Lost Season 5 DVD Special Edition!

Thanks to fb for sending me the following link. ABC will be releasing a special limited edition "Dharma Initiation" version of the Season 5 DVDs. Behold:



The DVDs come in sleeves that look like floppy disks (remember THOSE?!) and there's a VHS tape of an orientation video. Archaic indeed! And now... I feel old. But anyway... it's snazzy, but I think I'll probably be buying the regular edition of the DVDs.

You can read about all the special features of the edition here.

Lost: We Want Answers

So I'm finishing up the season 5 right now (or... I should be... I'm actually typing this blog entry right now) and I was thinking at the end of the book I should have a list of the questions I'd like answered in season 6. I have a rather lengthy list already, but I thought I'd throw it out to you and ask, What questions do you need answered in season 6? How old Richard Alpert really is? Where Jacob came from? If Geronimo Jackson are thinking of a reunion tour?

There's no way the writers will answer everything, so I'm interested in what things you think they SHOULD be answering for us. Thoughts?

"Every single night, the same arrangement..."

Ha! You've got that song in your head now, don't you? ;)

This one's for the Buffy fans. Toronto is hosting its annual Fringe Festival right now, featuring the best of avant garde theatre around the city all week long. And one of the troupes, "The Silver Stage," has carved out their own little unique niche in the festival: shadowcasts. You've probably seen them (or at least heard of them) before. Shadowcasts were made famous with the Rocky Horror Picture Show, where a group of actors would set up a giant movie screen at the back of the stage that played the movie while they simultaneously acted it out on the stage in front. Audiences love the interactive notion of it, and typically play right along, like they're also on that stage.

Well, Buffy fans... The Silver Stage is presenting, at the Fringe Festival, the shadowcast of BtVS's "Once More With Feeling"! That's right: for three nights over the festival, you can watch Buffy and her friends belt out their innermost thoughts ("I think this line's mostly filler") while they act it out on the stage in front, and you in the audience get to play along.

You can find more information about the Toronto Fringe Festival at their site, here, and you can go to Silver Stage's site to find out more about them here (besides Buffy, they're doing Blue Velvet -- what?! -- and, wait for it... Jurassic Park).

The "Once More With Feeling" shows will be held at the Bloor Cinema at 9:30 p.m. tonight (July 2), Sunday July 5, and Friday July 10. I've already got my tickets to the show on the 10th (because with any luck my book will be done by then!), and hope to see you there! Tickets are $10, and you can buy them in advance here (scroll down to The Silver Stage and choose either the July 2, 5, or 10 options).

Jack Teaches Sawyer About F-U-N!!

I found this video while watching Lost parody stuff on YouTube, and laughed so hard at the 45-second mark I couldn't breathe (seriously). I will be posting this often. For no reason at all. I LOVE Jack as Spongebob.

Lost's Season 6 Just Got Longer!

As Mary Murphy would say on So You Think You Can Dance, "WOOWOOOOO!!!!" IGN is reporting that Lost's season 6 has just been extended to 18 hours from the initial 17. This means they can finally fit in that extra hour to explain why Geronimo Jackson was such an influence on the Dharma Initiative. Or something.

Thanks to Hunter for the link. This news is goin' on my hot tamale train!

By the way, one more week until our rewatch begins! I hope you're getting ready. :)

Also, my publisher is still collecting endorsements about moi to print in the season 5 Finding Lost book. You can find out more here. And thanks to everyone who's been sending them in so far. You are totally making my week and giving me the oomph I need to make it through these final days of writing the book (still trudging along...). You like me, you really like me!!

RIP: Michael Jackson

First Farrah Fawcett, and now the King of Pop. What a day. I was a huge Charlie's Angels fan, and I was very sad to hear the news about Farrah this afternoon. But when I just got the news that Michael Jackson is dead, I was in shock. Both of these personalities were massive icons, both were considered freakish at some point. A few days ago, Fawcett's longtime partner said he wanted to marry her, and today he must be shattered.

Michael Jackson will always have a special place in my heart. He was my first true, crazy, full-blown crush when I was 11 years old. I saw him on the Victory tour, I had posters on every inch of my wall, I played Thriller so many times I wore out the record (yes, it was a record). In recent years Jackson's extraordinary career has been overshadowed by his addiction to plastic surgery, his weird shenanigans (like dangling a baby off a balcony), his weird white skin that EVERYONE knows is not natural, and his spending habits.

I truly hope that in the days to come, the obits focus on what a talent he was, what an amazing career he had, and what a legend he was in his lifetime. How amazingly gifted he was at a young age, even if that led to a solitary life of sadness, and what a massive, massive influence he was in music.

RIP, both of you. May you both find peace.

Yikes.

I've had quite a number of people send me this news story, and I really didn't know how to post on it without sounding completely disrespectful. So I guess I'll just post to say how tasteless it is that someone would do this. But also to say how STUPID the news organization was who fell for it. But whatever. Someone claimed to have photographs taken from inside the Air France flight that crashed a few weeks ago, recovered from a digital camera from a Brazilian guy named Paulo (sound familiar??) and he sent it to a Bolivian news show. Did it not occur to the organization that there is NO WAY a digital camera would have been functioning perfectly after crashing into the ocean? (I dropped mine once in the grass and it was wonky ever after.) No, apparently it didn't. Instead they ran with the story, warning viewers of the sensitive nature of what was contained within them, since you were about to see the victims as they hurriedly put on their oxygen masks in the first photo, and were actually blown out of the tail section of the plane in the second one.

Sadly, they didn't seem to notice that Kate Austen and the marshal were front and center in the photo. Ugh.



Here's the full story.

In other Lost news, there may actually be a chance we'll see another scene with Mr. Eko in season 6. Despite wanting off the show for personal reasons at the end of season 3, Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje has said in an interview that he would love to return to Lost in the final season. Mr. Eko is dead, but we know on the island that there are ways around that. Maybe he could appear the way Michelle Rodriguez has done, appearing to a characters -- Not-Locke, perhaps? -- to show them the proper way. Full article here.

Watching the Watcher

I have a funny story to share with y'all. In the past decade I've written a lot of books, on Buffy, Xena, Angel, Alias, and, obviously, Lost. I've wanted to be a writer since I was 5 years old. But when you write books like these, it makes it a little tough for friends and family -- i.e. those people who are kind of obligated to buy my book -- to read and give an opinion on it if they haven't actually watched the program. "Oh... um... yes, I LOVED the book. I was reading that section where you were talking about Bambi and how she reacts to her mother's death and it really... I'm sorry, what? Oh, right, Buffy... anyway, and how she's dating that zombie fella, and... vampire? Hm. Right, vampire. Um... is Buffy a rip-off of Twilight?"

Or something like that.

Anyway, when it came to Lost, however, I finally found a program that I could convince most of the people in my family to watch, and for the first time they're actually reading my books. My dad is one of those people, but he's not exactly a Lost freak (you know, like WE are), dying for the next episode, scheduling his life around it, etc. So I was going to his place this past weekend and I'm still working on the book, and I asked how many episodes he still had on his PVR that he hadn't watched. He went and checked and he said he had everything from Dead Is Dead onward. I thought, perfect, that's about where I am in the rewatches, so I can do some work while I'm down there. By the time I arrived at his house 2 days later, he'd gunned through all the episodes and was down to the final hour of the finale because he said he wanted to discuss the season with me. And before he'd watched that final hour, he started asking me a million questions, many of which I couldn't really answer without spoiling. But here was my favourite:

"So... obviously they can't die, because if they died in 1977 they could never get on the plane in 2004." I just shook my head and said, "Oh, Hurley..." HAHA!! Some of you might recall that I, too, had a rough time getting my head around it, but now it's the ONLY way I can watch the show, and I don't understand why other people don't get that Miles already got on the freighter, that happened in his past, and he could die any minute and it wouldn't affect what will always happen in 2004.

But what was interesting to me was listening to a casual viewer talk about the show. You guys are the diehards like me. But in my dad's case, when I dropped Richard Alpert's name, he looked confused and asked who that was. When I mentioned Radzinsky and how long I'd waited to see him, he looked at me, baffled, saying, "Why, who's Radzinsky??" And when we discussed Juliet he rolled his eyes and said he couldn't stand her, that she had no emotion and the actress is terrible. I argued instead (passionately) that I think the actress is wonderful, and that Juliet is the consistently calm person who talks like that, and by the end of the season she's just a shell of a person because she's lost Sawyer. I said for them, the Kate/Sawyer relationship lasted 3 months, but to us it lasted 4 years. But the Juliet/Sawyer relationship to us lasted 3 minutes, and to them lasted 3 years. So it's a little tough getting your head around their perspective, but if you try to see it from hers, it's completely different. He was suddenly over on my side about it and said he'd never actually thought about it that way. But then he started asking me who I thought the Man in Black was at the beginning and what he had to do with anything, so I said you know what, you need to watch that last hour. And I shall watch with you!!

Now, I know many people who watch shows with you where they've already seen it, and as they watch they tend to give warnings, "Oh, listen to this... OK, here it comes... wait for it... HAHAHAHAHAHA!!!" and I always think it's much funnier if the other person would just let me watch it and pretend they haven't seen it. So, if you watch a show with me that I've seen, I sit there silent. Instead, I was interested in watching the reactions of someone who hadn't yet seen it (as opposed to me, who's now watched it more times than I can remember, and who has thought it through so much my head is spinning half the time). He was silent (maybe emotional?) during the scene where Juliet fell down the shaft. Right before Ilana dumps the body out of the crate, Dad says, "So what do you think is in there, the Ark of the Covenant?" (LOLZ!!) When Jacob says to Locke, "So I see you found your loophole," Dad said, "Wait... so... that's the guy from the beach?!" And the best part was the very end, as the camera pans down the hole and he says, "Oh don't tell me she's still alive... what's that going to prove?" and then she starts banging the bomb, and I could see his body tensing with what's going to happen, and then... boom. White. I slowly turned to him with a smirk on my face, and his jaw was sitting on the floor, with him rigid, sitting forward in his seat. And I said, "I know how you feel. I think you might express it as, 'NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO.'" He said, "THAT'S IT??!!" My 4-year-old daughter, who had wandered in at an inopportune moment and had spent the previous 5 minutes facing away from the TV with my hands over her ears, now turned and said, "What happened?!" I said, "You know how Dora always finds her way home at the end of the show? Well, imagine if she only made it to the gloomy woods and then the show suddenly stopped and said you couldn't find out the rest of it until tomorrow? Or... eight months from now?" She grinned from ear to ear with her hand over her mouth. My dad continued to sit there, stunned.

I went out into the kitchen to help with lunch and I came back in to call them into the room, and there was my dad, rewatching the opening scene with Jacob and the Man in Black. I just might turn him into a diehard yet...

Getting Ready for Season 6: Origins

Here's another video that a few of you have sent to me in response to the videos I've been posting of theblackbox. This is done by a different person, and is quite beautiful, showing all of the Lost characters (including our beloved and sorely missed Chah-lie) as children. When you see them so young and vulnerable, you can't help but feel even more sympathy for them than you already do. As we've seen in the early seasons, the people on the plane were adults (mostly) but even so, they're still carrying around the pain of childhood. This video brings it all together, and the very end of it actually made me tear up. Where theblackbox videos make me wish Season 6 were right around the corner, this video allows us to reflect on what we've already seen.



And after you've watched that, check out this person's Lost trailer. Awesomeness.

Buffy vs. Edward

Oh. My. God. I can't remember the last time I laughed this hard at a clip on YouTube. This is SO bloody brilliant I don't even know where to start. Y'all remember what my new favourite T-Shirt said? Well... this is that dream come true. I have never loved Buffy's sarcasm the way I have in this clip. Make sure you're alone: if you're a Buffy fan (and not particularly a fan of Twilight), you will ADORE this and be laughing (and in my case, cheering and clapping) so loudly, you won't really want other people around. :) Enjoy!! (And thanks to Jeremy and Robbie for the link!)