Underpants On The Outside

Lost has a habit of setting up dozens of mind-boggling mysteries and solving NONE of them. My friend Jordan, whose use of imagery is nothing short of genius, describes the experience of watching the show as frustrating as “Dry Humping a Supermodel”.

Allow me for a moment to go on a tangent about Lost. See, there’s a whole lot of mystery on the island, everybody knows that. But lately there’s been a serious shortage of bad-assary, ever since Locke went from bad-ass-crazy to lame-ass-crazy and someone reminded Sawyer that he’s too pretty for fighting. As for Jack, well…when he’s not sitting around looking like he’s going to cry, he’s either losing an argument, pouting like a child, or getting punched in the face. Sooner or later, that guy is just going to have to learn to keep his mouth shut.

Now, Mr. Eko was bad-ass. He was a second season addition that reinvigorated the show, keeping it afloat while Michelle Rodriguez walked around trying to prove that there’s no nuance of human emotion that can’t be conveyed by making a face like you’re slightly near-sighted.

Eko was played by the same guy who played Adibese on Oz (nothing says bad-ass like prison rape). He spoke little and walked around with a big stick that he had carved scripture into, and while he never hit anyone with it, you definitely got the impression that if provoked there would be some serious smite-downs handed out.

Now why am I referring to Eko in the past tense? Because they killed him, that’s why. He didn’t even get to die a cool death, like dying after he kicked a polar bear in the nards. (That would be sweet. You do that, and I don’t care what kind of afterlife your religion has; you’re gonna spend the first couple millennia of it doing nothing but high-fiving guys.) No, Eko had to be one of maybe ten guys to die on a deserted island from pollution.

Allow me to explain: when the castaways first landed on the island, they couldn’t leave the beach. Those who went into the jungle were mauled by something huge, something that made noise like a tyrannosaur and knocked down trees…like a tyrannosaur. Locke came face to face with it once, but we had no idea what it looked like, since they showed his face the whole time. What the fuck was it?

On the dry-hump scale, I’d say this was a really really really hot supermodel, like Zorro-era Catherine Zeta-Jones. But on a satisfaction scale, I’d say it’d be like dry-humping her while she’s wearing Kevlar. Covered in sandpaper. Sixty Grit sandpaper.

For whatever reason, the monster left Locke alone; Locke even claimed that it had shown him something “beautiful”, and I think it was his use of the word “beautiful” that put finally put his bad-assness out of its misery. Of course, he couldn’t explain to anyone just what it was that he saw. That would be too easy. But eventually we’d see it. It was black smoke. Ta-da!!! Whoop-dee-doo, an intelligent fart. In fact, it marked the very first of these Dry-Hump Supermodel posts. So in honor of that post, I call the smoke “Flatulasaurus Rex”.

Back to Eko. After being mauled by the polar bear, Eko was sitting in his tent, when he saw a hallucination of his dead brother, who had been a priest. His brother told him to confess. Next thing you know, his tent had suddenly caught on fire. By the end of the episode, a huge cloud of Flatulasaurus killed him by picking him up and slamming him into the ground, completing the trifecta of “most improbable misfortunes ever.”

I kind of wish he had survived. I mean, I like the character, but I also like imagining him sitting around camp, waiting for someone to complain about being tired or something, so he could go “oh yeah, Charlie? Did all that FISHING tire you out? Yeah, when I was getting mauled by a polar bear, set on fire, and beaten up by a fucking fog, the whole time I just kept saying to myself, ‘well, at least I’m not fishing!’ You say you’re tired one more time and I’m gonna take this stick and smite your colon, so you best put on a smile, pal! I’ve been to prison!”

So what is the black cloud? Well, I have a theory. It’s the same theory anyone who’s read Michael Crichton’s “Prey” should have.

Prey is about a company making state-of-the-art nanotech. Of course, because it’s a Crichton book, money-hungry executives at the company never install proper fail-safes, and then the velociraptors escape and…wait, I got confused somewhere, but you get the idea. Just replace “velociraptors” with “big black cloud o’ nanotechnology”.

Now if you’ve read the book, and you know that there’s all kinds of scientific research taking place on the island, everything seems to fall into place. I’m just perplexed why the writers went in this direction, because Prey was by far the worst book I’ve ever read by Crichton. I like most of his stuff; Andromeda Strain, Terminal Man, and Jurassic Park were all terrific. Prey was crap. A great big black cloud of it.

I keep hoping that nano-cloud-o’-doom is not what’s going on here, but it looks that way. After two and a half seasons, I finally wore out a smooth patch on the sixty-grit, I’m halfway through the Kevlar, and more and more it looks like Catherine’s got a glass eye and an adam’s apple.

Now for this week’s episode. I’m late on last week, so I’m going to tack this week on the end because let’s face it: not a lot happened. When we left off last week, Kevin Spacey’s life was in Jack’s hands because if Jack doesn’t remove a tumor from Spacey’s spine, he’s gonna die. Sawyer and Kate had a whole lot of sexual tension without a whole lot of sex, which I sympathize with every time I watch the show, and Locke was walking around talking crazy.

This week. Locke’s still talking crazy, and Jack still has Kevin Spacey’s life in his hands, though now he tricked Spacey into the operating room (yes, there’s an operating room on the island – at this point someone could pull up in a new Nissan Versa and I wouldn’t bat an eye) and waited until the guy was under anesthesia before pulling the ol’ “psyche!” (Nice, Jack. Way to pick up the bad-ass slack by threatening a guy with a spinal tumor. Who is asleep. It works for those times when tripping a blind girl seems too high-risk. What ever happened to lines like, “My name is Sayid [something I can’t spell], and I am a torturer”?)

The only thing new in tonight’s “season finale” is that Sawyer and Kate managed to have sex, which only would have been exciting if the show was on cable. (Any rumors from my roommate Mary that I was shouting “PAN DOWN, PAN DOWN!!!” at the TV after Kate took off her shirt are complete lies.) But not only was tonight’s episode a bit of a let down, it was also the last one until February, when they’re starting back up with new episodes.

For the record, I’m not sure if I’m going to continue recapping the show, but if I do, I’ll probably put the whole “dry-humped supermodel” joke to bed; lately it’s felt a lot more like “Dry Humping a Dead Horse”.

Now that’s just gross.