To be fair, they actually have a reasonably satisfactory reason to explain this.
I know other people have stepped in to defend Locke, but frankly I’m just glad someone else has echoed my feelings on the man. I watched Lost with my brother, starting from season 1, this summer, and I’ve pretty much loathed Locke from episode 1.
Interesting factoid: the guy who plays Ben (who–heh–does look like an R. Crumb character, now that you mention it) was only supposed to be on about 3 episodes–he was going to be “Henry Gale” and “Ben” would be played by someone else, but the producers loved the guy’s performance so much that they combined the characters to allow the actor to stay on longer.
Just a couple comments:
It’s science fiction at its center, presented as drama and wrapped in heavily serialized mystery and intrigue. If you’re not a sci-fi fan, the whole show will feel very heavy handed and ridiculous. Also, the “fun” of the show is the more-questions-than-answers aspect. Just like the “fun” of 24 is Jack Bauer is superhuman and ostensibly immortal, who lives in a world where full-blown terrorism on American soil is as common as holding up a liquor store.
Anyway, glad you’re learning how to enjoy it. No show can have a universal audience, but this comes pretty close. Being a huge fan of science fiction (that is, fantastical scenarios and characters) and puzzle-piece story-telling, this show was right up my alley from the start.
That said, take Season Three with a few lumps of sugar; while it has its moments, it was the part of the series where the writers where struggling with progressing the story, as they had no end-date set. So for the first 2/3 of S3, you just have to hunker down and bear it, at least until the last handful of episodes. But, since you won’t have to wait week-to-week, perhaps it won’t be as bad.* Then Season 4 is pretty damn good, and Season 5 was on par with the first two seasons for me. That’s where the science-fiction really comes back into play.
*Also, S3 was plagued with tons of breaks, reruns, and hiatuses. T’was torture. Now, seasons 4-6 are pared down to about 16-18 hours, with virtually no season breaks. Season 4 is the shortest, because of the writer’s strike at the time.
“Welcome to the wonderful world of not knowing what the hell’s going on.”
Also very enlightening are the many, many demonstrations of that apparently most reliable of tools: the rifle butt. Good to know that, whenever you’re with someone and you don’t want them to hear what you say, or see what you do, or follow you, or anything at all, you just apply the rifle butt and it conveniently checks them out for exactly the amount of time you need your privacy, and never with any nasty consequences later. Not even headaches. Makes me wonder why, in all those old movies, the woman would say to the man, when she’s changing out of wet clothes, “You’re going to have to turn around.” How much easier, and more consistently reliable–pretty well foolproof, it would seem–to just apply a little rifle butt, and go on with what you need to do. I’ll definitely keep this in mind for practical applications in the day to day world.
This is precisely why I loathe that show to the depths of my soul. Every.Single.Time I even so much as glance at that shite, it’s just people being mean to each other, like some stupid soap opera. I think Lost is too much like Survivor…all backbiting, all the time.
Uh . . .
OK.
So . . . Season Four . . . what the screaming bloody jesus is going on? Each episode confirms my initial theory that this is a huge prank pulled on the audience: random nonsequiturs; the first truly Futurist TV series. Which, OK, awesome. But there’s still two more years to go on this, from where I’m at now. I expect to be highly impressed by how they manage to keep it afloat.
Oh, they do. And there’s more mindfucks in store. And still, somehow, you’ll have no idea where they’re steering this thing.
How far into S4 are you?
Ben just conjured up the genii-tornado monster, like the Mayor in Buffy Season 3 with his demon, to lay waste to the mercenaries sent to attack his little ticytacky housing tract in the suburbs of hell. Intercut with some Indiana Jones Iraqi Bazaar chases and Michael undercover on the boat.
Seems to me that one of the strongest, most frequently touched on themes for the entire series is parenthood; parent-child relationships. There really hasn’t been a tangent so far that doesn’t tangle itself up somehow in this or that character’s parental–or filial–drama. Relevant? Or just random freudian jetsam on the writers’ parts? (Don’t answer if you can’t without spoilage.)
“Destiny is a fickle bitch.”
All the best cowboys have daddy issues.
“Jesus is not a weapon. Enjoy your party.”
Season 5 seems pretty shark jumpy so far.
Up to 5.5. They seem, well, lost. There’s no real storyline yet; it’s like they’re trying to stretch out returning to the island as long as they can, to milk another season ender out of it or something. And suddenly Jack’s chemistry is all off: this season everyone else is in a show that has stopped taking itself seriously; it reads more like Buffy or Angel; slyly conscious of its excesses and cliches. Everyone milks that standard soap trope; the stricken or puzzled look, held unnaturally long, to allow the scene to fade out. But Matthew Fox is still playing it with that trembly seriousness that seems out of place with everyone else’s deliberate histrionics. Or maybe after four seasons of him being the Scully, it’s hard to buy that he’s suddenly bought entirely into the whole Twilight Zone thing, even moreso than the others.
And I’m really getting tired of the whole, “There’s no time to explain! You’re just going to have to trust me!” as a device to keep the audience in the dark. Becomes less and less believable with every iteration.
I mean, you either buy into the reasons given why characters can’t explain this or that (and, to be fair, they do at least give some reasons/motivations for characters not to talk or ask certain things) or you don’t. If you can’t, well, unfortunately it’s that kind of show. They basically give you enough to suspend your disbelief if you want to, and then it’s mostly up to how engaged you are with the characters to decide if you want to. It definitely isn’t seamless.
But I mean, does your impression of Season 4 at least resolve some of the “random non-sequitur” problem? It all sort of does come together in the end, no: all the strange threads and flashes this way and that? I’ll definitely concede that a good deal of the off-Island stuff at the start of Season 5 sort of feels like stalling though, I remember feeling the same way. Anything that resolves around Jack/Kate or Sun trying to be badass tends to drag on this show, not least of all because Jack and Kate were sort of made into morose characters in a way that was hard to maintain without the audience tiring of them.
Lissener - what do you think of Desmond and Penny? you haven’t mentioned them.
Yeah, the character leaps in Season 5 don’t sell; I can’t see the character that took four seasons to build as Jack getting that thoroughly defeated, and then boom back to normal just by shaving his beard? And Sun no longer seems like anyone I know either.
Desmond and Penny’s storyline seems way to tacked on to be so central, you know?
It’s interesting how much more compelling Locke’s character gets, the weirder the show turns. He’s far more appealing as a character when he’s in a state of doubt and bewilderment than when he’s a tower of certainty. Early on, his demeanor of smug self-righteousness was a huge turn-off for me. I just wanted to reach through the screen and slap that smarmy, knowing grin off his face. But as his place in the scheme of things becomes more and more uncertain, and his sense of himself more and more in doubt–and that obnoxious smile has been slowly replaced by an expression of questioning wonder–he’s become a character of depth and complexity. The more supernatural his storyline waxes, in other words, the more human he’s become as a character. Bonus: he and Ben have an odd chemistry onscreen where there’s as much wordless communication between them, which is nonetheless clear to us as we observe their interaction, as their spoken interchanges.
Yeah - although I’ve never been a Locke fan (for exactly the reasons you mentioned), he and Ben are easily the best actors on the show.