Royals looking to extend their unbeaten streak to 3 days!
I haven’t been able to find the answer to this one. When was the last time the Royals had 2 off-days in a row in-season? Bonus points if it wasn’t something in the first two weeks of the season when schedules are screwy because of Opening Days.
As such, not a ton of news again today, but we’ll do our best and also make up for it with a long OT/SotD section.
The Big Slick is today! Tickets are still available.
Big Slick is back in a big way! Join Paul Rudd,Jason Sudeikis, Rob Riggle, Eric Stonestreet, David Koechner, Heidi Gardner, and their celebrity friends for a softball game at The K on Friday, June 2. Gates will open at 4:30 p.m., with the celebrity softball game beginning at 5:00 p.m. After the game, stick around to watch the Royals take on the Colorado Rockies. And best of all, it’s all for a good cause. A portion of the proceeds will be donated to Big Slick to help in their mission.
This elicited a fair number of positive responses and the (sadly) expected blue checked mouth-breathing ones, as well.
Love is love.
This month, and every month. ️ #Pride pic.twitter.com/5xk42TORCc
— Kansas City Royals (@Royals) June 1, 2023
Want a crazy minor league stat?
3⃣5⃣ stolen bases and we haven’t even played a game in June yet
Dairon Blanco leads all of @MiLB with 35 stolen bases. #ChasingRoyalty pic.twitter.com/GG80M5VLTn
— Omaha Storm Chasers (@OMAStormChasers) June 1, 2023
The Star comes hard with 6(!) stories about the Royals. Someone get them two days off more often! Jaylon Thompson and Pete Grathoff each have a trio. I flipped a coin and it said we’re starting with Thompson.
First, he previews the upcoming Rockies series as Moose returns.
“When you spend 10 years of your life with people and … (many) in the minor leagues, you become more than teammates,” Moustakas told The Star during the 2020 campaign. “You become more than friends. It’s almost family. It is family, and it really showed in that 2015 season.”
He also talks about some changes MJ Melendez is making
Melendez is hitting .213 against fastballs, per Statcast. He has 28 strikeouts against the combination of four-seam and two-seam fastballs, cutters and sinkers. His struggles have contributed to a lack of plate discipline in chasing those pitches. Melendez has seen 485 fastballs and whiffed 34% of the time.
As a result, Melendez has worked to improve in the batting cage. He is hitting more off a tee to recreate his swing path and change his eye level. He also increased the height of the tee to mirror the high fastballs that he is seeing.
He also surveys some fans about whether they want downtown baseball or not.
Grathoff asked about the repairs to the scoreboard damaged by Edward Olivares’s home run:
“The reason for the smoke was that each panel has a power supply, and the ball happened to hit right on that power supply,” Sharita Hutton, the Royals’ Senior Director of Communication Strategy, wrote in an email. “That is also why a set of panels immediately below the damaged one went out temporarily.”
He draws parallels to the Ballys San Diego situation and how it might impact the future of MLB broadcasts in KC and around the league:
But fans in KC may want to keep an eye on how things go with Padres broadcasts, as Diamond Sports works its way through bankruptcy proceedings. Will Padres fans jump at the chance to watch now that blackout restrictions are being lifted? Will this end up being the first step in the league’s plan to take control of local television rights from Bally Sports?
And he tries to track down Adalberto Mondesi:
Chris Cotillo, who covers the Red Sox for MassLive.com, was asked on the Fantasy Baseball Beat when MondesÍ might be back in Boston.
“This is the greatest mystery facing the Red Sox these days,” Cotillo said. “This is a guy that they didn’t give up much for … but a guy they thought had upside even with one year left (before free agency).
“He has not progressed at all. He is not in game action, he’s not facing live pitching, I don’t think in Fort Myers. He’s just at a point where his ACL recovery has not gone as quickly as they thought.”
We’re going to slide the two blog entries for today in here because, well, there’s only 2 of them and they’re from 2 of the best Royals blogs out there.
First, David Lesky looks at the trade market and tiers players by their likelihood to be moved:
95+ Percent Chance
Chapman
I would say the only team Chapman doesn’t fit on is the Yankees just because they aren’t going to go down that road again. He’s averaging 99.4 MPH with his fastball and has been mostly back to form. I don’t think he fits on a team looking for a closer to take over without looking back, but I do think he’ll get save chances on a new team. Again, he fits on absolutely every single contender. I think the best bets, though, are the Dodgers, Rangers, Rays, Mets or Braves. There are a lot of good prospects on those five teams.
I think they could ask for Nick Frasso from the Dodgers, but I don’t think they get him for Chapman. Maybe with a sweetener attached, but I wonder if they could get Emmet Sheehan. Maybe it ends up with Landon Knack being the guy. I’m not sure who they’d target with the Rangers. They feel like a team that would be hard to find a middle ground with. My opinion is they should target someone like Sebastian Walcott and the Rangers may do it given what their current goals are, but the Royals like guys a little closer. That’s disappointing. Regardless, I would hesitate to think the Royals are going to get a top-10 prospect for Chapman, but bidding wars change everything, so you never know.
Kevin O’Brien, the Royals Reporter, looks at MJ Melendez’s batting profile in the context of possibly signing him long term:
In 51 games and 212 plate appearances, Melendez is slashing .205/.297/.362 with five home runs, 23 RBI, and a wRC+ of 80. The meager home run total, and .157 ISO, which is 19 points lower than a season ago, don’t give Royals fans hope that Melendez’s power has developed all that much in 2023. On the other hand, Melendez’s batted ball metrics demonstrate that his power this year is certainly maturing, even if it has shown in the surface-level numbers.
Got enough little tidbits here around MLB to make its own section.
Ben Clemens as Fangraphs talks about what Grathoff did with the Padres and Bally:
Earlier this year, Diamond Sports Group declared bankruptcy. That dry corporate action, precipitated by a huge debt burden, is starting to have real world consequences. This Tuesday, DSG missed a payment to the San Diego Padres, as Alden Gonzalez first reported for ESPN. That terminated the contract between Bally Sports (a Diamond subsidiary) and the Padres. By Wednesday, the Padres were off of Bally and broadcasting their own games via Major League Baseball.
That’s a pretty big escalation in what until now felt like a slow-moving situation. In fact, in bankruptcy court, Rob Manfred testified that the league received less than one day’s notice of this missed payment. “[They told us] less than 24 hours before they were going to go off the air that they were going to stop broadcasting Padres games,” he said. (Diamond’s lawyers have contested that timeline.) That led to the Padres terminating their contract with Bally Sports, naturally enough, and to MLB stepping in to broadcast games.
There was more news in court on Thursday
A U.S. bankruptcy judge ruled in favor of Major League Baseball and four of its teams in Houston on Thursday, forcing Diamond Sports Group, which runs broadcasts under the name Bally Sports, to fully pay the contracts in question.
…Diamond has long stated that it needs to secure streaming rights in order to prop up its Bally Sports+ app and run a more sustainable business, but it currently holds the streaming rights to only five major league teams — the Kansas City Royals, Milwaukee Brewers, Tampa Bay Rays, Detroit Tigers and Miami Marlins. MLB has shown no interest in providing streaming rights for the others.
Also on Fangraphs, Michael Baumann asks “What Would it Take For MLB to Force an Athletics Sale?”
If Fisher wants to sabotage the sport’s reputation in his city, play three-card monte with taxpayers and legislators in two states, shoo away potential fans, and let his ballpark fall into disrepair, that seems to be his prerogative. There’s nothing the fans, the players, even the government can do to prevent Fisher from continuing to destroy this team, and collect the profits from doing so. As long as the A’s don’t flirt with bankruptcy, the only body with the power to force Fisher out — the owners — has no incentive to make a change.
I don’t know if this had come out before, but Reddit had a post reach the front page with the title “Leaked audio of what an ejection looks like in MLB”. It’s from 2016 and most of the exchange was between Tom Hallion and Terry Collins. This was the year after Chase Utley had broken Ruben Tejeda’s leg on a dirty slide in the 2015 NLDS. Known hothead and headhunter Noah Syndergaard threw behind Utley and was immediately ejected. Then there’s 2 minutes of a hot mic so you can hear what goes on between umps, players, and managers during something like that. It was fascinating and I give Hallion a bunch of credit for how he acted there.
Just a reminder: In game 3 of the 2015 World Series, Syndergaard threw his first pitch behind Alcides Escobar because the Mets 100 mph flame thrower couldn’t handle a hot streak from a career .258 hitter. And then he told them to meet him 60 feet 6 inches away. Oh, hey, look what the Royals got for their troubles:
OT Intro
Today, we’re going to talk about Lost.
Last year, our family went on an amazing vacation to Hawaii. One of our stops was at Kualoa Ranch (https://www.kualoa.com/), filming site of hundreds of movies and TV shows. We took one of their tours on an old school bus where the driver would stop and tell you about a particular location or give trivia about a particular show filmed there. At one point, the tour guide asked “Who watched any of Lost” and most of the bus raised their hand. She then asked “How many watched a couple of seasons” and there were maybe a dozen people, at most. Then she asked “Who made it through the end?” and my wife and I were the only ones with our hands up.
While I think some people might want to deny they had sunk so much time into a show with a much-maligned finale, I think it was safe to take everyone at their word as we were the only ones who spent significant time in the prop room with the map from Desmond’s bunker, the model used for the submarine, a taxidermy polar bear, and tons of Dharma paraphernalia. Also, while on Oahu, we sought out the Lost beach on the north side and the Others camp, as well, and got a thrill from being there. Ever since, I’ve wanted to take a look back and see if the highs were as good as I remembered and that eventually morphed into a partial rewatch of about 30 episodes.
A couple of disclaimers. First, as we’ve talked about in the past, typically a lot of my writing is for me to put things right in my mind. I wasn’t planning on sharing these – I was just jotting down notes for individual episodes. But after we finished our re-watch, I was like “hey, here’s a large volume of stuff that people might want to talk about so let’s give it a go”. So I slapped a (couple) thousand word intro at the front and we’ve got our topic for the day. There might be some overlap between the notes in the intro and items covered in the individual episodes, but I tried to keep that to a minimum.
Obviously, this is going to be super spoiler heavy. Turn back now if it’s somehow in your queue and you’ve never gotten around to it. But, really, the show is more than 10 years old at this point so spoiler warnings are probably unnecessary. Spoilers start after the horizontal break – you’ve been warned.
What Lost did really well
There are a couple of simple things that probably don’t need a lot of rehashing as they were trademarks of the show. First, it was a compelling puzzle box show that kept people hooked for years. My wife and I watched it once it went into syndication right before the last season so we were “fortunate” enough to limit the suspense between episodes. I couldn’t imagine waiting a whole week for a new episode, much less a whole summer between seasons, especially with as slow a burn some of the show was. I mean, the summer between the two parts of “The Best of Both Worlds” in Star Trek: The Next Generation felt interminable to grade school aged me. I could only imagine how difficult waiting for the follow up to “Through the Looking Glass” would be if I had to wait through a summer rather than skipping right to the start of the next season.
Secondly, the well-acted and well-written character drama kept viewers heavily invested in the cast well beyond the mysteries. It wasn’t just what the mysteries were that was compelling but how it affected the characters that viewers loved or viewers loved to hate. The truckload of acting Golden Globe and Emmy nominations and awards speak for themselves, but it’s really hard to find a sour acting note outside of a handful of characters who get weeded out in the first couple of seasons.
A couple times a generation, there’s a show where, when it’s done, the cast will show up all over the TV landscape for the next decade. It didn’t hurt that Hawaii Five-O was filming in a lot of the same locations so Daniel Dae Kim and Jorge Garcia were regulars on that show. The IMDB overlap list for that show is literally over 300 (yes, there are some liberties taken with soundtrack and whatnot but most of those are cast and crew). Meanwhile, Once Upon a Time was written by Lost writers Edward Kitsis and Adam Horowitz so Lost star Emilie de Ravin was among the dozens of people who overlapped there. Michael Emerson took his boatload of awards from Lost over to star in executive producer J.J. Abrams’s Person of Interest, another show that boasts more than 50 overlaps. Some were already well known like Dominic Monaghan for his time in Lord of the Rings while Alan Dale’s career, mostly as a character actor, has spanned 5 decades. But, for most, this was easily their most well-known credit, the role in their introductory paragraph on Wikipedia. That’s before taking into account just how large the cast was.
However, there are two other features of the show that don’t get enough love how well they were done. Each was imperfect and the misses got a lot of visibility. But I think the show should get a lot of credit even for just attempting to do what they did.
First, Chekhov guns. I’m probably describing something everyone’s familiar with but maybe not the term. Per wiki:
Chekhov’s gun is a narrative principle that states that every element in a story must be necessary, and irrelevant elements should be removed. For example, if a writer features a gun in a story, there must be a reason for it, such as it being fired sometime later in the plot. All elements must eventually come into play at some point in the story.
Simply put: if you add something to a story, particularly something out of the ordinary, it has to have a purpose. For generations, murder mysteries have tried to do this, hiding the killer in plain sight for a reader to find them. There are a handful of suspects, red herrings, and actual clues that Sherlock Holmes or Hercule Poirot or Jessica Fletcher has to sift through to figure out the whodunit. Many, including Hemingway, have argued that this makes stories feel a bit formulaic and colorless. My counter argument would be that it forces writers to be disciplined and purposeful. Screen time, pages, and your audiences attention span are limited commodities – use them wisely. Also, when a foreshadowed element is well executed, it’s particularly satisfying to the audience.
But rather than hiding a handful of Chekhov guns, Lost simply littered the stage with them. There was no way to keep track of them all so they were all hiding in plain sight. You can watch the magician’s sleeves if he only has 2, but it’s a lot harder when he has 20 or 200. I don’t believe there’s any way to measure this, but Lost seemingly has the highest density of Chekhov guns of any show I can think of. It’s a creative solution to combat the problem that mysteries have seemingly always had where they seemed to either be too easy to be rewarding or too difficult and the audience feels unsatisfyingly tricked by the author relying on literary sleight of hand.
Unfortunately, it just led to two other major problems. One: there are only so many mysteries you can include in a show. The more that is revealed to an audience, the more they start to understand the rules of a show and the harder it is to surprise them. Two: some of those mysteries are just going to be left behind. Stakes escalate and many of the Chekhov guns are never fired. When you’re worried about flying through time or unleashing darkness upon the world, taking time to explain a polar bear will seem anti-climactic when viewers want to see the current high tension plot.
Secondly, Lost excelled at flashbacks for characterization. This isn’t to say this literary device hadn’t been used before, but Lost used it more than had ever been done. The show also did it with such expertise that it’s become part of the common TV language – whole episode character flashbacks are now in vogue again.
But, like the Chekhov guns, this proved to be both a strength and weakness of the show, trading one set of problems for another. It was a brilliant way to provide large characterization to characters who were all stuck on a small island in a small dramatic space. However, it also slowed down the main story. So many episodes, especially in the first couple of seasons, felt like 40 minutes of flashback and only 5 minutes advancing the current plot. That sort of worked when establishing the dramatic rules of the island but became frustrating when a viewer had to slog through a half dozen episodes to see what was going to happen with the hatch, the boat, or the Others.
I don’t think the audience fully appreciated how hard it was to balance the current plot element of the show with the equally important characterization of the show. Lost had a huge ensemble cast and the character flashbacks were the backbone of that aspect of the show. The audience had to be interested both in the multi-threaded plots while also being simultaneously invested in the multi-faceted characters and there’s only so much screen time to go around.
If the first three seasons weren’t difficult enough, they traded it for an even tougher task in seasons four and five with the flash forwards. The writers are trying to predict where the characters will be two seasons into the future. You can’t just let them grow organically and add and drop traits or plots, as needed. Once the writers showed where the characters were going to be a season down the road, they were locked in with very limited dramatic wiggle room. If something needs to change with a character? It’s going to look like a cheap retcon.
Where Lost struggled
I already noted a couple of aspects of the show where the staff and cast tried to ingeniously solve common dramatic problems, only to make new ones. However, those weren’t the most prominent issues.
I’ve always felt that where a lot of people soured on the show was the change in genre and tone between the three major “sections” of it. It went from paranormal survival drama in seasons 1 and 2 to hardcore science fiction in 4 and 5 to religious allegory in 6. The transition from the first to the second was fairly smooth with a lot of overlap. The first half of season 3 was not great but the second half was excellent. However, the second transition was much more rocky. It was not as well executed and, really, the two genres don’t fit together as cleanly. Also, while there’s some overlap between those three genres, there’s more area outside of the center of that Venn diagram. Asking your audience to transition not just once, but twice? That’s a heavy lift.
OT Conclusion
In the end, this is going to sound a little like my thoughts on Evangelion. Upon second rewatch and with some knowledge of what was going on – it holds up much better. However, I’m a science fiction veteran – this isn’t my first scifi rodeo. If I’m having to look for explanations of a number of major plot points, it’s understandable that casual fans lost interest. That is on the writers and directors to dial back some of the obfuscation and put forward a more coherent message for the major plots and themes.
Also, we had the benefit of generally watching the better episodes – I tried to pick the ones I remembered and/or the ones with higher ratings on IMDB and fan sites. We didn’t have to slog through Charlie’s frustrating heroin addiction or that awful episode of Jack’s tattoos or Nikki and Paulo.
Perhaps time also softens some disappointment. My lasting impression of Lost was that it was a good show for the first three seasons that got rocky in seasons four and five before falling apart in the sixth. As I already know the ending, this time, I wasn’t gripping the edge of my seat to see how it all turns out. I could slow down and watch for other little bits. I noticed that they did actually try to explain some of the loose threads, especially in seasons 4 and 5. However, some of the explanations were unsatisfying and others mangled some character arcs (poor Desmond) as they were trying to chase tying up the plot at the expense of character and it was just too hard of a needle to thread.
In the end, I really enjoyed this partial rewatch and my wife and I are considering a full rewatch in a few years when we have more time.
Episode Capsules
As noted above, there might be some overlap between what I said above and what’s in the individual episode capsules. Also, they’re not the cleanest writing – there’s going to be some sloppy prose and duplication of transitions. You’ll see my verbal crutches and repeated transitions in full force without me going back and editing them out. Sorry about that.
Ed note: this entry ended up being over 4000 words prior to adding the capsules, so I’m going to cheat like I did with Evangelion. I’m posting it all here today. But sometime between now and next Friday, we’re going to pull this section and then dump it into next week. Good news! You already know what’s bulking up next week’s OT section.
Seasons 1 and 2
Didn’t watch any eps, which is a shame as there were so many good ones, especially in season 1 like Locke’s walkabout or Sawyer and Kate’s backstory or the polar bear or the smoke monster. Season 2 and the tail section were less good but still had great elements and the introduction of the Others. Desmond, the hatch, the numbers, and the explosion – we skipped all of that, sadly. I remember the first couple of seasons gave me nightmares for a while. We should have watched more but my idea initially was just to watch a couple of eps from Season 3 and call it good. When we started watching, we were drawn back in.
Season 3
3.01 “A Tale of Two Cities” – Tried to catch up with the first two seasons and started here. I really wanted to see the scene at the start of the season where we were in Hawaii where that was filmed. It was just like we remembered it. The episode does the great juxtaposition of The Others and their suburban-like book club lifestyle and the survivors of Oceanic 815. I remember the first time we saw it, we were a little disappointed but, looking back, it’s a brilliant pulling the curtain back on The Others. While we were awash in the nostalgia of how good it was, I also remembered some of the frustration that we’ll get a lot less of, watching it as we’re doing. There was some flashback plot with Jack’s marriage falling apart and him thinking his dad was sleeping with his wife and it was just slow and draggy and frustrating. We originally watched all of Lost in 2009 in syndication, catching up just in time to see the series end in 2010. I don’t know how people watched this week to week – there was the week-to-week speculation that must have been fun. But, man, the show could drag, too, and provide some substandard answers. The polar bear was one of the iconic scenes from the first season but we’re only given a throwaway explanation, overshadowed by the visual of Sawyer and Kate in the cages and their new fight for survival against The Others.
3.08 “Flashes Before Your Eyes – Desmond episodes are the best. Sure, Henry Ian Cusick was good, but I think he was helped by being given some great writing. The premise of this one is simple: Hurley thinks Desmond can see the future so he enlists Charlie to try and get Desmond drunk and get the truth out of him. It’s a fun premise but Desmond episodes tended to reveal a lot of secrets about the show.
Lost did three things amazingly well: casting, creating the flashback formula, and extreme serialization and all three are on full display here. First, the casting is brilliant and, while most of the actors and actresses in Lost didn’t go on to bigger and better things (Michael Emerson is the only one maybe), they did circulate around TV for the next decade. Like contemporary Heroes, they turned up everywhere from CSI villains to guest stars on SyFy and at least half worked on Once Upon a Time.
Speaking of Once Upon a Time, that show from Lost writers Edward Kitsis and Adam Horowitz was one of many shows that took the flashback model from Lost and incorporated it heavily. It’s not that flashbacks haven’t been used in the past but not as heavily like this where they served as the basis for most of characterization.
Thirdly, while The X-Files set up modern serialization in TV drama, Lost took it down the field, making it impossible to miss an episode. The X-Files was made in the early days of the internet where theories were exchanged on usenet and chats were done in AOL Instant Messenger. But The X-Files also only had 6-10 anthology episodes per season. Every episode of Lost was indispensable. DVRs were a thing now so you didn’t have to worry about missing an episode.
This ep also has Desmond leaving Penny, after being scared off by her dad in the scene with the expensive whiskey they’re getting Desmond drunk with. It also has Eloise Hawking eerily predicting the future. And Desmond revealing that not Claire, but Charlie is being Final Destination’d.
3.22/23 “Through the Looking Glass” – This is one of the greatest episodes of TV ever. For most of the season, Lost drips tiny bits of plot around characterization through current events and flashback backstory. Also, unlike most shows, the average episode actually leaves more Chekhov guns on the stage than before it started, somehow. The season finales are often the opposite and this was the best of them all. If you uttered “Not Penny’s Boat” to the a certain age demographic, they would know exactly what it meant. Charlie’s heroic death was brilliantly done, foreshadowed by the previous episode we watched, and erasing all the frustrating Charlie-loves-heroin plot from before.
There’s action as the Survivors finally get the upper hand on The Others, winning most of the battle on the beach. It’s the first time that Ben’s plans are unraveling as he realized Juliet has betrayed him. He sends Mikhail to kill his own people (including a young Lana Parilla) as well as Charlie and Desmond in the Looking Glass station. There’s Naomi, her sat phone, and our first hints that something isn’t right. The middle gets a little bogged down by some heroes-in-transit and splitting up but it feels more shell game than stall. Ben reveals that Rousseau is his adopted daughter Alex’s mother.
But, in the frantic end, Ben pretends to have The Others kill the Survivors on the beach Hurley (and the heroes in transit) saves the day, Mikhail blows up The Looking Glass, “Not Penny’s Boat”, the sat phone works, Locke kills Naomi but not before Jack gets a call to the freighter, and it looks like the Survivors will finally be saved. But then the huge twist: Jack’s suicidal hero flash backs were not flash backs at all – they were flash forwards and “Kate! We have to go back!” It was the pinnacle of Lost and it was every bit as great as I remembered.
Season 4
4.01 “The Beginning of the End” – After the last episode, this is a bit of a comedown. It’s a lot of denouement of the last season. Not only that, but the island splits up… again. Jack takes a number of the Survivors but Locke convinces the rest, some of which feel contrived (Hurley). I guess I get why they felt the need to keep splitting the characters up, to give more threads to weave the plot tapestry, but it’s a bit frustrating. We also have more of heroes-in-transit going through the forest. Meanwhile, the Flash Forwards start painting a bleak picture of the future with soon-to-be-suicidal Jack visiting Hurley, who is in a mental institution.
Plotting during the first three seasons of Lost was hard. As mentioned before, they were basically creating a new formula. Each season was something like 3 hours of plot advancement, 3 hours of character advancement, and 10 hours of character backstory. That’s hard enough to balance, keeping people interested across an entire season while also putting together cohesive episodes. This gets double hard with going forward in time. At least with the flashbacks, if something didn’t work with a character, you could organically change it a few episodes down the road. With the flash forwards, the puzzle is nonlinear and if something doesn’t feel like it’s working, you have to retcon it, which feels like cheating.
4.05 “The Constant” – It’s not my pick (Through the Looking Glass is), but, for a lot of fans, this is the best episode in the series. This episode that seamlessly blends the science fiction the show is morphing into with the brilliant character drama it’s always been. Back in “Flashes Before Your Eyes”, we get a different type of flashback, a “time slip”, where Desmond’s mind goes back to the wrong time. Here, that plot device is used to the extreme as Desmond keeps shifting back and forth through time from the 2004 present (it was filmed in 2008, but this is when the show started) and 1996. The curtain is pulled back a little on the freighter as we find a familiar face return (Michael) and more about the people running it, specifically Keamy. On the island, Faraday starts explaining a little about how the island is in a different time than outside the island. We also get a sprinkling of high stakes as each trip through time brings Desmond closer to aneurysm. The ending even adds another layer with Faraday’s journal having the words “If anything goes wrong, Desmond Hume will be my constant.” But the scene that everyone remembers is where Desmond calls Penny on Christmas Eve – it’s just so well done, so touching – it hits all the perfect emotional notes.
4.09 “The Shape of Things to Come” – Watching only selected episodes like this really condenses the show down. Most of the drag is gone but we also miss a lot of the inbetween details. Keamy leads an assault on the island and plans to kill everyone there except for Ben. Jack finally gets Faraday to admit they aren’t here to save the Survivors. Speaking of which, that’s one of the things I really remember about this season – all 4 of the “new” cast members were just “twitchy” – they were all a bit off. I mean, knowing their backstory, it makes sense: Faraday is the mad scientist slipping through time, Charlotte was originally from the island and spent her life trying to get back there, Miles is a spiritual medium, and Keamy is a psychopath mercenary. But this all led to season 4 being weirdly on edge in a show that was already always on edge.
Beyond that, the show was just shifting. The first two seasons where a character driven survival drama in a weird location. Seasons 4 and 5 started leaning hard into science fiction. Season 3 bridged those two and contributed significantly to why it was the best season. A lot of people got lost in that seeming “bait-and-switch”, even if it seemed natural to the average sci-fi fan. However, the season 6 jump to religious allegory in lieu of more explanation didn’t sit well with almost anyone.
This was another one of those episodes where Ben’s plans fell apart and his bluff got his daughter Alex killed (after her mother, longtime favorite Rousseau and boyfriend Karl were killed in the previous ep). This breaks the already psychotic Ben and he summons the smoke monster (though it’s later retconned that’s not how it works), which attacks the attackers. The final flash forward is Ben confronting Widmore in his bedroom. Alan Dale’s Widmore is brilliant in all of his scenes up to this point, slightly rattled but mostly hiding it from Ben.
4.12/13 “There’s No Place Like Home” – This is actually a 3-parter and it covers a ton of ground, albeit imperfectly, so it’s not quite as good as the previous season finale as it takes a long time to get there. There’s a helicopter and a boat ferrying people to and from the freighter. There’s the bomb on the freighter thread. A number of the main characters on the island split up, including a bleeding Jack. Ben hands The Others over to Locke and tells that to Richard Alpert. Keamy is injured a couple of times but doesn’t die until he reveals he has a dead man’s switch that will blow up the freighter and Ben kills him anyways as revenge for Alex. There’s also a number of flash forward threads like Sun buying a company and working with Widmore, Claire’s mother shows up and makes Kate having Aaron uncomfortable, and Locke revealed as the one in the coffin. In the end, the freighter explodes and Ben moves the island. We even get a moment the show had been building up to for 4 seasons: Penny finds Desmond and the Oceanic Six are rescued. If you’re checking boxes for major plot points, it does a lot. However, they’re just not as well done as some of the others so they fall a bit flat.
Also, both this episode as well as the previous season finale are just evil with the concept of hope. In Through the Looking Glass, there’s a couple of moments where it looks like everything is going to be ok. I mean, you know that it’s really not because there are 3 more seasons of the show. But, for instance, when Jack makes the call – it feels like maybe everything is going to be all right. There’s some of that this time, too. They’re found by Penny but too many bad things have followed too many good things too many times – it’s Lucy with the football, we’re getting wary as viewers. You can’t just pawn people off with small victories like finding water or finding the hatch like in previous seasons – there need to be some big wins now that we’re on the back half of the show. And we know that getting off the island doesn’t really amount to anything with Jack screaming that they have to go back.
Season 5
5.01 “Because You Left” – If there was any doubt we were into hardcore science fiction territory, nope. The island, having just been moved last time by Ben, starts lurching forward and backward through time. There’s not as much cleanup to do as the previous season as this ending is starting to feel more choreographed, less frantic – there would be more episodes in season 5 to resolve what was left undone in season 4. This starts to feel a little like MCU where each episode is now being used to set up a bigger plot. That makes the big episodes have better payoff but it does weaken each individual episode. This episode mostly served to put the pieces in place for the rest of the season. Also, flashback and flash forward don’t have a lot of meaning when the characters are jumping through time.
5.07 “The Life and Death of Jeremy Bentham” – We tried to decide between this and the previous two episodes and split the difference. We watched the “Previously on” and first scenes for “This Place is Death” and “316” and then watched this entire episode. I mean, the big episode should have been “316” where the Oceanic Six go back to the island but it’s not that well thought of so I just skipped to the next pair. Part of the mystery from season 4 was “who is in the coffin” (Locke) and why is he going by Jeremy Bentham. Widmore was who convinced him to try and convince the others. But Locke fails and his crisis of faith scene, explaining his suicide attempt to Ben, is brilliant acting by both. However, then, inexplicably, Locke tells Ben about Eloise and Ben kills Locke anyways and takes away most of the gravity from the previous scene. Also, it doesn’t make a lot of sense plot-wise, and people were still arguing about it on the Lost subreddit so I didn’t get a clear answer of why it was done the way they did.
5.08 “LaFleur” – A friend talking about how they tried to fill in the gaps in season 5 and I think that’s fair. We didn’t notice it as much in first watching as we were trying to avoid spoilers and enjoying watching the story and drama unfold. At the time, it felt like they did a lot of sloppy retconning. Upon second watch, it wasn’t quite as sloppy, though it did suffer from some of the “unsatisfying” conclusions like, say, the polar bear. But, they really did attempt to explain a lot of the background – like shipping half the cast back to 1977 and filling in the Dharma and Widmore backstory. And using the other half to start exploring the “spiritual conflict” that would be the center of season 6. Not enough of the Chekhov guns are fired overall in the show, but for season 5, more are fired, even longstanding ones, than are left on stage. This was a Sawyer episode and they really ran Sawyer through the ringer this season. First, he finds happiness in an unlikely pairing with Juliet, a pairing that, on paper, just doesn’t feel right. Elizabeth Mitchell just does enough to make it work but Josh Holloway does the really heavy lifting – he’s not just a pretty face, it’s really believable. You really believe that he was actually really happy with his new life in Dharmaville. The end of this episode foreshadows that all getting ripped away. And, yet, the results of the season finale are so much worse. You actually are rooting for Sawyer when he’s beating up Jack, then Juliet walks away from him because of some perception about how he looks at Kate (“And you would stay with me forever if I let you, and that is why I will always love you”). And, to end it all, Juliet dies.
5.12 “Dead is Dead” – The backstory continues with the “revelation” of why Ben and Widmore hate each other. Michael Emerson is really good – his controlled, hyper-intelligent sociopath followed by his descent into madness following Alex’s death that showed a different flavor of crazy is really believable and really well done. Jacob and religion also really start taking hold in the latter half of the season, especially the finale. The Man in Black, masquerading as Locke, leads Ben to the Temple where he sees smokey posing as Alex and telling him to follow everything Locke says.
5.14 “The Variable” – When I mentioned “sloppy” earlier, this is part of what really feels sloppy: it feels like they break the consistency of the time travel rules. After abiding by “whatever happened, happened” as our guiding time travel rule to the point of even having that as an episode title, Faraday comes back and breaks that with an explanation about how people are the variables but it feels cheap in the way that Mulder “finding” his sister felt cheap in The X-Files. The rules were broken and the only real explanation was an appeal to sentiment. They might have been able to get away with this early on when they were making the rules, but as the explanations are filling in backstory, the space with which the plot can stay consistent within the world is getting smaller and this feels like it’s not within it. Then again, the religious allegory part seems to break it a bit, too. Everything else about the episode mostly works, though: Sawyer’s regrets, Daniel’s inability to warn Chang, and, really, Faraday’s death feels really appropriate – shot by his own mother in the past.
5.16/17 “The Incident” – Speaking of sloppy, the season finale is not as memorable as the last couple because of the sloppiness. The significance of many of the moments are muted by the way we got here. It feels way too convenient to just now have Jacob showing up at key points in each of the survivor’s lives – that needed to have been set up earlier on. They pick good moments in the characters’ lives and set it up well within the episode but it wasn’t foreshadowed enough previously. Jacob’s bodyguard burning his cabin, Locke’s corpse, and Ben killing Jacob all work, though. Similarly, the bomb plot feels really contrived – sure, the 50s Others just happened to get a bomb, Faraday happens to notice it, happens to know how to disarm it, buries it for decades, and determines it’s just the tool to somehow neutralize the pocket of energy that creates the hatch. Even for this show, that stretches things very far. But, again, the rest of the plot is a little off and on. Finding Rose and Bernard is nice, Sayid getting shot felt random, touched on Sawyer and Juliet above and I don’t like her change of heart, the Dhama conflict at the Swan site seems real, the shootout at the Swan site seems unnecessary, Jack wanting to fix things and having to drop the bomb work, but the bomb not detonating when it fell and near-dead Juliet, who should have died from the fall or being impaled by metal, somehow sets it off by hitting the bomb with a rock. Oof.
Season 6
6.01/02 “LA X Parts 1/2” – The vagaries of the flash sideways really hurt this season. There were a number of fan theories (https://lostpedia.fandom.com/wiki/Flash_sideways/Theories) about what it was: alternate timeline created by the bomb paradox, purgatory, a construct of the Man in Black, the flash sideways as the actual afterlife, etc. The official explanation is that it was a place where the characters met after death before moving on. Knowing this coming into the season makes it make a lot more sense. With that explanation in mind, though, we made a list of who was where at the end of season 5:
Dead in 00 previously: Christian, Charlie, Michael, Claire (unknown?)
Dead in 77: Charlotte, Faraday, Juliet, Sayid (almost), and potentially everyone else because of bomb
Alive in 77 (pending bomb result): Jack, Kate, Sawyer, Hurley, Jin, Miles, (Rose and Bernard)
Dead in 00: Alex and Rousseau, Locke, Jacob
Alive in 00: Ben, Sun, Frank, Ilyana and crew, Richard Alpert, the Man in Black
Alive in 00 (not on island): Penny and Desmond, Widmore, Eloise, Walt, Aaron
It’s hard to get past the “bomb didn’t blow everyone in 77 up” so you just have to accept it as a bad plot hole. Sawyer saving and then losing Juliet again is hard. Locke confirming that he’s the smoke monster is satisfying. Jacob appearing to Hurley and telling them to take Sayid to the temple works well, if we’re leaning heavy into the religious angle as does everything that happens at the temple. Sayid coming back to life is, well, unexpected as “dead is dead”.
6.04 “The Substitute” – For season 6, we’re just going to watch about every third episode. The leadup wasn’t as bad as I remembered it so maybe I misjudged the show. Also, for all the episodes we don’t watch, we’re going to watch the “Previously On Lost” so we get a decent sense of what is going on. While this episode is called “The Substitute”, Locke’s flash sideways is the B plot: he’s a desk worker who lost his job because of the walkabout but lucked into seeing Hurley who helped him get a job as a substitute teacher. But lots of actual “real-time” season 6 action happened during this time. A young Jacob still appears to some on the island while The Man in Black goes recruiting, this time after Sawyer, showing him his name carved into a cave wall along with the other candidates. In the next couple of episodes we didn’t watch, Jack and Hurley find the Lighthouse, Jin runs across a crazy Claire, Sayid kills Dogen in the temple, and that allows the Smoke Monster to wipe them all out.
6.07 “Dr. Linus” – The flash sideways part of the season feels like a lot of padding, to retell the flashbacks down another path, but it feels like there was still a lot to explain about the island and this is taking valuable time away from that, a puzzle to distract. It feels like DS9 giving 10 full eps to end the Dominion war but getting bogged down in Section 13 and Vic Fontaine and the like so that there’s not enough time to wrap up the Emissary plot that was central to a lot of the show. This one does have a couple of cool scenes like Jack betting Richard that he can’t kill himself and then Ilyana confronting Ben about killing Jacob. Going to steal a moment her to talk about Michael Fox – unless you count starring in teen drama Party of Five, he hasn’t much ton before or since Lost. They occasionally ask him to do too much, but he’s a near perfect Jack Shephard, arguably the biggest role in this giant ensemble cast. I know I’ve stretched the X-Files comparisons too far already, but, for one more, it’s almost David Duchovny as Fox Mulder good with nothing else in the career ever getting close. Speaking of acting, Michael Emerson is excellent, once again, with his story of regret about sacrificing Alex for the island and Jacob and his pitiful reason for joining Locke because “he’s the only one that’ll have me”. The flash sideways where he tries to blackmail William Atherton for his principal job to make the school a better place before backing down to get Alex a promotion is sweet-ish, but, again, padding.
6.09 “Ab Aeterno” – Richard Alpert’s long-awaited backstory is the highest rated episode of the season. Frustratingly, the crisis of faith has been a bit difficult for Nestor Carbonell to act as I think he’s being pushed to overact at times. But this was more a return to form, similar to his great scene with Jack a couple of episodes ago. The episode is a throwback to previous seasons as there are no flash sideways (one of only two, along with Across the Sea) and not a lot of plot movement in the “present day”. Titus Welliver’s temptation is good but Jacob’s “explanation” of his Man in Black comes up short again – it’s lacking detail (he can’t be allowed to leave the island) and done in metaphor (cork in wine bottle)
6.11 “Happily Ever After” – Once again, Desmond episodes really are the best and he’s a good vehicle to start unraveling the alternate reality of the flash sideways. There’s some stuff we must have missed earlier in the season with Widmore’s sub, Jin somehow there, and Desmond being kidnapped. But everything else about this episode mostly works: a flash sideways caused because Desmond can withstand electromagnetics? Sure. His flash sideways where he’s besties with Widmore is suitably surreal. What Lost does best is jumble up characters and make them fit together. So having frustrating season 2ish heroin-addicted Charlie helping Desmond pierce the veil fits perfectly. Then piling on Eloise as being able to seemingly see between realities – it’s just well done. The ep ends with Desmond looking like he’s going to be the chosen one to “wake” everyone up in the flash sideways. I’ve seen compelling arguments that Desmond never should have been brought back to the island as his character arc should have been done when he sailed off into the sunset with Penny. However, if you’re going down the Flash Sideways road, I’m not sure what other character could thread this plot and character needle.
6.12 “Everybody Loves Hugo” – Originally, we were only going to watch a handful of episodes like the previous season, but we were enjoying the ride so much that we decided to watch the rest of the show. This ep has another one of those kindof-disappointing but kindof-makes-sense explanation of the whispers sounds that has been there since season one: dead Michael confirms Hurley’s suspicion that they’re from people who can’t “move on” from the island. Similarly disappointing, Illana just randomly dies from dynamite, Richard’s and Ben’s joint crises of faith makes them erratic and uninteresting, and Sayid captures Desmond, who is acting weird after events from the last ep, before Smokey tosses him into a well. However, there is payoff of watching an ep with the likable Hurley: the plot with his good life and help from “insane” Libby is sweet and keeps unraveling the flash sideways mystery.
6.13 “The Last Recruit” – Even with the flash sideways, season 6 probably has more happening “in real time” than any other season. This ep’s flash sideways just move pieces into place. But, on the island, “in the real world”, so much more happens: Smokey tells Jack that he posed as his dad (more answers), (crazy) Claire tells Jack that they’re step-siblings, the Man in Black tells Sayid to kill Desmond (but a change of heart is implied), Sawyer steals Smokey’s boat along with the main characters but Jack heads back – mirroring Sawyer’s decision from season 4, and Widmore’s team betrays Sawyer (the only seemingly rational one at this point) and then starts firing rockets at Smokey. However, the big emotional moment in the episode is when Sun and Jin, who were scattered across time, get back together for the first time in three seasons.
6.14 “The Candidate” – This is the windup ahead of the finale. Sure, there’s some fluff with Jack and Locke in the Flash Sideways, but three major characters meet their end. Locke tricks them into going onto the submarine with a bomb. However, Sawyer doesn’t believe Jack’s (likely correct) interpretation of the rules that Smokey can’t kill them directly, so he unwittingly assists by setting off the bomb. Sayid gets some redemption for his sixth season heel turn with a heroic death. But even his sacrifice can’t save Jin and Son, who die together after spending three seasons apart. It’s one of the sadder moments in the show, they way they do it. First, they’ve been apart so long that you’re happy they’re back together, after much growth. Second, Jin could have escaped – we lay that out pretty clearly. Three, they (and Jack) realize Jin is sacrificing himself because if he can’t live with Son, he doesn’t want to live without her. he deaths felt a little arbitrary at the time, but not when looking back, considering what Locke is trying to do and where we’re heading with the conflict between him and Jacob’s chosen. I’m struck at how I don’t remember this episode from our watch years ago as it’s a pretty darn big deal. So much of the 6th season feels like that because of the Flash Sideways misdirection. It sucked a bunch of the emotion out of the events in “real time”.
6.15 “Across the Sea” – This is the other backstory episode that breaks up the season. However, unlike the praised Ab Aeterno, this is one of the most maligned episodes of season 6. It tries to “explain” but doesn’t explain a lot, once again speaking more in metaphor than in the concrete. I think some people see Lost fans looking for explanations like Charlie Brown and the football. But that whistles past the real attempts to explain things in the fourth and fifth season. As I mentioned before, in a show full of jarring transitions, the most jarring is the one from science fiction to religious allegory. For the longest time, Jacob was this mysterious, somewhat screwy side plot with the Others. But, at the end of the fifth season, his conflict with the Man in Black is suddenly the focus of the main season, a season when we were hoping to wrap up all (ok, most) of the other conflicts and mysteries between the other characters. I’m not sure there was any way to dramatically balance the scales between that and five seasons of heavy character drama. That’s too much weight to put on the writers and on Mark Pellegrino’s shoulders. Instead, he’s often upstaged in these important scenes as Titus Welliver’s Man in Black is just better than Mark Pellegrino’s Jacob.
6.16 “What They Died For” – We’ve talked a lot about the Flash Sideways and the Jacob/Man in Black conflict already this season, mostly negatively. However, this is the first episode I started really thinking “maybe it’ll turn out alright after all”. In “Happily Ever After”, Desmond starts to pierce the veil and it’s revealed that Charlie, Daniel, and Eloise are already all aware, to some degree, of the actual meaning of the Flash Sideways. However, this is the first episode where I really felt invested in how it would turn out, actively rooting for Desmond’s quest to succeed. Similarly, Jack becoming the new Jacob to battle the Man in Black’s Locke was where this show was always going to go. For all intents and purposes, this episode is part 1 of the 3 part finale as opposed to a stand-alone. Once again, I was struck by how little I remembered of so many critical plot points coming down the stretch. I, like most people, was so caught up in trying to get my mysteries answered and seeing how it would all end that not much stuck.
6.17/18 “The End Parts 1/2” I feel like I should leave a little bit for next week. But if you want to talk about it in the comments, go for it.
Honestly, I really wanted to talk about Michael Giacchino, who has won an Emmy for Lost, along with an Oscar, and three Grammys for his other work. But I simply ran out of time and words. Maybe I’ll use some of the time next week to improve on the SotD since the OT is already written.