The Leftovers: 1.01 "Pilot"

"The pope, I get the pope. But Gary fuckin' Busey? How did he make the cut?!"

It boasts the same executive producers as Lost and Friday Night Lights. You must have known I was going to write about this puppy. (Spoilers ahead for the pilot episode.)

The Leftovers is based on a novel by Tom Perotta (who also wrote Little Children, a similarly unhappy book) about a world event where 2% of the population (140 million people) just suddenly disappears, leaving the other 98% behind. Bewildered, overwhelmed, and questioning everything they ever knew, those who are left behind can't mourn their loved ones because they don't know what the hell just happened to them. The Religion vs. Science debate heats up, and people become embroiled in arguments and fights over what really happened on October 14th. 

Of course, the most obvious response is that it was The Rapture, that God chose his most beloved people to rise up into Heaven, leaving the rest behind. This, of course, wouldn't explain why there are so many questionable people who disappeared, or babies and children who were left behind. But it doesn't stop people from suggesting that was it. 

And the ones who are left behind are obviously the point of this story. Recently my aunt was telling me how every year she would put a notice in the paper memorializing my grandmother on the day she died. After a few years of doing this, her husband gently said to her, "You know, your mom can't see you doing this." And she said, "It's not for her. It's for those of us left behind." Funerals are never for the ones who are deceased, nor are the grave sites and tombstones: they're for the rest of us, those who have to go on living without those people, giving us something solid and concrete to remember them by. 

And after whatever the hell it was that took those people on October 14, it left behind people who are confused and broken, and don't know how to go on. This isn't a universe like in Brian K. Vaughan's brilliant graphic novel series Y: The Last Man, where every man but one dies, with planes falling out of the skies, governments toppling, and armies becoming obsolete. Or like the one in Flashforward, where everyone sleeps for two minutes and once again planes fall out of the sky and cars crash and trains derail and many people die. Or the one in Revolution, where the electricity suddenly shuts down and planes fall out of the sky (Christ, I never realized how many apocalypses begin with planes crashing down) and the world goes dark and many people die. This is a relatively small percentage of the population, and there's no real answer as to why. 

But we're human beings: asking why is the key to our existence, and what sets us apart from the animals. Without that question, we don't seem to have any motivation to go forward. And this opening episode of the series is a perfect illustration of what the world would look like if random people just suddenly... disappeared. The main focus is the Garvey family, revealed to us beautifully one by one as actually being connected, right to the very last (and most shocking) one of all. This is a family where the mother disappeared, where the father became police chief after his own father — the former police chief — lost his mind. Where the son is working for some sort of therapist/mystic named Wayne who brings people peace, and "unburdens" them for serious wads of cash. Where the daughter is in such deep emotional pain she barely talks, is going through normal adolescent heartbreak, but must do so with the added burden of a mother who isn't there. Where the mother... didn't actually disappear, but is a member of a strange cult of smokers who dress in nothing but white clothes, and don't speak, but believe that smoking proclaims their faith, and that anyone who is talking about the Disappearance, theorizing about it, or continuing to breathe clean air is simply wasting their breath. (OK, their "platform" isn't exactly clear, but presumably will become so in the coming episodes.) We see how hard it is to just go on when you don't have any answers, when the entire world has changed around you, when religious nuts are running rampant, and when the Ninth Doctor turns out NOT to be a Gallifreyan time traveller but an American reverend who has abandoned his religion and spends his time trying to convince people this is NOT the Rapture, people, listen up! 

The episode opens beautifully, with a harried mom at a laundromat trying to do a million things at once as her baby screams and screams, but she's multitasking and giving instructions over the phone and getting her laundry done and absolutely nothing is going right, and then... poof, her baby is gone. We don't see him disappear (did he just pop out of existence? float up into the air? disappear slowly?) and that's far more effective than if the writers had chosen to give us one scenario. Instead we only see the aftermath: a crying child whose father has disappeared, a car crashing because the driver is presumably no longer driving, and a mother distraught that the child she was too busy to comfort is suddenly gone. The opening scene comes full circle when Kevin Garvey, getting drunk at the bar, runs into the woman from the laundromat, who is similarly drinking her own problems away. 

Garvey tries to get his wife Laurie to come home, but she's entrenched in the new group. Liv Tyler's character, Meg, can't smile even though she's planning a wedding, and we wonder who she lost. Was it a husband? A previous fiancé? We get one very quick, brief flashback to what Kevin Garvey was doing at the moment of the Disappearance, and it's clear he was having an affair of some kind. At the "Heroes Day" gathering, a woman named Norah Durst gets up to talk about how she lost both children and a husband. Not only is she alone, but she still believes they're out there somewhere, and she tries with some difficulty to refer to them in the present tense. But she also has to deal with the looks she gets every day: if it was the Rapture, they seem to be thinking, then why did the rest of your family go but not you? 

This seems to be haunting those who are left behind more than anything. It's a new world where, as the dog killer at the end says, things are no longer the same. "They are not our dogs, not anymore," he tells Chief Garvey, and he could just as easily be referring to everyone. They are not the same, they've been changed by this. Kevin has nightmares of killing a deer, and seems to see the deer everywhere he goes. A stag would typically represent peace, stability, love, and gentleness, and all those things are gone, ripped apart by the Disappearance that just took 140 million people away like a pack of wild dogs. 

This is a show written by Damon Lindelof (Lost) and directed by Peter Berg (Friday Night Lights) and the influence of the two shows can be spotted throughout:
*Congressman Whitten, who goes to see Wayne to become unburdened, is Buddy Garrity
*the security guy who meets the truck is Peter Berg himself, who always makes a cameo in his shows
*Tom asks Whitten, "So you're from Texas, huh?" and Whitten says, "How did you know?" like a little in-joke to FNL fans.
*there are clearly Daddy Issues going on throughout the show, whether it's Kevin dealing with his own father or Tom dealing with Kevin.
*Tom is seen reading Albert Camus's The Stranger, which, if I were writing a book on this show, I'd know what one of the chapters was going to be
*the flashbacks are quick, but Lindelof specializes in showing how the present has been shaped by the past, and that is one of the cornerstones of this series
*the constant science vs. faith arguments
*the biblical Easter eggs (when Kevin is flipping the radio you hear someone proclaim "Corinthians 15!!" which is the chapter in the Bible in which Christ's resurrection is retold by Paul)

And of course, there are the trademark Lindelof questions here:
*what exactly is the cult in white supposed to represent, how did they form, and what do they hope to achieve? why cigarettes?!
*why does Tom have slash marks on his back?
*why did Laurie leave her family behind?
*what is up with Wayne? Why does he have a bunch of bikini-clad Asian women hanging around his pool? What does he do in the room to "unburden" people?
*what was happening in everyone's life before the Disappearance?
*what the hell happened on October 14th?

I wasn't sure what I thought of the show at the halfway point, but by the end I was really enjoying it. From the super-scary sculpture in the park to the fact that in a crisis, we tend to divide and argue rather than connect and heal, the tone of the pilot episode was almost pitch-perfect, introducing us to a dark world that looks like our own, but with even more grief and heartbreak. And the music, by one of my absolute favourite musicians Max Richter (the piano music playing throughout much of it is from his sublime record The Blue Notebooks, which I highly recommend and probably listen to three times a week), sets an atmosphere and tone much like Michael Giacchino did on Lost and Explosions in the Sky did on Friday Night Lights.

So, at least for the first episode, I'm hooked. Are you? 

Saying Goodbye to Breaking Bad... and Lost

I posted my thoughts on the Breaking Bad finale about an hour after I watched it. And Twitter and Facebook both lit up immediately after the show with people falling all over themselves professing their undying love to Vince Gilligan, Bryan Cranston, and everyone involved in the series. I've posted over on Facebook a few reviews that didn't love it — here and here — and one that absolutely hated it (here), and while I might not agree, I loved these little reviews standing there shouting against the tide of positivity.

Because I know how they feel. Only I was on the other side. I'm not Damon Lindelof or Carlton Cuse (well, Damon took a job from me once, but that's another story altogether...) and since they were the ones who actually wrote the series with that divisive finale, they had to take a lot of shit. I, while not writing the episode, had written about the series for six years, and for some reason ended up in the position of the Show's Defender, like anyone else in our quiet minority who actually loved the end of Lost but were outvoiced by those who hated it.

Now, everyone who's a creative type at all is the same when it comes to criticism: you can praise us all you want, but say one negative thing and we'll remember that FOREVER. It's why trolls exist on the internet, because we thin-skinned "artists" can't handle it, and crumble, and respond to you on Twitter or in the comments, and then you end up with more notoriety than the positive people. Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse received a ton of praise for the ending... but they'll never remember that. They'll remember the nastiness, the hatred, that proprietary feeling fans had over Lost and how Damon came in and shat all over it with an ending they found unsatisfying.

So when Breaking Bad ended and, as I said in my blog post, avoided the divisiveness that Lost, The Sopranos, and even Dexter created in their endings, I knew I wasn't going to have to defend the show this time, that other people would be really happy with the ending, too. Vince Gilligan has been held aloft and carried on the shoulders of many of the same people who stomped all over Damon and Carlton for their ending.

But I loved the end of Lost. So much so that when I posted on Facebook that Six Feet Under needs to step aside because there's a new all-time best finale in town, many people messaged and emailed me to say, "You mean... BETTER THAN LOST, NIKKI?!"

Hm. Well, I was closer to Lost. I was more invested in it. From beginning to end, Breaking Bad was a more consistently written show, but Gilligan wasn't meeting a 22-episode mandate. It's much easier to craft perfection in a first season when working with seven episodes, and not 23 like Lost had to do. There were things that had to be achieved in the Breaking Bad finale, things fans wanted, and Gilligan managed to make most people happy; Walt won, and he lost. Yet there are those who dislike the finale because he won, and those who dislike it because he lost.

Similarly, fans demanded that Lost do a number of things, chief among them is answer every single question that has ever been raised by the show. And they didn't do that. At least, not overtly. I wrote a 22,000-word defence of the Lost finale in my last book, and answered most of the questions fans said weren't answered. But maybe that was the problem: it became a little too subtle. For those of us who'd invested hours each week in studying every aspect of this show, it might have been satisfying, but for the majority of the viewers, it was a head-scratcher.

As someone who loved it, I can say that the Lost finale reached into my soul, made me weep with joy, caused lack of sleep over the next few days, and affected me emotionally more than any other show has ever done, before or since. I have never stopped defending it. I've never once said, "Well, yeah, you're right," because I believe in that ending wholeheartedly. Breaking Bad, on the other hand, was just... perfect. It was quiet, it wasn't the best episode of the series (see "Ozymandias" for that one), but it did what a finale is supposed to do. It wrapped things up, it gave us hope that life would still go on, and created a world that was encapsulated within the episodes of the series.

Damon Lindelof has finally spoken out and released an essay that was supposed to be on the finale of Breaking Bad, but instead turned into a piece talking about how watching the end of that show reminded him of how people reacted to the end of his show:

I'm sick of myself for continuing to beat this particular drum, so I can't imagine how sick of it you are. If it's unpleasant and exhausting for me to keep defending the Lost finale, aren't you getting tired of hating it? And so … I, like Walter White, want out. To be free. And to grant you the same.
I'd like to make a pact, you and me. And here's your part: You acknowledge that I know how you feel about the ending of Lost. I got it. I heard you. I will think about your dissatisfaction always and forever. It will stay with me until I lie there on my back dying, camera pulling slowly upward whether it be a solitary dog or an entire SWAT team that comes to my side as I breathe my last breath.

It's a poignant and sad piece, mostly because, as I said above, he spends the entire piece talking about those who hated it, and barely mentions those of us who loved it. Why would he? We feel the same way he does, and it's the haters who affected him so deeply. I know he'll be treated negatively for this piece (I mean, it's not like we live in an age of the confessional, right? Oh... wait...) and he'll be forced to face it all again, but I'm glad he wrote it.

But Damon, I really wish you'd realize that beyond those who loudly hated it is a group of us who loved it. And that image of Jack, on his back, looking up into the sky, satisfied that he'd done his bit for the world but will now die of a wound to his lower right-hand side? Um... do you think perhaps that image has become so iconic that it was also the final shot of this other finale that you loved so much?

All we needed in that meth lab was a dog and some bamboo.

Breaking Bad will go down in history as one of the greatest finales of all time. And Lost will go down in half the history books as the worst, and the other half as one of the best. Maybe there's something to be said for being controversial.

And how about this: discussing perfect pilots the other day, a friend of mine and I concluded that Lost had the best pilot, bar none, of any show we can think of. Breaking Bad's doesn't even come close. In fact, I watched the pilot of Breaking Bad and didn't watch another episode for another year. And then all of season 1 that followed Lost (remember... that's 23 episodes; Breaking Bad is in season 3 before it hits its 23rd episode) was near perfect. For many people, Lost didn't stick the landing, and that's all that matters. I loved it.

Is Breaking Bad the better finale? Yes, because it satisfied more people, and that's a finale's main goal. Is it my favourite finale? No... that one still belongs to Lost.

Damon's Fave Flicks

Here's a 5-minute clip from iamRogue.com where Damon Lindelof talks about the 6 films that really influenced him, and in many ways, influenced Lost. I LOVE his choices, and it makes me admire him even more than I already do. Thanks to joshua for the link!

Darlton Live!!

OK, I’m going to try to make this quick because I was supposed to get writing done today and I STILL haven’t seemed to crack it. It hasn’t been a good week for writing (I took the week off to work on Finding Lost: Season 6) and see, I’m used to taking a week off work and returning having written somewhere between 50,000 and 60,000 words (I type quickly). This week... not so much. I won’t say HOW pathetic (my editor might be reading and it’ll give her heart failure) but trust me, it’s pathetic. Every time I finally get deeply involved in something, the phone rings. Argh. But this book will happen, I promise.

SO. Last night (instead of writing) I was out at the LOST Live Talk with the NYT that was broadcast into movie theatres everywhere. (And I ran into redeem147, SenexMacDonald, and Question Mark!! It was totally awesome.) I sat with Mark Askwith at Space, and at one point we both whipped out notebooks at the same time, looked at each other and said, “GEEK.” I might ultimately post the full transcript (how do I have a full transcript? You might ask... good question. Ahem.) but for now, I’ll just post highlights (DL is Damon, CC is Carlton)...

• When asked how they come up with new ideas, Carlton said they just roll the dice. Damon added, “A TWENTY-SIDED DICE!!” and when the audience laughed he nodded approvingly, saying these were definitely his people.
• When working on the ending they said, if we were fans of the show, what would we want to see... and then they also decided they wouldn’t shy away from big emotion, and those two things were what helped form the finale.
• They said they needed to acknowledge just how BIG the finale was for the fans, that this was almost a spiritual thing, with anticipation and excitement and jitters, and treat the finale like the holy thing the fans think it is.
• Damon said the #1 question they get is, “Am I going to be really disappointed in the finale?” And he said, “Talk about performance anxiety!!” Haha!! He said they came up with an ending that satisfied THEM. One that also made the 425 people working on the show happy, and they knew if they could make them happy, they’d make the audience happy, too.
• Darlton went down to Hawaii for the shooting of the final scene, and said to the actors, “If you want any illumination of the final pages of the script, we’ll be right here to explain it to you,” and the actors were like, “Um... why would we start NOW?” They said for years the actors just get the scripts piecemeal, and just as in life, they don’t know what’s coming next, and they just go with it and never ask questions.
• CC said that the finale became real to them when they went and saw Giacchino recording the live music over the scenes for the score, and Damon got kicked out of the room because he was crying so hard. :::sniff:::
• They said the community that’s formed around Lost has become so important to them (yay!).
• They showed the clip from “Orientation” where Locke is about to push the Execute button for the first time, but doesn’t, telling Jack he needs to do it. There’s the whole, “Why is it so hard for you to believe?” “Why is it so easy for you?!” debate, followed by Locke appealing to Jack that this is a two-person job and he can’t do it alone. This made me really think a LOT about the finale, thinking that maybe Jack WON’T be the lone candidate, and that they’ll all realize he was right when he said if they don’t live together, they’ll die alone. I don’t think anyone is going to be doing that job alone.
• CC said one of the ideas going into the series was to explore the costs and consequences of faith, and that’s something they’ve explored throughout the 6 seasons.
• There was a question about the mirroring of the seasons, and they said that was deliberate (obvs) and that in this last season it’s about getting to know the character again but in a slightly different way, it’s like going back to S1 but we’re getting slightly different backstories for them.
• DL said the scenes of the mirrors are to give a sense of displacement. This idea of fans not liking new characters because they’re different is an attempt to make audiences have that who am I, how am I, where am I displacement that you sometimes get when looking in the mirror.
• At the end of season 1/beginning of season 2 they really knew where the show was going to go and they constructed the series’ overall mythology. Then before every season they would put together the detailed architecture of that particular season. CC said “We’re not JK Rowling; we collaborated with 425 people so it was obviously going to evolve as we went.”
• DL said they look at the show like it’s an organic entity, and they often let the show tell them what it wants it to be. (I loved here that they were talking about the show like it was the island!)
• DL said sometimes we make mistakes, and Nikki and Paulo was one of them (HAHAHAHAHA!!!!) They went on about N&P for a long time, and I loved EVERY MINUTE OF IT. They said Exposé was a polarizing episode because the fans who didn’t realize they were even there in the first place hated that they brought them to the fore for no reason, whereas the haters (like me!!) loved this episode because they just enjoyed the horrible death they gave them. They wanted Sawyer to be the voice of those haters, the “who the hell is Nikki?” line echoing what we were saying. Haha! They introduced N&P at a time when they didn’t have the end date, so they were sort of biding their time bringing things forward. He said, “We packed our fridge with food, some of which we never want to eat.” HAHAHA!!! DL said it’s obvious they’re going to make these mistakes, and he compared it to things like going to see a tightrope walker, where sometimes we enjoy the mistakes and seeing it happen... he said you sit in the audience at the circus going, “Wow, it would be HORRIBLE if he fell... but I’d still kinda like to see it!”
• Damon then made some sports joke about how even if you don’t know where the ball is going to go, you’ll swing the bat. Then he said, “At least I think that’s what you do in sports... I know nothing. Is that true, Carlton?” Carlton said, “Yes. In baseball you swing a bat.” Damon said, “Sorry, that metaphor just wouldn’t work with Orcs.” HAHAHA!!! Oh Damon I ♥ you!!
• DL said there will be a prominent Star Wars reference in the first 7 minutes of the finale. CC threw his hands up in the air like he’d just given a huge spoiler and then they bickered about what a spoiler was. ;)
• Question: What TV show made you go, “I want to do that.” CC said he watched tons of reruns when he came home from school, sitcoms and westerns mostly like Gunsmoke and Petticoat Junction. DL said it was watching Twin Peaks with his dad, where, when it was over they’d sit and talk about it for 2 hours and he said his dad said we should go rent David Lynch films, and he realized there was a creator hiding behind this show making it week after week and he wanted to be that person. He loved that there was a creator making this stuff that you’d want to discuss beyond the hour it was on.
• They talked about Eddie Kitsis being the guy who brought background characters to the fore, like Frogurt and Lapidus (getting the flaming arrow in Frogurt was Eddie’s favourite moment). He said Kitsis and Horowitz are the soul of Hurley. They have a very collaborative writing environment in the writers’ room. He said they never argue; it’s more like jury deliberation. You know the guy is guilty, you just have to convince everyone in the room to be on the same page.
• CC said “The greatest blessing of this show has been our partnership,” referring to Damon. Awwwwww....
• They said usually an ep takes a week and a half to break, and The Constant took 5 weeks. They showed the phone call from that episode, and when they came back DL looked really choked up. They said this was this mindbending episode that really challenged people and they realized the only way to keep the audience on board with the whole thing was to turn it into a love story at the end.
• They talked about how the premise of the show was that the characters were all solo acts and they needed each other to get over their stuff. AGAIN, it was reinforcing this idea of living together so you don’t die alone, which made me think differently about what is coming in the finale.
• What was your hardest plot choice? Killing Charlie. They said they tried to justify it (they even joked that they were like, “Um... Desmond’s actually been telling you that you were going to die for a LONG time, like, weren’t you listening??” but then they watched the episode and were absolutely in tears and realized that was a jerk thing to have done. ;)
• When asked about how fans seem to glom onto certain questions, they said they thought they’d explained or debunked certain things along the way but the fans don’t accept the explanation. For example, Aaron = special. The only person who ever said he was special was Richard Malkin, the psychic, and in the Eko episode they debunked him as a hoax, thereby removing the possibility that Aaron was special. He said the fans don’t accept that, and continue to think Aaron is special and that Malkin really meant it when he wanted Claire on that plane even though they’ve shown him up. This one really resonated with me, actually, because I’m sorry, but I’m in that fan camp simply because... what did Malkin have to gain by getting her on that plane? HE BOUGHT THE TICKET, for goodness’ sake. Why did he want her on that plane? Why did he give her money back? Why keep calling her in the middle of the night? There’s a difference between a hoax and a crazy person, and if he didn’t actually mean any of that then he’s a complete loon. Or it’s just really bad storytelling to deflect it, and I don’t think they’re bad storytellers. SO that was a little odd to me.
• They get asked “So... what’s up with Walt?” DL said, “Malcolm David Kelly is now 39 years old and six foot five!! By the end of the season you could hear that Peter Brady twitch of puberty in his voice and we were saying, ‘We gotta get that kid on a raft STAT!’” LOL!!!! As to whether or not Walt will appear in the finale? CC did give the answer. If you want to see it, just highlight the next line and you’ll see it, and otherwise you can move to the next question.
• YES. To which DL said, “Oh come ON, I say we’ll make a joke about Star Wars and it’s a spoiler, and you think THAT wasn’t?! Oh it is ON.”
• They showed the clip of the Miles/Hurley time travel argument, and said it was a re-enactment of the discussion they had in the writer’s room.
• When asked if they cast the parts for particular actors ever, DL said when writing the part of Ben, they said, “Who do we know who could convincingly play someone who was deceitful, untruthful...” and then a scream went up from the NYT audience because Michael Emerson walked onto the stage.
• Emerson was asked who his favourite person to act scenes with was, and he said recently he’s really enjoyed being paired with Jorge Garcia, because they’re polar opposites and it’s really interesting to have that... and this one delicious scene was... and then Jorge walked in. He joked, “I was standing backstage saying, ‘Do I go now? How about now?’ and the girl was shrugging and I was worried if I didn’t move soon Michael would start talking about working with someone else and I’d miss my window of opportunity.” HA!
• The next question was from a fan from Guelph, Ontario, and CC laughed and looked into the camera and said, “Hello all you fans out in Guelph! I hope there wasn’t too long a line!” Oh you JEST, CC, but I bet there was just as long a line in Guelph as anywhere else! GO GUELPH!!
• Now it moved to open mike questions (which always worry me... they should have been vetted.) They were asked, is a rule breakable? In S1 it looked like Smokey was going to kill John Locke by pulling him into the hole but Jack saved him. DL said he might not have killed him, and they talked around it and got past that one.
• They were asked a long-winded question about faith, and CC said the show has allowed them to illuminate their thoughts on faith, and the whole live together, die alone thing is where they went with it, that people form a community and find strength in that sense of common spirituality. On the show they lifted each other up (ooh, Desmond reference!!) To them that’s what’s important... finding the people to lift you up in this world.
• Re: Widmore: Coming on the freight he was going to do bad things because he felt remorse and anger at having to lose his son, but this past week he explained that Jacob visited him and he saw the error of his ways. DL said the way they wrote that was for the audience: We’ve given you all these clues over the years that Widmore is not to be trusted. Now we’re going to put this line in his mouth: Do you believe him? How are you going to use the stuff that you know to be true in this scene? So they’re leaving that up to us to see if we believe it or not. (Interestingly, I took it to be true because they played the Jacob music in the background, but now they’re suggesting maybe I shouldn’t have followed that musical cue; and also, DL referred to this as the scene of Widmore’s “demise,” where I was starting to wonder if the guy had been wearing a bullet-proof vest and wasn’t actually dead. Hm.)
• A fan asked specifically, “During the Tour de Stade scene (he’s referring to the scene where Desmond and Jack first met in the stadium) Desmond said, “You’ve got to lift it up, bruthah,” and he was hoping that would be a line that comes back in the finale. Again, for spoilerphobes, you have to highlight the next point to see Damon’s response.
• DL simply said, “You will not walk away from the finale disappointed.”
• Someone asked why they give away big surprises of guest stars in the opening credits (I’ll admit I was disappointed this week to see “Mira Furlan” in the credits because I would have LOVED the surprise of seeing Rousseau jump out of the car). He simply said, “If I were you guys, I’d hold up your hand to the bottom of the screen during the finale because it’s ALL going to be given away...” They said the obvious, that they’re contractually bound to put the actors’ names at the beginning, and they can’t tell an agent, “Oh, and by the way, we won’t be crediting your client in the show because we don’t want to ruin the surprise.” ;)
• Emerson said the best part of season 6 was getting to play two entirely different characters.
• Someone asked, “Why must there be a human presence on the island?” Damon said, “Wow. A softball.” Ha!! He said “Because the non-human presence would be boring.” He said in the Garden of Eden everything was lovely until humans screwed it up and they’re going with that. Jorge joked that there’s only one bird on the entire island, and then added, “He was special and killed off all the other birds.” HAHAHA!!!
• DL looked at Jorge and said, “You’re not just an actor on the show, but you’re a fan of the show. Why didn’t you want to ask us any questions after getting the full script?” Jorge thought about it for a second and said, “As a fan... I think I got it.” Big applause in the room.
• Jorge added, “Next fall, when you find that show you love, and you watch it, go into work the next day... and talk about Lost.” HAHAHAHA!!!
• I was annoyed by some of the questions, I’ll admit. Someone asked CC what his faith leanings were, and frankly I found that too personal and it had no bearing on the show. He handled it with grace. Someone else posited a theory about how the two timelines would come together and sort of put everyone on the spot, because if they say yes you NAILED it, then, um. Well. But if it’s wrong, they’ve eliminated a possible theory. I just thought these questions were STUPID.
• Someone asked what will ultimately be the significance of Eloise (like SERIOUSLY you can’t wait 3 more friggin’ days??) and they said when a character is inserted in the scene to catch people up really quickly on something, they call that the “Johnny the Explainer” character, and Eloise has been that for a few episodes.

And those for me were the main highlights. There was a lot more (best parts were all of DL’s geeky references, and them talking about how the two of them just sit and chat together in CC’s office over breakfast every morning) and it was SO much fun. You know, one of the things I’ll miss the most about Lost is these two. They’ve said that after the finale they will not be out there talking about it and doing interviews, and they want the audience to come to those conclusions. They’re not going to do the explaining for them. It was a great night. Thank you, Darlton!!

UPDATE: OMG, I can't believe I completely forgot to mention they showed us a clip from the FINALE!!!! For spoilerphobes, once again it's in white:

So Sawyer's hiding behind these bushes looking at Smokey by the well, and Ben comes up behind him and basically says, "Don't lurk, if you're here to join us, then join us." Sawyer rolls his eyes and wanders over with his hands up, and Smokey is his usual aloof self and asks Sawyer what he's doing. Sawyer said he heard Des was in the well so he was here to help him out. He leans over and says, "Looks like someone beat me to the punch. Oh well." Nice pun! So then Ben makes some caustic comment and Sawyer clocks him in the mouth with his elbow and it looks like Ben might have lost a few teeth or something, and then Locke says, "Do you know what I wanted with Desmond?" Sawyer says, "Sure, you probably wanted him to help you destroy the island." Smokey stands there, pause... as if, "Um... actually that was EXACTLY why. You totally ruined my Dum dum DUM!!! moment)" and then he says, "Exactly." And Sawyer says he's not that interested, and steps back, and Smokey looks at the shocked Ben, who's all, "Wait, WHAT? I didn't think you literally meant destroy the island, I thought that was figurative" and Smokey's all, "Oh, sorry... you mean because I promised to give you the island? Yeah... I forgot to mention it would be at the bottom of the ocean when you presumed ownership over it." and Ben looks pissed, and then someone (can't remember who) looks down at the base of the well in the dirt and says, "Hey, are those dog pawprints?" and they ARE and the whole audience just freaked out. I yelled out, "VINCENT!!!!" YAY!!! And that's where it ended.

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!

Why Damon Writes
Sorry it's been a few days since I posted. I'm pleasantly surprised at how many comments I got to my John Hughes post; it's great to see he affects so many of us, 20 years after those movies came out. And why do his movies affect us? Because of the writing. (Ok, and the music, and the acting, blah blah blah... but mostly the writing.)

In the midst of the ongoing writer's strike, several sites are popping up to give the writers a voice. They're not allowed to write for TV or film, but they can write to us. As part of an ongoing "Why We Write" series, Damon Lindelof has stepped up to explain why HE writes. And, no surprise here, it's brill:

I was listening to the news on NPR the other day and two things occurred to me. First, only assholes feel the constant need to tell you they listen to NPR (does anyone ever say, “So I was watching the CW last night…”?) and I guess that makes me an asshole. The second was that in the midst of listening to the story in question, I had finally figured out how to succinctly sum up why I write. It goes a little something like this --There’s this ninety-year old woman named Rose who, after honking her horn repeatedly at the school bus idling in front of her, decides she has much more important things to do and guns her Honda Civic around the bus. Before she realizes that the bus was stopped for a very good reason indeed, Rose finds herself watching a freight train bear down on her and almost instantly, it smashes into the passenger side of the Civic and pushes it a good hundred feet before screeching to a stop. Forgoing all the gory details, Rose is pronounced dead at the local hospital and the attending doctor in the ER is tasked with notifying next of kin. Turns out Rose’s husband has been dead for decades, but she has a couple sons and a daughter. The doctor calls one of her sons and his wife answers the phone. The son isn’t home, but the wife offers to take a message. The notification ethics, however, forbid the hospital from telling anyone but next of kin about Rose’s death and so they ask when the son will be home so they can call back.And the wife responds “He won’t be back for two months.” And the hospital says, “Well… do you have a number where we could reach him?” And the wife says no, she doesn’t. And why not?–

If you want to find out why not, click here to read the rest. This little missive is just another example of why the studios are a bunch of morons who don't see the talent that's most important to them, because they're too busy giving all their money to the onscreen talent. The writer's strike is going on, and the latest word in the pipeline is, if it doesn't end by January 31 (the date of Lost's season 4 premiere) then ABC will run season 4 as 8 episodes only, and they won't be giving Bad Robot those other 8 episodes. Which means just when Damon and Carlton knew they had 48 episodes left, and filmed the first 8 thinking there would be 40 more to follow, now they only have 32 to finish the story. So some storylines are going to have to be dropped to accomodate it. Yikes.

Update: Oops, since writing that post I've gotten a few emails from people asking if I knew for sure that 8 episodes have been dropped, and I just wanted to clarify that's just me speculating (as well as getting a bunch of emails over the past week from people saying the same thing, but they also didn't give me anything to back it up). I'm suggesting they could drop the 8 episodes for a couple of reasons: 1, if the network has assigned 16 episodes per season, and has scheduled Lost to begin each January/February and run until May, then they would have been working on other shows covering that fall slot, so they'd have to do some shuffling in order to give Darlton 24 episodes in season 5. Secondly, if you think of the logistics of it from the writerly angle, each season follows a certain arc, and presumably Darlton have sat down and worked out the basics of what the next 3 seasons will be, and they've broken it down in arcs. The first 3 seasons all had themes specific to that season, and if you imagine taking the last 10 episodes of season 1 and tacking them onto the beginning of season 2, it wouldn't have worked.

So that's just me speculating, and not saying anything definitive. Sorry if I misled.

From Damon's Mouth...

Damon has weighed in to TV Guide on the death of Nikki and Paulo (pictured, in background... oh come ON, like you wouldn't have immediately posted this photo if you'd seen it!), saying, "People hated them before they even opened their mouths to say anything significant because it felt like they were crashing the party," exec producer Damon Lindelof acknowledges of the characters who were abruptly introduced last fall. "The easiest thing would have been to just write them out and forget they ever happened, like the cougar on [Season 2] of 24. But that's not Lost. We should at least own up to it."

Teehee... since I don't believe for a second that these two ever had anything to do with the ultimate big mystery of the island, I'm sure their little "mistake" won't have any affect on the rest of the show. But man... still lovin' that episode.

In other news, I find it interesting that Lost came under such scrutiny last season for its airing schedule, yet Ugly Betty has exactly the same problems this year. Unlike Heroes, which is doing exactly what a show should do, in my mind (Buffy followed the formula for years and it never failed them: 8 eps in fall, break for Christmas, then 8 episodes in spring, break for March and part of April, and final 6 leading to the end of May) Ugly Betty is doing the one new show, 3 weeks off, 2 new episodes, 2 weeks off crap that Lost pulled last year. I tuned in last night after a good episode from last week, and was surprised to see it was a repeat. So I watched The Office marathon instead (the one show where I don't care if it's a repeat, it's going to rock -- there was a great promo for next week's, though!). Now, obviously Betty isn't a serial. It's not like we have to remember the brooch Amanda was wearing in episode 2 by the time we get to episode 14, but it's still really annoying when they just can't get their act together to take a proper hiatus and come back with new episodes.

Rumours continue to fly that Lost will follow the 24 formula next year. Which is great on the one hand -- 22 episodes straight through from January to May -- but on the other hand, we have to go SEVEN MONTHS between the ending of this season and the beginning of the next. That's a long, long time. Naveen Andrews, who plays Sayid, has been shooting his mouth off in the press again, weighing in on all the reasons the show's numbers are down this season (he counts his absence on the show as one of them in a stunningly modest comment). I love Sayid. LOVE Sayid. And I agree that lines have been wasted on Nikki and Paulo that would have been better given to him. But this guy comes out against the show every single time he's got a beef about it, and then wonders why they pull screen time from him. He said in season 2 that the show wasn't very strong anymore. He's saying now that "At least I'll always have season 1," as if everything beyond that has been like appearing on Walker, Texas Ranger or something. I think Naveen Andrews is a pretty cool guy, and hey, I appreciate anyone who can speak their mind. But I don't think I've EVER read an interview with him after May 2005 that was positive about the show. And it wouldn't hurt to stick up for the show occasionally if you're on it.

By the way, for all the talk of Lost ratings dipping this year, 24 is falling behind it. So maybe that whole January to May thing isn't such a great idea after all.

In other news, the death of Nikki and Paulo wasn't just a great thing for me as a viewer, but for me as a blogger. Turns out a LOT of people googled "Nikki" and "Lost" and guess who they found? I hope they liked what they saw, and come back. I had my biggest numbers yesterday!