[Remember That Time On LOST is a daily post running the entire month up until the season premiere of LOST on February 2nd. I’m going to just pick something awesome, noteworthy, or ludicrous about LOST when I wake up that morning, and hopefully get you geeks talking about it with me.]

I was originally going to title this one “Remember That Time On LOST When: You Realized The Show sucked?” but I balked because I felt it was a bit unfair. If the show didn’t suck, at the very least, the show has changed how we watch television, and also our expectations for how narratives are structured on a weekly basis. It marked a change from the weekly serial to something that seems intended to be ingested at three or four episodes at a time for maximum enjoyment. I know people who refuse to watch the show save for on DVD, and while I’m a glutton for the weekly satisfaction, they may actually be correct.

The beginning of LOST was a slow boil that emphasized character driven episodes with very little occurring on the Island. My less intellectual side calls it “really fucking boring” and “the shit that we waded through to get to the awesomeness of later in the series.” And to an extent, I still feel that way. However, if you go back and watch the show on DVD, the drudgery is mitigated quite a bit. It isn’t nearly as boring, because as soon as one episode ends, you’re able to keep chugging along. Nothing happens? No big deal, next episode.

This is in contrast to the feeling of watching it while it was airing. I’d like to describe the feeling of watching the first few seasons as they aired as this:

WHAT THE FUCK, THEY JUST SPENT AN ENTIRE EPISODE WALKING ACROSS THE ISLAND?

WHAT THE FUCK, THEY JUST SPENT AN ENTIRE EPISODE MAKING A GOLF COURSE?! YOU HAVE GOT TO BE FUCKING SHITTING ME.

LOST is one of the first television shows I can remember thinking worked better on DVD, simply because of the pace of the narrative. In fact, it seems to the extent that the writers may even have been conscious of how their show was being watched. Maybe they realized that people were consuming it en masse through DVD, and they felt less of an onus to give instant gratification every week. This show has been the tantric sex of television; we’ve been in the Masquerading Goat or some shit for six years, and we’re just finally about to rocket our loads and squirt our squirty stuff. Whatever that fluid is called.

So with the advent of viewers watching television shows four or five episodes at a time, writers seem more comfortable crafting storylines out over a longer period of actual time, since for most, the next episode may be no further than a remote click away. It’s allowed the characters to be fleshed out, before they were rocketed off on the the temporal mind-fuck that the show has become.

Or conversely, maybe the show has actually changed how we watch television out of necessity, since we can’t stand to be given the minuscule amount of information every week. Either way, we’ve shifted towards watching things large chunks at a time, as opposed to the serial method.

Maybe.

I could be wrong.

As well, LOST is also a show that has lent to the viewers the desire to rewatch the show, again exploiting the use of DVD or DVR. LOST is a fucking shitload of mythos and mysteries for anyone to carry around in their head at any one time. And let’s be honest, it’s been six years since we watched Oceanic 815 explode above the Dharma barracks, and there’s so much that’s occurred across so long a period of time, that must of it has rotted in our cortexes and shit.

LOST is the first show that I’ve actively wanted to rewatch just to understand how everything is tying together. It is such a dense show that rewinding and reexamining certain scenes and flashes upon the screen has become usual, for many people.

How many times has something popped up on the screen for but an instant, and you screamed out, “Oh shit! Rewind that!”. Really, LOST is the first show that’s made the rewind button a necessary button on my grimy, food-encrusted controller.

The show has turned the viewer into voracious scavengers. We’re all trying to connect dots, most of them leading to nowhere but false ends. But because anything and everything seems to be of such tremendous significance, we want to see the writing on every chalkboard, understand the dialogue from any Dharma videotape.

We’ve become active participants in the show, and it is through DVR and DVD that we have rewatched countless scenes. I’m that asshole friend of yours going, “Dude, wait, go back!”

And along with that, it has allowed people to become purveyors of knowledge. References to philosophers, physicists, ancient goddesses and other crazy shit. It’s engaged us at so many levels, and allowed a level of scrutiny and hypothesis that you don’t usually get in a television show. It has literally transcended the medium of television and spilled into alternate reality games, enormous sprawling wiki pages, heated, profanity-filled rants on Ventrillo, and other shit.

The show has changed how I watched TV, and it has influenced other TV shows to follow suit with dense mythos and mysteries, and slower, character-build storylines that are more palatable spread across four-episodes when you get to watch them on the ‘ole digital video disc. It’s gotten people interested in philosophers, weird physics shit that I’m sure the writers butcher and I comprehend even less, and really interacting as a community. It’s gotten me flattening my rewind button from over-use, and paying attention to every conversation and setting as if I’m going to find the recipe for the elixir of life, whether that’s wrong or not.

It’s changed me, man.

Tomorrow.

Christina Hendricks was at the DGA Awards, and Jesus Christ. That’s really all I can say. I’ve shied away from turning this place into an area where I just wank off to everyone that makes my loins boil – for the most part, I know. But trust me, I restrain myself – there would be women and men everywhere.

But c’mon. This is a real woman, full of beautiful real thunder. A stunning contrast to the emaciated, orange-skinned monstrosities that somehow pass off as the ideal woman in our vomit-culture. This lady has curves, and gorgeous porcelain skin. I’m madly in love. Plz marry me, kthnx. Click the above link for more pants-warming goodness.

Busy week. Tons of shit going on. LOST premiere. Playing Mass Effect 2. LOST premiere. Did I mention the LOST premiere? There’s the LOST premiere this week. I’m going to keep this short and sweet. I implore you to let me know what you’re up to this week, the countdown until Sunday, where we are treated to Corpulence and Advertisement night.

Monday Morning Commute. Every Monday I’m going to detail the various things I’m either currently or will be watching, reading, playing, and listening to in the next seven days. It’s Monday. You’ve got a long week of school, work, or compulsive masturbation to get through. Tell me the arts that you’re indulging in, to stave off suicide.

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[Remember That Time On LOST is a daily post running the entire month up until the season premiere of LOST on February 2nd. I’m going to just pick something awesome, noteworthy, or ludicrous about LOST when I wake up that morning, and hopefully get you geeks talking about it with me.]

At the end of Season Five, Jack Shephard decides that the best course of action in righting the misery of everyone on the Island is to detonate a nuclear bomb. It seems like an innovative, and creative way to advert suffering. How many people contemplate atomic vaporization as a salve to their ailments?

Jack Shephard, that’s who.

It seems a bit risky even pontificating at this point regarding what exactly happens at the end of Season Five, since the season premiere has inevitably leaked and people actually know. It seems like predicting the Red Coats to take the Rebels in the American Revolution after George Washington is already rocking out as the president.

But whatever, what can you do.

The idea is simple:

Dharma unleashes a pocket of eletctromagnetism-stuff sometime in 1977, and the result is the building of the Hatch, the failure of Desmond to push the buttons in the Hatch to disperse the energy, and Oceanic 815 crashing onto the Island. To prevent this, Jack decides he’s going to tell everyone to stop drilling, and that they’re treading on dangerous ground. Just like Faraday convinces Pierre Chang that he is from the future and has important shit in his head and should be listened to, Jack is like “Listen up, I have to tell you guys something serious, you’re all about to done fuck shit up.”

Oh wait, that would make sense.

So instead, Jack decides the only way to prevent all of this awful shit from happening is to detonate a hydrogen bomb near the pocket of energy, destroying it, and preventing them from ever unleashing the unstable energy source, and uh stuff. It’s a lot less subtle than the plan I proposed, but it’s epic as fuck and it excites us all a lot more.

The idea comes from a conversation that Jack has with Faraday. After blathering for an entire fucking season that the past is the past, and nothing can be changed, Faraday eventually comes across a brilliant realization: people are variables! I have to admit, that this is one of the few times during Season Five where I actively groaned internally. The entire speech came off like a an enormous diarrhea-barf of existential verbiage. As both a furious masturbator of existential philosophy, and fan of the erratic nature of human nature, it wasn’t the concept that bothered it.

It was how it was injected into the middle of a season where all we were told is whatever happened, happens.

Faraday: We’re like, people man. They’re the rogue elements, who like, do stuff, who are unpredictable. I read Dostoyevsky man, I know about shit!

I’m done complaining. I promise. I’m all for alternate realities, splitting from destined paths, and everything like that. I actually like the idea, which makes the last fourteen sentences irrelevant. Moving on.

What I want to happen:

So Jack has the idea that he can prevent the future from happening, acting as a variable in past events. What I’d like to happen is for this ideal to fail, and the show continues on the idea that the members of the Island are, in fact, the sources of their own misery. It would seem poetic that Jack is on the Island because his desire to detonate a nuclear bomb unleashed the pocket of energy which then had to be contained and dispersed every twenty-eight minutes or whatever.

However, that would result in half the cast dying, and we know that isn’t going to happen. Unless Jack has some sort of biotic barrier that prevent nuclear blasts from wiping him and the rest of the Island out, my theory isn’t going to happen.

What probably happened:

Reboot! Somehow, to some effect, Jack is correct. Their detonation of the bomb results in…something? Yeah, I guess I actually have no idea. There’s a lot of destiny being flung around like tits at Mardi Gras throughout the show. And I have to believe that all of these characters were called to the Island, by Jacob, for a reason. And even if they skirted being brought down on Oceanic 815, they’re going to be dragged their somehow. Eventually.

As well, I wouldn’t be surprised if the opening episode, titled LA X, starts with them at the crash of the plane. Maybe it isn’t Oceanic 815, but it’s them, crashed on the Island, again. They’re there for a reason, and they have to accomplish it. Jacob spits something like a circular notion at the end of Season 5, stating “It only ends once. Everything before that is progress.”

What if Oceanic 815 has been called to the Island over, and over, and over again? Groundhog’s Day type shit! Who the hell knows.

Jack’s bomb, did it solve anything, or did it just blow their crazy asses up?

Two days.

I understand that OL suffers from a lack of patronage on the Sabbath. But I just want to offer an early reminder to those who are stumbling their way around the site: Rafael Grampá’s Mesmo Delivery is being (re)released this Wednesday.

As a proud owner of an AdHouse Books’ edition, I can attest that Mesmo Delivery is the real fucking deal. In just under fifty pages, Grampá demonstrates a mastery of the comics medium that others spend thousands of pages striving for. As an artist, he tempers the putrid and violent with an appealing cartoon sensibility. Or perhaps he understands that the reader will feel at ease with the spiritually-Nickelodeon images, thus amplifying the effect of decapitations and pants-pissings.

Again, I won’t harp right now. Between my previous feature, the upcoming Variant Covers and my probable feature for this week’s Images & Words, Rafael Grampá is bound to have some solid real estate at OL. Just make sure you buy this book — in addition to the novella, Dark Horse is tossing in some bonus shit as well. Summarily, there’s no reason to not support this rising star.

[Remember That Time On LOST is a daily post running the entire month up until the season premiere of LOST on February 2nd. I’m going to just pick something awesome, noteworthy, or ludicrous about LOST when I wake up that morning, and hopefully get you geeks talking about it with me.]

Raw Fucking Awesome:

Ben: Okay, listen to me very carefully. I need you all to do exactly what I say. In a minute we have to run from this house as fast as we can At that moment, when I give the order, I want you to head straight for the tree line.

Hurley: You mean towards the guys with the guns?

Ben: No, we want to be as far away from them as possible.

I spent fifteen minutes rewinding Netflix to try and get this conversation as accurate as possible. Find an inaccuracy? Kiss my ass.

Summon thy smoke monster, summon thy goosebumps! One of my favorite moments on LOST is when Ben summoned the Smoke Monster in The Shape of Things to Come. My huggies were absolutely overflowing with brown excitement. One minute Linus is disappearing into some secret closet, and the next moment there is a bellow of death and the crackling of electricity. There is the vague sensation that something epic is about to occur, but I couldn’t believe what my brain was telling me.

Brain: Dude, he just summoned the Smoke Monster.

Me: No way, he couldn’t do that.

Brain: It’s coming dude, prepare for it.

Me: WHAT. WHAT. WHAT. WHAT.

Brain: Told you.

Me: Quiet!

Unfettered, jaw-dropping destruction is the only way I can describe the scene. Smokey had tore some ass up in his day, for sure. He laid waste to Boone, he gave a respectable ass-whupping to Eko, and he tried to drag Locke to his obliteration. But this was a different side of Smokey than we had ever seen. Smokey had been drinking green tea all damn day. He was hopped up and rocking out to Cowboys from Hell when Linus went into that secret closet and cried in his nasally voice:

Come hither,   Black Cloud of Annihilation, I Humbly Request You Rain Death!

And Smoke Monster was like:

Hell yeah! BRT, d00d!

Mercenaries were ganked and crushed and smashed into gorgeous gooey little bits. Lightning crackled and Linus and Sawyer and Claire and Hurley stared at a rather impressive manifestation of death. The cries of death and Smokey slowly gave way to an eerie quiet, and then there was silence.

I sat there completely rocked, trying to wrap my feeble brain around what I had just seen. When Ben summoned the Smoke Monster, it didn’t just give me one of my favorite moments in the entire show. It took the preconceptions about Smokey and threw them out the door. They landed in the same pile that all my preconceived notions about LOST land in, which is rather voluminous and reaches an impressive height.

Smokey can be summoned? What the fuck?

PREVIOUSLY ON LOST, they gave the impression that Smoke was this runaway formless demon thingamajig of doom. It seemed to deal out fatalities to anyone within its perimeter, displaying no particularities about who was felled or where. The whole idea was backed up by the fact that the Others still needed Dharma’s Sonic Fence to protect them when they inhabited their barracks. You want to argue they were just using it to keep out boars and mercenaries? C’mon dudes.

C’mon!

So the idea that Smokey could be tamed by some sort of summation was a significant paradigm shift. Just what the fuck was this Ball of Black? Who was controlling it? Ben showed that he had the means to summon Smokey, but could he control it? I don’t think the two are mutually exclusive.

What if Smokey is something of an independent spirit, but still answers to a higher calling? As an analogy – say there is a droid who operates under its own volition, and can do whatever it pleases. However, upon flipping a switch, it immediately has to do whatever its master demands.

If I’m going to begin flinging spaghetti at the wall, I’d argue that Smokey is a servant of the Island, and desperately hates its status as such. It has been corralled by the Others, via Jacob, and while it must do what they demand, it spends the rest of its days being pissed off and hating its situation. Which sounds like someone else.

In case you’ve missed it, I think that Smokey is Jacob’s Nemesis. Consider: Jacob’s Nemesis seems clearly subservient to Jacob, as though he is somehow bound to Jacob. He wants nothing more than to kill him, but he cannot carry out this wish. Instead he has to stare out into the sea and wish he could just go catch the plague in England or some shit. Whatever was going on in the Civilized World at the time.

But he can’t. He’s bound.

Just like? Just like Smokey! Smokey clearly serves the Island, whether or not it wants to. And since it spends a good amount of time beating whoever gets close to it into paste, I’m going to say that it resents its situation. We also know that Smokey can take the form of people – having appeared as Eko’s brother, Ben’s daughter, and I’m going to postulate, Locke. God only knows how/why Jacob’s Nemesis was reduce to Smokey’s form, but if Smokey can take human forms, and somehow Jacob’s Nemesis is appearing as Locke, it doesn’t seem impossible that they are one and the same.

All of this crazy conjecture and mind-warping started when Ben summoned Smokey. He went from some sort of rampaging immateriality into something that can be caged and controlled. And oh yeah, seeing the Smoke Monster lay waste to an entire mercenary group was pretty boss as well.

Tonight, despite my blood oath, I went back to Beacon Hill Wine & Gourmet to pick up my weekly syrup. No, not sizzurp! You know, beer! The sweet ambrosia with which the gods wined socialized and made merry! The GOOD STUFF!!!

Anyways, I hung my head and marched into the very store that I had sworn off a mere two months ago. I wasn’t happy about this decision, but I was in a time crunch and thus forfeited my foolish pride. Which, quite frankly, was really hard for me. Some days, foolish pride is the only ace I have up my sleeve.

To my delight, this second trip to Beacon Hill Wine & Gourmet was actually enjoyable. Whereas the cashier during the first excursion was a pretentious dongle hell bent on insulting me and then taking my cash, this second adventure saw a helpful young lady rocking the register. Truthfully, she talked and smiled as though she had been pounding Jolt Cola all damn day. But maybe that made her all the more eager to help me. I don’t know. All I do know is that thanks to a caffeine-riddled bloodstream of one female clerk, Beacon Hill Wine & Gourmet have officially been taken off of my shit list. Kudos.

Keep Reading »

[images & words is the comic book pick-of-the-week at OL. equal parts review and diatribe, the post highlights the most memorable/infuriating/entertaining book released that wednesday]

It seems as though a number of my favorite creators enjoy starting projects, getting me super-pumped about them, and then relegating them to the status of indefinite hiatus/who fucking knows?/cancelled. Do I ever expect to see the conclusion to Frank Miller and Jim Lee’s All-Star Batman and Robin? Short answer — no. Does it chap my ass that Warren Ellis’ Doktor Sleepless hasn’t been on a regular schedule for over a year? Let’s just say I’ve been wearing a lot of loose-fitting undies.

Fortunately, one of the guys on whom I can rely to finish his projects also happens to be one of my favorites. While the haters love to hold him in contempt (complaining that all his books are essentially the comics equivalent of popcorn-flicks), I cannot sing enough praises for the mighty Mark Millar. In the last few years, this guy has successfully completed some of the most entertaining miniseries and arcs. An incomplete and poorly arranged list:

Wolverine: Old Man Logan

Marvel 1985

Ultimates

Ultimates 2

Ultimate Avengers

Civil War

Wanted

When it comes to cartoon-magazines about superheroes, Millar’s consistency and excellence is absolutely unrivaled. The guy is a fucking titan of the industry, a writer whose own fandom is translated into passion and energy on the page. He might not be the mind-juggernaut that is Grant Morrison or a creator-of-continuity like Geoff Johns, but Mark Millar is a fucking boss.

So it is with the utmost pleasure that I present this edition of OL’s comic pick-of-week:

Kick-Ass #8

For any of you jerkies who’ve been out of the funny-book game since 2008, Kick-Ass is an exploration of what would happen if a comic book fanboy tried to become a superhero in the real world. Of course, shit goes wacky and all sorts of wannabes & imposters start showing up. Without giving too much away, I’ll tell you this — the first issue ends with protagonist Dave Lizewski getting the shit beat out of him during his first foray into the business of superheroism. Essentially, the combined effort of Millar and legendary artist John Romita Jr., the series is actually marked by its vulgarity, humor, and ultra-violent action scenes. In the best way possible.

Seven issues later and we’ve finally arrived at the end of the first arc. Now complete, I have no reservation in saying that this initial chapter of the Kick-Ass saga unrelentingly fires on all cylinders. Just as the book has done during its entire run, issue eight keeps the reader alternating between a state of jaw-dropping shock and belly-clutchin’ guffawing. We see the climatic showdown between the newly aligned Hit-Girl/Kick-Ass and the mobsters who’ve been hunting them. And what a climax it is.

Again, I really don’t want to spoil this issue but I will offer a look at some of its key ingredients:

Flamethrower. Castration. Cocaine. JRJR splash page. Child endangerment. Ben Grimm reference. Meat cleaver.

Trust me, it’s sick.

If the Kick-Ass movie is even half-faithful to this first arc (and word around the `net is that it’s full-faithful), we’re all in for a treat. Just make sure to read the comic first.

Because Comics is King.

[Remember That Time On LOST is a daily post running the entire month up until the season premiere of LOST on February 2nd. I’m going to just pick something awesome, noteworthy, or ludicrous about LOST when I wake up that morning, and hopefully get you geeks talking about it with me.]

When we first met Dicky Alpert, he was just a smarmy dude representing the false biosciencetechthing firm, Mittelos Bioscience. He was trying to get Juliet to come to the Island and unbreak all the uterus-areas of the women on the Island. No one could get their baby makers working, and it was an understandable source of consternation for the Others. So they sent their right-hand man out to recruit the beautiful, intelligent woman, who unlike The Woman Who Steals Aaron, doesn’t seem to spread for anything with a pulse.

(Though to be fair, both Sawyer, Jack, and Malcolm from Firefly are all fine specimens.)

I fell in love with the dude from the beginning, since he seemed to have the ability to ram buses into meddling ex-husbands, and had a prominent, strong set of eyes. There was a mystery to him, and I dug that. Obviously. If I didn’t dig mysteries, I probably would have thrown my pair of LOST underwear into the local creak a long time ago.

And I thought that was that. A bit player in the overall mythos of the show.

Wrong.

Double wrong.

My boy Dicky Alpert shows up again in the same season, looking like the Prince of Persia. And that’s when I realized there was more to this dude than meets the eye. For starters, the dude was on the Island in 1973. And aside from having shitty hair and dressing like someone from a Phish concert, the dude hasn’t aged.

This is the part where you say, alright, what the fuck is going on.

Alpert is the oldest member of the Others, from all my studies. My studies generally consist of whatever my caffeine-rotted brain can recall, as well as any minimal reading I have done over at Lostpedia. And that makes him intriguing as fuck. What the hell is a timeless, gorgeous man, doing on the Island? Eventually, we find out the answer. He’s working for Jacob.

Say it with me, what   the fuck?

HYPERTEXTUAL BRIEF ASIDE:

Here’s another tidbit you may or may not know. Like a lot of characters on the show, Richard Alpert is named after a real dude, though he has changed his name to Ram Dass. He was a Harvard professor who experimented heavily with LSD. Dude seems like the man:

Via Wikipedia:

Alpert accepted a permanent position at Harvard, where he worked with the Social Relations Department, the Psychology Department, the Graduate School of Education, and the Health Service, where he was a therapist. He was also awarded research contracts with Yale and Stanford. However, perhaps most notable was the work he was doing with his close friend and associate, Dr. Timothy Leary.

Having only recently obtained his pilot’s license, Alpert flew his private plane to Cuernavaca, Mexico, where Leary first introduced him to teonanácatl, the Magic Mushrooms of Mexico. By the time Alpert made it back to America, Leary had already consulted with Aldous Huxley, who was visiting at M.I.T., and through Huxley and a number of graduate students they were able to get in touch with Sandoz, which had produced a synthetic component of ergot wheat fungus called LSD. Alpert and Leary brought a test batch of both substances back to Harvard, where they conducted the Harvard Psilocybin Project and experimented with LSD relatively privately.

Moving on.

Alpert comes off to me like Jacob’s right-hand man. While there’s always a leader of the Others, who Richard then assists, I can’t help but feel that he ultimately answers only to Jacob. He’s like the guy who makes sure the one “in charge” doesn’t fuck up, because if he does, he’s going to stab him and roll him into the mud.

He’s done quite a variety of things in his days, from trying to recruit Locke as a child, to assisting Eloise Hawking while she ran the show. He’s always been timeless, accrediting that shit to some effect that Jacob has had on him. He answers to Ricardus, and speaks Latin. Ladies, he’s also disease-free, like dogs, and will bring your Mom flowers.

Where does Richard come from though?

I have my guess, probably the same as yours:

The fucking Black Rock!

It’s a blind stab, but at the end of Season Five, we see a ship coming ashore while Jacob and his Nemesis sit along the beach. The natural inclination is to say that shit is the Black Rock, but the idea that Alpert is on the boat is just a guess. It seems that there weren’t any “Others” at the team of the boat’s arrival, since Jacob   presents himself out in the open, which he hasn’t done at any other point on the show. Who the fuck knows.

Whatever the case, Alpert is one of my favorite mysteries of the show. It isn’t just that he’s timeless, or where he comes from, but rather his role in the entire play. If he was Jacob’s assistant, why does he stand idly as Jacob is murdered? Does he embrace fate, has he seen the future?

Or perhaps he is Jacob’s second assistant, to replace Jacob’s Nemesis/Smokey when he revolted. There’s a lot of theories bandied about that suggest that Jacob’s Nemesis can’t kill Jacob himself because he is bound in some way to him. Who knows, maybe it is that bond that makes one ageless, and when Smokey was like, fuck this, I quit, Jacob asked Dicky if he wanted in on the whole immortality thing.

Either way, it’s interesting to see what shall become of our boy, now that his BFF has been slain in his Temple of Doom or whatever. Does he answer to Locke/Facob? Or will he side with Ilana, seeing as that she seems to work for Jacob, and he was the only one to provide the correct answer to “What lies in the shadow of the Statue?”

I don’t fucking know! And I love it.

Renee thinks she’s all edgy because she just cut off some dude’s thumb last episode, but I don’t think she’s very bad ass. I used to like her more when she was a red hot and her thunderous cleavage carried every scene. But now that she’s emo and she listens to H.I.M, I’m not really feeling her.

It’s five episodes in, and the plot is already incomprehensible. Renee and Zia or whatever the fuck the guy’s name are going to meet with some guy to pretend they have some sort of deal. And this guy Vladimir, is who exactly? I have no idea. Vladimir though, that’s an original name. What next, they going to show some Russian dude pounding vodka?

Oh, there we go! Operation: Stereotype is complete!

My girlfriend told me that she thought the bleeding, drunken, thumbless Russian who Renee alludes to banging underage chicks is cute in a dumb goofy sort of way, which explains a lot about why she is attracted to me.

So the two of them are going to Vladimir, the guy, to get something. And whacky thumbless guy makes references towards Vlad doing icky things to Renee in their past or something. Jack looks on brooding and upset. I’m not really sure why though? And you know what’s the source of my confusion?

The fact that every fucking season, there’s a different cast of characters, and there’s absolutely no time to build a rapport with any of them. I don’t give a fuck about Renee.

Oh shit, Jack has a fucking iPad?!

And speaking of characters I don’t give a fuck about, there’s Dana Walsh. Dana Walsh is played by Katee Sackhoff, who dazzled my pants as Starbuck in Battlestar Galactica. Sadly, every time she’s on the screen on 24, I want to kill myself.

Somehow the writers think that the viewer gives a shit about the plight of some new character we’ve just been introduced to. How are we supposed to care about the past of a virgin character, exactly? I want to see Jack shooting people and being gruff! Instead, we’re treated to dozens of seconds which feel like hundreds of hours watching her arguing with her yokel ex-boyfriend. I cannot fathom how anyone in the writers’ meeting thought this was entertaining.

So Starbuck, I mean Dana Walsh, fled her hometown to reinvent herself, and her hick boyfriend found her even though she changed her name. And somehow, she’s supposed to exploit data streams, or something, to get him a “six figure payout”…What the fuck does that even mean? Is this the plot to Superman III?

Why doesn’t she just tell her supercop fiance that her ex-boyfriend is back and acting like an asshole? It seems so obvious. I tried to fly this by my girlfriend and she was all “Oh, like you wouldn’t be upset if I had hidden an entire life from you?” and then I didn’t respond to her valid point.

I’m just saying, if it was between that and being exploited by Cleetus, I’d opt for the former.

All of the subplots suck, which is the problem, well, every god damn season. I don’t care about Dana Walsh, ex-hick, except to poke fun at my significant other who grew up riding a cow to school. I don’t care about President Slumdog Millionaire and his shitty made-up country, and I don’t care about sympathetic Russian terrorist whose brother is dying of uranium poisoning.

Show. Jack. Shooting. People.

And then of course the last ten minutes or so are really tense and enjoyable. Of course. There’s always just enough awesomeness to keep me watching. Because I will always be a glutton for gunshots and car chases. As Jack tries to save Renee, she tells Leoben from Battlestar that she doesn’t care if she lives or not. Seriously, someone has got to take the Deathcab for Cutie away from her and crunch a Prozac into her alcohol of choice. She drops a single tear, and we all wept for her plight.

Thanksfully, Vlad knows a quality set of rib bangers when he seems them, and he lets her live. So they can go do something, to someone, to arrange a buy for something, or the such, which will lead to some sort of information. I think. Who cares. Ideally, it will lead to Jack shooting Vladimir in the head with a shotgun while falling out of a helicopter.