It's the last TV Round-Up of sweeps. And it's about two "huge season finales." I'm going to be a bit different this week and start with..
Alias: Before the FloodApprently the combination of the tainted water and the sub-sonic sound from the red ball thingy makes everyone go
28 Days Later. Everyone turns into zombies who are all lethal killing machine. Was it just me or was anyone else reminded of the first
South Park Halloween episode when an accidental mixing of embalming fluid and woistershire sauce created zombies that took over the town? Seriously, that makes about as much damn sense as this whole Rimbaldi thing.
The thing was internally this episode was insanely inconsistent. In an early scene, we see that it takes Syd and Nadia a couple of dozen bullets from a sub-machine gun to take down the zombie people. Yet later in the episode, Zombie Nadia (tm) is taken down by a single bullet from Slaone. What?!? To make matters worse, we hear about how the zombies kill any living person they get their hands on but yet when Nadia is attacked by a pack of them, she somehow survives because...what? She's part of the prophecy? The script writers just got lazy? This is why Alias is so frustrating to watch.
Among other things.
You know, for someone bent on world domination Elena Derevko ain't the sharpest knife in the drawer. Follow me here--Sloane betrayed APO and the CIA to help her out. Sloane seems to change loyalties with the changing of the wind, but yet Elena is somehow surprised that he betrays her, selling her out to help the APO gang. Who didn't see that one coming about a mile away? About the only thing that didn't happen was Elena trying to claim to somehow be Nadia's mother, which I fully expected to have happen at some point.
And then we get the cliffhanger. Or as I call it--you've got to be kidding me moment! It's set up early on by Irina when she tells Vaughn--you should tell Syd your deep, dark secret so you don't end up like Jack and I did. Then, we get to the final moments, driving in the car and Vaughn drops a bomb. "By the way, I'm not really named Vaughn and.." and then a crash happens. Wait, wait, wait....now, I like a good cliffhanger as much as the next person, but I want one that actually makes a lick of sense. So, Vaughn is really Michael Vaughn but is...who? Hobert T Foswerth insurance salesman from Sioux City? How the hell did the CIA let him come to work for him all these years if he wasn't Michael Vaughn? What--he just changed his name mid-stream and they went along with that? Also, I got the impression that Jack knew Vaughn before now, so wouldn't Jack know something and have SAID SOMETHING before now? Also, why did Vaughn try to find his father--also named Vaughn!--for much of this season? Was that just a useless plotline to get Michael Vartan away from Jennifer Garner due to their break-up and complete lack of tension on screen? This cliffhanger is just as bad as the one on
Enterprise last year with evil Nazi aliens that they pulled out of their collective rears. I know that
Alias wants to get some buzz going into the fifth season and a new tough time slot, but come on! This is just too much, guys! And I bet we start off much of season five with Vaughn in a coma and Syd trying to find the answers to his read identity, which will turn out he's actually a guy named Anakin who gets seduced to the Dark Side when Syd gets pregnant and he starts having visions of her death and desparately wants to save her...oh wait, that was another, better movie.
Seriously, I'm thinking about breaking up with
Alias. I think it just may be time for me to let it go and focus my energies on another show or pursue a new TV-show relationship. I'm going to think about this over the summer (I sure as hell won't be watching repeats of this season) and see where I'm at in the fall when the fifth season rolls around.
Espeically when there are much better shows out there such as...
Lost: Exodus, Part 2About halfway through last nights' big two hour finale, a family member looked over at me and said, "So, when is all this resolution going to start happening?"
I scoffed, pointing out they'd never watched
The X-Files much because if they had, they'd know you can never fully resolve an on-going story like you have on
Lost (Unless of course you're
Veronica Mars or
Buffy). Instead, you're going to get one or two resolutions of smaller mysteries and a whole lot of new questions that come up. It's just the way season finales work.
And
Lost did not disappoint there.
So, we find out that the Others are not interested in Claire's demon-child, but instead want Walt. Which I pretty much figured out early on in the story and this came as no huge shock to me. And Sawyer apparently got shot and is in the ocean, bleeding, which can't be good for Jin and Michael right now. (And for Saywer too, for that matter). So, I wonder how much of next season will be spent trying to resuce Walt from the clutches of the Others, assuming they can find them.
Meanwhile, the hatch is opened to reveal a long tunnel with a ladder leading to...well, we just don't know? We'll have to wonder about that until next season. (What?!? You expected to find something significant out?) It does make me wonder just what is on the other end of that ladder, how long it is and how long it will take our heroes to climb down it (obviously not Hurley as he seemed pretty addled to see the numbers on the outside of the hatch).
Also, we find out that Daniella's agenda was not to help our heroes so much as to help herself get Alex back. Which brings up the question--why did they take Alex? And then it also makes me still wonder if Daniella isn't one of the others who was banished when she had Alex or for some other reason. It seems as if she played into their plans a bit too well for her to have been a rogue element on the island.
We did get to see a glimpse of part of the monster, though we found out tantalizing little more about it. Except that Locke is not in any way afraid of it. In fact, he wanted to be taken by it down the hole for whatever reason. And was it just the music or did it seem to anyone else like we heard the sound of a chain pulling when Locke was drug through the jungle? Also, it's interesting that Jack sees a power struggle coming and is already making alliances for that day. The scene where he says they're going to have a Locke problem after getting the hatch open and if Kate has his back was a good one. As was the scene between Locke and Jack about the how's and why's they're all on the island. Locke's contention that he is a man of faith and that Boone had to be sacrificed for the greater destiny of everyone was a bit on the chilling side. What exactly is Locke's game and how much does he know? Also, I still have to wonder if he wants to be rescued from the island. After all, if he goes back, presumbably he'll be put back in a wheel chair, working for a box company.
I will have to say this--poor ol' Artz. Brought into the series in order to give two science lessons and then get blown up. Poor guy. (Though his comment about how there were 40 other survivors on the island, but no one seemed to care about that was a riot).
And why did we spend a long scene last week with Michelle Rodiguez's character only to have he
NOT SHOW UP AT ALL here?!? I kept scratching my head going--huh? Where is she? Why can't have more of her. I figured we'd find out she was on the other side of the island, basically in the role that Jack is to the survivors we've come to know over the course of this season. They made it far too obvious a plot point set up to drop the ball like they did here. I can't believe that Rodriguez would take the time to fly to Hawaii and back for what amounted to little more than a cameo on the show. There has to be more to it than this and I can only hope that next year we'll see her character come back.
Was it just me or were there a lot of commericals in this one? It seemed as if every five minutes we cut to progressively longer commercials breaks. And the funniest part was that Good Morning America advertised having a Lost cut scene in this morning's show. My response:
Yeah, if you'd not had this commerical, we could have had time for it. Also, I did get a bit irritated with the extended everyone gets on the plane scene in the final five minutes when we could have been, oh I don't know,
looking in the hatch!!!So, we have some answers, but not many. Not nearly as many as I think a lot of us hoped for. But then again, I went in not expecting a whole lot of big, huge, earthshattering answers. I think it addressed a few issues and gave the series some direction to follow leading into next year. And none of the cliffhangers felt forced in any way (unlike
Alias). I know one thing--it's gonna be a long, hot summer waiting to see what happens next. And I have to admit, I can't wait to see where it all goes from here.
posted by Michael Hickerson at 5/26/2005 07:47:00 AM |
|
