It seems like we went straight from heating the house to having to cool it down. We got through most of April without any indoor climate control, but I know we had to turn the heat on at least once or twice. No we’re on the verge of summer and it’s A/C season. Highs in the nineties all week, though it still gets down to the sixties overnight, so at least the days don’t start off that bad.
I finished 212 by Alafair Burke last night. I knew her as James Lee Burke’s daughter, but I didn’t know that she was a lawyer, former Assistant District Attorney and currently law school professor. I got to see her at the Edgar banquet last week, and her book was among the freebies given away at the end of the night. It is a sophisticated work. At first I thought it was relying heavily on coincidence as several seemingly disparate threads were suddenly connected together, but by the end of the book some of them had splintered off on their own again and the reason for the overall connectivity became clear. There was one plot point that relied too heavily on a lack of cell phone coverage in someone’s residence, but otherwise I thought it was a very good book.
Tony broke Gibbs’s rule #10 on NCIS (“that’s the one that gives me the most trouble,” Gibbs said), getting involved with someone involved in a case. Except, his involvement was almost completely in his own mind, and he only met the object of his desire briefly at the end. Good for Palmer, getting a chance to catch something Ducky missed, and good for Abby for sticking to her guns and refusing to abandon her work to give a lab tour to a visiting big wig.
Justified was fine this week, too. A hostage drama with one of the most eloquent career criminals to ever grace the screen. He and Raylan were well matched verbally, and the actor who played the hostage taker was terrific. There was a running gag involving where he hid the shiv he used to overpower his guards that reached its logical conclusion when Raylan handed over a piece of fried chicken wrapped in a napkin because of where the convict’s hands had been earlier. And you just know that Raylan was going to take that call at the end, despite all the reasons in the world to let it keep on ringing.
And then there was Lost:
The gang got back together again one last time. Miles, Richard and Ben were still off traipsing through the jungle looking for shit to blow up, so their presence wasn’t needed for this episode, but everyone else was together in one place at one time. Briefly. Sawyer wasn’t going back in that cage again (“feels like we’re running in circles,” he said), but Widmore knew his weak spot: Kate. One of my favorite lines of the episode: “I’m with him,” Jack says as the smoke monster stomps down trees, drags off Widmore’s crew, and generally causes mayhem and destruction.
However, some of the most interesting action was taking place off the island. Jack identified Locke as a candidate for his new surgical procedure and, being Jack, wouldn’t take no for an answer so he started digging around to find out why Locke might refuse the risk-free treatment. Along the way he bumps into Bernard (still a dentist), who recognized him as the guy who was “flirting with my wife” on Flight 815. The trail leads him to Anthony Cooper, Locke’s beloved father who is in a persistent vegetative state because Locke crashed the small plane they were in. Another plane crash–more devestation. Locke doesn’t think he deserves anything but punishment, but Jack tells him he can let it go. Then Jack admits he doesn’t know how to do this himself “and that’s why I was hoping that maybe you could go first.” More resonance with lines from the past (“I hope you find what you’re looking for” and “What happened, happened” and “I wish you believed me”) uttered by different characters in different contexts.
The fact that Jack invited Claire to stay with him gave me hope that, before all this is over, we’ll find out who he’s married to in the sideways universe. It’s not a big mystery, but it’s one I’d like resolved. And the fact that we saw Jin bringing flowers to Sun means that at least somewhere they’re still alive, because…
Because people were getting killed left and right last night. Lapidus gets one of the lines of the evening, the subject of this post, which were his parting words before getting beaned by a metal door. Presumably killed. As soon as the group abandoned the airplane, I figured his time was running out as he wouldn’t be needed much any more. Of course, let’s send the pilot into the submarine engine room because if he can run an airplane surely he’ll be of some help down there!
But even before that, the first bullet to the heart…almost. Kate is shot and I swear if she’d been killed I might have given up on the show. There are a few characters who can die, but she isn’t one of them, in my opinion. I know there are a lot of Kate-haters out there, but not me. Maybe it’s a pro-Canadian thing.
I found myself wondering why the smoke monster needed a watch. A question asked and answered within a few minutes — it really is the end of Lost! Jack’s theory of everything sounded right as soon as he said it. Fake Locke (aka Locke Ness Monster) can’t kill the candidates. It’s not allowed–the same way he couldn’t kill Jacob. But he could get someone else to do it for him–the same way he did with Jacob.
Everything might have been okay if Sawyer hadn’t jumped the gun. Sawyer was willing to change his mind and trust Fake Locke, but Jack? No way, no how. The guy got Juliet killed. Without Sawyer’s impulsive act, they might have sailed off (was anyone watching the bearing? Did anyone aboard even know the magical bearing?), Claire-less but otherwise intact. What would have become of Zombie Sayid is an open question, of course, but he redeemed himself in the end, taking one for the team. “There is no Sayid,” Jack said succinctly. At least no one got pieces of him on them. His parting shot was to tell Jack where Desmond was. Locke wanted him dead, so he’s probably important. Ya think?
And then we have The Poseidon Adventure crossed with Titanic as the two lovebirds, freshly reunited and renewed (thanks to Jin’s wedding ring), go down with the ship together. “We’ll never be apart again,” Jin said last episode. Honorable notion–but what about your kid, man? Are you going to leave her to Mr. Paik to raise? Minor quibble. I don’t think I reacted as much to the Kwan’s demise as to Hurley’s reaction to it. And if there’s any doubt as to who Kate really loves…
And if there ever was any question about whether Fake Locke might turn out to be good…
And yet — how complicit was Widmore in any or all of this? He was conveniently absent from around the airplane and the submarine was comparatively unguarded. Hmmmmm….
