PCP on TV - Lost Season 2 better late than never!

Welcome back to Pop Culture Panorama.  Today I’ll be talking about the TV show Lost.  I never watched Lost when it was first on the air, and by the time I wanted to watch the show, all I heard about it was that it was confusing and if you were jumping in to it late, you would be totally… well, lost.  I knew this would be a show I’d like, because I love the work of J.J. Abrams, especially Fringe, and I love sci-fi in general.  So this summer I resolved to watch the entire run of the show on DVD.  I just completed power-discing through the second season now, and these are my thoughts and observations about this show. (WARNING:  mild spoilers ahead if you’re like me and never saw the show before).

• I’m glad that I’m watching this on DVD, had I watched this one week at a time when it was live would have driven me nuts.  The 1^st episode of the season ends in a standoff that isn’t resolved until the 3^rd episode, and a shooting in the 6^th episode isn’t resolved until the 8^th.  Thank goodness I didn’t have to wait a week to find out what happened.  It seems every episode of this show ends on some sort of cliffhanger.
• The Dharma Initiative was founded by my fellow U of M alums.  Go Blue!
• I love how they link up characters – the guy that Jack allowed to die back when he was a doctor, having to choose between the two patients from the car crash, was Shannon’s dad and Boone’s step-dad.  Also, the character introduced in another of Jack’s flashbacks, Desmond, wound up being on the island as well.  He fled when the computer was shot in the hatch, but obviously nothing bad happened so I’d been kinda surprised so far that he didn’t come back for awhile.  They explain that when he does come back though, he’d been trying to flee the island.  And then in the season finale, we learn that Desmond had met Libby before their time on the island also.
• And then in Sayid’s flashback to his time in Iraq during the 1^st gulf war, he encountered Kate’s dad, as well as Kelvin, who was Desmond’s predecessor with pushing the button in the hatch.  And in Ana Lucia’s flashback to when she was working for Jack’s dad, they encounter Sawyer.

Read the rest of my musings after the jump

• I’m starting to get the feeling that with all of these links for characters before they ever stepped foot on the island that they were all brought to the island for a reason, and it’s not as random as it appears to be.
• When I found out Rose’s husband was white, not African-American, I thought to myself, wow an interracial relationship, didn’t see that coming.  In episode 9, Hurley voices the exact same thought aloud.  I wonder how many other people were surprised by that one.  At their characters’ ages, interracial relationships are far less common than at younger ages.  I also liked the backstory of how Rose & Bernard met, as revealed later in the season.
• The reunions when the two groups merge are touching, especially Rose & Bernard’s reunion, and Sun & Jin’s. 
• In the episode where we learned what Kate did – we see for a split second a television in her father’s Army recruiting office, and Sayid is on TV getting arrested (I guess for that infiltration job he was doing in season 1?) but it is only for a flash.  I almost missed it.  I wonder how many other little things like that I have missed already.
• Apparently Michelle Rodriguez gets typecast as a cop or soldier a bit:  SWAT, Lost, Resident Evil, Avatar, & Battle: Los Angeles.
• I didn’t see it coming that Libby was a patient at the same hospital as Hurley, in his flashback episode.  Was she a doctor that had a mental break or was she faking being a shrink all this time?  Unfortunately they don’t resolve that by the time of her death.  I did call it in that episode that Dave was an imaginary friend though.
• Everybody on this island is keeping secrets from everybody else.  In one episode, Kate finds out about Ben and gets mad at Jack for him not telling her, and in the same episode it is revealed that Kate, Rousseau, and Claire had found another hatch and were keeping that from everyone else.  Also in the same episode, we learn that Rose had been lying to her husband about her cancer not being cured before arriving on the island, and also that Rose knows that Locke had been in a wheelchair before the island.  And then the Pearl Station that Locke and Eko found.  Not to mention everything else that everyone is keeping from everyone else, like the discovery of the bottle so the raft sank, who attacked Sun, the purpose of the Button, and oh so many more.
• So here’s what I want to know:  Is Sun pregnant with Jin’s kid and therefore the island healed him as well allowing her to get pregnant?  Or did she cheat with the guy teaching her English?  They were hinting at that it seems, but haven’t revealed that yet.
• I love how paranoid Sayid is, going and even digging up the body that Henry’s map led them to and searching it for clues.  It seemed Ana Lucia was about to trust Henry, it’s a good thing Sayid is more careful.  Sayid is becoming one of my favorite characters.  I also liked his dry line about the statue foot that they see:  “I don’t know what is more disquieting, the fact that the rest of it is missing, or that it only has four toes.”  I’m actually glad he said that, because I didn’t catch the toes thing.  But yeah, that was a huge foot, so where is the rest of the statue and what is the significance?
• So Jack’s dad had a kid in Australia, I wonder who that is?  Considering we’ve only met 1 Aussie on the island so far, I guess that means Jack and Claire are half-siblings.
• In the finale Jack, Kate, Sawyer, Hurley, and Michael come across the other end of the tube from the Dharma Initiative Pearl Station that Locke and Eko found, it is in the middle of a field in the middle of nowhere.  I wonder if a building used to stand there, or if the Pearl Station was really pointless and their reports were meaningless?
• What the heck were the Dharma Initiative people up to?  Apparently not pressing the button results in a massive electromagnetic discharge, and that very discharge may have brought the plane to the island in the first place?
• Sci-fi actors of the world unite:  The Marshal from Kate’s flashbacks (as well as in the first season but I didn’t include him in the last recap post) was on X-Files, Supernatural, & Firefly.  Kate’s mom in the flashback was Aunt Zelda in Sabrina the Teenage Witch, and she’s also been on Supernatural.  Ana Lucia’s mom was in Total Recall.  In Sayid’s flashback, the CIA guy was Clancy Brown, aka Sgt. Zim from Starship Troopers, but most famously as the villain Kurgan from Highlander.  I had a feeling with that character, since they cast a recognizable actor in the role, that we’d be seeing him again.  Sure enough, he pops up in the season finale as Desmond’s predecessor in the hatch, Kelvin.  In Sawyer’s flashback episode, the dad from the 3 Transformers movies made an appearance as another conman.  Hurley’s doctor from his time in the mental hospital was Bruce Davison, aka Senator Kelly from X-Men 1 and 2, as well as a few other sci-fi roles.  Tom, the member of the Others with the fake beard, has been in Terminator 3, X-Files, & The Adventures of Brisco County Jr.  Penny, Desmond’s love interest from the season finale in flashbacks, would later appear on another time jumping show – Flash Forward.
• This season definitely has a higher body count than the first one (deaths on the island only counted here).  Shannon gets shot to death by Ana Lucia.  Donald dies from his broken leg that turned into an infection, along with 3 other unnamed survivors of the crash that die in their first couple days on the island.  Eko kills 2 of the Others on their first night on the island.  Ana Lucia kills one of the Others on the night that they abducted 9 of their group.  Falsely accused infiltrator Nathan has his neck snapped by Goodwin, the real infiltrator.  Ana Lucia impales Goodwin on a sharp stick as they fight once she confronts him about being the true infiltrator.  Michael kills both Ana Lucia and Libby in order to get his son back.  Kelvin gets killed by Desmond in a fight on the very day the plane would crash onto the island in an on-island flashback.  Sawyer shoots and kills one of the Others.  So, 14 on-island deaths, compared to last season’s measly 7.  Also, the season ends with a cliffhanger– we don’t know what happened to Desmond, Locke, and Eko, they might be dead and they might not.  In addition, 13 of the tail group are abducted by the Others, fate unknown, including the children Emma and Zack, and the flight attendant Cindy.
• Items from my last post on season 1 that are now resolved:  Kate’s original crime that had her on the run (she killed her stepdad); Jack’s marital history (he had been married and divorced); yes we encounter the tail section in season 2, and no, the racist couple from the airport does not show up as a part of the tail section.

Ok that’s all for today, thanks for stopping by!