I Had To Go Back: Flashing Forward to LOST Season Four!

Season Four of LOST represented a noticeable change in pace and structure for a show that was previously restricted by both.  Freed from the space of a full 22-episode American season of television, and given a series end date to aim for, this batch of fourteen hours feels like it moves incredibly fast, picking up more and more velocity as each episode passes.

This is both a gift and a curse for LOST!  It’s a gift in that the second half of its narrative gets to dispense with its signature teasing and deferring and can-kicking and start addressing mysteries both old and new with relative quickness. We’re introduced to new characters, then provided context regarding what they’re all about pretty much immediately.  Everyone addresses obvious conflicts right off the bat rather than making a concerned face then ignoring them (at one point, John Locke straight up asks Ben “what is the Monster?”).  Most importantly, LOST confidently explores the limits of the types of stories it can tell, in one instance even jumping through time and space in one episode.  This would prove to be a crucial development for the final two seasons, which expand on this ambition exponentially.

However, something that is undeniably missing from an otherwise stellar season of LOST are those pockets of air that allow you (and the show) to breathe.  Turns out that the much-maligned “filler” wasn’t such a bad thing; there is no “Tricia Tanaka is Dead” or “Outlaws” to be found in Season Four, and it’s a shame.  Those were the episodes, light on overarching mythology though they may be, where we really got to see our future faves develop, their personalities fleshed out before inevitably throwing them into life-and-death situations.  Hell, without “filler”, we’d never have such joyful shit as the island golf course, ya know?  There’s nothing really like that in Season Four, nor really the last three seasons in total, and you can definitely feel the loss.  For better or worse, LOST is mostly all business from here on out.

That said, watching Season Four live (minus one major bit of real-world frustration halfway through; we’ll talk about it) felt invigorating after an up-and-down Season Three.  All of a sudden, my favorite show was all forward momentum and propulsion, where it had previously been stalling and jerking.  We certainly had left the weeks and weeks of being locked in polar bear cages behind.

To celebrate this truncated season of LOST, then, here are four notable things to highlight!

1. The flashforwards

The first major change in Season Four of LOST is its continued pursuit of the story format alteration the Season Three finale twist provided.  Yes, we now are able to flash forward in time and check in on our characters years later, when some have made it off the island and are just absolutely miserable.  Hurley is back in the Santa Rosa mental institution, Jack and Kate are trying their best to play house and raise baby Aaron (Claire’s child,) Kate’s trying to beat her prison rap sheet, Sayid is now Ben’s personal assassin and John Locke….well, John Locke is dead.

From the outside, it’s a simple change.  But in practice, it’s a crazy mix-up to the status quo, and it really went a long way into making the show exciting again.  It was no secret that the show had begun searching for scraps at the bottom of the flashback barrel in order to maintain the “LOST format”.  All of a sudden, Damon Lindelof, Carlton Cuse and the writing staff seemed to find a second wind, just by virtue of placing our characters in future situations, instead of having to constantly create new pasts for them.  No more having to explain how Jack got his tattoos, or how Hurley got fast, or why Desmond calls people “brotha”.  No, now the show can call its shot by showing us destinations before undergoing the journey.  Why is Locke in a coffin?  Keep watching.  Why is Sun off the island, but not Jin?  Keep your eye on him.  So on and so forth.

Not all the flash-forwards were brilliant, to be clear; Jack and Kate getting engaged and continuously being awful to each other was a real season lowpoint.  Although I quite like the format “twist” of “Ji Yeon” (Sun flash-forward, Jin flashback), not every fan enjoyed the cruel rug pull.  And not every episode of Season Four necessarily flashed to the future.  There were still good old-fashioned flashbacks to be found (we even go all the way back and see Locke’s birth), but in this case, they feel like welcome throwbacks, and not massive yokes around the show’s neck.  The flash-forwards were in general a total success!  Who doesn’t want to see Sayid merc people again?

Also, it was sort of magical realizing that our castaways getting off the island was legitimately just the halfway point of the Bigger LOST Narrative.  Getting this much time with our characters off the island is a story turn that legitimately seemed impossible just a season or two prior.  It’s downright bizarre seeing Jack at Hurley’s institution, much less seeing Kate in a courtroom.  But because we’re in such uncharted territory, you lean in more.  As an audience member watching live, I no longer precisely knew what a given episode was going to look like.  It was thrilling.

Let this be a lesson, kids.  Sometimes in order to move forward, you have to stop looking back.

2. The freighter

Something I find funny about the new characters in Season Four is that they all essentially come from the same source: a giant fucking boat parked just offshore of the island.  I’m not sure one vehicle has ever spawned the entirety of a LOST season’s newbies before.  

Anyway, the fact that there’s a freighter that close to the island at all represents a major fucking sea change for the show, and there’s a little something to say about all of the major players on it (including a returning favorite).  So let’s talk about them!

Daniel Faraday

I’m not quite as enamored with Faraday as some fans, but what is undeniable is the infusion of energy the show receives the second he appears on screen.  There just is no other actor on the show quite like Jeremy Davies, whose line readings are filled with mumblecore aesthetic.  Somewhat paradoxically, Davies’ Faraday is also tasked with helping explain to the other characters (and us) the increasingly complicated sci-fi mechanics the show is utilized, including how time travel works, never an easy task.  Somehow, it works.  Maybe it’s the unique character of his delivery, but Faraday ends up being the perfect vessel for this heavy exposition.

The novelty of Faraday’s existence on the show starts wearing off for me somewhere around “The Constant”; I could only deal with a guy who constantly seems on the verge of tears for so long.  But I’ll always welcome him into my heart since he is the first person I think of when I reflect back on the seismic shift in tone after Season Four.  Maybe it’s because he’s the first of the freighter folk that we meet, maybe it’s because his whole storyline is kind of an epic time-travel tragedy (the full scope of which won’t be fully realized until the end of Season Five), but Davies will always be the figurehead of LOST: Part Two to me,

Oh, and everyone’s insistence on calling him Dan for short?  No, no, no.  He is not a Dan.  That man is a Daniel if ever there was one.  I will not negotiate on this.

Miles Straume

I’ll give Miles this: he easily has the most intriguing past life of any of the Season Four newbies.  The idea of a guy who has the incredible ability to read the last thoughts of dead people, but is only able to leverage into a slightly scummy side hustle, is pretty intriguing, and quintessentially LOST-ian.  Characters with “sixth senses” were in short supply on the island (Hurley is the only other one that comes to mind), so having Miles roll in was a nice extra color in the show’s palette.

I think future seasons contain the best Miles stuff, especially when he and Sawyer start becoming buddies.  Ironically, though, he may be too much like Sawyer in Season Four, all sarcasm, eye-rolls and general attitude.  On this rewatch, I learned to appreciate it, especially knowing what to come, but the actual archetype Miles represents can be a little much.  Ken Leung remains one of the more underrated actors that LOST ever employed, so he makes more out of it than a lesser performer would, but Mr. Straume was more of an irritant than I had recalled.

Frank Lapidus

I fully and freely admit that I have an irrational love for ol’ Lapidus, if only because, like Daniel Faraday, LOST didn’t quite have a character like him on the roster.  He’s just a slightly ornery yacht-rock-lookin’ dude, perfectly happy to wear a half-buttoned Hawaiian shirt as he is a pilot’s uniform.  Outside of a beautiful moment in the series finale, Season Four probably gives Frank the most to do (he’s mostly confined to hanging out in the back and looking exasperated in Season Five), so he really stands out in this batch of episodes.

For as cranky as he often is, his best quality is his ability to be a “go-with” guy.  Sent to the island on a mission?  He’s your guy.  Need him to help you get off the island once they realized they were misled?  He’s also your guy!  Need him to help cover up the entire plane crash and rescue mission in order to protect the lives of those left behind?  He may not understand it, but he’s got your back.  He was LOST’s ultimate utility player, brilliantly and easily portrayed by Jeff Fahey.  If nothing else, Frank was certainly the only character to ever receive the nickname “Kenny Rogers” from Sawyer.  Here’s to you, Captain Lapidus.

Charlotte Lewis

When any show adds a bunch of new characters on top of a cast that is already fairly expansive, it’s inevitable that one of the newcomers will draw the short straw and not receive the same attention as everyone else.  That short straw was drawn by Charlotte Lewis, sad to say.

Of the four main freighter folk, she is the only one whose backstory remains relatively unexplored, which is a shame since the hints that she was born and raised on the island would seem to position her as a major player going forward.  Unfortunately, that never really materializes for either Charlotte or Rebecca Mader, the actress that portrays her.  She is sort of saddled as being the love interest for Daniel, and we briefly see her past as an archeologist, but otherwise her actual purpose in the finished text of LOST remains muddled.  Worst of all, I feel like her personality never quite gets established in the same way her compatriots did, making her kind of fade into the larger background of the show before her death near the beginning of Season Five.

Charlotte is actually difficult to fully evaluate for that exact reason.  It’d be easy to write off Mader as just not up to the task, but with so little to really chew on or work with, it’s astounding she was able to make any impression at all. Sorry, Charlotte. Hope you’re able to eat more chocolate in heaven.

Martin Keamy

Martin Keamy is not exactly the most memorable villain in LOST’s arsenal.  Where characters like Benjamin Linus are cerebral, and The Man in Black is darkly charismatic, Keamy is just all militaristic brute force.  There are no gray areas with him.  But, I’ve always had a weird soft spot for him, maybe because he’s so simple.  His signature moment (assassinating Alex in front of Ben) only occurs because he’s the one dude who Ben can’t manipulate; you can’t play mind games with somebody that has no mind.  

He makes it all the way to the end game of Season Four, and actor Kevin Durand is able to make another appearance or two before LOST wrapped it all up.  But Keamy’s real purpose is to break Ben and send him off on his second-half journey.  Mission accomplished, soldier!

Michael Dawson

The big advertising point for Season Four was the return of Harold Perrineau to the show.  After Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse, Perrineau was the third panelist at the LOST Comic-Con panel that year.  It was a big deal, and you couldn’t miss it if you were even a mild fan.  This makes two things about Michael’s second stint odd.  

One, it’s strange that the show tries to make a tease out of this anyway?  There are early allusions to Ben having “a spy on the boat”.  Even as Michael leaves doors open for our heroes, and generally assists from afar, he isn’t seen on screen until the end of the seventh episode, over halfway through the season.  If it was meant to be a surprise, why bring Harold out all summer for fan questions?  I never understood this.

Two, the fact that LOST seemed so excited about bringing Michael back is at odds with the fact that they do way, way, way less with him than you might remember.  The crown jewel for Harold Perrineau in Season Four is undoubtedly “Meet Kevin Johnson”, the eighth episode that is almost exclusively a flashback episode catching us up on where Mike has been since leaving the island with Walt at the end of Season Two.  The episode is mostly just info-dumping (and frustratingly kind of character resetting…guess what, Michael has lost Walt again!), but I admit I’ve always liked it, if only because it’s another example of the show’s audacious ambition.  Here’s an episode that stars none of your regulars!  Love that kind of pace change.

But, beyond that starring vehicle, you just don’t see much of Michael Dawson.  The big theme for him in Season Four is the desire for redemption after his Season Two betrayal, which is a really potent storyline, ripe for drama!  But he never gets off the fucking boat, so he doesn’t really interact with most of our characters, and notably the ones he actively betrayed (not Jack, not Kate, not Sawyer, not Hurley).  He gets his ass beat by Sayid, tries to diffuse a bomb with Desmond and Jin, then gets implored by the ghost of Christian Shephard (a man Michael has never met; one presumes Cynthia Watros declined to reprise her role as Libby in this spot) to blow himself up to save everyone.  

This all feels like a real ball drop, and I’m not the only one that thinks so; Perrineau himself has always seemed raw about how Michael’s storyline ended.  He made points in post-season interviews about his disappointment regarding Walt’s status as another fatherless Black child, an observation I thought was unfair at the time but seems on to something upon reflection.  At the very least, it’s the very antithesis of a cathartic ending, a shame for a storyline that could have really, really used one.  Alas.

3. The writer’s strike

Season Four of LOST moves along at a pretty quick pace, but that pace notably turns into greased lightning about four episodes from the finale.  To those catching up the show retroactively on streaming, this may seem like a conscious artistic choice.  It kind of (kind of) isn’t.  Instead, one of the biggest factors in regards to Season’s Four unique and unusual speed is the 2007 WGA Strike.  

If you watched any television in the 2000’s, there’s a better-than-not chance that one of your favorite shows has a “writer’s strike” season.  BREAKING BAD’s first season was only seven episodes.  24 kicked its whole seventh season down the road, filling the gap with a TV movie.  FRIDAY NIGHT LIGHTS and HEROES took second season stumbles.  Shows like PUSHING DAISIES just never came back at all.  It’s kind of a sweet unifying factor for a whole generation of American television (I’ve always wondered how people who weren’t born yet feel about all of these old programs having weird disruptions).  LOST dealt with this interruption by pausing halfway through Season Four, causing an awkward month-long hiatus between “Meet Kevin Johnson”, which ends with the deaths of Rousseau and Karl, and “The Shape of Things To Come”, where Keamy completes the hat trick by assassinating Alex.  

The end result of this unexpected break was two-fold.  One, LOST’s master plan of three seasons with sixteen episodes each, running with no interruptions, was immediately foiled, which was admittedly a little frustrating.  Two, the final five episodes of the season feel like they’re moving on 1.5x speed.  After the aforementioned “Shape of Things to Come”, there are exactly two episodes before the three-hour finale begins.  It doesn’t sound like that big of a deal on paper, but it caught me off-guard then, and it caught me off-guard on this rewatch as well.  “Damn, we’re almost done”, is probably what I said both times (sounds like me, anyway).

All in all, Season Four lost three episodes, and one has to wonder if having those three hours back could solve some issues that LOST was left just having to mitigate.  One of those episodes was a confirmed Ben flashback, and another (crucially) was meant to be a Charlotte flashback.  I couldn’t tell you if those would be more plot-focused or if they’d be light deviations (considering “The Shape of Things to Come” is also a Ben flashforward, I have to imagine that episode would be changed from the studs as well.  I have a hard time believing there’d be two Ben episodes in one small season), but having that room to breathe would undoubtedly prevent the viewer from getting the bends.

Don’t get me wrong: I think the back-half of Season Four is fairly stellar; even the silly subplot of Jack getting appendicitis is not nearly as bad as other dumb Jack subplots.  But everything feels just a little consolidated and cramped, and we’ll never know if three extra episodes to let things sit would have alleviated that.  

Especially when one considers the best episode of the season happens to be basically stand-alone….

4. “The Constant”

Actually, it feels inappropriate and maybe a little controversial for me to call “The Constant” the best episode of the season.  It’s often known as the best of the series, if not of the entire 21st century.  No pressure!

I’m fairly certain I’ve mentioned this before, but let me say it again with emphasis: the love story between Desmond Hume and Penny Widmore is the beating heart at the center of LOST.  Even putting aside the generational chemistry between Henry Ian Cusick and Sonya Walger, the show always came alive when it came to telling the tale of these star-crossed lovers and their attempts to find each other, first by navigating an ocean between them, then eventually tossing through the continuum of time.  Besides maybe Sun and Jin, Desmond and Penny were the couple all the fans worth retaining were most invested in, and LOST knew it.

“The Constant” serves a couple of important functions in the Grander LOST Narrative.  It’s the first episode to begin establishing the rules of time travel in the LOST universe, the most important of which being that, if you start bouncing between two time periods, your brain needs to establish a “constant” (something or someone you love in both eras), in order to not explode.  It’s also the episode that sets the track for our castaways’ eventual rescue; with Penny establishing telephone contact with Desmond, she has a specific idea of where everybody is for the first time.  Finally, the mysterious assistance from an unseen stranger sets the stage for Michael’s Dawson return to the show.

But…even stripped of all that, it’s the episode where Desmond and Penny finally find each other after years apart.  Desmond, who has always been more time-sensitive since his exposure to magnetic radiation at the end of Season Two, has suddenly found himself bouncing from the current year of 2004 to his time in 1996, where he’s finding himself on uneven footing both with the Scottish military and his girlfriend, Penny Widmore.  As Desmond’s headaches and nosebleeds increase, Daniel Faraday implores Desmond to find him in 1996, where together they must figure out how to settle Desmond’s mind and soul.  Lest the stakes of this issue aren’t clear, a reminder of where Desmond is heading can be found in the strapped-down George Minkowski (portrayed by the luxury casting of Fisher Stevens).

And of course the answer to settling Desmond’s very being down is Penny.  What other answer could there be?  It’s why the core concept of “the constant”, the one thing you love the most no matter where in time you are, is so beautifully applied here.  It’s notable that the concept never really comes up again in the show, nor do they ever try to apply it to another pair of characters.  There’s just nobody else you can imagine having the type of bond Desmond and Penny have.  

It leads to perhaps the best three minutes of all of LOST, the phone conversation that serves as the episode’s climax.  The Giacchino score is wonderfully restrained and goes a long way into selling the emotion of the scene, no doubt.  However, I once again have to call out the performances of Cusick and Walger, who are so fucking in tune and connected the entire time, an incredible feat considering they don’t share the screen at all.  It’s a conversation we didn’t realize we’ve been waiting for since the end of Season Two, and all of a sudden, you’re in tears.  Great stuff.

Yes, it’s all very melodramatic, LOST wearing its dumb heart on its sleeve.  But, just like humans themselves, LOST always, always, always succeeds when it leans itself towards sincere over cynical.  “The Constant”, then, is the show at its most sincere, a full-throated romance that ends with a simple moment of connection.  

One of the most beautiful things about “The Constant” is the fact that it kind of comes out of nowhere, buried in the middle of the season.  Sometimes with LOST, you can get a sense of when they’re teeing something major up.  Not with “The Constant”; there’s a minimal amount of seeding in the episodes prior, nothing to suggest that a full-blown time travel love story is coming.  It just kind of gets dropped in your lap.  I’ve always admired the show for carrying that amount of confidence.

The biggest thing playing in favor of “The Constant”, at least for me…I have a giant, unabashed soft spot for surprise holiday episodes.  “The Constant” happens to be LOST’s one and only acknowledgment of Christmas happening on the island.  It was a date that I had long wondered if the show was going to make anything out of; October 31st passed by with nary a trick or treat on the island, and there was only a passing retroactive reference to Thanksgiving, provided to us by Nikki in “Expose”.  LOST would be forgiven for not making Christmas a specific priority, given everything else constantly on their plates.  But they did, and thank god. I cannot imagine the Penny-Desmond scene without that giant fucking Christmas tree behind Sonya Walger the entire time.  And I’ll never have to.

It’s not the same thing as the Christmas episode I had in my head, which was called “The LOST Holiday Special” (the O in LOST being a giant wreath on the title card), where the castaways awake on the morning of December 25th to discover it’s snowing, and Sawyer realizes he and Jack have gotten Kate the same gift (how embarrassing!).  Where Santa lands on the island to pick up his missing polar bear and save the day.  “The Constant” unfortunately can’t live up to that standard.

But it’s still good enough to be the best LOST episode of them all.  

Merry Christmas, everybody.

Hydra Island Weekend: LOST - MISSING PIECES!

My retrospective on LOST is returning next week with a look back at Season Four!  Apologies for the Halloween-induced hiatus after Season Three, but in a way, it’s fitting and representative of what the LOST viewing experience was really like.  After all, the normal three-month wait between seasons extended to an almost eight month pause in 2007, as the show transitioned from starting in the fall to premiering in the winter.

During that brutal break, the Powers That Be did their best to make the wait a little less unbearable with a series of short bonus LOST scenes that you could access from your cell phone (known as “mobisodes”).  So, in order to make your wait a little less unbearable, here’s a bonus article all about those mobisodes!  Ah, the verisimilitude!  Enjoy!

It’s almost impossible to imagine now, but a time existed in most of our lifetimes when consuming content over a cell phone was a strange novelty rather than a normality.  Hell, it wasn’t that long ago that watching a movie or TV show on a phone screen was literally impossible; if were born in the 80’s or 90’s, I want you to imagine the first five cellular phones you ever owned and try to visualize watching THE LORD OF THE RINGS on any of those screens.  But that’s a thing you can do now!  There’s a strong argument to be made that you maybe shouldn’t, but there’s absolutely nothing stopping you from trying.

Before technology reached that point, however, most companies stumbled through the 2000’s trying to figure out how to push content onto these increasingly-common cellular devices.  The topic of today’s article covers one of the more notable, if increasingly obscure, attempts in 21st century television.

Ladies and gentlemen, LOST: MISSING PIECES.

LOST: MISSING PIECES was a thirteen-part series that aired during the winter of 2007/08, with the intention of expanding the increasingly expanding mythology of LOST.  What they wound up being were, basically, a dozen glorified deleted scenes, some more interesting than others.  The extra gimmick was that they would first become exclusive to Verizon customers, who would get access to these scenes (dubbed “mobisodes”, a clumsy portmanteau of “mobile episodes”) a week before everyone else.  Not world-beating, but then, it wasn’t really advertised as anything other than a distraction during the extended hiatus between Season Three and Four.

What’s interesting, and slightly disappointing, is how much ambition this project had in its initial conception.  The first notion of a LOST mobisode series actually occurred in November 2005, where it was announced that there would be twenty-two mobile episodes being produced, six of which would be exclusive to the Season Two DVD.  Even cooler, the initial concept was that the twenty short-ish episodes would combine to tell a story of a pair of two previously-unintroduced survivors of the plane crash (which sounds to me like the concept that would eventually become Nikki and Paulo in Season Three).

Less cool is the fact that baked into this premise was the specific move of hiring two non-SAG members for these characters, which led to a bunch of pushback from all three creative unions (actors, director’s, writers).  Keep in mind that this was just a year or two prior to the WGA striking over the issue of residuals for online content.  Eventually, the studio brokered a deal with the guilds to provide residuals for this project, then titled THE LOST VIDEO DIARIES.  This prompted Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse to pivot to using established LOST actors, abandoning the non-SAG idea.  Although this revamped VIDEO DIARIES project moved far enough along to get a promo during the 2006 San Diego Comic Con, no formal contract agreements were ever made with the core LOST cast, and the year came and went with no mobisodes.

Finally, finally in November of 2007, the mobisodes began to be released, fully produced by ABC Studios and (with one exception) created from scratch by notable LOST writers (Lindelof and Cuse, Elizabeth Sarnoff, Christina M. Kim, Edward Kitsis & Adam Horowitz, Brian K. Vaughan, Drew Goddard).  The driving force behind each mobisode was the opportunity to expand on moments that the show hadn’t previously provided the time for.  Beyond the studio support and notable names behind the scripts, the direction of Jack Bender and the participation of every LOST actor you could possibly have wanted added a lot of legitimacy to the now-titled LOST: MISSING PIECES.

But were they any good?  Sometimes!  But not always.  Let’s go through them one by one and you’ll see what I mean. Watch along if you’d like.

1. “The Watch” 

Christian gifts Jack a family watch the day before his wedding.

Don’t ever accuse LOST: MISSING PIECES of being extraneous material!  Right off the bat, we’re answering questions set up all the way in the pilot.  We now know DEFINITIVELY where Jack got that watch he was wearing the day of the crash.  Turns out…his dad gave it to him as a wedding present!  Hot damn!

Look, I’m clearly being a dick, but “The Watch” does kind of establish what you’re in for with these.  It’s not bad; more scenes of John Terry and Matthew Fox interacting is never bad.  But it doesn’t really deepen your understanding of LOST in any meaningful way.  We’ve seen Jack talk with his dad the day before his wedding (in the far superior scene by the hotel pool, as Jack struggles to write his vows).  Yes, I suppose if you really wanted to justify this, you could look at the passing down of the watch as yet another instance of Christian passing on his bullshit to his son.  But it would only be another instance; LOST proper had already dramatized this to great effect.  And at only ninety seconds or so, how far is one willing to go to justify “The Watch” as an essential piece of LOST media?

2. “The Adventures of Hurley and Frogurt”

Neil antagonizes Hurley over his impending beach date with Libby.

Ah, yes, Neil “Frogurt”, the third entry in the trilogy of “Background Characters Thrust Into the Spotlight”, following Leslie Arzt and Nikki/Paulo.  Although first mentioned in passing all the way back in Season Two, Neil is probably the least remembered red shirt in all of LOST, which is odd since he’s the one played by an actor the average viewer was likely to recognize (Sean Whalen aka the “Aaron Burr” GOT MILK guy).

The reason, I imagine, that “Frogurt” has been memory-holed is that he’s really fucking annoying, and not in a fun way.  Why LOST decided to make all of these background characters as obnoxious as possible, I don’t quite know, but “Frogurt” takes the fucking cake (one made, naturally, of frozen yogurt).

This Missing Piece serves as his official introduction, and he decides to make his first impression by giving Hurley shit for having a crush on Libby and letting him know he wants to fuck her.  Cool, man!  I know “Frogurt” gets his comeuppance in Season Five, and that’s great and all, but it’s a punchline they already pulled off with Arzt.  It wasn’t worth them trying to do it again.  Fuck “Frogurt”.  I hated this one, lol.

3. “King of the Castle”

Jack and Ben play chess.

The best of the first three by virtue of being a well-written conversation between two characters that we know pretty well at this point.  It feels like a scene that could have been on the real show.  My issue is that its only real purpose is to tease something that we’re already aware of happening (that being the destruction of the submarine).  Actually, it’s not so much teasing as it is intensely foreshadowing this event because the writers know we know about it, too.  But then, what’s the point?  The only seeming purpose is for us to go “ooooohh, Ben’s hinting that something is going to happen to the sub!”  There’s not enough substance to go with the style (and the style is even a little on-the-nose, even for LOST…a chess match happening during a tense conversation!  Wow!)  Not my precise cup of tea.

4. “The Deal”

Essentially a reskin of the interrogation scene from Season Two’s “Three Minutes”, swapping out Miss Klugh with Juliet.  Again, not a lot of meat on the bone, but “The Deal” does introduce one great advantage of LOST: MISSING PIECES.  It allows for characters and actors who never got a chance to interact an opportunity to share a scene together.  So it goes with Elizabeth Mitchell and Harold Perrineau, two of the best actors the show ever employed, finally getting a little moment.  In this sense, I actually think “The Deal” has value, and successfully explores the unique format these scenes find themselves in.

Also, if you were to insert this scene into “Three Minutes”, that would mean Juliet gets introduced in Season Two, not Three, which…weirdly seems right.  She deserves to have debuted around the same time as Benjamin Linus, doesn’t she?  Good “Deal”!

5. “Operation: Sleeper”

Juliet reveals to Jack that she’s working as a spy for Ben.

Again, not terribly interesting, and serves only to show us a scene that had previously happened offscreen.  It’s nice to see the moment Juliet discloses to Jack that she’s working against our castaways, as well as why she’s willing to triple-cross Ben, but it isn’t strictly necessary.  It certainly doesn’t portray this revelation in a more interesting way than the average viewer’s imagination might have.  Thumbs down.

6. “Room 23”

Juliet informs Ben of a Walt-related incident.

I’ve always admired how eerie this one is, as well as how shook the Others seem to be by their underestimate of Walt’s powers.  However, I also remembered “Room 23” being a way bigger deal than it really turns out to be.  For some reason, I had a memory of us actually entering Room 23, with the camera slowly panning to a behind-the-back shot of Walt (or some height-appropriate kid standing in for him)?  Alas, it does not, although we do get a big gravesite for a bunch of birds.  

Again, it’s okay, and it at least informs why the Others are so willing to give Walt back, so I don’t hate the attempt here.  But I was sort of hoping the scene would go half a step further.  It feels like it ends just as it’s getting started, unfortunately.

7. “Arzt & Crafts”

Leslie Arzt bitches to everyone about the decision to move to the caves.

Look, I’ll never complain about more Arzt in my life, but my main complaint about this one is that I think it pushes the asshole-ness of our resident high school science teacher just a tad too far.  Calling Jack crazy for running around the jungle chasing his dead father is one thing, but slow-yelling at Jin and Sun to “bridge the language gap” is a different kind of dick move than we normally get from Arzt.  The punchline of him hearing a scary noise, then deciding to move to the caves after all is performed well, but you see it coming a mile away.  Wish I liked this one more! Sorry, Arzt!

8. “Buried Secrets”

Michael and Sun share a moment…and nearly a kiss.

The bottom of the barrel as far as these Missing Pieces go.  Michael’s weird bond with Sun at the beginning of Season One was kind of an interesting dynamic, and what made it work at the time was that it was never set up to make Mike the third part of a love triangle.  The two just had an understanding, you know?  So this scene pushing a near-romance between Sun and Michael is instantly repellant, at least to me.  “Buried Secrets” is LOST going back in time in order to give in to its lesser instincts.  Shoulda stayed buried, bitch!

9. “Tropical Depression”

Arzt discloses to Michael the reason he was in Sydney.

I like this one more than “Arzt & Crafts”, even if it actually works really hard to cut against the only real piece of knowledge Arzt ever brings to the table (“it’s monsoon season!”).  Still, what I like about this compared to the other Arzt Missing Piece is that it gives us an extra shade to his character that the actual LOST show didn’t get to (the presumed point of this project).  He actually comes off as a human being, and Daniel Roebuck is able to convincingly provide us that side of him.  Hearing his tale of getting stood up by a date he made online is rough, even if it happened to an annoying guy like Arzt!  Thus, “Tropical Depression” is one of the better Missing Pieces. Nice work!

10. “Jack.  Meet Ethan.  Ethan?  Jack.”

Ethan discusses with Jack what may happen if Claire gives birth on the island.

This one’s actually pretty good!  It’s a rare example of an extra scene that might have benefitted the actual show.  The amount of Ethan we get in Season One before the reveal that he is, in fact, an Other, is perfectly sufficient (maybe a scene or two in a couple of episodes), but more wouldn’t have necessarily been a bad thing, especially when it’s a scene as non-foreshadowy as this one (as opposed to “King of the Castle”). It’s Ethan and Jack actually sharing a moment, and both trying to figure something out, which is a nice touch.  One of the better Missing Pieces!

11. “Jin Has a Temper-Tantrum on the Golf Course”

Jin has a temper-tantrum on the golf course.

Almost certainly the most inessential of this whole 13-scene set; the whole thing is succinctly summarized by its title.  But…y’know what, I like it.  It might be my favorite of all the Missing Pieces.  First of all, we’ve all been there (I’m sure many have experienced Jin’s emotions this entire week), and Daniel Dae Kim so successfully communicates what it’s like to just need one little goddamn thing to go right after a series of total setbacks.  Second of all: it’s on the golf course!  It’s one of the best non-crucial sets in all of LOST, a throwback to the time in which LOST had to fill time with fun character stuff.  It’s a blast to see the golf course one last time!  More golf course stuff!

12. “The Envelope”

Juliet shows Amelia the envelope that will be revealed to contain Ben’s cancer X-ray.

The most unique Missing Piece, in that it is a legitimate deleted scene from the Season Three premiere “A Tale of Two Cities”, as opposed to something created after the fact.  And, again, it deserved to be cut.  There’s nothing precisely wrong with it, and I think it provides a crucial piece of context to something important.  But, I think the cold open to “A Tale of Two Cities” is pretty perfect, and it’s difficult to imagine how this scene could be worked in satisfyingly enough to justify messing with the flow.  An interesting little bit of insight into how episodes can get edited, but shockingly little more.

13. “So It Begins”

The ghost of Christian Shephard tasks Vincent the dog with finding Jack in the jungle.

A fitting finale, as it feels the most “grand” of them all.  Admittedly, I thought “So It Begins” was pretty “whoah”-worthy at the time, with its revelation that Christian Shepherd was the one who sent Vincent the dog over to find Jack in the middle of the jungle immediately post-crash, bridging us perfectly to the very first shot of the series.  And frankly, it’s still pretty cool…as long as you don’t think about it for even one second. 

I think this scene is written with the understanding that Christian is Jacob in disguise, but that doesn’t really make sense and, in fact, goes against how Jacob works.  Is this actually the Smoke Monster/Man in Black embodying Christian’s corpse (as it’s established he can do in later seasons)?  If so…why?  Why does he care if Jack is found or not?  Why Vincent?  Yeah, there’s plenty of ways to head-canon all this to make it fit, but the simplest explanation is that this scene was written before LOST had fully established what Jacob or the Smoke Monster could do (remember: all shows are a little made up!).

In a way, it’s the perfect Missing Piece.  It’s ostensibly cool, but LOST may have been a worse product with it integrated. 

So it ends.

24-Hours of Halloween Marathon III!

When I was a child, I was obsessed with holiday programming.

There was always a little thrill I got by going through the December TV Guides and identifying when certain Christmas specials were going to be on, the old and familiar (Rudolph!  Frosty!  Garfield!) alongside the new and untested (FOX’s 1999 special, Olive, The Other Reindeer!).  I should make it clear I didn’t necessarily watch everything that was on; even in the responsibility-free first decade of my life, how could I possibly pull that off?  But I liked knowing that the options were there.  A whole month’s worth of programming at my fingertips, even if just in “capsule description” forms.

It got to the point where I started cutting out newspaper listings and TV Guide pages and glued them to pieces of paper (yes, a literal manual “cut-and-paste” job) in order to create my very own Holiday Programming Guide, organized by date, time and channel.  That way, if one were ever so inclined, they could use this as a way to stay on top of all the different Christmas offerings; how else could you be reminded that 1997’s The Online Adventures of Ozzie the Elf was about to be on?  It should be mentioned that the applicability of this guide was always theoretical; even if some other kid or adult had been genuinely interested in using it to plan their prime-time hours accordingly, I only made one for myself and I wasn’t going to be giving it up.  

The concept of building a hypothetical programming block of holiday episodes, movies, and various miscellany never completely went away for me.  In both 2019 and 2020, back in an earlier iteration of this space, I developed a list of Halloween programming, enough to fit an entire 24-hour block, with the general idea being that, were someone so inclined, they could follow along with it and have the spooky spirit all day long.  Again, the usage is theoretical; to my knowledge, nobody has ever taken the offer up (almost as if most people can’t stay up to 4 or 5 am on a work night on a whim).  

After a few years off, I thought it’d be fun to resurrect this series from the dead!!!  What follows is exactly 24 hours worth of Halloween content from all across the decades.  Halloween is on a Thursday this year, so my recommendation is just to kick your Friday work day in the ass, enjoy the marathon and sleep in the next day.  In general, the idea is that the mood should slide from tame and family-friendly to more deranged as the night goes on.  Oh, and to add to the challenge, no double-dipping from previous years!  You can enjoy either the 2019 or 2020 editions to see what’s now off-limits.

To the list!

6:00 AM - 7:00 AM: Retro Halloween commercials! (YouTube)

As per tradition, we kick things off with a YouTube-curated hour of older Halloween commercials.  Much like the 2019 marathon, this one has a nice blend of 70’s, 80’s and 90’s advertisements, allowing for different generations to point at a dopey Lucky Charms commercial or RC Cola ad and go, “ah, the objectively best childhood was mine and mine alone!”  So as you enjoy your first cup of coffee/tea/whiskey this Halloween morning, please also enjoy the nice warm drug that is nostalgia (please use responsibly!).  Hey, is that a Spin City promo?  I remember that show!

7:00 AM - 7:30 AM: IT’S THE GREAT PUMPKIN, CHARLIE BROWN! (Apple TV)

Hey, I’ve somehow managed to never include any of the classic cartoon specials we’ve all grown up with in one of these!  I’m gonna go ahead and cash in on those now in order to provide you a Saturday morning cartoon feel to your morning.  First, let’s start with the famous 1966 Peanuts Halloween story, IT’S THE GREAT PUMPKIN, CHARLIE BROWN, where Linus sticks his neck out by expressing his weird beliefs to his friends, followed by his friends treating him like an asshole for it the entire time, culminating in Linus spending his entire night waiting for a messiah that never arrives.  The whole “Great Pumpkin” aspect of Linus’ personality is no doubt an intentional message about how sometimes having faith in something larger than yourself opens you up to criticism (but you gotta do it anyway), but goddamn, is this sometimes a frustrating watch.  Sally Brown, whose whole thing is having a crush on Linus, gets an opportunity to hang out with Linus all night in a pumpkin patch waiting for the Great Pumpkin, the kind of thing that usually becomes a core memory for young kids.  But then she starts screaming at him about wasting her Halloween night once it’s clear the Great Pumpkin doesn’t show.  These hoes aren’t loyal!

The B-plot involves Charlie Brown going out to trick-or-treat and receiving rocks instead of candy from, presumably, the adults in town.  It’s a fantastic illustration of Charlie’s “born loser” quality, but I’ve always been fascinated about the implications of this turn of events.  Do people in the unspecified town that the Peanuts gang lives in have rocks in their home just ready to go?  Was this a coordinated attack against this one eight-year old kid?  What did Charlie do to everybody?  Did he call in a bomb threat to the school or something?  What’s wrong with everyone?

You know what, actually, fuck IT’S THE GREAT PUMPKIN.  From 7:00 am to 7:30 am, watch this compilation of spooky Looney Tunes cartoons instead.  Nobody getting screamed at for holding harmless outside opinions in any of these!

7:30 AM - 8:00 AM: GARFIELD’S HALLOWEEN ADVENTURE! (PEACOCK)

One of these days, I’ll do the Big Garfield Article (don’t get too excited), in order to fully explain the weird way in which Jim Davis’ most famous creation has haunted me my entire life; in short, however, what it amounts to is that as a kid, I enjoyed the flabby tabby way too much and nobody in my life has ever let me forget it, despite now being in my mid-thirties.  Such is existence.

As a result of that childhood love, however, I’ve probably seen Garfield’s Halloween adventure more times than I’ve seen any other October special.  It’s likely the Monday-hating cat’s best holiday outing due to its superior songs (“This is the Night” and “Scaredy Cat” are top-tier Halloween tracks), classic Garfield antics (saying “gimme” instead of “Trick or Treat”?  What won’t this rapscallion do?), and its willingness to get legitimately scary from time to time, at least as far as kids’ programming goes; the old man in the house still kind of unnerves me to this day.

Besides its basic plot being remarkably similar to John Carpenter’s THE FOG, I think the thing I always remember about GARFIELD’S HALLOWEEN ADVENTURE is its music.  Lou Rawls is a really fucking funny choice for Garfield’s singing voice, especially since sometimes Garfield just sings in his Lorenzo Music character voice (like in “What Will I Be?”), but it’s an iconic choice regardless.  He has a gorgeous baritone that adds a lot of class to what is essentially an 80’s cash-in special.  And nobody is giving fucking rocks to our characters!

8:00 AM - 10:00 AM: OVER THE GARDEN WALL (Hulu)

A Cartoon Network mini-series from 2014 that I wish had existed when I was growing up, OVER THE GARDEN WALL is a ten-part whimsical animated tribute to both the retro animation styles of the 30’s and 40’s, as well as the beauty of the fall season.  It’s also arguably an existential trip to a dreamscape?  At its center is a celebrity performance from Elijah Wood, who’s pretty good (Elijah Good) as Wirt, but for my money, the star of the show is surprisingly nine-year old Collin Dean as Wirt’s brother Greg (although two close runners-up are Melanie Lynskey as the bluebird Beatrice and Christopher Lloyd as the mysterious Woodsman).

The songs are all lovely and cozy, the color palette gives off immaculate autumnal vibes, and its sort-of-twist near the end of the show (although I would refer to it as more contextual than a total rug pull) provides all kinds of implications as to the overall meaning of OVER THE GARDEN WALL.  What a beautiful way to spend your Halloween morning.

10:00 AM - 10:30 AM: THE SCOOBY-DOO PROJECT (YouTube)

I’m now pulling this marathon into a slightly different direction, although we’re still definitively in the “original Cartoon Network content” zone.  

Waaaay back on Halloween Night 1999, Cartoon Network broadcast a Scooby-Doo marathon that mostly consisted of episodes of The Scooby-Doo and Scrappy Doo Show, a far cry from their epic 25-hour marathon of the original Scooby-Doo, Where Are You? cartoon in 1995.  To up the ante, a series of original shorts aired throughout the 1999 marathon starring our Mystery Machine gang.  These shorts, when taken collectively, was known as The Scooby-Doo Project, a direct parody of the then-smash sensation THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT.

When I say direct, I mean direct.  Scooby and pals get lost in the woods, they end up in that fucking house at the end, Shaggy is even standing in the corner and everything, it’s heavily implied they’re all now missing…it’s surprisingly hair-raising when juxtaposed against the meta-nature of its humor and bright presentation.  In some ways, The Scooby-Doo Project putting classic cartoons into mature situations is what eventually led to Adult Swim.

I actually wrote about this thing a few years ago if you’re in the mood for a more complete write-up.  As far as this morning goes, it’s only about 20 minutes, so this gives you a little breathing room to pee or something.

10:30 AM - 11:00 AM: FUTURAMA Season 2, Episode 18 - “The Honking” (Hulu)

If I’m being honest, I’m stretching the definition of a Halloween episode juuuust a tiny bit in order to plug a thirty-minute hole here.  Strictly speaking, FUTURAMA never had an official Halloween episode during its classic run (Christmas was always more of its jam).  But this episode, in which Bender gets bitten by a werecar, is close enough for blogging work.  It takes its beats pretty directly from the classic WOLFMAN movies, there’s an act-one pitstop in a haunted house, the title is a pun on THE HOWLING…it counts!  There’s just no robot jack-o-lanterns or space trick or treaters or whatever.  I hope your heart isn’t broken.

11:00 AM - 12:00 PM: AMERICAN DAD Two-Pack! (Hulu)

One of the arcs of my life from teenager to twenty-something to thirty-something is my embrace of the Seth MacFarlane canon, then my subsequent rejection, followed by my tearful return.  A cartoon like Family Guy is the kind of thing you enjoy as a young teenage edgelord, then recognize it for the lowbrow shock-humor that it is, before eventually going, “you know?  A little Family Guy ain’t so bad.”

So it goes with the other major MacFarlane animated show, the arguably superior American Dad!, a series that has a real one-note premise (isn’t mid-00’s American jingoism fucking insane?), but has managed to leverage that into a nice universe of slightly surreal, yet character-based, comedy.  Although it’s usually pretty reliable for Christmas content, its Halloween output is a little more sporadic.  Still, I think these two episodes help you get that spooky flavor:

Season 6, Episode 3 - “Best Little Horror House in Langley Falls”

After years of being known for the best haunted house display in the neighborhood, Stan and Francine have to up the ante when a new Imagineer neighbor starts horning in on their territory.  Their million dollar idea: bring in a bunch of actual serial killers and set them loose inside their house (look, I give credit where it’s due…pretty spooky idea).  My wife and I have been quoting the navigation system of their neighbor’s spooky car for years (“at the corner, take a fright!”)

Season 12, Episode 9 - “The Witches of Langley”

Do you like THE CRAFT?  Do you like reminiscing about 90’s music?  Do I have the episode for you!  Steve Smith and his pals take up witchcraft in order to reclaim their lunch table at school.  Like all things boys take up, it leads them to becoming buttholes and menaces to their communities.  Meanwhile, Stan and Klaus start a podcast where they literally just list off the names of 90s bands they can remember, in one of the more searing indictments of the podcasting medium I can think of.  

12:00 PM - 1:15 PM: FRANKENSTEIN (1931) (Peacock, The Criterion Channel)

1:15 PM - 2:30 PM: BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN (1935) (Peacock, The Criterion Channel)

I’ve been having a blast the last couple of Halloweens slowly making my way through the vast Classic Universal Monsters series, which contains all kinds of things people don’t typically associate with the Draculas, Wolfmans and Creatures from the Black Lagoons, including Edgar Allen Poe adaptations, offbeat sequels, and outright comedies, including Abbott and Costello crossovers.  But, this afternoon, we’re going to stick with a couple of classics, the opening entries for my personal favorite Universal Monster, Frankenstein!

First up, 1931’s FRANKENSTEIN, which gives us the introduction to Boris Karloff’s monster, Colin Clive’s scientist (who gets the classic “It’s alive!” soundbite), James Whale’s confident humanistic direction, and the gorgeous, gorgeous sets.  There is a ton of memorable and iconic imagery in the classic Universal horror films, but almost nothing sticks under your skin as much as the shot of a grieving father solemnly carrying the body of his drowned daughter through town.  It’s one of the greatest films ever made for a reason.

Naturally, we follow up immediately with its even more revered sequel, 1935’s BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN.  In this one, James Whale gives us some Christ imagery, a nice camp performance from Ernest Thesiger, some colors of comedy (Frank smoking that pipe!) and an all-time efficiency performance from Elsa Lanchester as the titular bride (who, for the uninitiated, is not the movie as much as you might think).  We get some great Una O’Connor screaming for good measure.  It’s a bold direction for a sequel, especially considering they could have just had Frankenstein go nuts on a town again and called it a day.

Many other FRANKENSTEIN sequels are worthy of your attention as well, including 1939’s SON OF FRANKENSTEIN (which replaces James Whale with Rowland Lee and manages to basically not lose a step at all).  But loading this whole section up with old FRANKENSTEIN movies would be a bit of a cheat, wouldn’t it?  It’s tempting, though.  There are a lot of them, especially when you start including the British Hammer Frankenstein flicks.  Maybe next year?

2:30 PM - 4:00 PM - BOB’S BURGERS Mini-Marathon! (Hulu)

BOB’S BURGERS has long been a comfort watch for me.  I wouldn’t call myself a super-fan or anything, but its efficient and satisfying style of comedy makes it come in handy whenever I need something to lift my spirits for thirty minutes.  It’s also a cartoon series that completely and fully leans into seasonal episodes, be it Christmas, Thanksgiving or, luckily for our sakes, Halloween.  There are literally almost a dozen Halloween episodes to choose from, so the only hard part here was choosing which three to go with to fill this ninety-minute slot.  Here’s what I landed on:

Season 6, Episode 3: “The Hauntening”

In which the Belchers do their damnedest to scare the completely unscareable Louise.  There are a lot of memorable quotes in this one (including a moment of lucidity from Gene regarding childhood in the face of certain doom), but I was frankly hooked from the opening scene in which Teddy gets repeatedly scared by the same dancing witch animatronic.

Season 9, Episode 4: “Nightmare on Ocean Avenue Street”

In which the Belcher kids determine the identity of a rogue gorilla-costumed candy-stealer on Halloween night.  This one is great if only because of the escalating decoration war Bob and Teddy find themselves in with the store-front next door.

Season 7, Episode 3 “Teen-a Witch”

In which Tina starts dabbling in witchcraft in order to get revenge on Tammy for stealing her sand-witch costume idea.  As what happens with such dabblings, she lets the power go to her head, casting spells on anybody that wrongs her.  Has she met her match when a crossing guard curses her right back?  Watch along to find out, and enjoy a guest performance from Billy Eichner for your trouble.

4:00 PM - 5:30 PM: THE FOG (1980) (Amazon Prime)

I think late Halloween afternoons are for ghost stories (or at least this one is), and one of my favorites is John Carpenter’s HALLOWEEN follow-up, THE FOG.  It’s not really anywhere near as frightening as that initial Michael Myers story, nor is it as skin-crawling as other Carpenter classics like PRINCE OF DARKNESS.  What THE FOG is is remarkably cozy, at least as far as a story about ghost sailors returning to a small town to claim their gold can be.  The reason for that might be as simple as its Bay Area setting; Antonio Bay may be a fictional town, but considering most of the exterior location shooting took place in Marin County, one can do the math.

Besides its basic plot being remarkably similar to that of GARFIELD’S HALLOWEEN ADVENTURE, I think the thing I always remember about THE FOG is the beautiful radio station built inside the town lighthouse, where Adrienne Barbeau broadcasts her show out of.  It turns out to serve a crucial purpose in the movie’s story, where our ghost antagonists first make their presence known, but even if THE FOG had never left this set, I would have been happy.  More movies taking place in oddly located radio stations!  

The movie also includes Jamie Lee Curtis, Tom Atkins, Hal Holbrook and an all-time Carpenter-penned theme.  Snuggle up and get lost in THE FOG!

5:30 PM - 6:30 PM: THE X-FILES - “BAD BLOOD” (Hulu)

Pulling an episode from THE X-FILES for a Halloween episode is kind of cheating; technically, almost any random hour of the seminal sci-fi show could be a “Halloween” episode.  But this fifth-season episode is the one my wife and I always throw on during the actual night of October 31st, because it’s kind of the show in microcosm.  The conceit is not a terribly original one, and one you would be familiar with if you’ve ever seen RASHOMON (or even a parody of RASHOMON).  Scully and Mulder both debrief the spooky events of the night before, and it turns out their recollections greatly differ.  

BUT, in that classic X-FILES fashion, the writing is so fucking sharp (the various differences are fun to discover), it features a fantastic dual guest performance from none other than Luke Wilson and, most of all, it all centers so precisely around the two characters that made the show what it was: Fox Mulder and Dana Scully.  Yeah, they’re the leads, but their characters were so defined a half-decade in, both by David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson and by the elite writing staff Chris Carter had built.  The way Mulder and Scully process and visualize their previous night’s adventure is so fun because it’s so them.  BAD BLOOD is a good time!

6:30 PM - 6:45 PM: Music Video Break (YouTube)

I wanted to quickly shove this segment in to remind you all that sometimes Halloween goodness can be found in unexpected places.  To that end, here are two music videos from two different bands in two different eras that decided to hauntify their decidedly not-scary hit songs.  

“Everybody (Backstreet’s Back)” - Backstreet Boys

Those who were hooked into popular music in 1997 are probably already well aware of this, but for the rest of us, this is my opportunity to inform you that one of Backstreet Boys’ biggest hits of all time has a “haunted house” music video.  Its inspirations are many: there’s some Thriller in the choreography, BSB’s costumes seem vaguely Universal Monster-inspired (Wolfman, Phantom of the Opera and the Mummy), and although the mansion it’s shot in was allegedly the one used in 1995’s CASPER, it felt to me more like if the EYES WIDE SHUT house had opened up an all-ages venue in one of its less-used wings.  Best of all, Antonio Fargas, Huggy Bear himself, plays their bus driver.  Is this music video sexual?  Yeaaaaah!

“Doing It All for My Baby” - Huey Lewis and the News

If you have even a cursory knowledge of 80’s pop hits, you’re familiar with this Huey Lewis mainstay.  But, did you know this song, seemingly about a man who’s so in love with the woman he’s with that he’s made himself a better man in order to give her the best version of himself, is actually about Frankenstein and his Bride?  I bet you didn’t, but you’ll be set straight after one watch of this music video.

More of a mini-movie than a music video, “Doing it All for My Baby” gives us Huey Lewis doing his best Peter Sellers impression, performing no less than three roles, as Dr. Frankenstein, Frankenstein’s Monster, and his scariest role of all (if the Bride’s reaction is anything to go by), Huey Lewis.  There’s absolutely no reason for this to be a big spooky movie tribute, but it is.  What a stupid little joy.  No Huggy Bear in this one, though.

6:45 PM - 7:15 PM: WANDAVISION - “ALL NEW HALLOWEEN SPOOKTACULAR!” (Disney Plus)

It remains fascinating to me how quickly the Marvel Cinematic Universe became cooked, especially relative to how long it was dominant in the pop culture zeitgeist.  Part of the issue was that the various franchises reached a level of saturation that was unsustainable, both in terms of quality assurance and audience enthusiasm.  This was accelerated by its expansion into the streaming television space, churning out multiple miniseries for the past couple of years, some of which have hit (Loki, Hawkeye), and some of which have heavily tarnished the brand (Secret Invasion).

In some ways, though, the MCU’s first official TV show* was its best.  Although people complain about WandaVision’s ending, and gripe about its awkward fit into the second Doctor Strange movie, the star vehicle for Elizabeth Olson and Paul Bettany benefited from a real “right place, right time” bump.  Premiering close to the one-year anniversary of the COVID-19 pandemic, the TV show doubled as a tribute to other TV shows, the kind that people had undoubtedly been burrowing into during lockdown.  I Love Lucy.  Bewitched.  The Brady Bunch.  Full House.  The Office.  

*Especially since the actual first and best MCU TV show has appeared to have been completely forgotten about in terms of canonicity.

Or, in the case of “All-New Halloween Spooktacular!”, Malcolm in the Middle.  It’s featured here not just because it’s a random Halloween-themed episode (okay, it’s technically the exclusive reason it’s being featured, but you know what I mean), but because it’s probably WandaVision’s best outing.  Some of the show’s television homages don’t ever elevate beyond broad parody (some of the sixties stuff doesn’t feel quite right), but it feels right at home emulating late 90’s-early 00’s style sitcoms.  The bouncy incidental music, the cutaways, the deep holiday branding…it’s a lovely homage that also manages to push the show’s plot into exciting directions.  It probably helps to have seen the prior episodes, and be somewhat familiar with the MCU as a whole, but the “All-New Halloween Spooktacular” can be taken on its own off of holiday vibes alone.  

7:15 PM - 7:45 PM: I THINK YOU SHOULD LEAVE DOUBLE HEADER! (Netflix)

Tim Robinson is a modern entertainer I’d expected to be more divisive than he’s turned out to be; his brand of comedy is fairly specific, and is dependent on social awkwardness, shifts in demeanor, and a lot of yelling and swearing.  I’m sure there have been plenty of folks that have fired up his cult hit sketch series I Think You Should Leave on Netflix and immediately went, “nope, not for me”.  But for the most part, people seem to love him, including me.

The beautiful thing about his show is that more sketches than you’d think touch on holiday trappings, even if somewhat superficially; there are at least three that would be right at home in a Christmas marathon.  To that end, there are a few episodes that contain sketches that could arguably be considered “Halloween” themed.  Tonight, you get just two, but they’re goddamn good ones, and fairly representative of I Think You Should Leave as a whole.

Season 1, Episode 5: “I’m Wearing One of Their Belts Right Now”

There’s an argument to be made that this is the strongest batch of sketches I Think You Should Leave ever put together.  It opens with the famous hot dog car scene, which has been immortalized as a meme that you’ve almost certainly seen whiz by your social media feed sometime in the last five years.  It also contains a centerpiece Patti Harrison sketch, and the wonderfully unhinged “the babysitter was late” sketch.  But the reason it makes this list is the equally meme-immortalized “Night Robert Palins Murdered Me” song.  It may not necessarily be Halloween-themed, but…look, the guy asked for something spooky, okay?

Season 2, Episode 1: “They said that to me at a dinner.”

A confident season debut that gave us the instant classic “Coffin Flop” sketch, which in an of itself could qualify as Halloween content if you squint your eyes.  But, no, this episode gets the nod due to its concluding ghost tour sketch which, yes, rests a lot of its initial laurels on the shock of talking about cum and jizz.  But, in that signature Tim Robinson way, he makes this awkward and uncomfortable guy approach something resembling sympathy by the end.  He was confused about the rules!  He was just trying to make friends!

7:45 PM - 9:45 PM: THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS (Amazon Prime)

In the primetime slot, let’s throw on one of the best movies of the nineties, period, THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS!  It’s one I gave the full article treatment to in an earlier iteration of this blog, in case you were interested in a full review.  Needless to say, however, that it’s a movie that launched thousands of painfully unfunny people nationwide doing their “fava beans and a nice chianti” impressions in front of thousands of very patient co-workers and classmates.  Of course, Anthony Hopkins’ performance here is the stuff of Hollywood legend (although I’ve always been more of a Brian Cox guy),  but what makes SILENCE OF THE LAMBS endure for me is the beautiful characterization of Clarice (and the quiet, simmering performance by Jodie Foster), and the way Jonathan Demme’s direction and Ted Tally’s script are interested in her seeming infiltration into a male-dominated world.  The reason her scenes with Hopkins are so potent is that, ultimately, Hannibal is the only one to treat Clarice as an equal.

Spooky, thought-provoking, classic.  What better film to serve as the centerpiece of this Halloween marathon?

9:45 PM - 12:00 AM: THE EXORCIST (MAX)

Oh, yeah, that might be a better film.

Arguably one of the best movies, period, THE EXORCIST is obviously scary as fuck if you believe in hell and the devil; it’s one of the most popular depictions of demon possession for a reason endures as a horror classic because it always remembers to make the terror personal.  The fear of trying to help a child who is becoming sick beyond recognition.  The fear that established science cannot help us.  The fear of not being there for a family member in their time of need.  The fear of being forever haunted by our regrets.  The fear of eventually receiving a legacy sequel that sucks so bad that your two follow-ups get canceled and forgotten about (okay, I’m editorializing on that one).  It’s a moody nightmare, made all the more chilling for how quiet it’s willing to be for most of its runtime.  It’s a great watch anytime of the year, but I can’t think of anything better to officially kiss October 31st goodbye.

12:00 AM - 2:00 AM: A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET II: FREDDY’S REVENGE (1985) (MAX)

As we officially enter November 1st, we enter what I call the “insane stand-alone sequels to famous franchise” section.  I’m taking pitches for a catchier title.
I am of the belief that the first three Freddy Krueger flicks are essentially perfect for what they’re each attempting to be.  In a pinch, I’d pick NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET 3: DREAM WARRIORS as the crown jewel of the entire franchise.  However, for a couple of reasons, I’m picking the oddball Part 2 to take the midnight slot of this marathon.  For one, it’s surprisingly stand-alone, putting the story of Nancy Thompson completely on hold to bring us the tale of Jesse Walsh.  For two, FREDDY’S REVENGE is fucking bonkers.  We have a way-less jokey Krueger; he seemingly barely talks at all, a more fitting demeanor for the disgraced child murderer than the open mic night comedian we get from Part 4 on.  FREDDY’S REVENGE is also famously a thinly-disguised queer body horror tale which, considering this was released smack-dab in the middle of the Reagan era and the rise of HIV in America, makes it one of the gutsier 80’s slashers out there.  To that, er, end, it features Freddy killing the school coach by whipping his butt with a towel in the gym showers.  How could you turn it down?

2:00 AM - 3:30 AM-ish: HALLOWEEN III: SEASON OF THE WITCH (1982) (Peacock)

HALLOWEEN is one of the longest running, most beloved horror franchises of all time, and the funny part is that there’s only, like, four entries I would refer to as “quality”.  The 1978 original is, of course, one of the greatest films ever made.  HALLOWEEN IV is kind of fun in a “return to the basics” kind of way.  I’m kind of a big fan of HALLOWEEN H20: 20 YEARS LATER, in all of its late-90’s glory.  And then, of course, there’s the much-aligned HALLOWEEN III: SEASON OF THE WITCH.

Hated upon its release, with its decision to convert HALLOWEEN into an anthology series, rather than an ongoing Michael Myers saga, only serving to confuse more than anything else, I’m actually an advocate for its low-budget, grimy charm.  I can’t sit here and tell you to your face that it’s a good movie; when compared to the masterpiece that is the John Carpenter original, this one seems like a cheap exploitative excuse.  It features some bizarre acting, a sweaty lead performance from Tom Atkins, and one of the most gratuitous, sketchy sex scenes I can think of in a mainstream film.

But…consider how I first saw it.  I was over at a friend’s house, and we caught it running as a Sunday afternoon local station feature (when such a thing existed!).  I didn’t really understand it, and I remember being confused my my friend’s mom’s existence that this was, in fact, the original HALLOWEEN (although I was much too young to have known anything about the first HALLOWEEN, even at eleven years old, I strongly sensed that this movie about zombiefied Halloween masks could not possibly have been it).  But I remember being mesmerized by the Silver Shamrock jingle all the same.

Given that core memory, you’ll forgive me for having a soft spot for HALLOWEEN III: SEASON OF THE WITCH, a movie that features zero witches.  It does feature a healthy dose of skepticism regarding the Irish, so how bad could it be?  Stay up and check it out, and enjoy its chilly, abrupt ending!

3:30 AM-ish - 6:00 AM: Herschell Gordon Lewis Double Feature! 

Let’s get weird and loose as we approach the final descent of this spooky flight.  I do not profess to be a connoisseur of the splatter king Herschell Gordon Lewis.  I have really only seen a tiny fraction of his sizable filmography, although a full deep dive is a perpetual entry on my cinema bucket list, so potent to me is his unique mix of zero-budget, education film reel aesthetic, stiff 50’s style acting and creatively irresponsible gore stunts.  His stuff is practically made for the twilight hours of the marathon.  Check out:

BLOOD FEAST (1963) (Tubi, Kanopy)

Coming in at a brisk 67 minutes, I still haven’t stopped thinking about this nasty, loopy little thing since first watching it a few years ago.  Shot in four days, BLOOD FEAST features a real sheep’s tongue, a gloriously insane title card (where the already bloody typeset gets literally sprayed with more blood before your eyes), disastrous performances, and more discussion about Egyptian food than you might expect.  I’m sincere when I say it’s a must-watch.
TWO THOUSAND MANIACS! (1964) (Tubi)

In some senses, this other seminal Lewis work is even more unnerving to me than BLOOD FEAST.  Yes, TWO THOUSAND MANIACS feels more like an actual movie you could imagine being made by a human than BLOOD FEAST, but its story of a Southern hick town celebrating its centennial by torturing and murdering a car full of lost Yankees is plucking a string of anxiety unique to America.  Obviously, it’s wildly exaggerating, but it’s hard to deny that this is essentially what it feels like both the Northern and Southern United States think of each other.  Plus, it’s got a genuinely catchy opening song.  YEEEEEE-HAW!

6:00 AM - 7:00 AM: Take a power nap. The 28-day Thanksgiving marathon begins at 7:00 AM. First up, this YouTube rip of the 1995 Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade….

I Had to Go Back: Through the Looking Glass with LOST: Season Three!

The third season of LOST opens with an episode entitled “A Tale of Two Cities”, and concludes with a finale named “Through the Looking Glass”.  Both titles wind up being examples of the show being accidentally self-reflective.

At least in my experience both watching the season live, as well as rewatching it a few weeks ago, the third year of LOST is truly a tale of two cities.  Within one city resided one of the deadliest stretches of the show’s history, one that pushed me closer than I ever thought possible to giving up on LOST entirely.  Within the other city, one of the greatest stretches of the show’s history, one that made me wonder at the time if a better drama had ever aired on network television.

Season Three of LOST is a wildly uneven season, and one that was saved only when show-runners Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse famously successfully negotiated an end date for the show.  It’s an end date that LOST sorely needed; save for an interesting Juliet Burke flashback (undoubtedly assisted by the fact that we didn’t know anything about her pre-Island life yet) and a format-shifting Desmond episode, the first nine episodes of Season Three contained excruciating, repetitive or downright confusing flashbacks.  It also featured one of the most baffling new character introductions in the history of the show, and maybe in the history of the medium.  LOST was in a mild existential crisis, and it showed.  If LOST hadn’t doubled as a social event for me, there’s an excellent chance I would have stopped watching altogether.

But, once you reach the halfway mark or so (I actually think the season starts picking up significantly around “Tricia Tanaka is Dead”, but we’ll talk about it), Season Three all of a sudden starts increasing in quality and, more importantly, purpose.  Long-running threads and mysteries start getting resolved; among other things, we find out why Locke was in a wheelchair, Sawyer finally is able to confront the con man that destroyed his life, and we finally meet Rousseau’s child, Alex.  It all ends with a finale that answers the question that had been hanging over LOST from maybe halfway through Season One, “How can they keep cranking out these flashbacks?”  

Turns out being able to plan your landing makes for a smoother flight!  I go back and forth between calling Season Three “the worst LOST season” and “the best LOST season”.  An argument can be made to support either declaration.  But I think I’ve settled on it being perhaps “the MOST LOST season”, the batch of episodes that best highlighted what the show could do so well (going back to my intro article, that would be the little granular connective tissue things, as well as the bold narrative home run swings), and also what it so often fumbled on (bizarre writing and character choices).

By the end of the year, one thing was clear…both LOST and its audience had gone through the looking glass into new uncharted territory.  I’ll always love it for that.

What follows are sixteen highlights (and lowlights) of LOST Season Three!

1. The mini-season

Let’s start with the scheduling decision that might have immediately crippled Season Three before it even got started: the “mini-season”.

Television was rapidly changing in 2006.  For as long as I could remember, television show seasons were structured around “sweeps weeks”, a crucial network ratings period that seemingly occurred every month, but in general, were centered around the months of November, February, May and July.  A network’s Nielsen ratings during certain weeks in these months would essentially determine their advertising rates on both a local and national level for the rest of the year.  Yes, it was a completely arbitrary process that determined whether you lived or died (ain’t that America), and networks compensated for it by taking big swings during these weeks.  This could include major “event” episodes of established shows, or major celebrity cameos, or even star-studded specials, all in the hopes of drawing eyeballs to their stations and securing more favorable advertising dollars.

Of course, there were also off-weeks where shows were in reruns, there being too many weeks in a television season than there were episodes of a given series season.  This could result in odd periods where your favorite show was just…on vacation for a week or two, maybe even months at a time.  It could be annoying, but reruns were just part of life.  Hey, at least it beat the old days where if you missed it, you missed it.

Well, the way people were starting to consume television shows was beginning to shift in the mid-00’s.  With the rise of physical media, it wasn’t uncommon for people to just wait for their favorite show’s current season to get pressed onto DVDs and binge the whole thing over a summer weekend (Netflix was able to algorithm this mentality into an entire enterprise).  TV shows were starting to adjust how they aired in response; FOX’s 24 had famously shifted from a “premiere in the fall, end in the spring, with reruns along the way” model to a “come back in January and run straight through” model to much success.  But a lot of other networks were hesitant to make this change across the board due to those crucial sweeps period.

LOST had seemingly reached a compromise.  In an attempt to address a common Season Two complaint (too many reruns!), while also preserving a still-popular show for November sweeps, ABC, Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse had developed a “mini-season” model.  Season Three would return in November and run for six straight weeks before taking another break until late January, then run for sixteen straight weeks, all ending in a major finale.  Not bad, right?

Here’s the issue:  for whatever reason, Season Three decided to slow-roll its narrative in a way it never really had before.  Part of this was due to the disparate factions of characters that needed to be caught up with after the second-season finale; it took the first three episodes to get caught up with everybody.  For those doing the math, that is half of the “mini-season” just getting everyone back to square one.  The other three were spent just asking a bunch of other questions and establishing a bunch of new mysteries, all to add to the pile of old ones that had yet to be addressed (well, one episode was actually spent writing out a character they weren’t expecting to have to write out…we’ll talk about that!).  More than any of that, the first six episodes just felt strangely inert in a way LOST had almost never been, even at its lowest.  The flashbacks were uninformative and boring, the on-island developments were plodding and dragged out, and the twists bordered on self-parody (one episode ended with the revelation that…gasp… there was another island!)You couldn’t help but feel like the show was just spinning its wheels while insisting the car would get out of the mud soon.

The low quality of the first six episodes wouldn’t matter so much had the show been on a normal schedule; slow rolls and narrative valleys are not inherently disqualifying things.  But…LOST went on a fat break again.  Suddenly, all the momentum from the Season Two finale had evaporated like so much black smoke.  Again, had it not been for the fact that literally every friend I had was a fan, there is a very strong chance I would have moved on from LOST over the Christmas break.  Especially since there was one plot development that broke my heart so much, not because of what happened so much, but how it was executed….

2. Mr Eko’s death.

For years and years, I was convinced that “The Cost of Living” was my least favorite LOST episode.

This last rewatch allowed me to back off of that opinion somewhat, but time hasn’t changed the fact that Mr. Eko’s death is one of the strangest moments in LOST history, and one that admittedly was slightly outside of the show’s control.

As mentioned last week, LOST seemingly had big plans for Mr. Eko.  After making a big splash in Season Two and becoming a quick favorite of many fans (including myself), the show seemed to be positioning him as the imposing spiritual center of its narrative.  Allegedly, much of what was to be Mr. Eko’s arc going forward was given instead to Desmond (especially the premonition of Charlie’s impending death).  

Alas, it wasn’t meant to be.  For reasons that can shift depending on who you ask, Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje was ready to leave LOST after one season, and the show accommodate by giving Mr. Eko one last hurrah, in the fifth episode of Season Three.  In it, Mr. Eko is urged to give confession by his dead brother Yemi, who has suddenly appeared on the island (an appearance that was later confirmed to be LOST uber-villain the Man in Black; this is important to why I don’t like this).  As Eko reflects on a chapter of his life, he ultimately tells Yemi he has nothing to confess for.  How can he, when he has spent his life doing the best he can with what he has been given?  He ends up being murdered by the smoke monster for this answer.

At the time, I hated this conclusion for Eko.  Part of what made him compelling in the second season was his endless capacity for remorse.  Here was a man who had lived his life as an African warlord (but only after being “recruited” by a local gang, and even then, that recruitment was submitted to in order to protect his brother) before having to cover Yemi’s beat as the town priest.  Upon crash-landing on the island, Eko is forced to kill a pair of Others in self-defense.  As recompense, he takes a vow of silence for 40 days.  I just found it hard to believe this same man would reach his day of judgment and all of a sudden go, “lol just kidding”.

Now, I’ve come all the way around on this aspect of “The Cost of Living”.  With nearly eighteen years of reflection, I actually find Mr. Eko’s argument that, given how many awful things were foisted on him, he did the absolute best that he could and, thus, has nothing to be judged for, quite moving.  It’s undoubtedly bolstered by AAA’s quiet underplaying of this moment, and it allows you to really consider the mature approach Mr. Eko is taking on his life.

It’s the violent, vengeful nature of how the smoke monster kills him that I’m still angry about.  First off, the special effect is ridiculous; the monster takes on the form of a fist that grabs Eko around the waist and starts throwing him around.  Second of all, when I say “throw around”, I’m underselling it.  Eko’s body is thrown against several large and heavy trees before being pulled up in the sky and finally crushed against the jungle ground.  The way the show revels in all of this, you’d think AAA had fucked Carlton Cuse’s wife or something.

I hate this for an onscreen reason and an offscreen reason.  Onscreen, I’m not sure I understand why the smoke monster/Man in Black is killing him for this reason.  Why the fuck does he care about Eko’s unrepentance?  I suppose if one squints their eyes, you could justify it as “Eko’s emotional breakthrough makes him a stronger candidate for Jacob’s post and, thus, is dangerous”, but…it’s not clear if Eko even is a candidate.  The real reason is, unfortunately, that the show needed a reason for Eko to die, and this is what they chose due to the fact that they didn’t quite nail down what the smoke monster was at that point*.

*Note: not a “this show is fucking made up!” criticism!  Remember: all shows are made up.  A lot of LOST doesn’t snap into focus until the end date is finalized.

That takes me to the offscreen reason, the vengeful nature of Eko’s death.  It’s not a secret that this change in AAA’s excitement about the show ruffled feathers.  Unfortunately, episode co-writer Monica Owusu-Breen has gone on record as saying that Carlton Cuse had openly wished “to hang him from the highest tree. God, if we could only cut his dick off and shove it down his throat”. 

Cuse has obviously denied ever saying this (probably because it’s extremely racist), and he may not have said it!  We’ll never know for sure, but it’s undeniable from the visceral nature of Eko’s death (a nature not extended to basically any other death up to that point) that a score was being settled here.  Just a nasty note for one of my favorite characters to go out on.  It was the most deflated I had ever been about LOST.  It still hurts almost twenty years later.

3. My favorite Sawyer line

That said, the mini-season wasn’t all terrible.  At the very least, it contains The Greatest Forgotten Sawyer Line of the entire series.  It happens in the flashback within “Every Man for Himself”, the fourth episode of Season Three, naturally a Sawyer-focused adventure.  For what it’s worth, it’s probably the second strongest flashback of the first six episodes*, a story that follows an incarcerated Sawyer working out a con for the warden in order to reduce his time and secure the future of a daughter he only recently learned he had.  That daughter ends up being with Cassidy, a woman who he had double-crossed earlier in his life, a decision that has haunted him ever since.  Cassidy visits Sawyer in prison to inform him of their child, as well as to encourage him to write her a letter.  

A defiant Sawyer scoffs at the idea, and erupts with this fucking banger:

“What the hell am I gonna write?  ‘Dear Goo Goo Ga Ga!’ She’s a baby!”

Perfect.

*Sorry, “Jack beat the shit out his dad at an AA meeting”, “Locke worked at a pot farm” and “Kate was married to Nathan Fillion”.

4. Nikki and Paulo

The most famously clunky aspect of the early part of Season Three is, of course, the roll out of Nikki and Paulo, a pair of characters that were teased with a certain amount of intrigue.  One, Paulo was played by Rodrigo Santoro, a luxury casting of an actor that wasn’t all that well known in America, but was humongous in Brazil.  Two, Nikki and Paulo represented LOST returning to a trick that worked so well with Dr. Arzt back in Season One: bringing folk from the background to the main spotlight in order to present a new perspective.  It’s not the worst idea in the world!

But Nikki and Paulo just enter the stage with a big wet thud.  They don’t make their appearance until the third episode of the season, and even then not until its closing minutes.  They would go on to make sporadic appearances six more times before finally being killed off (we’ll talk about their deaths in a second).  The only real attempt made to make the two stand-offish characters active participants in the story is one of those hamfisted “heretofore unseen character is all of a sudden smarter and more competent than our established leads” moments; exploring a new hatch with a wall full of televisions, Nikki asks why nobody has tried to turn them on.  Locke responds that they didn’t think of it.  Paulo then emerges from the bathroom.  It’s all just kind of lazy and bad.

It feels for all the world like the writer’s room lost confidence in the “background characters become mains” idea long before Nikki and Paulo’s first episode aired.  They emerged just infrequently enough for you to forget about them altogether, just to get annoyed all over again.  The good news is that this very awkward failed experiment resulted in one of the more controversial episodes in the show’s run, an episode that I happen to love…

5. “Exposé”

The one and only episode in the LOST canon that is unequivocally, indisputably a shitpost.  It’s the Nikki and Paulo episode, where the characters get contextualized in flashback before getting buried alive in the beach, to be barely ever mentioned again, a “Poochie returned to his home planet” moment made manifest.  A lot of people hated it, a too-goofy hour of TV that prominently featured two deadweight characters, another episode of LOST burned on another waste of time.

I, however, loved it.  Loved it at the time, loved it again on rewatch.

I’m a little biased on this one.  “Exposé” aired on my nineteenth birthday, and what a goddamn LOST episode to air on one’s birthday.  It’s a silly one-off where Sawyer and the gang try to solve the mystery of Nikki and Paulo’s presumed deaths, all the while wondering, “who the hell are these two, anyway?”  To answer that question, we go into the past and follow Nikki and Paulo through significant events in the show’s history.  It’s one of the only episodes that is actively in conversation with itself, an apology wrapped in a jokey Twilight Zone-esque story.

But this is exactly why I like “Exposé”.  It’s not at all the episode the show intended to make; the goal was for Nikki and Paulo to be legitimate long-term characters on LOST.  But the gut feeling the writer’s room had for the characters, as well as the very obvious contempt the audience shared for them, made a change in plans inevitable.  But the show could have dug in its heels and continued to insist on their importance and legitimacy!  Instead, they decided to admit defeat and have a little fun.  I find that to be an endearing moment of humility, and one that couldn’t have occurred had LOST appeared in the streaming era, where the entire season would have been made in a vacuum and no changing of the streams would have been possible.

*There were genuine plans to have Nikki’s backstory be depicted as living the life of an undercover spy before the ending twist reveal of her actually being an actress on a spy show.  This became the opening flashback of “Expose”.

I don’t begrudge those who hated this fucking episode.  If you already felt like LOST was wasting your time, “Exposé” wasn’t going to help them beat the allegations.  But in a season that had already borne several self-inflicted wounds, the show’s willingness to start treating them felt like a good sign to me.

There were other new characters in Season Three that were actually good!  First and foremost….

6. Juliet Burke

As played by Elizabeth Mitchell, Juliet was one of those characters that just hit immediately, and it felt like the show had a lot of confidence in her right from the start.  Juliet is given the same treatment that Desmond was in the season previous; the cold open of the entire season is placed in her hands, as we watch her conduct a book club in what initially appears to be an average American suburb before PSYCH IT’S ON THE ISLAND!  

What’s immediately apparent in this opening scene is Mitchell’s ability to underplay emotion, a technique not always used by LOST as much as it could be.  Her face isn’t doing a whole lot, but even just watching her wistfully listen to Petula Clark warble “Downtown”* is enough to communicate a whole lifetime of frustration, homesickness, and broken promises.  Right from the jump, Juliet was an intriguing blank slate of possibilities, the platonic ideal for a new LOST character.

*Another reason Juliet felt like an All-Timer right out of the gate: much like Desmond Hume, she was assigned a famous pop song from the 60’s/70’s in her first scene.

I’d argue Juliet’s best moments come later in the series (specifically, Season Five), but it felt like a good sign that, even though her eventual betrayal of the Others and her integration into the main cast felt obvious and inevitable, it was still really satisfying to see unfold.  Yeah, the show used her as an awkward fourth angle in the Jack-Sawyer-Kate triangle (because why shouldn’t every single fucking thing on this show be in service of this particular storyline?), but she had already exhibited enough agency and pathos and sympathy that you were willing to let it go.

It’s possible Elizabeth Mitchell is one of the four or five best performers LOST ever had in its arsenal, and it was one of the encouraging things about Season Three that they were willing to utilize her as often as possible.  Her first flashback episode “Not in Portland”, which kicked off the straight-through section of the season, was an early sign that the show was going to be able to right itself after a terrible start.

The episode right after that wasn’t too bad, either…

7. “Flashes Before Your Eyes”

In some ways, “Flashes Before Your Eyes” is sort of the prologue to an even more famous episode, Season Four’s “The Constant”.  Both involve Desmond stuck outside of the present day, desperately trying to keep his relationship with his beloved Penny from slipping through his fingers once again, and both represent a paradigm shift in what a LOST episode could be.  “The Constant” just manages to be the bigger achievement, but failing to be as good as the uniformly recognized best episode of the show shouldn’t diminish what “Flashes Before Your Eyes” manages to establish.

First of all, after a couple of episodes where Desmond is mostly left to wander around the jungle sans clothing, as well as exhibiting the preternatural ability to detect, and help avoid, imminent danger surrounding Charlie Pace, “Flashes Before Your Eyes” serves as the official integration of everyone’s favorite Scotsman into the third season of LOST.  The final piece of the “what happened after the hatch blew up” mystery that the show had already burned three episodes resolving, this Desmond time-travel adventure easily served as the most charming and intriguing entry.  After introducing us to the Desmond-Penny romance in the Season Two finale (for my money, the heart of the entire show), “Flashes Before Your Eyes” gives us the background on how they fell apart in the first place.

But because Desmond episodes always have to be a little special, it’s no regular flashback.  No, Desmond is literally thrown back in time to relive one of the most painful chapters of his life.  One would think this would provide him the opportunity to do something different, to not let Penny’s dad Charles make him feel like a lower class loser, to buy Penny that ring instead of turning tail and joining the army.  Alas, fate steps in to make it clear that under no circumstances is he allowed to change what has already occurred (a crucial philosophy that comes into play in Season Five).  He appears to be condemned to his past with little ability to affect the future.  Oh, and on top of all that, once he flashes back to the present, he’s burdened with the knowledge that Charlie Pace is about to die.

Again, “The Constant” takes this time-travel story and runs with it to astonishing effect.  But “Flashes Before Your Eyes” sets up everything that is needed for us to buy that future masterpiece.  It establishes Desmond as the show’s true tortured romantic hero, it crucially finds a way for us to live in his relationship with Penny and, most amazing of all, it allows LOST to dip its toe into time-travel without it feeling like a huge leap or escalation.  For a week, it felt like LOST had gotten its groove back.

Then, one week later…

8. “Stranger in a Strange Land”

Perhaps the most infamous Bad Episode in the LOST canon, the one whose quality was so poor that it famously allowed Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse to begin negotiating an end date for the show, as it was clear that “infinite seasons with infinite episodes depicting infinite flashbacks” was not a realistic option for LOST.  I gotta tell ya, I’m glad Damon and Carlton got to start planning an endgame for this thing, but going to your bosses and arguing “we made an episode so bad that you have to figure out when to let us stop making the show” feels like a risky proposition.

If ever there were an episode to point to in order to make this case, “Stranger in a Strange Land” would be the one.  There’s an instinct to try to reclaim this tale of how Jack Shepard got his famous tattoos, so hated and reviled is this mid-season episode.  I’ve heard the case made that, clunky though it is, the really vile Jack flashback (where he basically gets drunk in Thailand, makes an ass of himself, falls in with a mysterious tattoo artist played by Bai Ling, and manages to get himself banned from the country) is a dark chapter of his life that is absolutely necessary in order for us to buy into the trick of the finale, “Through the Looking Glass” (more on that later!).  I actually like and agree with this train of thought, but it doesn’t excuse how off putting the whole episode is. 

It’s an hour of the show that feels empty, even vaguely inessential.  The main present action revolves around Juliet being put on trial, although essentially offscreen (it’s a Jack episode, after all, therefore everything must be seen through his eyes, even when it has nothing to do with him).  We’re introduced to a new Other who appears to have some real adjudicative status.  We promptly never see her again after this episode.  Sawyer and Kate are left trying to escape Hydra Island with Karl, a character that (kindly) is not anybody’s favorite.  The flashback resolves a mystery nobody in three years ever asked about, and the answer isn’t especially interesting: turns out Jack got his tattoos…from a tattoo artist!  Whoah!  

“Stranger in a Strange Land” reflected a show all of a sudden running on fumes, although based on how much the episode puts you to sleep, it might be leaking carbon monoxide.  There might be more infuriating moments and episodes in LOST history, but this episode was the show at its most leaden and comatose.  Thankfully, things pick up from here almost immediately.  The very next episode, as a matter of fact…

9. “Tricia Tanaka is Dead”

Also known as “Hurley, Sawyer, and Charlie hang out and fix up an old van.”  It’s the filler-iest of filler episodes; if the van didn’t feature in a key moment of the third season finale, you could make an argument that “Tricia Tanaka is Dead” could be skipped altogether.  “Tricia Tanaka is Dead” also kicks ass, one of the biggest arguments in favor of “filler” that LOST ever devised.

Yes, on the face of it, the episode is mostly a romp.  It features, among other things, Jin being taught how to say in English the only three things a woman needs to hear*, Sawyer knocking back a beer with a skeleton, and a chicken restaurant getting destroyed by a meteor.  Considering LOST was constantly being scrutinized for wasting its audience’s time by stretching its mysteries out for as long as possible, this side quest constituted something of a risk.  But when you consider how (for the most part) serious and story-focused LOST becomes once the endgame begins to get rolled out in its second half, you can’t help but wonder if LOST couldn’t have used more episodes like this. 

*For those keeping score: “I’m sorry”, “you were right”, and “those pants don’t make you look fat”.  Wildly corny joke bordering on hack, but in the context of Sawyer teaching Jin English, it’s hilarious.

We just don’t get a whole lot of episodes where it’s just the boys hangin’ out, you know?  It would seem somewhat contradictory to advocate a show that was often criticized for being slow to answer questions, but when you consider that the number one thing people say they loved about LOST were its characters, it starts to feel like there should have been like fifteen stand-alone episodes like this a year.  It worked for THE X-FILES!  Hell, if THE X-FILES had been, like, 100% stand-alone episodes, it would be considered the greatest show of all time.

It should be mentioned that, on top of all that, “Tricia Tanaka is Dead” isn’t all just bullshitting.  The flashback is somewhat bittersweet, establishing Hurley as yet another LOST character with an incompetent father, although David Reyes (as played by Cheech Marin) never actively feels evil or neglectful, just…not that good at the job.  Hurley, consumed with the feeling that he has been literally cursed by his lotto winnings, sees his absentee dad re-entering his life as just another of life’s teases, a knife that gets plunged when David admits, yes, he got back together with Hurley’s mom in order to get some of the money.  

But then…David does something almost none of the LOST Bad Dads ever did: he realizes his error and immediately works to change it.  He encourages Hugo to take his supposedly cursed money, start off a new life, and make your own luck, curses be damned.  It’s this idea of “making your own luck” that Hurley carries with him as he focuses on fixing up the abandoned Dharma van.  It’s why his specific crew of Sawyer (a man consumed with self-loathing) and Charlie (who is saddled with the knowledge that his death is imminent) is so important.  These are three characters who are in desperate need of forging their own path, and who better to lead them there than the eventual leader of the Island, Hugo “Hurley” Reyes?

And as the van careens down the hill, surely to get dashed by the rocks at the bottom, only for Hurley to pop the clutch and impossibly bring the van back to life?  As he begins driving around the Island, the eight-track of Three Dog Night’s “Shambala” blaring in the background?  It’s possible that LOST has never been better, including all of their major event episodes.

Tricia Tanaka may be dead, but LOST had suddenly found itself alive again.

10. Mikhail Bakunin

Mikhail (also known as Mr. Patchy due to his, well, eyepatch) is one of the funniest ideas for a character LOST ever had.  Here’s a guy with a goofy Russian accent that just wanders around the island causing trouble and is evidently immortal.  Why won’t he ever stay dead, despite being electrocuted, gored, shot and drowned?  Eat shit, that’s why.  In grand LOST tradition, he’s named after a notable figure from history, in this case, a Russian revolutionary and anarchist.  However, since LOST’s Mikhail is actually pretty loyal to the Others machine, I have to imagine he was given his namesake because the name sounds cool. Or they thought calling him Rasputin would be too on the nose.

A character that could have been a complete nothing is instead provided mild legendary status for two reasons.  One, great performance from character actor and horror legend Andrew Divoff.  LOST built a lot of its strength by filling the periphery with interesting and engaging actors, and Divoff was near the top of the list.  Two, he was a crucial piece of the puzzle that leads to Charlie’s death, a final defiant grenade-leveraging moment that altered the show forever.  He appears briefly in the flash-sideways in Season Six, but LOST otherwise lost something when Mikhail finally died for real.  Long live Mikhail.  You would have thought Sam Jackson’s Nick Fury was cool-looking.

11. Mr. Friendly

One of the fun things about the way LOST unravels over its six seasons is that the narrative focus shifts allow for marginal characters to all of a sudden find themselves in the middle of the main action.  A perfect example of this is a guy eventually known to us as Tom Friendly, an Other we get introduced to at the very end of Season One (he’s the bearded guy who informs Michael they “have to take the boy”).  We come across him once or twice in Season Two, where the devastating revelation is made that his beard is not real.  Other than that, though, Mr. Friendly is pretty much a sideline character, although one played by the legendary M.C. Gainey, so he stood out.

Then, all of a sudden, Season Three puts the narrative focus on the Others, which means it’s time for Mr. Friendly to be in, like, eleven episodes, practically now a supporting character in this massive ensemble.  You come to learn he’s kind of a compelling villain!  He’s definitely a company man, all too eager to give the business to Sawyer and Jack when the mood suits him, while still showing a certain amount of compassion when shit hits the fan during Ben Linus’ surgery.  When he finally gets plugged in the gut at the end of the season, a fate he absolutely deserves, you can’t help but feel a little disappointed.  At least he gets an extended cameo later in Season Four to confirm that, yes, Tom Friendly likes the fellas.  Representation!

12. “The Man From Tallahassee”

If we accept the official episode count*, which considers every individual hour as an individual episode, then there are 121 produced episodes of LOST.  “The Man From Tallahassee” falls almost square in the middle of that batch, right at #62.  This is sort of a fitting placement for the seminal Locke and Ben showdown episode, as one could make the argument that this is where the runaway towards the series finale finally emerges.  By the end of the hour, we are truly in the second half of the show’s story.

*Note: I do not.  Skip to the end of this article for more!

It’s where Locke truly sets himself off on his own path, even as he walls up everyone else’s (his destruction of the submarine is an underrated dastardly heel turn in the history of LOST).  After being constantly manipulated by Ben throughout Season Two, Locke finally has the opportunity to turn the tables, as Ben finds himself wheelchair-bound after spinal surgery complications.  Of course, Ben never enters any interaction without at least one trick up his sleeve, as the memorable twist ending proves.  A piece of metatext I’ve always loved about this episode is Ben’s constant talk of a magic box, which is for all intents and purposes the same thing as J.J. Abrams’ famous “mystery box”, a storytelling philosophy that theorizes hyping up the potential of the inside of a box at the explicit expense of actually determining its contents (aka how LOST itself was initially built).  The difference between Ben and J.J., however, is that Ben knows how to fucking deliver; the reveal of Anthony Cooper, Locke’s dastardly conman dad, inside the “magic box” certainly ranks as one of the great “Oh.  Oh.” moments in all of LOST.

Oh, speaking of Locke’s dad, and “The Man From Tallahassee” is where we definitely learn How Locke Wound Up In The Wheelchair, a question plaguing LOST fans since damn near the first episode of the show.  It’s a mystery I always felt wasn’t all that essential to pursue in order for LOST to have been a success (to some degree, it’s more compelling that he was in a wheelchair, not necessarily how he got there), especially considering how much they fucking teased in during other Locke flashbacks.  However, when an answer is this connected to a character’s established tragic history, when it’s this much of a cruel punchline to the joke that Locke’s life had up to that point been…how can you argue with it?  Locke’s dad pushing him out of the window of a multi-story building in order to preserve his own wellbeing is their entire relationship in microcosm.

So, when Ben reveals that he has the ability to conjure Locke’s dad from seemingly nowhere, Locke now has the ability to finally exorcize his tortured past once and for all….

13. “The Brig”

So, naturally, Locke delegates it.  Maybe he has leadership capabilities after all.

Five whole episodes separate “The Man From Tallahassee” and “The Brig”, yet they feel so much of a piece that to some degree, they both are better served when watched in succession.  “The Brig” picks up the thread left open by “The Man From Tallahassee”, and covers Locke’s time alone with the Others, as Ben informs him the only way to be accepted into the group, indeed the only way for him to truly live again, is for Locke to kill his own father.  However, as Locke will soon learn, even with Anthony Cooper tied to a post, he can’t bring himself to do it.  As established from the time he spent on a pot farm infiltrated by an undercover cop, Locke isn’t a killer.

But, he knows someone else who is.  And after Richard Alpert intervenes with fate by handing Locke a file on Cooper, a file that reveals a connection with someone else on the island, he knows how to solve his problem.

Yeah, this is the episode where Sawyer gets his revenge on the man who destroyed his family.

The whole “Locke’s dad was the original Sawyer” was a fan theory that had been around seemingly since Cooper’s introduction in Season One.  And it made a lot of sense!  Although there are quite a few seeming connections in the LOST-iverse that wind up being mere coincidences, this was one that had a lot of thematic and dramatic juice.  So it was quite thrilling that “The Brig” went ahead and confirmed it without the show ever tipping its hand.  The result is one of the leanest, meanest, darkest hours in the LOST canon.

Even though it’s technically a Locke-centric episode, this is really Sawyer’s time to shine.  Although Locke is the one who ultimately gains from the murder of Anthony Cooper, Sawyer is the one who undergoes the major change, and possibly the one that allows for the image rehabilitation he undergoes in the second half of LOST.  And it’s not a murder that comes easily!  As the episode morphs into a semi-bottle episode, and Sawyer finally confronts Cooper, there’s a lot of room for him to back down, for him to realize that revenge won’t heal his soul.  And despite Cooper being a defiant, dismissive asshole the entire time (possibly fueled by his belief that he’s already died and is now in Hell), you keep telling yourself normal narrative convention will win the day and Sawyer will figure out how to take the hero’s route.

And then Sawyer hands Cooper the letter, the letter he’s been carrying since the pilot episode, the letter that lays out in explicit detail every horrible thing he did to the Ford family.  And, in one of the coldest moves a LOST character ever pulls, Cooper literally says, “blah blah blah” and rips it to pieces.  A moment of catharsis torn to shreds.

That’s it.  Sawyer grabs a chain and chokes the life out of Anthony Cooper.  You would, too.

Sawyer is shaken in the episodes to come, and is clearly a changed man, but when you track his arc to its completion, it’s hard not to notice how doing the right thing begins to be easier for James Ford from here on out.  It’s a black-hearted message in a black-hearted episode (one that feels particularly focused due to its near-complete lack of a substantial B-plot): sometimes revenge is good.

Some may take issue with that on principle, but not me.  One way or another, Sawyer is unburdened.  And so is John Locke.  As he grabs the corpse of the man who cost him the use of his legs and throws him over his shoulder, Locke carries his destiny back to the Others’ camp, ready to see what’s next.  It’s an astounding episode in an astounding run for LOST, and one that you weren’t really prepared for, almost as if we didn’t know the show had it in them.

14. Charlie’s redemption song

I’ve thrown a lot of barbs at poor Charlie Pace the past couple of weeks, and for good reason: after a strong start way back at the beginning of Season One, it had been a rough year and a half for the biggest casting coup (Dominic Monaghan) LOST had in its arsenal.  The show just couldn’t seem to find a secondary conflict for the bloody rock god and heroin addict that wasn’t just “more heroin”.

But, man, wild what happens when you bake a ticking clock into any character, eh?  The moment Desmond informs him, “you’re gonna die, Charlie”, it’s like a switch went off.  Now, the self-pitying and seeming refusal to grow that had been so frustrating over Season One and Two became somewhat tragic.  The promise of Charlie’s demise made you remember exactly what was so appealing about the guy in the first place.  First, Monaghan really is excellent in the role, even when the character was at his most annoying.  He’s charming and a little roguish, and able to throw in some memorable barbs with the best of them.  Second, the redemption of a cute “bad guy” is always going to be appealing from an audience stand-point.

What made Charlie’s end run sing so beautifully was that it finally gave the guy a second conflict, that of Charlie vs. Fate itself.  Do you constantly run from danger in order to stave off the seeming inevitable?  Or do you set yourself up to be the hero in order to embrace your fate (or even, as “Tricia Tanaka” taught him, possibly make your own fate)?  It all “culminates” in easily the strongest Charlie-centric episode of all of LOST, “Greatest Hits”, as Charlie writes down the most seminal moments of his life in a letter that is revealed to be a final statement to Claire.  At the end, he goes off to save the day.  To everyone’s surprise, he survives to the end of the episode!  His fate will have to wait for…

15. “Through the Looking Glass”

LOST’s defining moment, an easy contender for top three LOST episodes of all time.  Certainly one of those “I remember exactly where I was when I watched it” kind of episodes.

In some ways, the Season Three finale succeeds in all the nuts-and-bolts TV stuff that LOST sometimes fumbled on.  It’s exciting and propulsive in a way that makes its eighty-plus minutes runtime just fly by, as our castaways and the Others finally battle head-to-head, and Jack Shephard becomes hyper-focused (nearly to a fault) as his overarching mission comes within reach: to get everybody off the island and back home.   We get Bernard trying not to go “full Rambo”, we have the confounding back-to-back moments where Jack kisses Juliet, then kells Kate he loves her, we get the all-time sequence where Hurley mows down a team of Others with the Dharma van, we get Sawyer getting revenge on Tom Friendly for taking Walt…the whole episode feels like a series of perfectly crafted moments, all beautifully linked together to create a whole.

Even without the flashback, this would have been a fairly shocking episode, as the present day action ends with Jack…succeeding!  Despite Locke throwing a knife into poor Naomi’s back (which somewhat undercuts the “Locke just can’t pull the trigger on Jack” moment a few minutes later, but no matter), they’re able to get Naomi’s radio back in operation, and contact is made with the freighter she arrived on.  Despite Ben’s insistence that this means the end for them all, our last moment on the island for the year is one of triumph: the outside world is coming to pick up our survivors.  It’s a moment that feels for all the world like one to be saved for a series finale, so the fact that this came a few months after the announcement that LOST would run for three more seasons was more than a little hair-raising.

But…there is a flashback.  Well, sort of.  It’s a tale of Jack Shephard at his lowest.  He’s addicted to pills and booze, and the mysterious news of the death of someone who is neither friend nor family is enough for him to prepare to launch himself off a bridge.  It’s a downer story, but one not fully out of line with the asshole we’ve seen in the other Jack flashbacks that year (again, beating the shit out of his dad, and being a general nuisance in Thailand).  But, even when watching, I knew something was coming.  Considering that Season One’s finale weaved multi-character flashbacks telling us the story of how everyone arrived on Oceanic Flight 815, and Season Two’s gave us the full tragic tale of Desmond Hume…this fairly straightforward Jackback didn’t feel like it had the proper scope and scale for a LOST finale.

And then…the final scene arrives and it becomes clear what we’re seeing is actually a flash-forward.  Jack is off the island, and he’s a fucking wreck (oh my god, is Ben right?  Is this the end for everybody?)  Some of the more astute of my friends at the watch party had put two and two together earlier that night from the opening scene just based off of the ridiculous beard Matthew Fox is rocking the whole episode (something about it just screams “future depression”), but you could still feel the energy in the room when Kate steps out of that taxi cab.  It still hits, and I’ve been aware of how it ends for seventeen years!

It’s hard to overstate how important the final moments of “Through the Looking Glass” are to the legacy of LOST.  As you remember, Season Three takes a long time to get going, burdened by a format that was dulling its creative juices, and hamstrung by a lack of real purpose.  Yet, the whole thing ends with a scene that proved it hadn’t lost its magic, not by a long shot.  LOST burned through the presumed stopping point of its story (they leave the island) only to show that they had a whole other set of potential compelling stories to tell, and they do it by pulling off an elegant magic trick, the kind they hadn’t pulled since….”Walkabout” all the way back in Season One?  LOST still had it.

As Jack yelled, “We have to go back!”  I realized I had come a long way from my own teetering on the brink earlier that season.  All of a sudden, I couldn’t wait to go back either.

Nicely done, LOST.  My fandom never wavered again.

16. The episode count

This isn’t an item that is super specific to Season Three, but watching this batch of episodes on DVD at the time was what made me notice this.

So.

LOST has a handful of two-and three-hour episodes, almost exclusively season finales.  As mentioned last week, I love these!  A lot of the beauty to LOST lives in its excesses.  There’s nothing like getting yourself wrapped up in an occasional movie-length LOST episode here and there during a watch-through.

BUT!  If you’ll notice, on all streaming sites the show has ever been on, these episodes have all been split up into several parts.  Thus, “Through the Looking Glass” is now “Through the Looking Glass, Part 1” and “Through the Looking Glass, Part 2.”  The middle sections of these epic installments are now interrupted with beginning and end credits that were not there before, completing upending the flow.  It drives me insane every single time, especially when one considers that every time LOST appears on a new streaming platform, its audience grows.  And with the growth comes a whole new generation of fans who think the episodes are just like that, which they aren’t.  New fans deserve to experience LOST the way we all did!

This isn’t a practice that began with the streaming sites, however.  To my recollection and research, this practice actually began with the DVDs.  Yes, starting with the release of the third season of LOST on physical media, “Through the Looking Glass” was split into two parts which, again, was a finale very carefully crafted and plotted to flow in a certain way and did not air as two separate episodes.    All subsequent season releases had their two-hour episodes split up in the same way.  To this day, I have no clue why this practice began, nor why it was retained.  

I know this is, like, the very definition of a privileged, first-world problem.  “Whaa whaa Netflix says Season Two of LOST has 24 episodes, when there were only 23!  Why is this happening to me??”  But it’s always disappointed me that the show has altered itself for reasons that are inscrutable, and it’s annoying that streaming releases have maintained this alteration.  Actually, one platform, Hulu, went one step further and edited a couple minutes here and there from each half of a given finale.  The fucking series finale was initially edited down by 18 whole minutes!    Why???  

They did eventually upload the finale in full, which shows it can be done.  All I ask is that “Exodus Part 2”, “Live Together, Die Alone”, “Through the Looking Glass”, “There’s No Place Like Home Part 2”, “The Incident” and “LA X” be given the same treatment.  I want to go back!

Hyrda Island Bonus: Experiencing THE LOST EXPERIENCE!

There comes a point in every intellectual property’s life where it tries to extend its “story” from beyond the narrative confines of the silver or small screen and into the World Wide Web, where anything and anybody could potentially become part of the narrative, even the dear soul reading this right now.  Shortly after this point, another point follows where said intellectual property inevitably pretends the previous point never happened, and finishes its life without ever mentioning it again.

It can be a relatively low level narrative extension, such as the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s attempt to turn a fictional in-universe news network into a full-blown YouTube channel, one that dropped nuggets of information about upcoming movies and featured interviews from your favorite characters (for reference, “WHIH: Newsfront” lasted through the promo cycles for ANT-MAN and CAPTAIN AMERICA: CIVIL WAR before being quietly discontinued).  But sometimes these internet extensions would become full-blown phenomena even beyond the property it was meant to promote; “I Love Bees” sure feels like it has a whole separate legacy from Halo 2.

That Halo 2 tie-in is, of course, one of the most famous examples of an Alternate Reality Game (ARG), the success of which launched a bevy of other tie-in ARGs, most of which have kind of become lost to time.  I’m certain I don’t really need to explain ARGs in this day and age, but in the event you’ve never come across one in the last twenty-five years or so, they’re basically puzzle games that mostly play out over the Internet, but can integrate some real-world interfaces (including phone numbers and real locations or buildings) in order to make the player feel like they’re part of the puzzle’s world.  At their best, it can make the player feel like a detective, exploring the textile universe to help solve a creepy murder, decrypt a strange video, or even just hack a website.

Of course, because there are a lot of ARGs (due to the fact that just about anybody with an ounce of creativity and ambition can start one), that means there are a lot of bad ARGs.  There are many that get solved too quickly, get abandoned by their creators after just a couple of days, or just feel too silly to maintain the illusion of reality.  Just like any mode of storytelling, ARGs really do need to be written in order to be satisfying.  They’re really hard, even (or even especially) when they’re meant to convey some very specific information.

In the summer of 2006, ABC launched its own ARG, The LOST Experience, a game that was ostensibly about the expansion of the hit show’s mythology, as well a vessel to provide answers to questions that the show itself was not intending to provide at that point (namely, the meaning of The Numbers).  With the full context of time, what the ARG kind of ended up being was a semi-shameless corporate marketing campaign and a purgatory for show writers that were on the rocks.  Naturally, I loved it at the time, and can still find some charm in it to this day, even amongst all the mess and nonsense.

Let’s jump in and take a look back at The LOST Experience. 

—

In brief: The LOST Experience followed the exploits of a character named Rachel Blake (played by Jamie Silberhartz), an online activist who is determined to bring down the Hanso Foundation, a mysterious corporation briefly referenced on LOST in the Swan orientation video from the Season Two episode…uh, “Orientation”, and would go on to get mild shout-outs throughout the rest of LOST’s run*.  As the game went on, we learned that Rachel was a gifted child who worked for the Widmore Corporation as a teenager until her mother mysteriously passed away.  As she dug through her family’s finances, it’s revealed that the Hanso Foundation was the one funding all of her higher education.  Further research causes her to discover corrupt goings-on among the Hanso Foundation, spurring her to quit the Widmore Corporation and presume the online hacker name “Persephone”.  And now it’s up to you to help her!  

*Magnus Hanso is revealed in the final season to be the owner of the slave ship The Black Rock.

The origin of the Numbers come into play when the Hanso Foundation’s nefarious plan is revealed.  It turns out that during the Cuban Missile Crisis, a Princeton mathematician named Enzo Valenzetti, at the behest of the United Nations, developed an equation that does nothing less than predict the end of human existence.  The Hanso Foundation got their hands on this equation (naturally named the Valenzetti Equation) and have spent decades researching how to possibly manipulate it, change it, and eventually control it.  The “core numerical values” of the Equation? 4, 8, 15, 16, 23, and 42.  Whoah!

If that all feels very much like an LOST-themed optional side-quest, well, you’re right.  But the way The LOST Experience had initially rolled out was undeniably intriguing.  It all started with a brief commercial during the Season Two episode “Two For the Road” that directed viewers to call a phone number, as well as a URL for the Hanso Foundation website.  Damon and Carlton even talked about this special commercial on an episode of THE OFFICIAL LOST PODCAST, speaking about the Hanso Foundation as if it were a real organization in our universe.  The roll-out of the Rachel Blake character was even more ambitious; she managed to crash that summer’s LOST Comic-Con panel, reaching the audience mic to ask a few pointed questions about the show’s ties to the Hanson Foundation before being dragged out by security.

Now, this was a pleasingly ambitious way to extend your LOST fandom into the doldrums of summer…just as long as you didn’t think about any of it, literally like at all.  Just off the top of my head, the idea that The Hanso Foundation is an existing company in our real universe blatantly contradicts the idea that this is supposed to be an extension of the fictional LOST universe.  Why is Rachel Blake, a fictional character, in San Diego yelling at Damon and Carlton?  Are Damon and Carlton part of the LOST universe?  Does the show LOST exist within LOST?  Do we exist within LOST?  If we’re meant to look at this as a real-world investigation into an evil company that the show LOST is just co-opting for their story, then…who cares about the Numbers reveal?  Who cares what the Numbers mean in real life?  You kinda had to not think about The LOST Experience too much in order to enjoy it.

But, that’s the thing, it’s not that fun to play pretend without thinking.  More to the point, part of the fun of watching LOST in the first place was using your noggin a little bit.  It’s not like you needed to be a college graduate or a philosopher in order to really get it, man.  But even in its worst moments, there was always an attempt on the show’s part to feel like there was a reward for leaving your brain on for the full hour.  So, just on that alone, The LOST Experience felt like a weak extension of the brand.

Also…here’s the thing about most of LOST’s official tie-in material: it all kind of sucks.  In almost twenty years, I’ve never heard anybody say anything kind about either the tie-in BAD TWIN book or the video game LOST: Via Domus.  The reason for this is fairly simple: had the story ideas for these things been all that strong, they would have been retained for the actual show.  It’s the reason there was never an official theatrical 24 movie, back when the Kiefer Sutherland-led show was hitting the zeitgeist: all of their potential movie pitches ended up getting used as actual episodes.

So, no, something like a LOST ARG cannot possibly provide vital information about Jack, Sawyer, Kate or Ben Linus.  The best you can hope for as a LOST fan jumping into The LOST Experience is something within the ARG catching on and perhaps leading to a crossover on the show prior.  Just a little nod.  Maybe Rachel Blake showing up in a flashback scene or something.  But, nope, there’s nothing like that, and there’s certainly nothing within The LOST Experience that you couldn’t glean from watching the actual show.  Even the “Numbers explanation” ends up getting swept under the rug by the time LOST completed its run; it turns out the Numbers were all associated with numbers assigned to our six final candidates to replace Jacob, a much more satisfying and character-based explanation than some fucking doomsday equation.

At its core, that’s the central issue with The LOST Experience; it never had a chance at replicating the show’s secret sauce, that of its memorable character creations.  Yeah, the plot of The LOST Experience is silly when written all out, but the Overall Plot of LOST is equally absurd when taken as a series of written paragraphs. But when experienced through the souls of John Locke, James Ford, Desmond Hume, Hugo Reyes, the Overall Plot is entertaining and often quite moving.  But there are no John Lockes or Desmond Humes in The LOST Experience.  How could there be?  Even if Rachel Blake had been a dynamite A+ character, short exposition-laden YouTube videos and brief Comic-Con outbursts are no way to establish her humanity, her wants and needs.

All that said, I do look back on The LOST Experience with a fair degree of fondness.  I wasn’t an active participant with the actual gameplay of the ARG, and found myself mostly happy to monitor on the sidelines and let other people go figure out the right email to send a message to in order to access a website, or whatever.  I did watch the videos found all along the way, as well as ruminate on what the expanded mythology could mean for my favorite show, even as, again, it turned out the answer was “absolutely nothing”.  The very idea that it could have meant something was enough for 18-year old me.

My favorite part of The LOST Experience was a relatively niche aspect of it.  One of the ways the ARG dispensed pieces of lore and information was via episodes of an in-universe conspiracy radio show hosted by a guy named DJ Dan.  DJ Dan, who was somewhere between Art Bell and Alex Jones, was a sworn enemy of the Hanso Foundation (and made sure it was known every single episode) took questions from people who reported being genetically manipulated by the Widmore Corporation, explained their family’s connection to the Dharma Initiative and, crucially, theorized about the identity of the online hacker “persephone”.  

The episodes of DJ Dan’s show (which were, frustratingly, usually hidden in the code of whatever website everyone playing was supposed to be convening on that week) were usually no longer than a few minutes and were ever-so-slightly corny, although not without the ability to respond to the gameplay unfolding in real time.  One episode had DJ Dan take great offense at the LOST wiki Lostpedia’s categorization of him as a “fictional” character, while another had him defend himself from accusations of being a sellout, no doubt a reference to the fact that one of the main websites to access these episodes was through something called sublymonal.com, which was basically just a fucking Sprite ad. 

None of this made DJ Dan stand out to me all these years later, however.  No, it was the pair of live episodes DJ Dan broadcast near the end of The LOST Experience, when it was revealed that the guy playing Dan was…pretty funny!  These two episodes were a lot looser and allowed our host to do a little banter with his announcer, who it turned out he had some chemistry and comedic chops with.  I’m probably in danger of overselling the value of these two DJ Dan episodes, and I’m aware I’m way in the weeds with this right now (it’s possible I’ve written more words about DJ Dan than I have about Sayid Jarrah at this point in this series).  But I emphasize how much all the DJ Dan stuff thrilled me, especially compared to the more straight-forward Rachel Blake and Hanso Foundation stuff within The LOST Experience, because it turns out DJ Dan was played by Javier Grillo-Marxuach.

Grillo-Marxuach, besides having a really satisfying name to say out loud, is a name most LOST fans should recognize as a founding member of the LOST writer’s room, having been a guiding voice in the first two seasons, as well as the credited writer for some beloved episodes (including Season One’s “House of the Rising Sun” and Season Two’s “Orientation”).  As I can tell, he was the primary mind behind the Season Two stuff I really loved (The Dharma Initiative).  He also has credited himself as the co-writer (with Jordan Rosenberg) of every word of The LOST Experience, a project he found himself in the middle of right as it seemed his time with LOST was coming to a close.  You can read the whole story here (and you really should, it’s a famous document within LOST circles for a reason), but despite the amazing amount of autonomy and responsibility Grillo-Marxuach was given to create and coordinate The LOST Experience (and I LOVE the confirmation that, as I suspected, a lot of the DJ Dan stuff was improvised), you can’t help but feel like being given the ARG assignment was a mild form of punishment for the unique creative talent that had found himself on the outs with the Powers That Be.  

And maybe that helps to define the ultimate feeling that one gets when they reflect on The LOST Experience: the sense that there is a real person or two trying to provide a soul and a pulse to a corporate-mandated project that ultimately didn’t matter at all.  Its place in the grand LOST canon is…uh…lost to time, possibly because it’s a difficult thing to “replay” almost twenty years later.  Most of the links are dead, and what remains needs a ton of context to be appreciated in any way*.  The Valenzetti Equation nor Rachael Blake nor Alvar Hanso never get integrated into LOST proper, and its story’s canonicity is more or less zero, written by a writer whose tenure with the show was about to end anyway.  It’s hard not to look at the ARG as an inconsequential failure.

*That said, this YouTube channel has most of the actual videos archived and arranged in chronological order if you’re ever interested in working your way through them.

But there was this one summer where it felt like maybe it was possible to earn some extra credit as a LOST fan.  It didn’t pan out, but I’d be lying if I said I regret the decision to follow along with The LOST Experience.  At least, I think I’d be lying.

Ah well.  We’ll always have DJ Dan.

I Had To Go Back: Down the Hatch with Season Two of LOST!

Ah, Season Two of LOST.

If one were to gather every single person who eventually bailed on LOST, polled them to determine exactly where in the show’s run they stopped watching, then aggregated their responses in a chart, I suspect the biggest answer cluster would be found somewhere within this season’s 23 episodes.  Where Season One is famous for being the height of LOST, Season Two is famous for being where it lost its height, an alleged indication that nobody was ever truly in control in the writer’s room and that, maybe, just maybe, there really was no predetermined conclusion the show was reaching towards.

In 2006, I was very well aware of these opinions, but I just couldn’t grok them.  How the fuck could anybody be losing faith in this show?  Look at everything the season had accomplished!  It integrated a bunch of new characters, one of whom (Mr. Eko) certainly appeared to have All-Timer status written all over him.  It brought up an intriguing question (“what happens if the button doesn’t get pushed?”), and then answers it by the end (“it crashes planes and turns the sky lavender”).  Most of all, it started taking bold storytelling risks (devoting a whole episode entirely to new characters and their dynamics, just to cite one example).  Were people just insane?  I loved watching Season Two when it was airing live, and I was fairly certain for years that it was my favorite of all the LOST seasons.

In 2024, rewatching Season Two with the knowledge of the show in its totality, knowing that most of the season’s new characters would end up not meaning all that much in the grand scheme of things, their air time given to the detriment of most of the already-established castaways…taking in the amount of real duds hiding amongst the crown jewel episodes…well, as a famous fictional former paraplegic once said….

“I was wrong.”

Season Two is where you can feel the show straining under its growing ambition and struggling to push against its standing restrictions.  As the cast grew and grew as a result of the merger with the tail section castaways, and the need became apparent to establish these new principals by giving them the Full Flashback Treatment, original cast members started getting less time (can you believe there’s only one Sawyer-centric episode in Season Two?).  This wouldn’t necessarily be an issue if most of the tail section survivors weren’t six feet under the ground before the season’s conclusion, making one wonder what the point of them ever was.

With hindsight, there was just as much chaos behind the scenes as in Season One, but this time, the show’s karma seemed to run out.  A lot of the head-scratching personnel moves tended to be explained by some sort of disagreement behind the camera.  The seemingly scrapped together Michael flashback in “Adrift”?  That only came as a result of Harold Perrineau crying foul about the original draft’s de-emphasizing of the obvious crisis at hand (Walt is fucking gone).  Libby and Ana-Lucia getting gutted near the end of the season?  Despite constant claims to the contrary, Cynthia Watros and Michelle Rodriguez getting hit with DUIs seems too coincidental to dismiss entirely.  The magic that had held the first season together had seemed to dissipate.

This isn’t to say that Season Two is a disaster!  Far from, as a matter of fact.  The good stuff is really good.  I am of the personal opinion that the Hatch stuff is a lot of fun, to say nothing of all the Dharma Initiative videos and lore.  The previously mentioned Mr. Eko is a stunning creation, an instant fan favorite from basically his first scene.  Hell, some of my favorite episodes of the show happen in Season Two.  And you just can’t write off any season that introduces two true LOST Hall-of-Famers in Desmond Hume and Benjamin Linus.

However, I have to give it up to people who started smelling a rat in the show’s sophomore season.  Too many creative dead ends appeared, too many characters seemed stuck in place.  And for those who hated the Hatch and the Button, well….there’s a lot of the Hatch and the Button.  In retrospect, it’s the season where the realities of the show’s longevity truly began to come into focus.  How long could the show keep layering new mythology on top of the old without truly feeling like it’s moving towards something resembling a conclusion?

I’ll always have a soft spot for Season Two, though.   I get more nostalgic pangs reflecting on Season Two than I do any of the other five, likely because it was the season I got most of my friends caught up on the show, and people started watching live right along with me.  Even relatively mediocre seasons, it turns out, are easier with friends.  

Live together, die alone.

Let’s take a look at fifteen specific things (good or not-so-good) about LOST: Season Two!

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1. Man of Science, Man of Faith 

For all of the issues Season Two would ultimately face, it undeniably starts with a bang.  The premiere, “Man of Science, Man of Faith” is a focused, tightly drawn hour that both kicks off the next phase of the LOST story and introduces a man who would eventually turn into the emotional heart of the show (even if nobody quite knew it at the time, the creators included).

I mentioned last week that the hatch-opening cliffhanger was perhaps the single source of frustration in an otherwise perfect Season One finale (“Exodus, Part 1 & 2”).  There was a production reason driving that particular decision (the hatch set wasn’t yet built at the time of filming “Exodus”, thus there was nothing to show), but it still felt like a weird cheat going into the summer of 2005.

Well, it ended up being worth the wait anyway.  The very first scene of the episode is maybe one of the most famous (and most-emulated) in all of LOST.  A fairly common opening salvo to a LOST episode is to present an out-of-context scene of something fairly un-islandy only to reveal that PSYCH we’re still on the island!  However, the cold open to “Man of Science, Man of Faith” is likely the best of them all: the slow following of the man to be revealed as Desmond Hume waking up and going through his morning routine (the stationary bike, the protein shake, the vinyl playing Mama Cass’ “Make Your Own Kind Of Music”) followed by the slow pan back up to the top of the hatch, the very same place we left Jack and Locke at the end of Season One….LOST had done quite a bit in its first season, but it hadn’t really done anything like this kind of major disorientation twist before.  I got chills the first time I watched the episode, and I get them all over again each time I revisit it.

But beyond the opening scene, “Man of Science, Man of Faith” fucking moves.  It’s propulsive in a way the show hadn’t quite been since…the pilot, maybe?  Its success mostly lies in immediately zeroing in on what was, up to this point, the central compelling conflict on the show: Jack Shephard vs. John Locke (if the episode title was any indication).  It even features a fairly successful Jack flashback!  I found it satisfying to see a moment in his life where his crippling stubbornness actually pays off (successfully performing impossible back surgery on the woman who would become his wife), even coming in the form of a miracle, tying the flashback conflict to the present conflict in a way lesser LOST episodes were able to do.  It’s a great fucking start.

(If I have one nitpick to offer…I don’t know how much I buy Jack recognizing Desmond as the episode ends.  Yes, I’m aware we’re still in the phase of LOST where the flashbacks are implied to be things the characters are actively thinking about, and the most central flashback scene involves the first time Jack met Desmond, so clearly the dude was on the doctor’s mind.  But it was only a few minutes of Jack’s life, and Desmond is shot so strangely in the final scene that he doesn’t even look like the same dude….I dunno, maybe I’m viewing the prism of my own shitty memory capacity, but it’s always felt like a leap.  Anyway, again, nittiest of nitpicks.)

“Man of Science, Man of Faith” doesn’t quite reveal as much on a rewatch as it felt at the time; we don’t catch up with half of our leads, we get only shadowy glimpses of the interior of the hatch, and even then are provided absolutely no context for anything we see in there (just more mystery, mystery, mystery).  But…there’s just this palpable excitement surrounding the whole hour.  It’s the highest-rated episode in the show’s history, giving a hint as to just how hot LOST was going into its second year.  It’s an episode that seems to relish the amount of eyes on it, and was absolutely embracing the challenge of picking up where the Emmy-winning first season left off.  It might be my favorite season premiere of the show (the pilot notwithstanding).

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2. “Orientation” and The Dharma Initiative

The second episode of Season Two “Adrift” is a flawed, compromised, rushed hour that catches us up with Michael and Sawyer floating through the wreckage of their failed raft expedition.  It also backs up and lets us see Locke and Kate wander around the hatch, the outcome of which we already saw at the end of “Man of Science, Man of Faith”.  Whether it’s the stretched out hatch stuff, or the unsatisfying Michael flashback (which was written at the last minute after Harold Perrineau balked at the episode’s initial focus on Sawyer and the Tampa Job), the whole thing can’t help but feel a little bit like a stall.

But THEN, we reach the third episode “Orientation” and, by the end of the night, LOST all of a sudden felt like a whole different show, one rife with a ton of sci-fi possibilities.  The show’s fortunes could turn quickly, it seems.

The famous moment from “Orientation” is Locke and Jack watching the…well, orientation film that introduces The Dharma Initiative to our castaways (as well as us, the audience).  After a creepy, lo-fi introductory jingle, Dr. Marvin Candle walks us through the history and intention of the Dharma Initiative, the duty statement of the people assigned to this particular hatch (which turns out to be the pressing of an Enter key on an 80’s computer every 108 minutes), while warning the viewer to never use the computer to do…something; alas, part of the film had been spliced out.  It’s all so overwhelming, to the point where all Jack and Locke can do is sit there.  Locke eventually mentions, “We’re gonna have to watch that again”.

To be straight and to the point, “Orientation” felt like the biggest expansion of LOST’s lore ever.  The purpose of the Hatch?  Now established.  The history of past visitors to this island?  Clarified!  Plenty of mysteries to reflect upon as the season moves forward?  Naturally.  It was genuinely exciting to have some concept of what went down on this island prior to our heroes crash-landing onto it.  It also established the hatch as a game-changing location, given its stocked pantry and amenities.  Suddenly, our characters are going to have access to a limited supply of food, which means a whole other set of issues (the term “mo’ money, mo’ problems” comes to mind).  Not to mention our two leaders can’t seem to agree on whether pressing the button even does anything; Jack is literally screaming at Locke by the end, even as he’s implored to look at it as a leap of faith.  

“Orientation” also features a typically strong Locke-focused flashback, this time giving us the story of a grief-stricken pre-paralysis John meeting the love of his life Helen (who was only previously alluded to as the name he referred to a phone sex operator as back in “Walkabout”).  Unfortunately, Locke is consumed with the recent betrayal by his father, who has conned his way back into his son’s life, only to take his fucking kidney (it’s a long story).  He parks his car outside his house, takes small meetings with him only to get hurt every single time.  It’s the type of morose tale that makes you gear up for a gut punch ending; it’s a relief, then, that it doesn’t turn out that way.  Instead, Helen (played by the always wonderful Katy Segal, it should be mentioned) takes Locke for who and how he is.  Her only ask is to trust that she can help him move on from his obsession over the man that traumatized him.  She implores him to look at it as a leap of faith.

We also get some nice business with Sawyer, Jin and Michael, who are now imprisoned by a group that are presumed to be the Others.  A late-episode con job by Ana-Lucia (who we last saw via flashback sharing a drink with Jack in an LAX bar in the Season One finale “Exodus”) proves there was an advantage to inserting a character that could humble James “Sawyer” Ford.

Of course, Ana-Lucia and her crew would be revealed to not be the Others but, in fact, the survivors from the tail section of Oceanic Flight 815.  They become a major focus of the season, so let’s talk about them!

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3 .The Tailies

We’ll talk about the major tailies in bigger detail in a second, but I should mention that their mere introduction was enough to make me feel like my investment in LOST was paying off.  It was clear from the pilot (where we see the plane split in half) that there was an entire section of Oceanic Flight 815 that had been completely unaccounted for, which made for a nice narrative “break glass in case of emergency” device.  After all, the question of how LOST would ever introduce new characters was a valid one (it’s not like there was a major freeway cutting through the beach).  So the tail section’s introduction and integration into the greater LOST narrative felt like a sign that the Creators That Be were paying attention, and taking full advantage of the setups they had provided themselves.

As Season Two chugged along, and it became clear that they were being treated like main characters, with flashback-centric episodes and everything*, my eighteen-year-old mind started buzzing with possibilities.  LOST was absolutely barreling towards a meticulously thought out conclusion, this much I knew for sure.  But until they got there, the very concept of Michelle Rodriguez, Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje, and Cynthia Watros being fully integrated with the actors we’ve already come to know and love felt genuinely exciting to me.

*If we count “The Other 48 Days” as one big flashback episode, six of the season’s 23 hours are devoted to the flashbacks of a member of the tail section.

Of course, that payoff….really didn’t end up happening.  By early Season Three, the last Tailie left standing was everybody’s favorite island dentist and husband to Rose, Bernard Nadler.  There are a variety of reasons why the main three Tailies fizzled out, and they’re each worth their own separate post-mortems.  But, as a whole, the overall legacy of the Tailies is that of a learning experience.  

From Season Three on, LOST generally gets pretty good at working in new characters (Nikki and Paulo and a couple of weirdos from Season Five and Six notwithstanding) and, in fact, Season Two ended up establishing maybe the two best characters in the show full-stop without you even realizing it (Desmond Hume and Ben Linus).  But characters like Juliet Burke and Daniel Faraday (hell, someone like Frank Lapidus) never felt like distractions or deviations from the larger point, even as they begin their arcs as vague antagonists.  Their purposes in the narrative tend to be clear from the outset.  Not so the Tailies, who burn very brightly early on in the season, culminating in their very own episode “The Other 48 Days” (an episode I love, by the way!  We’ll talk about it!), then get integrated with the main cast and kind of start….sitting around?  Doing laundry?  Digging holes?  If the show hadn’t made the correct decision to start pitting Mr. Eko and John Locke against each other, the Tailies might have faded away altogether before the television year reached spring break.

It all goes back to Season Two being the year where the show was learning in real time how to take themselves to the next level.  They were brave enough to swing on this one, but it led to an ultimate strike-out.  It doesn’t negate the double and triples they hit during other at-bats in Season Two, and it was the only way for them to start becoming major hitters at the plate in seasons to come.  But it’s still too bad.  Whenever I watch through Season Two, I find myself getting excited, then disappointed, in the Tailies all over again, especially when the main three all fizzled out for different reasons.  

Take….

4. Ana-Lucia

The “big get” for Season Two was the casting of Michelle Rodriguez as Ana-Lucia Cortez, a character that, as previously mentioned, had actually already appeared in a flashback sequence during the Season One finale.  Although Rodriguez hadn’t quite become the goofy icon she’d later be established as (considering that, in 2005, the FAST AND FURIOUS franchise hadn’t yet begun to become its smartly stupid self), given her popular work in GIRLFIGHT, BLUE CRUSH and RESIDENT EVIL, it still felt like a huge deal that LOST snagged her.  It was a cool idea planted early: here comes a tail section character who seems to have already forged a bond with our main hero, Jack Shepard!

To the show’s credit, the first “arc” of Season Two pushed Ana-Lucia, the LAPD officer with skeletons in her closet, early and often.  She was the hot-headed de facto leader of the Others and she spent a lot of the first third of the season pushing some of our regulars around, grilling them as to their intentions, and berating them for not taking the various jungle threats seriously.  I suspect the intention here was to indicate the intense trauma she and the other tail section survivors underwent over the first 48 days post-crash.  She would eventually accidentally shoot Shannon in the gut and nearly get her ass beat by Sayid over it.  I suspect the intention here is to set Ana-Lucia up as a hardened soul who makes fatal mistakes, as evidenced by her flashback where she seeks extra-judicial vengeance against the criminal that shot her in her pregnant gut.

The intentions for Ana-Lucia were clear from the jump, is what I’m saying.  It’s obvious what they were trying to set up with Rodriguez: in the grand LOST tradition, she was a flawed anti-hero whose rough introduction is meant to lead to a moment of redemption.  The men themselves, Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse, even stated that the intention all along for Rodriguez was to come on to do a one-season “killer” arc (which has always seemed like an unprovable artful dodge regarding the time elapsed between the actress’ DUI arrest and their eventual departure).

Alas!  The arc, and the character as a whole just….doesn’t work.  There’s nothing else to say.  I want it to work.  The Michelle Rodriguez hiring was cool!  The idea of the character is sound!  But her killing another equally-troubled character quite literally is the most interesting thing Ana-Lucia ever gets to do.  After the extensive ramp up leading to her integration with the main cast, she spends most of her time just hanging out on the beach in self-imposed isolation.  Jack briefly, famously, recruits her to start building and training an island army, but Sawyer steals all the guns two episodes later and you never hear about the island army ever again.  She gets a pretty good interrogation scene against Michael Emerson’s Ben Linus (then named Henry Gale), but otherwise she’s in a holding pattern until she gets shot in the gut once more by Michael Dawson (more on that later).  The “killer” arc never fully arrives.

So what you’re left with is an unsatisfying storyline that wound up eating up a lot of the season’s time.  All you can really do is wonder what went wrong.  The debate whether her one-and-done status was planned from the beginning or a late morality-driven switch up will likely never be answered, but neither explanation adequately explains why Ana-Lucia is relegated to third-tier status after episode ten or so.  All I can say is, if that was the plan from the beginning, it was a bad plan.  

5. Mr. Eko

I need to make it known right up top that Mr. Eko is easily a top-five character for me, which is likely the driving force behind my dual defensiveness of Season Two and my antagonism towards Season Three (we’ll get there).  He’s just one of those characters that made an impression the second he first appeared on screen, even if a not-insignificant amount of the fanbase racistly theorized he was going to be revealed as Rose’s husband (he was not).  LOST hadn’t had such a blatantly spiritual and stoic figure before, the literal definition of “speak softly and carry a big stick”.  It helps that Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje is a tremendous and imposing actor, one unlike anybody the show had up to that point.

He’s another character that actually has slightly less to do than you might remember; he’s sidelined quite a bit in the middle of the season as he becomes fixated on building an island church.  But, he also easily has the most to do overall of any of the other tail section members.  For the first third of the season, before the tail section is fully integrated with the main cast, he plays as the more reasonable second-in-command to Ana-Lucia’s paranoia-fueled leadership style.  Despite his imposing frame, he’s much kinder to Michael, Jin and Sawyer, risking his life and reputation by taking the latter back to his camp for medical care.  Yet, he’s unafraid to put his foot down when necessary, making it very clear he is to be listened to if you want to live.

Once he makes it to our hatch, Mr. Eko is almost immediately paired up with John Locke, the other man of faith on the island.  This match-up will eventually fuel the underrated Season Two finale, where Eko takes on pressing the button as his “leap of faith” signal of divine purpose, just in time for Locke to experience a spiritual crisis (more later!).  It’s in this stretch that the character’s full potential really becomes clear.  Beyond his somewhat-memeable ability to take a simple question and answer it with a drawn out story about some king from the Bible, the firmness of Mr. Eko’s faith puts into contrast the flexibility of Locke’s.  Thus, Mr. Eko is able to do something none of the other tailies managed: recontextualize (and further develop) one of our already-established leads.  His front-and-center focus in the season’s endgame sure made it seem like the show had major plans for our favorite warlord-turned-pastor.

So…why did Mr. Eko flame out so soon after Season Two?  Well, it can get really difficult to parse exactly what happened: depending on what source you read, Akinnuoye-Agbaje either was a source of frustration on the LOST set from almost the second he arrived, requesting rewrites or refusing to shoot certain scenes unless accommodations were made, or he was let down by the show’s writing, taking a unique Black character and reducing him to just another blood-thirsty gangster in his first flashback.  I think what is most likely is AAA just never adjusted to island life, and that uncomfortability trickled into everything that happened next.  Regardless, he asked to be released from his contract and the show had to come up with something at the beginning of next season (I didn’t like it, but we’ll get there).  

The big rumor is that what Desmond Hume ends up doing in Season Three and beyond (traveling back in time to try to save Charlie, and bringing all of our characters together in the afterlife) was supposed to be Mr. Eko’s long-term arc.  Alas, not to be; Mr. Eko will always be a frustrating dashing of possibilities, reduced from a series-long All-Timer to a one-season wonder.  On the other hand, it allowed Desmond Hume to become the ultimate fan favorite he would wind up becoming.  Perhaps I shouldn’t mistake coincidence for fate.

6. Libby

This entry is mostly here in tribute to my friend Jimmy, who was an early vocal Libby adopter and was devastated to see her go out so abruptly.  Jimmy isn’t dead or anything, but after the Libby catastrophe, I wouldn’t call what he’s doing living either.  RIP, my man.  This is for you.

Yes, the most notable thing about Libby (played by the lovely Cynthia Watros) ultimately ends up being her status as a secondary casualty at the hands of Michael Dawson.  It’s a shame, too, because she made a pretty decent impression in the short time she had on the show.  If nothing else, she had easy romantic chemistry with Hurley, easily the most lovable guy on the whole damn island.  

So…why did they kill her off?  It’s not exactly clear, although it seems worth mentioning that Cynthia Watros also got hit with a DUI charge shortly before her exit stage left.  It certainly seemed like a character with more planned in the tank, her surprise appearance in a Hurley flashback serving as primary evidence.  In a less-forgiving read, it seemed like Watros got fucking merc’d in response to legal troubles, or perhaps made to be an example, alongside Michelle Rodriguez, for the rest of the cast.  

A more charitable interpretation, however, might simply be that it was decided the Ana-Lucia death needed an extra punch (perhaps another admission that the Ana-Lucia character wasn’t working), and killing Hurley’s soon-to-be girlfriend served as said punch.  For what it’s worth, Lindelof and Cuse vocally appeared to have every intention of building her backstory through appearances in other flashbacks.  Frustratingly, this wouldn’t pan out; Watros would only make four more appearances before LOST concluded.  Whether this was an admission that the show really had nothing for her, or if her abrupt axing caused animosity within Watros is not clear.

Libby is without a doubt one of the bigger “what-ifs” in LOST history.  What if they had allowed her to thrive, instead of being yet another female character killed in Season Two?  What if they had resisted the easy urge to twist the knife in Hurley’s back and, instead, let their romance blossom?  What if they had let us know what was going on with her in that mental institution?  Alas, we’ll never know.  And neither will my friend Jimmy.  Again, he’s alive.  But is he?

7. Rose and Bernard

Rose and Bernard, the show’s matured married couple, are a real LOST oddity in that they are essentially background players that also feel very important to the show’s tapestry.  Rose was with LOST from nearly scene one, a chambered bullet from the pilot that eventually gets fired when the tailies arrive.  Jack is the one to coach her through some turbulence-related anxiety on the plane, then the one to administer CPR on her (after Boone proves himself inadequate), and finally, the one to start suggesting for her to let go of the idea that her husband may still be out there.  Rose remains definitively optimistic, a point of view that pays off when Bernard makes it back to her mid-Season Two.   

From there, Rose and Bernard exist mostly to be the Normal Older Married Couple on the island.  They’re never really a crucial part of the narrative; the plot never revolves around them in the way it does around Jack, Kate, Locke or Sawyer.  But, the show always knew we sympathized with them, so they would bust them out whenever a moment needed extra weight.  The dangerous sharpshooting mission at the end of Season Three?  Throw Bernard in there!  We love him!  The civil war brewing among the castaways at the beginning of Season Four?  Let Rose choose a side!  We care about what she thinks!  It’s a nice trick LOST keeps up its sleeve, and honestly, they use it well throughout the show’s run.  They’re characters that can just disappear for twenty episodes straight before re-emerging from the ether to give Jin some marriage advice or something.  

Anyway, their Season Two flashback-centric episode “S.O.S.” was always a nice little treat, and a positive example of LOST’s growing ambition.  Much has been made of the show’s need for “filler” in the first three seasons, and I think it quickly became a dirty word.  The thing is…”filler” can sometimes be good, even necessary!  “S.O.S.” was just a light episode about Bernard trying to make a sign on the beach for passing planes to spot.  Nothing could be more low-level in terms of stakes, especially considering how much had already happened.  But I’d much rather they burn an episode in a 23-hour season giving Sam Anderson and L. Scott Caldwell a chance to take the lead rather than to try to create a false “event” out of nowhere (“DON’T MISS THE LAST FIVE MINUTES”…only for nothing to happen in said last five minutes).  

Rose and Bernard were an underrated example of “background players” being used well.  They were always a treat when they popped up.  Quintessential LOST stuff.

8. “The Other 48 Days”

So….what if LOST just did the pilot all over again, but this time, it was about a group of survivors who had way less luck and joviality bestowed upon them?  Would you love it?  Would you hate it?

Not everybody loves “The Other 48 Days”, the story of what the tail section suffered and endured on the island up to this point.  I can understand why some may find it to be just a rote excuse for exposition, and there is something to be said for the fact that the episode is perhaps explaining/contextualizing events that were already dramatized just by their mere allusions (could there really be a way to depict the hell the tail section went through that would be more horrific that what your imagination could conjure up?).  It ultimately tells us stuff we could have surmised on our own, and ends up feeling like a clip-show episode of a LOST spinoff that never existed.

And that’s exactly why I like it.  It’s the kind of episode that would flatly just not exist in the version of LOST that arrived during the streaming era.  “Go back in the story?  Whatever for?” I can imagine the blustery, red-faced, dumb, very much less handsome-than-me Netflix executive sputter.  Because, fuck you, that’s why.  “The Other 48 Days” is purely ambition for ambition’s sake.  

I love that there was just this whole other version of LOST going on over on the other coast of the island, where instead of high-strung, paranoid Jack, we got high-strung paranoid Ana-Lucia.  Where instead of Locke’s quiet stoicism hiding a capacity for violence, we get Mr. Eko’s quiet stoicism hiding a capacity for violence.  Where instead of Other-in-disguise Ethan, we get Other-in-disguise Goodwin.  Where instead of Rose Nadler, we get…um…Bernard Nadler.  (Wait, why is this episode any different than any other episode of LOST?) Where instead of just Boone dying, we get a shitload of other people dying (oh yeah, there it is!)

One could look at “The Other 48 Days” as wasted time, 45 minutes spent highlighting a set of characters that would all be dead twenty episodes later.  But, no.  It feels like quintessential early LOST to this reviewer, an episode that revealed how expansive and ambitious the main narrative could be, even if reality would soon set in that said ambition would have to be altered and tempered in order for the show to fully take shape.  It’s the kind of thing that later seasons would have little room for, and I’ll always respect its existence on that alone.

9. Michael’s storyline

Michael Dawson, and by extension his young son Walt, was one of the most unique characters during LOST’s first season.  As the show’s exclusive parental unit (the pregnant Claire eventually notwithstanding), Michael had a completely different set of motivations than almost anybody else on the island; his end goal was to get his goddamn kid, the one he’s fought all of his life to spend time with, home and safe.  This also made Michael very relatable; not all of us are convicted felons or bound to a wheelchair, but a LOT of us are parents, and even more of us are parents who can’t help but feel like we’re fucking everything up.  Filter that all through one of the most professional and established actors the show ever had (Harold Perrineau), and you get a conflicted, funnier than you remember, character whose torment formed the crux of the first season finale’s cruelest cliffhanger (“we’re gonna have to take the boy”).

Season Two had different plans.  To be blunt, Season Two is where Michael becomes the “Waaaaaaalt!” guy.  Then he’s gone for like seven episodes before becoming the guy who kills Ana-Lucia and Libby and betrays his friends.  Then he’s off the show, save for a brief stint in Season Four.

There are a lot of reasons for the weirdness surrounding Michael in Season Two.  For one, Malcolm David Kelly, the kid actor who played Walt, hit a growth spurt, which necessarily boxed in future possibilities for Michael (less screen time for Walt pretty much had to mean less screen time for ol’ Mike).  Two, there are conflicting reports regarding the motivation behind Perrineau’s departure.  The actor has gone on record as saying Michael’s exit at the end of the season came as a surprise to him, and occurred after previously asking for the character to be more central to the action.  By his account, this was twisted as him saying if there was no further material for Michael, then the character should be written out*.

*I pulled all of this from Maureen Ryan’s 2023 book “Burn It Down: Power, Complicity, and a Call for Change in Hollywood.”

The truthfulness to all of this is murky (as with all conflicts we are not a part of) but I will editorialize and say, with the reading I’ve been able to do, I think Perrineau has more of a case than we may want to admit…yeah, we’ll talk about it later down the line.  Regardless, Michael Dawson, a complicated character portrayed by an excellent actor, got squeezed out over the course of the second season. 

At the time, I genuinely enjoyed this turn.  I always had an affinity for characters whose allegiances had to change, either due to a change in motivation or just out of a need for survival.  I like seeing actors have to play different notes within their characters!  I even genuinely found the fact that Michael and Walt get to leave the island at the end of the season intriguing.  For all the world, it felt like Michael was headed for a darkly ironic ending, where his betrayal of his friends leads to a betrayal by the Others.  Maybe they’d kill him, or go against their word and keep Walt.  But…nope!  A deal turns out to be a deal, and they sail away.  I always knew they had some sort of a plan for Michael, it was just a matter of waiting for them to execute it.  And then Michael returned in Season Four and ... well, we’ll talk about that collapse in a couple of weeks, but needless to say, the failure to end the character in a satisfying way complicated my future feelings about the character’s fizzle out in Season Two.  Just another weird storyline in a season that all of a sudden started having a bunch of them.

10. The Button

First of all, it’s always been very funny to me that Season Two makes a big deal out of “The Button”, this magical thing that everybody eventually becomes obsessed with either pushing or not pushing.  The way the characters make it sound, it’s easy to imagine The Button being a giant red “launch the nukes” kind of button, or maybe a big old Staples-esque Help button that you can slap with your palm.  But, the button is literally just the Enter key on an old computer.  It’s not even the only button you have to push prior to pushing The Button; you gotta key in “4 8 15 16 23 42” first!  That’s, like, fifteen buttons!  It’s not a point against the show, but it always made me laugh.

Anyway, “The Button” is sort of an early flashpoint in the show’s shift in popularity.  I knew quite a few people who found this whole thing really tedious, causing them to drop off of LOST altogether.  But, it was always fairly satisfying to me because it was a sign that the season really did have some structure.  The season eventually opens with the question, “what happens if the button doesn’t get pushed?”, and it ends with the answer (shit goes down).  Pretty simple, really!  Asked, answered.  I get why folks felt their chains getting yanked by The Button, especially since it marked a change from “survivalist drama with fantasy elements” to “genre show”, but I always liked it.  That’s it really.  Just wanted to stand up for The Button, even if it should be called The Key (although I guess another cult genre show has already done that).

11. “Fire + Water”

Look, it wouldn’t be a complete season of LOST without some catastrophic Charlie episode.

On the shortlist for “worst episode of the show”, “Fire + Water” isn’t without its ambitions, nor its things to admire.  Controversially, I kind of like the dreamlike sequences that sort-of replace the flashbacks for this episode.  People kind of shoot moments like Claire playing the mother Mary down for being stupid, but I can at least give LOST props for thinking outside the box and not being overly concerned about looking cool.

No, the big issue with the episode is its dramatic cowardice.  As established last week, the trouble with Charlie was that, once the character had more or less gotten through his heroin withdrawals and survived an attempted murder in Season One, there wasn’t much left for him to do besides be the “Claire guy”.  As the first season concluded, it became clear that heroin wasn’t done with our poor rock star: the remains of a prop plane were discovered in the jungle, along with its cargo of drugs being smuggled inside mother Mary statues.  The big Season Two conflict for Charlie, then, is heroin again.  Clever!

You may remember “Fire + Water” as the episode where Charlie relapses, freaks out, and tries to baptize baby Aaron against Claire’s wishes.  Here’s the thing: the episode makes it pretty clear he’s not actually on heroin.  All the rest of that synopsis is accurate, but he’s stone-cold sober throughout.  Oh, yes, he’s clinging onto a bunch of those statues “just in case”, but he’s not actually relapsing.  No, his insane behavior is being motivated by just “island visions”, a broad crutch LOST leaned on too much.  I assume this was a half-measure to justify Charlie acting like a lunatic without actually making him an addict again.

As a result, we just watched 40 minutes of Charlie acting like a douche for no real reason, eventually leading Locke to beat the shit out of him in front of everybody, a moment that always bugged me back in the day, but that I found utterly cathartic on this rewatch.  Even worse, stealing a baby forced the character into a dark corner LOST wasn’t really able to commit to busting him out of.  They briefly double-down; the next episode has him kidnapping Sun as part of a Sawyer con, probably Mr. Pace’s lowest moment ever.  But then, things just kind of…move on.  Charlie gets his comeuppance in the form of a socked jaw when he eventually confesses to Sun what he did to her, but the baby baptism thing just never comes up again.  Two weeks later in the show’s timeline, Charlie’s babysitting Aaron like nothing happened.

I promise I’m going to be nice to Charlie next week; I genuinely believe the end run of Season Three showcases the guy at his strongest.  But Season Two is a rough look for a former fan-favorite-to-be, showing just how far LOST as a whole had moved on without him.

12. Desmond!

Considering the totality of LOST’s failure to get any of the tail section characters to truly launch and integrate themselves into the narrative proper, it’s worth noting that Season Two does manage to immediately introduce a character that would become vital to the Big Story of LOST.  We just didn’t really know it at the time.

Yes, Desmond Hume, the man who stars in the cold open of “Man of Science, Man of Faith”, ends up becoming a huge part of the show.  Imagine LOST without Penny Widmore?  “Flashes Before Your Eyes”?  Fuckin’ “The Constant”?  So it remains astounding that Henry Ian Cusick was only initially signed on for the first three episodes of the season, presumably never meant to return.  Luckily for us, Lindelof/Cuse/The Other Powers That Be realized what they had and found a way to bring him back in time to anchor the second season finale “Live Together, Die Alone.”

Most of Desmond’s impact in Season Two would be relegated to that finale (which we’ll be talking about shortly!), but this isn’t to say that Hume didn’t pop immediately.  Besides that killer season-opening scene, Desmond also shines in a critical flashback scene for Jack, who receives some vital advice from the world’s unluckiest Scotsman as he runs a Tour de Stade.  Even as Desmond’s role in the first three episodes is mostly relegated to freaking out over the Button, acting with extreme paranoia, doling out only surface-level information, then running out into the jungle, the thing is…Cusick is really compelling while doing all of that.  He was instantly unlike any other cast member from the first season.  As we all awaited his return, it felt like we had all decided as an audience that he was a fan favorite.  Sometimes, the audience is always right. 

More about Desmond to come, but we have to now talk about easily the most game-changing addition to LOST…

13. Ben Linus!

If LOST would fail to resemble what it would eventually become without Desmond Hume, it’s literally unimaginable what the show would be without Benjamin Linus (or “Henry Gale” as he’s known for Season Two).

The one thing LOST had lacked entering the second season was a definable Major Villain.  Sure, there were antagonists throughout; there was the unseen “monster”, the details of whom were so vague that it could have been almost anything.  There were the heretofore unseen Others, personified by Ethan Rom, but he gets capped by mid-Season One.  I suppose Sawyer was prone to being a racist, anti-social asshole much of the time.  But there wasn’t really one central figure to point to and say, “Him!  He’s the Villain of LOST!”

Enter Ben.

Or, at least, enter Henry Gale.  And I suppose he doesn’t so much enter as he is delivered.  He is initially found by Rousseau wounded in a net in the episode “One of Them”.  She alerts Sayid, only for Henry to be taken back to the hatch for treatment by Jack, although Sayid remains skeptical throughout.  Henry appears to have an alibi as to who or what he is; he was on a hot-air balloon with his wife until they got off-course and crashed onto this weird place.  He has details and logical answers to spare for every question thrown at him by our castaways.  He even seems nice and reasonable oftentimes.  But there’s just something about him.  He has an unusual knack for identifying what everybody is insecure about, and is very good at pressing the right buttons to have a barrage of punches swung his way.

It’s impossible to explain just how much the tone shifted the second “Henry Gale” (and more specifically Michael Emerson, the man who played him) hit the LOST island.  Right as the normal dynamic threatened to get stale and stagnant, here came a character that none of our regulars had the ability to fully read.  More to the point, “Henry’s” ability to pluck the tense strings of all of the various conflicts that had been brewing amongst the castaways over the last season and a half also served as proof that maybe the writers and the Powers That Be had been doing the work this whole time after all.  Consider how little “Henry Gale”’s arrival would matter had there not been palpable wants and desires so clearly communicated from our main cast to us for him to exploit.

Much like Cusick, Michael Emerson was only signed on to do a handful of episodes in Season Two, but everyone knew pretty much immediately what they had with this captivating character and performer.  He disappears a couple of episodes before the end, only for him to re-appear at a crucial moment in the Season Two finale, revealing himself to be the leader of the Others, in one of the great “of course!” moments in LOST history.

From there, he became a series regular from Season Three all the way to the very end.  We’ll have lots of time to keep looking at the man who would be revealed as Benjamin Linus, but it truly did feel like something in the show’s very DNA changed by the time “One Of Them” ended.  And it did.

14. “Live Together, Die Alone”

“Live Together, Die Alone”, the second season finale, is one of the only episodes of LOST where I can instantly and specifically recall my state of mind after the episode had ended.

By 2006, I was just dipping my toe into the world known as “driving a car around by myself”.  A friend of mine had thrown a finale party at their house that night and, after the episode had ended, my brain was FIRING.  What happens now that the hatch has exploded?  What are the Others going to do to Jack, Kate and Sawyer?  “Henry Gale” is this leader?  How engaging is this Desmond guy?  Wait, fuck, does Penny know where the island is?

It was a lot to take in, and it was clear a lot of change was coming to LOST.  I specifically remember driving myself back home at around 11:30 at night.  The drive from my friend’s house to mine happened to take me right past the high school I was days away from graduating from, a place I had gotten to know for four years, and was about to spend almost zero time in ever again.  On the radio (106.5, back when it was an alternative station) played Gnarls Barkley’s mainstream hit “Crazy”.

None of these things really connect specifically to LOST.  But every single element kept my LOST-induced high going anyway.  “Crazy”?  What does this mean?  Is this a clue for next season?  My old high school….is this a metaphor?

It’s all kind of funny when you consider that “Live Together, Die Alone” is kind of a lesser finale when weighing it within the totality of the show.  The on-island action is ever-so-slightly spinning its wheels, as Michael leads our castaways to their kinda-obvious trap (with a sort-of weak in-universe explanation from Jack) and Locke and Eko keep marching towards the un-pressing of the Button.  Given how easily I can remember how the hairs on my head felt after its initial airing, I was a little disappointed at how inert this episode sometimes felt on a rewatch, even if it was only every once in a while.  

But, oh my god, that Desmond flashback.  That Desmond flashback.

I’ve alluded to it several times already, but: the decision to hand the dramatic keys over to Cusick to anchor the second season of the still-quite-popular LOST was a ballsy decision that I’m unsure other shows of its caliber would have gone for.  “Do a Jack episode!”, you could imagine someone in the boardroom yelling.  “Do a Locke flashback, and let’s get some answers on that wheelchair, eh?” a presumably separate board member might have declared.  But, no, they went all in on their hunch that the reaction they and the audience had to Cusick’s performance was the real fucking deal.  And they were right.

Desmond’s story has a different kind of feel than the other flashbacks we’ve been accustomed to.  It becomes very clear at the beginning that we’re being dropped into the middle of a love story.  Desmond has been released from military prison, and is being offered a large sum of money by a very rich and powerful man (Charles Widmore) to leave his daughter alone forever.  To say Desmond is at the lowest point of his life would be an understatement.  He’s so desperate for a win, he decides to sail around the world in order to beat Widmore at his own competition.  A batch of horrific weather maroons him on a certain island, and becomes a recruit for a certain button-pushing process in a certain hatch.

The Desmond flashback is actually pretty efficient, considering how much info it gives us about the previous inhabitants of the hatch.  But even without the exposition of it all…I don’t think it’s that hot of a take to say that the Desmond Hume - Penny Widmore romance is easily the most successfully written relationship on all of LOST, as well as maybe the heart of the entire show.  And it’s all the more impressive when you consider just how little screentime Sonya Walger and Henry Ian Cusick share together in this episode.  It’s really just one scene, where she confronts him outside the stadium where Desmond will shortly dispense his “you have to lift it up” advice to Jack.  But it’s a scene that tells us everything.  It’s not so much the words that are said, it’s that the chemistry between Walger and Cusick is evident and obvious.  There’s a whole universe's worth of history between them, the kind of magic that only happens every so often in fictional storytelling.

I’ve also always really enjoyed Locke’s crisis of faith coming to fruition, leading to his ending moment of humility (“I was wrong”).  In the full context of LOST, however, knowing just how much more tragic Locke’s life was going to get…it was hard seeing him eat shit this hard, being this wrong.  I just want my boy John to be confident and correct!  “Live Together, Die Alone” also serves as Mr. Eko’s swan song as it relates to the Bigger Narrative of LOST (his swan song episode in Season Three features the character more centrally, but it’s a side story meant to write him off the show forever).  There’s a lot to love, and a lot to ruminate on, even almost twenty years later.  If nothing else, “I think I crashed your plane” is a top twenty moment of the show.

Oh, and I should mention…the energy in the room when we realized that cut to a snowy base wasn’t a commercial, but in fact a little coda to the season, where we discover Penny had been searching for Desmond all this time and the hatch explosion (and the magnetic anomaly that resulted from it) has provided her first lead as to his whereabouts.  The stage has been set for one of LOST’s greatest hours.  But, that’s a story for Season Four.

15. “Com-ing OUT.”

Okay, this last little tidbit is just for fun, and it’s not even really my tidbit, just one that’s been rattling in my brain each and every day since it was pointed out to me.

I’ve been listening to the since-completed “Down the Hatch” podcast, a very in-depth episode-by-episode deep dive into LOST hosted by Josh Wigler and Mike Bloom, an extension of Wigler’s now-defunct Post Show Recaps podcast network.  During their Season Two coverage of “Orientation”, Wigler points out the unique way Michelle Rodriguez delivers her line “coming out!”, to alert her tailies to let her out of the tiger pit, her infiltration and investigation into the identities of Michael, Jin and Sawyer complete.  To Wigler’s credit, Rodriguez does hit the words quite oddly, resulting in it coming out as “com-ing OUT.”  

Now, there’s nothing wrong with this, it doesn’t make her a bad actor or anything.  But it IS fun to say once you hear it. “Com-ing OUT.”  Try it.  “Com-ing OUT.”  Hell, try it with a similar three-syllable phrase.  “Pop-ping CORN.”  “Feed the DOG.”  “Bleed-ing OUT.”  Well, hopefully you won’t need that last one.  I’m sure Ana-Lucia wished she didn’t.

Hydra Island Weekend: Looking Back at THE OFFICIAL LOST PODCAST!

Happy Saturday! So, remember on LOST how the Others had that second smaller island that was behind the big central island? The one that was called Hydra Island, for some reason? Where a lot of that early Season Three stuff took place, and although you had this sinking feeling none of the action taking place there was going to be all that relevant or even interesting, you were ultimately just happy to get more of the show you loved?

Yeah, think of this weekend bonus article as my LOST Hydra Island series. They’re going to feature little tangential LOST-related topics that I couldn’t fit into the main series, but felt I could squeeze a short-form article out of. This weekend, we’re starting off with a banger. Enjoy!

We live in a time of people being spread thin, of too few resources being split among too many individuals.  Supply chains are still recovering from a prolonged (and arguably still unresolved) pandemic.  Prices have gone up while wages have stagnated.  People are getting increasingly sick with dwindling access to healing medicines.  Even in the civilized world, we lack quite a bit.  It’s bleak.

However, if there’s one thing we are in absolute excess of in 2024, it’s podcasts. Way too many goddamn podcasts.  Everyone has a podcast.  Chris Kattan now has one.  Unfortunately, I have one.  By the time you wake up tomorrow, you will probably have one.  It’s just the lay of the land now, seemingly the number one way we currently communicate.

But it wasn’t always this way!  Not even twenty years ago, there were hardly any podcasts at all.  Oh, sure, there were a handful of early adopters here and there; Leo Laporte had already launched “This Week in Tech”, Jesse Thorn’s college radio program “The Sound of Young America” had launched as a downloadable podcast, and President George W. Bush had begun delivering his weekly address in the form of a podcast (yes, really).  But in 2005, it was still an up-and-coming media format.  There just wasn’t that much going on.  There certainly weren’t any podcasts hosted by a pair of writers and producers that took you behind the scenes of one of the biggest shows currently on TV.

Oh, wait, fuck, there was.  As of November 8, 2005, there definitely was.  It was called THE OFFICIAL LOST PODCAST and it was hosted by LOST showrunners Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse.  I totally forgot.

For today’s bonus LOST article, let’s talk a little OFFICIAL LOST PODCAST!

Make it stand out

Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.

In terms of structure, THE OFFICIAL LOST PODCAST was a fairly straightforward endeavor.  Presented by ABC producer Kris White and launched a few weeks into LOST’s second season, the podcast typically began with an interview with one of the eight thousand cast members of the show.  After a few minutes, it would transition over to the Big Guys themselves, Lindelof and Cuse, the show-running uber-gods that oversaw the Great LOST Storyline.  They would “rehash” the episode that had aired the week before “pre-hashing” the episode to come.  They’d wrap it all up with a round of fan questions!  Seemingly nothing to it.

What made it special is the unique, giggly chemistry between Lindelof and Cuse, as well as their acuity for what kind of podcast they wanted to present to the world.  Nowadays, there are many, many, many television shows with “companion podcasts” available for download the day after broadcast (if not the night of).  Shows as diverse as THE GOOD PLACE, BREAKING BAD, THE CROWN, LATE NIGHT WITH SETH MEYERS, and any HBO show you can think of (including forgotten documentaries such as MCMILLIONS) have official tie-in podcasts where showrunners, actors, or fans could drop in at any time.  But there’s an undeniable “official” feel to many of them, perhaps even a little corporate.  The insight feels reviewed, the banter controlled and guard-railed.

Not THE OFFICIAL LOST PODCAST.  The show was invariably loose and extremely goofy, to the point where you could often lose sight of the fact that it was officially sanctioned and produced by ABC, the network the show aired on.  Lindelof and Cuse would spend just as much time bitching about the phone ringing in the office they were recording out of, or commenting on the famous trailers driving by their window (they once seemed particularly excited about Nic Cage’s) as they would giving insight into the creation of their television sensation.

To some degree, this ethos of “screwing around” rather than “pulling the curtain back” makes sense.  After all, considering the “mystery box” nature of LOST, and the fact that part of its art is dragging its viewers along to some degree, how much insight into the show could the showrunners really provide?  It’s not that Lindelof and Cuse never revealed their hands on the podcast; they actually did it quite a bit, even if in cheeky fashion.  There’s a late Season Three episode where, by the end, it truly seems like John Locke’s goose is cooked; he’s laying in a pit of human skeletons, a bullet in his gut.  The next week’s podcast episode had Cuse musing, “If I was a betting man, I would not bet on John Locke being dead” (Lindelof proceeded to bet five dollars that he would be, which should give you a good idea as to how the podcast generally conducted itself).

But, generally speaking, the way for Lindelof and Cuse to get through an OFFICIAL LOST PODCAST episode alive was to say less while seeming like they said a lot.  So, Lindelof and Cuse leaned more into the shenanigans than any official podcast nowadays would.  One week, the two genuinely seemed more excited to choose a piece of stock music for the podcast theme song than they did to talk about the episodic fiction they had dedicated the last two years of their lives creating.  There were unbelievably candid moments where they actively questioned their own network’s marketing of the show, mocking on the air the extreme over-promising of certain episode promos.

In the spirit of the “silly over substance” philosophy, when it came to fan questions, Lindelof and Cuse seemed to zero in on some of the least-ready-to-be-presented fan questions imaginable.  Insane screen names read out verbatim, typo-riddled text that went uncorrected…anything that would generally be filtered out of a more “professional” show hilariously got featured front and center.  Sure, they could have pulled questions from the undoubtedly-enormous stack that came with some intelligence or understanding regarding the show (or even how television production works); then again, what’s the fun in that?  Only THE OFFICIAL LOST PODCAST dared to pull inquiries from people with usernames like “harryfeatdb1” or “DePlaneBossDePlane".  I’ll never forget the moment in a special video episode where, after a particularly long and rambling fan question, the two pretended to fall asleep before leaving the question unanswered.  Cruel?  Yes.  Vaguely unprofessional?  Arguably.  Funny?  You bet.

Make it stand out

Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.

Sometimes, bullshit generated from the podcast would even seep its way into the official canon of the show.  For the ultimate example, I point you towards Ezra James Sharkington.  You all know that character, of course, as the Dharma-branded shark that attacked Michael and Sawyer in the Season Two episode “Adrift”.  This beloved be-finned character was unnamed in the episode, but got officially christened in response to a question asked by “Ice Cold Dharma” on the May 11, 2007 episode of the podcast.  After being asked what this shark’s name was*, Lindelof stated that it was Jim.  Carlton responded that he thought it was Ezra, Jim became the middle name “James” and Lindelof capped it off with the last name “Sharkington”.  The episode quickly derailed from there; Cuse declared “ABC is gonna pull us”.  A quick moment of delirious improv was all it took for a legend to be born.  Ezra doesn’t have a Lostpedia entry or anything, but if you ask certain LOST fans what that damn shark’s name is, you bet they’d be able to tell you.

*”What was the name of the shark in Season 2, Episode 2?” stands as perhaps the net average fan question asked on THE OFFICIAL LOST PODCAST.

Now, all of this was well and good in the mid-to-late-aughts, but it’s impossible to separate the fun-loving, goofy personas Lindelof and Cuse presented on the mic from the unfortunate behind-the-scenes realities that have leaked over the past couple of years, where the combination of Cuse’s vengeful iron fist and Lindelof’s complete inexperience with the personnel-focused responsibilities of a show-runner led to many cast and crew members with bitter tastes in their mouths.  It’s a topic I’m going to defer from talking about too much, but it undeniably alters a modern relisten to THE OFFICIAL LOST PODCAST.  Intellectually, it’s understandable that people contain multitudes; it’s perfectly conceivable that people can present as one way when hopping in front of a microphone and goofing around with a creative partner, and another way when under the gun or facing intense creative pressure with multiple stakeholders all wanting completely different things from a vision you have to put your name on*.  But, emotionally (at least for me), I wanted to believe that Lindelof and Cuse were fun, complimentary, and equitable bosses all throughout their tenures on LOST.  Reality just didn’t bear that out.  Alas.

*It’s worth clarifying that no amount of creative pressure excuses any leader making any teammate feel lesser, even under the guise of “joking”.

Regardless, for a certain type of fan (i.e. me and my friends), THE OFFICIAL LOST PODCAST was an essential part of the viewing experience.  After all, what other shows out there had supplementary behind-the-scenes content quite like this?  It was a show whose quality was susceptible to how much energy the two hosts had in them; some episodes towards the middle of a season would be missing either Lindelof or Cuse; on rare occasions, their segment would be skipped altogether.  Later seasons of the podcast leaned heavily on quick video episodes that would amount to DVD-extra-style interviews.

But the magic never fully left, all the way through to the show’s finale.  I’m thrilled that every episode has been archived by fans and is easily accessible via many YouTube playlists.  If you’ve never watched the show, I highly recommend pairing THE OFFICIAL LOST PODCAST  up with your initial LOST journey.  If you’re digging into a rewatch, why not revisit the audible shenanigans once more?

Just make sure if you submit a question, you don’t put the hosts to sleep.

I Had to Go Back: Reflecting on Season One of LOST!

“I’ve looked into the eye of this island, and what I saw…was beautiful.”

- John Locke

When one observes the entire six-season run of LOST from 30,000 feet up, its inaugural season is the most visible and separate from the other five by almost every major metric.  The pilot is still considered one of the best pair of hours in the history of the medium, one major spoke of ABC’s three-pronged attack (along with DESPERATE HOUSEWIVES and GREY’S ANATOMY) that turned the network from a joke to a powerhouse in one television season.  The ratings for LOST consistently hovered around (and often exceeded) 20 million an episode its first year; on average, 17.6 million people tuned in every week.  The first season won six Emmy Awards, including Outstanding Drama Series, a feat the show never came close to accomplishing again.  LOST’s first twenty-five hours contain something like four or five of the best episodes of the show, full stop.  Most importantly, during that first season, you could basically turn to anyone in your life who watched TV with even marginal regularity and say, “oh my god, LOST last night, right?” and a passionate conversation was almost guaranteed to begin from there.

For many people, Season One is known as “the good season”, the stuff they really liked before the show crashed and burned.  We will absolutely be exploring over the next few weeks whether that’s a fair view to have, or even if it’s an opinion that’s understandable, but that’s the legacy of the first season.  For about eight months, America seemed to be united in its love for our group of castaways.  How many other things on TV has this country been united on in the twenty years since, even briefly?  GAME OF THRONES?  BREAKING BAD and MAD MEN?  Fucking TIGER KING?

As I’m sure is the case for most fans, LOST initially appeared on my radar due to the major marketing campaign ABC and Disney underwent in the weeks and months preceding LOST’s September 22, 2004 premiere.  The ads were EVERYWHERE; it was hard to miss the slew of mysterious television spots that filled every commercial break that summer about some plane crash drama.  It’s difficult to illustrate how much of a risk this all-in approach was for the semi-fledgling network*, considering the humiliation they’d be facing if LOST had bombed.  

*The year prior to the LOST/DESPERATE HOUSEWIVES/GREY’S ANATOMY shock-and-awe attack, ABC’s only two top-thirty shows were Monday Night Football and The Bachelor.

And, honestly?  It would have been reasonable for it to have completely flopped.  Save for Dominic Monaghan, who was fresh off of the LORD OF THE RINGS trilogy, and perhaps Matthew Fox if you were a big PARTY OF FIVE guy, the massive ensemble was made up of established character actors (Terry O’Quinn, Daniel Dae Kim) and relative-to-complete unknowns (Evangeline Lilly, Maggie Grace, Ian Somerhalder).  It wasn’t like ABC had a lot of other hits to point to as a reference; LOST’s closest analogue, ALIAS, was a cult genre fave, but never exactly a ratings powerhouse.  In most of the multiverse, LOST’s ceiling was becoming the next ALIAS.  Its floor might have been the next entry in the “Brilliant But Canceled” canon.

But it didn’t flop.  It was an immediate sensation.  Whether it was due to the unique setting (the beaches of Oahu!), its almost unfathomably good-looking leads, the compelling mysteries surrounding the island and castaways, or maybe just the fact that America still had residual Hobbit Fever, close to 19 million people tuned in that week and the show more or less held that number all the way through the year.

Whether the first season still remains Peak LOST for you, or if you admire the show more in its later years once it transforms into the sci-fi serial it secretly always wanted to be, it’s kind of astonishing Season One is as good as it is considering LOST managed to find itself in turmoil behind-the scenes almost immediately.  Specifically, a green show-runner named Damon Lindelof worked himself into a full-blown panic attack early on before eventually quitting the show, then un-quit, then brought in an experienced hand in Carlton Cuse in order to fully figure out what to do with this hit they had on their hands.  And this was just by Episode Eight!  Many of the key figures in the writer’s room for Season One would not be around for the long haul.

Still, the first season of LOST had a lot of built-in advantages.  It successfully incorporated the studio notes of being a little more normal and palatable for a general audience.  The famous flashback format was rife with potential, the characters blanker slates, their backstories complete unknowns.  Its “mystery box” approach to story-telling was an intriguing gimmick rather than the frustrating mechanic it would eventually become.  It was fun.  It was the kind of show that made you want to bug all your friends until they succumbed and watched it with you, if only so you had someone else to bounce theories off of (at least I hope other people did this).

I’m happy to report that, twenty years later, the first season of LOST still holds up.  Yeah, there are a couple of total misfires, as is wont to happen in the American twenty-four episode cycle.  There are a few intriguing mystery threads that wind up being dead-ends (although fewer than it sometimes feels).  There are a few characters that end up getting lost in the shuffle.  But, on the whole, it totally lives up to its pedigree as the outstanding television drama of 2005.  I think even those who ended up abandoning the show could come back to this first batch and recall why they ever liked it in the first place.  

Let’s break down 23 notable things about Season One, either high or low.

1. The Pilot

It’s difficult to know what to say about the LOST pilot that hasn’t already been said a million different times by a million different people in a million different outlets.  Upon twenty years of reflection, what strikes me about it the most is the fact that it’s the one episode of LOST that pretty much everyone agrees they like, the one J.J. Abrams directorial work that appears to be genuinely unifying.  The biggest LOST hater I have in my life will to this day readily admit how fun he found that initial first episode.  My mom, who bailed on the show three episodes in, was captivated by the LOST pilot (most likely due to its lush Hawaiian setting).  In short, the LOST pilot felt like a jolt of lightning that briefly set pop culture ablaze.

Yeah, yeah, I know, I said in the intro article earlier this week that J.J. Abrams references were going to be minimal from here on out, but it really bears mentioning that, for as little as he had to do with LOST as a completed six-year product, the pilot was honestly and truly his baby first and foremost.  One of these days, I’ll codify my full thoughts on J.J. when I do my film-by-film breakdown of the three STAR WARS trilogies (haha, just kidding, I will never reveal my complete thoughts on STAR WARS to the internet), but suffice to say that I often find him all sizzle, no steak.  It’s not that he’s completely without talent, or not a nice guy.  He just fundamentally lacks skill (his storytelling abilities have actually atrophied in the twenty years since the LOST pilot).  Thus, his movies kind of go in one ear and out the other for me.  

I say all this because I think his work behind the camera in the LOST pilot is shockingly efficient, mature and steady.  The pacing of the first twenty minutes alone could be studied in film schools.  The shock of the opening moment, where we meet Jack Shephard (or at least his eye) for the first time.  The ratcheting up of tension as he runs out of the jungle onto the beach.  The way we’re immediately thrown into chaos, as we quickly meet a bunch of faces, some of which will become some of the most iconic characters of the show.  The way we learn so much about Jack from the way he conducts his triage.  Then, as things eventually calm, the way the Michael Giacchino score slowly swells in as the credits begin to roll.  It’s gorgeous.  To watch the first act of LOST is to completely understand why the world of 2004 was so captivated by it.

The other 65 minutes or so are also pretty great, although I personally think the second hour is stronger than the first, if only because it feels grander in scope.  Hour One mostly centers around the power trio of Jack Shephard (Matthew Fox), Kate Austen (Evangeline Lilly) and Charlie Pace (Dominic Monaghan).  To refresh memories, it’s the episode where we first learn that there’s a fucking monster on the island.  We also get Greg Grunberg’s wonderful whiplash-inducing cameo as the pilot of Flight 815.  We also get our first round of flashbacks, where we learn that Jack was previously…uh, bitching about the strength of the airline drinks.  Interesting!  Still, you gotta start somewhere, and an important part of LOST’s infrastructure was established early on.  We also get an early scene with L. Scott Caldwell’s always-lovely Rose Nadler.

The characters the show initially focuses on is perhaps LOST showing its 2004-ness just a bit.  Jack and Kate will, of course, wind up being essentially the two leads of the show.  But…remember when it felt like Charlie was also going to be a major character?  It wasn’t the worst call at the time; Monaghan was undoubtedly the biggest name the show had on its call sheet, and it would have been malpractice not to feature him early and often.  More to the point…Dom is fucking great in the pilot!  He’s charming, confident, a bit impish, maybe a little irascible.  The first hour of LOST, then, is a good reminder of what could have been with our bloody rock god Charlie.

The big centerpiece bit of Acting in Episode One is the “count to five” speech that Jack gives to Kate, which has always felt like a monologue that felt more natural to write than it was to read (I just don’t know that people really talk like this).  But the function of it works all the same; as the mysterious island monster begins its all-out assault on the three of them, the callback to it (Kate counting to five while scared out of her mind) works like a charm.  As a bit of story structure, it’s a great way to really sell us on the sheer horror of the otherwise completely unseen monster.

Episode One also does a lot of character setup in relatively little time.  The much beleaguered brother-sister-lover(?) pair Boone (Ian Somerhalder) and Shannon (Maggie Grace) are established about as well as they can; Boone gets humbled early when an attempt to help Jack facilitate a tracheotomy falls by the wayside, while Shannon remains obstinate to the idea that they may not be rescued any time soon.  We also meet the extremely pregnant Claire Littleton (Emile de Ravin), the feuding Korean couple Jin (Daniel Dae Kim) and Sun (Yunjin Kim)  and, of course, the rotund fan favorite “dude” Hurley (Jorge Garcia).  Lots of characters to mark, and there are more to come.  Yet, the great trick of Hours One and Two is that the introductions are so specific and so efficient that you never for a second feel like the show is collapsing under its own weight.

Episode Two contains most of the really famous “LOST Pilot” stuff.  We get the polar bear, we get the French distress signal, we get the famous Charlie question “Guys, where are we?”.  Most importantly, at least for the Ritter household*, it’s our formal introduction to everyone’s favorite incorrigible redneck Sawyer (Josh Holloway).  Yeah, we first see him getting into a fight with resident Iraqi Republican Guard, torturer and hunk Sayid Jarrah (Naveen Andrews) and accusing him of being the reason the plane crashed in the first place.  Then again, we also see him gun down a polar bear in the jungle, a sentence that didn’t seem possible at the beginning of the pilot.  People contain layers, is what I’m saying!

*For the record, the reason I am allowed to openly have a crush on Josh Holloway is because my wife also openly has a crush on Josh Holloway.

We also get the first hint that Kate may not be who she claims to be, when little Walt (Malcolm David Kelley) shows his father Michael (Harold Perrineau) a pair of handcuffs he found in the jungle.  We eventually get a flashback that reveals Kate was a federal prisoner; we also learn in another piece of backstory that Charlie was openly jonesing for a heroin fix while on the flight, an early hint that the backbone of LOST would be challenging what you think you know about the people that populates this deserted island.

When you put the two hours together, you have what is certainly one of the best television pilots of the 21st century, if not in the medium.  Abrams, Lindelof and co. had ignited a powder keg, and the fledgling ABC had a zeitgeist-y hit on its hands, much to the consternation of Lindelof himself (more on that later).  For the first time in almost ten years, the network had 18 million Americans all turning to each other and asking…

“What happens next?”

2. The flashbacks

Easily the most innovative aspect of LOST was its patented flashback format.  Every episode would center on one character and, as they went on an adventure on the island in the present, we would get some insight into who they were before the plane crash.  Ironically, although the flashbacks forced the show to keep looking backwards, at their best, they kept the show moving forward for several reasons:

• By design, it gave the show more variety in setting than just “jungle, beach and cave”.  Suddenly, we could be in Los Angeles, South Korea, the 1800’s, or somewhere completely undefined.

• It allowed something resembling equity amongst a cast that was always probably too large.  Yes, there would always be a Big Four (Jack, Kate, Sawyer, Locke) whose backstories would be fleshed out to the point of tedium.  But on any given week, a second-tier fan favorite (Hurley, Charlie, Jin and/or Sun) could get their chance to shine.  Hell, it would eventually allow glorified background characters to become show leads for a week (the aforementioned Rose Nadler!).  It could almost become a weird source of pride for fans with attachments to oddball castaways, although it could also become a source of frustration (I have a friend who’s still bitter they never gave Libby her own episode).

• Honestly, the flashbacks helped keep the Mystery Machine running.  Even within its most fruitful periods, LOST was more comfortable asking questions than answering them (for obvious reasons).  The flashbacks allowed for a natural way to set up a whole new set of mysteries for each one of our major players every week.  How did John Locke end up in a wheelchair?  What’s up with Sawyer’s letter?  Why is Kate on the run?  What happened to Jack’s marriage?  Why is Hurley seemingly cursed?  What’s the deal with Boone and Shannon?  Even in periods where the main storyline seemed to hit snags and lulls, there was always something for you to ruminate on.

• It allowed the show to bring in new characters and actors without having to resort to “Gilligan’s Island”-esque tricks!  Some of the most memorable characters existed mostly within the realm of the flashback.  Christian Shepard, Edward Mars and Anthony Cooper would all appear on the LOST island eventually, but for the most part, their scenes could only exist in the traumatic past of our castaways.

For the most part, the flashbacks were at their most intriguing and revelatory in LOST’s initial season, for reasons that are likely self-evident.  Every character is new, anything could have happened to them before we met them on that doomed plane wreckage.  It’s genuinely impressive how many of the initial batch of flashbacks really hit.  Kate being a fugitive?  Cool!  Jin and Sun being in a crumbling marriage (but in ways that are not what they appear)?  Intriguing!  Sawyer being a con man?  Devastating and fitting!  But one of the first flashbacks the show ever did also ended up being arguably their best…

3. “Walkabout”

I’m guessing “Walkabout” is most LOST fans’ “all-in” episode.  It’s almost certainly the show’s defining moment, and it comes in its fourth hour.  Incredible stuff.

Obviously, even without its famous ending twist, the first episode centered around John Locke would have been a winner.  After spending the first three episodes on the sideline (barring a pretty iconic conversation with young Walt about the game of backgammon), Locke comes out swinging here.  He’s tracking paths in the jungle, he’s throwing knives around, he’s barking orders to not tell him what he can’t do.  Holy shit, this guy’s a badass!  What, precisely, can’t he do?

Well, as we learn in the flashbacks, he can’t earn the respect of his boss.  Or his telephone girlfriend.  Or attend a spiritual journey.  Or, as we learn in the episode’s conclusion, walk at all.  It’s an incredible turn of the story, the kind of thing that should have been obvious all along, but was expertly hidden from us until the cruel reveal.  It’s a SIXTH SENSE-eque twist, in the sense that you want to watch it again immediately with the new context in mind.

The beautiful thing about “Walkabout”, though?  Just like THE SIXTH SENSE, not only does knowing the twist not spoil the experience, it actually sort of enhances the episode.  Hell, it actually sweetens the minimal scenes we’d gotten of John Locke up to that point.  Although the show will have plenty of time to unspool every tragic thing that’s happened to Locke in his cursed life, even if they never showed us another second of his past after this episode, we would know:

• He has a menial, depressing job in a box factory.

• He’s belittled by his boss (who comes off like a mega asshole in the context of Locke’s paraplegia, holy shit).

• He dreams, perhaps delusionally, of being a great warrior, soldier and strategist. 

• He gets “broken up with” by a phone sex operator he insists on calling “Helen” and spending way too much money on

• He’s denied the chance to go on an Australian walkabout, even after traveling all the way there because

• As mentioned, HE’S IN A WHEELCHAIR

So the fact that he crash-lands on an island and can all of a sudden walk again?  Who in that position wouldn’t see back and enjoy the rain?  Give an orange-peel-covered smile to a fellow castaway?  Try to become the hunter and leader you always dreamed of?  To believe again?  What happens to John Locke is a goddamn miracle, and he’s not going to let this one go to waste.

We don’t know it yet, but the real legacy of “Walkabout”, besides its twist, is its planting of the seeds of the great unifying conflict of LOST: science vs. faith.  The show wouldn't really start dramatizing and verbalizing it until the next episode, but John Locke’s initial flashback episode is the one that first posits the important question: “what if someone actually loved being marooned on this island and didn’t want to leave?”  John Locke’s search for purpose, and intermittent understanding of it, is one of the defining storylines for the show.  And after everything he’s gone through, why wouldn’t it be?

4. “White Rabbit”

During my rewatch of Season One, the episode that most increased in esteem in my eyes was the fifth, “White Rabbit.”  To discuss why, however, we first need to discuss Damon Lindelof.

Lindelof has been a prolific and high-profile writer, producer and creator in the days before and since LOST was on TV.  THE LEFTOVERS.  WATCHMEN.  PROMETHEUS.  The upcoming DCU series GREEN LANTERN.  All of these are projects you’ve undoubtedly at least heard of.  Yet, being the showrunner of LOST will almost certainly be his defining legacy, an impressive feat considering, again, most people think J.J. Abrams called all the shots on that show.

But, nope, it was Lindelof and his co-showrunner Carlton Cuse, basically from the beginning.  However, there was a brief period between Abrams’ official separation from the show and Cuse’s arrival to help with the workload where it truly was just Lindelof left to fend for himself.  It didn’t go great!

It’s important to mention that, prior to LOST, Lindelof had never run a television program before agreeing to take the show over after the completion of its pilot.  He had producing experience from his three-year stint with CROSSING JORDAN, but being the manager of a medium-sized company was something he was essentially forced to learn on the fly.  If one asked the reasonable question, “why the hell did he ever agree to the job in the first place?”, well...he wasn’t planning on LOST being a hit.  The pilot was grand and expensive and intriguing, but it was still relatively niche.  There were absolutely no guarantees (or even indicators) of success.  Lindelof had made the reasonable calculation that this would be a thirteen-episode run, maybe one year if they were lucky.  He’d get the reps, then move on to the next gig.

Then LOST became a smash.  And all the expectations that come with being a ratings juggernaut came crashing onto his shoulders.

It won’t surprise you to hear that Lindelof essentially worked in the midst of a permanent panic attack and came very close to quitting the show altogether.  Cuse, his old partner from NASH BRIDGES, eventually agreed to be his co-showrunner and from the episode “Solitary” on, the famous partnership (and eventual podcast duo) had formed.  LOST would march forth under their tutelage from then forth, until its very last frame.

The reason I give you all of this behind-the-scenes context is because “White Rabbit” is 100% an episode forged from Lindelof’s early constant state of panic and doubt.  He has sole writing credit on it, the only LOST episode of its kind in that regard.  The episode revolves around unofficial island leader Jack Shephard struggling with his inability to bring the disparate group of survivors together.  His intense self-doubts take on the form of what appears to be Jack’s dad Christian Shephard (John Terry), whose body Jack had been on the way home to bury.  Along the way, he reminisces on his terrible relationship with said father, who instills the idea in him early on in life that he “just doesn’t have what it takes”.  

Jack’s worried he’s either going crazy or witnessing the impossible, the latter possibility heavily advocated for by newly made man Locke.  At the end of the day, though, he manages to work through it all enough to dig deep and lead.  As the episode concludes, he finally unifies the castaways by hitting them with the famous “we have to live together, or we’re gonna die alone” rally speech.  Jack perhaps doesn’t have what it takes, perhaps; it’s something the show will explore time and time again over its six seasons.  But he has enough to get everyone through that night.

“White Rabbit” isn’t a perfect episode.  I’ve never really liked Jack’s pleading speech to the Oceanic gate agent, for instance.  In both writing and performance, it feels too much like a pretty good college showcase monologue.  But “White Rabbit” is one of the few episodes I disregarded at the time that I now heavily admire.  I’m not a big Jack fan; I think he’s a frustrating character to follow the journey of.  But if there was one episode where the show had the clearest prism to reflect him through, it’s this one.

Damon Lindelof has famously stated LOST is ultimately about the loss of his own father.  In that way, the show is a constant revealing of Lindelof as a person.  “White Rabbit”, then, may be the most insight he’s ever given us about the way he views the world.  It’s a remarkable and underrated hour of the show, made all the more special for its being pulled out of a hat.

5. Everyone is hot

There’s a famous Garfunkel and Oates song entitled “Why Isn’t There More Fucking On This Island?”, an extremely spoilery walk through an honestly pretty fair question regarding LOST.  

Look, I don’t mean to be superficial, but I’ve mentioned it before: every single person on this show is hot, even the characters with “non-traditional” body shapes (Jorge Garcia can fucking get it).  Basically every character/actor is a relative smokeshow.  I bring this up because it’s an aspect of the show that should not be slept on when trying to analyze why it became such a phenomenon.  People wanna look at pretty people doing stuff.  We know this!  It’s what helped boost 90’s juggernauts like FRIENDS and ER!  Crucially, it wasn’t the only good thing about those shows, but it undeniably was an X-factor.  

So it goes with LOST.  Whether male (Josh Holloway, Ian Somerhalder, Terry O’Quinn, Daniel Dae Kim, Naveen Andrews, Dominic Monaghan) or female (Evangeline Lilly, Emilie De Ravin, Yunjin Kim, Maggie Grace)...hell, whether I even like the actor (I think Matthew Fox is kind of limited, but I gotta give it up for that jawline)...why wasn’t there more fucking on that island?

6. Charlie Pace’s flameout

Something that stands out watching the first third of Season One of LOST is that Dominic Monaghan is all over it.  He is literally the third lead behind Matthew Fox and Evangeline Lilly for the first few episodes.  This is notable only because I’m not sure he gets anywhere as much burn on the show ever again until maaaaybe the end of Season Three. 

It makes sense!  As mentioned, Monaghan was probably the biggest chip ABC had from a marketing standpoint.  LORD OF THE RINGS was still super-hot in 2004, Monaghan was one of the younger members of the cast and, frankly, the role of Charlie Pace seemed tailor-made to get millennial teenage girls all in a tizzy.  To review: he was a cute British rock star who wore Vans, strummed a guitar, and wore tape around his knuckles so he could write little Sharpie messages on them.  BUT, he also had a deep dark flaw: he was a heroin addict that is now forced to be in withdrawal.  It’s an intriguing setup!

So, what happened?  Part of the Charlie problem is that he was one of the first characters to more or less have his story arc resolved.  In the seventh episode “The Moth”, John Locke essentially shamans Charlie through his heroin addiction, who eventually literally pushes his way to daylight after rescuing Jack from a collapsed cave-in.  It’s a quintessential early episode of LOST; a little cheesy, but completely sincere and, thus, kind of moving in spite of itself.  Charlie is able to throw the remainder of his stash into the fire and is now able to focus on more worthwhile pursuits, like the cute little pregnant blonde.

Here’s the thing: they never really replace his arc with anything else.  He kind of becomes the “Claire guy” for a while, the de facto father to little Aaron, the guy who shares the screen mostly with Emilie de Ravin, the guy Claire refers to when she yells, “Chaaa-lie!”  The only real non-Claire conflict they throw at poor Charlie in Season One turns out to be more heroin (a prop plane is eventually found in the jungle containing a major stash hidden in Virgin Mary statues).  This would prove to be a turn the show never even commits to, but we’ll talk about “Fire + Water” next week.

What feels stunningly obvious on rewatch is that Charlie Pace should have died in Season One.  There’s a wildly memorable scene in Episode 11, “All the Best Cowboys Have Daddy Issues”, where Charlie is found hung in the jungle, an apparent casualty in the kidnapping of Claire by the hands of Ethan Rom, a castaway who turns out to be a spy for The Others, a mysterious group of people who seem to already be on the island.  Jack, going through his weekly dose of Needing To Fix Everything, cuts Charlie down and begins administering a few brutal rounds of CPR.  Despite his best efforts, he’s not breathing.  Kate begs him to stop and let him go.  The music swells to a final note.  The camera even cuts to an aerial long shot, an indication that commercials are coming.

Then…Jack jumps right back into CPR.  And this time…it works!  The day is saved!  It’s good shit, but it also feels like the show is getting stuck with Charlie as a consequence of a well-executed fake out.  You can’t help but wonder what would happen if the show had gotten the nerve to stick with executing one of the show’s biggest draws halfway through its first season.

And yes, I can hear you screaming, “Season Three!  Not Penny’s Boat!  You’re suggesting getting rid of one of the most memorable deaths on the show ever!  What are you talking about?”  And…yeah, I don’t really have an answer to that.  Maybe I would stick with this version of the show.  But I admit I’d love to see the universe where they 86 Charlie here, just to see what happens.  Especially considering we wouldn’t have to suffer through the next Charlie episode just a couple of weeks later…

7. “Homecoming”

Also known as LOST’s first Great Plot Stall!  This is the one where Claire returns to the castaways with a convenient case of amnesia.  Ethan, the undercover Other, threatens to kill one castaway a day until she is returned.  As he begins to follow through with his vow (R.I.P. Steve…or Scott), Jack and Co. manage to find Ethan, beat the shit out of him, and start to pump him for information until…Charlie unloads a full clip into him.  The in-show explanation: Charlie doesn’t want Ethan to be able to hurt Claire ever again.  The real reason, I suspect?  The show wasn’t ready to start answering the kinds of questions the characters would have asked Ethan.

I only bring this episode up due to its honor of being Damon Lindelof’s cited Worst Episode of LOST.  He explains why in this interview, but suffice to say that he felt the same way I did about Charlie’s storyline; they just didn’t have anything else to say about him besides him being a drug addict.  I’m not sure I agree with his assertion that “Homecoming” is the least of LOST, but it remains a frustrating watch all these years later.  Season One doesn’t have a lot of out-and-out clunkers, but “Homecoming”  served as an early example that it’s really, really hard to service seventeen main characters satisfactorily.

8. Sawyer

“Who is my favorite LOST character?”

It’s a question I’ve asked myself quite a bit over the past twenty years.  John Locke remains maybe the most unique character the show ever came up with; how often do you see a man who could be equal parts savage and pathetic?  Desmond Hume was always at the center of the most satisfying parts of LOST (ah, but we’ll talk about that later).  There’s a chaotic part of my soul that wants to throw out someone crazy like Mikhail Bakunin or Frank Lapdius.  (Dare I say Nikki and Paulo?  No.)

But the answer is James “Sawyer” Ford.  Maybe always has been.

He’s a character that bumps people quite a bit in Season One, likely because he’s a racist misogynist who, in ways both charming and not, literally doesn’t care about anybody else on the island, nor is he much interested in helping to stitch together a society.  The character also loses a little shine for being a major player in the interminable LOST Love Triangle.  By the time Season Four or Five rolled around, though, and the irascible con man had fully entered his Hero Arc and begun to play house with Juliet Burke, most (if not all) fans had let him into their hearts.

But I was always in on him from the beginning.  I actually had a sense Josh Holloway was something special in his solitary silent scene in the first half of the pilot.  All he does is light up a fucking cigarette, but there’s something about the way he’s standing, his eyes, his hair…a whole compelling history is implied in these scant few seconds, the perfect framework for a successful LOST character.  Holloway is an actor capable of a full bevy of emotions without ever quite feeling like he’s Acting.  He can be abrasive, stubborn, kind, wounded, often all in the same scene, sometimes in the same damn sentence.  Thus, even at Sawyer’s biggest asshole lows (he kills a tree frog next season and called Hurley a fat ass way too often), he was never less than absorbing. 

It also helps that Sawyer owns something like five or six of my favorite lines in the whole show; he comes up with a fucking banger in the second half of the pilot right after gunning down a polar bear in the jungle.  When asked where it came from, he responds “Probably Bear Village, how the hell do I know?”.  If I remember to do it, maybe I’ll sprinkle in the others as they occur.

9. Michael Giacchino’s score

Look, what is there to say about the famous LOST score that hasn’t already been said by everybody over the past two decades, or that hasn’t already been validated by Giacchino’s skyrocketing career (quick, name a prominent film composer currently working that isn’t him, John Williams, or Hans Zimmer)?  The musical themes in LOST might legitimately be more iconic than a handful of the onscreen characters; “Life and Death” is certainly a more memorable aspect of the show than Shannon Rutherford ever was.  Also consider how creative the score was from week-to-week; the orchestra famously included an angklung, a flapamba, and the gutted out insides of a piano, all in order to create an unsettling, decidedly un-jungle like sound.  It was a wildly unintuitive choice, but it was the right one.

Obviously, there’s a billion great musical moments in the first season, but the one I always think about comes pretty early on in the very first episode.  It’s the music that scores the first beats after the opening.  It’s titled “Credit Where Credit is Due”, a fitting name considering it’s where the credits first begin to display on the screen.  The show suddenly slows down, and the music changes gear in kind.  It perfectly represents the unsettling crash after the adrenaline rush of the first ten minutes.  It’s a small moment, but one that’s always stuck with me.

LOST without Giacchino is like a banh mi without pickled vegetables.  You’d still have a nice sandwich, but it would miss a huge part of what makes it special.  Giacchino has deserved every shred of the career he’s obtained since LOST left the air.

10. Musical montages

Michael Giacchino’s score is so high-level and iconic that I think an aspect of early LOST that has been forgotten is its penchant for diegetic musical montages.  One may remember that in the first two-thirds of Season One, Hurley was walking around with a Discman.  The show uses this as a device to overlay real songs onto end-of-episode montages.  And, let me tell you, Hurley has some eclectic tastes.  The big three montages utilize “Are You Sure?” by Willie Nelson, “Delicate” by Damien Rice (at least, parts of it, before the CD player dies for good) and “Wash Away” by Joe Purdy.  That last one in particular inspired me to buy Purdy’s album “Julie Blue”, a wise decision because it’s excellent; another song off that album, “I Love the Rain The Most”, would end up getting utilized by another ABC drama, “Grey’s Anatomy”.

LOST would famously find ways to use existing music via other means (how else would Mama Cass’ “Make Your Own Kind of Music” or Petula Clark’s “Downtown” become so ingrained in the show’s narrative?), but…there’s just something so Early LOST about these Discman montages, if only because they never really do them again after the first season.  It was a fun gimmick and I’ve always wished they had found a way to give Hurley another music player to walk around with.  Maybe there could have been a Dharma iPod in the hatch or something.  Alas.

11. The hatch

LOST’s Big Mystery in Season One ends up being a mysterious hatch found by Locke and Boone in the middle of the jungle, mostly by happenstance.  It’s first found in Episode 11 (“All the Best Cowboys Have Daddy Issues”) and is finally opened at the end of Episode 24 (“Exodus, Part Two”*).  The contents of the hatch are the driving force of the entire second season.  

The hatch turns out to be a humongous deal, and it’s impressive how captivated America seemed to be by it, considering the hatch was initially captivating solely because the show implied that it was.  Think realistically about what could have been inside that hatch.  Jack at one point theorizes its function as a shelter, while others worry there may be any number of awful things inside (a spray-painted “Quarantine” sign gives many characters pause).  But at the end of the day, nobody has a clue, either on the show or in the audience.  There is little tangible indication as to what to expect once the hatch was opened, or even if the resolution would be interesting at all.  

The hatch was the mystery box personified (and thus LOST in summary), and is probably as good an argument as to the storytelling technique’s efficacy.  They were able to string this open-ended question along for fourteen episodes (longer if you consider the Season Two episode “Orientation” to be the true resolution to “what is in the hatch?”) with barely a crumb of context as to what to expect in there.  Truly, it wasn’t a mystery doled out in stages.  It was just “hatch is closed” then “hatch is open”.  Hell, they managed to turn this into the first season cliffhanger, effectively extending the mystery an additional three months.  This blatant hype tactic didn’t seem to quell fan enthusiasm; the Season Two premiere is one of the most-watched episodes in the show’s history.

The fuckin’ hatch, man.  People loved it. It might be the most famous long-term mystery the show ever did, the first wild swing it ever took.  I’ll always respect it for that.

*Some people might feel compelled to say, “ah-ah-ah, good sir, it was actually at the end of Episode 25, “Exodus, Part Three”!  Those people would be wrong.  There is no “Exodus, Part Three”.  I’ll get into it at some point, but the way the DVDs and streaming sites have screwed up the episode count has driven me crazy for almost two decades and I need to point it out whenever I get the chance.

12. The numbers

Perhaps no data set more represented the binding code of LOST than “4, 8, 15, 16, 23, 42”.  

Although their first appearance was in Episode 17, aptly titled “Numbers”, in which we learn fan-favorite Hugo “Hurley” Reyes is a cursed man, having using the above six numbers to win $150 million on a lottery ticket, these six numbers were codified into LOST’s DNA from the very beginning (Oceanic Flight 815, anybody?).  Once “Numbers” hit the airwaves, however, you started noticing those damn numbers started everywhere, in ways both comedic (the girls’ soccer team jerseys in the airport) and deadly serious (the code for the button).

The numbers did wind up having a definitive explanation, kind of*.  But, even if they didn’t, the numbers were satisfying, anyway.  To some degree, I mean that literally; they’re satisfying to say aloud (try it!)  There’s no real pattern to them, but they all seem of a piece.  More to the point, the numbers helped illustrate, maybe more than anything else, the unifying nature of the LOST universe itself.  Everything is connected.  The world is both impossibly vast and shockingly small. The same damn set of numbers keeps following someone around and, as a consequence, it follows everyone else.  

The numbers also served as the opening line of my million-dollar idea: a LOST-themed “Rent” parody that I forgot about entirely until just this second.

*It actually had a non-definitive explanation first, but we’ll talk about that later.

13. The french woman

Season One, and LOST as a whole, has a fun habit of having mysterious figures that function colloquially as memorable nouns.  “The polar bear.”  “The hatch.”  “The monster.”  “The island.”  One of the most popular was Danielle Rousseau, also known by most as “the french woman”.  As played by the late Mira Furlan, she was one of the earliest indications that our survivors were truly not alone, and constantly straddled the line between true friend and true foe.  For instance, we first meet her as she’s strapping fan favorite Sayid in advance of a torture session, brought on by the fact that she is both an extremely broken and traumatized survivor herself, as well as completely out of her mind.  Yet, she will eventually become a source of information, advance warning and assistance as the show chugs along.

I bring Rousseau up, not only because she was an integral early piece of the show’s mythology, but because she served as an example of how any LOST character had the potential to grow into something that surprised you.  Although she was never a top-tier character for me (she just showed up too infrequently for her to get that close to my heart), and she never was able to obtain the status of “flashback-centric episode” that other side characters did, her sudden death in Season Four was effective enough to make me reflect how just how important an ingredient she was in the bigger LOST stew.   It felt like an end of an era, a tie to the early days of the show snuffed out.  RIP to Danielle Rousseau.  You would have loved the Olympic opening ceremonies this year.

14. “Whatever the Case May Be”

I highlight the twelfth episode, a Kate-centric episode where she suddenly becomes very interested in the contents of a briefcase that Sawyer finds in some submerged wreckage, not because it is a particularly good episode, but because it is a particularly bad one.  

It’s not just because it feels like a downshift in gears after the previous episode “All the Best Cowboys Have Daddy Issues”, the aforementioned thrillride that ends in Charlie’s near-demise.  In context, following that episode up with a smaller stand-alone was purposeful.  Between episodes 11 and 12, LOST went on winter break.  Presumably, the show would be picking up new viewers when it returned that January, if only just to finally check out this thing everyone’s been talking about.  It’s slightly bumpy on a binge, but not immediately diving into a mythos dump feels intentional.

No, the issue is that, on this rewatch, it struck me as the first indication that the flashback format has its drawbacks.  If you don’t count the flashbacks in the pilot, this was the second occurrence of a character receiving an additional flashback-centric episode.  Jack Shephard was the first, which, him being the ostensible lead of LOST, seems logical.  Kate being the next one up would indicate her being the co-lead of the show, an important character whose life would be worth reflecting back on.  So it’s a shame that the second dip into her backstory was such a dud.

Kate has long been a particularly frustrating character for me, and one that the show was always a little lazy about; too often, they would have her insert herself into the main action of the show despite another character’s (usually Jack or Sawyer) rebuke, she would get found out, inevitably the mission would get complicated, she would become a teary mess and beg for forgiveness, wash, rinse, repeat.  Her flashbacks had a similarly repetitive nature; outside of a spare few, they usually detailed her being on the run and using someone for her own gain/escape, typically getting them hurt or killed in the process.  So it goes with “Whatever the Case May Be”, as we see Kate help rob a bank in order to steal a lockbox that contains a toy plane, which belongs to someone from her past, the very same plane that is in the case Sawyer finds in the present.

Yes, all of the show’s characters are inherently contradictory and flawed messes; such is the beauty of LOST.  The idea of a woman trying to become a good person, if only she didn’t keep running away from growth, is an intriguing one.  But it proved frustrating to watch a character shun evolution for years.  As a result, Evangeline Lilly, an otherwise skilled and engaging actress, was constantly stuck in first gear, never quite getting the same opportunity for range as her fellow castmates.  It didn’t help that Kate’s main narrative on the show was the love triangle between her, Jack and Sawyer, something the show went on and on and on with...but we’ll get there.

Suffice to say that “Whatever the Case May Be” was the first sign that ABC’s vision of a island castaway show that could be extended in perpetuity with the narrative device of flashbacks with which to tell an infinite amount of backstories about our main characters had a inherent flaw: sometimes the first beat is the most interesting.

15. “Outlaws”

The sixteenth episode of Season One, “Outlaws”, features Sawyer heading into the jungle to settle a beef he’s having with a boar.  The money sequence of the entire thing is him playing “I Never” with Kate.  For all the world, it feels like one of those dreaded “filler” episodes LOST had built a reputation for, even in its first year.

Anyway, it’s one of my favorite episodes of the season, if not the show outright.

First off, I feel like we need to establish what even constitutes a “filler” episode when it comes to LOST.  Yes, the show would famously go on tangents in order to maintain holding patterns (looking at you, Hydra Island!) But from the jump, folks were so hungry for answers from LOST that anything that didn’t immediately move the mythology forward was considered a complete waste of time.

In my humble opinion, this is a HORRIBLE way to try to derive meaning from LOST!  Some of the absolute best moments of the show don’t move the story or plot forward in any way, but make you feel happy for having hung out with this particular set of characters for an hour (Season Three’s “Tricia Tanaka is Dead” being perhaps the platonic ideal of a “filler” episode).  So it goes with “Outlaws”, which doesn’t necessarily tell us anything fundamentally new about Sawyer (he’s a traumatized con man who’s prone to manipulation himself), but does serve as an example of certain characters who could be a source of constant backstory.  We know that he has a tortured past, but did we ever suspect that he may have erroneously killed a man?

It helps that, again, Josh Holloway is a natural leading man, and someone who I’m honestly shocked didn’t become an instant crossover star into film.  He’s tall, blonde and handsome, yes, but he’s also adept at playing all different types of emotions (frustration, sarcasm, lust, sadness, sometimes all at once) and making them feel unified under one character’s psychology.  Even the worst Sawyer episodes are a little engaging just off of Holloway’s shoulders alone.

“Outlaws” is also unique in that it is the moment where it feels like LOST’s obsession with the aforementioned Jack-Kate-Sawyer love triangle felt genuinely engaging.  I’ve already mentioned that I found this element of the show the most tedious, if only because the answer always felt obvious: Josh Holloway and Evangeline Lilly had the juice, while Lilly and Matthew Fox didn’t.  Kate and Sawyer hooking up always felt like an inevitability, while Kate and Jack flirting felt like watching two aliens try to communicate as humans.  But I never felt invested in it beyond that surface level subjective opinion.

But then we reach this episode’s “I Never” game and, not only do the two actors lock the fuck in, the attraction between the two characters finally felt justified.  Not only is the novelty of the game a great way to dump exposition while feeling like a genuine conversation, but it reveals just how similarly broken both Sawyer and Kate really are; the mutual drinking at the prompt “I never killed a man” is one of the show’s most elegant expansions of character mythology.  This linking of these two major characters feels of a piece of the larger LOST tapestry; as ridiculous as Sawyer’s quest to kill a boar is, one that he’s made as a personification of every single sin he’s ever committed, Kate will go on a similar journey with a horse next season.    

Put it this way: as a self-ascribed Kate hater (a Kater?), I've never seen her appeal more than in this sequence.  That has to be worth something.

16. Walt 

Ah, yes, Walt, he of the titular famous “Waaaaaaaaaalt!” scream.

Walt Lloyd is probably the character that most symbolized missed opportunities.  Initially established as the kid son of beleaguered father Michael Dawson (and easily the youngest castaway on the show), he was later revealed to have psychic powers, and possibly some real darkness within him, so much that a batch of mysterious Others on the island take a serious shine to him.

The issue with child characters on television shows is that they tend to be played by child real people.  Children real people tend to grow up; in the case of Malcolm David Kelley, he grew up really quick and really notably.  This isn’t always a big deal, but LOST was not a show that was able to do many time jumps until the end of Season Three.  An episode usually covered a consecutive day on the island, which created an issue once Walt suddenly was growing a few extra inches of height.

So….they wrote him off the show at the end of Season One!  The Others steal him off the raft and that’s kind of the end of that mystery.  Yes, he made a handful of appearances after, but we never really get true and definitive clarification on what his powers were all about.  There’s enough there in the text of the show regarding the potential scale of what he could do that you can resolve it through some nifty headcanon, but it’s hard to shake the feeling that an intriguing storyline got snuffed out before it even got started thanks to real world reality.  

I bring this up because Walt is a sticking point to some of the show’s most adamant haters to this day.  “They never went anywhere with Walt!  Fuck this show!”  My response to that is to circle back to one of my earlier points about LOST as a whole; yeah, parts of it are kind of made up and it leads to unsatisfactory dangling threads, but…shit happens.  It would have been nice if they had developed a contingency plan regarding a potential growth spurt of its solitary child actor, but the nature of the show during the first half of its run meant there wasn’t much room for one.  Once the show started jumping forward (and backwards) in time, the show had more or less moved on from Walt. 

17. Boone’s death

Boone Carlyle isn’t technically the first castaway to die; that honor technically belongs to either pilot Seth Norris or, if you’re a Wiki canon dork, Gary Troup.  But it’s clear that Boone was the first Significant Death in the show’s history.  It made the cover of an Entertainment Weekly cover and everything.

Boone, of course, dies under the tutelage of John Locke, who had been recruiting him to help him secretly open the hatch for the past several episodes.  In an island-induced vision, Locke locates the sight of a crashed propeller plane up in a tree.  Locke has begun to lose the feelings in his legs again (which scares the shit out of him) and convinces Boone to climb up and scope out its contents.  Unfortunately, the plane begins to shift and the plane lands on the ground, with Boone’s now-crushed body in tow.  A panicked Locke drops Boone off at Jack’s feet then disappears, leaving others to clean up his mess.

It’s one of those LOST events that generated a lot of consequences and, thus, a ton of great moments.  “Do No Harm” was itself a great hour of LOST, the show taking a page from the “ER” playbook and letting us watch Jack suffer as his efforts to save Boone’s life spin further and further out of control.  However, without Boone eating shit in that abandoned propeller plane, we would never get that spine-chilling moment of Locke banging on the window of the hatch, begging the island to not forsake him.  We’d never get that equally magical moment right after when an interior light floods the window, a massive sign from the gods for Locke to keep going.  We’d never get that sobering scene of Locke standing alone at Boone’s funeral, his shirt covered in dried blood, trying to find the words to justify what the fuck just happened. 

As for Boone himself, he unfortunately was a prime candidate to be the First Significant Death.  Boone and Shannon were characters that were evidently not working from very early on, at least relative to others that were popping off the screen left and right.  After a Boone flashback episode, “Hearts and Minds”, was also an arguable soapy dud, the writing appeared to be on the wall.  Boone was a sacrifice that the island, er, I mean, the show demanded; it was an obvious way to keep putting the screws to the show’s main central tension at that point (Jack vs. Locke), it added pathos to the budding romance between Shannon and Sayid, it qualified as a legitimate water-cooler moment (it’s easy to forget, but Somerhalder was something of a fan favorite, even if Boone kind of wasn’t, if that makes any sense).

LOST is usually pretty careful about not just killing people off for shock, unless the show is specifically put in a corner.  The death of Boone Carlyle, then, set the template for that.  He drew the short straw creatively, but his passing still set the stage for the rest of the season and beyond.  It was good stuff and cleared the way for even more significant deaths to come.  RIP, King?

18. Shannon

Both times I’ve watched through the first season of LOST with my wife, one character stands head and shoulders above the rest on her Most Hated List.  We have shared beef with Jack and Kate, and she had a particularly difficult time with Ana-Lucia this time around.  But her least-favorite character by a knockout is Shannon Rutherford.

It’s an opinion she shares with many, and it’s not difficult to see why.  Beyond not being provided much to do as a character until it was already too late, Shannon is also easily the most anachronistic figure in all of LOST.  The main spine of the show’s plot takes place in the year 2004, but for the most part, you’d never know it; most of the characters have a more-or-less timeless feel to them.  Jack is a doctor, Hurley is a goofy guy, Michael is a father, Locke is a crazy survivalist, Sawyer is a redneck con man…all archetypes that have existed and always will exist.  Then there’s Shannon, who is essentially a “Paris Hilton”-type, a rich socialite who could not be more at odds with the circumstances of the show if she tried.

This is not inherently uninteresting, and squinting my eyes on this last rewatch, you can see the framework of where they could have gone with her.  A character who starts off abrasive and disconnected from the rest of the group and grows to be vulnerable is a good idea for an arc!  It’s exactly what they did with Sawyer over the course of LOST.  But it just feels like Shannon is a character who got lost in the shuffle very early on, inherently shackled to another character (her stepbrother Boone) that felt stuck in first until his death.  Once Boone was gone, Shannon hadn’t really grown enough to be an independent character.  The writing was on the wall.  Despite an attempt to form a romance between her and Sayid (a crucial and consequential pairing that I unfortunately never bought for a second), Shannon’s death followed not far behind, in an early Season Two episode “Abandoned”.  

To be clear, I think this was a mistake on the show’s part, as opposed to a fuck-up on actress Maggie Grace’s side.  Although there were other actors I liked better, she did the absolute best she could with a character that never got enough oxygen to breathe. The Season Two Shannon-centric episode that ended in her demise was an especially egregious error, as it represented the one and only time they really tried to contextualize why she was so nasty, manipulative and selectively helpless throughout the first season.  Flashbacks on the show usually represent an opportunity for LOST to take a character and challenge what you think you know about them.  However, when they come right before the character leaves the show forever, they kind of reek of desperation, an apologetic Hail Mary.  So it went with Shannon.

I know this was all more of a Season Two rant, but Shannon dying was easily the most interesting thing that ever happened to her, so I’m talking about it now.  When a show is trying to serve dozens of main characters at once, at least a couple are going to fall by the wayside.  If it had to be anybody, her and Boone were probably the right choice; their relative youth would have made it difficult to mine more than a flashback between them.  But you always have to wonder what would have happened if Shannon had been allowed to live long enough to be free, rather than just as a figure meant to die so that a man could feel sad.

19. Sayid

This isn’t to throw shade at Sayid Jarrah, by the way.  If Charlie was the character most calculated to be a fan favorite, Sayid is the one that actually claimed the crown.  What’s not to love?  He’s the resident hunky badass who knows everything about fighting AND technology, but also has an evil side to him (he lived his life pre-crash as a torturer for the Iraqi Republican Guard), but ALSO has a sad side to him.

As it happens, though, he may also be the character I slept on the most from my first watch to my rewatch.  I had sort of chalked him up as the “when in doubt, break Sayid glass and let him beat the shit out of someone and/or save the day at the last second” guy.  And, look, he’s not NOT that on the whole.  BUT, man, considering how many characters on LOST have to be a little dense and not clock what’s happening right in front of them in order for the show to continue, it was constantly satisfying having ONE guy who never missed a goddamn thing.  Sees a mysterious wire on the beach?  He follows it along.  Hears about everyone opening up a hatch in the middle of the jungle?  He’s the only one who asks if there’s a plan on the real chance something’s in there they’ll regret letting out.  He’s the first to recognize Michael is full of shit at the end of Season Two.  He’s an early Henry Gale skeptic.  On and on it goes.  In a show filled with shaky leadership, Sayid was always the adult in the room.  Godspeed, even if you had a weird zombie arc in Season Six there.

20. Claire

Much like her island beau Charlie Pace, Claire Littleton was a character that got a little lost in the wind once Her Big Character Thing Resolved.

Known by many early on as The Pregnant Lady, then The Girl Who Got Kidnapped, Claire went from being of imminent importance to the narrative (literally everybody stops what they’re doing to try to rescue her) to fairly decentralized once baby Aaron is born.  So, just like Charlie, she kind of just starts doing stuff, both on island and in flashbacks.  In Season Three, she gets the idea to tie messages to the legs of birds.  It’s later revealed that she and Jack Shepard are half-siblings.  She disappears from the show for an entire year to go run out into the jungle.  It’s kind of all over the place.

But, seriously!  She felt like a central and winning character for much of LOST’s inaugural season.  Maybe it was because, due to her impending maternity, she was one of the island’s most vulnerable and unique figures.  Maybe it was due to the fun chemistry Emilie de Ravin had with Dominic Monaghan (even if I still don’t think the Claire-Charlie relationship works at all, or even really given the room to work.  Later.).  Maybe it’s just her extremely Australian accent (say it with me now: “Chaaa-lie!”).  Yet, I don’t think I ever knew anybody who was a “Claire fan”.  Like many listed throughout this article, there were just too many other characters gasping for airtime on LOST.

(Also, I don’t know how charming I found that “invisible peanut butter” thing.  The intention is sweet, but if Charlie insisted he could get me an actual jar of Jif to satisfy my cravings, and he showed up with an empty jar and started playing make-believe, he might have gotten thrown in the fucking ocean way earlier than Season Three.)

21. This crazy UK promo

This one is a little bit of a stretch, but there isn’t enough meat on the bones for a separate article, and I’d be remiss if I closed out the Season One article without directing everyone to this batshit UK commercial promoting LOST’s impending international syndication.  You may even remember this bouncing around the internet at the time.  It’s the one that decided not to advertise the show’s arrival on Channel 4 by using clips from the show, but by creating a completely bespoke scenario where all of our principals dance around the beach to a Portishead song.

Directed by famed photographer David LaChappelle, it’s a surreal experience for sure, and worth two minutes of your time.  As I watched it again, two concurrent thoughts swirled in my head:

1. By and large, it’s a fairly accurate representation of the character dynamics that permeated the show’s first season.  Prominently featured is Kate switching back and forth between dancing with Jack and Sawyer, with both men exchanging hard glares.  Sun and Jin have harsh, conflicting chemistry.  Michael appears stuck in reverse.  Shannon and Sayid look to be in a deep tango.  All the while, Locke stands to the side conducting everything, with little Walt standing by him mirroring his movements.  Not every moment correlates with anything; I’m not sure why Claire and Boone briefly pair up.  But, all in all, it’s a decent metaphorical snapshot of what one can expect if they were to start watching reruns, even if it gives no indication of what the show feels like texturally.  This brings me to my second thought…

2. What possessed Channel 4 to go this direction?  You gotta respect the commitment to the aesthetic; everyone is wearing deep eyeliner and what can only be described as “trashy afterparty” attire.  And I will never reject a corporation leaning into artistry.  But you would think, with LOST being such a phenomenon in the US, that a channel would want to just air clips from the pilot to hook in their hometown audience.  Instead, they gave them something they’d never forget and hoped it would compel them to tune in.  I like to imagine there’s someone out there who saw that commercial, watched the pilot and went, “why is everyone just running around?  Where’s the dancing, the passion?”

There are two cuts of this thing; there’s a shorter second one that replaces “Numb” with some generic “we’re all lost” voiceover.  For obvious reasons, I vastly prefer the Portishead version than the voiceover version; the second cut feels too much like a normal UK tv advert to me.  Give me the one I’ve never forgotten twenty years later, please.

22. “Exodus” and the first LOST finale

LOST was often at its most fun when it was fully indulgent, and it was rarely more indulgent than when it came to the end of the season.  LOST finales were multiple-hour events and the Season One finale “Exodus” set the template for years to come.

First of all, it was broadcast in a way I always appreciated, even at the time: “Exodus” is technically a three hour episode that aired over two weeks.  The hour-long “Exodus, Part One” aired on May 18, 2005, and the two-hour “Exodus, Part Two” aired on May 25, 2005.  On its face, this would seem to be the result of a television network trying to maximize the amount of weeks its blockbuster program was on the air, especially in a juicy sweeps period like May.  Outside of not wanting one show to take up the entirety of an evening’s prime-time schedule, there isn’t wasn’t any other reason to split “Exodus” up like this.  But, you know what?  I’m glad that they did.  There was something kind of cool about a show’s finale being so excessive that it had to be poured into a whole other calendar week.  They only ever did this a second time, with Season Four’s “There’s No Place Like Home”, and it’s a shame.  

Anyway, “Exodus”, like all LOST finales, has a genuine claim as one of the best episodes of the show, period.  The launching of the raft is one of the most satisfying blends of image and score; Giacchino was absolutely cooking with “Parting Words”.  Their apparent rescue at the hands of the mysterious bearded man, and the subsequent stomach punch of “we have to take the boy”, gives me chills to this day.  I loved the show building the runway to Season Two with the guest cameo of Michelle Rodriguez as tail section member Ana-Lucia, the kind of called shot only LOST could do (even if it was an eventual missed shot…we’ll talk about it). 

I even liked the big group flashbacks that culminate in everyone taking their seats on the doomed Flight 815, even if it sort of feels like something that could have been saved for an eventual series finale.  The flashbacks take on all kinds of different tones.  Some of them, like Kate’s, are expository.  Some of them, like Michael’s, are melancholy.  Some, like Hurley’s, are just a fun romp.  LOST flexes a lot of range in “Exodus” and it often feels effortless, almost like they didn’t realize how much they were capable of.  It’s great stuff.

And then, of course, there’s that cliffhanger, as the hatch is finally opened and Jack and Locke close out the epic first season of LOST by….staring down the opening and not doing anything else.  See you next summer!  To be honest, it may be the only real mark against the episode in my eyes, and even that has a practical explanation.  The reason we get no insight into the contents of the hatch by season’s end is, simply, that they hadn’t built the contents yet.  The set that eventually became The Hatch was used as The Caves in Season One; the caves had to be destroyed over the summer before the hatch interior could be created.  Completely understandable.  Still, it felt too much like a generic tease for a show that was already catching heat for not having answers readily available.

Beyond that, though, “Exodus” made it known that seasons of LOST were worth watching to the end.  They were never boring, and almost always complete showstoppers.  Even in the first sixth of its life, LOST knew how to send audiences home happy.

23. Leslie Arzt

I end with a tribute to one of the most unique characters in the show’s canon, the irritating, incorrigible Dr. Leslie Arzt.  His legacy was borne from his ability to burst from the background directly into the main action of the first season’s finale.

The thing about LOST is that, despite there being something like seventeen major speaking parts at any time, there were 48 surviving passengers of Oceanic Flight 815, any one of which could potentially have the ability to become important, although none of them ever really did.  However, Arzt was the show’s first attempt to try and he made his mark by being one of the biggest assholes to ever walk on the beach.

He was a high school science teacher who loved to lecture the other castaways about everything they were doing wrong; he berated our heroes for taking too long to launch their raft, he yelled at them for handling old rotten dynamite the wrong way and, most of all, he was furious that nobody ever learned how to say his name.  Interestingly, Dr. Arzt’s main gripe was that he wasn’t part of the main cast, forced to stay on the sidelines as Jack, Kate, Sawyer and Sayid got to go on sexy adventures in the jungle.

I go on about Arzt for a few reasons.  One, my friend Jimmy would never forgive me if I didn’t highlight his favorite LOST character.  Two, anybody who gets to be played by Daniel Roebuck deserves its own section.  Three, I think Leslie Arzt highlights just how playful LOST could be, even when it was experimenting.  It was impossible not to wonder, as one initially watched the first season, what would happen if these background characters came to life.  Well, here you go, here’s one!  And he’s a douche!  It all leads to that aforementioned surprise explosion in “Exodus”, as Arzt waves a stick of dynamite around, causing it to combust, and Arzt along with it.  Blood and guts fly, at least as much as a TV-14 rating will allow.  It’s a wonderful surprise, and an instant fan-favorite moment.

Other background players would get slotted into main roles before the show’s conclusion, with much more catastrophic results.  But Arzt did it first, a true trailblazer in the “How Do We Get New Characters On LOST?” field.  As I think of Dr. Arzt, molder of young minds, I think of the words Hurley speaks to Jack in the minutes after the explosion, as the dust settles and finale business continues:

“You got some Arnzt on you.”

Don’t we all.

I Had to Go Back: Twenty Years of LOST

As I sat in my lonely cubicle, staring at a computer screen, wondering why in the world we were all being asked to come into the office just to fulfill the privilege of hopping on Zoom meetings all day, my eye finally wandered over to the right corner of my company-issued laptop.  

June 6th, 2024.  

It suddenly occurred to me.  It was already the beginning of June….how many days did I have left?

I had known for about nine months at that point that I wanted to do a mega-series for LOST’s twentieth anniversary, where I went through each season highlighting notable moments, episodes and characters.  I knew I wanted to time the first article so that it was released on the actual anniversary of the first episode’s broadcast.  But, outside of a couple of loose paragraphs here or there, I hadn’t really made much movement on it.  So…how much time did I have, really?  

I pulled up my Outlook calendar and started counting the days between now and September 22, 2024.  One, two, three…..about a minute later, I had my answer.

I sat there in disbelief.  There was just no way I had added that up correctly.  I counted again.  The result remained the same.

108 days.

I took it as a sign, but not before staring intently into the void.  As my eyes went blank, and my expression became increasingly intense, the camera zoomed in on my face and a familiar “woosh” sound filled my ears….

Not that anybody ever has or, really, even would, but if someone were to ask me what my favorite television show of all time was, my answer to this day might still be LOST.

There are a lot of television shows from all eras that I adore, and even think are better than LOST on the whole.  Who could say no to the AMC 1-2 punch of MAD MEN and BREAKING BAD?  What would I do without the quick British masterpieces THE OFFICE and FLEABAG?  Has there yet been a sitcom that could possibly live up to the titular shows of BOB NEWHART, DICK VAN DYKE or MARY TYLER MOORE?  Can I pretend 24 wasn’t my go-to action thriller obsession for years, even if much of its philosophies, uh, haven’t aged well?  Yet, my gut response to “favorite TV show” is still LOST.  It probably always will be.

This is a remarkable achievement for a show that often frustrated me while I was watching it live, and one that I hadn’t really done a full rewatch on since its final broadcast on May 23, 2010.  I hadn’t been avoiding it on purpose.  It wasn’t out of disappointment with the finale (although my thoughts on it have always been a little mixed), it was just one of those things that I always meant to do, but never got around to.  LOST concluded, and it was like the drive to take the journey again just sort of instantly….evaporated.

Again, this is an admittedly ambivalent attitude towards something I just called my favorite television show just one paragraph prior.  But it’s undeniable that the show had its rough and jagged edges throughout its six-season broadcasting history.  It’s equally undeniable, however, that LOST walked so that a lot of other TV shows could run.  There were programs before it that drew people in with its larger mythology, but kept them glued to the set with their fascinating characters (looking at you, X-FILES), and there were programs that asked the kind of simple questions that can captivate nations (“Who killed Laura Palmer?”).  But it felt like LOST alone briefly made it possible in the 21st century for network television to take a big swing at an unabashedly sci-fi premise with a humanistic framework.  

Who could forget the intriguingly simple premise?  “A plane crashes on a remote island, and the survivors must now figure out how to stay alive.  Oh, and there’s a monster and a polar bear.  And the dude from PARTY OF FIVE and the other guy from LORD OF THE RINGS are there.”  LOST was a surprising and instantaneous hit for ABC, which presented both incredible creative opportunities and some frustrating limitations.  After all, what would happen if the show ever dared to aim its ambitions towards some more high-level sci-fi concepts, such as time travel or multiple timelines? What if it fell away from stand-alone episodes completely to become something intensely serialized? Well, the massive success on your hands would become…not a niche show, exactly, but one with a reputation for sloughing off more viewers every year (the pilot drew 18.65 million viewers; the finale just 13.57).

Given its ambitious narrative scope and large cast, one has to figure that LOST is the type of show HBO would have thrown a lot of money at if they had the chance.  Were it to be made today, I imagine it would have been dumped onto a streaming platform, doomed to be fervently discussed in online spaces for a week, then get quietly canceled within a summer or two.  But, instead, it aired on a major network in a prime time slot (Wednesdays at 8!) and got everybody talking about it every week (at least in the beginning).  It made instant genre stars of just about every single one of its leads and, more importantly, inspired dummies like me to spend way too much time talking about it two decades and an entire lifetime later.

Although it was an imperfect show, LOST managed to arrive at the perfect place and time in its medium’s history.  I’ll always love it for that.  So much so that it’s a show I find myself getting defensive about, even after all this time.

And, look, there’s been a lot to get defensive about in regards to the show’s legacy over the past twenty years.  In fact, there are three pervasive myths about LOST that I keep seeing recur over and over and over in online spaces and verbal conversations that never cease to drive me crazy.  If I may, I’d like to kick this whole series off by busting these myths right now.  Ahem:

Myth #1: LOST is proof that J.J. Abrams can’t write an ending!

I mean, the part where J.J. Abrams can’t conclude a story isn’t a myth, at least not to me.  He’s essentially on record as saying he’s the “setups and possibilities” guy (this is more or less what the infamous “mystery box” style of storytelling is, and you can take it from the man himself).  What I object to is the idea that LOST is the smoking gun proof of J.J.’s shortcomings.

Look, even if you were a moderately engaged fan, you’d be forgiven for thinking all this time that Abrams was the showrunner for LOST, guiding it along for all six of its seasons, from the beginning of the pilot to the final seconds of the finale.  After all, it was absolutely marketed at the time as his show, ABC already having one Abrams genre hit on their network (ALIAS).  To be fair, he was extremely hands-on with the creation of that famous first episode, having both directed and co-written it.  He was the face of the show during its initial media campaign; as a result, Abrams and LOST are two names that have been intertwined for twenty years.

It may surprise you, then, to hear that his involvement beyond that famous pilot was essentially nil.  As soon as the first episode was in the can, Abrams passed on subsequent show-running responsibilities and instead ran off to go make MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE III.  Aside from returning to co-write the Season Three premiere (A TALE OF TWO CITIES), Abrams really had nothing to do with LOST again beyond its opening eighty minutes.  Every peak and valley the show would find itself traveling through for the next six years would be more or less at the hands of its two actual show-runners, Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse.  We will have lots of time to talk about them over the coming weeks, but suffice to say, the previous three paragraphs make up the bulk of the J.J. Abrams references you’ll see from me over the coming weeks.  

Myth #2: The finale reveals that they were dead the whole time!!  Stupid!

Given that the premise of the show was, “a plane crash lands on an island, and the survivors must reckon with their pasts while figuring out how to stay alive in the present (plus sci-fi stuff)”, the number one theory among the general population as to What Was Going On since the first night LOST was on the air was “they actually died in the wreck and are now in purgatory”.  Which, in a sense, is kind of what the ultimate metaphor of LOST is.  The beauty of the show was often not so much the crazy polar bears or psychic powers or time travel or whatever, it was the characters being faced with their past sins and possibly finding some sort of redemption (or not).  In the metaphorical sense of the word, it is correct to say that the island was functionally a purgatory.

But it wasn’t literally purgatory.  The characters were alive after the crash.  I know this because the finale of the show says this explicitly.  We’ll get to how I feel about the finale when we get there, but a character literally has a monologue that explains most of the major mysteries on the show.  Hell, he practically stares at you through the camera while he says it.  To contextualize what he says would require watching the show in full.  But I can say with no uncertain terms that what he says isn’t “you all died in that plane crash, and you’ve been in a literal purgatory ever since.”

So, why does it seem like so many people have this understanding?  My theory as to what happened here is that people who bailed on the show somewhere along the way got curious after the finale aired, looked up what went down just for their own curiosity, sped-read their chosen summary (or worse, a clickbait article) and interpreted what they saw in a way that justified their decision to stop watching.  “What?”, you can hear some people saying.  “They were dead the whole time?  I knew that show fucking sucked!”  From there, people who had watched and perhaps just weren’t clear on what happened picked up on these disingenuous complaints and assumed they must have been correct.  Add in fourteen years worth of time, and you can see how mistakes got made.

(Also, an artistic final shot of the wreckage on the beach, sans any human actors, that played over the finale’s credits complicated things a little bit.  A little added network tag instead became fuel for a misinformation fire.  Alas.)

I’m not saying the actual resolution is totally brilliant (again, we’ll get there), but what people think happened isn’t what happened*.  If you were holding out watching because of this, worry not.  There’s plenty of silly things LOST fumbles on, but the ultimate reveal IS NOT that everybody died in the plane crash.  I promise.

*Of course, all true LOST fans know that whatever happened, happened.

Myth #3: The show was made up as it went along!!!

I mean, this one is kinda true, but only in the sense that all television programs are a little made up as they go along.  Unexpected things happen; actors leave or pass away, guest stars dazzle and start earning themselves an unanticipated expanded role.  Plans change, writers and showrunners leave.  Ideas that seemed great at conception turn out not to work once they’re executed.  New ideas emerge, scrapping the old roadmap you were once using as your guide.

“AH”, you, the hypothetical stupid person, obnoxiously bellow, “but shouldn’t they at least have had a general plan?  They didn’t even have a plan!”

“Actually”, I politely and handsomely reply, “they did.”  No, there wasn’t a massive show bible with everything handsomely plotted out, perhaps bound in a series of beautifully spined folders, separated out by seasons that can be pulled out at the beginning of each new broadcast year.  But, then again, what show really does (seriously, name one)?  But they did have an outline of what they imagined each character’s deal to be, along with a broad structure of the show and possible episode ideas, developed as part of their pilot presentation package.  Why wouldn’t they have that?  What network would greenlight a show without any of those things?

So, yeah, sometimes LOST hit dead ends.  Sometimes it found itself in a corner it had to get itself out of.  Sometimes, it straight up just fucks up.  But sometimes, just like actual stage improvisation, the lack of strict guardrails allowed for some really astounding hours of television.  That feeling of a show going in and out of confidence is essentially what made it special, and certainly unlike any other week-to-week experience of its day.

In the end, LOST’s great power came from both the little things and the really, really huge things.

By the little things, I refer to its unparalleled attention to detail, and its willingness to turn anything and everything into a potential easter egg or clue as to where the show was ultimately going.  So much so, in fact, that too-eager viewers would often lead themselves astray by focusing on odd production things that were nothing more than that (a bird making a strange sound, for instance) and extrapolating them into the lynchpin of their giant unifying theory.  LOST showed up just in time for the internet to really explode past the days of the usenet groups and into full-blown fandom economies, and it definitely took advantage of it.  You had to sift through a lot of dipshit theories (and I mean a lot) from people who didn’t really know how TV production or scriptwriting worked, but the search itself was kind of thrilling.  

So thrilling, in fact, that I think it’s impossible to describe to those who have found LOST on streaming platforms how the pain of having to wait six days (if you were lucky) between episodes was part of the experience.  It was six days to over-analyze what, in the end, could easily turn out to be a light nothing episode.  To discuss with friends at school just what the fuck happened.  To wonder “what’s going to happen next?”

By the really, really huge things, I refer primarily to its enormous narrative swings, attempts at home runs so wild that I’d be hard pressed to think of a show at the level LOST was at that attempted similar storytelling techniques.  As an example, for two hours, the second season finale handed the keys over to a guest star we had only briefly met over twenty episodes ago.  All of our old favorites played huge roles throughout the episode, yes, but the main narrative thrust had a new character at its center.  This is an enormous amount of trust to put into not only your new actor, but your audience as well.  And you know what?  It’s one of the best episodes of the entire series.  LOST pulled it off, almost as it didn’t know it wasn’t supposed to do something like that.  The episode is vibrant, heartbreaking, and consequential, a home run caused by a huge swing.

None of this is to mention the dual timelines being jumped between in Seasons Four and Five, or the special shitpost episode that made a big show of killing off two characters that were about as far away from fan favorites as you could think of.  Or, or, or.  To watch LOST every week was to just find yourself in awe sometimes of its unbelievable audacity.  

Where LOST found itself in trouble was in the medium day-to-day things, like acting and writing*.  Although it was always strong at the crafting of a larger story, there would usually be at least one scene in any given episode with an odd line reading or a strange piece of dialogue that made you go, “what was that all about?”  And, look, the show contains some of my favorite performances from a network show, but ...not every LOST actor was created equally.  Many episodes often confuse “crying” for “effective emotion” (like…a lot).  Some characters never did develop a satisfying arc, leaving their performers to have to just hammer home a general emotion.

*I will say that visual direction was a fundamental aspect of putting together a weekly program that LOST almost always excelled at.

As you’ll see over the next few weeks, LOST wasn’t perfect.  But with twenty years of hindsight, those imperfections were what made it unique.  Sometimes you need a Nikki and Paulo to make you appreciate a John Locke.  Sometimes, you have to bear through a “Stranger in a Strange Land” in order to appreciate a stone-cold masterpiece like “Through the Looking Glass”.  LOST was a goofy, brave, ambitious series that didn’t always get everything right.  But it was still fun, even when it didn’t, which is less often than remembered.

I’m really excited to go through every season with you all (and I should mention, this is NOT for first time watchers.  Spoilers abound!).  And just like on the island, surprises could occur in this space at any moment.  Stay vigilant!

For now, celebrate LOST’s 20th birthday by rewatching the pilot that started it all.  Then, watch the rest of the season as soon as you can.  The Season One article is going up this Wednesday!

Steve Drops a Bomb in 1941: SPIELBERG SUMMER Concludes!

Taking Steven Spielberg’s 70s career in its totality, it’s stunning how fully formed he was as a filmmaker essentially right out the gate.

Certainly, there were lessons to be learned about working around both nthe limitations of technology and the increasing scope (and expectations) that comes with success.  But, all in all, it didn’t take Spielberg very long to find his voice once he made the jump from television to feature films.  All of the hallmarks of what makes a “Steven Spielberg movie” are present basically from DUEL on: fractured families, Everyman protagonists, worlds in constant states of wonder, faceless enemies.  From the second his number got called, it seems Spielberg knew what he wanted to say with his chosen art form and found ways to filter himself through all kinds of different genres.  Car chase, aquatic thrillers, UFO epics…all of them quite different, yet in their own ways unified.

I mention this because this week, the final week of the First Annual Spielberg Summer, we’re diving into 1941, maybe the singular Spielberg movie that gets referred to as “the bad one”.  To be clear, Steven has had his fair share of underwhelming features, but most of them have gone under the radar and subsequently provided the dignity of being forgotten.  Not 1941;  45 years later, it’s still synonymous with “Spielberg failure”, undoubtedly aggregated by its lampooning in subsequent wiseguy media throughout the 80’s and 90’s (such as the end of this Animaniacs clip).  All of this ensured a generation of kids like me would grow up just assuming 1941 was a piece of shit.

Anyway, I know it sounds like I’m gearing up to provide a full-throated defense of Spielberg’s first (and maybe his only?) out-and-out comedy.  I’m not.  I watched it.  It sucks.  But I will say, what kept me engaged with it, more than anything actually happening in a surprisingly heavy-on-its-feet comedy from creative collaborators I otherwise admire, was identifying little thematic elements here and there that still indicated a real filmmaker, one that had changed the industry just a couple of years prior.  Although 1941 is an unfixable mess, Spielberg still finds avenues of expression that make it a signature work.

In short, 1941 is a clear failure.  Yet, it’s a failure made by an interesting guy with thoughts in his head.  And in that sense, is it a success?  No.  But maybe.

Let’s talk about it.

1941

Directed by: Steven Spielberg

Starring: Too many to list.  Major highlights include: Treat Williams, Toshiro Mifune, Christopher Lee, Tim Matheson, Nancy Allen, Ned Beatty, John Belushi, Dan Aykroyd

Written by: Robert Zemeckis, Bob Gale

Released: December 14, 1979

Length: 118 mins

The main action of 1941 takes place six days after the infamous Pearl Harbor bombing.  The Japanese army has settled on its next area of American soil to attack: Hollywood, CA. What follows is the city’s comical attempts over the course of the day to fortify themselves and prepare to fend off their newfound enemy.  Although actually watching the movie makes it difficult to imagine any of the performed beats really happening between any two people that existed in reality, the Zemeckis-Gale screenplay does in fact incorporate some actual historical events, including the Zoot Suit Riots, the Great Los Angeles Air Raid of 1942, and the bombing of the Ellwood oil refinery.  Documented evidence of an army secretary being sexually aroused by airplanes sadly remains missing (more on that later).

It would appear that 1941 aspires to be a mix between the 60’s all-star comedy (think along the lines of IT’S A MAD, MAD, MAD, MAD WORLD) and the 60’s all-star war picture (something like THE GUNS OF NAVARONE, perhaps, or maybe THE GREAT ESCAPE).  The movie is stuffed to the gills with recognizable faces; besides Dan Aykroyd and John Belushi (who, from the way 1941 is presented, you’d be forgiven for thinking were the main characters), there’s Treat Williams, John Candy, Toshiro Mifune, Christopher Lee, Slim Pickens, Lorraine Gary, Murray Hamilton, Michael McKean, David Lander, Robert Stack, Ned Beatty, the famous nerd guy from GREASE who would go on to voice Mandark in DEXTER'S LABORATORY….these are just the ones I was able to think of off the top of my head  It’s an enormous cast, and most barely get a chance to shine, much less to get a signature moment.

The problem on the comedy side is that, despite the appreciable amount of on screen ability, the script just isn’t that funny.  Jokes come at you constantly, which is probably the correct approach to appropriately build that “epic scale” it so desperately wants to evoke, but hardly anything actually generates a laugh.  You definitely want to, you wait for the opportunity to do it, so much do you respect the various talents involved both on and off the camera.  But you just don’t.  There are isolated ideas that make me chuckle in retrospect (Stack’s hardass Major General character being so moved by DUMBO primary among them), but for the most part, 1941 just sits there covered in flop sweat.

Part of the issue is that the core comedic conceits of many of the characters, when one exists at all, are just kind of bizarre, and borderline unpleasant.  Nancy Allen’s Donna Stratton is the aforementioned airplane fetishist, which…look, we don’t kink shame in this space, so this idea in and of itself isn’t necessarily unfunny.  But it’s not clear what the movie thinks would be funny about this, outside of “it’s a WWII picture, so there logically would be a lot of airplanes around”.  Slim Pickens, seemingly cast in this as a direct reference to his famous role in DR. STRANGELOVE, spends most of his screen time pretending to shit in a toilet.  Treat Williams’ whole thing is that he doesn’t like eggs.  Laughing yet?

What the film is missing is somebody normal in the middle of it all.  Every single character, to a tee, is not somebody one would recognize out in the world; thus, there’s nobody to hang onto and navigate the 1941 universe with.  Perhaps the closest is Ned Beatty’s Ward Douglas, whose primary motivation to take up the fight against the enemy is to ensure everyone has a Merry Christmas.  But even there, he’s too heightened, in the same way everybody else in this version of Hollywood is heightened.  There’s some apt commentary at play there, for sure, but it results in a loss of function.

Worst of all, it’s hard not to feel like the then-up-and-coming comedians are completely wasted, only cast so that the movie can attach itself to rising stars.  John Belushi, having already made a name for himself on the early years of Saturday Night Live, been directed by Jack Nicholson, and broke out in film with NATIONAL LAMPOON’S ANIMAL HOUSE, is kind of an “you had to be there” comedic figure whose talents were frankly better presented in sketch comedy.  He became famous for boisterous, loud characters like the Samurai or the guy who works himself up into a heart attack on Weekend Update.  However, I found him most engaging in small sketches that required him to chill out and let his knack for comedic expression come through: this sweet and precise laundromat scene he did with Gilda Radner is one of the great unsung Golden Era SNL skits.  So it’s a shame that his big ask in 1941 is just to be a broad “wild person”.  Aykroyd, his SNL costar and always my favorite of the two, is appropriately cast as a fast talking military man, but with nary a memorable line to use his silver tongue on.  John Candy, one of the funniest people on the planet in 1979, makes so little of an impression, you somehow forget he’s there at all.  Waste after waste after waste.

*I’m sorry to report that his work as Bluto in ANIMAL HOUSE has aged about as well as Belushi himself.

On the non-comedic side, it’s a tragedy that Toshiro Mifune and Christopher Lee are featured so prominently and are also given nothing interesting or memorable to do.  It especially hurts in Mifune’s case, considering he’s easily the biggest star (and the best actor) Spielberg had gotten to direct up to this point, AND considering Mifune didn’t make American productions all that often.  Lee camps it up as much as he can as the evil German General Von Kleinschmidt, but again, there’s not a lot of room for him to shine through the chaos.

What surprised me more than anything else was 1941’s inability to really build anything comedically.  Spielberg is normally a master at the “set up, escalation, payoff” style of action filmmaking; his next film, RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK, would be almost exclusively made up of this kind of thing (think about that famous truck chase sequence), and it’s the reason that the initial Indiana Jones adventure may be the director’s finest work of them all.  I’d go one step further and say that his ability to tell stories through motion may be Spielberg’s ultimate legacy when all is said and done.  

But, for whatever reason, when applied to long-form comedy, you can feel Spielberg struggle.  It’s not that he CAN’T be funny; his most popular films have little moments of comedy throughout (who can forget the “objects in the mirror are closer than they appear” shot in JURASSIC PARK?).  But the “epic comedy” reveals itself to be a poor fit.  Not all of that is Spelberg’s fault, per se; after all, he didn’t write the jokes.  But Spielberg doesn’t ever seem to land on a tone that fits, and eventually just settles for “big”.  It’s no coincidence that the end credits sequence, one of those fun ones where the actor’s name comes attached with a clip from the movie, is almost exclusively shots of people screaming.  With nothing else to work with, Spielberg just leans into the excess and hopes for the best.

(I should mention here that, again, Robert Zemeckis and Bob Gale wrote this fucking thing!  The BACK TO THE FUTURE trilogy alone stands as proof enough that they’re not exactly hacks or anything, so I was rattled at how desperate the comedy felt in this.)

The closest Spielberg gets to achieving his signature climbing scope is in a major dance sequence at a nightclub that morphs into an all out brawl, growing from a fight between Bobby di Ciccio and Treat Williams over Dianne Kay. It’s easily the most “Spielbergian” scene of the movie, as the camera confidently swoops around the dance hall, people’s swinging movements (whether fighting or dancing) timed just so to the band music.  Best of all, the amount of people fighting seems to grow almost imperceptibly over the course of the sequence until it’s practically everybody throwing blows at each other.  It’s worth noting that, although this is the kind of thing he’d eventually make his bread and butter, there really wasn’t anything like this in Spielberg’s previous films (DUEL, THE SUGARLAND EXPRESS, JAWS, CLOSE ENCOUNTERS).  Even in a flop outing, Spielberg shows an ability to grow and develop as an artist.

With that said, I did genuinely get a kick out of seeing darker themes within 1941 leak through, the sort of things Spielberg would eventually begin tackling head on instead of highlighting within the margins.  A minor character that stood out to me was Joe Flaherty’s nightclub host Sal Stewart, who offhandedly remarks in a moment of downtime that his real name is Raoul Lipschitz.  Even in the context of a broad, screamy farce, Spielberg can’t help but point out the very real darkness for many in the advent of a second World War, where de-emphasized Jewishness is a survival tactic.  And, of course, 1941 marks the first appearance of a common villain in the Spielberg-verse: the Nazis.  The threat of fascism in Spielberg’s filmography encroaches further and further as we work through the 80s and into the 90s.  But, for now, they remain the same level of conniving, borderline incompetent cannon fodder that they’ll eventually be in the INDIANA JONES films, which is frankly more respect than they’ve ever deserved.

In the grand scope of Spielberg’s career, 1941 stands out as the first prominent creative failure in his canon.  However, it’s important to note a couple of final things.  First, it wasn’t really a bomb at the time; it just wasn’t the free-money-generating enterprise that JAWS and CLOSE ENCOUNTERS were.  1941 made $94 million compared to the $35 million it took to make it, which is solidly in the green.  I suspect the bigger concern to the Powers That Be is that the increase in budget didn’t lead to higher profit.  But audiences didn’t appear to necessarily hate it at the time!  As well, a quick scan of the YouTube comments underneath the clips that Universal has uploaded to YouTube would indicate that 1941 has its fans and admirers to this day.  Some claim that the director’s cut, which runs just under two and a half hours, is superior.  I’ll have to take their word for it at this point in time.

So, 1941.  Not a masterpiece, unfortunately, and in some ways, a deflating way to end the first Spielberg Summer in this space, especially knowing what’s to come next year.  Still, without these disappointments, some valuable lessons may never be learned.  Spielberg himself admitted that, where the success of JAWS and CLOSE ENCOUNTERS taught him to hold on to as much control as possible over every aspect of a film, the failure of 1941 taught him when to delegate to second-unit directors, as he declined to do with the miniatures this time around.  It’s not the movie Spielberg hates the most (by all accounts, that would be 1991’s HOOK).  He’s not even particularly embarrassed by it.  He just wishes it was funnier.

That makes two of us. 

CLOSE ENCOUNTERS and the Cost of Passion: SPIELBERG SUMMER Continues!

Welcome to Week Four of our first Annual Summer of Spielberg!  This summer, we’re working our way through the 70’s canon of Steven Spielberg and we’ve reached yet another notable film in his then-young career that warrants much discussion.

It’s an early Spielberg epic exploring humanity’s response to seeing colored lights in the sky, where people and animals begin disappearing from a sleepy town in Southwestern America, and true UFO believers become obsessed with proving their creeds to their families and loved ones.  It all ends, as you remember, with first contact officially being made, and the true intent of our alien visitors being revealed.

I speak, of course, of 1964’s FIRELIGHT.

It was technically Spielberg’s “first film”, a distinction that could just as easily be made about 1971’s DUEL and 1973’s THE SUGARLAND EXPRESS.  He famously made it at the age of 17 on a budget of $500, and even more famously turned in his very first profit after screening the movie for one night in Phoenix, AZ and making $501 at the box office (Spielberg figured in an interview with James Lipton in INSIDE THE ACTORS’ STUDIO that they got 500 people in the theater, charged one dollar a head, and someone must have ended up paying two, hence the profit).

The vast majority of FIRELIGHT is unfortunately unavailable to the public; something like three minutes of its semi-unfathomable 135-minute run time remains.  On the other hand, considering the cast was mostly theatre students from the local high school, as well as Steven’s sister Nancy, one has to imagine three minutes is more than enough to pull whatever you need out of what is ultimately a curiosity, the Steven Spielberg movie before there were Steven Spielberg movies.

Everyone seemingly moved on after FIRELIGHT’s one-night-only release date of March 24, 1964.  But Spielberg clearly never shook the idea of aliens visiting our world, a story borne from a lifelong obsession with unidentified flying objects and watching a meteor shower with his father.  The reason we know he never shook it is because FIRELIGHT more or less got remade as an actual Hollywood-backed film, CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND.  Only this time, there was way more pressure on Spielberg, who in the thirteen years since FIRELIGHT had made a genuine paradigm-shifting blockbuster in JAWS and was now being looked at to deliver once again.

And…he did!  Spielberg managed to match the lofty expectations generated from his water-bound blockbuster and made a film that is much bigger in scope that JAWS ever was.  It’s also much more melancholy in ways I had forgotten about.  Most importantly, it’s a movie that reflects more of its creator’s obsessions and state of mind than maybe was even intended at the time.

Let’s do it!  It’s CLOSE ENCOUNTERS time.

CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND (1977)

Directed by: Steven Spielberg

Written by: Steven Spielberg

Starring: Richard Dreyfuss, Teri Garr, Melinda Dillon, Francois Truffaut

Released: November 16, 1977

Length: 135 minutes (theatrical version), 132 minutes (special edition), 137 minutes (director’s cut)

As one might imagine in a movie entitled CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND, Spielberg’s fourth feature-length film, like many classic sci-fi stories before it, asks what might happen in a world where extraterrestrial beings finally reveal themselves to Earth.  Its story consists of several threads that eventually weave together like a tapestry.  There’s the tale of Roy Neary (Dreyfuss), who almost literally crosses paths with a UFO and becomes compelled to find it again.  There’s Jillian Guiler (Dillon), whose little boy Barry is abducted by mysterious lights in the sky.  There’s Claude Lacombe (Truffaut, the seminal French New Wave director making an extremely rare appearance in an English-speaking film), a representative of the French government who finds himself collaborating with the U.S. government on something incredible: establishing first contact.  All parties will eventually find themselves in Wyoming, hoping to communicate with the aliens utilizing an established five tone sequence (you know the one, even if you think you don’t know it).

The most notable thing about taking CLOSE ENCOUNTERS sequentially is that, even though it’s not even close to being the first Spielberg movie, it may be the very first Genuine Spielberg Movie, one you’d be able to spot from a mile away.  It has all the hallmarks one expects from his classics: we’ve got a fractured family (the Nearys), a lost child* (Barry), the wonders of space and the great beyond, benevolent alien beings, shadowy faceless government enemies and vehicles, and, most important of all, the Everyman selected by his circumstances to become the hero of an incredible story.

*Although, something I haven’t yet noted: essentially every one of Spielberg’s films prior to this have also included a missing child in some way.  It’s more literal in THE SUGARLAND EXPRESS (the Poplins are trying to regain custody of baby Langston) and JAWS (the death of Alex Kintner), while in DUEL, the loss is more implied (David Mann’s family life is on the rocks).  Steve’s been doing it from the beginning!

It’s all the more impressive that Spielberg was able to establish such a reliable template for himself when you consider how turbulent the movie’s creation really was.  JAWS has taken up all the oxygen when it comes to “troubled 70’s Spielberg productions”, but CLOSE ENCOUNTERS did not itself have much of a smooth birth.  Its initial conception goes back to 1973 as a film entitled WATCH THE SKIES, with Paul Schrader working on a first draft of the script.  JAWS pushed everything back a year or so, and a major setback occurred when it turned out Spielberg fucking hated Schrader’s draft, eventually referring to it as “one of the most embarrassing screenplays ever professionally turned in to a major film studio or director”.  Seems a bit harsh to me, but suffice to say, Spielberg and Schrader split over creative differences soon after.  After several rounds of rewrites from folks like John Hill, David Giler and Matthew Robbins, Spielberg began taking a crack at the script himself, using the famous Disney song “When You Wish Upon a Star” as influence.

A couple of years later, once JAWS was in the rearview mirror and Spielberg’s alien project was finally ready to go, its producing studio, Columbia, ran head-on into financial issues.  This already huge problem was exacerbated by the fact that CLOSE ENCOUNTERS’ budget grew exponentially.  Spielberg had quoted the studio about $3 million in 1973; by the time its filming was completed, it sat at about $20 million.  Lightning strikes and hurricanes destroyed much of the Alabama soundstages.  A producer, Julia Phillips, eventually got fired for doing too much cocaine.  Spielberg himself said the shooting experience for CLOSE ENCOUNTERS was “twice as bad” as JAWS, just to set the bar.

One of the seemingly biggest factors in the shoot being prolonged is the fact that Spielberg’s own vision for the film kept increasing in scope throughout the life of the movie, all the way up to and including its release.  The production schedule kept lengthening as new ideas kept generating in Spielberg’s head, and he had issues defining the movie’s “wow-ness” in various cuts.  Cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond eventually had to drop out of reshoots due to other commitments (although a team including Douglas Slocombe took over, so perhaps everything worked out).

This all leads to one of the most famous aspects of CLOSE ENCOUNTERS: the existence of several cuts.  The theatrical version was released in November of 1977, but Spielberg never seemed truly satisfied with the way it turned out.  Despite having final cut privileges and a request to the studio for six more months, Spielberg agreed to have the movie released as it stood, only later leveraging its success to make a director’s cut in 1980.  Famously, that director’s cut actually wound up being five minutes shorter, as he wound up going back and removing or shortening many other scenes (most notably the scene where Roy throws a bunch of bricks and dirt into the family kitchen), exercising an artist’s right to fuck with a completed work that his friend and colleague George Lucas would take to its absolute breaking point.

The Director’s Cut also features the addition of several minutes of footage, including an infamous, studio-mandated look at the insider of the mothership, a move that Spielberg regretted so much that it generated a third cut of the film, a VHS “Collector’s Edition” that included all the new and old footage, minus the mothership interior.  There actually appears to be a fourth recut version floating out there, a syndicated television edition that was available on a 1990 Criterion Laserdisc.  

(For what it’s worth, the version I watched was the theatrical version.  It may be the only version I’ve seen.  Maybe somewhere down the line, I’ll check out the other two versions just to say that I did.  The Director’s Cut has its ardent supporters, up to and including the late Roger Ebert who called it better than the original.  I just…man, Spielberg’s right, he shouldn’t have given in on the mothership interior.  It seems so anti-imagination and, thus, anti-Spielberg.  One of these days.)

The reason I bring all this extensive recut history up is that, whether he intended it or not, nothing could be more illustrative of CLOSE ENCOUNTERS’ main themes of single-minded obsession in the face of something extraordinary than this driving need for Spielberg to get the movie right.  One can easily imagine him sifting through the footage of CLOSE ENCOUNTERS at various points of his life and looking much like Richard Dreyfuss hovering over those mashed potatoes.  Hell, one can just as easily imagine him seeing that fateful meteor shower as a kid and getting that obsessive idea implanted in his head: “I have to tell this story.”  He tries it once with FIRELIGHT, he tries it several times over several decades with CLOSE ENCOUNTERS, he comes back to it over and over in his filmography (picking it up next with E.T.).  He keeps plugging away at that five-toned tune, hoping to finally make contact.   

In that sense, you get more of Steven Spielberg’s psyche in Roy Neary than maybe he even meant to, which may be why subsequent editions tried to sand the edges off that particular storyline, even if said edges are just too jagged to ever be made smooth.

Oh yeah, that ending.  I guess we should talk about that ending.

What really struck me about CLOSE ENCOUNTERS on this rewatch is just…how kind of sad the ending is, even a little bleak.  Oh, sure, on the whole, the final half-hour or so is Spielberg firing on all cylinders.  Humans and aliens slowly and successfully communicating via the usage of simple musical tones is pure Spielbergian fantasy (I mean this as a compliment).  It’s thrilling and is perfectly paced, perfectly scored.  It’s maybe the most parodied and memorable part of the whole film.  Tonally and textually, the ending of CLOSE ENCOUNTERS is quite the crowd-pleaser.

No, I mean the way Roy Neary’s story actually concludes.  Neary’s journey is, of course, the backbone of the entire picture.  To recap, he is a lonely electrician who is merely in the right place at the right time to get an up-close encounter with a UFO.  From then on, he becomes singular-minded and obsessive about an undefined shape.  He sees it in his pillows, he draws it on his work notes, he famously builds it at the dinner table with his mashed potatoes.

The shape is revealed to be Devils Tower in Wyoming, the agreed landing spot of our alien visitors, the area where first contact will officially be made.  Roy eventually begins to make his way over to Wyoming in order to fulfill his new destiny, but not before successfully scaring off his wife and kids.  Prior to his departure to Wyoming, a morning of throwing bricks and dirt into the kitchen is enough to cause his wife Ronnie (Garr, in peak heartbreaking form) to take the kids to her sister’s for a while.

As I had correctly recalled, the movie ends with Roy being chosen by our alien visitors to come back with them into space, where he’ll be able to embark on the most incredible adventure any human could ever imagine being on.  What I had forgotten, however, is that the scene of Ronnie leaving for her sister’s is the last time we see her or the kids in the movie ever again.  There’s no resolution beat at the end where Ronnie realizes her husband was correct, no cut to them catching up with this incredible event over the broadcast news, no nothing.  Frankly, positive resolution between Roy and Ronnie may not even be a realistic thing to hope for; I turned to my wife at the end of CLOSE ENCOUNTERS and asked her, “if I had all of a sudden starting acting like a lunatic, obsessed with a location and convinced aliens are speaking to me until you literally left the house, would it matter at all if I was later proven to be 100% correct in my beliefs?”, her immediate answer was “no”.  It’s reasonable to believe Roy never sees Ronnie or his children ever again.

But then, such is the Great Theme of CLOSE ENCOUNTERS, that of single-minded devotion and obsession, bordering on religiosity.  No matter what happened in their lives previous to the movie’s start, all of our principals have undergone a soul-rattling, magnificent experience.  From the second the spaceship first arrives, the lives of Roy, Claude, and Jillian (and many nameless others) have diverged from their relatively normal paths.  They are now responding to a higher calling, not unlike the many in history who have turned their backs on their loved ones and the lives they had built in order to better devote themselves to God, shaving their heads and vowing poverty and charity.

So, yeah, although it’s a wonderful and uplifting ending in terms of tone and texture, it’s difficult to call the conclusion of CLOSE ENCOUNTERS overall “happy”.  The lives of those left behind have quite literally been ruined, or at least altered irrevocably.  Subsequent editions have tried to trade out some of Roy’s crazier moments for scenes that play with more sympathy (like him breaking down inside his shower, for instance).  But, it’s hard to edit or tinker around the fact that Roy ditches his life and loved ones to pursue a higher calling.  It’s magical and devastating in equal measure.

In that sense, CLOSE ENCOUNTERS seems to be a story of emerging genius (and how closely it can be linked to genuine insanity), and I don’t think it’s an accident that this is the version of the UFO story that emerged once Spielberg took over the script himself.  It’s also not surprising to me that Spielberg seemed to struggle with articulating it all, going back and tinkering with it two or three times.  It’s sort of a movie about Spielberg at this time in his life, having changed Hollywood irrevocably and forging his path as an industry great while barely entering his thirties.  Not that Spielberg broke the hearts of all of his loved ones in order to make fucking JAWS or anything, but there’s the feeling of truth to how Roy is drawn by a higher power to this jaw-dropping turn in his life.

That’s the power of lights in the sky.  And meteor showers.  And getting all your friends together to make a too-long movie that earns your first dollar.  It just may trigger something in your brain and soul that kicks off a lifelong passion. 

And the world may change along the way.

JAWS REDUX: SPIELBERG SUMMER Continues!

Hello, friends!  Our little stroll through the Steven Spielberg films of the 1970’s resumes this week as The First Annual Spielberg Summer continues.

Today, we’ve reached the first truly bigger-than-life, overwhelming movie in his oeuvre.  JAWS is on the short list of most important movies ever made, even if you’re only measuring individual impact on the trajectory of Hollywood and filmmaking (and to be clear, JAWS stands on its own fins even when stripped of that context).  If you’re part of a certain generation of film fan, it’s almost certainly one of the movies that got you into movies in the first place.  

It’s possible some of you have been waiting for this article since Spielberg Summer began.  Perhaps you’ve been looking forward to a brief history of the famously-snakebitten production, and how Spielberg managed to turn chicken shit into chicken salad by allowing significant mechanical failures (say it with with me now, “they couldn’t get the shark to work”) to actually enhance the film’s drama, conflicts and terror, cloaking the titular beast in the shadows of the audience’s mind and imagination.  You likely are anxious to celebrate JAWS’ second-to-none cast, especially the main trio of Roy Scheider, Richard Dreyfuss and Robert Shaw.  It’d be wise to talk about how fully developed Sgt. Brody really is, and how his fear of the water and his drive for integrity are constantly thrown into conflict by a never-ending set of exterior circumstances.  Hell, a good discussion could be had about how beautifully the largely land based first half informs the waterlogged second half, by establishing stakes and psychologies before sending everybody out to sea.

It’d be a good article to write this week.

Except, well….I’ve written it already.

Yeah, I’ve previously talked about JAWS, and it wasn’t even that long ago.  About two years ago, in this very (differently branded) space, I did a summer series on the entire JAWS franchise, including the famous 3D sequel, as well as the not-so-famous Italian knock-off sequel CRUEL JAWS.  I can’t speak to the actual quality of that article, although I was two years less good than I am now, so you can run your own math and make that determination for yourself.  My point is, what was created in 2022 is more or less the same article I would have written now.

It’s a mildly interesting conundrum I find myself in; this is the first time I’m writing a second article about a movie.  Obviously, I knew this was going to be a problem going into this first round of Spielberg retrospectives, and I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about what fresh angle to take.  I tried to resist the idea of just rerunning that one under the Crittical Analysis brand, as that comes with an implied level of laziness there that I wasn’t ready to reconcile within myself.  But, I’ll be honest, I wasn’t coming up with a better alternative; after all, JAWS is a difficult movie to find new unique angles about fifty years later.  

But, then…the Monday before the Fourth of July, I had the opportunity to see JAWS in an actual, genuine movie theater for maybe the first time ever.  

And it was like seeing it for the first time.  

“Oh, new angle.”

This week’s article might be a little briefer than others in this series, and certainly a little different.  But my last experience with JAWS was a genuinely different one, and I would remiss if I didn’t take the opportunity to document it.

So here it is.  JAWS!

JAWS (1975)

Directed by: Steven Spielberg

Written by: Peter Benchley, Carl Gottlieb

Starring: Roy Scheider, Richard Dreyfuss, Robert Shaw, Lorraine Gary, Murray Hamilton

Released: June 20, 1975

Length: 124 minutes

The ability to watch a classic film on the big screen is one of life’s amazing little treats.  It can often feel like the difference between seeing the Mona Lisa actually hanging in the Louvre and looking at a photo of it on your phone.  You get the idea either way, but actually being in Paris, seeing it at its actual intended size, surrounded by other human beings, all there to do the same thing…it’s just a whole different experience.

Unfortunately, the ability to actually see classic films in a theater often depends on where you live.  If you live in a major city, or at least within the proximity of one, you’re usually in good shape.  You will likely have the ability to throw a dart randomly at the newspaper movie listings* and land on the opportunity to see one of the greatest movies ever made, usually well within driving distance.

*I know that there are no such things as “movie listings” or “newspapers'' anymore, but I don’t think the dart metaphor works as well with a laptop or phone screen.  Don’t want anybody cracking their screens, ya know?  You’ll just have to indulge me on this one.

If you live in a mid-to-small market like I do, however, you’re usually at the mercy of the small handful of revival houses that you have.  I can only speak for myself, but in Sacramento, CA, there are three places in town and one of them (The Dreamland Cinema) is teeny-tiny.  That leaves The Tower and The Crest for your revivals and that is literally it.  Oh, sure, we have lots of regular movie theaters, but most of the chain mega-plexes in town have stopped doing Flashback Features long ago.  So it’s just these three locations holding down the fort right now.  At least two of them feel under constant threat of closure.

Luckily, I live down the street from one of them (the Tower), and they seem to be relatively awake at the wheel.  Not only is there a consistent stream of repertory screenings throughout the year, they appear to be paying attention to the time of year in which they’re screening.  It’s how people in town can see a whole festival of Hitchcock movies in October.  It’s how my wife and I got to see WHEN HARRY MET SALLY… on New Year’s Eve last year.  It’s also what allowed us to see JAWS on a big screen the week of July 4th.

We had seen other classic screenings at this theater before, and we had never been in danger of being the only people there or anything, but it truly shocked me at just how many people showed up to JAWS that night.  It probably shouldn’t have been a surprise; after all, we’re talking about one of the most famous and popular movies ever made even to this day, the movie that more or less invented the “summer blockbuster”*.  But, really, I had never seen the Tower lobby that full before that night.  Again, this was a Monday night.  That was the first sign that we were potentially in for a special night.

*Yes, this means you can technically draw a straight line between JAWS and DEADPOOL & WOLVERINE.  Whether this is a mark for it or a knock against it, I’ll leave for you to determine.

The second sign that magic was in the air came relatively early on, when the entire town of Amity gathers in the police station following the gruesome death of little Alex Kintner, crowding around Sheriff Brody (Scheider) and Mayor Larry Vaughn (Hamilton), demanding an explanation and plan of action from their leadership.  As Brody struggles to wrangle the masses, the nasty sound of fingernails scratching across a chalkboard cuts through the din.  Everyone turns around to see the grizzled shark hunter Quint (Shaw).

The scene becomes dead silent.

In the movie theater, however, the room filled with the sound of something like four beers all cracking open at once.

The crowd was locked in.  Summer had begun.

It really is something to watch a classic crowd-pleaser work its magic and…well…please the crowd!  What follows is a list of just ten of the endless amounts of JAWS moments that absolutely crushed that night:

• Brody telling a fellow beach-goer “That’s some bad hat, Harry.”

• The guy who exclaims “A whaaaaat?”

• The corpse popping out of the busted hull of that sunken ship (no, seriously, this one killed.  Screams in the audience and everything).

• Brody filling his glass near the brim with red wine.

• “Michael, did you hear your father?  Get out of the water now!”

• Quint crushing his beer can with one hand, followed by Hooper weakly crushing his styrofoam cup.

• Hooper screaming “aye aye” to Quint in that intensely sarcastic pirate voice.

• The USS Indianapolis speech (the room was dead silent, no beer cracking this time).

• “Smile, you son of a…” BANG

• Pretty much every Quint rendition of “Farewell and Adieu”.

It all reminded me of two things: one, I reflected back on the Big Important Issue in the far-away year of 2019, where Martin Scorsese declared Marvel movies as not cinema, but theme parks.  As you may remember, this triggered responses from James Gunn and Joss Whedon (back when Whedon felt compelled to make a statement about anything at all).  It also drew ire from superhero fans all across the Internet; it still appears to be a sore spot for some to this day.

And, look, I’m not here to re-litigate a wound.  Although I do find the reaction overblown relative to what is ultimately just a qualified opinion (as far as I know, Scorsese didn’t say “and you’re all dipshits for watching them”, he just said they weren’t cinema to him), I get that it can be annoying to devote your free time to something that gets dismissed so broadly by somebody with authority.  That said, speaking as someone who has found enjoyment in both the MCU and Scorsese films, the reason I never got worked up about Marty’s comments is because “theme park attraction” is neither an inaccurate description of what modern superhero movies ultimately are, nor does it need to be a pejorative term in and of itself, so long as the movie in question is a well-built and thoughtfully constructed roller coaster.

What are theme park rides, after all?  They are mechanisms for us to take a break from our lives, even if just for a little bit, in order to put ourselves in some artificial danger and generate some thrills and emotions together, even if we’re all walking in as strangers.  It’s something for us to enjoy together as people.  The best ones work even if you’ve ridden it over and over.  At their finest, movies are roller-coasters.  

JAWS is a pitch-perfect example of that.  On July 1st, 2024, a bunch of people filed into the main room of the Tower Theatre with just one commonality (“I wanna watch JAWS tonight!”), paying to see a movie we all probably already owned at home and had almost certainly all seen multiple times since childhood.  And, you know what?  The roller coaster was just as fucking good today as it was when we all first rode it decades ago.  In truth, it hits all the more when you have a forged, temporary community to ride it with.  

(Of course, JAWS isn’t just mindless thrills and chills, it’s also well-built in terms of setting up its characters and stakes, which makes us as an audience care, which makes the moments of action and terror hit all the more because we’re bought in, but now I’m getting into first article territory here.  I just bring it up because this is the element that some of the MCU movies lack, especially some of the latter-day ones, after characters got firmly established and the ability to coast on good vibes became available.  Again, just in my opinion as a fan.  Anyway.) 

That brings me to my second thing: it’s more fun to see a movie in theaters.  It just is.  And there so many things currently working against the in-person experience right now.  For one, watching movies at home has never become more technically convenient; even the ability to afford one or two streaming services gives you access to a never-ending array of movies of all types, age, and quality.  For two, movie tickets have obviously skyrocketed in price, just in time for inflation to grow out of control and wages to seemingly stagnate across the board, making a trip to the movies an easy luxury to cut in tough times (especially if you have a child or two).  

For three (and, I think, final…I know I’m currently in a numbered list within a numbered list, I promise I’m going somewhere), the in-person experience just may not be available depending on where you live.  Going back to the beginning of this article that is technically about JAWS, especially when it comes to classic cinema, you may just be completely fucked if there’s no house in town that screens them.  This can be especially brutal considering, if you run in any sort of cinephile circles for more than ten minutes, you’ll run into the common piece of wisdom that “if you didn’t see [insert movie], you didn’t see it right”.  It’s a frustrating thing to come across when your options are to watch a movie on the Criterion Channel at home, or not see it at all.

My point being…if you have the opportunity to see a beloved movie from any decade, and it even slightly works for you in terms of time, distance, and finance…grab it with all ten fingers and just do it.  You’ll be very unlikely to regret it.  JAWS on July 1st, 2024 was a good illustration as to why.  Here is a movie playing out in front of me, one that I had seen probably a dozen times in my thirty-six years on Earth, and it was like a brand new adventure.  People were screaming.  Hooting and hollering.  Cracking open their beers when something cool as fuck was happening.

There was nothing like it.  It was clear as day at that moment why JAWS and Steven Spielberg helped change Hollywood filmmaking forever.  

I can’t wait to do it again.  After all, the damn thing is turning fifty next year.

But until then….farewell and adieu.

On the Road with THE SUGARLAND EXPRESS: Spielberg Summer Continues!

Hello! All summer, I’ll be working my way through the five films Steven Spielberg directed in the 1970’s. Two weeks ago, we kicked things off with DUEL, and things continue forth this week! If you like what you read, stick around! More to come…..

As mentioned in the first installment of Spielberg Summer two weeks ago, one of the aspects of working through Steven Spielberg’s filmography I was most looking forward to was knocking out the not-insubstantial amount of his movies I hadn’t managed to watch already, especially the blank spaces from the twentieth century.  Yeah, obviously, I’m eager to revisit stone-cold classics like JAWS and CLOSE ENCOUNTERS, but each decade of his career contains at least one movie I just straight up haven’t seen, like little Christmas presents waiting to be opened.

Well, here we are, Week 2 of the First Annual Spielberg Summer and I’ve already reached my first first-time watch!

Up until about two weeks ago, I knew THE SUGARLAND EXPRESS primarily as that movie one sees in the form of clips near the beginning of any given Spielberg documentary or retrospective.  Operating under fifty years worth of hindsight, SUGARLAND EXPRESS feels like a movie hidden between Spielberg’s television career culmination in DUEL and his stratospheric jump into popular culture in JAWS.  It’s a film not talked about much in 2024 outside of the context of “Steven Spielberg’s first theatrical film”.  All I really knew about its story (again, just off of very brief clips) was that Goldie Hawn was in a car and she’s looking for…a baby, I think?  I presumed it was her baby?  I never ventured forth to find out.  There were just always bigger Spielberg movies to jump into or revisit, and the opportunity to knock this one off the watchlist never arrived.

It’s my pleasure, then, to report that it was a delight watching THE SUGARLAND EXPRESS with a clear heart and fresh mind (aka, what if I didn’t know this was directed by the man soon to become the most famous and powerful director of my lifetime?).  It turns out I was right about Goldie Hawn being in a car, and she’s absolutely looking for her baby, so I was off to a good start immediately.  What I hadn’t gleaned was that THE SUGARLAND EXPRESS is a scrappy, sad, spookily prescient movie about America’s unique intersecting relationship with desperation, crime, and media, featuring a trio of lively and shifting performances from Goldie Hawn, William Atherton, and Michael Sacks.  What’s not to like about it?  Seriously, what?

THE SUGARLAND EXPRESS (1974)

Directed by: Steven Spielberg

Written by: Hal Barwood, Matthew Robbins

Starring: Goldie Hawn, William Atherton, Ben Johnson, Michael Sacks

Released: March 31, 1974

Length: 110 minutes

THE SUGARLAND EXPRESS tells the fairly straightforward story of the recently released Lou Jean Poplin (Goldie Hawn) and the still-incarcerated Clovis Poplin (William Atherton).  One fateful day in Texas, Lou Jean visits Clovis at his minimum-security prison with a mission: their young son is being put into foster care in the town of Sugar Land, and she’s determined to get him back.  Following a relatively efficient break-out, almost nothing about this plan works out in any way.  After the elderly couple they’ve convinced to give them a ride get pulled over by Patrolman Maxwell Slide (Michael Sacks), the Poplins are forced to commandeer the patrolman’s vehicle, as well as the patrolman himself.  As the three improvise their way towards Sugar Land, it’s up to Captain Harlin Tanner (Ben Johnson) to figure out how to guide this situation to a non-tragic conclusion, even as the Poplins’ increasing media profile (as well as the fact that - and this cannot be emphasized enough - they have no idea what the fuck they’re doing) and notoriety may prove that an impossible mission.

The first thing that leaps out about THE SUGARLAND EXPRESS after watching DUEL is that…hey, it’s essentially another car chase movie!  The scope has definitely increased exponentially; instead of one lone visible character, we have somewhere around ten speaking roles.  Instead of two vehicles, there are seemingly hundreds of cars getting demolished by the film’s end.  But, at its core, it’s another Spielberg movie exploring characters trapped in their cars trying to get from Point A to Point B in desolate America.  One wonders if those who had caught both movies at the time just viewed Spielberg as “that car chase guy” (as opposed to the smart person I would have been at the time; I likely would have walked out of the theater in 1974 and said something like, “I bet the fella that made that movie is going to do a shark movie that’s going to alter Hollywood forever, just you watch!”).

The second thing that leaps out about THE SUGARLAND EXPRESS is how many other pieces of popular culture are conjured in the mind as its story unfolds.  In particular, the growing media scrum surrounding Lou Jean and Clovis lightly evokes Billy Wilder’s deeply cynical ACE IN THE HOLE (although Spielberg never gets anywhere as bitter or acidic as that particular Kirk Douglas masterpiece).  Of course, one cannot watch a pair of criminals running towards a tragic end without thinking of BONNIE AND CLYDE.  However, when you watch enough moments of people cheering Lou Jean on, imploring the young couple to not give up, of crowds gathering around the car with signs of encouragement…you can’t help but think about O.J. Simpson when watching SUGARLAND EXPRESS in the here and now.

It’s worth mentioning at this point that the tale of Lou Jean and Clovis is based on the real story of Ila Fae Holiday and Robert Dent, although like all factual accounts in film, SUGARLAND EXPRESS understandably plays somewhat fast and loose with the details (Bobby never broke out of prison, for instance).  What does appear to be true, though, is the fact that they led a very slow-moving police chase through Texas, one that eventually caught the eye of local TV crews and bystanders.  For a brief moment, Holiday and Dent held court against the state, and everyone just…watched and rooted them on.  The O.J. story became a circus for a million reasons that are way above the weight of the Holiday/Dent story, but little forgotten sensations like theirs (and THE SUGARLAND EXPRESS) prove that, even if O.J. wasn’t a beloved athlete and pitchman,even if the country hadn’t been in the middle of yet another of its famous “racial reckonings”, even if the whole thing didn’t go down in Los Angeles (the epicenter of front-facing American scandals), people might have been sucked in anyway.   Folks love a good story, and they especially love an underdog  Besides, who can’t relate to a mother trying to reunite with their child?  Screenwriters Hal Barwood and Matthew Robbins understood this even at the time, and their screenplay reflects that deep knowledge.

THE SUGARLAND EXPRESS is one of those movies full of interesting faces embodying interesting characters.  Consider the moment where the gas station guy whose store gets commandeered by the police and is implored to take it up with the captain, leading to him wandering in the background from car to car asking who the captain is.  It’s ultimately throw-away, only there to add to the chaos that surrounds the Poplins from the jump.  But it’s a moment so filled with life and relatability (how the fuck would he know who the captain is, anyway?)  The whole movie is like this; everyone is anchored in Spielberg-world as someone with feelings and perspective; even a character that could have been easily made a villain (the foster mom) ultimately ends up being sympathetic, capable of love, and worthy of protection.

However, THE SUGARLAND EXPRESS lives and dies on the four performances at its center.  That brings me to the third thing that stood out to me about it: why didn’t any of you tell me William Atherton was in, like, every frame of this?  A long time menace in the minds of people my age and ten years younger/older as the dickless EPA agent in GHOSTBUSTERS, it was stunning to see him ten years younger and so human and sympathetic.  What struck me the most about Clovis is his dichotomy; he is alternately just as motivated to reunite with his child as he is terrified about the escalation of possible consequences if they move forward with their highly-improvised plan.

When I reflect on Atherton as Clovis, I think about maybe my favorite scene in the whole movie: Clovis and Lou Jean have holed up in a used car lot and begin watching a Wile E. Coyote cartoon playing at the drive-in theater across the street.  Although they have no sound, Clovis provides all of the wacky sound effects for Lou Jean.  As the cartoon continues, Wile E. makes one of his classic errors* and careens off a cliff.  As the woeful cartoon coyote makes contact with the canyon, Clovis stops making noises and just kind of takes it all in.  He seems to be relating to Wile E.’s plight and fate at that moment; the Poplins seem fated to crash and burn off the side of a cliff themselves.  

*Undoubtedly off the back of trusting his hard earned cash with the ACME Corporation once again, but never mind.

Ben Johnson and Michael Sacks are also quite effective in their respective roles as pseudo father figure and unexpected ally.  But it’s Goldie Hawn that was the biggest revelation at the time of release.  I’m not a Goldie scholar, although I’m aware that her early shtick was that of a dizzy blonde on projects like Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In and the film CACTUS FLOWER, which won her an early Best Supporting Actress Academy Award in 1969.  Her Lou Jean feels somewhat like a riff off that persona; Lou Jean is definitely excitable and highly naive, and one could argue her lack of any plan characterizes her as ditzy.  But there’s a real pain and emotion behind all the outer chaos that makes her quite compelling, and makes the SUGARLAND EXPRESS finale hurt all the more.  I thought a lot about a similar trick Paul Thomas Anderson pulled with Adam Sandler’s famous manboy act in PUNCH DRUNK LOVE.  In both cases, an inner humanity is found through a comedic persona.  To my knowledge, Hawn and Spielberg never worked again, and it’s a shame.  

THE SUGARLAND EXPRESS also begins Spielberg’s ability to collaborate with major Hollywood talent, even at the unfathomable age of 27 (!).  The cinematographer for SUGARLAND EXPRESS was none other than Vilmos Zsigmond, one of the biggest keys to the way the New Hollywood movement looked.  The amount of major directors he shot movies for is staggering: besides future collaborations with Spielberg, he also worked with Brian De Palma, Robert Altman, Peter Fonda, George Miller, Jack Nicholson, Sean Penn, Richard Donner, Woody Allen, Roland Joffe, Martha Coolidge and, of course, Kevin Smith.  With SUGARLAND EXPRESS, you couldn’t ask for a movie that has the texture and feel of a great 70’s American movie more; it’s equal parts dusty, melancholy, and bittersweet.

Zsigmond actually ended up being a key mentor to Spielberg, and was able to filter the young up-and-comer’s unique emotional style through good old-fashioned functionality.  In particular, Zsigmond would refuse to start shooting a particular shot until Spielberg could articulate from whose point of view it was meant to express (i.e. justifying the shot by saying “it looked pretty and interesting” wasn’t going to be acceptable).  To Spielberg’s credit, he accepted the on-the-fly mentorship.  In short, even if THE SUGARLAND EXPRESS is a more minor film in the Spielberg canon, the things he learned throughout its creation would be indispensable in his approaches toward his own future masterpieces.

Then, of course, there’s that score.  Yes, perhaps the most consequential thing about THE SUGARLAND EXPRESS is that it’s the first collaboration between Spielberg and John Williams.  By 1974, Williams was already a well-accomplished film composer in the 50’s and 60’s, having worked on projects as diverse as a handful of GIDGET flicks, William Wyler’s HOW TO STEAL A MILLION, the Peter O’Toole musical GOODBYE, MR. CHIPS and the infamous camp classic THE VALLEY OF THE DOLLS.  By 1971, he had already secured an Academy Award for Best Scoring off his work with FIDDLER ON THE ROOF.  However, his initial collaboration with Spielberg here would prove to be the start of a path that led to his Hollywood canonization. 

(As far as Williams’ specific score for SUGARLAND EXPRESS, it’s solid, although I couldn’t help but notice that the main harmonica theme sounds like somebody was trying to sneak in the melody to The Twelve Days of Christmas before chickening out at the last second.  Listen to it and decide for yourself, just as long as you understand that you’re going to think I’m right.)

Funnily enough, THE SUGARLAND EXPRESS stands as the only movie Spielberg ever submitted for Palme d’or consideration, a ballsy move that I’m forced to extend my respect towards.  Alas, didn’t win (the 1974 Palme d’or went to THE CONVERSATION instead; whatareyagonna do?), although he, Barwood and Robbins walked away with a Best Screenplay award at that year’s Cannes festival.  That would do it as far as major awards.  As far as critical reception, reviews seemed mixed.  Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert were individually low on it, while Pauline Kael was quite taken.  

As far as the general public, there weren’t a ton of people that showed up for it.  THE SUGARLAND EXPRESS only made about $12 million worldwide, which was anemic enough for Universal to call off the game and pull the film from theaters after only two weeks.  This seems unfair considering the movie was made for $3 million, but then I guess this is why I don’t make the big bucks.  One would imagine, in any other world, Spielberg’s goose might have been a bit cooked here.

Thankfully for the rest of us, we live in this world, one in which Spielberg’s next project for Universal was already underway and, in fact, had begun before THE SUGARLAND EXPRESS had even been released.  That project is a little beach movie called…..well, we’ll talk about it in two weeks.

(I like to imagine there’s a hypothetical reader out there who voraciously read an essay on THE SUGARLAND EXPRESS from start to finish but has managed to never hear of JAWS in any way, shape or form.  If you’re that reader, uh….spoilers, I guess.)

Driving Around With DUEL: SPIELBERG SUMMER Begins!

From the time I started writing about movies as a hobby, a thought had been rattling around in my brain.

How am I going to do it?

It’s one of the first things that crossed my mind after working my way through the filmography of Martin Scorsese during 2020, a project from an earlier iteration of this blog finally completed.  As I got to thinking of other legendary directors with a varied and rich body of work, I had to ignore the voice in my head that kept repeating a simple phrase.

You should do it.

I had brought up the idea to friends in the past, and they would say the same thing I had been telling myself for four years.

Do it.

Just do it.

So, fine.  I’m doing it.

Just like I’m guessing pretty much every film fan born between 1970 and 1990, Steven Spielberg was the first director whose work I fell in love with.  I have my mom to credit for that one; she made damn sure I was going to be growing up seeing stuff like JAWS, RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK, and JURASSIC PARK.  I get the instinct; all three of those movies were and remain stone cold classics, the type of movies you’ve literally never heard anyone say a bad word about.  But, in truth, I think my mom has always pulled inspiration from Spielberg’s personal story: born into a family directly affected by the Holocaust, Steven had to rise above both antisemetic attacks in school and struggles with his faith by burying himself into his obsessions with watching and making movies.  I never suffered anything even remotely close to that in my own life, but considering I was a kid who sometimes felt aimless and anxious even at the age of nine, I think my mom found some sort of path forward with sharing Spielberg’s biography and career with me.  (Does this make me the Steven Spielberg of writing intermittently about movies?  Who’s to say?)

So okay, fine, I’m doing it.  But it didn’t solve the bigger issue….how do I do it?  As of this writing, Spielberg has made a grand total of 36 feature length films* which, by my math, is sixteen weeks shy of 52.  To tackle Spielberg’s filmography the way it deserves to be tackled (individually, week by week) would essentially make this a year-long project.  And that presumes I don’t get distracted by a shiny object somewhere along the way, and lord knows I have too much ADHD flowing through my veins for that.

*Yes, for the purpose of actually being able to get through this without running the risk of passing away before its completion, I’m skipping his episodic television work, as well as his producing credits, although I could likely do a whole year on just TINY TOON ADVENTURES, ANIMANIACS and FREAKAZOID alone.

But then, I realized….why not take it decade by decade?  After all, the last half century has yielded specific ups and downs in Spielberg’s career, and each individual decade has at least one masterpiece that will be a treat to revisit, as well as some less popular works I’ve never seen.  Why don’t we just slow roll this thing and dedicate the next few summers in this space to going through every Steven Spielberg movie ever made?  What are you going to do, fight me on it?

So…let’s do this!  I’m finally doing it.  I’m finally working my way through the works of Steven Spielberg.  Starting today, and every other week for the next ten weeks, we’re going to explore the five feature-length movies he made between 1971 and 1979!  For reference, we would begin with today’s subject, DUEL.  Following that will be THE SUGARLAND EXPRESS, JAWS, CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND and, of course, 1941.  Good times.

Even if we weren’t going chronologically, the seventies would make for an excellent and intriguing starting point for a Spielberg career retrospective.  It’s easy to forget, now that the Steven Spielberg Brand has been so well-established, but he was an important thread in the New Hollywood movement.  Of course, he was arguably an equally important thread in putting an end to what New Hollywood typically stood for.  By cutting his teeth on more character driven (and moderately budgeted) work such as SUGARLAND EXPRESS, Spielberg ushered in a new era of busting blocks and popping corn with JAWS and CLOSE ENCOUNTERS.  By the end of the 70’s, Hollywood had seemed to form into something more populist.  As a result, it sometimes feels like Spielberg’s artistic integrity has been mildly questioned, as least in comparison to other seventies titans like Martin Scorsese, Terrence Malick, John Cassavetes and Stanley Kubrick.

But, I would argue the reason “Spielberg” became a genre all its own is because he never lost that knack for character-driven drama, even amidst the spectacle of his most famous works.  Yeah, you show up to JAWS for the scary shark, but it’s the beautifully understated performance of Roy Scheider that stays with you.  It’s the persistent quest of Roy Neary that makes CLOSE ENCOUNTERS what it is.  It’s even, as you’ll see, the relatable loserdom of David Mann that makes DUEL so potent.  Although it’ll be interesting to track the quality of his output as we get closer to modern day, it seems to be that he rarely loses at least that key quality.

Taking his seventies’ work as a single set is to watch him navigate his inherent skills behind the camera, and his natural interests as a human, and filter them through an increasing scope before it arguably grows too unwieldy and blows up on him.  Needless to say, I’m excited.  I hope you are as well.

Welcome to SPIELBERG SUMMER: YEAR ONE - THE SEVENTIES!

DUEL (1971)

Starring: Dennis Weaver

Directed by: Steven Spielberg

Written by: Richard Matheson

Length: 74 minutes (expanded to 90 minutes for 1983 theatrical run)

Released: November 13, 1971

I can’t say with any confidence how many people reading this have ever truly tried to commute within the confines of California.  What I can say, though, is that I spent four years of my life driving the 53 miles between Sacramento and Stockton twice a day, five days a week.  I don’t know that the entire 110,240 miles really looked like the stretch of road that serves as the setting for DUEL, but I promise that every miserable inch of that commute 100% felt like it.

Even if you’ve never seen DUEL, you’ve almost certainly heard of it, even if just as “Steven Spielberg’s first film!!”  You likely know it vaguely as “that movie where a guy gets chased around by a truck”.  If your awareness only runs that deep, then, you’ll be surprised to hear that DUEL is...a movie where…a guy gets chased around…

…by a truck.

It turns out that DUEL is a masterpiece in high-level summary.  It’s a TV movie made with all A-plot in mind; David Mann (Dennis Weaver) is a salesman who has hit the road in order to meet with a client.  His loping, winding, boring drive from Point A to Point B is interrupted when a truck allows him to pass through the one-lane highway they’re both on, only to immediately begin to try to run David off the road.  The aggressive driver is never seen, turning the truck itself into a character, one that billows enough smoke to connote the devil himself.  Along the way, David makes several pit stops, including a diner, a phone booth on the property of an exotic animal trainer, and an abandoned school bus.  By the end, either David or the truck driver will find themselves in a fiery inferno.  Who will it be?  Man or machine?

(You should know, by the way, that I resisted making that last sentence “Mann or machine?”, but only because I saw somebody else make that joke already.  Anyway.)

I remember seeing DUEL for the first time about twenty years ago when Universal first released it on DVD back in 2004.  Up to that point, I had known DUEL exclusively as that aforementioned mythical “first Spielberg movie”, the one that launched the wunderkind TV director’s career, the best TV movie of all time, the cult classic to end all cult classics.  To be honest, though, I don’t have much of a memory of that first watch.  It’s entirely possible I didn’t even finish it.  For better or worse, I found it to be the exact movie I was sold.  A guy is driving down the road and starts getting increasingly harassed by another guy in a truck.  Extend and escalate for 90 minutes, bada bing, bada boom, you’ve got DUEL.  As a (extremely relative) longtime Spielberg fan, I was glad I saw it.  But it was mostly a curiosity and nothing further.

DUEL, then, gains a ton of power as one marches into adulthood and you begin to realize how much of your life is spent sitting in a car, zoning out and winding through some unremarkable road or highway.  There are days when you reflect on your commute and wonder how you even managed to get home at all, for as little brain power as you were putting into it all.  Drive long enough, turn your brain down enough, and it’s entirely possible you could find yourself in a life-or-death struggle between you and some asshole in a truck.

As it turns out, the genius of the November 13th, 1971 ABC Movie of the Week is that the horror is plausible.  It could even happen to you later today.

Needless to say, I found DUEL wildly compelling this time around.

———

By 1971, Steven Spielberg was already a director on the way up; after making his debut by directing Joan Crawford in the 1969 pilot of Rod Serling’s Night Gallery, Spielberg became a TV director for hire, working on famous programs such as Columbo and Marcus Welby, M.D., learning old-school techniques on the way, while also finding room to experiment where he could.  Eventually, his reputation was steady enough that Universal commissioned him to do four television movies, a deal that ended up yielding only three.  The second was 1972’s SOMETHING EVIL (CBS), the third was 1973’s SAVAGE (NBC).  The first, and easily most famous, was 1971’s DUEL (ABC).

It should be noted that the version of DUEL that aired in 1971 was a lean, mean 71-minute cut of the film, perfect for the 90-minute time slot it had been afforded.  The version of DUEL I suspect most people have seen is the 90-minute cut that was created for a 1983 theatrical run, a project commissioned off the back of Spielberg’s remarkable run in 1982 (his directing of E.T. and his co-writing and producing of POLTERGEIST).  Some of the extra scenes feel fairly obvious and perfunctory (I’ll talk about one of them in a second); some scenes surprisingly fit right in, the primary of which being a sequence with the broken down school bus.  People seem a little split on this part, with some characterizing it as too Disney-esque.  I actually kind of dug it, as it’s a moment where the unseen truck driver varies up their method of torture, shifting from aggression to something more beneath-the-surface sinister.  In this sequence, David is hesitant to help push the stranded school bus, not only because he’s in fear of his life, but because he’s not particularly thrilled about his hood getting scratched up.  When the truck reappears to continue chasing David, it takes a quick time out to pleasantly push the bus back onto the road.  For lack of a better phrase, David’s cucking is complete.

That’s another aspect of DUEL, by the way, that you just don’t get as a kid: how the main tormentor for David Mann isn’t the mysterious aggressor in the truck, it’s life itself.  

The obvious question regarding extending out the premise of DUEL more than a few scenes, let alone to ninety minutes, is “why doesn’t David just let this go?”  Yes, obviously, both he and the truck driver eventually reach a point of no return, where both pairs of heels have been dug in too far for this not to end in someone’s death.  However, the genius of the storytelling here is how deftly, but emphatically, it shows us just how powerless David really is in his day-to-day life.  His commute is constant and extremely boring.  His job is vaguely defined, but involves him selling something nondescript to various faceless clients.  It’s implied that his private life provides no relief, as he quips to a gas station attendant who just referred to him as boss, “not at home, I’m not”.

(It should be mentioned that the ninety minute cut makes a bigger deal of the home life thing, with an entire added sequence of David on a pay phone having a tense, emasculating conversation with his wife.  We get to see the wife and everything.  It’s filmed with competence and well framed, and if you’re trying to add 18 minutes to a movie, it’s a logical place to expand.  But…I don’t really like it.  The scene is proof positive that one need not visualize what can be expressed in a single sentence.  Sorry, I just wanted to vent about it.  Moving on.)

David is just kind of a loser, or at least (more importantly) he perceives himself as one.  So when a truck loping along the same stretch of road as him starts being kind of a dick, he decides to stand his ground for once and be a dick right back.  And, as it goes for most of us, this proves to be his folly.  It’s maybe the ultimate inciting incident for a story, one that makes you yell at the screen for a character to just drop it, while knowing deep down that you may have done something similar yourself.  It’s an understandable and recognizable human instinct and that’s why it’s so compelling.  It helps that Dennis Weaver plays David with such an Everyman quality; even when he’s panicking and making poor decisions, you can’t help but recognize parts of yourself within him.

There are issues with the script, a Richard Matheson adaptation of his own short story, the primary of which being the overwritten voiceover monologues for Weaver.  It’s got to be terrifying to write a script with almost no dialogue, and I’m sure it felt like there was a need to verbalize something about this crazy situation David finds himself in.  But the voiceovers are almost uniformly unnecessary, to the point where I was convinced these were additional theatrical cut extensions, meant to streamline the emotions of the picture.  Alas, no, they were there from the jump, an unusual misstep for an otherwise tight film.

One has to figure, though, that these voiceovers stand out all the more because there’s so much else right about DUEL.  The constant creativity; its sense of rapid, but never overwhelming, pace; its Hitchcock-ian sense of tension building (the best moment of the movie might be David trying, and failing, to track the type of boots his assailant wears).  A special note must be made of its sense of world-building, as well.  A key piece of exposition comes not from a David Mann voiceover, nor really from anybody talking to David at all.  It comes from the AM radio talk show David is listening to in the car.  It’s a bunch of dudes calling in talking about how they no longer feel like the man in their own homes.  It’s another reason why the added scene with David on the phone with his wife is so unnecessary; anything that sequence might have established, Spielberg and Matheson have already baked into DUEL, practically in the background.

———

So, where does DUEL stand in the greater Spielberg canon?  Well, it’s hard not to watch it without immediately reflecting on JAWS, a movie with the same general idea (swap out a truck with a shark and you’re already halfway there), although given the new brand of Hollywood polish that would go on to define the work of Spielberg and most of his contemporaries for decades to come.  Funnily enough, this was the movie that made Universal realize that he was ready for a movie with the scale of JAWS, although there’d be another theatrical movie in between, THE SUGARLAND EXPRESS, which we’ll break down in full in two weeks.

More to the point, however, is that DUEL’s major legacy is as Spielberg’s first major shot across the bow.  At just twenty-five years old, and after doing consistently solid work on television (including the first Columbo episode), he had shown that he was special in a way that not many others at the time were.  In a world where TV movies could be a legitimate launching point for major filmmakers (i.e. an extinct world), Spielberg completely took advantage of the training ground he had been afforded.  As mentioned, the only real issues with DUEL come from the script, and even those are easy to forget when taking the movie in totality.  From a directorial standpoint, Spielberg already had the steady hand of a seasoned pro, establishing a character expeditiously, then putting him through the ringer in the way any average reasonable person could relate to, heightening the stakes all along the way.  

All in all, DUEL isn’t quite a masterpiece, but it’s close.  As it turned out, it didn’t need to be anything more.

In two weeks: 1974’s THE SUGARLAND EXPRESS!

The Heartbreaks and Triumphs of NIGHTS OF CABIRIA

I. You suffer, you go through hell. Then happiness comes along.

Human beings are nothing if not resilient.  

It’s a good thing, too. Even for mammals, we’re a wildly anxious breed, likely stemming both from our capacity for abstract thought as well as our unique awareness of our own mortality.  We typically view the way we spend our time on Earth through the prism of knowing that this is the only chance we get.  Unfortunately, this can manifest in ways considerably less than stellar.  We learn to hate, create and purchase and use weapons, wage wars, all out of the fear that somebody or something may try to take our one solitary life away from us prematurely.  We also have the less than favorable habit of making unhealthy and impulsive decisions.  We take leaps both metaphorical and literal with the justification of, “well, you only live once, right?”.

On the other hand, the anxiety of humanity can lead to more productive habits.  We aspire and yearn.  We learn to create.  And play.  And worship.  Despite living amongst the people who channel their existential dread destructively, we can and will decide to use the ticking clock of time to make the world a better place than when they found it.  To take a second to dance to music.  To look for love.  To just…not let things get to them.

More than anything else, though, human beings dream. We imagine ourselves in a better place, doing something more fulfilling, finally leaving behind whatever’s holding us back. Even more than fear, the pursuit of a dream is perhaps the most powerful driving force the species has at its arsenal. A dream is ultimately the thing that gets us up in the morning.  It’s what allows us to take a beating from a world filled with other human beings making fear-based decisions.  Because, who knows?  Maybe if you just keep going, things will get better.  Maybe if you take just one more step, you’ll arrive at the place you’ve always wanted to be.

At the end of the day, human beings are resilient, all because of our ability to dream.

It’s a thought that kept recurring to me when re-watching NIGHTS OF CABIRIA, Federico Fellini’s sixth film and influential 1957 masterpiece.  It stars his wife Giulietta Masina and tells the story of…well, Cabiria, a prostitute on the streets of Rome (referred throughout via euphemisms such as “working girl”) who keeps aiming for something more, despite both her insecurities as well as her apparent inability to attain anything resembling genuine affection from anybody. She searches every conceivable avenue one could think of to locate love.  She ends up briefly in the arms of a vain (and scummy) film actor.  She throws herself at the (metaphorical?) feet of the Madonna at the local church.  She attends a magic show at a local music hall.  She even meets the man of her (maybe literal) dreams.  Nothing seems to take and, in fact, everything only hurts her more.  Although it’s a movie basically told in vignette, the emotional continuity from beginning to end is palpable.  The movie does have what could be interpreted as a happy ending, although I’d argue it’s more defiantly hopeful than anything else.

If you’ve never seen it, it’d be rational to assume from the description above that NIGHTS OF CABIRIA is a huge fucking bummer, or maybe a weepy melodrama, a maudlin affair.  But here’s the thing: it kind of isn’t.  Okay, maybe it is, purely in the sense that the story it tells is extremely heartbreaking.  But it’s also as good of a testament to the human spirit as anything I can think of, the kind of movie that actually makes you want to get out and live rather than shrivel up and die.  NIGHTS OF CABIRIA is probably the premier Fellini film as a result, the perfect bridge between his “let’s go to the circus” early work and the dreamlike feel to his later periods.  And, honestly, even if it wasn’t so insightful in its writing and intuitive in its direction, it would still be a five-star affair because of the dead-perfect performance from Masina at its center.

It’s a movie I’ve been meaning to write about for a long time!  Let’s explore NIGHTS OF CABIRIA.

II. Stay out of trouble. You'll get a miracle, like me. It'll happen.

Cabiria is a character that became the lead of her own film sort of by accident; she first appears in a brief scene in one of Fellini’s first movies, 1952’s THE WHITE SHEIK.  To be perfectly honest, although she’s still played by Giulietta Masina, this version of Cabiria doesn’t quite jive with the fully fleshed out woman we get later on in NIGHTS OF CABIRIA (the WHITE SHEIK iteration generally feels more in control of her life and emotions, for one). It’s ultimately a somewhat minor sequence in a somewhat minor film.  Still, Masina was clearly comfortable commanding the screen, and it allowed Fellini the freedom to start featuring her more and more as their intertwined careers moved forward.

Signs of Masina possibly becoming a major film lead perhaps shouldn’t have been all that surprising; after all, she had already appeared in what is generally considered Fellini’s first film, 1950’s VARIETY LIGHTS* and a handful of other films by the time her first scene as Cabiria rolled around.  THE WHITE SHEIK definitely wasn’t her first movie or anything.  But there was clearly something there and, watching her quick Cabiria cameo, it’s hard to deny that the movie picks up just a little bit in her four solitary minutes.

*A movie in which she seemed to have an early lead in portraying the beleaguered wife of an artist with fame and younger women on his mind, something that would serve her well both on and offscreen.

The major Fellini-Masina collaboration between 1952’s WHITE SHEIK and 1957’s NIGHTS OF CABIRIA is, of course, 1954’s LA STRADA and we’ll get into that one in a second.  Suffice to say, though, that after initial mixed reception, LA STRADA eventually found international acclaim, capped off with its victory as the inaugural winner* of the Best Foreign Language Film Academy Award in 1956.  However, even with Fellini and Masina’s growing international acclaim and clout, finding a studio willing to finance NIGHTS OF CABIRIA proved difficult, allegedly due to its featuring of prostitutes as sympathetic leads.  It took legendary super-producer Dino de Laurentiis to put the money up himself before filming could begin.

*Technically speaking, anyway; the category actually goes all the way back to the 1946 Academy Awards.  However, prior to 1956, winners received Special/Honorary Awards as opposed to actual Oscars.  In case you were looking for some conversation grease at your next dinner party.

**Note that I couldn’t find anything to necessarily substantiate this.

De Laurentiis’ bet paid off; in 1957, NIGHTS OF CABIRIA won the very next Best Foreign Language Oscar.  As well, Giulietta Masina snagged a Best Actress award at that year’s Cannes Film Festival.  Although there are many people* to credit for the high quality of NIGHTS OF CABIRIA, it’s hard to argue against placing its success at the feet of its primary collaborators, the husband and wife team at the top.  Thus, I think I’d be remiss if I didn’t talk about them and what specifically brought to CABIRIA.

*Including the singular Pier Paolo Pasolini, who cowrote CABIRIA’s screenplay before going on to become a legendary and provocative director himself.

III. Too much thinking will make your head explode.

Federico Fellini is one of those directors that is often presented as a “titan of cinema”, one of the guys who changed the language of movies as we know it, whose works inspired an entire generation of future Scorseses and Kubricks.  And look, in this instance, the shoe fits.  Fellini is a guy you just eventually need to know if you aspire to be any sort of film fan at all.  His is a filmography well worth diving into head first.

Thankfully, it’s not as esoteric an oeuvre as others can be; although Fellini has a signature style all his own (playful, dreamy and highly emotional), he filtered it through all kinds of different movies.  There’s big bombastic meta-narratives, there’s melancholy character pieces, there’s scummy little crime stories.  Look around enough, and there will inevitably be something that speaks to you.  However, he also happens to be a director whose major, seminal, medium-defining works (LA DOLCE VITA, 8 1/2) are NOT the ones I would point first-timers towards, great though they may be.

My favorite Fellini period is actually his first, his smaller (but no less powerful) character pieces from the 1950’s, often featuring his wife Giulietta Masina.  Now, that doesn’t mean I dislike his stuff from the 60’s, where he started playing with format, and really dug into his famous penchant for excess.  8 1/2 might be the most important Fellini movie.  But it definitely needs to be worked up to.  On the other hand, films like LA STRADA, IL BIDONE, and I VITELLONI are just as wonderful because of their accessibility, as well as their stopwatch-like precision and thematic resonance.  The characters are complete humans vividly drawn, and their actions continuously drive the narratives and conflict.  Maybe that’s all Basic Filmmaking 101, but they’re reminders that, for all of the barely-controlled chaos of his 60’s and 70’s work, Fellini could do the basics better than anybody.  It makes sense; you have to become fully fluent in a language before you can begin to take it apart.

Of this period, LA STRADA is probably the film most recognized as Fellini’s first masterpiece, and you should absolutely go watch it as soon as you can.  It’s a devastating story of a cruel man, his meek and naive assistant/companion/maybe wife, and the charming performer she connects with on the road.  It features American legends Anthony Quinn and Richard Basehart, whose performances are all the more astounding when you consider they’re dubbed in Italian.  And, of course, it features Masina in a role that feels somewhat like a precursor to Cabiria.  Her Gelsomina is emotional and fragile, isolated from how the world really works.  Yet she’s susceptible to love, and yearns to be treated with warmth.  LA STRADA is one of the finest films ever made, and certainly one of his most influential (just listen to Martin Scorsese fawn over it).

But I’ve always liked NIGHTS OF CABIRIA more.  As you’ve undoubtedly already gleaned, it’s my favorite Federico Fellini movie.  Now, to be perfectly fair, this might just be because I saw it first; CABIRIA was my introduction to Fellini as a whole and I was both captivated by the performances at its center and genuinely surprised at how accessible the movie was at its core (I can’t imagine anybody watching this and not at least follow along).  But even after consuming much of Fellini’s filmography, I still gravitate to CABIRIA over all others more because it features all of the same qualities as LA STRADA: a tragic human story about people on the margins of society, featuring at its center a sweet fragile girl who wants to be loved.  Crucially, though, Cabiria as a character has two beautiful features to her personality that LA STRADA’s Gelsomina seems to lack: passion and perseverance.  Both characteristics are displayed perfectly by Masina (who we’ll talk about in a bit).  And that’s what gives the movie its juice.

As far as directorial style goes, Fellini would go on to be known for a very playful style (undoubtedly stemming from his avowed love of the circus as a young boy) that would become less and less literal as time went on.  LA DOLCE VITA and 8½  played with the format of film itself with unintuitive editing or unexpected shifts in perspective and almost always with a unstated desire to fill the screen as much as possible with stuff.  As he moved into the 60’s and 70’s with movies like JULIET OF THE SPIRITS, FELLINI SATYRICON and even his segment of SPIRITS OF THE DEAD, he used color, costumes and dream logic to evoke a completely different cinematic world than anybody else was quite playing in.

NIGHTS OF CABIRIA is admittedly simpler than all that, and it’s very much grounded in a relatively recognizable world.  But something more dreamlike, even supernatural, seems to exist in the margins.  Consider something like the famous “Madonna” scene where Cabiria decides to give religion a try as a solution to her troubles.  It’s a stunning and memorable sequence, and about as maximalist as the movie gets.  Cabiria tags along with her fellow prostitutes as they take a pimp’s uncle to the local church in order to get his limp healed.  The church is filled with unfortunate souls moaning, wailing, prostrating themselves in front of the Madonna shrine, crying for salvation, for healing.

Cabira slowly, reluctantly gets into the spirit.  She kisses the altar, kneels, then quietly prays, almost to herself, “help me to change my life.  Bestow your grace on me too.  Make me change my life.”  As time goes on, it’s clear that nothing has changed, and she eventually grows resentful of the experience.  But the way the scene in the moment builds, as everyone is screaming for mercy, and Cabiria manages to find peace amidst the chaos….to watch it, it sure does feel like God might be there, waiting for Cabiria to find her strength.

Of course, what helps us believe in it all the more is the way Masina plays her in that moment, completely lost but open (desperate, even) for direction.  Actually, to put it bluntly, without Masina, most of the key CABIRIA moments wouldn’t hit the way they do.  The film’s greatest strength is its star, and it’s time we get into why.

IV. The cynical mask drops off and all that is best in us awakens.

It should be noted that, when it comes to art, I believe in the spectrum of opinion.  Not everyone likes everything, and there is no real objectively correct viewpoint when it comes to film.  Even the most set-in-stone classic films, performances and performers deserve to be questioned, maybe even despised.  I don’t really believe that you have to think something or someone is good or bad.

That said, if you don’t like Giulietta Masina, I think you’re a huge fucking loser.  

Sorry, I just have genuine trouble imagining the kind of person who could watch her in a movie and not immediately fall even a little bit in love.  She just…kind of has that kind of expressive face and imperceptible aura, you know?  The second Masina appears on the screen, your sympathies lie with her completely and totally.  You start living with every little scrap of happiness she gets, and dying off of every mountain of pain she gets thrown against.  Although her filmography is shorter than you might expect (less than thirty movies), she managed to make a lasting impact on the industry anyway due to her unique ability to express joy and heartbreak in equal measures.

Masina is just the best, and a major reason I’m so fond of Fellini’s early run of masterpieces.  Considering the types of stories he liked to tell, her unique ability to express joy and heartbreak in equal measures made her the perfect leading lady for Fellini in this period.  And, oh my god, does she ever get to express both joy and heartbreak, in all their different shades (and sometimes simultaneously) throughout NIGHTS OF CABIRIA.  As it happens, Cabiria turns out to be a fully realized human being, whose gruff and prickly exterior seems to be developed from a lifetime’s worth of insecurities and abuse from strangers.  That exterior can’t keep her from taking time to dance to a mambo, or continuing to desire something more.  This is the kind of thing Masina’s bread is buttered on.  She’s able to take this fleshed-out character off of the page and make you feel everything she feels.  Your heart soars when Oscar (Francois Perier) sweeps her off her feet.  You’re crushed when movie star Alberto Lazzari (Amedeo Nazzari) simply sweeps her under the rug.  It’s an astounding performance, made all the more impressive by its simplicity.

The moment I think about over and over when it comes to Giulietta Masina as Cabiria is the movie’s few moments of unbridled happiness. It’s when Cabiria meets Oscar, a man she meets after a disastrous night at the theatre (more on that in a bit). He’s handsome, thoughtful, and kind. Most of all, he likes her for who she is. He seems eager to marry her and whisk her away to a life of industry and comfort. Overwhelmed by this good fortune, Cabiria runs home to the place she shares with her friend Wanda. Through the fence, she lets loose on all of Oscar’s wonderful qualities. She caps it off with a triumphant, “He loves me!”

Now…even on a first watch, it’s the kind of moment that makes you check the runtime, notice there’s like twenty minutes left, then sit back and wait for the knife to twist into your heart. It’s worth mentioning that even Wanda seems skeptical of this man being dropped seemingly from heaven. Although we’re all hoping for NIGHTS OF CABIRIA to simply coast to a happy ending and get out, we know realistically, another shoe is about to drop.

But…Cabiria is so fucking happy. Masina radiates so much innocent joy, the kind that mostly gets beaten out of us in adulthood. In the face of her exuberance, what are we to do? We’re happy right along with her. He loves her! Why root for anything else?

V.  Loneliness is a heavy burden, but I'd rather be alone than make compromises.

It’s difficult to decide which section of NIGHTS OF CABIRIA is the most heartbreaking.  Hell, the damn thing starts with poor Cabiria being thrown off a bridge; things manage to go downhill from there. The clear frontrunner for “most devastating” would seem to be its final sequence, where Oscar turns out to be just one more motherfucker, his solitary goal revealed to be robbing her of her money and throwing her off a cliff (he at least restrains himself from following through on that last part).

However, even given that punch in the head, I’ve always found the preceding vignette even more distressing.  It’s the scene where Cabiria tries to find solace in a little local art.  A magician is putting on a show, and plucks a reluctant Cabiria from the audience to be a part of his next trick.  He puts her under hypnosis and asks her to visualize the fictitious handsome man in front of her (whose theoretical name is also Oscar).  As he describes what she’s supposed to be seeing, Cabiria ends up buying into the illusion completely and totally.  For just a minute or so, she’s done it. She’s achieved everything.  She’s about to be married, and whisked away to a life of domesticity.  Of respect. Of something resembling dignity.  Even if for a moment, it’s real.

Alas, as all tricks must, the hypnosis comes to an end and Cabiria is harshly returned to reality by the peals of laughter from the audience.  It’s immensely sad to watch her genuinely not understand why she’s being mocked.  As a viewer, it’s hard to even understand the point of the illusion from an entertainment perspective; one is forced to conclude the “funny part” is the idea that someone of Cabiria’s status could ever have anything resembling love or contentment.  It’s just one more moment of her being used for something cheap, and by this point in the film, you’re just so frustrated for her (which, again, wouldn’t be the case if Masina didn’t have you in her pocket from the jump) that you feel just as helpless as if it were happening to you.

And yet, that feeling of helplessness is where the movie’s famous ending derives its power.  Because, even after being thrown into the river, and cast aside, robbed, mocked, possibly ignored by God himself, somehow Cabiria still stands on her two feet, broken but not defeated.  As she slowly walks away from Oscar’s betrayal, a traveling troupe of musicians emerges from the forest and starts walking along behind her.  It should be noted that the song they’re playing is a riff on Nino Rota’s main theme for Cabiria, a melody that is more sweetly haunting than it is cheery (i.e. the exact right tone).  But, the meaning remains the same.  For the first time in 120 minutes, someone crosses Cabiria’s path and provides something kind.  The thick tear of mascara that has run down Cabiria’s face is slowly paired with a reluctant smile.  As you swear she glances right at us, we now know: she’s going to make it, even if it’s just to the next disappointment.  

There’s a reason why SWEET CHARITY, the Cy Coleman scored musical and subsequent Bob Fosse movie that directly adapts NIGHTS OF CABIRIA and retrofits it to exist in 60’s America, adheres closely to this ending as well.  Not only is it one of the strongest and most memorable conclusions in film history, it’s the only possible one that the story of Cabiria could ever have.  Even in the midst of our lowest moments, beauty can suddenly surround you at a moment’s notice.

You never know.  And that’s why you have to keep moving forward.

After all, you only live once.

And The Nominees Are: Breaking Down the Ten 2023 Best Picture Hopefuls

I love the Oscars.  I hate the Oscars.  I like the Oscars.  Do I like like the Oscars?  Guys, stop.  We’re just friends.  I don’t even think of them like that.  Oh my god, stop.  You’re being so stupid right now.

Since childhood, I’ve felt every kind of emotion possible towards the Academy Awards.  The first Oscars broadcast I remember watching live with some sort of concept as to what was actually going on was the 70th Academy Awards, the one where TITANIC completed its year-long Wilt Chamberlain-esque dominance against all of Hollywood by winning eleven trophies.  It was also the one where they trotted out seventy past winners for a special “Family Album” segment, which I sort of remember being awkward even at the time.  Still, an undeniable magic emanated from the ceremony through the television and into my brain.

From there, I entered a years-long period of being super into the Oscars.  All the way through high school, I became an Oscars nerd (girls loved it).  I carried around a little pocket book that listed all the past winners and nominees in every category, as well as a brief write-up of every past ceremony (girls loved it).  I even mastered the art of putting together an Oscars ballot, realizing early on that if you wanted to win a pool, you had better stop voting with your heart and start investing in an Entertainment Weekly or Variety subscription in order to read the tea leaves (girls loved it).  My shining achievement was winning the grand prize at an Oscars party in 2006, which netted me both a DVD copy of the 2003 David Spade movie DICKIE ROBERTS: FORMER CHILD STAR and a box set of special features for the 2005 remake of KING KONG (which I hadn’t seen).

And then, I entered a even-more-years-long period of rebuking the Academy Awards, deciding I had finally seen through their shiny veneer, and assessing it as a ceremony that was more interested in rewarding mediocrity and pleasuring its own phallus rather than actually celebrating art, unlike the then-recent past where they were lavishing awards to CHICAGO and CRASH.  Looking back, it’s obvious I was just walking around with a cognitive disorder that most men in their early twenties suffer from known as Being a Butthead (symptoms include just knowing you’re the smartest and most cultured person in any given room, saying the words “devil’s advocate” more than once a day, and finding any excuse in any conversation to be a chippy little bitch).  But at the time, I really did think the quality of movies had cratered and was in disbelief that the Academy could put on a show every winter and pretend that they hadn’t.

Now, I still feel like the overall state of Hollywood is rather dire and too much mediocre slop is getting regaled with accolades by default.  But, I now can’t really think of the Oscars without thinking of a quote from comedy uber-producer Lorne Michaels in regards to SNL’s unique creative process: “the show doesn’t go on because it’s ready; it goes on because it’s 11:30”.  

So it goes with the Academy Awards.  They’re not given out because there’s finally enough great flicks to bring honor to.  They’re given out because it’s almost spring and they just happen every year.  As a result, some years they really got it (what a year 2007 ended up being, eh?) and some years they really do not (quick, the 94th Academy Awards were less than two years ago, what won Best Picture?).  But if you accept them as merely a snapshot as to what we’re guessing might be enduring works in the field, they never become anything less than fascinating, even when they end up being completely incorrect.  Even people who profess to hate the ceremony and not care about them at all seem uniquely obsessed with them, just from a different angle.

As it happens, this year’s crop of Best Picture* nominees feel like a more interesting pool than in years past.  It’s a mix of populist blockbusters, esoteric and challenging films being presented to the mainstream, international crossover hits, and traditional Oscars fare.  It’s a pretty good cross-section of genres and, thus, felt like a good list to work my way through this month.

*Not that Best Picture is the be all and end all of Academy Award nominee pools, it just feels the most straight-forward.  “Here are the ten best movies of the year”, the claim seems to be.  You don’t need to know anything about acting technique or editing processes in order to weigh in.

So…let’s take a look at this crop of ten and see what we have here.  I don’t know that I’m necessarily going to do this every year, but I’m more excited to dig into the Best Picture nominees than I have in literally half a decade or so, and I don’t think I’m alone.  But, are any of them any good?  Read along and find out!

AMERICAN FICTION

DIRECTED BY: Cord Jefferson

WRITTEN BY: Cord Jefferson

STARRING: Jeffrey Wright, Tracee Ellis Ross, John Ortiz, Erika Alexander, Leslie Uggams, Adam Brody, Issa Rae, Sterling K. Brown

ALSO NOMINATED FOR: Best Actor (Jeffrey Wright), Best Supporting Actor (Sterling K. Brown), Best Adapted Screenplay (Cord Jefferson), Best Original Score (Laura Karpman)

An imperfect first feature, but perhaps the best kind of imperfect first feature.  AMERICAN FICTION is a movie bursting with ideas and creativity, and feels for all the world like a story Jefferson (who has a ton of comedy bonafides, but whose GOOD PLACE work I was personally most familiar with) has been sitting and thinking about for a long time.  Its main story is of a well-regarded, but beleaguered, author (Wright) who is told his work doesn’t sell due to it not being “Black enough” (which means everything you might imagine it to mean).  In a fury, he submits a joke manuscript (under the pseudonym Stagg R. Leigh) filled with every maddening Black literature trope in the book: street vernacular, drug slinging, gang members in durags.  He then has to deal with the reality of it becoming critically-acclaimed in its own right, and threatens to become his first bona-fide financial hit.   The satire is occasionally brutal, but always honest, to the point where I genuinely fear I’m coming off sounding like one of those goddamn literary judges in this very here sentence.  How’s that for meta?

Where you can feel Jefferson’s voice still forming is in the movie’s awkward marriage between its vicious satirical eye towards the performative activism of…well, essentially every artistic domain, and its desire to also be a relatively straight-forward family drama.  Monk attends a literary seminar back home in Boston, just in time for Mom (Leslie Uggams) to begin developing Alzheimer’s.  His sister Lisa (an underused Tracee Ellis Ross) passes away suddenly and his estranged brother Cliff (Sterling K. Brown) is in town for the funeral.  Monk maybe learns to open his heart when he begins dating the woman down the street.  You get the idea.

AMERICAN FICTION is actually competent on either side of its story’s coin, but you can’t help but wish that it backed up and picked a lane for now.  Still, you have to admire a movie that is willing to take a slightly Oscar bait-y tale and infuse it with a keenly observed indictment in the way well-meaning white people in power infantilize and commodify stories of black trauma in order to assuage guilt (and maybe feel like they did something) at the expense of other types of stories by black voices.

Despite the structural whiplash, Jefferson has created a movie that has guided Jeffrey Wright and Sterling K. Brown to their first Academy Award nomination (which feels impossible).  I’m genuinely excited to see what Jefferson comes up with next.

(Plus, this movie features Adam Brody doing what he does best: playing a dirtbag Hollywood producer.  What’s not to love?)

ANATOMY OF A FALL

DIRECTED BY: Justine Triet

WRITTEN BY: Justine Triet, Arthur Harari

STARRING: Sandra Huller, Swann Arlaud, Milo Machado-Graner, Antoine Reinartz, Samuel Theis, Jehnny Beth

ALSO NOMINATED FOR: Best Director (Justine Triet), Best Actress (Sandra Huller), Best Original Screenplay (Justine Triet and Arthur Harari), Best Editing (Laurent Senechal)

I have a very specific fear, one that has developed concurrent with the meteoric rise of true crime documentaries, podcasts and television networks.  

My fear is that I will one day wake up or come home and find my wife dead under a bizarre circumstance.  The fear doesn’t stem from the death of a spouse (although I should make clear I also fear that, and would find that devastating), but, rather, the routine investigation that comes after.  I know a lot about myself, and one thing I’ve learned is that I do not hold up well under scrutiny.  Especially when I’m aware that the person scrutinizing thinks I’ve done something I didn’t.  I get squirrely, nervous, agitated.  Suspicious.

I’m nervous that everyone’s going to think I killed my wife, is what I’m saying.

So, yes, I found ANATOMY OF A FALL very nerve-wracking.

It’s a rather exquisitely constructed movie, a film that delivers on its titular promise.  A man mysteriously falls out of an attic window.  His wife stands accused.  Along the way, several isolated moments from their marriage get pulled apart, analyzed, ripped apart.  We also learn about the zany game that is the French judicial system (allegedly; I suspect it’s heightened here for dramatic effect just like American legal dramas).  Their blind son gets pushed to tell “his side of the story”.  A dog gives one of the best goddamn animal performance since Rin Tin fuckin’ Tin.

However, the entire two-and-half-hour film seems to hinge on one crucial, extended sequence: the pivotal argument Sandra and Daniel have the day before his fateful fall (or murder?).  ANATOMY OF A FALL tries to keep it as ambiguous as possible whether Sandra is guilty or innocent; even by the end when the court makes its decision, an argument could be made that they got it wrong.  Thus, this argument (which begins as an orated transcript before transitioning to full-on chamber scene) needs to keep this ambiguity while still giving both characters reasons for their intense anger and unhappiness.  

Mission accomplished.  In a scene that probably runs about ten minutes or so, we get a full picture of a marriage built on resentment and stifled creativity.  He’s mean and obstinate.  She’s cold and seemingly uncaring.  It’s not pleasant (and not the kind of thing I would ever want put in a public record), and it’s certainly damning.  But does it mean she did it?  You’ll have to watch to decide, even though you can’t know for sure.  And that’s the power of ANATOMY OF A FALL.

Oh, and a steel drum cover of 50 Cent plays way more pivotal of a role than you might expect

BARBIE

DIRECTED BY: Greta Gerwig

WRITTEN BY: Greta Gerwig and Noah Baumbach

STARRING: Margot Robbie, Ryan Gosling, America Ferrara, Will Ferrell, Michael Cera, Kate McKinnon, Rhea Perlman

ALSO NOMINATED FOR: Best Supporting Actor (Ryan Gosling), Best Supporting Actress (America Ferrara), Best Adapted Screenplay (Greta Gerwig, Noah Baumbach), Best Production Design (Sarah Greenwood, Katie Spencer), Best Costume Design (Jacqueline Durran), Best Original Song (“What Was I Made For?” - Billie Eilish & Finneas O’Connell; “I’m Just Ken” - Mark Ronson & Andrew Wyatt)

BARBIE has unfortunately become a somewhat difficult movie to discuss on online spaces over the past couple of months.  Think it got snubbed at the Oscars (despite it receiving eight nominations, including those for Greta Gerwig and Margot Robbie)?  Think it’s a groundbreaking and important blockbuster?  Think it’s a man-hating woke disasterpiece*?  Think it’s pretty good, but with some messiness?  Congratulations!  Someone on the Internet probably thinks you’re an idiot.

*Although this take isn’t as prevalent as people seem to want to think, it’s always been a criticism I’ve found fascinating, since it’s an instant confession that the critic in question either didn’t see the movie, or went into it with that opinion ready to go and worked backwards.  BARBIE is man-teasing, perhaps, but it definitely and obviously isn’t hating.  Much of the movie’s power actually comes from its observation that the answer to female subjugation is not male subjugation.

Such is life for a movie that has undeniably spoken to the masses in a way I’m not sure anybody thought possible prior to its release.  And, why shouldn’t it have?  Although the claims of it being the first original blockbuster of a generation is a little disingenuous (it is based off of a popular toy, after all), it is the first in a while to be as audacious and colorful and funny as it is.  It has a great cast, some of whom feel like they’re being properly cast in a movie for the first time (Kate McKinnon as “Weird Barbie” comes immediately to mind).  The songs are bright, colorful, and clever.  The sets are tactile and gorgeous.  It’s even got something to say about the world.  BARBIE was just a good goddamn time at the movies.

I have my quibbles about it.  For instance, I’m not convinced “beach you off” is as funny as the movie clearly believes.  I also thought America Ferrara’s big speech reads better on the pge than it does on the screen, if only because it makes too literal the theses that the rest of the movie had been doing a remarkable job communicating thematically up to that point, one of the only times BARBIE seemed to be courting clapping over anything else.

But then…I don’t think movies need to be perfect in order to be effective and resonate.  BARBIE is a big blockbuster with a brain.  Isn’t this what we’ve been clamoring for for years?  I don’t think it’s going to win the big prize this weekend (and there are better movies amongst its competition), but it absolutely deserves to be in the conversation.  It’s a win.  Can’t wait for four toy-based movies that are doomed to fail over the next couple of summers!

THE HOLDOVERS

DIRECTED BY: Alexander Payne

WRITTEN BY: David Hemingson

STARRING: Paul Giamatti, Da’Vine Joy Randolph, Dominic Sessa

ALSO NOMINATED FOR: Best Actor (Paul Giamatti), Best Supporting Actress (Da’Vine Joy Randolph), Best Original Screenplay (David Hemingson), Best Editing (Kevin Tent)

The most straight-forward heart-warming crowd-pleaser amongst the ten, I could tell THE HOLDOVERS was working for me when I realized I wasn’t all that bothered by watching a blatant Christmas movie very out of season, something that usually drives me crazy.

I suspect for many, Alexander Payne’s latest starts clicking immediately, as the old-school 70’s blue Ratings Board notice appears, followed by retro production company logos appearing on the screen.  This is a film that is unabashedly trying to fit itself into the New Hollywood aesthetic, complete with somewhat grainy film stock, a mellow soundtrack and, most importantly, character-based storytelling.  I actually kinda thought literally busting out the old logos was pushing the aesthetic close to 70’s movie kabuki, and I immediately worried this was going to be more of a stunt than anything else.

I shouldn’t have been concerned.  THE HOLDOVERS is so committed to telling the kind of story that the New Hollywood movement was known for making.  It focuses on a set of losers, and allows them to have flaws and contradictory feelings.  It really gets going when it focuses down from a story about a set of prep school students left behind on campus for the holidays (the literal “holdovers”) to a story of just one holdover, Angus Tully (Sessa), and the bond he begins to form with his cranky classics professor Paul Hunham (Giamatti) and the school’s kitchen manager Mary Lamb (Randolph).  

THE HOLDOVERS is a movie about people who have been left behind in one way or another, and have essentially resigned themselves from ever forging connections with others, from moving on from their disappointing pasts and futures.  But, as what so often happens during the Christmas season (whose aesthetic this movie wears like a friggin’ glove; how perfect a setting is snowy Massachusetts for something like this?), an opportunity for renewal and hope and revival.  All three of our main characters have been diverted from the idea of ever having something resembling a normal family unit.  But maybe they can be the family they make, not the one they have.

It’s all well-worn territory in Hollywood filmmaking, true.  But when it’s approached not with treacly manipulation but with such sincerity as it is here, who can complain?  

KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON

DIRECTED BY: Martin Scorsese

WRITTEN BY: Martin Scorsese, Eric Roth

STARRING: Leonardo DiCaprio, Robert DeNiro, Lily Gladstone

ALSO NOMINATED FOR: Best Director (Martin Scorsese), Best Actress (Lily Gladstone), Best Supporting Actor (Robert DeNiro), Best Cinematography (Rodrigo Prieto), Best Film Editing (Thelma Schoonmaker), Best Production Design (Jack Fisk and Adam Willis), Best Costume Design (Jacqueline West), Best Original Score (Robbie Robertson), Best Original Song (“Wahzhazhe (A Song for My People)” - Scott George) 

This is the only one I get to cheat a little bit on.  I already wrote a whole-ass article about this one in November, and my generally positive thoughts haven’t changed in the weeks and months since.  The details of this true story are still infuriatingly evil, Scorsese grapples with the tricky question of “whose story is this to tell, really?” about as well as anybody can (despite many people still feeling otherwise), and DiCaprio still has a stupid grimace on his face for the entire three and a half hours.  

When I reflect back on it, however, what strikes me about KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON is its simplicity.  Compared to the other 180-minute star-studded epic in this group, Scorsese keeps his flourishes to a relative minimum, with most of the bold stylistic choices kept to the beginning (I still love the presentation of the opening exposition as a 20’s newsreel) and the ending, one of the most purposeful auteur cameos I can think of, and easily the most singular and memorable moment in a movie full of ‘em.  Does it still make me pine for a cadre of indigenous storytellers in Hollywood to tackle this kind of content in the future?  Of course!  But this version is pretty goddamn good.  Scorsese’s still got it at 81 years old.  What a miracle.

MAESTRO

DIRECTED BY: Bradley Cooper

WRITTEN BY: Bradley Cooper, Josh Singer

STARRING: Bradley Cooper, Carey Mulligan, Maya Hawke, Matt Bomer, Sarah Silverman

ALSO NOMINATED FOR: Best Actor (Bradley Cooper), Best Actress (Carey Mulligan), Best Original Screenplay (Bradley Cooper and Josh Singer), Best Cinematography (Matthew Libatique), Best Makeup and Hairstyling (Kau Hiro, Kay Gerogiou and Lori McCoy-Bell), Best Sound (Steven A. Morrow, Richard King, Jason Ruder, Tom Ozanich, and Dean Zupancic)

There’s exactly one scene where MAESTRO functions as intended, where the movie’s actual subject successfully transforms into its intended subject.  We watch Leonard Bernstein teach a conducting class, walking an aspiring student through a fermata he is struggling to transition his orchestra out of.  Bradley Cooper as Bernstein is easygoing, warm, knowledgeable, direct but not mean.  Most crucially, you actually learn something about music!  The student’s trouble is audible, and Bernstein’s solution is clear even to those who don’t know the first thing about classical music.  It’s actually quite wonderful.

Naturally, we then cut to Bernstein dancing with this student in a club as Tears for Fears blares on the soundtrack.  The movie ends about ninety seconds later.  Thanks for nothing, MAESTRO.

Yeah, I fucking hated this.  Despite all my efforts to keep my biases in check, I suspected that this was going to happen; it’s the lone Best Picture nominee that feels perfunctory, like it got in simply by checking all the right boxes on a list (even the “Holocaust” nominee this year feels different from others of its ilk).  It’s a biopic with a beloved actor desperate for an Academy Award that touches on themes such as art, cancer, being gay, and being an asshole.  What’s not to love?

I don’t mean to, nor even really want, to speak ill of either Bernstein or Cooper.  Bernstein is one of the great mythic figures of the twentieth century, whose mind (like all the great ones) was a series of contradictions.  Even after a bad time at the movies, I’m eager to re-engage with his work and dig into his life.  And I harbor no true hate for my man Brad!  I’ve liked him for over twenty years now, going all the way back to his time on Alias. (remember Alias?)  I think he has an eye for direction, and I even think the screenplay he co-wrote here is really onto something.  There are a ton of rich themes permeating the story of the Leonard Bernstein-Felicia Montealegre marriage.  Having to share your life and trust with a man who can seldom be himself, a man who has the very soul of music flowing through him, one of the true artists to have ever lived, yet can’t seem to truly connect with many around him….there’s a lot there.

But there’s no room for MAESTRO to really engage with any of those things, outside of lip service.  Because Cooper’s quixotic search for a Best Actor trophy has taken all the oxygen.  Look how much he’s acting here!  He’s acting his ass off!  Holy fuck, he doesn’t even look like Bradley Cooper (because he’s in prosthetics and makeup the entire time)!  How is doing it?  All the while, Carey Mulligan is right beside him doing twice the work with half the effort.

Never mind other things that stuck in my craw: the arbitrary usage of black-and-white for the first forty-five minutes, the even more-arbitrary usage of Bernstein’s music throughout, the fact that you don’t even get much of a sense of why he was special, outside of people constantly saying he is.  Part of me just wants Bradley Cooper to just get his stupid Oscar so he can rid himself of the same cognitive disease that is currently afflicting Amy Adams and threatened to claim Leonardo DiCaprio.  Actually, that reminds me: if Cooper loses this weekend, how do you think he feels about raw animal meat?

OPPENHEIMER

DIRECTED BY: Christopher Nolan

WRITTEN BY: Christopher Nolan

STARRING: Cillian Murphy, Emily Blunt, Matt Damon, Robert Downey Jr., Florence Pugh, Josh Hartnett

ALSO NOMINATED FOR: Best Actor (Cillian Murphy), Best Director (Christopher Nolan), Best Supporting Actress (Emily Blunt), Best Supporting Actor (Robert Downey Jr.), Best Adapted Screenplay (Christopher Nolan), Best Original Score (Ludwig Goransson), Best Cinematography (Hoyte van Hoytema), Best Production Design (Ruth De Jong, Claire Kaufman), Best Costume Design (Ellen Mirojnick), Best Makeup and Hairstyling (Luisa Abel), Best Film Editing (Jennifer Lame), Best Sound (Gary Rizzo, Richard King, Willie D. Burton and Kevin O’Connell)

I struggle with Christopher Nolan.

This is not a struggle I take lightly.  I want very desperately to be a full-fledged fan of his work.  His movies are literate, exciting, and almost uniformly well-cast.  He has a love for the integrity of both the act of making films as well as watching them, almost to a fault.  He as a man is not nearly as pretentious as his reputation often portends; a quick review of his favorite films reveals a palette that leans grand, meticulous and popular.  I’m fairly certain most people have heard of a majority of the films he loves.  He’s not that esoteric!  This is not a bad thing at all!  It’s imperative there be a high-level filmmaker that is accessible on this level.

I just…don’t ever get that jazzed about his actual movies.  There was only one time I ever felt like I was floating on air after walking out of a theater screening a Nolan film and that was THE DARK KNIGHT and, even then, it was likely the hype talking (I was with a group of friends and had gone out of town in order to see it in IMAX.  Pretty serious stuff).  I never felt that way about the Batman sequel ever again.

For all the other Nolan films post-MEMENTO, I find myself just saying, “it was good, I really did like it” over and over, usually as a closer after spending a couple minutes talking about what I didn’t like about it.

So it goes with OPPENHEIMER, a movie that is frequently thrilling and haunting; how could it not be, given the subject matter.  It looks gorgeous, and shares a similar “Cavalcade of Stars” quality to its supporting cast as KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON.  It has its moments of tension, especially impressive when considering most people know where this is all going.  The Trinity test sequence is pretty gripping, even when you know nobody goes up in flames as a result of it.

It’s also a somewhat misunderstood movie.  Contrary to some people’s hand-wringing about it, the movie doesn’t come close to providing a loving portrayal of its titular subject matter; yes, it shows him wrestling with the unique guilt of following your natural passion all the way to creating the ultimate doomsday device.  But depicting guilt isn’t the same thing as asking us to sympathize.  A character in the movie even says this directly to him, albeit in relation to a different topic: “you don’t get to commit sin and then ask us to all feel sorry for you when there are consequences”.  And for those who thought it would have been more respectful to Japanese culture to show the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki getting annihilated by a bomb, let’s just say we disagree.

On the other hand, OPPENHEIMER doesn’t wind up feeling like the whole of its parts.  In particular, I feel like Robert Downey Jr.’s role as Lewis Strauss is overly complicated.  His perspective in the film is peppered throughout the film in black and white, much like the bits of Guy Pearce narrative in MEMENTO.  I suspect (although do not know for sure) that this was broken up in order to keep the last hour of the movie from being bogged down in a lot of hearings and interviews and talks of security clearance revocations.  However, given that the bomb gets dropped right around the end of hour two, guess what ends up happening?  It’s unclear to me if this aspect of the story added much to the movie’s overall power at all.

Is it Nolan’s best work?  It’s possible.  It was certainly fortuitous to become part of the summer’s biggest phenomenon, as it likely pushed a different type of audience towards it; it’s possible this is the first “movie for adults” a lot of younger folks had the opportunity to see.  It’s an important moment in one’s life!  I just wish the movie had been more streamlined (note: this isn’t the same as saying it’s too long).

OPPENHEIMER was good, I really did like it.  It was.  Really!  I did.  Seriously.

PAST LIVES

DIRECTED BY: Celine Song

WRITTEN BY: Celine Song

STARRING: Greta Lee, Teo Yoo, John Magaro

ALSO NOMINATED FOR: Best Original Screenplay (Celine Song)

Having grown up in the era of the “sweet protagonist wants nothing more than to get with the free-wheeling girl of his dreams, if only she weren’t engaged to the biggest asshole on the planet” movie (see: THERE’S SOMETHING ABOUT MARY and THE WEDDING SINGER, to name just two), I often wondered if the formula would benefit from some rejiggering.  What if, as so often in life, the other guy was actually a nice normal guy, and our two leads realize some things just aren’t meant to be?

Well, I finally got it with PAST LIVES, and it turns out it’s fucking devastating.

The one movie of the ten that feels like it could easily translate to the stage, PAST LIVES is just a sweet, melancholy meditation on the seemingly-little connections we make as we move around this planet that turn out to become lifelong “what if”s.  Effortlessly romantic, the story of Nora (Lee) and Hae Sung (Yoo) is told more or less in three parts: their fun courtship as twelve-year olds in Korea, their reconnection over Skype in their mid-twenties, and their in-person meetup in New York in their thirties.  She’s married now, and settled in a country and city she’s calling her own.  To Hae Sung’s devastation, her white husband (Magaro) is a nice, supportive man (and, to the movie’s immense credit, a fully realized human being).

The honest concept of life being a train ride, with an infinite number of tracks it could possibly go on, but with the subsequent sacrifice of the ones you don’t follow…it’s a difficult one.  Life rarely places you where you imagined it, which doesn’t make reality bad or unpreferable.  But we’re prone to wondering..what if one little thing had gone differently.  Would I be happier?  Would I be where I’m magically supposed to be?  It’s why the movie’s concept of the “past lives” (specially, the idea of in-yun) is so potent and so sweet and so heartbreaking, especially when Hae Sung approaches the concept in a completely different light.  

A small little movie that seems like kind of an Oscars afterthought, if I’m being honest (it only has two nominations), I still admire it for its honest portrayal of complex emotions that I’m willing to bet are very universal, regardless of one’s culture.  

POOR THINGS

DIRECTED BY: Yorgos Lanthimos

WRITTEN BY: Tony McNamara

STARRING: Emma Stone, Mark Ruffalo, Willem Dafoe, Ramy Youssef, Christopher Abbott, Jerrod Carmichael

ALSO NOMINATED FOR: Best Director (Yorgos Lanthimos), Best Actress (Emma Stone), Best Supporting Actor (Mark Ruffalo), Best Adapted Screenplay (Tony McNamara), Best Original Score (Jerskin Fendrix), Best Production Design (James Price, Shonda Heath & Zsuzsa Mihalek), Best Cinematography (Robbie Ryan), Best Makeup and Hairstyling (Nadia Stacey, Mark Coulier, and Josh Weston), Best Costume Design (Holly Waddington), Best Film Editing (Yorgos Mavropsaridis)

It is here that I will provide my one and only real hot take prediction regarding tomorrow night: I have this gut feeling that Emma Stone is going to win Best Actress over Lily Gladstone, if only because that would be the outcome most perfectly calibrated to cause the biggest shitstorm on Monday morning.

Remember, everybody, “Best ____” on Oscar night usually means “Most ____”.  And it is undeniable Emma Stone is doing the most acting, especially when compared against the way more understated performance from Gladstone in KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON.  Look at her walking around funny and making little animal sounds!  She’s really going for it!  When you also consider that this year’s Oscars isn’t predicted to have a bunch of other surprise winners or losers, and also that Stone has won it before and the last time she won, she also managed to be tangentially connected to a bigger controversy….it’s all just too perfect.  I feel fairly strongly about this.

That aside, I actually loved POOR THINGS, and I was a little concerned that I wasn’t going to.  It maybe shouldn’t have been that much of a surprise; I loved THE FAVORITE, although the enduring memory from that was an all-time Olivia Colman performance more than anything else.  I’m not typically a fan of the type of whimsical hyper-stylization that Lanthimos likes to indulge in, as I kinda find it to be a crutch to obscure an inability to tell a narrative.  But POOR THINGS’s story-telling remains crystal clear, even if I had trouble parsing out the meaning of every detail (why was Dafoe burping up bubbles, exactly?).  People seem split on Ruffalo in this, but I actually really enjoyed seeing him go full cartoon character after spending the last ten years playing a theoretical one over in the MCU.  And despite my sort-of swipe at her earlier, I really do think Emma Stone is good in this pseudo-riff on the story of Frankenstein’s monster.  Her original talents as a comic performer (a muscle I feel she gets to flex less and less as time goes on) especially come into play here.

It also has as much on its mind in regards to the way men sexualize and infantilize women as BARBIE does, making the two movies a weirdly perfect double feature.  Sure, POOR THINGS depicts four thousand times as much fornicating (a fact that, admittedly, some critics point to as a undercut of the movie’s feminist ambitions), but nevertheless, it points to an interesting undercurrent of popular themes in Hollywood nowadays.  And the relative success of both with audiences suggests an undercurrent of wanting to see those themes explored.  It’s kinda cool!

THE ZONE OF INTEREST

DIRECTED BY: Jonathan Glazer

WRITTEN BY: Jonathan Glazer

STARRING: Christian Friedel, Sandra Huller

ALSO NOMINATED FOR: Best Director (Jonathan Glazer), Best Adapted Screenplay (Jonathan Glazer), Best International Feature Film, Best Sound (Tarn Willers, Johnnie Burn)

A profoundly difficult movie to talk about, especially when it’s not guaranteed that the person you’re speaking to has seen it or not.  I highly suspect THE ZONE OF INTEREST is even more of a chilling gut punch if you manage to walk into it completely cold.  If you don’t know what its thing is, I recommend ceasing reading further and just go see it, though it should be warned: it’s not a date night movie.

For those who have seen it, or at least now what it’s about…what is there to say?  It’s a Holocaust movie that winds up being the most chilling and effective because of its refusal to actually depict the Holocaust.  It mostly shows us team meetings, reveals of blueprints, of domestic squabbles between our primary German family, living right next door to the infamous Auschwitz death camp.  Of work transfers.  Promotions.  Evil, as it turns out, lives within bureaucracy and structure. 

THE ZONE OF INTEREST strips itself of any sort of narrative comforts we’re used to when it comes to mainstream depictions of the Holocaust.  There are no arcs to speak of, no swelling moments of hope and triumph in the face of human atrocity.  It’s almost boring, at least if it weren’t for the horrifying sound design that feels specifically calculated to trigger a panic attack within you.  You quickly become hyper-vigilant of any variants in noise; is that thumping coming from the house or next door?  The question as to whether this is something that can sustain interest for more than a few minutes is a fair one (and there are some people who have made it clear that this was actually more of a bore than anything else), but it’s hard not to look at this as perhaps the only true Holocaust movie.  Evil has no three-act structure.  For most, it’s just going to work.

The Delightful World of Jacques Tati: Cleaning Out My Criterion Closet

Hello!  This is the first in what will likely be a very occasional series where I take the opportunity to finally go through the various Criterion box sets I have sitting around.  Some of them I bought for myself in the middle of a series of “what does anything matter anyway” shopping sprees back in 2021.  A couple of them I believe were provided to me as a Christmas present.  One I think might have just appeared in my home one day?  Regardless of how they got here, I figured they would each eventually make for some good writin’ content.  At least here’s hoping.

Here we go with the first official entry of the “Cleaning Out My Criterion Closet” series: The Complete Jacques Tati!

(I’m open to suggestions on the series name.)

Let me start with this: I find Jacques Tati delightful.  

His work pushes a lot of my creative buttons, some of which I didn’t know I even had.  His movies are, to a one, lush and bright and colorful and playful, qualities that are always going to win points with me.  Also, I didn’t realize this about myself, but I find Tati’s specific style of quiet observational social satire to be very comforting and warm, especially since it manages to so often be eerily prescient.  On top of everything else, I find myself strangely fascinated with directors who managed to carve out their place in film history with a relatively brief filmography.  Although he has also starred in, written and directed a handful of shorts, Tati’s feature-length directorial count is just six (five, depending on how one wishes to categorize his last movie, 1974’s PARADE).

So, yes, when finally working my way through the Complete Jacques Tati box set I bought myself from Criterion almost three years ago, I found myself smiling often and delighted quite a bit.  Imagine my surprise, then, to find that Tati is a sneakily polarizing filmmaker, at least if the healthy sampling of various Letterboxd reviews, some from mutuals, are anything to go off of.

I should remind everybody that, of course, the Letterboxd app is the first, last and only source for objective truth in film criticism.  All joking aside, plenty of praise is still heaped on Jacques Tati anyway, even by those that don’t profess to get him, and nobody seems to really argue his credentials, either as a visual artist or as a film auteur.  

But a lot of people don’t think he’s all that funny.

It is the singular thing that I see holding people back from really embracing Tati’s filmography.  Going back to Letterboxd, one generally-positive review of MONSIEUR HULOT’S HOLIDAY describes the humor of the film as hitting him “with all the comic force of a gentle breeze and the energy of an afternoon nap”.  A two-and-a-half review of JOUR DE FETE simply reads “it may be time for me to finally accept that tati is not for me”.

To be clear, there’s not a single thing wrong with feeling this way, and it doesn’t invalidate anybody’s film taste to do so; those two particular reviews come from folks whose writing and style of critique I genuinely love and aspire to one day live up to.  But I keep coming back to the question of why certain styles of humor hit with some people and others don’t.  It’s one of those grand questions of being alive to me, roughly equivalent to “Why are we here?” or “Why does God allow people to suffer?” or “Why does my headphone cord always manage to find the perfect corner or edge to get stuck on in order to suddenly yank me backwards?”  The question of how an individual's sense of humor works is ultimately unanswerable, but it feels like a query of vital importance regardless.

I’d be lying if I didn’t have this all in the back of my mind as I went through Tati’s films and shorts over the past couple of months, almost all of them for the first time.  Admittedly, there were periods where I sort of agreed with those who said his style doesn’t click for them.  Then again, there were moments when I couldn’t believe anybody could watch these movies without a big, fat, permanent smile on their faces the whole time.

As it turns out, Jacques Tati is more a state of mind than anything else, and adjusting to his style is half of the fun, the “aha” moment when you realize he is clicking for you.  And it is a singular, practically peerless style, one worth trying to break down to figure out…

….why is Jacques Tati funny for some, and not for others?

———

My first encounter with Tati was only a couple of years ago.

In December 2021, MON ONCLE was the weekly selection for the Arroyo Film Club, a…uh, film club I was (and am!) a member of.  I jumped into Tti’s third feature film relatively cold.  The only things I really knew about it were that a) it was critically acclaimed and b) it was part of a series of loosely connected movies by Jacques Tati starring a character named Monsieur Hulot.  Hulot had a signature look (gray trench coat, hat and a pipe of comical length) and was known for strolling through various social situations that often featured displays of new technology, in this case a modern “house of the future”.  Sounds fun!  I imagined something like Mr. Magoo, a movie filled with humorous set pieces with that old-fashioned “setup, complication, payoff” formula that made many frantic comedies of the 20th century so satisfying.  Imagine all the different contraptions inside that house he would have to tackle and wrangle!  

For those who have seen MON ONCLE, you know that it’s….not really that.  I mean, it’s not not that; it’s not that it doesn’t have good old-fashioned gags.  One of the biggest laughs in the movie is a scene where Hulot starts playing around with the kitchen glassware inside the home of his wealthy sister and brother-in-law.  His wonder and delight in a jug that bounces off the floor is quickly followed by his harsh discovery of a matching tumbler that….doesn’t.  And it is a movie that is mostly made up of comic setpieces that develop a joke all the way through to its logical conclusion; the rubber hose factory is proof enough of that.  It was just the light, patient way in which Tati did it all that threw me off.  His particular sense of humor turned out to be something way more subtle than I was used to.  

For one, it wasn’t a movie that was all that concerned with getting up close and personal with its characters; every shot felt just a little distant, almost literally observational, like I was watching something unfold across the street.  It sounds like nothing more than a simple style choice, but when you reflect back on your favorite comedies, most of them (if not all) rely on close-ups, all the better to accentuate and highlight a given joke, situation or punchline.  Reaction shots are an essential tool in a comedian’s belt.  Not for Tati.  He is much more interested in watching his jokes unfold from afar, almost by accident.  It takes some time to adjust to that!

For two, considering it’s a movie categorized as a “Monsieur Hulot” adventure, he didn’t seem to be the primary focus of MON ONCLE (especially surprising given that he is the titular oncle).  When he is, he’s not always the main driver of the action.  More often, things happen around him: the things he observes in the modern home of his sister and brother-in-law, the light mischief he allows his nephew to get away with, the ridiculous path he must take through his building in order to reach his room.  When things do happen, he barely seems bothered by them.  It was all a much more detached experience than I had ever expected from a bright and colorful French comedy from the 50’s created by a man with a background in clown and mime.  

I definitely liked it.  But as it became my turn to discuss it during the club’s meeting/Zoom session, I couldn’t focus on anything beyond MON ONCLE just…not being what I expected.  It was hard for me to evaluate it on its own terms just because what it was was so different to me.  I was expecting to go to a concert and watch a band play a big, bright march.  What I got was a light, but slightly high-tempo, waltz.

I suspect, and can only suspect, that this might be a similar barrier to entry for others trying to experience Tati for the first time.  It’s not really a question of his movies just being too damn smart for cretins to truly understand (god, do I hate those kinds of arguments), but it is a question of its style of humor being so singular that it’s hard to really process the first time around.  And if it was that discombobulating the first time, why would you go back for a second try?  Frankly, if the box set wasn’t already sitting there daring me to do something with it, I probably wouldn’t have dipped back in.  MON ONCLE wasn’t what I was initially expecting, which can only be processed as disappointment.

Guys and gals, I’m telling you, give Tati another try if you haven’t already.  Watching MON ONCLE a second time, it revealed itself to be a masterpiece.  Because once you can adjust to how he saw the world, his work is quite rich. I really hesitate to call his movies a “vibe” because, either positive or negative, aren’t all movies a “vibe”?  What exactly would a “non-vibe” movie be?  But his best work hits this great cross section of “pleasant” in terms of appearance and “prescient” in terms of content, and it’s genuinely difficult to identify any other movies quite like them.  

What else can you call that but a vibe?  

But like all vibes, they’re only valuable when you can feel them for yourself.  Without that, there’s not much else to hold onto.  But if you’ve watched a few Tatis and you just don’t find yourself loving them, take a little time and revisit.  I’m proof positive that it can make a difference.

After you do that, I recommend doing what I did and start working your way through his relatively brief filmography in order and seeing what emerges.  For me, I started realizing the style choices that once made MON ONCLE vaguely impenetrable to me are actually the precise elements that make him so damn delightful.

———

Something to keep in mind about Jacque Tati’s films is that they really are not the “belly laughs, roll on the floor in fits” kind of comedy, at least not to me in the present day.  Maybe its postwar French audience were in hysterics, but I guess we’ll never know, because they’re presumably all dead.

Regardless, people who complain that his style of humor is just too light to be taken in aren't exactly completely off base or anything.  The jokes on display are observational, almost detached, and Tati applies this method of comedy consistently throughout his filmography, especially the four Hulot films.  He casts himself as the presumably central character (either Hulot or, in 1949’s JOUR DE FETE, Francois the Postman), but then sort of wanders in and out of the narrative at will.  His movies are purposely constructed to feel loose even when, in actuality, they’re constructed with an obsessive eye for detail that made him one of the purest auteurs in all of film (it’s also what ended up cutting his directorial career short, but we’ll get there).  Nothing about his movies are forceful in any way; you are trusted to arrive at the conclusions he’s trying to draw you towards, but they don’t get mad at you if you don’t.

The idea of the detached oblivious protagonist can be found even from his first starring role, in a short entitled “Soigne Ton Gauche!” (Watch Your Left!).  There, he plays a farmer who gets the opportunity to be a boxer.  He takes it with such aplomb, and enters his own little world so quickly, that it seems to be lost on him that he’s very much in the process of getting his ass beat by the professional fighter he’s been set up to fail against.  His first Hulot feature, MONSIEUR HULOT’S HOLIDAY*, is made with the same light touch, as the titular character makes his film debut attempting to relax at a seaside resort.  He makes his entrance in the main hall by innocently leaving the door open, allowing a gust of wind to hit his fellow vacationers; one man’s mustache begins to flap.

*MONSIEUR HULOT’S HOLIDAY is perhaps the one Tati movie that would benefit from a rewatch for me.  I had a pleasant enough time with it, but compared to the next two Hulot movies, it didn’t move me as much.  I also opted for the original cut, which runs about 100 minutes.  I have to wonder if Tati knew what he was doing when he eventually went back in 1978 and recut it to a much tighter 86.  I guess I’ll let you know.

What Jacques Tati seemed to be the most preoccupied with in his art, and what doesn’t really start coming to focus until MON ONCLE, is the increasing reliance on technology into a no-longer-simple postwar world.  It’s never usually set up as a “man vs. machine” battle of wits; more often, we see people interact with new technologies or modern furnishings in order to evoke an ironic “isn’t this silly?” response.  Shots of a television broadcast playing video of Apollo 11 shooting into the stars juxtaposed against a car breaking down on a city freeway.  A dog accidentally triggers an automatic garage door sensor, locking the home owners inside.  Two steps forward, two steps back.  That sort of thing.    

As you might have noticed, the issue with some of his style and observations is that, frankly, they’re so dead-on and prophetic that they don’t even register as jokes in the twenty-first century.  My go-to example: one of the big signifiers of “modernity” at Villa Arpel in MON ONCLE is a garden filled with rocks and a garish (if admittedly playful) fish-shaped water sculpture.  Now, one quick walk around my neighborhood here will show the “front lawn filled with rocks” aesthetic is still a popular style choice, at least where I’m at in central California, and it looks just as odd in real life as it does in MON ONCLE.  

But that’s my point.  It’s not really a joke, now, is it?  A set dressing detail that would likely have seemed exaggerated in 1958 France now just seems like what a nice, modern house looks like in the here and now.  It’s not worth laughing at.  It’s the same as the camper car at the center of 1971’s TRAFIC, a vehicle that comes equipped with everything one needs to rough it in the great outdoors: a water line, a small table and accompanying chairs, a television set.  This is presented as absurd, but it now just seems like a prototype for your average RV.

To view it one way, it’s exactly why Tati’s movies are so thrilling.  His ruminations on our reliance on technology were extremely accurate!  But to view it another way, it’s why his movies can feel so light and so inconsequential.  

What I don’t think anybody can deny is how playful his movies are.  Sets that appear to be constructed one way suddenly collapse to reveal themselves.  Recurring jokes take on a slightly different rhythm, almost as if their creator is aware of you adjusting.  To visit Villa Arpel one more time, I’ll never forget the night-time scene where, as Hulot attempts to get through the gate, the house suddenly appears to have eyes.  Yes, it’s clearly two people in the window, their silhouettes serving as the pupils, but the way they follow Hulot around from afar….it’s simple magic.  How could you not be delighted?

Speaking of being playful, let’s talk a little PLAYTIME.

———

Jacques Tati’s fourth feature film PLAYTIME is probably his biggest feat and my personal favorite of his.  Naturally, it’s the movie that basically ruined him.

It’s a movie told more or less in two parts.  As per Tati norms, the plot is pretty simple, no more than a starting point; this time, Hulot must go into the city in order to attend a meeting.  The first part of PLAYTIME is Hulot’s arrival and introduction to “modern” Paris, a land of glass and concrete where seemingly every building is nothing more than a labored labyrinth built to disconnect its inhabitants.  What was most striking about this section of the film, especially coming off of MON ONCLE, one of the most lush and colorful movies I’ve ever seen, was watching Tati suddenly experiment with a monochromatic tone.  Although ever vibrant, his conception of Paris is one of metallic and uninviting grays.

If PLAYTIME sounds cynical, I’m not certain that’s the goal.  Its primary thesis, at least in the beginning, is that modern city life is divisive by its very nature, even as we all find ourselves crammed into the same space.  A moment I keep thinking about is an overhead shot of an office manager walking over to a cubicle in order to pick up a phone and call another worker sitting in another cubicle across the room.  Another moment is a striking sequence of a modern (and very upscale) apartment building, where everyone seems to be watching the same boxing match, but completely sequestered by thick walls.  They’re unified, yet separate  As usual, Tati doesn’t punctuate any of this.  He just holds the shot long enough for you to arrive at the point on your own, then moves along.

The second half of PLAYTIME, on the other hand, is maybe Tati at his very finest, something that could only be referred to as “the restaurant sequence”, if it’s indeed possible for a singular sequence to take up an hour of runtime.  We sit in a fancy, happening restaurant in Paris (The Royal Garden) just as it begins to open its doors to patrons.  As often happens, things don’t go according to plan.  Pushy diners want to change tables.  Dishes sell out.  Doors get destroyed.  The restaurant begins to run past capacity. 

It’s a thrilling sequence for a plethora of reasons, the first of which is the illusion of it occurring in real time.  It begins with the restaurant opening up for dinner service and its first early-bird diners coming in.  It ends with its drunken patrons stumbling out to the street just in time for the morning cock to crow.  In between, we watch as the internal traffic ebbs and flows, as characters we saw earlier mix and intertwine, as dishes run out, as glass gets destroyed, as drunkards get expelled only to return.  By the time it’s all over, you genuinely feel like you’ve been part of the waitstaff all night.

Second, if you thought Tati was going to hang out in a gray world for too long….bitch, you thought.  It’s not the Arpel house, but the set of The Royal Garden is so satisfying to look at and take in that you’d swear you’d want to live there (or at least take a date to).  It’s a beautiful piece of meticulous scenery, made all the more delightful when it’s revealed that pieces of it have been explicitly designed to get destroyed.

There’s just ... a music to the second half of PLAYTIME  Just like all great compositions, it sets its rhythm just long enough for you to get used to it, and then bam a tempo change occurs, or a sustained note you had previously forgotten was even still playing gets resolved.  As mentioned earlier, the glass front door shatters and breaks.  Shit, now what?  Later, after we have just enough time to forget about it entirely, the solution is revealed: the doorman holds the brass handle and continues to let people in and out as if the door was still functioning.  Play time, indeed.

PLAYTIME is perhaps not an intuitive movie; it was not a success upon its release, and it severely stifled Tati’s career.  Why didn’t it do better?  For starters, Hulot as a character is even more hands-off than in previous entries, which may have alienated audiences, both then and now.  Compared to MON ONCLE, Hulot seems to be a supporting character in his own movie.  He disappears for large stretches, the screen time deferred to an American tourist just as lost and in awe of Paris as Hulot himself.  This was an intentional choice, meant as a compromise between art and commerce; Tati had started to become bored of the Hulot character, yet his movies would lose a sellable angle without him.  Thus, PLAYTIME is designed to make Hulot mostly invisible.

Alternatively, PLAYTIME could maybe never have been successful enough to make back its money.  The shoot just went on for too long, and cost too much to have ever been viable.  The entire movie is essentially one big massive, multifaceted, tactile set (dubbed “Tativille”, which took half a year to construct alone, from September 1964 to March 1965).  To actually shoot the damn thing took them from April 1965 to October 1966 (!).  The money frequently ran out, with heavy reliance on government grants to get the project done.  Tati’s persistent, obsessive need for control over every detail of the world he constructed, the creative spark that makes his movies so unique, ended up being what wound his career down.

And yet.  The result is a movie that exists in a world you desperately want to explore.  Imagine if “Tativille” still existed?  You’re telling me you wouldn’t pluck down money for tickets to have your own playtime in there?  Imagine actually being able to hang out and eat and dance in The Royal Garden?  Tell me you don’t wish it still existed?  But it doesn’t, at least not in our world.  On the other hand, it can always be revisited through PLAYTIME.  And if nothing else, the movie should be commended for that, the living testament and masterpiece of one of the purest auteurs the medium ever bore witness to.  

Why am I waxing on about it so much?  Because I think it’s my favorite of his main six, the one that best exemplifies his unique form of genius.  Yet, I think it’s a difficult one to just jump into.  It’s not where I’d tell a novice to start their journey, but I would tell folks who watched it once and found themselves on the outside of it to give it another try.

Tati’s filmography does feel like it fizzles out a tad after PLAYTIME.  His follow-up feature, 1971’s TRAFIC, is fine and full of imagination, and I admit to being pretty excited when it first began (Tati taking on commuting?  Let’s fucking go!), but it feels like a movie whose air has been taken out of it.  The main comic point is seen (as man starts to aim ever more towards space and stars, it’s never been more difficult to navigate the pathways here on Earth), but there’s an unusual lack of focus to it that made it meander a little too much for me.  Perhaps on that magic rewatch, I’ll find my way in.

Then there’s 1974’s PARADE, a movie that seems to have split sentiments amongst cinephiles, as well as Tati fans.  Although it’s included in the Criterion box set as his sixth and final feature, some people don’t seem to include it in the official count, referring to TRAFIC as his final movie.  It’s an understandable argument.  PARADE is a non-narrative feature, shot on video and made for television, that documents a performance of Tati’s circus troupe.  I’d hesitate to call it a strict documentary; there are too many small flourishes to call it an objective observation (besides the closing shot of children picking up the show’s instruments and beginning to perform magic themselves, there’s a lot of audience interaction and interruptions throughout the movie that smell of predetermined set-up, unless Dutch audience members really get down like that).  Regardless, it really is mostly just a series of short segments.  There’s some miming, there’s a lot of juggling and acrobatics, there’s some singing, there’s, like, a psychedelic rock performance?

And, look, at a distance, I didn’t really dig PARADE either.  Even at ninety minutes, it’s a little too long for what it is, and feels too much like a lost PBS program from the 70’s, the kind of thing that might have been rerun during the early days of Nickelodeon.  One wonders if paring it down to its best forty-five minutes and keeping it within the confines of a TV feature might have done wonders to endear it to its audience.  Were I to watch it out of context (I cannot imagine what someone would make of this were this the only Tati they’d ever seen), I don’t think I would have gotten it at all.  It feels too out of place, too un-indicative of what made Tati’s masterpieces so endearing.

But…I can’t fully dismiss PARADE, either.  Maybe it was the opportunity to see Tati’s amazing physicality on full display, even at a more advanced age, in a way he didn’t get to do as much as Hulot.  Maybe it’s because I had watched his earlier shorts where he played around like this a little more.  Maybe it was the accidental bittersweet nature of realizing his Hulot quadrilogy was truly bookended by movies and shorts that allowed him to be a clown.

All I know is, despite everything, by the end of PARADE, I was still sitting there with a smile on my face, still delighted, even in a much lesser work.

What can I say?  That’s the power of Jacques Tati.  Even at his worst, you can’t help but smile.

I Watched Every Super Bowl Halftime Show.

I love the Super Bowl.

I shouldn’t. I don’t know the sport of football intimately. I don’t really have a favorite team. But I actually think this plays in my favor. Imagine your ride-or-die squad playing in the Super Bowl? How would you ever be able to relax? I wouldn’t be able to settle my nerves until the game was over, and by then, you would have completely missed all the dumb, wonderful stuff that makes up a Super Bowl broadcast.

The reasons I love it are numerous: for one, it’s one of the last things (perhaps the sole remaining) that we as a country experience together. People have been tuning out of the Oscars, we barely vote, and nightly television has become ever splintered. But seemingly everyone checks out the Super Bowl in some capacity or another, even if they can’t stand it.

This brings me to the second reason I love the day: the broadcast has largely grown to accommodate all these different crowds. The football game itself is usually high-level, so fans of the sport are set. For the stoners and less discriminating, there are the endless assault of star-studded commercials that are never, and really have never, been funny even by accident. And for the non-football crowd, there’s that little concert that occurs halfway through.

Ah, yes, the halftime show. The oft parodied, sometimes maligned, but always discussed halftime show. For most of our waking lifetimes, this has been the spot where a musical artist puts on a show, sometimes with a bevy of special guests and sometimes not, and with frequent success! If nothing else, it allows for generations to discuss what type of music and performance is legitimate and interesting and which ones are not. Isn’t talking to people fun?

However, the halftime show was not always this way. The concert vibe is actually a fairly recent development that wasn’t really committed to until the 21st century. For the first three decades of the Super Bowl’s existence, there was a throw-shit-against-the-wall-and-see-what-sticks quality to its halftime entertainment. For years, it was just local college marching bands. The 80’s gave us floats and Up With People. Disney even tried their hand at producing some halftime synergy. Some were fun, while many, many, many were campy, memorable disasters.

So…I thought it’d be fun to work our way through them and see how the show evolved. What will we learn? Probably nothing, outside of the value and scarcity of one’s time. But hopefully it’ll be interesting anyway. Let’s find out!

(Please note that there are a handful that are essentially lost media, and they will be marked in red as applicable.)

Super Bowl I - January 15, 1967 (Kansas City Chiefs vs. Green Bay Packers)

University of Arizona Symphonic Marching Band (feat. Grambling State University Marching Band, Al Hirt, Anaheim High School Ana-Hi-Steppers Drill Team and Flag Girls)

Performed at Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, Los Angeles CA

As you might expect, the very first Super Bowl halftime show is fairly nondescript and, frankly, unrecognizable from the major star-studded productions we’re used to today.  As you also might expect, it would be best to gett used to this, as this is par for the course for quite some time.

In terms of production, it’s totally fine!  The broadcast is clearly still working out its kinks; the camera is top-down the whole time.  This makes sense considering a marching band’s big gimmick is the formation of shapes, but the camera is too far away, it’s not super dynamic (it’s basically just a static shot the entire time)...it's just not that fun of a watch.

Arizona’s marching band, though…fun show!  It’s about what you’d expect; the music  sticks to the classics; “The Sound of Music”, “The William Tell Overture”, and the like.  It took me a while to get used to the formations, but once I adjusted to what they were supposed to be, I found them quite impressive!  My two favorites were the Dixieland steam boat, and the two football players facing each other on opposite sides of the field.  It’s entertainment at its most simple (“ooh, shapes!”), but it’s at least well-executed.

I must say, though, the most memorable moment of the first halftime show was a depiction of an Old-West shootout, complete with actors shooting guns at each other like so many Wild Bill Hicocks.  Even better, a couple of band members jump in to break it up and become collateral damage.  Yes, a gun battle on the world’s biggest football stage, with innocent bystanders taken out.  Why they decided to do this is unclear; yet it guarantees the first Super Bowl halftime show will remain forever singular.

Super Bowl II - January 14, 1968 (Green Bay Packers vs. Oakland Raiders)

Grambling State University Marching Band 

Performed at Miami Orange Bowl, Miami FL

At the moment, this one appears to be lost media.  There’s not a ton of Super Bowl lost media, as most of the broadcasts exist in some form or another.  Alas, this one appears to be mostly gone; there’s allegedly not even a full copy in NFL Film’s possession.  If it’s any consolation, Halftime Show #2 doesn’t sound like it was the best watch; the broadcast was beset with technical difficulties and 80% of the country lost the video feed from the second half of the second quarter to three minutes into halftime.

Grambling did well as a supporting guest for Super Bowl I; I have to imagine they did just as well as the main headliner.  Alas, who knows?

Super Bowl III - January 12, 1969 (New York Jets vs. Baltimore Colts)

America Thanks (Florida A&M University Band)

Performed at Miami Orange Bowl, Miami FL

Now we’re talking!  Loses momentum in the second half as it devolves into more line formations, cool though they may be (an eagle flapping its wings is a special standout).  But it’s the presence of some big goofy costumes and a giant, possibly inflatable, horn o’plenty that implies a goofier (and more fun) future for this slot moving forward.

What I ultimately found charming about this, despite myself, is the sincerity in which it approaches its patriotism.  As a show, it doesn’t seem like it’s trying to score with anybody or prove a point.  It just wants to pay tribute to America! For better or worse, it seemed like something most people just did, even at the end of a turbulent and culturally revolutionary decade like the sixties.  Compare this to the way patriotism in sports has been weaponized in various ways and directions in the near-sixty years since, and the third halftime show is downright adorable.

Super Bowl IV - January 11, 1970 (Minnesota Vikings vs. Kansas City Chiefs)

Tribute to Mardi Gras (Southern University Marching Band, Marguerite Piazza, Doc Severinsen, Lairen & Tara, Al Hirt, Lionel Hampton, Carol Channing)

Performed at Tulane Stadium, New Orleans LA

The copy I had available wasn’t the best; it’s a slightly grainy black and white and the sound isn’t as crisp as one would hope.  But this is otherwise dripping with early 70’s goodness.  There’s even some creepy puppets and floats by the end!  Carol Channing holds the distinction of the first solo artists to appear to sing a song for a Super Bowl halftime show, although she didn’t feel like she was doing full-on “Carol Channing” shtick, so it doesn’t stick out as much as you would think.

Overall, this one is pretty fun: New Orleans jazz is a good style for these early iterations of the halftime shows to build around.  You just keep waiting for the broadcast quality to catch up to the growing ambitions of these productions.

Super Bowl V - January 17, 1971 (Baltimore Colts vs. Dallas Cowboys)

Southeast Missouri State Marching Band (Anita Bryant, Up With People)

Performed at Miami Orange Bowl, Miami FL

Pretty easily the best of the first initial five.  Southeast Missouri State’s Marching Band was actually fairly dazzling (not a term I thought I’d use in regards to a 70’s marching band routine, but here we are), with the most ambitious formation routines to date; loved the back and forth formations to create the words “Super Bowl”.  Anita Bryant, a singer I knew more for her, uh, social stances than I ever did as a performer, was sort of a mixed bag for me.  She has an intriguing low register in her voice, but I found the arrangement of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” to be too maudlin to be engaging for as long as it went on.

The real highlight, though, are the floats meant to represent the various regions the newly-merged NFL teams hail from.  They’re all fairly garish and not exactly great combo jobs; all of the California squads are represented by a little number with a giant Academy Award and a man with a camera.

Then, of course, there’s Up With People, a group you’ll be hearing a lot about before the end of this article.  Their specific brand of dorky earnestness still comes off as practically counter-culture when compared to something like America Thanks, but it’s hard to make something like “Someone Smiled At Me” and “Let All of the People In” sound like anything more than, presumably, “Age of Aquarius” B-sides.

Super Bowl VI - January 16, 1972 (Dallas Cowboys vs. Miami Dolphins)

Salute to Louis Armstrong (Ella Fitzgerald, Carol Channing, Al Hirt, USAFA Cadet Chorale, U.S. Marine Corps Drill Team)

Performed at Tulane Stadium, New Orleans LA

This halftime show also appears lost to time; a full game video exists, but with none of the pregame or halftime stuff thrown in.  There’s an eight minute sort-of-home-video that shows the Tyler Junior College Apache Belles and Band arriving to New Orleans, rehearsing and performing at the Supber Bowl.  It includes taped-off-the TV footage of the halftime show with stock music playing over it, so one can almost kinda get an idea of what the show would have been like.  I should mention that the stock music is going for “sweet, hazy nostalgic memory” over “Louis Armstrong trumpet”, so it’s in conflict with the show footage.  

Otherwise, though, I think this one isn’t eligible for fair evaluation.  It’s a shame, too: a glance at the topic (Louis had recently passed away) and the guest list makes it sound pretty fun.  The minimal footage we do have is fun.  The video is at least an interesting watch for its look into a meaningful moment for a group of young kids.  Other than that….

Super Bowl VII - January 14, 1973 (Miami Dolphins vs. Washington Redskins)

Happiness Is… (University of Michigan Marching Band, Woody Herman, Andy Williams)

Performed at Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, Los Angeles, CA

This one is unfortunately a little underwhelming.  Woody Herman rocks a mean clarinet, but the band feels a little uninspired.  The “NFL” formation has been done, and better. I kind of like the different helmet carts being driven around the field, I suppose.  Also, the theme of “Happiness is” is pure early 70’s poppycock, and is way looser of a theme than you might expect.  “Happiness is a fiesta and the bullfights!”  “Happiness is rooting for your favorite team!”  “Happiness is discovering America from coast to coast!”  Eh.  It’s just all the same stuff these acts have been doing for years already.  It all ends with Andy Williams singing “Marmalade, Molasses and Honey” followed by “People”.  Pass.

I do think it’s interesting that the only thing the halftime shows of this era are trying to promote is the idea of the NFL and its various teams as a result of the still-recent merger.  The only ones trying to get exposure here is the league itself.

Super Bowl VIII - January 13, 1974 (Minnesota Vikings vs. Miami Dolphins)

A Musical America (University of Texas Longhorn Band, w/Miss Texas 1973 Judy Mallett on fiddle)

Performed At Rice Stadium, Houston TX

Unfortunately, this one also appears to be missing forever. There really doesn’t appear to be an upload of it anywhere.  Oh, there’s a YouTube video that claims to be of the 1974 halftime show, but it really just looks like a promotional or home video of a Longhorn performance.  The most obvious thing that proves this isn’t the Super Bowl is that Judy Mallett never shows up on the advertised fiddle.  Although the first clue that this was a fraud was the announcement you hear near the beginning of the vid that tonight was ”Mom’s Night”.  Nothing wrong with a night for the moms, but even a dummy like me suspect this is the kind of promotion the Super Bowl wouldn’t have needed to utilize, even in these early years.  Although I do think this year’s Super Bowl should also be Bobblehead Night.

Super Bowl IX - January 12, 1975 (Pittsburgh Steelers vs. Minnesota Vikings)

Tribute to Duke Ellington (Mercer Ellington and Grambling State University Marching Bands)

Performed at Tulane Stadium, New Orleans LA

Juuuust enough footage is available (about seven minutes, or a little over half) to evaluate.  It’s perfectly fine, but it does feel like well-worn territory at this point.  I do find the folks in the comments of this particular YouTube video to be genuinely charming, with everyone expressing a collective desire for halftime shows to go back to the days when it used to be about the drilling, not just the dancing.  I genuinely love when people express a passion for things I have no frame of reference for.  However, this does explain why this leaves me a little cold: it’s just great drilling, and not much more.

Super Bowl X - January 18, 1976 (Dallas Cowboys vs. Pittsburgh Steelers)

200 Years and Just a Baby: A Tribute to America's Bicentennial (Up With People)

Performed at Miami Orange Bowl, Miami FL

Up With People!

The tenth halftime show is notable for being the first one to have a non-marching band as their headliner, although Up With People has enough love of lining themselves into formations to last three Super Bowl performances.

Look, it’s difficult to call this “good” by any objective measure.  I find myself both utterly captivated, but palpably horrified, by Up With People.  Their obsession with that dorky “clean” white 70’s sound, their relentless positivity cranked up so high it borders on sarcasm, the pastels….they’re so actively annoying that you actually have to give it up to them.
More than anything, this performance seems to mark a turning point.  It doesn’t have to just be marching bands, even if the material is still about the same that a marching band would do.  The shapes on the field, the “America!” theme, the great American songbook…it’s not exactly a departure from the current norm.  Oh, and the bicentennial theme is fascinating, if only because, again, it’s done with complete sincerity.  It’s not trying to go for “America uber alles” or “take that liebirals!”  It’s a celebration of how far the country had come and, admittedly, how far it had to go.  Oh, and it was a message delivered by Up With People.  In a year that included SNL and Taxi Driver, nothing apparently said the Spirit of 1976 more than Up With People.

Super Bowl XI - January 9, 1977 (Oakland Raiders vs. Minnesota Vikings)

It’s a Small World (Los Angeles Unified All-City Band w/the New Mouseketeers & Audience card stunt)

Performed at the Rose Bowl, Pasadena CA

Used as the hard launch for the New Mouseketeers a week before the premiere of the New Mickey Mouse Club, this really feels the most like an ad so far.  For the most part, it’s low on spectacle and high on good vibes.  The theme is “It’s a Small World”, so there’s a segment with dancers in different cultural attire, and everyone gathers around a small globe.  Its lessons on global intersectionality is mostly limited to waving around giant cloths of different colors.

I’ll give points to its one big trick in the finale: getting the entire sold out stadium involved in a giant color card flip, extending out the spectacle into the stands.  In a world where Disney can’t seem to bring together anything or anybody, they managed to unite the entire Rose Bowl in an impressive illusion.  Nice job, Mickey!

Look, I have a soft spot for the uncool during an event that is now all about the desperate need to be cool, but….I have my limits.  Too much fake high energy arm dancing, too much fakey bright singing….I actually all of this to be more aggravating than Up With People, but that might just be because that group has been body slammed by just about everybody for the entirety of my life.  Precious Disney was just as bad in the 1970’s.

However, if nothing else, it’s a first for the Super Bowl; it’s the first halftime show to be produced by The Walt Disney Company.  This one looks tame compared to others to come.

Super Bowl XII - January 15, 1978 (Dallas Cowboys vs. Denver Broncos) 

From Paris to Paris of America (Tyler Apache Belles Drill Team, The Apache Band, Pete Fountain, Al Hirt)

Performed at the Louisiana Superdome, New Orleans LA

This one also appears to be missing, although there is another fake upload titled Super Bowl XII Halftime Show that just ends up being some strange Orange Bowl halftime show featuring the Electrical Light Parade.

From the description, it feels like it might be well-trodden territory by this point.  Al Hirt makes a return to the Superdome.  Based off of other halftime videos, the Apache Belles Drill Team appear to be a kickline/flag-waving act.  And look, they’re great!  But it feels like we’re reaching a point where light spectacle is all the halftime shows are going for at this point.

Super Bowl XIII - January 21, 1979 (Pittsburgh Steelers vs. Dallas Cowboys)

Salute to Caribbean (Ken Hamilton, feat. various Caribbean bands, including Gramacks out of Dominica)

Performed at the Miami Orange Bowl, Miami FL

I actually really liked this one.  It’s exactly what it purports to be, a salute to the Caribbean.  I especially liked the simple-seeming stage design, with the field turning into the Caribbean sea, and dancers getting their moment on their affiliated islands.  I also got a kick out of the Miami crowd going apeshit for Ken Hamilton, a singer I had no previous awareness of and could find limited information on.  This show is a good time!  

If I had a knock against it, it’s that the whole production has such a late-70’s Disney sheen to it that I had to make sure they didn’t produce it (it won’t surprise you that it was produced by Carnival Cruise Lines).  It feels like the Disneyland version of multiculturalism; shiny production values and immensely fun, but a palpable sense of soullessness.  However, it easily clears the fucking Mouseketeers for me.

Super Bowl XIV - January 20, 1980 (Los Angeles Rams vs. Pittsburgh Steelers)

A Salute to the Big Band Era (Up With People w/Grambling State University Marching Bands)

Performed at the Rose Bowl, Pasadena CA

I’m not sure why, but this one broke me.  Maybe it’s because the calendar has officially turned from the 70’s to the 80’s, maybe it’s because Up With People is now the main attraction rather than one simple flavor in the stew that was the 1976 halftime show.  Whatever the reason, the cheese that I originally found goofily charming has now become acidic.  Standards from the Great American Songbook being sung with bright sincerity while everyone is either stepping left and right or swinging their arms around…it all reminded me of the corny Broadway revue-style shows I kept doing in college (that my beautiful and very supportive friends kept coming to and pretending to like(.  The good news is that there can’t possibly be that many UWP numbers still to come….(looks at the list)....FUCK.

Super Bowl XV - January 25, 1981 (Oakland Raiders vs. Philadelphia Eagles)

Mardi Gras Festival (Southern University Marching Band w/Helen O’Connell)

Performed at the Louisiana Superdome, New Orleans CA

This one also appears missing.  From what I can gather, it’s nothing we hadn’t seen before.  It would have been cool to see Helen O’Connell in this setting (and would have been a nice break from Up With People), but alas.

Super Bowl XVI - January 24, 1982 (San Francisco 49ers vs Cincinnati Bengals)

Salute to the 1960’s and Motown (Up With People)

Performed at the Pontiac Silverdome, Pontiac MI

All I’m going to say about this one is that, in a show called “Salute to the 1960’s and Motown”, these motherfuckers Up With People slipped in the Monster Mash. Classic Motown!

Super Bowl XVII - January 30th, 1983 (Miami Dolphins vs. Washington Redskins) 

KaleidoSUPERscope (Los Angeles Super Drill Team)

Performed at the Rose Bowl, Pasadena CA

I’m sorry to say, KaleidoSUPERscope is kind of a dud.  The drill team is talented, but the amount of skills on display aren’t really up to par entertainment-wise; it feels like a higher-scale version of the kind of thing a parent would have to sit through at a school function.  The audience card tricks are impressive, but it’s something we’ve already seen in years past.  It’s also undercut by the broadcast showing us the instructions being displayed on the Jumbotron; so much for magicians never revealing their secrets.  Otherwise, it’s just a lot of banner-waving and line formations.  Oh, and a lot of Electrical Light Parade-esque renditions of standards from the 60s and 70’s.  It does end on a grand finale of a very sincere message of peace and love to the world for the new year, which appears to just kinda be the same thing the show was, but with balloons and fireworks being released.  Yawn.

The most exciting thing that happens occurs early on, when the camera accidentally switches to the people in the control room for about thirty seconds.  They seem like they’re having a good time.

Super Bowl XVIII - January 22, 1984 (Washington Redskins vs. Los Angeles Raiders)

Salute to Superstars of Silver Screen (University of Florida and Florida State University Marching Bands)

Performed at Tampa Stadium, Tampa FL

The Mouse returns!  It’s a movie musical tribute!  With two marching bands!  Tinkerbell kicks us off!  Welcome to the 80’s!

I confess to kinda digging this.  There’s at least a general commitment to getting the eras they’re homaging correct (the 42nd Street Busby Berkeley choreography was pretty much dead on).  And I think having Donald Duck and Goofy running around and participating in the action undercut the fact that every single performer on the field is a huge dork that deserves a wedgie.  All it was really missing were some celebrity cameos (Carmen Miranda Minnie doesn’t count).  Finally, I dunno if the audience was mic’d up, but it sure sounded like people were going apeshit for this.  It gets declared the “best halftime show they’ve ever had”.  I dunno about that, but it’s definitely the MOST halftime show we’ve ever had up to this point.

It’s not good at all, but it’s the good kind of not good.  I can be a weird sell sometimes.

Super Bowl XIX - January 20, 1985 (Miami Dolphins vs. San Francisco 49ers)

World of Children’s Dreams (Tops in Blue)

Performed at Stanford Stadium, Stanford CA

The theme is about as corny as it gets, although I suppose after nineteen of these or so, it should become clear that the halftime show at this point was clearly meant to be entertainment for kids.  I guess it works, although the theme is also applied broadly; a segment about the moon landing lines up with the kinds of things kids dream about becoming one day (and it gets us a rad jetpack stunt, easily the best thing in the whole show).  The segment on America, maybe not so much (“the land of dreams”, I guess?  It’s a stretch).  I also laughed at how hard they worked to fit in the Olympics.  We were still taking a victory lap after the 1984 Olympics, it seems.

I dunno, it’s more 80’s personality-free cheese.  This segment is in danger of dying, or at least becoming less than relevant.  And to be fair, we’re far away from the time when the show was being advertised as heavily as the game itself, so it is a bit of an afterthought.  But, goddamn, couldn’t it at least be somewhat cool?  Just a little?

Cool jetpack, though.

(Also, another funny behind the scenes audio glitch at the end, this one with just a slightly bitchy tone.)

Super Bowl XX - January 26, 1986 (Chicago Bears vs. New England Patriots)

Beat of the Future (Up With People)

Performed at Louisiana Superdome, New Orleans LA

“We are proud to dedicate the halftime spectacular today to the memory of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.  This show is produced by Up With People…”

So opens the twentieth Super Bowl Halftime Show, as we see rehearsal footage from UWP rehearsing their dorky dance moves in places as diverse as Hawaii’s Diamond Head and the Great Wall of China (I’m sure they were thrilled).  From there, we get their patented well-meaning theater kid energy in droves.  At one point, they all assume the formation of a set of moving footprints, which is a visual more upsetting that I think was intended.  One guy sings “The Power of Love” wearing a loose-fitting neon green tie.

It feels like, at this point in the eighties, we’ve gone officially off the rails.  The production values are bordering on self-parody; I didn’t really think the decade ever had the neon cocaine aesthetic it’s often portrayed as having, but after three Up With People joints, I’m forced to believe most homages don’t go far enough.  While this was clearly not prime real estate for the NFL, I feel the broadcast reaching a point of crisis that’s being masked by some particularly strong football dynasties (this was the era of the Niners and the Bears).  Seven years away from Michael Jackson.

“And a fitting tribute to the memory of Martin Luther King Jr.”.  So the halftime show ends.

Super Bowl XXI - January 25th, 1987 (Denver Broncos vs. New York Giants)

Salute to Hollywood’s 100th Anniversary - The World of Make Believe (George Burns, Mickey Rooney, Grambling State University and USC Marching Bands w/various Disney characters and So-Cal high school drill teams and teachers)

Performed at the Rose Bowl, Pasadena CA

This contains an omnipotent shot of an inflatable Mickey Mouse hovering ominously over the Hollywood sign.

Again, it’s insane in the way only 80’s Disney can be, but it’s an entertaining lunacy.  It opens with a pre-tape of George Burns doing a couple of creaky jokes in his sleep.  About two minutes in, Mickey Rooney starts going nuts dancing in a marching outfit.  People in horse costumes start dancing on hind legs.  Everything appears to have sequins, including Goofy’s cowboy getup.

Look, the Disney ones crack me up, while Up With People make me throw up.  It’s a pretty easy choice to make.  I will say this one is maybe just a bit too busy compared to the 1984 offering.  There’s too much to take in, so it all kind of washes over you. Still….I mean, Mickey Rooney is really having a good time leading a marching band.

Super Bowl XXII - January 31, 1988 (Washington Redskins vs. Denver Broncos)

Something Grand (Chubby Checker, The Rockettes, 88 grand piano players, San Diego State University Marching Aztecs, California State University Northridge Marching Band and USC Marching Band)

Performed at Jack Murphy Stadium, San Diego CA

Still 80’s cornball, but with a touch of class.  Who doesn’t love the Rockettes, even if their presence gives this the feel of a Thanksgiving Day Parade, rather than a Super Bowl halftime show?  The 88 grand pianos on the field is admittedly a great stunt, and the whole show feels of a piece, which puts it head and shoulders above most of the rest in the decade’s pool.  I also find it hilarious that Chubby Checker went ahead and did “Let’s Twist Again”, the sequel to “The Twist'' with the exact same rhythm and melody.  

You still can’t help but feel like there’s something missing from the average production, almost like the powers that be are no longer sure what the halftime show is supposed to be.  The search for an identity continues.  Still, at least this one was non-irritating.

Super Bowl XXIII - January 22, 1989 (Cincinnati Bengals vs. San Francisco 49ers)

Be Bop Bamboozled in 3-D (Elvis Presto, South Florida-area dancers and performers)

Performed at Joe Robbie Stadium, Miami Gardens FL

Oh, my goodness.  

What is there to say about a halftime show whose main get is an Elvis impersonator that doesn’t appear to know a lot of Elvis songs?  The setlist, in order: “Rock This Town”, “Tutti Frutti”, “Do You Love Me”, “Devil With a Blue Dress On”, “Great Balls of Fire”, “Greased Lightnin’” and “True Love”, a set whose unifying feature is being non-Elvis songs.  

I also loved the completely out of context card trick that Elvis Presto plays with the audience.  Whether it’s a trick for the in-stadium audience or the at-home audience is not precisely clear, nor is it clear if the trick even works.  He just kind of sings a few different suits, people cheer and the show moves on.  There also might be a 3-D element, as teased by the Bob Costas-narrated opening?  I suppose, since we all exist in the third dimension, this one might be skating by on a technicality. 

Absolutely one of the oddest halftime shows in the history of the Super Bowl.  Of course, I loved it.

Super Bowl XXIV - January 28, 1990 (San Francisco 49ers vs. Denver Broncos)

Salute to New Orleans & 40th Anniversary of Peanuts (Pete Fountain, Doug Kershaw, Irma Thomas, Nicholls State University Marching Band, Southern University Marching Band, USL Marching Band)

Performed at Louisiana Superdome, New Orleans LA

An odd one with a somewhat arbitrary premise mashed together with a well-worn one: it’s the 40th Anniversary of the Peanuts comic strip, AND it’s another tribute to New Orleans (something they apparently did every time the Super Bowl was played at the Superdome).  Thus, we get a lot of horrifying-looking Charlie Brown characters riding riverboats and stuff.  It’s not all that interesting; the Peanuts angle could have had some juice if they had committed to it at all.  The New Orleans stuff has been done multiple times before in this space.  The only real highlight is a well-done River Queen formation illusion.  All in all, a missed opportunity.  I’m not kidding when I say the character costumes are nightmare-inducing, though.  Maybe that’s the highlight.

Super Bowl XXV - January 27, 1991 (Buffalo Bills vs. New York Giants)

Small World; Tribute to 25 Years of the Super Bowl (New Kids on the Block; Disney characters, Warren Moon, 2,000 local children)

Performed at Tampa Stadium, Tampa FL

What is there to say about maybe the most infamous pre-MJ halftime show of all time?  What is there to love about it?  What is there to hate about it?  Let me count the ways:

1. The fact that the halftime show, for the most part, is performed by two-thousand children, one of the crazier ideas in Super Bowl halftime history

2. Despite its theme ostensibly being about both Small World and the first 25 years of Super Bowl history, it’s mostly about honoring the troops fighting for us in the Gulf War

3. Chip and Dale at one point do the MC Hammer Dance

4. A little blond kid with a bowl cut sings “Wind Beneath My Wings”, which is, again, revealed to be about the troops

5. George and Barabara Bush make a video cameo about halfway through, also honoring the troops

6. The video of their cameo cuts out a little early, but their audio continues on as the camera pans and cuts through many of the two thousand children.  Even when you think they’re done, they’re not.  The Bushes ramble on long enough for the video to eventually come back.

7. A Giant Mickey comes out in an Uncle Sam get-up just in time for the “It’s a Small World” tribute.

8. As mentioned above, this is all build-up to the real, real headliners, which turns out to not be the troops.  It’s New Kids on the Block!  This is actually kind of an important moment, as this is one of the first times a halftime show was built around a big music act “get”.  It’s still to be streamlined and figured out, and it’s way cooler to say Michael Jackson was the first.  But, he wasn’t.  It was them New Kids.

A horrifying, crazy debacle.  Everything that rocks/sucks about the Super Bowl halftime show all rolled into one 14-minute extravaganza.  What’s not to love?

Super Bowl XXVI - January 26, 1992 (Washington Redskins vs. Buffalo Bills)

Winter Magic, A Salute to the 1992 Winter Olympics (Gloria Estefan, Brian Boitano and Dorothy Hamill, the 1980 US Olympic Hockey Team, University of Minnesota Marching Band)

Performed at Hubert H. Humphrey Metrodome, Minneapolis MN

The presumed nail in the coffin for the brown age of the Super Bowl halftime show, the one that got market-corrected by a special episode of IN LIVING COLOR, the one that made the powers-that-be realize that these aren’t cool anymore, if they ever were.

In isolation, Winter Magic is lame in the way all the Up With People/Disney ones are lame; too bright, insincere sincerity, too old-fashioned.  It doesn’t help that its theme is vaguely out of season.  Yes, it’s to celebrate the upcoming Winter Olympics, and yes, the music they use is generally winter-themed, but….it’s hard not to feel like it’s a Christmas show being performed at the end of January.  It’s hard not to hear “Walking in a Winter Wonderland” and “Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy” and not feel like you’re supposed to be carefully hanging stockings by chimneys.

Gloria Estefan is okay, but feels like something extra they threw on.  Boitano and Dorothy ice-skate to the insipid “One Moment in Time” which negates any good vibes Estefan might have otherwise provided.  The ice rinks are comically small.  Still, it’s possibly the most important halftime show in the history of the medium, if only because it forced the NFL to up the ante the next year.

Super Bowl XXVII - January 31, 1993 (Buffalo Bills vs. Dallas Cowboys)

Michael Jackson

Performed at the Rose Bowl, Pasadena CA

The only thing I have to figure out on this one is how to address the big ol’ elephant in the room: the second half of the performance is dedicated to the kids of the world, so that they might have peace in our time.  Michael Jackson is surrounded by hundreds of them and, in case that weren’t enough, a good old-fashioned audience card stunt gives us drawings of about half a dozen more.  To be fair, this was just before the first accusations began to appear, so there was nothing really unusual about any of this to the general public in January of 1993.  However, it’s hard to ignore what we know since.

Other than that, perhaps the most famous Super Bowl halftime show of all time lives up to its reputation three decades later.  The coolest thing in the entire twelve minutes actually happens before a note is sung.  Following an intro done by none other than James Earl Jones and a nice stunt featuring a pair of MJ doubles, the real deal emerges from the center of the stage.  Following that is….absolutely nothing.  He just stands there, frozen.  For about two minutes.  The crowd is going nuts.  Finally, he moves his head from the left to the right.  Ecstatic cheering.  He finally starts in with “Jam” and puts on a hell of a show.  But even if he had stunk up the joint, there’s probably never been a more succinct display of absolute star power than that.  It may never happen again in the history of the Super Bowl halftime show, unless they bring back Brian Boitano.

Super Bowl XXVIII - January 30, 1994 (Dallas Cowboys vs. Buffalo Bills)

Rockin’ Country Sunday (Clint Black, Tanya Tucker, Travis Tritt, The Judds)

Performed at the Georgia Dome, Atlanta GA

An enjoyable show and, given the location and eventual game winner, a well-timed one.  I admit that country is not my wheelhouse and, thus, can’t weigh in too much on this.  I knew most of the names, but didn’t really know any of the songs.  I recognize the gravity of the Judds reuniting, but it didn’t mean much to me personally.  I do think it’s an interesting move immediately following the 1993 Michael Jackson show.  A different (but no less popular) genre while utilizing multiple artists feels like a savvy way of continuing to diversify the audience that might stick around for these particular fifteen minutes.  Hopefully they continue this path and don’t do anything too silly next!

Super Bowl XXIX - January 29, 1995 (San Diego Chargers vs. San Francisco 49ers)

Indiana Jones and the Temple of the Forbidden Eye (Patti LaBelle, Indiana Jones & Marion Ravenwood, Teddy Pendergrass, Tony Bennett, Arturo Sandoval, Miami Sound Machine)

Performed at Joe Robbie Stadium, Miami Gardens FL

A Super Bowl so insane and corny that it actually becomes something resembling art, this probably represents the most blatantly promotional halftime show of the Disney era.  Meant to advertise the then-newly opened Indiana Jones dark ride at Disneyland*, this show feels more like a theme park stunt show than anything else, which is almost assuredly intentional.  It has all the hallmarks: “cool stunts” (aka, a lot of rolls and fake punches), piped in dialogue bits (Marion, one of the best Indiana Jones characters of them all, gets especially short shrift here; most of her spoken words are some variation of “Indy, help!”  It’s all a little chintzy, especially given the MJ-induced juice this spot had been infused with just two years prior.

*It sure is keen that this ride, which I still think of as relatively new, is almost thirty years old.  Time sure is neat!

Then again, what theme park stunt show opens with Patti LaBelle singing her head off (even if she does appear to, in the context of the show, maybe be the leader of an African tribe?  I shall probe no further into that), or feature the sudden appearance of Tony Bennett singing “Caravan” with the Miami Sound Machine?  What theme park would have the right to make the prized jewel Indy is trying to lock away in a museum be the Vince Lombardi trophy itself?  So, in a way, the Indiana Jones halftime show kind of kicks ass?  It’s certainly singular and for that, you kind of have to hand it to them.

Super Bowl XXX - January 28, 1996 (Dallas Cowboys vs. Pittsburgh Steelers)

Take Me Higher: A Celebration of 30 Years of the Super Bowl (Diana Ross)

Performed at Sun Devil Stadium, Tempe AZ

A shining example of one of the best types of halftime shows: handing over thirteen minutes to a singular star in order to perform five of the biggest songs in the world and let them do their thing.  To that end, Diana Ross brings her fastball here; her setlist is as follows:

• Stop in The Name of Love

• You Keep Me Hangin’ On

• Baby Love

• You Can’t Hurry Love

• Why Do Fools Fall in Love

• Chain Reaction

• Reach Out and Touch (Somebody’s Hand)

• Ain’t No Mountain High Enough

• I Will Survive

• Take Me Higher

In between her “Oops, All Bangers!” concert, she manages to fit in several costume changes and caps it all off with an exit from the stadium via helicopter (this all preceded by an entrance into the stadium via crane).  The word “legend” is thrown around a lot, but….

Super Bowl XXXI - January 26, 1997 (New England Patriots vs. Green Bay Packers)

Blues Brothers Bash (The Blues Brothers - Dan Aykroyd, John Goodman, Jim Belushi; ZZ Top, James Brown, Catherine Crier)

Performed at the Louisiana Superdome, New Orleans LA

Possibly the most unique of all the “tribute to New Orleans!” halftime shows, 1997’s was most notable at the time for the recorded intro from Fox News anchor Catherine Crier, which was seen by some as an erosion of the cable channel’s journalistic integrity, a phrase I need not add any commentary to.  

To me, this one stands out for feeling very hollow.  I should state that I’m on the record as not really getting the Blues Brothers.  I love the 1980 film, but I don’t truly understand them as an actual band playing actual music on an actual stage.  Nor do I get Aykroyd’s continued insistence on keeping it going after John Belushi’s death.  Different strokes for different strokes, I suppose, but they were always a little lost on me.

Suffice to say, this halftime show is nuts, but in a chintzy way, like watching a halfway decent tribute band at Universal CityWalk or something.  It’s definitely unique and you’re vaguely happy it happened, but you can’t help but feel like you would have been better off if it hadn’t.

Super Bowl XXXII - January 25, 1998 (Green Bay Packers vs. Denver Broncos)

Salute to Motown 40’s Anniversary (Boyz II Men, Smokey Robinson, Martha Reeves, The Temptations, Queen Latifah, Grambling State University Marching Ban)

Performed at Qualcomm Stadium, San Diego CA

This one was a slightly odd watch; it’s simultaneously a nostalgia act for the glory days of sixties’ Motown (and their selections of Robinson, Reeves and The Temptations could not have been more perfect) AND a retroactive nostalgia act for the then-relatively new Boyz II Men and Queen Latifah.  One wonders how people must have felt then about having this new type of R&B being put on the same level as these legends.  Watching it now, though, it’s all kind of one big swoosh.  The 1960’s and 1990’s now feel roughly equivalent in terms of distance from the present and, for a generation born in the 2000’s, both might as well be in the biblical times.

Bonus points for being the first halftime show I ever watched as it aired live!  It’s good!  It also gave me existential dread.  What else do you need from the Super Bowl?

Super Bowl XXXII - January 25, 1998 (Green Bay Packers vs. Denver Broncos)

Salute to Motown 40’s Anniversary (Boyz II Men, Smokey Robinson, Martha Reeves, The Temptations, Queen Latifah, Grambling State University Marching Ban)

Performed at Qualcomm Stadium, San Diego CA

This one was a slightly odd watch; it’s simultaneously an intentional nostalgia act for the glory days of sixties’ Motown (and their selections of Robinson, Reeves and The Temptations could not have been more perfect) AND an unintentional retroactive nostalgia act for the then-relatively new Boyz II Men and Queen Latifah.  One wonders how people must have felt then about having this new type of R&B being put on the same level as these legends.  Watching it now, though, it’s all kind of one big swoosh.  The 1960’s and 1990’s now feel roughly equivalent in terms of distance from the present and, for a generation born in the 2000’s, both might as well be in the biblical times.

Bonus points for being the first halftime show I ever watched as it aired live!  It’s good!  It also gave me existential dread.  What else do you need from the Super Bowl?

Super Bowl XXXIII - January 31, 1999 (Denver Broncos vs. Atlanta Falcons)

Celebration of Soul, Salsa and Swing (Gloria Estefan, Stevie Wonder, Big Bad Voodoo Daddy, Savion Glover)

Performed at Pro Player Stadium, Miami Gardens, FL

Perfectly serviceable and entertaining, perhaps the ideal baseline for what these should be.  Again, one of the secrets of a good halftime show is having one to three long-running artists with a few songs everyone likes and just having them perform them.  Anything more and you’re doing great.  Anything less, and you probably need to do some rethinking.  It’s a formula that will save the show’s ass later on in the 2000’s, and it certainly carries the night here.

Overall, 1999 feels like a redemptive show for Gloria Estefan, who was last seen in this space trying to carry the 1992 Winter Wonderland debacle.  Here, she just gets to jam with Stevie Wonder.  She sounds great, he sounds great.  Also, the fun of these things are that they double as time capsules.  Remember when Savion Glover was just everywhere?  What was the deal with Big Bad Voodoo Daddy?

Super Bowl XXXIV - January 30, 2000 (St. Louis Rams vs. Tennessee Titans)

Tapestry of Nations (Phil Collins, Christina Aguilera, Enrique Iglesias, Toni Braxton, Georgia State University choir, narrated by Edward James Olmos)

Performed at Georgia Dome, Atlanta GA

You would think, from a review of the line-up, that this would indicate a move from 90’s hits to 00’s hits.  Here comes “Genie in a Bottle” “Bailamos” and “Un-Break my Heart”!  And, hey, it’s Phil Collins, can’t wait to hear “Can’t Stop Loving You”! 

BZZZZT.  No, this is Disney’s big tribute to the coming millennium, which means for some reason that we get a bunch of sappy songs you either don’t remember or never heard.  Christina and Enrique duet on “Celebrate Hand in Hand”, which as we all know was the official theme song of Walt Disney World’s Millennium Celebration.  Toni Braxton comes out to sing “We Go On”, a song written to close out IllumiNations: Reflections of Earth, an Epcot laser show.  Collins only manages to sing “Two Worlds”, your least favorite song from TARZAN.

It’s all nuts in the way only Disney’s early-century attempts at synergy can be.  But it’s undeniably a letdown.  There’s not one song or stunt or puppet I remember.  It’s just kind of a grey, fake-nice blob.  Which is to say, it’s the perfect opening ceremony for the 21st century.

Super Bowl XXXV - January 28, 2001 (Baltimore Ravens vs. New York Giants)

The Kings of Rock and Pop (Aerosmith, NSYNC, Britney Spears, Mary J. Blige, Nelly)

Performed at Raymond James Stadium, Tampa FL

MTV.  Aerosmith.  NSYNC.  A prerecorded intro sketch featuring Ben Stiller as the character Timothy Swackhammer, Halftime Coordinator.  The 2000’s have begun in earnest.

This show begins a tradition (still upheld to this day) of the halftime show trying to make two distinct flavors taste good together, usually in vain.  Mixing Aerosmith with NSYNC isn’t quite as awkward as you might imagine, although it helps that both parties seem happy to be here.  Aerosmith was riding high on their 21st century resurgence, while NSYNC just seemed enraptured at even being on the same stage with the legendary rock band.  They each sing a couple of their songs, then NSYNC plays backup harmony with Steven Tyler.  A couple of guest stars stop by, bada bing, bada boom.  All in all, of Justin Timberlake’s three Super Bowl halftime appearances, this is easily the least disastrous.

PS: Britney fans will be disappointed with this one; she basically just shows up as backup to “Walk This Way”.  One has to wonder if, had the 2004 show debacle hadn’t occurred and her mental health hadn’t taken a dive by 2007, there was a window where a Britney Spears solo halftime show might have been a reality.  Alas.

Super Bowl XXXVI - February 3, 2002 (St. Louis Rams vs. New England Patriots)

9/11 Tribute (U2)

Performed at Louisiana Superdome, New Orleans LA

Yeah, like I’m enough of a dumbass to sharpen my knives against one of the most iconics halftime shows of all time.  My main quibble aside (that being that the list of 9/11 victims scrolling on the screen throughout the set aren’t especially readable for the television audience nor, presumably, those in attendance in New Orleans), it’s an undeniably effective performance.  I’m not exactly a U2 fan, nor am I a committed skeptic: I exist somewhere in the middle of the Bono Love/Hate spectrum.  They unsurprisingly keep it to the hits (and, shockingly, only three!), which is precisely how I like them.  It’s good!  Even if it weren’t, I wouldn’t dare admit it!  It’s the 9/11 Tribute Show, for god’s sake!

Should mention: Janet Jackson was the original pick for this particular year’s headliner, but got bumped after 9/11 in order to find a different act more suitable for the moment.  Keep this in mind.

Super Bowl XXXVII - January 26, 2003 (Oakland Raiders vs. Tampa Bay Buccaneers)

Shania Twain, No Doubt (feat. Sting)

Performed at Qualcomm Stadium, San Diego CA

This one was very odd and unsatisfying.  You might wonder how Shania Twain and No Doubt might blend together.  Well, we’ll never know, because the 2003 halftime show doesn’t even try.  Shania goes on first, and I must say she was a real letdown.  An obvious lip-synced performance of “Up!” and “Man! I Feel like a Woman!” and she’s outta there!  Thanks for playing, Shania!

Then comes mid-2000’s No Doubt (aka the worst No Doubt) and they play just one song and it’s exactly the one you think they might do.  Then out comes Sting for some reason, and they start jamming on “Message in a Bottle” and by “they” I mean Sting, No Doubt and not Shania Twain, who I am left to presume was already tucked away in a Qualcomm suite by that point.

What can I say?  It sucked, an attempt at smashing two unrelated acts together and hoping people were interested.  This was the year I opted for NBC’s counter-programming, a prime-time edition of Jimmy Fallon and Tina Fey doing Weekend Update.  That broadcast is now unfortunately lost media, but I wish this halftime show would get lost as well.

Super Bowl XXXVIII - February 1, 2004 (Carolina Panthers vs. New England Patriots)

Choose or Lose (Janet Jackson, P. Diddy, Nelly, Kid Rock, Justin Timberlake, Jessica Simpson, Spirit of Houston and Ocean of Soul marching bands)

Performed at Reliant Stadium, Houston TX

Perhaps the most infamous halftime show of them all.  I will avoid adding too much to twenty years of conversation about the “wardrobe malfunction”, although it’s obviously one of the most hand-wringingly overwrought controversies of our lifetime, and the hypocrisy of Janet catching all the shit for it and Justin being able to just keep doing this “I’m a little stinker” act for nearly another two decades is infuriating to this day.

I will point out a couple of things I find funny:

• 1. The “wardrobe malfunction” is the best thing to ever happen to the 2004 show because it otherwise kind of sucks?  It’s another, “this star does one song, then this unrelated artist does another song, then another unrelated singer does their thing, then two of them come together” that reeks of halving an ass.  

• 2. The reason the show features the Mid-00’s Top-40 All-Stars is that the theme for this year was technically “Choose or Lose”, MTV’s pro-democracy campaign that was technically a different venture from the privately funded Citizen Change and their famous slogan “Vote or Die!”.  Yes, the goal was to drive out the vote.  Instead, everyone saw a covered breast for a quarter of a second and John Kerry ended up losing to George W. Bush by 3 million votes.  Coincidence?  Yes.

Super Bowl XXXIX - February 6, 2005 (New England Patriots vs. Philadelphia Eagles)

Paul McCartney

Performed at Alltel Stadium, Jacksonville FL

Thus begins an era that many find refreshing and nostalgic, while some found somewhat staid and overly reactionary to the moral panic the year before.  It’s the Legends of Rock run!  I will say in advance that, for the most part, I actually really like the next six halftime shows, where a legacy act or artist gets twelve minutes of just them and their worldwide audience to sing their hits.  No guests, minimal histrionics…just the music, maaaaan.  I’m not in love with what they necessarily represent; they feel too much like a “please don’t me mad at us anymore” kowtowing to a generation that somewhat refused to believe any music after their time could have any value.  BUT, the next half-decade worth of shows are pretty high level, so fuck, maybe the “this is the only real music” crowd has a point.

Anyway, McCartney’s show is probably my least favorite of the six, although it’s still strong.  When it comes down to it, his set of four curated Greatest Hits are the lesser of the next five acts to follow, at least for me (my hottest Beatles take: I’m not a “Hey Jude” guy).  It’s still a great and confident set, and the complete opposite of the 00’s ones that preceded it.  Simplicity is the name of the game.  McCartney comes out, says “Hello, Super Bowl!”, sings the songs you most associate with him, then gets out.  No gimmicks, no tricks, no exposed breast (unfortunately).

Super Bowl XL - February 5, 2006 (Seattle Seahawks vs. Pittsburgh Steelers)

The Rolling Stones

Performed at Ford Field, Detroit MI

Mick Jagger is impossible to parody.  You cannot possibly exaggerate how much he never really stops moving, nor can you ever successfully overinflate the amount of his perpetual motion in relation to his age, a dichotomy that was already funny in 2006, and only gets more insane with time.

Anyway, look, it’s great!  They’re rocking their asses off on a tongue-shaped stage.  The energy never ceases, and the 13 or so minutes they’re allotted whizzes by in an instant.  You know exactly what you’re getting from a Rolling Stones halftime show (you’ll never believe this, but they play “Start Me Up” and “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction”), and I suspect that was most of the appeal, both for the football-watching audience at large and the NFL themselves. 

Super Bowl XLI - February 4, 2007 (Indianapolis Colts vs. Chicago Bears)

Prince (w/Florida A&M University Marching 100 Band)

Performed at Dolphin Stadium, Miami Gardens FL

On the generally accepted short-list of greatest halftime shows in Super Bowl history, the mystique behind it was undeniably boosted by the turn in the weather.  How much more do you want than it actually raining during “Purple Rain”?  Who doesn’t like the vague danger of somebody (or several somebodies) getting electrocuted during a football game?

There are other things to love about it, the first being Prince’s singular presence.  Love him or hate him, there was never anybody like him.  Also, I love the “Purple Rain” segment as much as everybody else, but I had forgotten the detail that his set is almost entirely covers.  The whole middle of this is him doing “Best of You” by the Foo Fighters.  For some reason, I respect this as a power move.  I could do three more of my mega-famous songs, but I’d rather put a spin on other people’s.  I had also forgotten that, three years after America freaked out forever on Janet Jackson, Prince turning his guitar into an Austin Powers-esque phallic symbol caused another mini-panic*.

*About 150 complaints were filed with the FCC about this year’s broadcast, with most people bitching about either this or that “do something manly!” Snickers commercial where two guys accidentally kissed.  Good times.

Looking back, this felt like a good balance for the Super Bowl halftime show.  A legacy artist showing the kids how it’s done, while throwing in just enough subversion to rankle mom and dad.  Just a little.

Super Bowl XLII - February 3, 2008 (New York Giants vs. New England Patriots)

Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers 

Performed at University of Phoenix Stadium, Glendale AZ

This one took me the most by surprise.  Obviously, Tom Petty was a legend, and there’s absolutely nobody in this country consciously walking around that doesn’t know at least two of his songs.  But for whatever reason, I had never really engaged with him much as an artist.  I had never seen him live, either in person or on video.  In some ways, this was my first real exposure to his vibe.

At least in this context of this halftime show, I was wildly charmed by him.  He seemed humbled by the moment in a way almost no other artist to perform in this slot ever is, like he seemed genuinely surprised and touched to be there.  He had an easy-going vibe to him, with a nice continually contrasting set to match.  He rocks out with “American Girl”, then we all get to ride the mellow waves of “Free Fallin’”.  So on and so forth.  

I wish I had had the chance to become a fan while he was still alive, as I suspect I would have had a great time seeing him in an actual venue.  For now, though?  Him sneakily being one of my favorite halftime shows will have to do.

Super Bowl XLIII - February 1, 2009 (Pittsburgh Steelers vs. Arizona Cardinals)

Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band

Performed at Raymond James Stadium, Tampa FL

Great show, and I’ll always respect a good wall of sound on Super Bowl Sunday.  It did strike me, however, that the no-longer-than-fifteen-minutes format of the halftime show rips the Boss of one of the signature things about his shows: the long, rambling, verbal setups to his songs.  Alas, he’s left to just blow the roof off of Raymond James Stadium (to those who argue that it doesn’t have a roof, I’d ask you to consider why that might now be) by ripping through three of his greatest hits, as well as his then-new one, “Working on a Dream”.  Major points that this halftime show happened before Clarence Clemons passed away, which means we get some sexy sax action.

Also, for those who forgot, this is the one where Bruce power-slides his crotch into the camera.  BRUUUUUUUUCE!

Super Bowl XLIV - February 7, 2010 (New Orleans Saints vs. Indianapolis Colts)

The Who

Performed at Sun Life Stadium, Miami Gardens, FL

The last of this six-year era is probably my favorite, and yes it’s absolutely as simple as I like The Who the most of the six.  All five songs they performed on this night are five of the best rock songs ever.  They still were able to rock.  They sounded great.  Nothing else to it, really.  Even in 2010, The Who were uniquely suited for the moment in a way few were.  They actually had the nerve to open with “Pinball Wizard” and resist the urge to do nothing cutesy to it, like call it “Football Wizard” or something.

Look, sometimes a deep analysis isn’t warranted!  This one rocked!  The end!

Super Bowl XLV - February 6, 2011 (Pittsburgh Steelers vs. Green Bay Packers)

The Black Eyed Peas (ft. Usher, Slash, local Dallas high school drill teams and dancers, Prairie View A&M University Marching Storm)

Performed at Cowboys Stadium, Arlington TX

Look, sometimes a deep analysis isn’t warranted!  This one sucked!  The end!

Okay, okay, I’ll try just a little more.  The 2011 halftime show is usually ranked amongst the worst, and I can’t really levy a contrarian opinion.  It’s quite poor, and it seems quite poor for a variety of reasons.  First, the sound levels are atrocious and would have sunk even the greatest artist.  Second, the Black Eyed Peas weren’t that good in the first place, and their sound has aged horrendously over the last twenty years (oh boy, more tinny bass drops!).  Third, even if it hadn’t, they were never the right band for this particular moment.  The Black Eyed Peas are meant to be enjoyed in the club, perhaps played over the intercom of a basketball game.  A live act, they are not; they’re mostly just kinda standing there the whole time.  Fourth, although Slash looks like he’s trying to get the fuck out of there as soon as possible, fellow special guest Usher is giving it his all.  It’s shocking how much the show picks up the second he arrives, making the headlining act look all the more amateurish.

This was the Super Bowl’s toe-dip back into music of the youth, and it probably couldn’t have gone worse.  It’s very fortunate they didn’t just give up on the concept entirely and start Googling if Glenn Miller was still alive.

Super Bowl XLVI - February 5, 2012 (New York Giants vs. New England Patriots)

Madonna (ft. LMFAO, Cirque du Soleil, MIA, Nicki Minaj, Cee Lo Green, a shit ton of local high school drumlines)

Performed at Lucas Oil Stadium, Indianapolis IN

Okay, so Madonna wasn’t exactly new in 2012.  But she was still coarse enough in style to ruffle some feathers with the modern day football audience, which always makes these shows even 5% more interesting.  

Look, even if you’re not a fan of her catalog (I’m somewhat ambivalent myself), Madonna can obviously still put on a show!  Less great are her odd assortment of guest stars.  Nicki is still in her prime here, and Cee Lo seems happy to be there, but I didn’t need reminding that nepo-baby-dipshit-rap-act LMFAO was ever a thing.  MIA doesn’t make much of an impression musically, although her flipping off the camera made headlines the next day, which counts for something.

This one feels like the opening act of a new era for the halftime show, where singular artists are given the space to do their unique thing, whether or not the main television audience was going to be super into it.  Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t, but it at least adds a little variety as we enter the last ten or eleven halftime shows.

Super Bowl XLVII - February 3, 2013 (Baltimore Ravens vs. San Francisco 49ers)

Beyonce (ft. Destiny’s Child)

Performed at Mercedes-Benz Superdome, New Orleans LA

Out of respect (and fear) of the Bey-hive, I’ll keep my comments positive, not that I have much to complain about anyway.  Beyonce is probably worth a deep dive one of these days, as so much of the last twenty-five years of pop culture seems to run through her in one way or another.  It also speaks to her incredible longevity that she seemed like the perfect choice for a halftime show in 2013, yet now feels a little too early in 2024.  This was pre-LEMONADE and RENAISSANCE, yet she still has more than enough hits to carry the fifteen-minute slot.  She manages to fit in a few measures of nine songs, including two Destiny’s Child numbers and a DC-ified version of “Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It)”, which seems like it has to be a record amount up to this point.  

Beyonce’s specific stage presence is sort of amazing to behold.  Her vocal prowess is well-documented, but it’s fascinating to watch her make a lot out of her dancing ability.  I wouldn’t call her graceful in motion, exactly, but there’s a quickness and sharpness to it that makes it feel more than what it is.  That sounds like a slam, but it isn’t.  What I’m describing is star power.  She’s got it in spades.  I only wish I hadn’t initially watched it in the context of a room full of anxiety-ridden 49er fans.

(Also, I give it points for committing to the “Destiny’s Child reunion” gimmick.  Once Kelly Rowlands and Michelle Williams arrive on stage, they never leave it again, as I recall.)

Super Bowl XLVIII - February 2, 2014 (Seattle Seahawks vs. Denver Broncos)

Bruno Mars (ft. Red Hot Chili Peppers)

Performed at MetLife Stadium, East Rutherford NJ

I can’t get a gauge on how “cool” he is, necessarily, but I am an open buyer for what Bruno Mars sells.  He genuinely seems like he can do it all: sing in an almost-long-forgotten style, play any and all instruments, dance like his life depended on it…it’s good stuff.  I suspect it comes off as corny or try-hand to others, but I’d rather someone be a cheeseball while bringing back that 70’s R&B feel than “be cool” doing whatever the fuck we were doing in 2014 (probably listening to Major Lazer or something).

It’s a fucking blast from beginning to end, and in retrospect, Bruno Mars probably snagged his halftime spot at the exact right time.  He only released one other album after this, the equally successful 24K MAGIC, before dropping off somewhat in the public consciousness (although one can easily imagine Silk Sonic showing up as a guest on one of these someday).  2014 felt like the year he was everywhere, and it was a rare moment of the Super Bowl striking while the iron was ripping hot.  

Super Bowl XLIX - February 1, 2015 (New England Patriots vs. Seattle Seahawks)

Katy Perry (ft. Lenny Kravitz, Missy Elliott, Arizona State University Sun Devil Marching Band)

Performed at University of Phoenix Stadium, Glendale AZ

A solid show all-in-all.  Katy Perry has the exact right repertoire for the event; I didn’t confirm it, but it sure feels like every single song in her set that night was a number one hit that saturated the market in its time.  It’s got spectacle; special points for her entrance onto a giant puppet lion, as well as her eventual flying around on what could reasonably be described as the NBC “The More You Know” star.  Heck, even the (as usual) completely unrelated special guests feel worked in as part of the show this time around.  

I’ve talked my shit about Katy in the past and, living through her early-2010’s reign, she could easily get on one’s nerves; again, it’s impossible to exaggerate how completely inescapable her TEENAGE DREAM reign was.  But, with a healthy dose of hindsight, I feel I have no choice but to respect her.  She took time to figure out her persona and aesthetic, then made her fortune going all in on it.  Even as I groaned through “Roar” and “Dark Horse”, I had to admit her legendary status.  This was another halftime show that was extremely well-timed; a couple years later, Katy would almost certainly be hocking her awful “Swish Swish” song.  She was at the height of her powers in the winter of 2015.  Bravo.

(Also, to all of you who mercilessly mocked Left Shark: shame on all of you.  He was just vibing, the way any of us would have given the opportunity.  Leave him alone!)

Super Bowl 50 - February 7, 2016 (Carolina Panthers vs. Denver Broncos)

Coldplay (ft. Beyonce, Bruno Mars, Mark Ronson, Gustavo Dudamel, University of California Marching Band, Youth Orchestra L.A.)

Performed at Levi’s Stadium, Santa Clara CA

This is one of my very favorites in halftime history.  The vibes are very high and very positive, possibly because it’s still daytime, or maybe it’s the seemingly Haight-Ashbury inspired color palette throughout.  Regardless, I had a smile on my face the entire time.  That said, things don’t really pick up until Beyonce and Bruno Mars show up and start dueting on “Uptown Funk”.  In a sense, the whole show starts to feel like a Halftime Multiverse of Madness.  I’m not sure there’s been three former/current halftime show headliners on stage during a halftime show before, but it adds to the star power of the proceedings.

In the context of this particular project, I also got chills during the finale, where tribute is paid to the first fifty years of halftime shows.  I felt a little delirious seeing clips from the past shows, some of them now feeling like I had watched fifty years ago at this point.  It gave me the push I needed to get through the final seven halftime spectaculars.

Final note: Coldplay is one of those bands I was adamant in my hatred for during my high school days.  Then, occasionally, I would hear a song of theirs and think, “okay, well, I like that one”.  Fifteen occurrences of that later and I think I’m just a casual Coldplay fan, the treacly “Fix You” notwithstanding.  Getting older is mostly becoming comfortable with who you are. 

Super Bowl LI - February 5, 2017 (New England Patriots vs. Atlanta Falcons)

Lady Gaga

Performed at NRG Stadium, Houston TX

Another personal favorite.  A lot of my Lady Gaga admiration has eroded over the years, as she’s expanded her portfolio into jazz standards and Oscar grabs.  No disrespect to either of those pursuits; the provocative Gaga stuff couldn’t last forever, and to some degree, it’s hard to top hanging yourself on the VMA’s.  But I liked the weird, theater-person-in-need-of-psych-meds energy she had in the late 2000’s/early 2010’s.

And this halftime performance is basically 100% that.  She’s dancing around with her hands in little claw shapes.  She’s bouncing around the stage on strings.  She’s being a little weirdo the whole time.  I suspect this is anathema to a good time to many, but it’s hard to deny her singularity.  And, at the end of the day, isn’t that what the halftime show is all about?  There aren’t even any guests this time; who needs ‘em?

Super Bowl LII - February 4, 2018 (Philadelphia Eagles vs. New England Patriots)

Justin Timberlake (ft. the Tennessee Kids, University of Minnesota Marching Band)

Performed at U.S. Bank Stadium, Minneapolis, MN

I dunno, I thought this one was kinda pee.  I have no real hate towards JT, I generally like his music (especially the 20/20 EXPERIENCE sort-of double album, although I suspect I’m somewhat alone on that one).  But his “I’m just a little goofy guy from your youth” act was starting to wear thin in 2018, and is almost unrecognizable in 2024.  

The issue isn’t the setlist, which again I think is pretty okay and a good fit for the halftime show.  It’s how…bland and timid it feels.  It’s also impossible to ignore the unfortunate symbolic meaning of him even being back at the halftime show at all.  The fact that he was extended an invite after 2004 and Janet Jackson appears to be essentially banned for life reveals too much about what actually offends us.  Timberlake perhaps isn’t obligated to refuse the opportunity on moral grounds, nor is he perhaps fully in control of who he can select as a special guest.  However, the fact remains that the absence of any sort of acknowledgment of him avoiding any sort of consequence has the distinct smell of cowardice.

Thankfully, he WAS able to bring in Jimmy Fallon for a pre-recorded intro.  Isn’t that epic?  Who’s to say whether the show is good or bad then?  Look, the TROLLS song!  That’s fun, isn’t it?  The whole thing just feels impossibly dated despite barely being five years old.  Also, even though it ends up being the most memorable part of the night, fuck him for the little Prince “duet”.

Super Bowl LIII - February 3, 2019 (New England Patriots vs. Los Angeles Rams)

Maroon 5 (ft. Travis Scott, Big Boi, Georgia state University Marching Band)

Performed at Mercedes-Benz Stadium, Atlanta GA

I thought this one was also urine-esque, for much the same reason as the year before.  I don’t hold much against Maroon 5.  I like many of their songs, not that they happened to perform any of them that night.  But, Adam Levine is so fucking corny and swagless; only he could perform a song called “Moves Like Jagger” and not attempt to even move a little bit like Jagger.  It’s probably for the best, but still, read the fucking room, Adam.  It’s also hard to lose from your mind his unfathomably dorky sexts* while he’s ripping off his shirt to show off his bare chest with his very cool tats.  Go ahead, Adam!  Howl like an animal!  I’ll never get “I may need to see the booty” out of my mind.

*I do struggle with this all becoming public information.  On the one hand, it’s really none of our business.  On the other hand, it’s very very funny, so it’s impossible to say whether it’s bad or not.  Fuckkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkk!

Throw in a surprise appearance by Travis Scott, and it’s just kind of an ugh night.  Big Boi was cool, though, and his two songs were easily the highlight of the show.  I desperately wish he and Andre 3000 would get back together.  Imagine Outkast doing a halftime show?

Super Bowl LIV - February 2, 2020 (San Francisco 49ers vs. Kansas City Chiefs)

Shakira and Jennifer Lopez (ft. Bad Bunny, J Balvin, Emme Muniz)

Performed at Hard Rock Stadium, Miami Gardens FL

I remember people going ape-shit for this one at the time, almost as if we all knew deep down we were mere weeks away from something resembling a social apocalypse.  In that sense, it’s a fascinating watch.  Future historians, please note: there really was a quarter of the year 2020 where life was pretty much normal!

It’s a fun one and probably the most thematically coherent of the “take a couple artists and have them split the show” bunch.  Shakira looked the same in 2020 and she did in 2001, and she sticks to her four or five major crossover hits.  Then out comes J-Lo, whose particular star power strikes me in a way nobody else’s does.  It’s genuinely difficult to process her as a human being.  Like, I can’t imagine her just walking around in a house somewhere or, like, eating food.  Does that make sense?  Beyonce and Lady Gaga bowl me over by sheer force of will.  With Jennifer Lopez, I don’t even consider her the same species as myself.  No, I have no clue what’s driving that, but there it is.

What really struck me here is that this was the first time the halftime show would dip its toe into millennial nostalgia.  It absolutely will not be the last going forward.  It’s not even the last on this list.  But that’s what this is.  Some of these songs were pushing twenty years old at the time, even if it didn’t feel like it.  Even four years ago, our generation was generally still young enough that these were just songs that we knew, not artifacts from days gone by.  Don’t worry, every person older than me has informed me that it gets worse!

Super Bowl LV - February 7, 2021 (Kansas City Chiefs vs. Tampa Bay Buccaneers)

The Weeknd

Performed at Raymond James Stadium, Tampa FL

A halftime show that is likely to age weird, given the fact that it managed to broadcast in that post-lockdown orders, pre-vaccine creation period.  My wife astutely pointed out how many of the dancers’ costumes were designed to cover up the fact that they were masked.  There’s also a strange, empty atmosphere to the entire proceedings.  A scan of the crowd reveals social distancing, which my brain still processes as “oh, man, they couldn’t sell out this game” because I’m dumb.

It doesn’t really matter, as The Weeknd puts in a hell of a show, albeit one that generated a meme with legs.  He’s an odd talent: he’s definitely not of the “pick up an instrument and start jamming” variety, and he’s definitely electronica-adjacent, but he’s not hiding behind the bleep-boops to mask that he’s charisma-deficient (like, say, the Black Eyed Peas).  He definitely has a presence to him, and more than a little flair for the dramatic.  Another defacto theater-kid-made-good story.

Super Bowl LVI - February 13, 2022 (Los Angeles Rams vs. Cincinnati Bengals)

Dr. Dre, Snoop Dogg, Eminem, Mary J. Blige, Kendrick Lamar (ft. 50 Cent, Anderson .Paak)

Performed at SoFi Stadium, Inglewood CA

This show is notable to me for two reasons:

1. I believe this is the first halftime show to revolve primarily around celebrating a producer.  I don’t think Dre discovered every single one of these people, but consider the prominent featuring not only of Eminem and 50 Cent, but the intro and outro showing Dre looking out over the city, as well as Dre pretending to adjust the levels on a giant soundboard throughout the show.  The implication is clear: the last twenty to thirty years of hip-hop came from Dr. Dre’s influence.

2. This halftime show was responsible for a year-long existential crisis for me.  In terms of millennial nostalgia-baiting, the 2022 halftime show runs where the 2020 one walked.  The whole broadcast was like this, to be honest: commercials featured such of-their-time celebrities as Zach Braff, Lindsay Lohan and the cast of THE SOPRANOS.  I guess nobody ever gets to decide when they’re the new generation to have their youths milked by corporations, but I can tell you I wasn’t ready for it on February 13, 2022.  

This show was very popular; a lot of “now this is how it’s done!” reactions to the halftime show flew through the Twitter-sphere.  And, look, it’s a great show.  Dre and Snoop still got it.  I really loved the set, a series of connected rooms that everyone is walking in and out of.  Em is singing about losing yourself, while 50’s hanging from the ceiling like it’s 2003 again.  But you’re never prepared for when you become the old guy lamenting why things can’t just be how they were, and how the kids would never understand what real art is.  

All this to say, the show is great.  But it also signaled the sudden end of one chapter of my life, and the forceful beginning of another.  We’re now our parents’ age.  Thanks for the reminder, Dre!

Super Bowl LVII - February 12, 2023 (Kansas City Chiefs vs. Philadelphia Eagles) 

Rihanna

Performed at State Farm Stadium, Glendale AZ

This one is another in the “give one artist fifteen minutes to remind everyone why they’re at the top of the industry”, which feels like the most successful formula on the whole.  Rihanna is especially impressive here considering she had been inactive for six years or so prior to this.  She also easily clears the record for most songs performed by one artist at the halftime show.  She does a total of fifteen full or partial songs before her slot is through.  And, honestly?  It’s great, if only because she has one of the greatest stank-faces in modern music.  Overall, it was a great reminder that Rihanna’s been gone for a while, but she’ll never truly go away.  Even if she never releases another album, her legacy is secure.

This was also the show that assuredly caused a lot of guys around the world to go, “....she’s pregnant, right?  No, I’m wrong, why would she be performing while pregnant?  But she’s not dancing a whole lot….god, I’m just being an asshole.  I’m not going to turn and ask my wife.  But, like, she is, right?” (It turns out she was, thank god.)

Super Bowl LVIII - February 11, 2024 (San Francisco 49ers vs. Kansas City Chiefs)

Usher (ft. Alicia Keys, Jermaine Dupri, H.E.R. will.i.am, Lil Jon, Ludacris)

Performed at Allegiant Stadium, Paradise NV

I’ll be honest, this one took a bit to get going. For all the retro Vegas-y action going on, the first few minutes are a little slow, as Usher just kind of makes his way from his throne to the stage. Things pick up when Alicia Keys gets introduced, and it never loses steam again. By the time the show went full Starlight Express, I felt delirious.

Usher is another one of those artists whose ubiquitousness is often slept on. Someone on Twitter actually had the nerve to ask if anybody knew any other Usher songs besides “Yeah!”, but it’s easy to forget he’s been around for over twenty-five years, and has been cranking out hits pretty much the entire time. I think we’re so used to him being around that his music just kinda fades in the background now. But, he’s got a discography to be respected! This show clearly proved that.

Points for going for the obvious fan-favorite choice and bringing back Lil’ Jon and Ludacris for the end. Bonus points for the troll move of including will.i.am, certainly making him the only member of the Black Eyed Peas that will ever get to return to the halftime show. Prayers up for Justin Bieber not getting the invite and having to settle for just being in the crowd.

———

I’m exhausted.  One more thing, then I’m going back to bed until Usher takes the stage.  In no particular order, my personal five favorites and least favorite halftime shows:

FAVORITE

1. Coldplay ft. Beyonce and Bruno Mars (2016)

2. The Who (2010)

3. Prince (2007)

4. Lady Gaga (2017)

5. Michael Jackson (1993)

LEAST FAVORITE

1. Winter Magic (1992)

2. Up With People Salutes Motown (1982)

3. Up With People Beat of the Future (1986)

4. Shania Twain, No Doubt (2003)

5. The Black Eyed Peas (2011)

The Surprising Endurance of MEAN GIRLS

1. SO NOT FETCH

Nostalgia is a funny drug.

We humans tend to overrate the past at the expense of the present, and use that feeling to inform the future.  “Things were just better twenty or thirty years ago”, we say.  “Life was easier”, which it often is at the beginning of our lives, when we have the capacity to ingest and process sugary crap and the ability to live without major responsibilities.  It can feel like we spend our entire existence trying to enter our peak, only to get there and immediately yearn to return to when we were first starting the climb.  What can I say?  We’re hard to please.

The truth is, of course, that most periods of time are roughly equivalent to every other.  There are valleys (living during WWII) and peaks (living after WWII*), but for the most part for most people, major social plusses came with many unrelated minuses, pushing life to about even.  Kids in the 80’s got to enjoy peak NBC Letterman and the explosion of blockbuster entertainment, but lived with the specter of a Russia-induced nuclear holocaust that could begin at almost any second.  Kids these days have access to essentially all of the world’s information and knowledge at any time and any place, yet must live in a world where making public every moment of your life has been practically de riguer since birth.  So it goes.

*Assuming you were white.  Being male was a good idea, too.

For me, nostalgia is even more of a funny thing.  I more or less grew up in the 2000’s, a decade I now spend way too much time thinking about in the 2020’s.  It’s a set of years I often look back on with fondness, even though I really have no reason to.  I began the decade smack dab in the middle of sixth grade and ended it with just a few more months of college left to go, a time period anthroplogists refer to as The Most Embarrassing Ten Years of My Entire Fucking Life.  It was an excruciating time mostly marked by having to figure out how to regulate emotions for the first time, greatly exacerbated by the advent of LiveJournal and the beginnings of sharing every dumb thought in your head to countless strangers on the internet.  

It didn’t help that, purely in terms of popular culture, the 2000’s were largely a wasteland.  Some grand things were on the horizon in terms of television (LOST, Mad Men, Breaking Bad and Friday Night Lights all premiered in this decade, all within three years of each other), and I think actually there were some things to like and admire in popular music, although you had to know where to look (alternative college stations were a good place to start).  Even with those silver linings, though, you had to filter through the glut of depressing reality shows (for those who think it gets no worse than Keeping Up With the Kardashians….my brother, you have no idea how much trashier it can get; Calabasas’ favorite family comes off as downright classy compared to something like Are You Hot?) and the continued poisoning of political discourse (his image has been severely rehabbed over the years, but getting the net average Republican and Democrat together in mid 2004 and asking them what they thought about George W. Bush was asking for someone to get killed, possibly yourself).

The worst was the movies*.  The current “IP and Superhero” era we appear to maybe be entering the end of is often cited as the worst one in Hollywood history, which may or may not be true.  However, we often overlook just how…ugly….and goopy…and orange everything seemed to look like in a post-9/11 world.  To get an idea of what every blockbuster looked like in high school, one can look no further than the poster for 2002’s THE SCORPION KING.  It really has it all: a bunch of muscle-bound actors making faces into the camera against uncomfortable fire colors, all with a vague “extreme” aesthetic.  Bleak times.

*Okay, I suppose the worst was the terrorist attack and financial crisis that respectively bookended the decade.  But then again, have you watched BATTLEFIELD EARTH lately?

Crucially, there also weren’t a lot of movies with anything resembling wit.  Just as an example, Will Ferrell was leaving SNL and cranking out the hits (OLD SCHOOL, ELF, STEP BROTHERS, TALLADEGA NIGHTS, to name just a few), and they absolutely have their fans, but they (along with seemingly every other comedy at the time), seemed to dabble exclusively in either manic, obnoxious, frat, or manically obnoxious frat humor*.  Fun times could be had at the mall cineplex or on a date or something, but there seemed to be a lot of empty calories going around comedically.  

*Don’t get me wrong, I quite like Will Ferrell as a comedian.  His countless appearances on late night shows are legendary, and he’s a top-five SNL cast member ever.  His movies just don’t do anything for me, is all.

During my time in high school (2002-2006), there were really only three movies that people seemed to quote with any regularity: ANCHORMAN: THE LEGEND OF RON BURGUNDY, NAPOLEON DYNAMITE and MEAN GIRLS.  I don’t really like two of those movies.  I have always been really fond of the third.

So this is the MEAN GIRLS article.

II. ON WEDNESDAYS WE WEAR PINK

MEAN GIRLS is kind of a miracle.

For so many reasons, it feels like it should be one of those things, an artifact of a specific time.  For starters, it stars Lindsay Lohan, maybe the poster child of the decade, the physical manifestation of what the 2000’s felt like.  The precocious child star turned prime tabloid fodder, the performer who burned out so hard on various addictions so publicly, Lohan eventually became such an obvious punchline for a million unfunny talking heads and comedians that you just wanted somebody to air lift her out of Hollywood in order to drop her off at an abandoned silo somewhere for her own good.  There were seemingly hundreds of celebrities that fit this bill that decade (almost always young women), but Lohan always seemed the most tragic.

For second, MEAN GIRLS was created and penned by Tina Fey, as big a guiding directional force for 2000’s comedy as anybody else.  Whether she was a force for good or not, however, largely depends not only on who you ask, but when.  Her oeuvre is one that feels under constant audit; a quick Google search of “tina fey racist” ought to give you an idea of how it frequently goes for her.  Now, in isolation, you can probably successfully defend her on every point of contention.  However, when taking it all in totality, you can sort of see how she epitomized a certain comfort comedy had in the beginning of the 21st century in regard to engaging in racial stereotypes under the guise of “I’m not actually racist so”.  I think intent is way more crucial in unpacking comedic racial commentary than we make it sound sometimes, but it still gives one much to think about in terms of where elegance comes into play.

On that note, for…thirds? I think?  When watching MEAN GIRLS in 2024, you definitely feel its mid-00’s energy begin to show.  Teenage girls at a mall?  The use of landlines (hands-free though they may be)?  Vicious gossip being spread around school via paper?  Technology tends to creep up on us, but it’s downright bizarre how different the human high school experience has become a mere two decades later.  None of this is to mention how, yes, it also engages in arguable racial cheap shots (its Asian representation remains a point of contention both then and now) and words that would absolutely not be used now, Regina George’s liberal use of…uh, the r-word being the most obvious candidate.  Obviously, it’s not used in order for anyone behind the movie to actually put down the disabled (it’s actually one of the most clarifying things about Regina’s true character), and it doesn’t personally offend me.  Yet, one imagines this would be an easy rewrite in the here and now; I highly suspect the 2024 remake has worked around this.

And yet, for all of this, MEAN GIRLS remains one of the relatively few stone-cold classics that the 2000’s ended up producing.  To watch it now is to marvel at how much of it still works.  The casting is essentially perfect all the way up and down the call sheet.  Every line is seemingly a perfectly quotable nugget.  And its story of a formerly home-schooled girl infiltrating the Plastics, the nastiest most insular clique in school before losing herself in the facade and becoming a Plastic through and through herself is a surprisingly astute one all these years later.  No, the movie never gets quite as dark as it clearly wants to be; one of its biggest shock-laughs (Regina getting suddenly hit by a school bus) gets immediately softened, and it generally has to abide by its PG-13 rating.  On the other hand, it’s played for laughs that the sex-ed coach gets busted for sleeping with several students, so I’d argue it finds its darkness all the same.

Even the elements I worried would age the film turned out to be some of its strongest.  I mentioned above how the fall of Lindsay Lohan felt tragic in a way that other public celebrity meltdowns in the 2000’s didn’t, and that’s because it represented a very real loss of talent.  It’s very, very easy to forget how good she used to be; in fact, MEAN GIRLS might represent the last high-quality project she was (or may ever be) a part of.  To play the role of Cady Heron requires two things: the ability to play wide-eyed sheltered, almost child-like, wonder and insecurity towards almost everything around you, as well as the capacity for embodying full unbridled bitchiness.  Lohan does both with seemingly no effort at all.  There are showier performances surrounding her in pretty much every scene, yet MEAN GIRLS likely wouldn’t work at all without her.

And man, are there some showy performances going on here.  Just as an example, our three central Plastics are also all wonderful in their own ways, and I’ve always admired how precisely drawn their personalities are, as well as how they work in relation to each other.  Karen Smith (Amanda Seyfried) and Gretchen Wieners (Lacey Chabert) are both vapid suck-ups in their own ways to Regina, but there’s also crucial differences in how they go about it.  Karen is famously rock-stupid, but also possibly the only truly kind person in the group?  Gretchen, on the other hand, sometimes seems actually wounded when she gets her hands metaphorically slapped.  There’s a genuine insecurity when, say, she gets told her try-hand slang invention “fetch” is “never going to happen”.  As for Regina, she was a star-making role for Rachel McAdams* and I’m not kidding when I say you could feel it in the theater as you were watching it.  

*Although I suppose THE NOTEBOOK coming out the same year didn’t hurt.

Then, of course, are the SNL, TV vets and future stars that litter the supporting cast.  Amy Poehler (whose “cool mom” of Regina might be my favorite side character of them all).  Ana Gasteyer.  Neil Flynn.  Diego Klattenhoff.  Rajiv Surendra.  Dwayne Hill.  Tina Fey herself.  Special shoutout to Lizzy Caplan and Daniel Franzese for taking two roles that could have been stuck in expository dialogue hell and imbuing them with personality.

But then again, even if nobody else in the supporting cast shone, as long as Tim Meadows was there, MEAN GIRLS would likely retain its legendary status.  His Principal Ron obviously gets the number one best line of the entire movie (“I will keep you here until four”), but Meadows manages to lift every other one of his lines with this active blank face that makes everything 15% funnier.  I don’t mean to be the guy who says a man in a movie with GIRLS in the title is the MVP and, frankly, he’s not.  But he’s absolutely the sixth man of MEAN GIRLS.

Of course, it’s kind of difficult to pick the true number one best line.  There are the obvious zeitgeisty ones: “I have ESPN”.  “Stop trying to make ‘fetch’ happen”.  “She doesn’t even go here!”  “You go, Glen Coco!”  However, I might pitch the dark horse “what are marijuana pills?”.  But picking the true number one is difficult because, well, there are a lot of goddamn great lines in MEAN GIRLS.  And this leads me to ending this section by defending Tina Fey’s comedic sensibility after acknowledging why maybe not everything about it has aged all that well.  Yeah, not everything about her sensibility is great; looking back, she was probably too obsessed with the Hilton sisters in her time as Weekend Update anchor.  The content of her humor may not have survived, but the loopy cadence and witty spirit of it lives on, if the lasting endurance of this and 30 Rock is any indication.  She was a major reason I fell in love with comedy in the first place, so I’ll never fully write her off.  

Nostalgia is a funny drug.

III. THE LIMIT EXISTS

So, I have something to confess.

Full disclosure time: the plan for this month’s article was to not just wax on about the original MEAN GIRLS, but to also compare it to the remake/musical adaptation that came out this month.  If nothing else, I find the very concept of the new movie fascinating: it’s a movie adaptation of a Broadway musical adaptation (also penned by Fey!) of a twenty-year old original that also appears to double as kind of a straight-up remake.  What is one to think when many of the joke structures of the original seem preserved, and a pair of original cast members return in their old roles?  MEAN GIRLS 2024 seems like an attempt to bridge two generations in one two-hour musical.

My vision for this month’s article was to enter into the 2024 MEAN GIRLS remake with full eyes and a clear heart, and assess what the Gen Z version of a millennial favorite might look like.  Hell, it might have even allowed me to go on a good old-fashioned screed about the relative creative bankruptcy of the current Broadway practice of taking well-known intellectual properties, adding fifteen bullshit songs and an additional forty minutes, then waiting for the cash to roll in.  It probably would have been a really interesting article.

The thing is…I couldn’t do it.  I couldn’t bring myself to see the new MEAN GIRLS.

It’s not out of some sort of confusion as to its general existence.  The musical is popular!  The movie stars well-known people!  It’s fucking January, a month that could use a little sugary pop at the box office!  And I am a recent convert to the Church of Renee Rapp, just like everybody else who have found her scorched-earth style of handling press junkets to be delightful.  This is not me making a big show of Refusing to See Something.  It’s not even out of a pearl-clutching “how dare they” moral outrage as to how they could possibly touch a nostalgic classic.  Again, the 2000’s fucking sucked.  Touch away, you monsters.

But I just couldn’t get myself to hop in the car, take out my wallet and cough up twelve bucks on a weekend day to see a copy of a movie that means more to me than I guess I thought.  And I will remind you I blew a free afternoon to watch THE EXORCIST: BELIEVER.  So, instead, the remainder of this article is going to be about breaking down exactly why I decided to abandon its actual crux.

To be clear, there are a couple of things about MEAN GIRLS 2024 I find concerning.  As I had never heard it before, I did work my way through the original cast recording of the Broadway score and was dismayed to find that none of the songs were particularly catchy in melody or memorable in lyric, a red flag in an adaptation of one of the most quotable movies of its generation.  Although I disliked very little of what I heard, it also provided little of the loopy joy practically every other line of the original movie did.  I took a break from the soundtrack and ultimately never came back to it.  

More disheartening are the clips I’ve seen where it looks like the screenplay for the 2024 version is mostly going for doing the same jokes from 2004, only a little worse?  It’s one thing to recast most of the adults, one of those things that just has to happen if you’re remaking a twenty-year old movie (although my brain is also refusing to adjust to Busy Phillips replacing Amy Poehler as Regina’s mother).  But then Tina Fey and Tim Meadows are returning as the same characters, presumably as some sort of nod to continuity?  I’m not sure why that would matter, but I suppose it’s possible.  I imagine it might also be that they were the two cast members that didn’t necessarily age out of their characters, or maybe it’s just Tina putting her thumb on the scale a bit, bringing her friend along with her.  Whatever the reason, there they are, confusing the intent of the entire endeavor just a bit.

The point is, it appears MEAN GIRLS 2024 is largely just doing the original again, only with alternate takes.  Coach Carr, now played by Jon Hamm, is misspelling the word “hormones” on the whiteboard this time, a major step down from the misspelling of “chlamydia” the first time around.  Meadows’ “I did not leave the south side for this!” has been downgraded to “I did not go to graduate school for this!”  I dunno, I’m already not a fan of movie remakes/reboots trying to court fans of the original by pointing at something and going “remember this?”.  However, it turns out what I hate even more is someone waving something in my face and asking “remember this?” and the thing in their hand is only vaguely recognizable.

I would imagine the best path forward for a project like MEAN GIRLS 2024 is just to rebuild it from the ground up.  An updated MEAN GIRLS is not the worst idea in the world; technology changes, but kids remain the same throughout generations.  I don’t begrudge the idea of replacing three-way phone calls for FaceTiming and TikToks.  Sunrise, sunset and all that.  But that means you have to let the old jokes go, too.  And replacing them with new ones.  New ones without any of the old cadences and setups.  And that’s difficult when the whole point of the endeavor is to present yourself in the shadow of an original.

I should make it clear: this is not me declaring MEAN GIRLS 2024 as bad!  How could I?  I didn’t see it, and I’m not in the habit of making a definitive evaluation of something I haven’t seen or read or listened to.  But I highly suspect it would be a waste of my time, speaking as someone who is both a humongous fan of the original and as someone outside the very targeted demographic the new one is seeking.  Maybe there’s value in realizing these things at a certain point and just letting it go.

As it stands, I couldn’t put the key into the ignition to hear music I didn’t really like paired with old lines I’ve come to love, but rewritten to be just a little worse.  Not when I have the original easily accessible at essentially any time.  So I didn’t.  I’m happy to just kind of live in a world where the original MEAN GIRLS is a singular entity.  I’m happy to pretend Tim Meadows didn’t come back to the role, either in the 2024 musical or in the 2011 TV sequel.  I guess I just didn’t want the spell broken.

Nostalgia is a funny drug.

Stocking Stuffer: The Twelve Craziest Things that Happened on THE SANTA CLAUSES

Okay, look, I know I’m supposed to be with my family right now, drinking eggnog and watching Rudolph or arguing about Ron DeSantis or whatever today.  But I can’t help it.  I can’t let this Christmas season end without completing a little bit of unfinished business.  In my defense, you’re supposed to be with your family right now too, and here you are.  Bear with me for a second.

This year was notable on the blog for me being able to update and “complete” a couple of long form series for me.  Last month, I was able to resurrect my 2020 Scorsese retrospective by reviewing KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON.  A couple of weeks ago, I was able to put a bow on this summer’s Sofia Coppola series by breaking down her biopic PRISCILLA.  

However, I recently brought to my own attention that I made a promise at the end of 2020.  After spending a few days going over the delirious insanity that was the SANTA CLAUSE trilogy, I had made a declaration at the end of the article for THE SANTA CLAUSE 3: THE ESCAPE CLAUSE -

This marks the end of the canonical story of Scott Calvin, at least so far.  In the advent of Disney + expanding every brand under their corporate arm, it's a little surprising there hasn't been a SANTA CLAUSE 4 announced yet, or a 10-episode TV spinoff starring Curtis and Buddy.  However, I wouldn't be surprised if Mickey Mouse changes his tune in the next couple of Christmases.  If he ever does, I'll be here to review it.

As it turns out, Disney eventually met me somewhere in the middle.  Technically, the movie trilogy is still defunct as of 2006.  HOWEVER, last year, they dropped six episodes of a follow-up continuation series, entitled THE SANTA CLAUSES!  My wife and I watched it and basked in its asinine nonsense, then thought nothing else of it afterwards.  I realized later, after Santa had already come and gone, that I was technically obligated to do a write-up.  Okay, well, I wasn’t going to go back and post something in late January, so I chalked it up to a lesson learned.

 THEN, Disney had the nerve this fall to drop a second season.  I took this as a sign.  Thus, today, on the holiest of days, I present to you the twelve craziest things that happened during the first two seasons of THE SANTA CLAUSES (now streaming on Disney Plus!):

1. Let’s start with the theme song, a short little thing that sets expectations for the show perfectly.  It’s not so terrible as it is downright bizarre, a jingle that seems to be missing a middle section.  One’s mileage may vary, but I felt like I was going crazy every time this thing played in front of me.  The graphics aren’t much more comforting, I’m afraid.  It starts with a CGI reindeer turning around and staring straight into your soul, and it concludes fifteen seconds later with a bevy of CGI Santas raining down your screen.  Interesting choices, both.

2. The episode titles themselves, quickly revealed at the end of the title sequence, are oddly chosen and crafted.  I think they’re going for “funny-sounding” over anything truly informative.  Here’s a sampling of a few of them: you be the judge as to whether that particular mission was accomplished.

   Chapter One: Good to Ho

   Chapter Two: The Secessus Clause

   Chapter Four: The Shoes off the Bed Clause

   Chapter Five: Across the Yule-Verse

   Chapter Seven: The Kribble Krabble Clause

   Chapter Eight: Floofy

   Chapter Twelve: Wanga Banga Langa

3. Something that you probably suspected about THE SANTA CLAUSES is that it does dabble a little bit in the brand of conservative humor you may associate with modern-day Tim Allen.  Yes, Santa moans early on in the first episode about how “you can’t even say Merry Christmas anymore”.  Hacky shit, but I would actually submit that there isn’t enough of this going on in the series.  Not that I think it’s particularly amusing, but I feel it’d be a stronger choice to go all in on the cranky boomer jokes rather than do one or two before settling for an amorphous “IP brand extension” tone.  Yes, it probably is now “more accessible for all audiences”, but nobody’s watching but me anyway, you know?  Let’s have some personality!

4. One of the running themes early on in the first season of THE SANTA CLAUSES is Santa’s search for a suitable replacement, a hiring event that gets opened up to celebrities and notable figures.  It’s actually a pretty decent setup for a series of famous faces coming up to the North Pole and doing their thing for thirty seconds.  Naturally, the show provides us only one: NFL great Peyton Manning, who auditions by grunting out, “Ho-Ho-Omaha!”, a reference to Peyton’s famous audible call that I’m guessing most of this show’s potential audience had probably forgotten about in 2022, or maybe never heard before at all.  One has to imagine what would have happened if the first season had filmed a MERE year later; maybe Santa would be getting pitched by the Kelce brothers to appear on New Heights or something.

5. The Season Two premiere contains an interesting treat.  The episode’s centerpiece is a quick music video-esque segment, featuring all the elves dancing around and providing backup to another elf singing “Dancing with my Elf”, a parodic cover of the Billy Idol song “Dancing with Myself”.  Oddly, this turns out to be part of a training simulation for Scott Calvin’s son (don’t worry about it).  I didn’t dig too much as I felt deeply weird Googling a child actress for more than a couple of seconds, but this felt like a way for Disney to showcase a potential child star in the making by finding a way to fit a singing showcase where one normally wouldn’t fit.  I find this somewhat charming in an old-school Hollywood kind of way.

6. Season Two features the Easter Bunny.  The Easter Bunny is played by Tracy Morgan.

7. Season Two’s main villain is a former Santa, known as the Mad Santa. One episode contains a flashback to Mad Santa’s original reign.  He is hosting a party and banging away on a piano singing a song, to the tune of We Wish You a Merry Christmas, about how he doesn’t like porridge.  Tracy Morgan’s Easter Bunny declares that the song “slappeth”.

8. Later on in the season, rhe Mad Santa grants everyone at a Santa Claus-themed park a present based on their deepest desire.  One person gets a signed framed photo of Guy Fieri (I admit this one made me genuinely laugh).

9. A running storyline throughout THE SANTA CLAUSES’ second season is the need for Santa’s head elf Betty (Matilda Lawler, who is pretty easily the best child actor on the show up to this point) to attend Kribble Krabble, which turns out to be the elf version of the Amish ritual Rumspringa, where adolescents get a chance to live outside their religious confines.  Here, Betty must go live among the humans in New York in order to….oh, who knows.  Referring to Rumspringa as “Kribble Krabble” is one of those things that feels vaguely offensive in ways that are imperceptible.  There’s nothing really wrong with it, but it seems like there should be.

10. 90’s television and movie stalwart Laura San Giacomo recurs as Christmas witch La Bufana, a name I only held onto for its resemblance to that of jazz legend Paul Bufano.

11. THE SANTA CLAUSES expands on the greater SANTA CLAUSE lore (a bone-chilling sentence if ever there was one).  It also contains a pretty major retcon.  We find out in the fifth episode of Season One that the Santa that Scott Calvin appeared to have killed (played then by Steve Lucescu, now played by PARKS AND REC alum Jim O’Heir) is not, in fact, dead!  He simply retired to the afterlife (which kind of sounds like he died to me, but never mind).  Also, the passing of the mantle to Scott was no accident; he was a carefully chosen successor, handpicked by Santa after a chance encounter when Scott was a kid.  See?  There’s no random manslaughter in the original movie anymore!  Are we having fun with any of this yet?

12. It’s likely this is the only thing you ever knew about THE SANTA CLAUSES and, in fact, might have been your first indication that the show even existed, but it should be noted that Casey Wilson, the pilot episode’s big guest star as the girl Scott Calvin encountered in the very first SANTA CLAUSE film, has gone on the record with what a disinterested asshole Tim Allen was during the filming of her episode.  Although this is something that technically allegedly occurred offscreen rather than on, I think its potential truth helps clarify the weird feeling the entire show provides.  It’s a show where even its main star, playing the titular character, barely wants to be there.  You can feel it.  There’s a big feeling of “who gives a shit” that permeates every scene of every episode of this.  Amazingly, there’s a very real chance it gets a third season.  As long as the streaming slot machine needs feeding, anything and everything can be a quarter.

    You can bet I’ll be there if and when.