Underpants On The Outside

I know what you’re thinking: “z, didn’t you say you were done with dry-humping supermodels?  Didn’t you acknowledge that this bit was old and stale?”  Yes.  Yes, I did.  But if you’ve read this site for a little while, you’ve probably noticed I’m not tremendously reliable.  And for the past two episodes, the switcheroos, fake-outs and shenanigans have gotten out of hand.  It needs to be said.

Take two weeks ago.  The episode focused on Jin and Sun.  If I may digress, they’re the island’s Asian couple, and while I’ll admit I’m prone to cheap humor - often resorting to chauvinism, dick jokes and racial stereotypes - I’m still amazed that with all the broken electronics on the island, no one has turned to them and said, “Are you SURE you can’t fix it?”

Sun and Jin have always been a good couple of characters.  Their past is filled with the intrigue of organized crime, an extramarital affair, potentially illegitimate children and class struggle - it’s like Goodfellas, Unfaithful, and Lady and the Tramp all rolled into one.  The episode two weeks ago revolved around Sun’s pregnancy, because if she stays on the island, she’ll die like every other pregnant woman there.  (The island is seriously against unsafe sex.)  Fortunately for her, we find out that she’s part of the Oceanic Six, as her flash forward shows her back in Korea when she goes into labor.  We also see Jin, desperately trying to pick up a giant stuffed panda and make it to the hospital, but nothing can go right for him - his cab drives off with the panda inside and he drops his phone, where it is crushed by a motorcycle. The tension got pretty thick as scenes of Sun and Jin on the island were interspersed with scenes of Sun in the throes of labor and Jin frantically trying to make it in time.  It really seemed like something terrible was going to somebody.  But Sun had her child, both of them were healthy, and Jin made it to the hospital.  The wrinkle was that Sun was in the future, post-island, while Jin was in his pre-island days, bringing the panda to some ambassador as an errand for his boss.  Jin is dead in the future.  (Admittedly, I should have seen this coming.  Several months ago, Daniel Dae Kim, the actor who plays Jin, was caught driving drunk in Hawaii, where the film the show.  He is now the fourth actor on the show to get a DUI, and it would appear that the producers don’t really appreciate that sort of behavior: of the other three actors, two of them had their characters get shot to death, and the third’s character was beaten to death by the flatulasaurus.  I appreciate that they’re socially conscious, but you’d think ABC would start keeping a couple taxis on retainer.)

In a show where nothing is what it seems, even this was intolerable.  For instance, it was a shock to find out that the Others weren’t some tribe of long-lost, backwoods sociopaths who got their jollies from kidnapping - they’re just scientists who masquerade as backwoods sociopaths to give their kidnapping a little more pizzazz.  That was quite the fast one the writers pulled on us, but what’s important is that it moved the plot forward without negating any of the previous material - after all, the Others were still kidnappers.  If anything, the twist made them even more creepy, like some sort of nefarious drama club.

But the episode with Jin and Sun was nothing more than cheaply manufactured drama.  I had just wasted an hour watching two innocuous events that did nothing for the overall plot.  Sun had a baby.  Jin bought a panda.  I ate a sandwich - big fucking deal.  But because they added some quick cuts and ominous cello music, I spent forty-five minutes being nervous. The episode wasn’t ‘Lost’ so much as it was ‘Lost Time.’ (ZING!)

I’m still a little resentful.  This was supermodel dry-humping at its worst: it was intentional. Some gorgeous creature had taken me home, turned out the lights and worked me into a sexual insanity, but at the last moment the lights came on, revealing my dick tucked into nothing more than a well-lubricated armpit.  And in that moment of horrible realization, she started to laugh, because I had just been dry-humped for sport.  (I might be overthinking this.)  That’s just mean.

Then there was last week’s episode, which actually managed to be entertaining despite the fact that it followed Michael.  I hate Michael.  Once his son was captured by the Others and turned into a semi-omniscient weirdo, his character consisted solely of weeping, pouting and shouting, “They took my boy!” anytime someone pointed out that he was being a prick.  The only positive was the he killed the abhorrent Ana Lucia (sucks for you, Michelle Rodriguez - maybe next time you’ll have a designated driver.)

We thought we were done with Michael - after freeing Kaiser Soze, Michael and his son Walt were given a boat and allowed to leave the island entirely.  But he’s back, working under an assumed identity on the freighter that brought the new arrivals.  Here’s a superfast rundown of why:

Mike tries to kill himself because he’s still a weepy little girl. But he can’t, and he’s told that it’s because the island doesn’t want him to kill himself. In an effort to become mortal, Michael agrees to work for Kaiser Soze and sabotage the boat, to foil the plans of the billionaire looking for the island.

Maybe it’s just me, but if I found out I couldn’t die, there would be a bunch of things on my to-do list that would go above “work for man who kidnapped my son,” and “become mortal.”  Things like, “Become famous stuntman,” and, “bang groupies befitting a famous stuntman.” But what do I know?

I don’t know what the term for personifying a land mass is - is it anthropomorphize? Landopomorphize?  Whatever it is, landopomorphizing the island used to be one of the symptoms of Crazy, Stabby Locke, and I for one never thought it was “real.”  Now that sane people are talking about the island’s desires, it’s one more signal that Lost is letting go of any grip it still had on reality.  The island is just a much larger, leafier version of the Narnia closet.  But the episode was still decently interesting, and rating my interest in terms of supermodels, I would give the episode a solid Gabrielle Reese.

But the biggest dry-hump of all came at the end of the episode when I found out there wouldn’t be any new episodes until late April.  Fuuuuuuuuuuuck that.  Lost takes a ridiculous number of hiatuses.  By now I don’t even know what season we’re in anymore. It’s like when you’re in an off-again, on-again relationship and someone asks you how long you’ve been dating, and you say “six months” at the same time she says “four years,” and you suddenly realize the only way either of you is getting out if this is if one of you moves to Canada. 

It’s especially infuriating because the producers said they wouldn’t be doing this bush-league hiatus stuff.  (Well, okay: I don’t actually know that they said that, but that’s what ex-Roommate Kat said, and she’s always right about that sort of thing - she’s the most anal-retentive person I know. In a good way.)  The show may be on a decline, but I still want to watch it - I enjoy it, and at the very least it provides me with a weekly occasion to hang out with my friends, not to mention a terrific source of conversation.  I need my Lost!  I suck at conversation!

For example, I now need to get a month’s worth of small-talk out of my latest island theory: the island is a fully sentient landmass, but it is only a baby island, which is why no one is aware of its existence.  In fact, the island is the illegitimate child of Australia and Indonesia, and while Indonesia insists that the baby is Australia’s, Australia refuses to pay any support, pointing out Indonesia’s loose morals and recent associations with New Zealand and Fiji.  (And we all know how many kids THOSE two have.)