Sean T. Collins has written about comics and popular culture professionally since 2001 and on this very blog since 2003. He has written for Maxim, The Comics Journal, Stuff, Wizard, A&F Quarterly, Comic Book Resources, Giant, ToyFare, The Onion, The Comics Reporter and more. His comics have been published by Top Shelf, Partyka, and Family Style. He blogs here and at Robot 6.
(Provided that I deem them suitably fabulous, your name and message will be considered eligible for publication unless you specify otherwise.) Review Copies Welcome
* First of all, the Ewoks do not suck. "The Ewoks suck" is the kind of thing Star Wars nerds who are insecure about being Star Wars nerds and feel like they have to be tough guys about it--the worst, most insufferable kind of Star Wars nerds--say in lieu of whipping their dicks out and measuring them and yelling "see?!?!" The Ewoks are awesome. They look like teddy bears and fight like the Viet Cong. If given the choice between living among humans for the rest of my life and living among Ewoks, the choice would be it's not even a choice. Ewoks every time. What I'm saying is that the Ewoks are better than you.
* Second of all, fun episode. I like Miles--he brings a different tone to the show in terms of how his character works, something a little harder to get a handle on thanks to both how he's written and how Ken Leung performs him. For example, like every single other character on the entire show and approximately 90% of all the characters in nerd-centric fiction, he has daddy issues, but he doesn't play them in the hard-exterior-surrounds-wounded-puppy manner everyone else does, not even after an entire episode dedicated to pushing him into that place. My read on him is that the combination of not having a father/being told his father rejected him and his mother with being able to hear the thoughts of dead people makes him has just made him think life is all some big cosmic joke, so why bother? Leung plays this like he honestly could say "fuck this" and walk right off the show at any moment. It's intriguing.
* I think his best moment in this episode was when he returned his money to the grieving father, not to do the right thing by the guy, but to lay down the hard truth on him. He didn't seem to derive any schadenfreude or pleasure from it, which is what saved it from being too on the nose--he just sort of spat it out and split, like his own internal hardness forced him to do it but he couldn't contemplate deriving any kind of satisfaction from it (either out of cruelty or out of being a better person and returning the stolen cash). I didn't anticipate the scene working out that way, and it was a pleasure.
* In his Lost recap this week, Todd Van Der Werff points out that this episode felt like it came from an earlier season. We have a first-time flashbacker for the first time in a while, and the forward movement on any of the show's mysteries is pretty minimal. Back in Season Two or so, having an episode where one of the biggest revelations is that some redshirt got killed by electromagnetism would be par for the course, but nowadays everything's jam-packed. I kind of liked that throwback feel.
* The other revelation this episode, besides the kinda non-revelation that Daniel was in Michigan, is that one of the dudes from the new set of plane-crash castaways is somehow in on the mysteries and working against Widmore and his forces, and is also using the "what lies in the shadow of the statue" catchphrase. I assumed this means he's working for Ben, but a lot of my friends (and a lot of Internet speculation) argue that there's a third party at work here. I'm not sure why that conclusion's being drawn--but during the show I complained that whoever that guy was, him and his cronies should have just killed Miles if they wanted to make sure he didn't go to work for Widmore, and now that the third-party theory has been suggested to me I think that's the best available evidence that he isn't working with Ben. Ben's dudes would have shot Miles from across the street.
* Also, Ilyana is another "shadow of the statue" catch-phraser, and she claims to be working for the family of one of Sayid's victims, and what do we really know about them that we didn't learn from Ben? So maybe the third-party theory is correct. On the other hand, remember the blonde German lady Sayid dated for a while before they mutually betrayed and shot each other? I'm pretty sure she really was working for Widmore, no?
* I think the Kate/Roger sequence of events was surprisingly rich. On the one hand, Roger is right--Kate was involved with everything that's happened to poor little Ben. But on the other hand, he's kind of accidentally right--that is the kind of thing that only a paranoid drunk who believes the worst of everyone (including his own kid, when he hasn't been shot and kidnapped) would think about a lady who gave blood to save his son's life then tried to comfort the dad when the kid went missing. And on a third hand that I've grown for the purposes of this paragraph, it's another instance of Sawyer's caution and Juliet's pessimism proving out over Kate's "we've got to DO SOMETHING"ism--she could have simply kept her head down and let Sawyer run the show as he saw fit, but instead she's pretty much fucked them without even trying. It's downright Jackish, is what it is.
* Oh yeah, Dr. Marvin Candle/Pierre Chang is Miles's father, duh. At least they made the reveal funny: "That douche is my dad" takes away a bit of the anti-climax sting.
* Is it just me or is Hurley becoming less of the common-sense audience stand-in and more of the "I'm too slow to follow this show" audience stand-in?
Could the "shadow of the statue" guys really be working for Ben? There was no sign of them among the new crash survivors when Ben left with Locke to face the smoke monster, but then when Frank Lapidus (the pilot) got back to the survivors, with Ben still gone, a bunch of them (including some who I think had shown no sign of cultism right before Ben and Locke left) ganged up on him because he didn't know the secret password. I'd guess it's a sign they've been initiated into the Others, but who knows.
Even if the blond lady was working for Widmore, that doesn't necessarily mean everybody Sayid killed was. Ben could have sent him after a variety of targets.
And how can you not be practically jizzing about the prospect of a Destro/Rat King on this show?
I'm really loving the shit out of LOST this season, and Miles has been one of my favorite characters, for all the reasons outlined above, but also because he was previously Uncle June's crazy lil' buddy on the Sopranos, and I like to think that means that The Sopranos and LOST share a common universe.
And FWIW, I always assumed the "Shadow of the statue folks" were a third party, possibly connected to the Others but outside the Widmore/Ben/Richard Alpert axis of evil.
Coop is onto something in that there's something about Lost where you can play the usually nasty, dismissive game of "they're all playing their old characters" and it sort of works, or at least could be made to work.
Sean, I'm afraid there wasn't enough room for all of that after the Green Lantern oath.
My current theory is that the Shadow of the Statue folks are indeed a third (fourth?) faction, and that they are, like Miles and Charlotte, the grown children of Dharma people who left the island before the Purge. In this theory, they view Dharma (and by extension the island, and possibly certain discoveries/artifacts on the island) as their birthright, and therefore have reason to be opposed to both Ben (the dude who killed their parents) and Widmore (the dude who wants the island for himself).
I tend to think that the Shadow of the Statue people are in some way affiliated with what was once Hanso/Dharma. So you know, Gardner's idea works for me.
I'm of the opinion "Shadow of that statue" folk are Dharma/what Dharma became. I think we're fairly certain that there is "a" actual Dharma out there since there were Supply drops being made for the swan, which didn't seem to come from Ben/others, as I believe that he really didn't know about the Swan or what it was for.
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Comments (15)
The "Ewoks suck" line made me laff because it is in character for teddy bear Hurly (who's rewriting Empire to get rid of the weak parts).
Posted by Bill Sherman | April 16, 2009 11:26 AM
My girlfriend's one hope in life is that Pierre's middle initial is F.
Posted by jeffk | April 16, 2009 1:34 PM
Could the "shadow of the statue" guys really be working for Ben? There was no sign of them among the new crash survivors when Ben left with Locke to face the smoke monster, but then when Frank Lapidus (the pilot) got back to the survivors, with Ben still gone, a bunch of them (including some who I think had shown no sign of cultism right before Ben and Locke left) ganged up on him because he didn't know the secret password. I'd guess it's a sign they've been initiated into the Others, but who knows.
Posted by Jesse M. | April 16, 2009 2:13 PM
That's interesting, because I actually have "Ewoks Suck" tattooed on the length of my dick.
Posted by Tom Spurgeon | April 16, 2009 4:07 PM
Tom, be fair to yourself: It reads "Everyone knows that Ewoks suck and Han Solo shot first because Corellians rock" when you see it in full.
Posted by Sean T. Collins | April 16, 2009 4:48 PM
Even if the blond lady was working for Widmore, that doesn't necessarily mean everybody Sayid killed was. Ben could have sent him after a variety of targets.
And how can you not be practically jizzing about the prospect of a Destro/Rat King on this show?
Posted by Ben Morse | April 16, 2009 7:43 PM
'Cuz that's what Widmore was! It was Castaways vs. others till Chuck & Co. came along.
If there's a new crew, they'd be, like, the Triceratons or Cobra-La.
Actually, that would make them even cooler.
Posted by Sean T. Collins | April 16, 2009 7:50 PM
I'm really loving the shit out of LOST this season, and Miles has been one of my favorite characters, for all the reasons outlined above, but also because he was previously Uncle June's crazy lil' buddy on the Sopranos, and I like to think that means that The Sopranos and LOST share a common universe.
Yes, I'm a huge nerd, sue me.
Posted by COOP | April 16, 2009 8:50 PM
And FWIW, I always assumed the "Shadow of the statue folks" were a third party, possibly connected to the Others but outside the Widmore/Ben/Richard Alpert axis of evil.
Posted by COOP | April 16, 2009 8:53 PM
Coop is onto something in that there's something about Lost where you can play the usually nasty, dismissive game of "they're all playing their old characters" and it sort of works, or at least could be made to work.
Sean, I'm afraid there wasn't enough room for all of that after the Green Lantern oath.
Posted by Tom Spurgeon | April 16, 2009 9:39 PM
For my part, I still believe that Lost takes place in the same universe as Grey's Anatomy because each show has a Dr. Shepherd.
Widmore is Serpentor, Sean.
Posted by Ben Morse | April 16, 2009 11:09 PM
My current theory is that the Shadow of the Statue folks are indeed a third (fourth?) faction, and that they are, like Miles and Charlotte, the grown children of Dharma people who left the island before the Purge. In this theory, they view Dharma (and by extension the island, and possibly certain discoveries/artifacts on the island) as their birthright, and therefore have reason to be opposed to both Ben (the dude who killed their parents) and Widmore (the dude who wants the island for himself).
Posted by Gardner | April 16, 2009 11:18 PM
I tend to think that the Shadow of the Statue people are in some way affiliated with what was once Hanso/Dharma. So you know, Gardner's idea works for me.
Posted by Matthew Perpetua | April 17, 2009 10:46 AM
I'm of the opinion "Shadow of that statue" folk are Dharma/what Dharma became. I think we're fairly certain that there is "a" actual Dharma out there since there were Supply drops being made for the swan, which didn't seem to come from Ben/others, as I believe that he really didn't know about the Swan or what it was for.
Posted by Pinkshirtbadman | April 17, 2009 2:29 PM
"Ben's dudes would have shot Miles from across the street."
Unless they know they can't, because Miles is destined to go back in time.
Even Ben doesn't wanna fuck around with time-discontinuities.
Posted by gene phillips | April 23, 2009 9:48 AM