Isle of Lost

The Lost season finale airs tomorrow night, leaving us bereft of new episodes for
eight months.



I like Nikki Stafford’s idea of watching the whole series to date again before the final season begins in early 2010 and discussing it episode by episode over at Nik at Nite. We’ll even have the 5th-season edition of Finding ‘Lost’, now available to pre-order, in hand by the time we revisit this past year. But I’m reminded of an exchange between young Daniel Faraday and his mother, Eloise, in a recent episode: When Daniel is told that there’s no time for such pursuits as the piano, he says that he’ll “make time” — a sentiment to which Eloise knowingly replies, “If only you could.” I recall my dad more than once musing that there should be an extra day of the week that by Constitutional (or perhaps cosmic) decree would be devoted to all those hobbies and projects that never seem to get the attention they deserve. Sign me up!

Meanwhile, if you have time before the Lost finale or are missing it the day after, here are some fun links.

With the strange and rather disappointing behavior of Richard Alpert in last week’s Lost, I decided to revisit a Nik at Nite thread from a few months back for a pick-me-up. It was devoted to haiku on Alpert — and the charismatic actor who plays him, Nestor Carbonell, late of many shows including the live-action Tick series (as Batmañuel), and frequently (but apparently falsely) accused of using mascara or eyeliner.

Haiku is a form of Japanese poetry more contagious than the swine flu. There are further nuances and themes in its original practice, but in English it’s basically three lines of five syllables, seven syllables, and five syllables, as lovely, pithy, or tongue-in-cheek profound as you can make them, depending on the mood and purpose.

Example for you:
That line was five, this seven.
And this one is five.

You can keep each line a phrase or sentence unto itself, or wrap ’em around from
one line to the next. The first haiku below is from frequent Nik at Nite poster Batcabbage, the next two are mine; no offense to the other contributions, but I didn’t ask for permission to reprint anything here and don’t think Batcabbage will mind.

Can’t kill your father?
Here’s a file. Let James do it.
Manipulation.

older than you think
I always look the same (well
grew my hair out once)

Where did I come from?
If you really must know, I’m
The Fifth Cylon. Psyche!

I checked out ABC’s own ‘Lost’ Untangled once and found it a ridiculous waste of
time; just tried to try it again, but the viewer froze up, so we’ll stick with that assessment. However, Nik at Nite turned me on to a far more amusing, unofficial action-figure series created by Benny & Rafi Fine. Other “franchise” characters appear either randomly (The Joker) or... not so (Claire from Heroes is used because they have no figure of Claire from Lost). While I haven’t seen them all yet, and there may be a level of internal continuity, you can start wherever you like; I watched the latest three, which involve Star Trek, the Yankees, and Batman, in reverse order of production and it hardly mattered. I should warn you that few of the voices remotely match the characters, which is frustrating, although it makes the dead-on Hurley
that much funnier. [all bad links now]

Jorge Garcia, who actually plays Hurley on Lost, has a blog called Dispatches
from the Island that’s always worth a look. He’s given us behind-the-scenes glimpses at such things as the cake made to celebrate the show’s 100th episode, seen atop this post, crafted with insane detail by the people at the Food Network series Ace of Cakes, and Hurley’s Dharma jumpsuit. I’ve not visited often enough but the posts are usually so short and sweet there’s almost no excuse. One post in its entirety: “Here’s a picture from a talk show I did in Munich.” Photo. “[The] main difference between German talk shows and Spanish ones? No ant puppets.” It’s a quintessential, highly clickable old-school weblog.

We’ll close on a gag my pal, commenter, and sometime writing/researching partner Arben put together. Radzinsky was until recently just a name heard in a flashback of Desmond’s — somebody assigned or confined to the Swan station, known colloquially as the Hatch, who eventually went out of his mind. Now that half of our cast has time-traveled back to 1970s, we’ve met him in the flesh, prompting Arben to mock up the title card for a Lost spinoff set during the era of Starsky & Hutch, when the guy was banished to button-pushing detail, obviously called…



[Update: Arben prevailed upon me to rework the gag in the style of an old tee-shirt decal and remove the earlier version.]


Related: Quick Hits • Got to Get You into My Life • Links to Love