[addendum]
i just watched last nights episode, it had lots of good stuff, and locke’s last line has so much potential that i can forgive them, as long as we get some decent resolution by season’s end. which is in a few weeks? it’s either sixteen or fourteen episodes, this was episode eleven.
[/addendum]
finally got caught up on lost. they’re, uh, they’re really running low on characters aren’t they? at this point, any more major deaths and they’ll be very much running up against the empathy test. you know, the point where all the characters you liked when the show started aren’t on the show anymore and suddenly you’re watching something else, but it’s still called the same thing?
sliders started out with jerry o’connell, rembrandt (the black guy), arturo (john rhys davies), and wade (the girl). arturo died and was not replaced with a duplicate, nor did they encounter any more alternate arturos, a curious side effect of the actor getting fired off of the dimensional-travel show mid-run.
he was replaced by kari wuhrer, who did a lot of softcore nudity direct to video, and fit the trope around then of ’sexing it up’. this is fine, except john rhys davies was the best actor who was ever on that show, so you know, whatever, it’s sliders. fox at this point wanted it to be an action show, so it changed from alternate histories to cheap versions of species, anaconda, the island of doctor moreau, and whatever else was in theatres at the time.
wade (the girl) left next, and was replaced by jerry o’connell’s brother, charlie o’connell, playing his characters brother, neither of who’s names i can remember. around here the cromagg dynasty became the recurring, dimension conquering villians, and they were about as interesting as they sound. by the end of the show, jerry and charlie o’connell had been fired and replaced with a black science girl (we’re not racist, we swear, look, now there are two black people!) and another bland white dude, playing jerry o’connell’s character in a new body. (yes, the main character is still a white guy, but seriously, we’re not racist. never mind that the black supporting characters may as well be the only non-whites in the entire multiverse…)
so by the end of the show, they’d jumped from four friends hopping between alternate timelines to one of those people and three new characters fighting dimension-conquering mongoloids.
i’m getting tangential here. the point is that if they kill off anymore characters lost will be running perilously low on characters i can empathize with and want to see survive. i’m very much in doubt at this point that we’ll ever get ‘all’ of the answers, or even a satisfying amount of them, and while it’s nice to see ben proving himself more multifaceted than lying schemester, there’s a certain point where you cross a line between bucking tradition and ignoring tradition. it’s good for a show like galactica to not have lee and starbuck hook up, because it’s expected that they will and it’s breaking tradition and expectations for them not to.
it’s bad for a show like galactica, or any show, to not have lee and starbuck hook up, because if that’s what the audience wants to see, and they don’t get it, that’s going to drive them away. you have to be fucking awesome to get away with that, and for lack of ship to ship combat to distract us, season three felt at many points like a long slow tease for the kind of story we knew they weren’t going to give us. you can have lee and starbuck buck tradition, as long as they follow that up by jumping in vypers and blowing the holy hell out of the cylons. if we’re not getting either, you will (and did) lose viewers.
part of me is glad that i waited to watch season four of lost until i could get it in a big meaty chunk, but unless they blow up new york city or something like that, i think the show may have plateaued for me. if the worst the monster can do to a special forces unit is beat one of them up, do i really care what it is anymore? the thing can rip trees out of the ground, but now it’s like, did it take out mr. eko because he was just too weak to fight it off? because he was simply so awesome that they writers couldn’t handle him anymore?
and ben can go anywhere and do anything and he’s supposedly got all this power, but he has to trick sayid into doing his dirty work. he doesn’t have any kind of island-based offensive power? there’s a war between a rich executive and a guy with a mystical island, and it’s all manipulations and tricks? we’re introducing a new arch-villian and Rules and Competition between them, and we STILL don’t have any real answers to questions we’ve been asking since the first season.
it’s just underwhelming. i want to say i’m disappointed with where we are right now. they’ve got a few episodes left this season, but the mysteriousness doesn’t feel legitimate anymore, it’s just the writers stalling for time. the new mysteries aren’t distracting me from old mysteries so much as pissing me off.
galactica, meanwhile, is 100% pure intensity from the moment the season began, with nothing to break the tension except the week between episodes. THEY are obviously in it to win it. whether it ends satisfyingly or not, i’m there for the ride.
lost… i’m losing my patience with lost. we waited almost a year for new episodes and i just want to reach through my tv (technically my monitor) and pummel the writers. you’re not being cleverly coy anymore, you’re just being schmucks. give us as many answers as new questions, or stop killing off all the likeable characters. it’s kind of that simple.
