The Empire Strikes Back is the best Star Wars movie for a pretty obvious reason: as the second act of the story, the bad guys are winning. As Dante learned writing the Divine Comedy, it is always more fun to hang out with bad guys than good guys. This far into season 6 of Lost we are clearly in the second act of the final season, and, right on schedule, the bad guys are in glorious form. I can only assume that while I am writing this a series of Youtube clips are being thrown together, scoring the final moment of “Sundown” — The Man in Black’s bad-ass slow-motion walk away from the temple with his crew — to any number of songs, including “Damn …

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John Locke episodes are always the best ones, and this was no exception. This was the episode where I really started to feel like Lost is serious about answering some questions, and this episode featured all the human emotional anchoring I was looking for in LAX. (To be fair, it may have been in LAX, I just did not appreciate it because of the 8 months I had to wait to watch it). And our final story arc was advanced and clarified. I may be overstating it because it JUST ended, but I feel like this may be one of my favorite Lost episodes ever. Not top 5 but top 10.

For one thing we had lots of time on Lost stuff I like all …

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Total Spoilers.

Kill Bill, my favorite movie of all time, does a bit of a trick between its two parts. Volume 1 is a kick-ass action spectacle. Volume 2 is suddenly all character driven, and features one nearly bloodless kill where volume 1 featured dozens of exploding corpses. Going from volume 1 to 2 is a test — are you in this merely for the violence? or are you in this for the storytelling?

Over the years, Lost has put us through a similar kind of test. The show was originally designed to be just a realistic island survival story with no science fiction/fantasy elements. Season one reflects that — it is mostly realistic. Stories about hunting boar and whatnot. The sci-fi/fantasy button …

» Continue Reading “Lost Season 6, episode 1: LA X”

The last season of Lost premieres tonight, and it’s shaping up to be the first really BIG, really ANTICIPATED television event of the year. If you plan to tune in and then obsessively talk about not much else the following day, we have the recaps for you!

We’re pleased to introduce Geoff Klock as our official Lost re-capper during the sixth and final season. (You can also find him at his blog, and here are his past Smart Pop essays.)

Tune in every Wednesday for his recaps and enjoy the big premiere tonight!…

» Continue Reading “Last season of Lost: Get your recaps here!”