Thursday, September 29, 2005

Lost, Season 2, Episode 2

As soon as Kate was trapped alone and locked in the room, I said -- I actually said this out loud -- "No problem, she can just crawl out through the air ducts!" Of course, I was mostly joking and hoping this wouldn't happen, because it is one of the worst TV/movie/videogame cliches. Yes, every secure area just happens to have large, easily accessible, human-sized air ducts leading in and out of it. And the ductwork is always so sturdy that it can support the full weight of one or more adults, even though there is no conceivable architectural reason for this. Can you imagine the building designers arguing? "Fred, let's use very thin sheet metal or plastic for the air ducts, OK? It will save money." "Oh, no, if we did that, how would they be able to support the weight of a full-grown person crawling through them? Even though it will cost ten times more and only help our enemies to infiltrate or escape, we have to create incredibly strong reinforced air ducts. Think of them as uncomfortable hallways."

After that, I just started saying "filler" out loud every time the show went off on another useless tangent. OK, we get the idea, Mike cares about his son, we already knew that. Do we really need to see the exact details of his custody battle that happened years ago? Do we need to see some little cliffhanger scenes that are repeats of the exact same cliffhanger scenes we saw last week? You can't recycle cliffhangers, they become cliff-huggers!

Let me predict what happens in the next episode (and, for that matter, the next 5 episodes). Here goes:

Oh no, the Others are coming! They have big pointy sticks! They're after Mike and Sawyer. Run, Mike and Sawyer, run!

Cut to a flashback of some castaway's Mysterious Past. Something troubling happened to him or her years ago, which explains the occasional mysterious, troubled look in his or her eyes, but has no relevance to the current story.

Cut to a flashback of something that happened last week. Ooh, it was odd and unexplained then, and it still is now.

Insert random mysterious coincidences. Some dude has a weird symbol on his forehead, and, wait, isn't that the exact same symbol on the bottoms of Kate's shoes? Spooky! They find a bowling ball with a serial number on it, and it just happens to be the number of Sawyer's favorite phone sex line back home. Mega spooky! One character is thinking about a plate of shrimp, and just then another mentions a plate o' shrimp. Cosmic!

Cut to Locke saying something about fate and destiny. The island is like a box of chocolates. No matter where you go, there you are.

Here's what there won't be: good, reasonable explanations for any of the mysteries we have seen so far.

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