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!)

Lost: The Funniest Show on TV!

I don't know how I somehow missed these brilliant YouTube clips, but thank you to Matt for pointing me in their direction! Someone has cleverly edited together various clips of fun moments from each of the first three seasons of Lost (I know... it's like looking for a needle of happiness in a haystack of misery), and then turned each one into the musical intro for each season. It's BRILLIANT. (OK, I DID notice that in the last two they had to rely on some blooper reels, especially for the Terry O'Quinn bits, but they're still great.)

Watch for the moment in the season 3 intro that made me laugh hysterically. I'm sure you'll guess what it was.

Here's season 1:



Season 2:



Season 3:

Happy Bloomsday!

Yes yes, it's June 16th, which means, it's Bloomsday! James Joyce's monumental novel (in more ways than one, cough), Ulysses, is entirely set on June 16, 1904, and for the past 15 years or so, I always had this image of me sitting down and reading the entire book, beginning to end, on one Bloomsday. Yeah, right. Fat chance that.

And then Damon Lindelof had to go and mention it would be in an upcoming episode of Lost. And then Ben Linus is reading it in "316." And so I started reading it, too. (And despite what people might have thought when I recently said my captivity had ended, that was just the 10-day, 15-hour-a-day marathon I took in the middle of the writing process; I'm still working on it every night and weekend with a hand-in date of July 6....) And here it is, Bloomsday, and I'm STILL reading it. And writing about it. And thinking my chapter on it is getting CRAZY long and my editor is going to have to slash it to bits. And I'm wondering what Joyce was smoking. And marvelling at his genius. And wondering what the hell is going on in several passages. And actually figuring other passages out and chuckling at a couple of jokes. (Throwaway? HAHA!)

But as for whether I'm truly enjoying it... er... oh hey, look, something shiny! Gotta run!

Getting Ready for Season 6: Miracles

And here's the latest video from theblackbox. I am loving these!!

An Immodest Proposal

Or, You Know You Love Me.

Damn, Gossip Girl already had dibs on that line. ;)

This is a strange and kind of awkward post for me to make, but I'll make it anyway. And I want to preface it by saying it was someone else's idea, not mine. :) Brief version of the sales pitch: Who wants to have their words appear in my next Finding Lost book? You do? Then read on!

I'm sure y'all know what a foreword in a book is, but just in case, a foreword is like a preface to a book, but it's written by someone other than the author. Usually someone with some sway in the community to which the book is aimed. Like, when I convinced Neil Gaiman to write a foreword for a book I edited a couple of years ago. Do you know how excited I was to be the first person in the world to read something he'd written? SO excited, that's how excited (and then J.J. Abrams gave me an endorsement quote for the back cover... yep, greatest book ever to edit). That book is here if you wanted to check it out, by the way. If you love the original Twilight Zone, buy this book.

ANYWAY... so far, I haven't had any forewords in my books. Not that I went out of my way not to have them, but I never really thought of who might want to write such a thing. Typically my books are written to the fans, for the fans, and I tend to stay away from official interviews (the one time I broke my own rule was for the Angel book, when I interviewed many people in the cast, but then again, that came out after the series was finished so they ended up being more like tributes to the show). But then yesterday one of my readers -- a reporter for a newspaper -- emailed me with a wonderful suggestion:

What about having you guys write my foreword? He suggested my publisher could solicit quotes from my Nik at Nite readers saying why you enjoy the Finding Lost series and/or my blog, and then put them into the book. I responded saying it was a great idea, but exactly how would I word the post? It's a little difficult to do it modestly. I ran it by my editor and she loved the idea, and said she's sure I wouldn't rub anyone the wrong way. So here goes:

I know you all think I am the awesomest of awesome. So now I need you to tell the world of my brilliant genius. And don't worry... you won't say anything I haven't heard before.

*Cough.* That didn't work. Let's try again:

Do you KNOW who I am? Or how friggin' lost you would be without me...

Man, this is harder than I thought. One more try:

Hey guys, you know how I've been blogging on Lost all season and we've been having all these great discussions and it's been so much fun? I'm wondering if you might help me out a bit by writing up something saying how much you've enjoyed reading my commentary, or, if maybe I've helped you come to a different understanding of the show either through my blog or my books, maybe you could say that? It would be a huge help! And I feel like we've become like a big happy family, so I would love for you guys to be a part of my book. And if you decide not to, that's OK, too. But you will be dead to me.

Seriously, if anyone is interested, what my publisher is looking for are just a few sentences saying why you think my writing is helpful to Lost fans. Matthew, the guy who came up with the idea, is going to write a brief intro of a paragraph or so, and then we'll run your quotes underneath one after the other. It'll be like those pages of endorsements from various reviews that you see at the beginning of books, only mine will be from the important peeps who watch Lost with me! For me, it's far more meaningful to have nice words from you guys, the people with whom I've really bonded over Lost discussions, than to turn to a media person or something. Not that the DocArzt quote wasn't wicked on my season 4 book; I was so thrilled to have that from him. But you guys are really special to me, and I'd love to have your words in the book, too!

Anyway, if anyone is interested, my publisher will need all of the accolades/praise/deep love by July 15, and you can send an email here. If you want to put something like, "Nikki Foreword" in the header, that will help set your email apart. The quotes that are chosen will run in the book under Matthew's introduction, along with whatever name you provide to run with it (feel free to offer your real name and screenname, or just one or the other; whatever you're most comfortable with). Thanks, everyone! Man, that was one of the most ego-driven posts I could have written, eh? I feel kinda dirty.

30 Rock vs. The Muppets

What? A post that's NOT about Lost?! Yes, let's talk about one of my other billion favourite shows for a change. Thanks to Jay for sending me this hilarious link. If there's anyone out there who is a big fan of 30 Rock and The Muppets (me! me!) then you probably adored the scene near the end of this season, where Jack asked Kenneth the Page what the world looked like through his eyes, and we saw... Jack and his tailor as Muppets (pictured). For me, one of the funniest 30 Rock moments ever.

Well, it turns out, this might have been a hint at a much bigger connection between 30 Rock and The Muppets. Blogger (and co-creator of the Whedon-driven Angel: After the Fall comic book series) Brian Lynch has uncovered a conspiracy: that, in fact, 30 Rock is nothing more than a rip-off of the Muppets! Okay, it's all tongue-in-cheek, but his evidence is pretty compelling -- and awesomely funny. Go check out his post here, and get ready to laugh!

Oh, and while you're there, check out his post on what a movie poster of a reimagined non-Whedon-helmed Angel might look like. A badass Jorge Garcia as Gunn had me doubled over. :) (Check me out: I STILL brought it back around to Lost.)

The Island Is in Springfield!!

And for today's non-analytic post (I promise I will get to some serious stuff soon), I was following this guy's work throughout his "Lost week" on his blog. This is an artist who takes various characters (mostly comic-book) and draws them as if they were on the Simpsons. I think he's completely amazing. I was enjoying the daily drawings of variations on Hurley, Sawyer, Locke, Jack, Kate, Ben, and Charlie on my own, but then a LOT of people sent me emails asking if I'd post on it. So... of course! If it lets more people know about this guy, it's worth it. You can go here to see all of the Lost characters. Enjoy!

UPDATE: And I no sooner had that up when someone emailed me to say he'd interviewed Dean Fraser (the guy who Simpsonized the Lost cast) and you can read the interview here. Thanks for sending that, Simon! And hey, turns out Dean is a Canuck! Woohoo!

OMGOMGOMG

OK, could this commercial mean what I THINK it means... and if so, does this mean season 6 will be the GREATEST SEASON OF LOST EVER?! Watch until the end:



Thanks for Farley for pointing it out to me!

Getting Ready for Season 6: Destiny

Here's another wonderful trailer from theblackbox. This one made the hairs on my arm stand up. BEAUTIFUL!!!



Watch the trailer in HD here.

And the Statue Is...

Tawaret! Yeah, yeah, y'all have already seen this on EW and everywhere else.

Hello my lovelies. My captivity is at an end, and I have emerged bleary-eyed and exhausted. I wrote 65,000 words of the book, which I will now spend the next month editing while writing the last 1/3 of the book (which consists of all the books... sigh... why did I leave reading all those things to the END?!)

Anyway, back to the statue. The day after the finale, ABC posted a recap in which the author said the statue was Tawaret. The recap came to EW's notice a week later, and when they posted last week that the statue was absolutely Tawaret, people flipped and have been arguing about it ever since. But if anyone had read through the 410 comments on my original post on the episode (what?!) one of my readers, Tom, noticed the recap on May 15 and we were already discussing and arguing it there.

Wait, you DIDN'T read through all 410 comments?! Ok, even I had trouble keeping up. ;) And that's why I posted it here. I didn't really accept it then, but I think it's gotten to the point where we no longer have a choice.

But the issue is this. When we first saw the statue in "LaFleur," we thought it might be Set. I made an argument for it then, and suggested *maybe* also Anubis, but there were no jackal ears, so that wasn't likely. Then one of my readers suggested Tawaret (yes, we were on the ball back then!!) which is a hippo-like goddess with a round belly that represents fertility. I said this was an excellent suggestion, and maybe there's a suggestion that once the statue was destroyed, women on the island couldn't have children. But the statue was most likely destroyed before Dharmaville, and yet Amy still had Ethan. (It could have been destroyed in the bomb blast, but when the gang is standing by the well in "LaFleur," they see it, then another flash happens and they stand up, and it's gone. That's 1977, so technically it should have already fallen by then.)

My concern with it being Tawaret is simply the look of it. The statue on the island looks masculine, and doesn't have a belly on it. When we saw it from the side in the finale, Benny suggested Sobek, the crocodile god, also associated with fertility, and I thought we'd found our god. And then the ABC recap (they used to be written by script supervisor Gregg Nations but I don't know if he's still doing them?) came out and said without question that it's Tawaret.

So what do you think? Typically on this blog I only look at what's IN the episode as canon, not what's outside it. Podcasts, recaps, and interviews can definitely enrich our experience of watching the show, but it shouldn't dictate how we watch it. If the statue is Tawaret, I'll wait until I see it from the front to know that. If Kate really loves Sawyer over Jack, I'll wait until she says that and not rely on a clip show to tell me that.

But now that EW has gotten hold of the story and it's spread all over the Lostverse, I'm assuming the answer is more definitive. All the fans will accept it's Tawaret, and that tidbit will be worked into next season somehow to make it definitive. And don't get me wrong: I love that the writers chose a more obscure Egyptian god, AND that one of my readers guessed it early on!!

Jossless Buffy = INSANITY

So there's lot's more hatred out there for the new Jossless Buffy idea. You probably all read the one about Joss Whedon being asked for a comment, in which he said, "I hope it's cool." The end. And then hung up his cellphone, threw it against a wall, ran to the closest wooden chair, ripped off one of the legs and staked himself in the heart with it. OK, maybe that last part didn't happen, but I know I certainly felt like doing that to MYSELF. GRR... ARGH.

This comic made me laugh LOTS. Especially because of my love for Twilight (see profile pic for proof of that love). :)



You can read the illustrator's thoughts at his site here.

I hope the Kuzuis hear the outcry of the enraged fans and media. I've yet to see a SINGLE article that says, "You know what? This could be a really good idea." Because it's not. And everyone except the money-hungry Kuzuis knows that. Part of me hopes they do it, that they sink $100 million into it and lose every penny. But then the movie would still be out there. And then, needing more money, they'd probably sell the Buffy rights to Michael Jackson or something.

We need to keep opposing this. No Jossless Buffy! No Jossless Buffy!

Help me out here. What would a Jossless Buffy be like? How about:
• Lost without Darlton
• A car without a steering wheel
• The Fellowship without Gandalf
• Bohemian Rhapsody sung by Screech from Saved by the Bell
• Macaroni without cheese
• Galactica without Adama
• Opus without Berke Breathed
• Alice in Wonderland written by Bobcat Goldthwait
• Buffy the Vampire Slayer without JOSS frickin’ WHEDON