Going to Guam

Today’s the best I’ve felt in a week. Still had trouble modulating my body temperature last night, but the pain is diminishing and I’m able to handle a wider range of foods.

Last night I finished reading the manuscript for a novel I’ll be reviewing in CD #61. It’s a fairly complex book, so I’m going to let it roll around in my mind for a day or two before I tackle the review.

Life on Mars did an episode unlike any from the BBC series last night, although there were bits of dialog (the part about The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, for example) were lifted straight from the original series. I guessed the hooker’s secret fairly early on. I also guessed that the Chinese deliveryman was the killer because I glimpsed his red jacket at the back of a shot, but I got that one wrong. The notion that there might be others like Sam is intriguing, something not explored by the BBC, unless you take into account the misbegotten sequel, Ashes to Ashes. With shows like this one and Eli Stone, I start to wonder when the character is going to stop freaking out every single time something odd happens and start accepting these visions as par for the course.

“We’re not going to Guam, are we?” My favorite line from last night’s Lost. More

I was astonished at the pace this show achieved last night. I didn’t think we would see the O6 back on the island until the end of the season, and yet there they are. Well, some of them, anyway. I got the impression that they were yanked out of the plane by one of those electromagnetic anomalies and that everyone else was left behind, in a Langoliers sense. If Lapidus went, too, there must be a really surprised co-pilot somewhere who thinks, perhaps, that the rapture happened and he was Left Behind.

I would like to know what changed Kate’s mind about going along with this crazy plan even more than I’d like to know what she did with Aaron. The logical guess would be Claire’s mother. I liked finding out why Christian Shepherd wears tennis shoes on the island, but I was surprised that no one asked Ben who had used his face to swab the deck when he showed up for the flight. Lots of proxies, with people standing in for those present and absent. A new marshall, escorting Sayid to Guam, for example.

My other assumption from the final turn events is that the Oceanic survivors were trapped during the Dharma initiative’s heyday when Locke turned the not-frozen donkey wheel. That van looked in prime condition. Guess the Losties were conscripted into Dharma, and the “O6” were yanked into the same time as them. I think it would be hilarious if Ben got left behind on the plane, too, since he supposedly wasn’t allowed to come back. However, we only have his word for that.

The acceleration of events is a little disorienting. We spent three or four years covering less than four months on the island, and in the course of a year or so we’ve covered three years off the island. It seems a little out of balance, but I guess we’ll adjust.