Thursday, January 22, 2009

the day after the season premiere, reviews & followup links:

"Lost": "Nothing in the show is season-long" [**The Watcher - chicagotribune - Mo Ryan interview w Lindelof re premiere]
Damon Lindelof expounds on last night's season premiere: "There are actually sort of three acts to the season. The first act is the first seven episodes, the second act is eight through 13, and the final act is 14 though 17. Every time that you think that the show has settled into, 'Oh, is this all about the Oceanic 6 trying to get back to the island and the island is skipping through time,' it changes. But we don’t want to tell you how it changes or what frequency it changes. All we can say is, there are a lot of twists and turns this year."
"Lost" returns to record-low ratings, with viewers fleeing throughout the 2 hours [latimes-showtracker]
"Lost" retools its logo [courant.com] now you can sort of see the cityscape in the letters of 'Lost'//
What is the meaning behind "Shotgun Willie"? [amyrobot.com]:
Lost: the meaning of season premiere music: Desmond played "Make Your Own Kind of Music" by Mama Cass; Juliet plays Petula Clark's "Downtown" (It's a sad, wistful song about wanting to be somewhere else); Dr. Candle puts on "Shotgun Willie", a 1973 song by Willie Nelson. After getting through the lyrics about Shotgun Willie sitting around in his underwear, the record starts skipping on the lyric "Well you can't make a record" before getting to the rest of the line, which is "Well you can't make a record if you ain't got nothing to say." The skipping record is like the whole island that starts skipping around through time... And the lyrics might refer to Dr. Candle's unsuccessful attempt to record his introductory video on the Dharma Initiative (the one we saw a few seasons ago) because he gets interrupted when his construction crew stumbles on the time-travel mechanism that lies inside a hunk of rock on the island. Or maybe Dr. Candle really does have nothing to say and the whole premise of the Dharma Initiative is incorrect, or philosophically wrong?
This was the best season-opener since Season 1 [wpost-celebritology-Dueling Analyses]
// What just happened? [*sepinwall]
Is "Lost" quantifiably better than before? [housenextdoor]
// Meet recap band "Previously on Lost" *
*note that "Previously on Lost" is title of several items all linked to around this time, beginning of S5, the first by Sepinwall & then JmsP at TunedIn, and the latter two on successive tvtattle Lost link roundups:
- imagined summary scene posted on A List of Things Thrown Five Minutes Ago, prvs dlww post
- title of a band that sings recaps (haven't lkd into this, really)
-title of the youtube video where one guy watches all of lost straight "henry gale's the leader! .. there are two islands!" (this is my fvr)


+my follow-up reading list:

Tuned In - TIME.com » Lostwatch: You Can’t Make a Record If, You Can’t Make a Record If, You Can’t… « | 80+ comments

*What's Alan Watching?: Lost, "Because You Left" & "The Lie": Uh-oh, Zoot skipped a groove again! | 100+ comments

**The 'Lost' season premiere: Timeless | The Watcher

and: Completely 'Lost': THE SEASON FIVE PREMIERE



Wednesday, January 21, 2009
the day of the season premiere, prepatory links:

"Lost" time travels through Season 5 [nj.com Sepinwall Q&A w Lindelof]
Time travel plays a big role this season, but Damon Lindelof says traveling through time was built into the show's DNA. "The big question going into this year is this idea of, there's only two fundamental approaches to time travel," says Lindelof. "There's the 'Back to the Future'/'Heroes' approach where you can go back and change things, that stepping on a butterfly, suddenly, there's a different president, people have antenna heh, George McFly's a best-selling author. And the other way is, if you went back in time and tried to kill Hitler, you would fail, because Hitler wasn't assassinated. What would happen if you were in the past and tried to change the present as you knew it, would you A)Fail, or B)Succeed, or C)Cause the thing you were trying to prevent. And that's really interesting to us, because there's no (do-over's)." well that keeps seeming weird to me bcs dsn't that require that some events count as things you can't change and some don't? bcs clearly you do change things, by being there, you step on things, things happen that did not happen - all of what is happening to you had not happened. unless you say 'these things are always' which ok works for me. Leibniz ~ look at all of time at once, all of this was & is always happening this way, you were always going to 'go back in time' and step on this leaf...). but unless you conceive of things that way .. to say you can't 'change the present' seems like acting as if the present is affected only by the big~noted events
U.S. Airways crash a "Lost"-ian coincidence? Producer said: "Oh My God" [dailybeast short interview w exec producer Jack Bender] ..the week before Lost returns, the US Airways flight went down in the Hudson River and everyone aboard survived. well good. Everyone involved on the show must have been stunned when they saw the plane in the water. / Bender: When J.J. Abrams asked me to work on the series, I hadn’t seen a group of co-stars like this since ER. / There’s never been a show that anticipated its ending two years in advance. really?
The first 5 minutes of EVERY "Lost" season premiere tells you everything [slate] There are 342 tiny clues tonight [boston.com]
"Lost" even more confusing! [bostonherald] // Revelations will drop like no-name extras [tampabay] What makes "Lost" great is what also makes it frustrating [usatoday]
"Lost" cast: Before they were stars [11points.com: youtube clips of MrEko, Kate, Hurley in commercials, Juliet in Gia...] // Does Juliet really love Jack? [nymag intrvw w E Mitchell]
Recapping "Lost" up till now [nydailynews] // Season 5 is all about quantum physics [nypost] / Meet the newest "Lostie," Zuleikha Robinson [nypost] familiar name? no I'm thinking of Zuleika Dobson - by Max Beerbohm - '1911 novel a satire of undergraduate life at Oxford'
Do the explanations make "Lost" less interesting? [latimes] The mysterious becomes the merely preposterous. The weirdness of a polar bear on a tropical island is more satisfying than any reason you can provide for it. nah. actually pretty cool to connect the bear to Charlotte's dig in Tunisia ~ the island moving ~ maybe the bears were there to push the wheel, after living in those dharma cages solving mechanistic puzzles to get fish cookies // Newbies not welcome [sfgate - Tim Goodman's rvw]
Watch "Previously on Lost," a video parodying "Lost" addiction [time.com] right, saw this via Tuned In. guy watches all four seasons straight = 2.7 days*

[ TV t a t t l e . c o m ]

*note that "Previously on Lost" is title of several items all linked to around this time, beginning of S5, the first by Sepinwall & then JmsP at TunedIn, and the latter two on successive tvtattle Lost link roundups:
- imagined summary scene posted on A List of Things Thrown Five Minutes Ago, prvs dlww post
- title of a band that sings recaps (haven't lkd into this, really)
-title of the youtube video where one guy watches all of lost straight "henry gale's the leader! .. there are two islands!" (this is my fvr)