[QUOTE=friedo]
I have two favorite lines from this series:
Thug: What does the gun do?
Miller: It shoots bullets. Real fast.
Order Guy: Everybody look out! He’s got the comb!
[/QUOTE]
I actually laughed at both those lines. I wondered if anyone else caught the gun line besides me. 
[QUOTE=Onomatopoeia]
I wonder if there’s a listing of all 100 or so Objects and their known effects.
[/quote]
Amazingly, Wikipedia has an obsessive listing.
Actually I much prefer the seeming randomness of it.
[QUOTE=Otto]
Amazingly, Wikipedia has an obsessive listing.
[/QUOTE]
Interesting. Well that leaves about 30 unknown Objects and about 75 unknown individual effects (if we include the Objects we don’t currently know).
My son and I watched the whole Lost Room miniseries. We really enjoyed it. I know it’s popular to diss the SciFi Channel, and what with Jonathan Edwards and wrasslin’ I can’t blame you if you want to, but between “Lost Room” “Eureka” and “Battlestar Galactica” the SciFi Channel has REALLY got it going on all of a sudden. It’s as if they sacked all the idiots and replaced them with smart people.
“Lost Room” reminded me of Tim Powers’ approach to fantasy – take a mythic element of the past and completely reinterpret it so it’s fresh and new. In the Lost Room we have the usual collection of objects with magical powers whose mysterious origin is of great importance to the protagonists. There’s even supposedly an object that controls all the others. (“One ring to bind them all” anyone?)
But instead of dressing up the story in tired old medieval threads, they reinvented it, using commonplace objects with weird abilities not usually found in stories about magic lanterns and such. Such as, scrambling eggs and sublimating brass.
Furthermore, instead of using the tired cliche of magic spells to create the objects, they went with modern physics. I could see the whole thing as a temporal accident of sorts, ripping holes in the space-time continuum.
Of course, they never really explained what happened, did they?
It’s so rare to see a TV miniseries or series or a movie make intelligent use of the kind of thinking that goes on in the best written F & SF that I’m just boggled. Where did all this goodness come from?
Tell you the truth, the Lost Room reminded me strongly of Powers’ Anubis Gates, where an ancient spell rips holes in the time continuum right up to the present day and beyond, and all sorts of groups are doing all sort of things about it. It’s nothing LIKE The Anubis Gates, which is set mostly in historical London, so I’m not saying any stealing is going on, just that there’s a certain similarity there.
There were a few disappointments, of course. When the detective tells the guy who’s been tracking the objecs for years via computer to do a cerain thing, it’s such an OBVIOUS thing, the sort of thing anyone who’s been tracking the objects for years has probably done on a daily or at least weekly basis. Coulda set that up better, somehow.
But overall … wow. That’s good SF. Maybe whatever it is that has made written SF and F so much better than anything else for decades is finally trickling over into visual SF and F.
The questions are:
When or how will he become “The Object”? If he destroys another object, will the replacement object be something he personally owns or something simply in his possession. I presume everything in the hotel room is an object so something on the outside has to become a replacement object. Does he have to have possession of it on his self or/and be or have the object in the room? So some where out there is an “jockey shorts” object and “sox” objects? Does his spit and other bodily fluids become objects? Ball of lint in bellybutton?
[QUOTE=ouryL]
The questions are:
When or how will he become “The Object”? If he destroys another object, will the replacement object be something he personally owns or something simply in his possession. I presume everything in the hotel room is an object so something on the outside has to become a replacement object. Does he have to have possession of it on his self or/and be or have the object in the room? So some where out there is an “jockey shorts” object and “sox” objects? Does his spit and other bodily fluids become objects? Ball of lint in bellybutton?
[/QUOTE]
(I see no need to talk in Spoiler boxes since the series is over by now.)
Joe became an Object as soon as he killed the original Occupant. That’s how he was able to remain in the Room during the reset and fetch Anna Banana. Now he must suffer the terrible burden of sentient Objecthood.
[QUOTE=friedo]
(I see no need to talk in Spoiler boxes since the series is over by now.)
Joe became an Object as soon as he killed the original Occupant. That’s how he was able to remain in the Room during the reset and fetch Anna Banana. Now he must suffer the terrible burden of sentient Objecthood.
[/QUOTE]
Yes, but how soon before people forget him? Does his clothes now become objects?
[QUOTE=ouryL]
Yes, but how soon before people forget him? Does his clothes now become objects?
[/QUOTE]
The Legion chica and his daughter each remembered him which indicates that he wasn’t ripped out of time the way that the Occupant was, hence he wouldn’t be forgotten. His clothes don’t become Objects, unless of course an original clothing Object is destroyed in the Room and his own clothing item gets transformed to replace it.
Just some speculatin’.
As to the origin of the room and it’s objects, I think it’s ostensibly been ripped out of time. Probably from a parallel universe. In “our” universe, the motel that stands now has (and always has had) only 9 rooms. In this other universe, it had 10. The event that happened on May 4th, 1961 somehow sent all the objects into “our” universe (the one with only 9 rooms), with the 10th room now transcending time and space. The original Prime Object (the man) was now sent to our universe, where he apparently never existed, so when he went looking for his wife, who did exist in both versions of the universe, she of course didn’t know who he was. It’s also apparent that the objects cannot be destroyed and can’t age outside the room (since the man was still young). So does this mean Joe will not age from now on?
Now what was the event? I find it odd the motel is in New Mexico. I can’t remember any of the city names, but did it happen to be anywhere close to the White Sands Proving Grounds? Maybe something noo-que-ler happened.
As a side note, Dakota Fanning 2.0 has Spongemonkey teeth.
Fanning 2.0, as I suspected, is Dakota’s sister.
Elle Fanning (Anna):
Dakota Fanning
Confirmation: Location of birth, as well as last name.
I saw “Anna” and like all of us, I was like “What? They couldnt get Dakota?”
[QUOTE=cmyk]
Just some speculatin’.
Now what was the event? I find it odd the motel is in New Mexico. I can’t remember any of the city names, but did it happen to be anywhere close to the White Sands Proving Grounds? Maybe something noo-que-ler happened.
[/QUOTE]
The motel is somewhere near Gallup, if I understand correctly. That’s where the bus ticket drops you, and didn’t they walk to the motel from there? White Sands is two or three hundred miles away.