Vincent: the best thing about Lost

So my next post is pretty critical of Lost and how it treats Eloise. And I’ve written a lot recently about ways in which Lost sucks and does a disservice to its characters.

And it does. But there’s one character that I think they handled beautifully from start to finish in Lost. And not coincidentally, it’s the character that I have never heard a complaint about from the fanbase.


That’s right. Vincent.

It’s hard to go wrong with a dog this sweet. But Darlton did more than just give us a cute puppy to coo over. They used Vincent as a character and as a plot device pitch-perfectly throughout the entire run of the show.

Vincent the character was someone we, the fans, deeply cared about throughout the show. We cared about his relationship with Walt – Cara cited Walt’s farewell to him in the season one finale as one of the most moving moments of the show. He helped Shannon before she was killed (for loving Sayid). I cared about what happened to them as the human characters skipped through time and space. He made episodes that featured him better because I was always happy to see Vincent when he showed up. One common refrain I heard throughout the often discouraging sixth season was “More Vincent!” And as the show waned, it turned into a beg – a wish for a bright spot in the disappointing winding down of the show.

Vincent was also used brilliantly as a literary device. He was used to lead people into the Jungle of Mystery for believable reasons. Because, everybody loved him, who wouldn’t save Vincent? He was an emotional or comic relief for many scenes, a way to easily but effectively punctuate scenes without overdoing it.

And Vincent’s placement in the opening and closing shots of the show was just unbelieveably beautiful and perfect, and multifaceted. First off, dogs are cute and make everything +1. Furthermore, at the beginning of the show, it created just the right amount of mystery and suspense. At the end of the show, Vincent, the developed character we cared about, gave the show its last strong punch of emotional resonance. Furthermore, it reflected the parallelism of the beginning and ending shots of the show.

The sixth season made a lot of mistakes, but its closing on-island shot was an excellent choice that emotionally redeemed many of my qualms as I watched the show end in tears. And Vincent was the reason that shot, and to some extension the show, worked as well as it did.

Quit whining, Netflix.

Oh, whatever, Netflix. Your whining has grow tiring and predictable:

The Internet is perfectly fine. The internet is fantastic. I have like two dozen tabs with like gif files open and the internet is fast as shit:


The Internet, basically, is much more competent than your inconsistent ass, Netflix, so enough with the fucking theatrics.

(I'm sorry, Netflix, please come back. I love you and your affordability and huge library. I didn't mean it, I was just having a moment, you know how I get when I don't have my X Files or King of the Hill. You're such a good video delivery service, I've never had a video delivery service like you. You let me write about all my favorite stupid shows. When I make it to the big time, I'm going to take you shopping and buy you lots of stuff.)

In defense of kittens.

Above you will see me and my dear friend Erika holding kittens. You may wonder, where did we get the courage? We are not, as you may expect, exceptionally brave women. No. It is just that these tiny cats are just too cute.

I came to cuddle them after my boyfriend found some abandoned six-week-old kittens last week. Having been fed years of fear-mongering media stories of kittens - you know, how they eat faces, poop on televisions, and generally ruin lives - I was understandably against the idea of bringing kittens into our well-ordered, immacuately appointed home.

But my partner was moved by their notoriously seductive mews, so often compared to the sirens of Homer. And against my will, we moved them into our basement.

Here comes the twist in my story, reader. Because I was also taken in by these creatures. Kittens are, in fact, totally cute.

I know, I know, this is a rather startling argument. Subversive. Radical, even. But trust me. I have evidence.
If you will look at the the kittens in the above photo, you will see that they fit in a man's hand. This is an illustration of how small these kittens are (contrary to prevalent stereotypes about their terrifying hugeness). Small beings are often read as cute. These are very small, and thus cute, mammals.



Above, you can see that these beings have a lot of hair. Though most believe that kittens have leatherlike skin, in fact these baby cats have plenty of fuzzy fur that is soft and nice for nuzzling. Though the word nuzzling may have been sullied from misuse in those anti-kitten stories above, it is actually quite a pleasant sensation.

Their beguiling mews are not a form of deception, but are instead an indication of their very factual adorability.

I know I'm taking a risk here. I know this is going to create quite the controversy. But I will say it here, to all those nay-sayers on this hot-button issue: kittens are adorable. Deal with it.

The End of Lost, and why the sixth season missed the sci-fi mark

I am a rather contrary person, but I am also quite the conformist on occasion, which is why I write groundbreaking, earthshaking posts that generally go something like “HEY YALL DID YOU KNOW THAT CONTRARY TO POPULAR OPINION, CHEESECAKE IS DELICIOUS?” or maybe “HEY YALL I DON’T LIKE CLEANING AND HOUSEHOLD CHORES, I KNOW WEIRD RIGHT?”

So I’m not exactly sure how to react to the Lost finale after watching it yesterday morning.

I liked it. I did. But tentatively, problematically.

I reacted well to it, like I reacted well to Across the Sea. There were plenty of problems, but like that episode, I felt like it gave me a better idea of the nature of the show and its ideas and what it’s trying to get across.

I liked it much better than Across the Sea in many ways. While Across the Sea was a bit of a rush job as far as “developing the island as a character”, this was a coda for characters who were already extremely well-developed.

That’s what The End really did well. It banked on the viewer’s strong emotional ties to these characters: it made us remember how wonderful Jin and Sun and Rose and Bernard and even Jack and Kate are, made us remember that a big part of the reason we’d cared about this show for so long was the characters: well-developed, well-articulated, three-dimensional. The acting was also exceptional: I’m not usually a huge fan of Evangeline Lilly’s acting skills, but even she gave her character’s end gravity and meaning. In a show that consistently punished, tortured, killed its characters with rewards few and far between, it gave us something unexpected in its conclusion: their happiness in their death, their redemption through their trials. It showed us what they died for in a way the penultimate episode could not. Seeing these characters find understanding and happiness was incredibly powerful after six years, and it made the conclusion much more pleasant and satisfying. I cried several times, but not bitterly or out of sadness.

--

I have no problem with big, epic, science fiction shows ending up being about religion, like BSG and now Lost. Science, to me, is about religion. Maybe it’s because I’ve never been that good at understanding either. But life, growing, changing, nature, are wonders to me. Creation and science are fact, but the facts are constantly shifting, truth is constantly changing with our knowledge. The universe is not something we can intimately understand.

Thus, I did not mind the focus on faith and religion in this episode or these season. Faith has always been a strong current in the show. It’s mixed with science to create grand mystery and suspense, and when the plotting and pacing are good (as they were in this final episode, it can be magnificent).

But science was mostly abandoned this season, in favor of magic and religion. And that’s not living up to the show – it’s lazy fucking writing.

I had reserved judgment on the “magic everywhere in this bitch” aspect of the season. And now, I feel cheated.

Magic, as I hope I illustrated above, is not mutually exclusive with science. The light, the energy, the magic, the heart, works to a certain degree as a motif - flashes of light are a frequent punctuation on the show, and energy is a basic concept in science. But the show does not develop the energy/light/force as the scientific property behind many plot points on the show. Instead, it chooses to focus on developing a side world that ultimately does not exist. That’s wasteful writing, and it’s unnecessary.

A more productive tack to take, in my opinion, would have been to start developing the island as a character early on in the season, placing Ab Aeterno and Across The Sea early on in the season. Some of the weaker episodes (in particular Sayid’s, the Kwon’s, Kate’s, and Sawyer’s) should have instead been devoted to seeing more of the history of the island and developing how the energy affects the inhabitants, and defining the parameters of the protector’s guidance of the island. In this way, the show could have answered a lot of central questions: questions they built up and promptly abandoned. If you’re reading it, you know what they are. For me, I think that it would be easy to explain:


-the island’s past, particularly with regard to all of the Roman and Egyptian imagery and mythology

-conception and pregnancy [Particularly here – I would have loved to see more Alison Janney in different situations because I love her]

-fucking magnets, how do they work

-time and how it shifts

-the smoke and the nature of MiB

The problem with the construction of this season is that they did not trust the viewer enough. I do not dislike the idea of the sideways as purgatory. But they worked too hard to build it up when they really didn't need to in order to give these characters resolution. But I do dislike that they created a demand and an anticipation for specific aspects of the show, and actively chose to avoid answering those questions.

Further reading:
Jezebel
TLo
this ain't livin

Dirty laundry: I also hate it

Last week, I wrote at some length about how much I hate doing the (fucking) dishes. I still hate them. But I forgot to write about another thing I hate.

Laundry.

I hate laundry. I hate everything connected to laundry, except of course for the wearing of clean clothes.

When I was a child, I perpetually refused to throw my clothes in the goddamn hamper. Nothing has changed in nearly two decades. There are clothes all over my floor, on my bed, even on the back of my couch. I suck at putting away my fucking clothes.

What's worse is that my boyfriend is perfect about this. He comes home from working outdoors and immediately puts them in the wash, then in the dryer immediately after that. So that mess up there? All me.

Gardening porn.

Earlier today, you probably saw a weird plant next to a picture illustrating my rant about laundry. That's my beloved rosemary plant.

For my birthday this year, I asked for some basil and some rosemary from my boyfriend. He obliged, and my basil has been hitting it out of the park:


But my rosemary wasn't flourishing at quite the same rate. So I transplanted it, twice, and bought a little sister for her, and mixed in some sandy soil. It's doing pretty well. But I want a bush, so I don't have to worry about how much I can and cannot take to season my salmon.

In other news, my "Big Bertha" bell peppers are failing:



I transplanted a couple of plants out, but for some reason the ones didn't get transplanted are dying.

Wahhhhh, I was looking forward to them. Luckily, my yellow bell peppers are kicking ass:


I have to transplant them, too. Hope they don't die!

Oh, my cucumbers, by the way, are kicking ass and blooming all of a sudden:

Coffee: today it fails me.

Coffee has many varied purposes, including tasting delicious and making chocolate taste especially delicious. But for me, its central purpose is to wake my tired ass up in the morning.

Today, that is not happening. I have been awake and drinking coffee for three full hours. I have had an egg and the last piece of cheesecake in addition to several cups of coffee. I have been working and watching TV, as is my routine. I've walked around, done some gardening.

But I am still fully prepared to wake up in three hours with no memory of what's happened and qwerty on my face.

Coffee, what is your DEAL today?