Spoiler Alert

I think this episode was worth the wait– it gave us possibly the most important reveal of the season so far: an exact date in a flash-forward!!! The flash-forwards have driven me crazy all season because the writers have been careful not to let us know when they happen or in what order. As I’ve speculated previously, the first one (with Jack at the end of last season) is probably one of the last to actually happen chronologically and I figured Sayid’s, where it’s revealed that he is an assassin working for Ben, was probably one of the first. Ben’s flash-forwards confirm this as we’re finally told he meets Sayid in October of 2005. If you’ve been paying close attention, you’ll know that the events happening on the island in the present are December 2004 or the first week of January in 2005 (it was almost Christmas according to a calendar on the boat in “The Constant” four episodes ago). Which means Ben finds Sayid in Iraq about ten months after the current events.

I was thrown way off base by Kate’s flash-forward earlier in the season, which depicted what looked like a two-year old Aaron who she was raising as her own. There’s no way to know yet if those events happen before or after this week’s flash-forward but I always assumed it couldn’t be too long after the Oceanic Six got off the island because she was going to trial. But considering the legal system and how long things can get strung out, maybe ten months or more isn’t too far fetched. And maybe I was wrong about Aaron– maybe he was only supposed to be about one year old and I was off on the age.

This is important because I was right the first time. At the beginning of the season, I predicted that this season would depict the events leading up to the Oceanic Six getting off the island and that by the end of the season, the present would catch up with the future. But after the confusion with Aaron, I decided I was wrong and expected it to take the rest of the series for that to happen. If Sayid had time to find Nadia, marry her, and then have to bury her all within ten months, we have to assume that the Six will be getting off the island very, very soon. There’s only five episodes left in the season and taking a look at an episode guide, I discovered that the last three of the season are called “There’s No Place Like Home” Parts 1, 2, and 3. Will those episodes get the Six off and then fill in all the blanks about the flash-forwards? Or will they get the Six off and take their time off-island, leading up to the flash-forwards? And then next season, how much time will the show focus off-island in the present? Finally, is that title a double-meaning? I expect Jack and Hurley will try to convince the others that they need to get back to the island after all of their talk in the flash-forwards about how they “weren’t supposed to leave.” I wonder if the show will take its time in doing this or if that ultimately is how that three-parter will go, getting the Six off and then some of them back on the island all this season.

Personally, I think a whole season about characters simultaneously on and off island would be a really fun change. It might be interesting to see that for a while to take the place of flashbacks and flash-forwards– everything in the present but in a lot of different places. Or maybe that’s a little too Heroes…

I would assume that Ben’s threat to kill Whitmore’s daughter Penny is supposed to tell us that she’s the one that was next on Ben’s list at the end of “The Economist.” I didn’t call this– I really expected it to be one of the Six. Still, I’m glad it’s someone we know and have had some reason to care about. I’m still wondering what happens to Desmond– he’s not one of the Six but he’s on the boat. Does he killed before the others get off the island? I thought perhaps he does get off and he just isn’t considered one of the Oceanic Six because he wasn’t on the plane, but that theory is killed by the fact that Aaron is one of the Six but he wasn’t technically an Oceanic passenger. And yes, I realize Ben gets off the island, but it’s obviously not publicized.

And I’m going to have a heart attack if we don’t figure out who was in the casket Jack went to see at the end of last season pretty soon. I would have expected more clues by this episode.

Anyone else think Ben was lying about getting off the island with Desmond’s boat? It’s pretty well established that if you try to get off with a boat you’ll just go in circles (i.e. Michael’s raft in first season). I think Ben has had a way off this entire time– maybe another submarine no one knows about or something (just what exactly is in his secret room?) But as quick as he was to let himself get captured by Jack at the end of last season, and to be held captive by Locke lately, it’s obvious he has a lot up his sleeve and I can’t imagine that sub was his only means of escape.

Ben can control the smoke monster. Or at least summon it. I’m glad to know that because it means he hasn’t been blowing smoke (no pun intended) every time he’s claimed he has all the answers Locke has been searching for. He really does have some understanding of all these mysteries, though I think even he isn’t completely informed. Now I want to go back and see if there’s any clues in previous episodes that Ben may have been responsible whenever the smoke monster attacked people.

LLAP

-Cap’n Logan

Until the early 90s, prime-time dramas, much like sitcoms and other kinds of series, were mostly episodic, meaning the show had a basic premise that was all you really needed to understand in order to tune in. You could watch any episode in any order without needing to see everything that came before it. Sometimes there was a slight progression or one episode that would call back to another, but if you missed an episode here or there, you didn’t have to worry that you couldn’t follow the next one. Every week was a new, stand-alone story with the same characters, similar to Sherlock Holmes stories. These shows tended to be somewhat formulaic in order to come up with enough material to do several seasons, often over 100 separate stories. Good examples of this are Star Trek: The Next Generation and the early seasons of The X-Files.

Series like Star Trek: Deep Space Nine or Babylon Five were seen as experimental but drew in large audiences because they took longer to tell big stories. Their characters went through deliberate changes, evolving with their grandiose plot arcs. Instead of occasional two-parters, every story would be bigger than one episode, sometimes lasting entire seasons or longer. The drawback to these sorts of shows is that they’re a long-term commitment– if you don’t watch the whole season, if you miss even one episode, you could be missing an important piece of the puzzle and be totally lost until you catch the rerun or wait for the dvds.

These continuous shows are becoming more and more common. Sci-fi fans are especially beginning to expect it. The most successful shows are of this type, shows like Heroes, Lost, and 24. The days of the formulaic and episodic sci-fi show, ala Quantum Leap, seem to be mostly behind us. Why is that? I hear a lot of talk in director commentaries and interviews about this being a positive step forward, that we’ve moved to this kind of storytelling because it creates deeper, changing characters and more complex stories can be told. That’s certainly one of the pluses to the continuous format, but I wonder if that isn’t more of an effect than a cause.

This trend is best illustrated by Smallville. The first season was mostly episodic– you really didn’t have to see the episodes in order (except maybe the pilot) to understand another, even though minor details would come back here and there, and there was a slight build up to the season finale. Slowly but surely the show moved in more of a continuous direction and now it follows the Lost and Heroes thread– you need to see pretty much every episode of a season to follow it. In fact, one of its biggest problems these days is that it still does lame, contrived one-shot episodes in the middle of season arcs that bog down the story. So why didn’t it just stay with the episodic format? I think it’s because writers keep covering the same territory. There are only so many one-shot sci-fi plots you can do in a show. A lot of completely unrelated shows have reused a lot of the same premises. For example, how many times have you seen the fight club scenario? A main character gets kidnapped and forced to fight to the death, and the supporting characters have to rescue him/her. I’ve seen it in Star Trek: Voyager, Angel and Smallville (just last year!). And get this: Birds of Prey was an episodic show that only got 13 episodes, and ONE of them was a fight club episode!

Voyager, “Tsunkatse”

Smallville, “Combat”

My point is, these huge stories that go through an entire season or even a whole series, in the case of Lost, is thriving, I think, because there seems to still be some unexplored territory there. Granted, it’s been THE popular format for close to a decade now (after shows like Deep Space Nine were no longer simply experimental) and so a lot of that ground has been covered. What’s nice about them is that very long stories can look more original, even if they aren’t really in essence, because so much more can happen within them. If the fight club scenario was a six-episode arc, it’s possible something more than the same old formula could be done with it. Heroes has been criticized as being just a live-action X-Men, and yet it’s extremely popular. Is that because the stories are so complex and the characters are given time to mature and grow, so we really don’t mind that the initial premise is something we’ve seen before?

But I sometimes wonder if expecting your viewer to watch every single episode of a show is still too much to ask. A lot of networks have begun putting full episodes on their websites in case you miss something, which makes it a lot easier to catch up if you miss something. But I find it a lot harder to follow a lot of shows at once this way, not only because I have to see every episode, but because there’s a lot to keep track of. With 24, you have to remember everything that’s happened in a day and you have to readjust from it’s hour-to-hour format after watching anything else (which is pretty jarring until you get used to it). With Heroes, I have to keep up with a lot of characters and how they’re all connected, and ditto with Lost, except there I have to remember pretty much everything that ever happened because it all ends being important to understand anything that’s happening!!!

I realize the episodic format isn’t dead. A lot of cop shows still keep this and I think CSI is too, though I’ve never watched it. Chuck is an interesting hybrid of both, with contained stories but a lot of through-lines that only matter if you care to keep up.

So what do you think? Do you prefer the current trend of continuous shows or do wish you could just tune in whenever you wanted and didn’t have to make a TV show a six, seven, or even a ten year commitment? I’d love comments on this.

LLAP

-Cap’n Logan