I received an interesting proposal via e-mail yesterday, a chance to be in front of a TV camera for the first time. At least, I’m pretty sure it’s the first time. First time the camera will be aimed deliberately at me. It’s not a done deal yet, so I won’t say more at this juncture, but stay tooned.
I’m getting back into my normal exercise routine for the first time in 2010. I herniated a disk in my spine in early January and have had lower back pain ever since. It’s just now starting to abate after four-plus months. I exercised a bit and tried swimming as a low-impact replacement, but I’ve recovered to the point where I can do my usual 35 minutes on the elliptical (3 miles, 400 calories) each weekday without exacerbating the pain. Apparently our bodies reabsorb the disk material after a while, so the pressure on my nerve bundle is waning. It feels good to be able to work toward getting back in shape.
One of the delights of the new series Justified is the witty, razor-sharp dialog. “I didn’t order assholes with my whiskey,” Raylan says to the loudmouths in the bar just before challenging them to an ill-advised back alley rumble. Later, when a bad guy reaches for his guy, Raylan warns him, “I shot people I like more for less.” The series is really developing into one of my favorites. Timothy Olyphant is pitch perfect for the part, and the assorted cast members are all fascinating and colorful in their own rights. I wasn’t fond of the scene where Raylan is warning his ex-wife to get out of the house because the bad guys want to kidnap her. “I’m not going anywhere until someone explains to me what’s going on.” Rather than take 15 seconds to explain (which is all it took once he actually reached the house), Raylan tells her he’ll be there as fast as he can. I was sure the bad guys were going to get there in the interim. The show is violent, and the violence is felt. People get shot and writhe in pain. They don’t all die, and the ones that do don’t die right away.
Apparently Happy Town isn’t a happy series for ABC. After tonight, they’re going to put it on the back burner until June, when it won’t do any more damage to their ratings, and then burn off the remaining five episodes that are in the can. Can’t say I’m surprised. Quirky isn’t enough to captivate a solid audience.
How I Met Your Mother was wall to wall New York celebrities this week. Peter Bagdanovich (who had a funny schtick in the elevator over the closing credits), NY Times crossword editor Will Shortz, Michael York, and Arianna Huffington were all guests at a party the friends crashed (en route to see Wrestlers vs. Robots). The Big Bang Theory was funny, as usual, with guest star Judy Greer as a nymphomaniac physicist who did her best to sleep with the entire male cast (except Sheldon), several of them at once.
You have to wonder when Rick Castle actually finds time to write. We’ve seen a few scenes of him laboring over the computer, and he had some pages to show to his daughter this week, but he doesn’t appear to have anything remotely resembling a routine. I had an inkling about the solution to this week’s murder (the Orient Express solution, in a way). Good to see “Ken Malansky” from the Perry Mason series. The scummy hotel clerk was a colorful character. They sort of telegraphed the kiss a bit at the end. I knew what was coming the moment they sent Castle down the hall to find Beckett.
Okay…Lost.
So, what did we learn? We now know who Adam and Eve were (which I didn’t expect to find out in this episode — and boy, didn’t Kate look fine in the cave from season one?). We know how MiB became smoky. We know how Jacob ended up being the guardian of the island (and wasn’t that scene very Biblical in a “take this cup from me” context?). We get an inkling of how the donkey wheel came to be. We know the identity of the little boy who has been haunting MiB. (Who else saw him, by the way? Was it Hurley?)
One idea I take away from the episode, though, is that the “rules” that Jacob and MiB have been playing by–they’re made up, the same way MiB (or, more accurately BiB [boy in black]) made up the rules to their childhood game (which is based on the Egyptian game Senet). Is it safe to assume that their mother was as nutsy cuckoo as, say, Rousseau or Claire? She sure seemed to be. She knew stuff (somehow) but how much of it did she just make up. She definitely had powers (witness what she did to MiB’s excavation and “tribe,” the original “others”), though we don’t know where they came from. In a way she reminded me of the Fates, making her thread and weaving it into a tapestry. (Some pundit wondered why young Jacob and BiB had such different hairstyles if their “mother” cut both.)
One reason I think the rules were made up is that “momma” said that they couldn’t harm each other, but Jacob clearly harmed his (nameless) brother by pushing him down the hole into the glowing cave. I wonder, though, whether the creature that is inhabiting Locke now, and that inhabited MiB for so long, is actually Jacob’s brother turned monster, or if it was just a monster in the cave that was released by Jacob’s actions. Didn’t Locke/MiB say something about his crazy mother a while back? Makes it seem like smoke monster Locke really is MiB in some form. His drive to get off the island is consistent with it still being the spirit of the man pushed down the hole, too.
Is MiB now the “light in the cave”? Momma said, “If the light goes out here, it goes out everywhere,” and people believe that if MiB leaves the island very bad things will happen to a lot of people…maybe to everyone.
For me, the last five minutes redeemed the episode, though I wish there had been a more expeditious way to get there. We only have 3.5 hours of new material left.
