It's the first week of the most obnoxious head-to-head competition on network TV this season: Lost on ABC vs. Veronica Mars on UPN. Both excellent shows, both "can't miss" television I'd heartily recommend to anyone -- annoyingly scheduled to air at the same time. (This fact was succinctly tackled by Shocho on his blog.)
Since a competition has been made of it, I've decided to keep score. Every week that new episodes of both shows air, I'm going to judge who I think brought the better hour of television. This week was simply no contest -- Veronica Mars wins in a landslide.
Lost was unfortunately just listlessly, aimlessly marking time this week. Don't get me wrong, I'm a very patient viewer of Lost. I truly don't need answers to big mysteries every week. I often enjoy the flashbacks more than the mysteries on the island. But I still need an episode to go somewhere, to tell some meaningful story. This week just didn't.
Michael's flashback was truly a waste of time, a series of four cut scenes engineered to tell us all what we already knew: that he'll do anything to get Walt back. We already knew from last season's Michael/Walt episode that Michael's wife had moved out of the country and taken Walt away. No additional information was given here. No alternate insight or perspective to the one we saw before was offered. It was a pure retread of old news.
Michael and Sawyer have a minor adventure or two getting back to shore. No real surprise in the fact they'd end up back on the island, so what a shame it took the whole episode for it to happen. Jin appeared to have a far more compelling journey back to the island, but that potentially interesting material was not included this week. No doubt it will appear soon, probably presented in a manner similar to the way Kate and Locke's exploration of the hatch was covered in backtrack mode this week.
And as for Kate and Locke... well, they had a minor adventure or two of their own as well, but Locke really didn't get any meaningful information out of Desmond that couldn't have quickly and easily been explained to us next week.
So, barring some major revelation in the future that makes some minor detail of tonight's installment become suddenly important, it seems to me that we could have skipped this episode completely and gone straight to the next one.
Meanwhile, Veronica Mars kicked things off in high gear. All the top quality dialogue was still there. The show is still smart and fun. A new mystery got kicked off -- is someone trying to kill Veronica? Who? Why? The Veronica/Logan/Duncan love triangle was shored up. Another Buffy alum appeared on the show (Charisma Carpenter, filling a Mrs. Robinson sort of role, not that she really looks old enough for it). Good stuff all around.
Come on, Lost... you're not just going to let a show with less than a tenth the audience you have totally bitch slap you like this and get away with it, are you?
4 comments:
Agreed on all counts. And I'm happy to announce that I got a VCR working so I got to see both. Ongoing dramas like Lost occasionally have interstitial episodes where nothing important happens and things just move along. Or maybe that's just a week of writers' block.
Well I disagree with you regarding the Michael backstory. While it wasn't the best flashback - I thought seeing the WTC in the background was neat, and it drew great parallels to what was happening on the raft at that exact moment between Michael and Sawyer.
Overall - I think we're going to find out next week is going to be similar. The first three episodes look to form one big story and we're seeing it from a different perspective each week. The story may not have advanced a lot this week - but none the less it is inching forward.
Gotta agree with you on Lost. I thought the fact that the episode ended precisely where the season finale did (even using repeated footage - Jack leaving the camp) was really uneventful. The raft relationship building between Michael and Sawyer also went nowhere. Michael is still a bigger jerk than Sawyer. At least Michael made one revelation; that he shouldn't have risked his son's life on the raft.
I'm also really skeptical about Desmond. I believe this is the first instance of a non-passenger tying in with the past of the characters. I'll be anxious to see how this resolves.
"Adrift" wasn't terrible, but it certainly didn't move the plot along. It raised more questions about Desmond and his bunker, but I was as equally impressed and annoyed with the reintroduction of the bunker as I was with the 1950s scenes in Back to the Future Part II. It appears to me that the writers were forced to change the screenplay of a two-hour premiere midstream and tacked on the series' first disposable flashback.
I hope my "Bad Robot Shows Suck After Two Season Theory" doesn't have to be revised.
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