TDTVS

Pilot – Part 1

Night 1 of 82. We have started watching all the previous seasons episodes of Season 5 of TDTVS , one at a time, every weeknight until January when new episodes begin again.

I still have trouble with the jet engine remaining running long after the crash and then spectacularly blowing up when some red shirt is sucked into it. The second explosion when the wing crashes down on the sand is a credibility stretcher as well.

This episode is entitled Pilot (Pt 1) because it was what the producers, in the traditional sense, used to sell the show to the network. But knowing now, what I didn’t know then, I’m betting it is also called this because of the key role the pilot played in the plane getting lost.

Just how old was J.J. Abrams in 1969? Do you think the genesis of LOST was a show called The New People?

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Man of Faith


John Locke

Like Mr. Locke, I am a man of faith, as long as you consider faith in failure. The FRS were leading tonight’s game by 13 to 1 after 5-1/2 innings and then as if to validate my faith, they have given up 5 runs in the last two innings. I’m pretty sure they won’t blow the remaining 8 run lead in the last two innings, but if they do, you should have faith that I will blame myself for the loss because I jinxed the team by saying, “Pretty sure they won’t.”

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Political Action Figures

And here I have been slowly building up my collection of TDTVS action figures, how so 2004, I need to get in the moment. According to a New York Daily News article there are 2008 Presidential campaign action figures available from HeroBuilders.com.

Poor Joe Biden, he doesn’t rate a figure though. You can get McCain in a T-shirt, Palin dressed in some Japanese school girl fantasy outfit (among others) and Obama, sans shirt, who looks like he has been working out. Also available for your collecting pleasure are a couple of disgraced politicos who had trouble with that whole faithful section of their marriage vows, John Edwards and Elliot Spitzer.

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TDTVS Warm Up

If you look over in the side bar you will see a countdown to Season 5 of Lost. Right now it stands at 147 days. That is based on something I read that said the first show of the new season will air on Thursday, January 15th.

Because I can’t for the life of me remember exactly how things ended up at the end of season four, I do remember who was residing in the coffin, but most of the other stuff is hazy, I figured that maybe I should rewatch the last few episodes of season four before season five starts. Well, hell, if I’m going to watch some, why not all? So if there are 82* episodes so far, if I back up 82 days from January 15th I should start a single episode a night on Saturday, October 25th. Let’s stretch it out a bit more…how about watching one episode each weeknight? Five gazinta 82, 16 times with a remainder of 2. That gives me a start date of Tuesday, September 23rd. Let’s take a day off between finishing watching season 4 and the start of season 5, for party planning, and start watching the show on Monday the 22nd. That even has a nice symmetry because the show originally premiered on September 22, 2004.

So every weeknight from 9/22/2008 until 1/13/2009, including Thanksgiving, Christmas & New Years, I will watch an episode of Lost. I’ll use the title of that episode as the title of that night’s post and if I’m really creative I’ll relate something in that episode to something that happened that day.

*Lostpedia list 82 episodes while Wikipedia lists 83 because they count last season’s finally as two separate episodes. I think that if they aired on the same night, one after the other with no credits between them they are one episode, so I’m treating it as such. Eighty-two it is.

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Serenity

Along with our Netflix membership, we are also members of a couple Movie Gallery video stores here in town, due mostly to our TDTVS addiction. Every once in a while one of them will call us and leave a message on our phone answering machine to say they haven’t seen us in a while and to bring us back we are entitled to a free movie rental. We got one of those calls on Thursday. A while? Ha! The last time we were in any of their stores was when Season 3 of Lost was released or the last time they offered a free rental.

Having just finished re watching the Firefly DVDs on Friday we decided to see if we could get the Firefly based movie Serenity as our freebie. Luck was with us as Movie Gallery had a copy on the shelf, so today we had “Lunch and a Movie.”

Well, both the Mrs and I love Firefly, but were disappointed with the movie — there goes our nominations for the Browncoat Hall of Fame… Part of the appeal of the show was the character interaction among the crew with the plot of each episode serving as a vehicle to move the developing relationships along. The movie, as I explained to someone (Hi Rae), was too movie-ish. Everything had to be bigger, faster, more and it was jarring. On TV they used what they called the mule, basically a tarted up ATV, to get around planetside. For the movie they had some sort of hovercraft with giant jet engines and seated four comfortably. Why? During the run of the show when ever there was encounter with another spaceship it was always just one, for the movie they pulled a George Lucas – Industrial Light & Magic with a final battle consisting of hundreds of vessels crisscrossing and dodging and weaving. Why, when a dozen would have done the trick? There were several other instances with over the top gun battles, hero vs bad guy one on one epic hand to hand battle on the edge of a precipitous drop and and some sappy feel good Hollywood romancing.

Fortunately the movie, when it was released in 2005, didn’t make a lot of money (according to IMDB it almost made back it’s $40 million budget), so they didn’t make any sequels. Unfortunately, it didn’t make enough at the box office to revive the TV series.

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Membata…

…is Indonesian for “doubt” or “uncertainty”.

The last episode didn’t actually jump the shark but it did water ski precariously close. The same thing that really derailed National Treasure for me is one of the things that stretched credibility to the breaking point. Ben blows up the “vault” in the Orchid Station so that he can get to the place he needs to be to move the island. He follows a tunnel for a while then has to kick his way through a sheet of ice and starts to climb down a ladder into a room that looks as if it has been sealed for a very long time. A rung of the ladder breaks because the wood is so old it is dry rotted and Ben tumbles to the icy floor. He then gets up, dusts himself off, pulls some matches from his pocket and lights one. He takes the match to a hurricane lantern hanging on a nail, lifts the glass and the wick lights! That Dharma Initiative lamp oil must really be something.

Another little thing that I need someone to explain to me why the lying. Locke convinces Jack who in turn convince the rest of the Oceanic 6 to lie about the whole island experience. They concoct a story about how they were the only survivors to protect the ones they left behind. Why? The island is no longer where it was, Locke moved it (in space or time or both), how are they going to get found?

I loved the wooden wheel thing that Ben had to turn to activate the whatever that would move the island, reminded me of the Wheel of Pain that Conan had to turn as a child slave that made him the strong man he was. Also kind of reminded me of the wheel that the donkey was chained to in the blacksmith’s shop where Will Turner worked. Or maybe the helm of the Black Pearl. Where’d those last two references come from? TDPM was on USA tonight and I would have watched the whole thing too, if Donna hadn’t make me rewatch “There Is No Place Like Home Parts 2 & 3” at around 9:00 PM.

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We Wish You A Happy Red Hot Deals Day

Can’t blog right now, last hour of Lost is on. Come back tomorrow.

That Ben is such a nice guy.

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