picture over and over again. Even if it’s corny. I don’t care.

In All…

My first reaction is that there could not be a more fitting end to this show. We got delivered the craziest bunch of broken people, and what better way is there to end the show than to heal them all. At the moment, I don’t get why people would feel cheated for not being told certain mystery elements. Granted, they are exactly why I got into the show, but experience has taught me that answers to questions can be pretty damn disappointing (Horcruxes, for example).

It’s going to be hard letting go. I always have one series that complete eats me up. Before LOST, it was 20th Century Boys. After LOST… I don’t know yet. After I finish one of these obsessive series, there’s always a period of mourning. I just can’t get into anything else yet. There’s plenty of things I want to watch, but just… not now. Not yet.

I’m looking forward to watching it all over again in a few months. If I’m up for it, I might write down the questions I have trouble finding an immediate answer for, and seeing what I can come up with. I don’t need the instant gratification of knowing what every little detail means. I’d rather open the pot and taste exactly what kind of island stew is brewing.

What a crazy trip it’s been. Thank you for a great six years, LOST!

Favourite Quote: Locke: We’ve been waiting for you.

The Episode…

After a mythology heavy episode, this one really nailed the character counterpart: most of this episode was all about people trekking through the jungle, shooting each other unexpectedly, or being eaten by the smoke monster. And that’s what LOST has been doing at its finest for the last six years, so why complain now? The episode was a brilliant set-up to the final one. The pieces are in place (although some seem to be missing, like Desmond) – now it’s up to Jack and Locke to play their game of island chess.

On the flash sideways side, there was some pretty nifty stuff going on too. It’s taken a while, but it appears that the Losties will finally be meeting – at a concert, nonetheless. I love the idea of them gathering in one place, I wonder what that will mean? Giacchino also went all-out with some magnificent musical wonderwork, making the scene where Desmond meets Hurley unforgettable.

The Questions…

So Desmond is the fail-safe. What does that mean? It appears that Desmond is the emergency Jacob in case Jack fails. But what if the logic stretches out beyond that, and hints us to what the sideways universe might mean?

Look at it this way: Desmond seems awfully close to being Jacob in the flash sideways. He’s gathering everyone, showing them what it’s all about, trying to make them remember. Does this mean that the flash sideways are what happens after Jack failed to kill the man in black? Is Desmond trying to set everything straight again? I think this is an interesting possibility for the flash sideways – they would finally make sense.

In All…

I didn’t talk about so many things – Richard, Ben, Miles (where is Miles?), but with the final coming up, I’m trying not to overthink things and just see where they go. It’s going to be one hell of a battle in the end, and I have no idea what’s going to happen. I wonder how much excitement they can possibly cram into a series finale. I wonder if my head will explode?

The Episode…

So, apart from one throwback montage, there were no cast members to be seen in this episode. Obvious: it enrolls sometime around the birth of Christ. Interesting time to begin this, right? LOST finally opens the cupboard entirely, and shows us what started it all: an ancient myth, not quite unlike Cain and Abel (what we were already guessing). The myth shown in this episode is one of the oldes myths around – a myth about rivaling brothers – and, for me, it suits its purpose: it shows us that this story is as old as time itself. There’s no point in asking where the mother came from – because she also had a mother. That’s just the way the universe works.

What I am finding a bit hard to swallow is the following: in the last episode, we witnessed how the Man in Black killed three – or four – of our beloved friends. In this episode, however, we see that this evil wasn’t always evil, that it’s actually pitiable. I’m not sure whether I want to feel pity for this guy or not. I know this fits perfectly into the LOST idea of thousand shades of grey, but I’m not sure. The easy way out of this show would have been if there was ultimate evil. It might still happen, though. I’ll see where they take it.

On the other hand, Jacob was shown in a very bad light. He’s a crybaby, a mother’s boy, and obediently does what he’s told. Just like his brother, he’s not polarized anymore. Do I want this? How will I understand this when the show is over?

The Questions…

In general, the viewers seem to be in two groups about this episode. There’s the people like me, who think this episode did provide us with answers, and there’s the ones who feel cheated: that LOST created a mystery to solve another one. I think the problem with choosing a mythical path for your end-game is that you’re bound to reach the end of your logic, of your why-questions, and end up asking whether there is a God or not. Because LOST doesn’t want to ask this question (as it is a spiritual show and not a religious one), people are annoyed. Don’t understand me wrong though – they would have been more annoyed if a God actually came into play.

That being said, on to why I think this episode delivered. Obviously, the most visible explanation (who Adam and Eve are) isn’t the most important one. It was – in my opinion – executed with the sole purpose to give the viewership an immediate reward. But the best LOST rewards are usually so deep under the surface that you just have to dig a bit more to understand it.

What this episode delivered, in my opinion, was a sense of how this island works. The key lies in the Mother’s line, later uttered by the Man in Black: “It always ends the same”. There’s a mythical island, with powers you’ve never seen before (powers we have witnessed: the Swan, the Incident, Desmond’s flashes…), powers that seem semi-scientific but really go way beyond what science can understand. People want to find this island (the people who built the statue, the temple, the Dharma Initiative…), but they always wipe themselves out in the end. Someone else over at the SomethingAwful forums said it a lot better than me:

Jacob needs to find a replacement, he simply can’t guard the island forever because eventually he’ll grow so tired of it he’ll let the smoke monster leave just so it’ll end. If Jacob admits that the smoke monster is right, that humans are all evil, then he’ll have lost the right to keep the smoke monster from getting loose and destroying them. He’s been bringing candidates to the island since the early days of man, sometimes they study the island and build temples and monuments to their homeland’s gods and sometimes they try and learn the secrets of the island for themselves. Eventually they’ve all killed each other. They have never known more about the island than the characters we know so they aren’t really important. The smoke monster is not able to kill any person that Jacob has touched, marking them as a possible replacement. The people are able to kill each other though, which is the point of the game. If the smoke monster can get a candidate to kill Jacob and then get the replacement to decide the world isn’t worth protecting then the smoke monster wins.

Those are the rules to the game. Everything else can be brought back to that. Obviously it reeks of Deus ex Machina, but it’s a damn nice Deus ex Machina if you ask me – because it’s a literal one. How else can you explain the mysteries on this show? Did you really want to see Jack, Kate, Sawyer and everyone else going “Yes, I too have diabetes! That’s why crashed on this island! And that’s why Walt killed those birds!”?

Next Week…

Next week marks the return of our Losties, who apparently will be starting their quest to find Desmond. Is Frank truly dead? I hope not, but hey, what better ending would there be for this guy?

In All…

I liked this episode. It’s very hard to the take the LOST way of writing seriously if none of the characters we know and love are in it, though. We’ve come to expect a certain way of acting, of delivering strange lines, and it’s just weird to focus and entire episode on actors who aren’t used to this. We’ve never had anything like this before, and it was kind of alienating.

I think that in retrospect, we’ll look at this episode as a quick briefing to get into the season finale. All this stuff about LOST jumping the shark – three episodes from the ending! – will be forgotten once Hurley returns to the screen. It’s kind of the commercial break before the third act.

A long review – for a very, very intellectually tiring episode. See you next week!

The episode…

This episode was, without a doubt, the most disturbing LOST episode ever. I can stand losing Sayid – him deciding to do something good on a whim showed us that he was a good guy. Obviously, some of his storyline is left hanging. I personally think this will be the case with every character on the show (and will cause some people to be disappointed): Sayid incorporated the sickness, but what was it, in the end? Was it being persuaded by Smokey? It must have been. This makes the Sundown episode even more tragic: Dogen told Sayid – who had been fighting internally for six seasons – that he was a bad guy, and Sayid, tired by the fight, believed him. Interesting take on the sickness, and it makes sense if you look at Rousseau’s crew in season five. They were all persuaded by the monster, that was “only a security system”. Which was a downright lie. Oh LOST, you deviously humanist series.

Sayid had only been gone for moments when Sun and Jin got the axe in what I think to be the most disturbing LOST death ever. Just like Juliet’s death in the Incident, it was torn over multiple scenes – but opposed to Juliet, who had been a tragic-fated character right off the bat, it was never quite clear whether Sun and Jin were indeed tragic. It so appears they are: they spent six seasons trying to find each other, only to be killed in doing so. Makes sense why their reunion wasn’t the big tear-jerker scene. It’s really, really harsh, but I understand. I just would’ve wished for Jin to see his daughter. At least she’ll be in good Korean hands; and Mr. Paik will have a chance to redeem himself for all the mistakes he’s made towards Sun and Jin. You can do it, Mr. Paik.

Closure, twice over. Surely, it didn’t come the way or at the time we expected it to come, but it fits. It’s hard to admit it, and it makes me boil inside, but from a narrative point of view, these deaths fit. But what about Frank? Sure, it would be awesome to have him say one line per episode for about three seasons and have him go down saying “Aw Hell” and being hit in the head by an exploding door… But I want to see Frank again. Hey, I guess they filed him in the Ilana column. That’s the column where they put newly added characters that won’t get exposition because the fans get pissed every time one does. Nikki and Paolo were still awesome to me (in an sarcatic way), so meh.

The Questions…

The cat’s out of the bag. For anyone left in doubt, we now know that Smokey is a bad guy. But what about Jacob? He’s responsible for a lot more deaths than Smokey is – after all Jacob caused the Losties to crash on the island, killing hundreds. Smokey, on the very next day, killed one person: the pilot. A few red shirts and an angry black priest later, he might have reached half of Jacob’s death amount.

Is this a “greater good” kind of thing? Is Jacob indeed an evil bastard? Oh LOST, I guess we’ll only know for sure who’s light and who’s dark in the near future…

Next week…

Next week promises to be something we’ve never seen before. Apparently, the episode will feature next to no cast members. Instead, we’ll get a more than healthy dose of Jacob and Smokey. The rules of the game might finally be revealed. I wonder if our man in black will finally get a name?

This might sound stupid, but whether or not a name is given to our nemesis seems very important to me personally. I remember that, when the show had only just begun and J.J. Abrams was still actively involved, Abrams gave a lecture about a box: it’s not about what’s inside, but the mystery of what might be. The thought of this box – also alluded on LOST sometime in the third season – intrigued me. Now, the question remains: do we want the ultimate thing in this series to have a name? Won’t every name be a disappointment?

In All…

Gripping, sad, so sad. There’s just nothing to say about this episode. Even if I did write so much, words appear to fall short. Getting on that submarine was the worst decision they ever made. In doing so, the LOST writers have effectively done the hardest there is to do for an author: kill your darlings.

Favourite Quote: Jin: “I won’t leave you. I will never leave you again.”