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All just where-my-head-is-now nonsense, but it's here if anyone wants to read it.
There's a moment in "Lost" season 4, when Ben's daughter has just been murdered in front of him, and he mutters to himself, "He changed the rules." I realized, after recovering a bit from the whirlwind end of the season, that this is the secret to the show's success, and it's missing this that made me give up on watching it the first time around. In the first season you get tricked into thinking there's a formula (because so many TV shows have one) and to some extent they do stay with the action-on-the-island/flashback routine (though in season 4 those turn into flash-forwards, which despite the cheating involved made me sit up and go "cool"). But every season begins and ends with a game-changer: in the first season you get to know the characters, and then there's the hatch; in the second season you get to know the characters more (this was where it dragged a bit for me, especially since everything began to center on Locke, and I can't stand Locke), and then you get Henry Gale and the hatch blowing up and the advent of Ben; the third season (which I missed the beginning of as it aired, or I never would have quit) starts with a wallop of a rules change as you see where the Others live and get to know them from the inside. And then we get to start fooling with time, which always turns me on, even if it's ridiculous. It's the non-formula of a constantly expanding universe, and although the more supernatural aspects still make me cringe on occasion, it's all done cleverly enough to make me accept most of the premises. (And where I don't I just laugh out loud and keep going.)
The other thing that makes the show work so well is that it uses a large ensemble effectively, which is really unusual (contrast "Heroes" which did this well at first and then fractured and fell apart). I have characters I like and characters who really annoy me, and quite a few who annoy me when I'm not loving them, and how the characters are used is often problematic, but they are all clearly-drawn and effective. And I mourn them when they die, which happens frequently (although we still have flashbacks and... ghosts?). I'm not sure why the leadership tug-of-war had to be between men only, but the contrast between Jack and Locke is a good linchpin, and then Ben gets added in and sparks start striking. *has a little fangirl moment* This is remarkable in that none of them is particularly likable. (I do like Jack, about half the time, when he's not being stubbornly stupid. This may be less than half the time, come to think of it.) They are all three amazingly determined, though, which makes the struggle real while they're all making horrible decisions right and left and you just wish Rose and Bernard would start an insurrection and declare a dictatorship with Sawyer as head of security. And I admit to lots of moments of sympathy with Ben as he manipulates and stabs his way toward his mysterious goals, although this is mostly because *see fangirl moment*. (He may be a totally sexless character but my God he can move the island.)
(This is also a great show for spot-the-actor, especially for PoI, but other shows too: Diana from "White Collar," what are you doing hanging from that parachute? Sorry you only got a few episodes before Locke knifed you in the back.)
So, I'm looking forward to seeing how the rules change again in the last two seasons!
(Incidentally, I realized that I did the rules change thing to a less dramatic degree in my novels, with the introduction near the end of each book of a new aspect that expands the plot and widens the characters' world; it's narrative instinct, really, but it doesn't get taken advantage of as often as it could.)
More examples, just to keep myself amused, of how Michael Emerson could totally play my man-of-many-names (same spoiler caveats):
*
Shutting his eyes, George leaned into the hand. He felt buttons unfastening, and the shift of Bennett's weight to the deck, and then a mouth closed around him. At first neither of them moved, though the motion of the boat rocked him back and forth and dissolved him into delicious languor.
Then he thrust once, and the mouth slid away. "It's not much use this time, though," said Bennett's voice, but drier and harder, losing its rich amusement. "Should I just get you off so you can think, Mr. Merrill?"
The voice had transformed itself fully, and George knew it too well; he stumbled backwards away from pleasure, already diminished and tucking himself away, before he opened his eyes. "Not that desperate, I see," said Friedman, getting to his feet. "Good. Take the helm if you would; these shoals are dangerous."
The tiller was lashed in place; George released it, but the boat still guided itself by the steady wind in the middle of the endless sea. No rocks were visible below the surface. He looked forward and saw Simone in the bows, swinging the lead.
"No bottom with this line, chéri," she called.
"What does she know?" said Friedman. "Look again."
Over the side the fish still swam, but now all head and tail, like a river of golden spermatozoa, like... tadpoles. As George watched, they sprouted legs in ones and twos and fours, their tails shrank away and their bodies widened, until there were thousands of golden frogs in the water, swimming with push and shove, tumbling in the wake of the boat. Simone cried out in joy and clapped her hands.
Then from under the surface rose, with the velocity of a diving Stuka, an enormous primeval creature, all mouth and thrusting dark muscular body, its eyes sightless. The mouth swallowed frogs; the body twisted and gulped and sucked, and the gold in the water diminished until there was nothing left. And then the creature shuddered -- George grasped the tiller convulsively as the waves threatened to splash aboard -- and a river of vomit came out of its mouth, green and black, profaning the blue of the sea.
The monster dove again, and now George could see that the vomit was frogs, half-dead and twitching, covered in muck and ooze and leaking dark fluids, olive and aubergine and shit-brown. A thousand thousand slimy things, living on in agony. The horror stretched as far as the horizon. The whiteness of the sails was the one purity left in this watery world.
Simone whimpered.
"This is my blood," said Friedman. "Drink this in remembrance of me." A hard shove between George's shoulder blades, and he fell, with only time to fill his lungs before he went under. He clawed his way to the surface, wiped frog guts out of his eyes, and saw the boat now out of reach, sails bellied full with the wind. Friedman had Simone in his arms and they were kissing; George could see her unbuttoning Friedman's shirt, and Friedman's hands burying themselves in her hair, and then he took a wave of slimy water in the mouth and began to sink.
*
*
She turned to Will; he had knelt down at the tideline and was using a large shell he'd acquired on his recent wanderings to scoop up damp sand and pile it in a heap. "Why don't you care for appointments?" she asked.
"It was a foolish thing to say, wasn't it? Given that my whole life seems to be ruled by where I must be when. I just like having some choice over when I start out to keep them."
"I picked the right name for you." He quirked his head in her direction, inquiring, but kept digging. "Free Will."
A tiny smile, instantly suppressed. "I wish." He began to pat the sand into a rectangular foundation. "You know the story of the appointment in Samarra?"
"No."
"It used to be better known. A servant sees Death in the marketplace in Baghdad, feels he is being threatened, and borrows his master's horse to ride away to Samarra to escape. Then the master goes to the marketplace and asks Death why the threatening gesture, and Death replies, 'It was not a threat but a start of surprise at seeing him here in Baghdad, for I had an appointment with him tonight in Samarra.'" Will started digging a tidy moat around his foundation. "It is rather like that with me, except that I already know about the appointment, and am afraid I may end up begging for a horse."
"What was Death doing in Baghdad?"
Will grinned at her. "Multi-tasking." He continued creating his moat, scraping out channels in the direction of the sea. Janet looked down the beach at the gentle waves, closer now. The tidal shift was considerable here, and there would be a lot less beach at high tide. Their path back was safe, but some of the fishermen further down the coast would need to be careful not to be marooned.
"Why are we here?" she asked.
"We have an appointment. Would you like to hear another story?"
"If you insist."
"It's about a fisherman; it seems appropriate to the location. This particular poor man always casts his net four times a day, trusting in Allah to provide him a good catch, but on this day his first cast brings him only a dead donkey, the second a vessel full of mud and sand, the third bones and broken glass. But he still trusts, and he casts again, and this time he brings in a valuable copper bottle stopped with lead."
"What happened to all the fish?"
"Funny about that. All the best fisherman stories depend either on a really big fish, or a magical fish, or absolutely no fish at all. Or giving up fishing to follow a prophet. Anyway, he decides to open the bottle, because impulsive behavior is a characteristic of the sort of fisherman who ends up in stories, and out comes a genie, and the genie says... well, that part is long and complicated, and involves King Solomon, which allows you to make jokes about my names, so let's assume that done."
"Peace be with you," said Janet.
"And with your spirit. To summarize, the genie is stuck in the bottle. And for the first hundred years he vows that whoever sets him free will gain eternal riches. No one does. Then for the second hundred years he swears to open up for whomever frees him the buried treasures of the earth. Oil, one assumes. But it doesn't happen. And then" -- Will was building towers now -- "he gets really angry, and says, 'I will kill the man who frees me, allowing him only to choose the manner of his death!' Guess when our fisherman comes on the scene?"
"Goodness, he did have bad luck. How did he choose to die?"
"Oh, he didn't die. He used the old 'how can you possibly fit in this little bottle when you're so huge' trick, popped the stopper in, and threatened to throw the bottle back in the sea. The genie did his bidding after that. Mostly."
"So are you identifying with the genie or with the fisherman?"
"I am merely providing entertainment."
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yunitsa and penwiper26, if I start quoting the Beatrice-absolution scene here, you will shoot me, right? :)
And I know this is all me crushing on ME because he can play characters like this one (whom I invented before I'd seen ME in anything) but it's still a very odd brain-trick. Gah.
There's a moment in "Lost" season 4, when Ben's daughter has just been murdered in front of him, and he mutters to himself, "He changed the rules." I realized, after recovering a bit from the whirlwind end of the season, that this is the secret to the show's success, and it's missing this that made me give up on watching it the first time around. In the first season you get tricked into thinking there's a formula (because so many TV shows have one) and to some extent they do stay with the action-on-the-island/flashback routine (though in season 4 those turn into flash-forwards, which despite the cheating involved made me sit up and go "cool"). But every season begins and ends with a game-changer: in the first season you get to know the characters, and then there's the hatch; in the second season you get to know the characters more (this was where it dragged a bit for me, especially since everything began to center on Locke, and I can't stand Locke), and then you get Henry Gale and the hatch blowing up and the advent of Ben; the third season (which I missed the beginning of as it aired, or I never would have quit) starts with a wallop of a rules change as you see where the Others live and get to know them from the inside. And then we get to start fooling with time, which always turns me on, even if it's ridiculous. It's the non-formula of a constantly expanding universe, and although the more supernatural aspects still make me cringe on occasion, it's all done cleverly enough to make me accept most of the premises. (And where I don't I just laugh out loud and keep going.)
The other thing that makes the show work so well is that it uses a large ensemble effectively, which is really unusual (contrast "Heroes" which did this well at first and then fractured and fell apart). I have characters I like and characters who really annoy me, and quite a few who annoy me when I'm not loving them, and how the characters are used is often problematic, but they are all clearly-drawn and effective. And I mourn them when they die, which happens frequently (although we still have flashbacks and... ghosts?). I'm not sure why the leadership tug-of-war had to be between men only, but the contrast between Jack and Locke is a good linchpin, and then Ben gets added in and sparks start striking. *has a little fangirl moment* This is remarkable in that none of them is particularly likable. (I do like Jack, about half the time, when he's not being stubbornly stupid. This may be less than half the time, come to think of it.) They are all three amazingly determined, though, which makes the struggle real while they're all making horrible decisions right and left and you just wish Rose and Bernard would start an insurrection and declare a dictatorship with Sawyer as head of security. And I admit to lots of moments of sympathy with Ben as he manipulates and stabs his way toward his mysterious goals, although this is mostly because *see fangirl moment*. (He may be a totally sexless character but my God he can move the island.)
(This is also a great show for spot-the-actor, especially for PoI, but other shows too: Diana from "White Collar," what are you doing hanging from that parachute? Sorry you only got a few episodes before Locke knifed you in the back.)
So, I'm looking forward to seeing how the rules change again in the last two seasons!
(Incidentally, I realized that I did the rules change thing to a less dramatic degree in my novels, with the introduction near the end of each book of a new aspect that expands the plot and widens the characters' world; it's narrative instinct, really, but it doesn't get taken advantage of as often as it could.)
More examples, just to keep myself amused, of how Michael Emerson could totally play my man-of-many-names (same spoiler caveats):
*
Shutting his eyes, George leaned into the hand. He felt buttons unfastening, and the shift of Bennett's weight to the deck, and then a mouth closed around him. At first neither of them moved, though the motion of the boat rocked him back and forth and dissolved him into delicious languor.
Then he thrust once, and the mouth slid away. "It's not much use this time, though," said Bennett's voice, but drier and harder, losing its rich amusement. "Should I just get you off so you can think, Mr. Merrill?"
The voice had transformed itself fully, and George knew it too well; he stumbled backwards away from pleasure, already diminished and tucking himself away, before he opened his eyes. "Not that desperate, I see," said Friedman, getting to his feet. "Good. Take the helm if you would; these shoals are dangerous."
The tiller was lashed in place; George released it, but the boat still guided itself by the steady wind in the middle of the endless sea. No rocks were visible below the surface. He looked forward and saw Simone in the bows, swinging the lead.
"No bottom with this line, chéri," she called.
"What does she know?" said Friedman. "Look again."
Over the side the fish still swam, but now all head and tail, like a river of golden spermatozoa, like... tadpoles. As George watched, they sprouted legs in ones and twos and fours, their tails shrank away and their bodies widened, until there were thousands of golden frogs in the water, swimming with push and shove, tumbling in the wake of the boat. Simone cried out in joy and clapped her hands.
Then from under the surface rose, with the velocity of a diving Stuka, an enormous primeval creature, all mouth and thrusting dark muscular body, its eyes sightless. The mouth swallowed frogs; the body twisted and gulped and sucked, and the gold in the water diminished until there was nothing left. And then the creature shuddered -- George grasped the tiller convulsively as the waves threatened to splash aboard -- and a river of vomit came out of its mouth, green and black, profaning the blue of the sea.
The monster dove again, and now George could see that the vomit was frogs, half-dead and twitching, covered in muck and ooze and leaking dark fluids, olive and aubergine and shit-brown. A thousand thousand slimy things, living on in agony. The horror stretched as far as the horizon. The whiteness of the sails was the one purity left in this watery world.
Simone whimpered.
"This is my blood," said Friedman. "Drink this in remembrance of me." A hard shove between George's shoulder blades, and he fell, with only time to fill his lungs before he went under. He clawed his way to the surface, wiped frog guts out of his eyes, and saw the boat now out of reach, sails bellied full with the wind. Friedman had Simone in his arms and they were kissing; George could see her unbuttoning Friedman's shirt, and Friedman's hands burying themselves in her hair, and then he took a wave of slimy water in the mouth and began to sink.
*
*
She turned to Will; he had knelt down at the tideline and was using a large shell he'd acquired on his recent wanderings to scoop up damp sand and pile it in a heap. "Why don't you care for appointments?" she asked.
"It was a foolish thing to say, wasn't it? Given that my whole life seems to be ruled by where I must be when. I just like having some choice over when I start out to keep them."
"I picked the right name for you." He quirked his head in her direction, inquiring, but kept digging. "Free Will."
A tiny smile, instantly suppressed. "I wish." He began to pat the sand into a rectangular foundation. "You know the story of the appointment in Samarra?"
"No."
"It used to be better known. A servant sees Death in the marketplace in Baghdad, feels he is being threatened, and borrows his master's horse to ride away to Samarra to escape. Then the master goes to the marketplace and asks Death why the threatening gesture, and Death replies, 'It was not a threat but a start of surprise at seeing him here in Baghdad, for I had an appointment with him tonight in Samarra.'" Will started digging a tidy moat around his foundation. "It is rather like that with me, except that I already know about the appointment, and am afraid I may end up begging for a horse."
"What was Death doing in Baghdad?"
Will grinned at her. "Multi-tasking." He continued creating his moat, scraping out channels in the direction of the sea. Janet looked down the beach at the gentle waves, closer now. The tidal shift was considerable here, and there would be a lot less beach at high tide. Their path back was safe, but some of the fishermen further down the coast would need to be careful not to be marooned.
"Why are we here?" she asked.
"We have an appointment. Would you like to hear another story?"
"If you insist."
"It's about a fisherman; it seems appropriate to the location. This particular poor man always casts his net four times a day, trusting in Allah to provide him a good catch, but on this day his first cast brings him only a dead donkey, the second a vessel full of mud and sand, the third bones and broken glass. But he still trusts, and he casts again, and this time he brings in a valuable copper bottle stopped with lead."
"What happened to all the fish?"
"Funny about that. All the best fisherman stories depend either on a really big fish, or a magical fish, or absolutely no fish at all. Or giving up fishing to follow a prophet. Anyway, he decides to open the bottle, because impulsive behavior is a characteristic of the sort of fisherman who ends up in stories, and out comes a genie, and the genie says... well, that part is long and complicated, and involves King Solomon, which allows you to make jokes about my names, so let's assume that done."
"Peace be with you," said Janet.
"And with your spirit. To summarize, the genie is stuck in the bottle. And for the first hundred years he vows that whoever sets him free will gain eternal riches. No one does. Then for the second hundred years he swears to open up for whomever frees him the buried treasures of the earth. Oil, one assumes. But it doesn't happen. And then" -- Will was building towers now -- "he gets really angry, and says, 'I will kill the man who frees me, allowing him only to choose the manner of his death!' Guess when our fisherman comes on the scene?"
"Goodness, he did have bad luck. How did he choose to die?"
"Oh, he didn't die. He used the old 'how can you possibly fit in this little bottle when you're so huge' trick, popped the stopper in, and threatened to throw the bottle back in the sea. The genie did his bidding after that. Mostly."
"So are you identifying with the genie or with the fisherman?"
"I am merely providing entertainment."
yunitsa and penwiper26, if I start quoting the Beatrice-absolution scene here, you will shoot me, right? :)And I know this is all me crushing on ME because he can play characters like this one (whom I invented before I'd seen ME in anything) but it's still a very odd brain-trick. Gah.
