LOST: the rest of Season 5

Let me just note how hard it is to sit here and write this, because I'm so champing at the bit to get on with Season 6. I'm not sure I've ever enjoyed Lost as much as I did on the back half of this season.

I'll admit, I'm prejudiced by one big sweet spot it hit for me: this was truly the Groovy Age of Lost. I've always loved the Dharma Initiative stuff, partly for the general reasons Todd Van Der Werff explains thusly:

There's something about out-of-date technology and abandoned research facilities wasting away in the middle of a tropical paradise that gives the show that extra level of intrigue (think of those oddly unsettling training films, for instance).

. . . but it makes the icing almost as thick as the cake for me that the technology is of groovy vintage, as opposed to, say, the nigh-ubiquitous, all-but-obligatory steampunk. I love it that major chunks of a whole season were set in the Dharma Initiative compound when it was active. I just can't tell you how awesome it was to see some of my favorite characters tearing around in a VW love-bus blasting Captain & Tennille. It was great fun seeing Dr. Chang as an actual character, and learning his connection to Miles--another character I've grown very fond of this season. Even Radzinsky (who looked spot-on for the period) had his own insufferable "charm"--I can't remember the last time I enjoyed loathing a character this much.

Best of all was seeing how Sawyer and Juliet had grown together three years into this extended Summer of Love. Oh man, did those two make shippers of us all, or what? I think every commentary I read expressed something to the effect of, "Please don't let Jack and Kate come in and screw this up!" It was inevitable, I guess, but that didn't make it any less annoying. When Kate plunked down right between Sawyer and Juliet on the submarine, I literally jumped up and shouted at the teevee, "Oh would you just FUCK OFF!!!"

Unfortunately, Juliet had a few weird moments in the finale where the writers seemed too obviously to be jerking her around like a puppet in order to get her and other characters where they needed to be. The effect was disappointingly clumsy. I guess it got made up for, though, in her powerful last moments with Sawyer above the pit.

Let's talk about Sayid. When he took the woman who would later have him in custody back to his hotel room, I was grinning/groaning and thinking, "Well, there's another damn bullet-point for Sean's frakking list." Despite all that evidence Sean marshals for why Sayid is not the badass fans make him out to be, count me a yay-sayer. The thing about Sayid is, he's not Superman or even Jason Bourne, just a guy with some military training and experience. That suffices to make him the resident badass in this lot, which consists of a morbidly obese guy, a scrawny junky musician, etc., even if you throw in a physically-fit surgeon who knows which way to point a gun. Not infrequently over the seasons, the survivors have faced situations that really called for a Jason Bourne, and poor Sayid was almost always the one who had to face them in that role. Even if he tended not to be equal to those situations, he still acquitted himself a damn sight better than most people might have, and I think that's why fans continue to admire him even in the face of his nearly 0-[however many] record. That, for me, is the in-story takeaway, but I think a lot of writing dynamics conspire against him, too. There have been many occasions when Sayid's success would leach the drama out of slow-burn rising action, or prevent something the writers wanted to happen, and the only thing they figured out to do with him was put the brakes on him, tie him up, knock him out, or whatever. Plus, I think he's absolutely a victim of the Worf Effect (in fact, he's named as an example in that tvtropes listing).

I have to say, it rang jaw-droppingly false that Sayid wouldn't have the sense to play along with Sawyer and Jin right from the start after his (here we go again) capture by the Dharma folks. I suppose it was fun seeing him get the MKUltra treatment from the torturer-in-a-teepee, but even so, I never bought it. Nor that he would have left Ben for dead, as opposed to making damn certain, after taking the extraordinary step of shooting him in the first place.

Speaking of young Ben, I thought that kid did a fantastic job. He was like a sadder, frailer Harry Potter for the Lost universe, where the closest destiny he gets to the wish-fulfillment of Hogwarts is running away from Dharma to live with the Others and the ominously ambiguous "magic" of the island.

My argument about Sayid above notwithstanding, I find myself agreeing with most of Sean's "Lost Thoughts," but I found this post--worth reading in its entirety--especially spot-on. The perfunctory, pro-forma way the show finally dealt with Rose, Bernard, and of all "characters," Vincent, did more to drive that point home than deflect it.

I could go on--there's always something arbitrary about when I end these posts (how crazy is it that I haven't even touched on the whole Jacob/Locke/Ben thing yet?!?)--but I can't stand to put off Season 6 any longer. I'll just close by saying I love the way that finale ended, with Juliet smacking that bomb with a rock, and then the fade to white. All bets are off, I guess!

Namaste.