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chaniI've seen the three last episodes of State of Play, the finale of Life on Mars and the latest Lost !
State of Play didn't disappoint me. Good quality there. John Simm is definitely a talented actor but the whole cast was pretty amazing and I loved the characters of Cameron Foster(Nighie) and his son, Dan who was played by James McAvoy (they stole every scene they were in). The last twist about Collins being actually guilty for the murder of Sonia Baker reminded me of a novel by Michael Connelly, the one in which Harry Bosch is investigating on his mother's death.
As for Life on Mars...I'm torn. I liked the finale for many reasons but at the same time it did disappoint me a little bit. It's really weird.
Perhaps it's because I didn't watch it for a supposed resolution of a supposed enigma. It was pretty obvious that we were in Sam's mind (the little girl looked awfully like Alice in Wonderland), that he was partly trying to live in denial and partly struggling in thoughts against lot of stuff, including his own feeling of guilt. I've always though that Gene was Sam's double, the dark/loose hidden part of himself and that Hyde was a clue about it...as in Jeckyll and Hyde you know and as in "hyde" sounding like "hide". In Stevenson's novel a potion did the trick so Jeckyll could let it go out and become someone else. In LoM a coma made it happen and Sam had to be a watcher, as well as an actor, of his own messy subconscious. So turning iHyde into the Hyde Ward from the hospital lessened the whole thing. It's a pity.
I could have lived without the hospital scenes but I guess that they had to make Sam wake up from the coma he was in otherwise the finale wouldn't have looked like a true one and we wouldn't have progressed from the finale of the first series. It was about Sam's journey so they had to make something happen.
I enjoyed the play on words about "operation", even though the "being under cover" thing has been quite obvious since he got the Hyde phone number. Also it was a cool pun. We were inside Sam's mind and his inner persona would have been an insider in Gene's department !
By the way I liked Sam questioning his own identity. Was he DCI Sam Tyler in a coma or DCI Sam Williams under cover and pretending to be DI Sam Tyler and actually suffering from amnesia and hallucinating about a supposed 2006 Manchester? It was tied in with 2006 Sam recording his story and saying DI instead of DCI before correcting himself.
Eventually he chose to be the Sam who didn't let his friends down.
Yet I was disappointed because the finale turned out to be more about Sam/Annie and the appeal of a possible neverending love (heavy Eros/Thanatos theme there) than about Sam/Gene and Sam embracing his subconcious drive. The final kiss was totally unecessary and a concession to tv cliche IMO. I nearly wish the episode had stopped when Sam jumped from the roof.
On the other hand I liked seeing the whole team back in a car for a fast and wild ride, with Gene still in the driver seat, and I liked the creepy little girl switching off the tv and therefore recalling that it was just a show and that we could back to our normal schedule. It echoed Sam jumping from the roof since both actions ended the 2006/2007 side in Sam's world (and we were part of it as watchers from 2006/2007), leaving it behind while the Sam!1973 could go on forever, hidden, without us watching it, spying on them. Maybe I've read too many books by Jasper Fforde but I couldn't help interpretating it through the prism of Thursday Next's adventures in which fictional characters have their own lives apart from us. The ride went on for Sam, Gene, Ray, Chris and Annie even though we couldn't see them anymore. I like that idea.
Did Sam Tyler die on the show? Well, even if his fall was "real" I'd say that the series ended before he actually died for good and I suppose that his last seconds stretched into eternity within the confines of his 1973 fantasy. In a way the Gene Hunt world was a near death experience he wanted to revive.
But did Sam even really wake up from his fantasy? Perhaps his awakening was part of his coma-induced dream, an hallucination within an hallucination. It's open to various interpretations.
Still, I really wonder how a spin-off based on Gene Hunt will make sense without Sam!
Unless of course the writers decide to include a true mystery in this, or the idea that all post-trauma fantasies are connected to each other as if every person in a coma were plugged in only one alternate world so people can actually share their fantasy-characters.
Unless Gene Hunt could escape that world like a literary character from Thursady Next's adventures...
Or Gene Hunt is just a universal metaphor and the writers can use him without any connection to Sam Tyler's mind and he would alwyas look like Philip Glenister. Convenient!
Okay a few words on Lost now.
First I don't believe that Locke is dead. He can't be dead. I don't want him to be dead. He must heal.
If he's dead I stop watching Lost.
I am not sure I liked what they did with Ben in the episode. I think they have changed their mind more than once about a character who wasn't supposed to remain on the show first. I need to see more to tell if turning him into just another character who once found himself on the island but came from "the outside world" was a good idea. But were the flashbacks we saw even his?
I've been wondering for a while, and writing it in here, whether all those flasbacks we get to see are really flashbacks showing us what the characters used to be and do before the island, in the "real world". We tend to take them as a proof that the characters have a certain past. But is that sure? After all one of those flashbacks showed Hugo and Libbie in some mental institution, suggesting that maybe we couldn't trust what we see on screen. Either Hugo was hallucinating the whole thing or the flashbacks didn't give us an omniscient point of view.
By the way I liked how they tied in this week's episode with the Hurley-centric one, solving the mystery of that body called Roger! Ben and his daddy issues echoed so many storylines again.
What if all the connections between the characters, all the echoes in the storylines, happened only because they are all the same character or figments of one character's imagination, a metaphor of his struggles? What if the faceless Jacob was that character ? I don't think the island is a purgatory or some place haunted by ghosts, I don't think they are all dead, I think they might not be alive, none of them. Jacob would be like a player pulling the strings of his puppets, powerful and helpless at once. A god and a shadow in the universe he's creating in his own mind. But why does he need help?
Of course there's that Richard Alpert who seems to be an original inhabitant of the island and looks exactly the same through the years as if he were an Immortal or something. Well, if we trust Ben's flashbacks...
The writers probably don't know where they are going and how to bring a closure to the series yet but my instinct tells me that the flashbacks can't be trusted...
So I'm again prone to interpret everything as a poetic licence. And Jacob represents the writers who made this out but feel helpless because they don't know what to write next and need the characters to find a way out.
After all Jacob is JJ Abrams' middle name!
As for Life on Mars...I'm torn. I liked the finale for many reasons but at the same time it did disappoint me a little bit. It's really weird.
Perhaps it's because I didn't watch it for a supposed resolution of a supposed enigma. It was pretty obvious that we were in Sam's mind (the little girl looked awfully like Alice in Wonderland), that he was partly trying to live in denial and partly struggling in thoughts against lot of stuff, including his own feeling of guilt. I've always though that Gene was Sam's double, the dark/loose hidden part of himself and that Hyde was a clue about it...as in Jeckyll and Hyde you know and as in "hyde" sounding like "hide". In Stevenson's novel a potion did the trick so Jeckyll could let it go out and become someone else. In LoM a coma made it happen and Sam had to be a watcher, as well as an actor, of his own messy subconscious. So turning iHyde into the Hyde Ward from the hospital lessened the whole thing. It's a pity.
I could have lived without the hospital scenes but I guess that they had to make Sam wake up from the coma he was in otherwise the finale wouldn't have looked like a true one and we wouldn't have progressed from the finale of the first series. It was about Sam's journey so they had to make something happen.
I enjoyed the play on words about "operation", even though the "being under cover" thing has been quite obvious since he got the Hyde phone number. Also it was a cool pun. We were inside Sam's mind and his inner persona would have been an insider in Gene's department !
By the way I liked Sam questioning his own identity. Was he DCI Sam Tyler in a coma or DCI Sam Williams under cover and pretending to be DI Sam Tyler and actually suffering from amnesia and hallucinating about a supposed 2006 Manchester? It was tied in with 2006 Sam recording his story and saying DI instead of DCI before correcting himself.
Eventually he chose to be the Sam who didn't let his friends down.
Yet I was disappointed because the finale turned out to be more about Sam/Annie and the appeal of a possible neverending love (heavy Eros/Thanatos theme there) than about Sam/Gene and Sam embracing his subconcious drive. The final kiss was totally unecessary and a concession to tv cliche IMO. I nearly wish the episode had stopped when Sam jumped from the roof.
On the other hand I liked seeing the whole team back in a car for a fast and wild ride, with Gene still in the driver seat, and I liked the creepy little girl switching off the tv and therefore recalling that it was just a show and that we could back to our normal schedule. It echoed Sam jumping from the roof since both actions ended the 2006/2007 side in Sam's world (and we were part of it as watchers from 2006/2007), leaving it behind while the Sam!1973 could go on forever, hidden, without us watching it, spying on them. Maybe I've read too many books by Jasper Fforde but I couldn't help interpretating it through the prism of Thursday Next's adventures in which fictional characters have their own lives apart from us. The ride went on for Sam, Gene, Ray, Chris and Annie even though we couldn't see them anymore. I like that idea.
Did Sam Tyler die on the show? Well, even if his fall was "real" I'd say that the series ended before he actually died for good and I suppose that his last seconds stretched into eternity within the confines of his 1973 fantasy. In a way the Gene Hunt world was a near death experience he wanted to revive.
But did Sam even really wake up from his fantasy? Perhaps his awakening was part of his coma-induced dream, an hallucination within an hallucination. It's open to various interpretations.
Still, I really wonder how a spin-off based on Gene Hunt will make sense without Sam!
Unless of course the writers decide to include a true mystery in this, or the idea that all post-trauma fantasies are connected to each other as if every person in a coma were plugged in only one alternate world so people can actually share their fantasy-characters.
Unless Gene Hunt could escape that world like a literary character from Thursady Next's adventures...
Or Gene Hunt is just a universal metaphor and the writers can use him without any connection to Sam Tyler's mind and he would alwyas look like Philip Glenister. Convenient!
Okay a few words on Lost now.
First I don't believe that Locke is dead. He can't be dead. I don't want him to be dead. He must heal.
If he's dead I stop watching Lost.
I am not sure I liked what they did with Ben in the episode. I think they have changed their mind more than once about a character who wasn't supposed to remain on the show first. I need to see more to tell if turning him into just another character who once found himself on the island but came from "the outside world" was a good idea. But were the flashbacks we saw even his?
I've been wondering for a while, and writing it in here, whether all those flasbacks we get to see are really flashbacks showing us what the characters used to be and do before the island, in the "real world". We tend to take them as a proof that the characters have a certain past. But is that sure? After all one of those flashbacks showed Hugo and Libbie in some mental institution, suggesting that maybe we couldn't trust what we see on screen. Either Hugo was hallucinating the whole thing or the flashbacks didn't give us an omniscient point of view.
By the way I liked how they tied in this week's episode with the Hurley-centric one, solving the mystery of that body called Roger! Ben and his daddy issues echoed so many storylines again.
What if all the connections between the characters, all the echoes in the storylines, happened only because they are all the same character or figments of one character's imagination, a metaphor of his struggles? What if the faceless Jacob was that character ? I don't think the island is a purgatory or some place haunted by ghosts, I don't think they are all dead, I think they might not be alive, none of them. Jacob would be like a player pulling the strings of his puppets, powerful and helpless at once. A god and a shadow in the universe he's creating in his own mind. But why does he need help?
Of course there's that Richard Alpert who seems to be an original inhabitant of the island and looks exactly the same through the years as if he were an Immortal or something. Well, if we trust Ben's flashbacks...
The writers probably don't know where they are going and how to bring a closure to the series yet but my instinct tells me that the flashbacks can't be trusted...
So I'm again prone to interpret everything as a poetic licence. And Jacob represents the writers who made this out but feel helpless because they don't know what to write next and need the characters to find a way out.
After all Jacob is JJ Abrams' middle name!
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no subject
Date: 2007-05-12 11:05 pm (UTC)I find it a bit off putting, to be honest, that you think the writers aren't giving the series enough thought. It is their job, after all, and from the interviews I've seen with the writers and creators, they seem to have mapped it all out... though that may not come across very well in the episodes themselves. I am admittedly easy to please when it comes to Lost (sometimes it seems like everyone only wants answers, and aren't satisfied when they get them!) so maybe that's why I don't agree with you.
Either way, they've set a cancellation date for Lost which should help them plan and map out plots and episodes better. So hopefully it won't feel like the writers are floundering in the next two seasons.
no subject
Date: 2007-05-12 11:32 pm (UTC)If I'm wrong and everything is really plotted and maped then it's worse because it means it's just a problem of writing quality and not an issue of writing process.
I don't particulary want answers ("Exposé" was one of my fav episodes yet it wasn't an answers-giving episode), I'm more interested with the characters' journey but I guess I've become hard to please when it comes to tv writing.
I blame Joss Whedon!
no subject
Date: 2007-05-13 10:31 am (UTC)I loved Exposé as well. Sure, it was filler but it was excellent filler! A lot of people disliked that episode precisely because it contributed nothing to the overall arc... but I believe the diamonds, or Nikki and Paolo will have some importance in future episodes, much like the foot statue we saw, surely it must tie into something! There would be no point in introducing it otherwise. Or perhaps I have too much faith in the writers!
I'm a lot more interested in the characters as well but I get the feeling we may be in a minority - on a certain message board I frequent it often seems like every character is more or less disliked and everyone is just watching to get answers, which isn't the right motivation to keep watching, IMO.
no subject
Date: 2007-05-13 10:40 am (UTC)Juliet seems to be a character also showing a lot of flexibility in terms of writing.
I don't want to be spoiled but...Locke isn't dead, is he?
no subject
Date: 2007-05-13 10:51 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-05-13 12:10 pm (UTC)Also maybe the Mickail thing was a clue when Ben told him "I thought you were dead". It might be a way to warn us not to think too quickly that a character was dead...
no subject
Date: 2007-05-13 10:16 am (UTC)I still watch "Lost" and try to ponder the stuff I see, even the stuff that looks weak, so it must mean that I don't think it's that bad! ;- )
no subject
Date: 2007-05-13 10:35 am (UTC)Enjoy your Sunday! :-)
no subject
Date: 2007-05-13 10:37 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-05-13 08:07 am (UTC)After all Jacob is JJ Abrams' middle name!
And mr. Abrams' alter ego asked Locke to help him... :)))
no subject
Date: 2007-05-13 10:18 am (UTC)Flaubert said "I'm Madame Bovary", I think that JJ could say "I'm Locke"!
no subject
Date: 2007-05-13 11:56 am (UTC)I agree with you about State of Play - good writing and a very strong ensemble. The quality of the acting and writing has definitely spoiled me so much that I find it difficult to watch German television, because it only very rarely comes close.
Life on Mars: I was a bit disappointed too. I didn't even want to think too much about the implications of the ending, because I just didn't care that much. It felt like the writers needed to wrap it up and they did it without conviction. I was thinking along the lines of a Stephenson Jekyll and Hyde connection, too. There's one book in the Ian Rankin's Rebus series, Hide and Seek which does this quite nicely.
Lost: John Locke can't be dead. I'm not going so far as to say I won't watch it anymore if he is, but I suspected that would be your reaction. I don't believe he's quite done yet. He's special and that will play a part.
I quite like your Jacob speculation, but as with Life on Mars I think they will go an easier route.
no subject
Date: 2007-05-13 12:06 pm (UTC)Probably.