LOST’s final season finally hits emotional pay-off with episode 7!

SPOILER ALERT!!!

LOST's season 6 promo photo resembling da Vinci's "The Last Supper." The homage was no accident.

LOST’s final season has been slightly disappointing…until last night’s (Tuesday, March 9, 2010 in the United States) Ben-centric episode #7, “Dr. Linus.”  The episode pulses from a lively, yet taught script and an original vision deftly directed by veteran actor/director Mario Van Peebles.

Whoever the genius was that hired Van Peebles – an established independent film director – to direct such a pivotal episode in the LOST mythology, they deserve much credit for helping to create what proved to be a series-defining episode. Van Peebles has made a few cheesy choices as an actor, but the majority of his work as a director is passionate, powerful and under-appreciated (including NEW JACK CITY, PANTHER and his pièce de résistance biopic about his father, BAADASSSSS!

The LOST creative team have produced a unique situation in network television: for the first time, fans are looking forward to the end of a series…as opposed to watching a great series continually get green lit until it becomes  mediocre, running out of new ideas and story themes until finally advertisers drop off and the series is cancelled.

With LOST’s planned series ending, longtime fans anticipate the wrap-up of plot points and conflicts introduced five and six years ago.  The writers continue to innovate, appropriately blowing up your standard serial drama expectations as they developed an entire new time line with season 6, further complicating the master story arch.

Now casual and devoted fans alike, don’t get discouraged.

LOST writers Carlton Cuse and Damon Lindelof have already used the first 7 episodes of sesason 6 to pay off some of the island’s biggest mysteries:

• 1. The numbers – We now know where the origin of the numbers significance. Candidates from a master list of mortal heroes. Mortal warriors for the forces of righteousness, fallen and flawed as all humans.
• 2. The Smoke Monster – …is nature’s dark force. A force that also uses a genetic replica of John Locke’s body to walk the Earth island in human form.
• 3. Jacob – …God? Buddha? Jesus of suburbia? The Holy Ghost? Jacob has clearly come into focus as a force of nature. A force of positivity. A steward of the hero candidates.
• 4. Super Fanboy Easter Eggs – …continue to pay off. Minor characters like Rose, Leslie Artz and many, many others continue to return with crucial plot-forwarding screen time. Likewise, popular deceased characters like Boone Carlyle and Alex Rousseau have returned as part of the “flash sideways” time line. Wikipedia reveals – complete with credible sources – that nearly every major and minor character from the series will return for season 6 including Elizabeth Mitchell as fertility specialist Dr. Juliet Burke, Michelle Rodriguez as police officer Ana Lucia Cortez, Dominic Monaghan as rock star Charlie Pace, Jeremy Davies as deceased physicist Daniel Faraday, Rebecca Mader as anthropologist Charlotte Lewis,  Harold Perrineau as Michael Dawson Maggie Grace as Shannon Rutherford, Katey Sagal as Locke’s ex-girlfriend Helen Norwood and Cynthia Watros as Hurley’s short-lived love interest, Libby Smith.

Considering the season 5 cliffhanger wherin series hero Jack Sheppard (his last name is beginning to have added subtext) puts the gears in motion to blow up an atomic bomb and yield the dual timelines in season 6, Jack has been a reflective, passive protagonist throughout season 6…until episode 7.

Absorbing and internally deliberating the universal forces of darkness and light – forces beyond his control – Jack’s standoff with fate, as the lit stick of dynamite hisses, allows the audience to see that Jack’s inner battle has been resolved: his transformation into a man of faith is complete.  The prodigal hero even impresses ageless Others’ adviser Richard Albert with his show of faith in Jacob’s motives (at the crucial life-saving moment when Albert has lost his own faith).

Considering the show’s Western hemisphere production, it would be easy for the writer’s to make the good-versus-evil themes play out in a Judeo-Christian sub-textual framework. But show runners Cuse and Lindelof have managed to evade that pothole in which creative works like THE MATRIX and LORD OF THE RINGS unavoidably fell…an endorsement of monotheism by proxy. The promo photo tribute to “The Last Supper” might suggest otherwise, but LOST entire current season is more of a battle between good and evil as opposed to the Christian God and Devil.

Ben’s monologue at the end of act 2, prior to the final commercial break, pulses as a moving work of mannered acting, eliciting that same emotional push/pull that only an unspeakable car-crash combination of happiness and sadness can pronounce. That cold weather melancholy only a Superchunk song can elicit. Or a Nick Drake, Elliott Smith or Big Star song. Prosaic pop songs wherein crushing sadness is only alleviated because you (the listener) realize that there is at least one other person in the world (the songwriter) that feels the way you feel.

The monologue is punctuated by the unexpected response from Jacob’s mysterious guard, Ilana. Her character’s emotional response to Ben, that she’ll be willing to vouch for his soul, to give him another chance at redemption is one of the most original, pure storytelling devises that Lindelof and Cuse have created. Completely unexpected, the often tragic history that we’ve seen associated with Ben’s character arch makes the monologue and the entire episode payoff with a deep emotional punch unlike anything network television storytelling has ever encountered.

The genius of Kristen Wiig

I’ve been admiring Kristen Wiig in bit parts (ADVENTURELAND, KNOCKED UP)  for a while now, but I hadn’t watched enough Saturday Night Live (SNL) to discover that she is a comic genius…until I watched her host the SNL primetime Christmas special as Gilly.

With Gilly – the little trouble-causing, Orphan Annie-resembling, minx – Wiig’s face becomes elastic, her voice and spacious timing are dastardly neurotic while her eyes bug right out of her head. You can tell that Wiig has fine-tuned her comic skills with more than 10,000 hours of rehearsal, improve and performance from the sheer intensity…she never breaks character (Jimmy Falon anyone?). With years of training as a member of The Groundlings, her focus and comic timing leave some of the other SNL cast members appearing amateurish and boring.

Digging up the best holiday related clips from season 1 to the present, the entire special was hilarious, but it was the Gilly character that forever sold me on Wiig’s mighty thespian powers.

The Gilly character and her childish desire to create anarchy while remaining mostly silent holds a mirror up to society. She becomes both light and dark, good and evil…and Wiig abandons her mastery of sarcasm with Gilly. Sadistic and adorable, Gilly is Wiig at her most brilliant…rolling the entirety of the dark chaos of the human condition into a character that barely speaks. It’s both creative and creepy…and I totally understand why they had Wiig host the Christmas clips show as Gilly.

I absolutely get it…and it’s genius. Look for Wiig to become SNL’s next break-out superstar.

Lecture: J.J. Abrams’ and his “Mystery Box”

If you are digging the new STAR TREK film, or if you are a fan of Lost and its co-creator J.J. Abrams, check out his TED lecture wherein he explains how mystery is one of the most important motivating mechanisms in his storytelling.

Abrams falls into fast-talking director mode as he postulates on the inner-workings of LOST being one gi-normous mystery (What is the island? What is the smoke monster? What is Jacob?).  The inciting incident of STAR WARS…wherein R2D2 begins to play the hologram to Luke…sets up a mystery. JAWS and ALIEN – since the audience never gets a good look at the monster – propel their stories based on mystery.

All writers and members of the creative culturatti will want to view this short lecture.

Thanks to my buddy Eric Melin for pointing me (and now you) in the direction of this lecture.