Dear Friends, Due to unfortunate considerations of time and cost, Backwards City is no longer a print journal. However, we will maintain our presence on the web that, however meager, we hope you might enjoy.
Lost has been my guilty semi-pleasure this television season. I downloaded the pilot because the people over at AICN wouldn't stop talking about it. The pilot, though imperfect, was good enough that I kept watching, and the inertia of the mystery has propelled me all the way through 18 episodes. Last night's, "Numbers," was the best or second-best episode ever, revolving around a series of apparently cursed winning lottery numbers with a mysterious connection to the island.
But the show itself is doomed, because the creators are laboring under the misapprehension that what people are interested in with this show is soap opera, not science fiction. They clearly have no idea what the real deal with the island is, or the true solution to any of the show's supposed mysteries. All they have to give week after week are set character pieces with an at-best nominal connection to the stranded-on-an-island situation. The larger mythology is never hammered out, much less addressed, and even the basic, nuts-and-bolts Gilligan's Island society-building stuff is being flagrantly ignored. And so the show jumped the shark (or, if you prefer, X-Files-ized) almost instantaneously.
It's a shame too, because it has a great premise.
(Edited for clarity.)
We watched I [Heart] Huckabees and it was better than expected. From the description and trailers, I expected a wholesale ripoff of Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency, with maybe a little Wes Anderson-style mayhem thrown in for flavor. And while that's approximately what I got, it went down smooth. It's funny, and pop philosophy is almost as good as real philosophy, except for whole deep thought part. Might as well rent it. I mean, what else are you gonna do?