LOST 1x22 – Born to Run
Apr. 12th, 2024 09:46 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jedi_of_urth posting in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
tori_reviewsSo I seem to be a bit lost on what day of the week it is. But I think it’s Friday now.
LOST 1x22 – Born to Run
I’m in sort of a weird spot with this episode. I liked pretty much all of it, I don’t have any major objections, and yet I’m cold toward it. It probably says more about my…interest but not passion toward the show. I need something that excites me about the show, a character I love, a ship I’m rooting for, something I’m excited for them to get to. If this was a new show, the mysteries and uncertainty might be enough to at least give me more to talk about, but I don’t think it would be enough for me invest in watching an episode a week instead of one every day or so.
This is a really good Kate flashback story; although I still think Kate would have to be a bit crazy to have organized a bank robbery in order to get the toy plane back or for that that to have been so important to her about getting in the case (maybe I think so more, if it was that important to her, I think she would have tried harder to take it at the time). (Maybe she did also want to do a bank robbery and just made sure to pick the bank where she could get the toy plane too, but that wasn’t the way it looked in the other ep.) There’s a lot that still isn’t explained, it doesn’t seem like Tom was the one writing to Kate, and it clearly wasn’t her mother, so we’ll need to learn that at some point; and obviously we don’t know the beef between her and her mom, that Tom seems likely to be aware of but keeps helping her in spite of the legal risks, in spite of his family.
Having Tom in Kate’s backstory does say a lot about her relationship to Jack in the present. It makes Jack very much the replacement for Tom in her life, probably more than she could have ever thought she would find, since the extremes of living on the island sort of mask the absence of the longer connection she had with Tom. I don’t know quite how to take Tom’s commitment to Kate in this story, but I don’t think I’m supposed to be quite sure how to take his actions. Kate doesn’t know, and in a lot of ways probably doesn’t want to know just how much he loves her, whether it’s romantic (seems to be at least partly) and he sort of settled for someone he could actually be with, or if it’s an old friend that he knows needs a friend really badly. The fact that his loyalty to her gets him killed (seems to? That seemed to be the implication, but they could say he was alive later without it being a contradiction) is maybe the one aspect that I sort of think we should see more in Kate’s behavior after this point in her past, but it’s probably easy enough to insert it into how she’s been acting, even if I prefer more explicit exploration.
Which is probably my biggest issue with this flashback story. I will say I do think we needed to see these flashbacks because it wouldn’t be realistic to express much of it in present dialog and actions; but I feel like we’re looking through a peephole into the story. I don’t have enough emotional connection to what’s introduced in the flashbacks for it to hit as its own story, and the impact it has on the present story is not going to have a lot of depth, at least that hasn’t been the case.
It's also a pretty good Kate story in the present, and the flashback doesn’t feel out of place with the present story, they just play in concert very well. I kind of called that Sun had been the one doing the poisoning (at one point Walt runs up to Sun and Kate and those are clearly the three top suspects) but I didn’t consider that Kate kind of put her up to it, and I think makes a fair amount of sense. Sun is the one with the knowledge to make a poison like that (for whatever reasons she has so much plant and medical knowledge, we haven’t been told), but Kate is the one to go on the attack like that.
So, if what Kate told Michael is true (which is admittedly suspect), she should really be going on the raft. Jin gives the impression of knowing something about boats (fishing background I suppose), but I’m a little conflicted about whether the language barrier is something they really wouldn’t want on the trip or if it’s actually a really good idea to have someone who speaks another language in case they aren’t picked up by English speakers. While bringing Sawyer for muscle isn’t a bad idea (for sailing/rowing and if they run into trouble), I wouldn’t suggest Michael leave Walt behind; however if Michael and Walt stayed behind, who would I pick as the fourth? I wonder how much experience Shannon has with sailing, and there certainly could be some useful skills among the background players, science teacher might have useful skills but I’ll admit doesn’t seem like a boat person. Sayid would be a maybe, but I’m hesitant to put him on a raft with Sawyer and his skills are often useful on the island.
I do think even if I was watching this without knowing there are five more seasons I wouldn’t be able to get all that excited about the raft project. If it had launched mid season I would be wondering what could happen when they came back, how far they would have gotten, what sort of new element the show might introduce that way, but launching at the end of the season means it’s not going to have a lot of impact and everyone will be back soon. To a certain extent this comes back to being a network/mass appeal version of the kind of plot you get in genre fiction much more often, and mostly only made more predictable by being made 20 years ago.
As much as I struggle to take Jack’s side on a lot of things, I do think a lot like him on the hatch situation. Although I suspect Locke the liar hasn’t told them that sometimes lights come on inside. Most likely it’s some kind of bunker left over from some base built on the island; it probably only provides shelter, but that’s not nothing (especially with monsoon season coming). Now, I think it’s entirely possible that they could really hurt themselves (again) in trying to open the hatch, so it could easily not be worth it, but I think that calculation is worth doing. So does Locke’s knowing that Walt is special trump his belief that he is special and destined for something inside the hatch? (Note that I didn’t really think Locke was responsible for the poisoning, if it would have grounded the boat and kept everyone on the island I probably would have.) Again, I say this as if I don’t know anything that’s coming.
LOST 1x22 – Born to Run
I’m in sort of a weird spot with this episode. I liked pretty much all of it, I don’t have any major objections, and yet I’m cold toward it. It probably says more about my…interest but not passion toward the show. I need something that excites me about the show, a character I love, a ship I’m rooting for, something I’m excited for them to get to. If this was a new show, the mysteries and uncertainty might be enough to at least give me more to talk about, but I don’t think it would be enough for me invest in watching an episode a week instead of one every day or so.
This is a really good Kate flashback story; although I still think Kate would have to be a bit crazy to have organized a bank robbery in order to get the toy plane back or for that that to have been so important to her about getting in the case (maybe I think so more, if it was that important to her, I think she would have tried harder to take it at the time). (Maybe she did also want to do a bank robbery and just made sure to pick the bank where she could get the toy plane too, but that wasn’t the way it looked in the other ep.) There’s a lot that still isn’t explained, it doesn’t seem like Tom was the one writing to Kate, and it clearly wasn’t her mother, so we’ll need to learn that at some point; and obviously we don’t know the beef between her and her mom, that Tom seems likely to be aware of but keeps helping her in spite of the legal risks, in spite of his family.
Having Tom in Kate’s backstory does say a lot about her relationship to Jack in the present. It makes Jack very much the replacement for Tom in her life, probably more than she could have ever thought she would find, since the extremes of living on the island sort of mask the absence of the longer connection she had with Tom. I don’t know quite how to take Tom’s commitment to Kate in this story, but I don’t think I’m supposed to be quite sure how to take his actions. Kate doesn’t know, and in a lot of ways probably doesn’t want to know just how much he loves her, whether it’s romantic (seems to be at least partly) and he sort of settled for someone he could actually be with, or if it’s an old friend that he knows needs a friend really badly. The fact that his loyalty to her gets him killed (seems to? That seemed to be the implication, but they could say he was alive later without it being a contradiction) is maybe the one aspect that I sort of think we should see more in Kate’s behavior after this point in her past, but it’s probably easy enough to insert it into how she’s been acting, even if I prefer more explicit exploration.
Which is probably my biggest issue with this flashback story. I will say I do think we needed to see these flashbacks because it wouldn’t be realistic to express much of it in present dialog and actions; but I feel like we’re looking through a peephole into the story. I don’t have enough emotional connection to what’s introduced in the flashbacks for it to hit as its own story, and the impact it has on the present story is not going to have a lot of depth, at least that hasn’t been the case.
It's also a pretty good Kate story in the present, and the flashback doesn’t feel out of place with the present story, they just play in concert very well. I kind of called that Sun had been the one doing the poisoning (at one point Walt runs up to Sun and Kate and those are clearly the three top suspects) but I didn’t consider that Kate kind of put her up to it, and I think makes a fair amount of sense. Sun is the one with the knowledge to make a poison like that (for whatever reasons she has so much plant and medical knowledge, we haven’t been told), but Kate is the one to go on the attack like that.
So, if what Kate told Michael is true (which is admittedly suspect), she should really be going on the raft. Jin gives the impression of knowing something about boats (fishing background I suppose), but I’m a little conflicted about whether the language barrier is something they really wouldn’t want on the trip or if it’s actually a really good idea to have someone who speaks another language in case they aren’t picked up by English speakers. While bringing Sawyer for muscle isn’t a bad idea (for sailing/rowing and if they run into trouble), I wouldn’t suggest Michael leave Walt behind; however if Michael and Walt stayed behind, who would I pick as the fourth? I wonder how much experience Shannon has with sailing, and there certainly could be some useful skills among the background players, science teacher might have useful skills but I’ll admit doesn’t seem like a boat person. Sayid would be a maybe, but I’m hesitant to put him on a raft with Sawyer and his skills are often useful on the island.
I do think even if I was watching this without knowing there are five more seasons I wouldn’t be able to get all that excited about the raft project. If it had launched mid season I would be wondering what could happen when they came back, how far they would have gotten, what sort of new element the show might introduce that way, but launching at the end of the season means it’s not going to have a lot of impact and everyone will be back soon. To a certain extent this comes back to being a network/mass appeal version of the kind of plot you get in genre fiction much more often, and mostly only made more predictable by being made 20 years ago.
As much as I struggle to take Jack’s side on a lot of things, I do think a lot like him on the hatch situation. Although I suspect Locke the liar hasn’t told them that sometimes lights come on inside. Most likely it’s some kind of bunker left over from some base built on the island; it probably only provides shelter, but that’s not nothing (especially with monsoon season coming). Now, I think it’s entirely possible that they could really hurt themselves (again) in trying to open the hatch, so it could easily not be worth it, but I think that calculation is worth doing. So does Locke’s knowing that Walt is special trump his belief that he is special and destined for something inside the hatch? (Note that I didn’t really think Locke was responsible for the poisoning, if it would have grounded the boat and kept everyone on the island I probably would have.) Again, I say this as if I don’t know anything that’s coming.
