LOST And Found

Can you believe it's been ten years to the day since LOST first premiered? Yep, everyone's favorite show about that wacky supernatural time-traveling island first aired on Wednesday, September 22, 2004.

Yep, ten years after and I still have no idea what the hell was going on. Smoke monsters? A mysterious hatch? Magic numbers? A disappearing and reappearing island? Time travel? Flashbacks? Flashforwards? You'd go crazy you should try and figure it out.

And forget about that ending! The characters all end up in some heavenly waiting room? Four years after the final episode aired and I still don't know what the hell that was about. 

Now that I'm thinking about it, it's making me mad all over again. Six years of my life I devoted to that show, and that's the payoff I get? Thanks for nothing, LOST! I'm sorry I remembered your anniversary!

It Came From The Tube: Alcatraz

Caught the premiere of Alcatraz last night. First time I've watched live TV in... wow, I can't remember. Alcatraz is the latest series from executive producer J.J. Abrams, of LOST, Star Trek and Super 8 fame.

So what's it about? On a dark and stormy night in 1963, all 256 prisoners and 49 guards inside Alcatraz prison suddenly vanished without a trace. Flash forward to 2012, when the inmates begin to reappear unaged and start wreaking havoc in the modern world.

Police Officer Rebecca Madsen teams up with Alcatraz expert Diego Soto (Jorge Garcia, of LOST fame) to investigate the reappearances of the inmates. Along the way they discover a secret government project tasked with rounding up the prisoners, headed by Emerson Hauser (Sam Neil) and his assistant Lucy (Parminder Nagra).

The cast is impressive, especially for a TV show. Sam Neil is great as always. Jorge Garcia pretty much plays himself, which he's done in everything I've ever seen him in. Hey, it seems to be working for him, so good for him. Robert Forster's also in the show and it's always great to see him. He doesn't turn up in TV shows much. And of course I'll watch anything Parminder Nagra's in. I've been crushing on her ever since Bend It Like Beckham.

Overall I was impressed with the premiere. In addition to the great cast, there's plenty of action, a continuing mystery to unravel and even time travel shenanigans. I was intrigued enough by the revelation at the end of the second episode to come back for more.

There are lots of flashbacks to 1963, which lead to unavoidable comparisons to LOST. Hey, much of the action even takes place on an island! Hopefully that's where the similarities will end and the show won't degenerate into the murky morass of abandoned plot lines that LOST turned into. If anything the show's police procedural format is more reminiscent of Fringe, which is a good thing, IMO.

My one fear is that the show could become repetitious very quickly. If every episode is going to feature an inmate showing up and killing some people while the good guys search for him, find him and put him into super time-proof prison, it's going to get old really fast. They'll need to shake things up now and then to avoid the Scooby Doo Syndrome ("Old Man Johnson dressed up like a monster to scare people away from the Big Rock Mine treasure!"). Hopefully they realize this and will adjust the plot lines accordingly.

Take a little bit of LOST, a LOT of Fringe, some Green Mile and X-Files, and even a little bit of Friday The 13th: The Series, shake well and you get Alcatraz.

John Locke

Now that LOST is over, I've been re-watching the first season on DVD. What a different show it was in the beginning! In the first few episodes, the characters' main problem was trying to find food and fresh water. No flash forwards, time travel or heavenly waiting rooms to be seen anywhere.

My two favorite characters on the show were always Hurley and John Locke. I drew Hurley here and here, so I thought it high time to draw Locke.

It's downright criminal that the creators took the single most interesting character on the show and killed him off at the end of Season 4. Sure, we still got to see Terry O'Quinn's top notch acting for another two seasons, but he wasn't playing Locke anymore. He was the Smoke Monster pretending to be Locke.

Locke didn't get a chance at redemption or any kind of grand sendoff. His storyline just abruptly and senselessly ended. I kept expecting the real Locke to somehow come back to life at the last minute and defeat the fake Locke, but alas, it wasn't to be.

Anyway, here's my rendition of John Locke (the TV character, not the philosopher), if he was a Hanna-Barbera type of cartoon character. Apparently it's been a while since I drew any kind of human character. As I started to color Locke, I had to stop and think how to make flesh color!

Drawn in Photoshop on the graphic tablet.
Here's the very rough preliminary sketch I did of Locke.

LOST In Thought

So, how about that final episode of LOST? That was... interesting.

So all this last season we were led to believe that the characters were still on the island, but were also somehow living in some alternate reality where Flight 815 never crashed. But then at the last minute we find out that it's not really an alternate reality at all, but some sort of heavenly waiting room where time didn't exist and the souls of all the characters were hanging out until they all showed up and could move on into the afterlife together.

I would be lying if I said that's how I thought the series would play out when I watched the first episode six years ago. And so would the writers.

I thought that the first three seasons of the show were brilliant, but once they left the island and then spent all of Season 4 trying to get back, I felt the show kind of lost its way. For one thing I never quite bought the Oceanic 6's motivation for keeping the island a secret. They kept saying it was to protect their friends who were still on the island. Protect them from who? Charles Widmore? It seemed pretty safe from him, since Ben actually moved the island at the end of Season 3. Nobody would have been able to find it anyway, even if they'd known of its existence.

I also felt their reasons for returning to the island were a bit sketchy. I know they wanted to try and rescue the ones they left behind, but honestly, would any sane person deliberately try to go back to an island like that? By the time Season 5 rolled around with all the time travel shenanigans, it all got to be a bit much to keep track of. But I went along with it all, because it was LOST, and what else am I going to watch? Two And A Half Men? I'd rather chew on steel wool.

The show also had a frustrating way of setting up storylines and then just up and abandoning them for no good reason. The whole Ben vs. Widmore thing was a prime example. It looked like those two were heading for an epic confrontation for control of the island, and then POOF! Widmore completely disappears from the show for all of Season 5 (OK, we saw his younger self, but I don't count that) and he doesn't reappear until the tail end of Season 6, when he was disposed of in the most unsatisfying way possible.

They should have spent Season 6 wrapping up everything, but instead they troweled on even more mysteries and added yet more characters to keep track of. I came to the realization sometime in Season 5 that the creators weren't even going to attempt to answer all the questions they raised on the show. So I wasn't totally unprepared with the way it all ended.

Character development seemed to suffer in this final season as well. In the past, the characters were very well defined, and they drove the plot. This last season that all went out the window, and everyone was acting out of character, saying and doing things simply because the script demanded it. There was no real plot, and everyone was just running back and forth, teaming up and switching sides. I lost count of how many times Sawyer switched allegiances between Fake Locke and Widmore and anyone else who was standing around. After a while it was exactly like watching basketball players run up and down the court.

I had my own theories as to what was happening and how it would all play out. I assumed that since Desmond had the power to send his mind into the past or to other timelines, that he was going to use this ability to somehow transport everyone on the island into the non-plane crash dimension, where everyone would live happily ever after. I would have much preferred that to the new-age Kumbaya ending we got.

I didn't think much of the "spiritual" ending when I first saw it, but now that I've had a couple of weeks to think about it, I'm OK with it (I know the producers will breathe a collective sigh of relief knowing that I approve). The scenes of the cast reuniting in the church were very moving, and ultimately satisfying. After everything they'd been through, it was nice to see everyone happy and smiling (and clean!), even if it meant they were all dead.

The final scene on the island with Jack staggering back to the bamboo field where it all began was also quite touching. When Vincent the dog comes out of the jungle to lie down with him so that Jack wouldn't die alone... well, I think I got something in my eye.

It would have been nice if they'd have given us an ending that cleverly tied up all the loose plot threads, an ending so perfect that we'd all have slapped our collective foreheads and exclaimed, "Of course! Why didn't I see that coming?" But it wasn't to be.

It's not the ending I expected or wanted, but ultimately I'm satisfied and I can live with it.

So now what the heck am I going to watch on TV?

Hurley Title Card

With LOST just about to come to an end, I thought I'd pay tribute to it one more time before it's over.

I always liked the title cards at the beginning of old Warner Brothers and Hanna-Barbera cartoons. Some of them were true works of art. So here's my take on a title card if LOST was a Hanna-Barbera type of cartoon.

I've been a big fan of LOST ever since it premiered in 2004. I've seen every episode and I read a couple of show-related message boards, but even I have to admit that most of the time I have no idea what's happening on the show.

They crash on the island, they encounter the Others, then some other Others, then yet still some other Others, they see a smoke monster, they get off the island, they decide to go back, they crash again, they go back in time & visit the past for a while, they set off a nuke and now they both DID and DIDN'T crash on the island in the first place. It's a lot to have to sort out.

At one point I followed all these developments in minute detail, but around the last season it got to be too much and I gave up. I'm still watching, but I've decided to just go with the flow and stop trying to analyze everything that happens, and just watch the pretty pictures on the screen.

This had one of the longest gestation periods of any of my illustrations. I got the idea to do a title card of Hurley being chased by Smokey well over a year ago. I kept trying all these complicated layouts that just didn't work, no matter how I arranged them. I finally gave up in frustration and shelved the drawing. Then a week ago, while watching LOST, I remembered the drawing. I opened it up again, and suddenly a simplified layout that worked popped into my head and I drew it up. Ideas are like tomatoes. Sometimes they're not ready to be picked and need more time to ripen.

Drawn in Photoshop on the graphic tablet. The yellow title text was hand lettered.



Here's the original digital sketch. It's not much to look at this time. There wasn't a lot of planning this time, as I mostly just made it up as I went along.



If you're not familiar with the title cards I'm always talking about, here are a couple of samples. Hanna Barbera used these on all their shows in the 1960s and 1970s. They kind of faded away after that, but some of the recent Cartoon Network shows have started using them again.

Hurley Says I Rock!

Back in December I sent out my official custom-made 2009 Christmas Card. In addition to sending it out to friends and family, for some reason I got the notion to send one to Jorge Garcia, Hurley of TVs Lost. I'm not really sure why I sent one to him. I didn't expect anything out of it. I guess because I'm a fan of the show, and also a follower of his blog. Maybe I felt some sort of kinship with a fellow blogger.

Anyway, I mailed him a card and promptly forgot all about it. Then last week, I got a big envelope in the mail. Inside was this autographed photo of Jorge. Awesome!

Hurley says I rock, dude!

It's Not Just The Title, It's How I Feel After Watching

Hey, LOST is back for its final season! Hey, I have no frakkin' clue what's going on!

SPOILERS AHOY!

Well, that was certainly weird. Apparently after the atom bomb went off on the island in 1977 (I think?) there are now two time lines? One in which the Losties were thrown back into the present day, and one in which they never crashed on the island at all, in which the island is under water. Yup, makes perfect sense to me!

I was under the impression that the creators were going to wrap everything up in the final season, but it looks like they just delivered a big package of WTF? to our doorsteps. Two time lines? A temple full of other Others? More new characters to keep track of? The embodiments of Good and Evil possessing the bodies of familiar characters? My head's hurting. Excuse me while I go and lie down in dark room.

I've been a big fan of the show ever since the first episode, but I have to admit that half the time I have no idea what's going on with the plot. That's not a condemnation, by the way. I kind of like that it's convoluted and confusing. It's fun trying to figure out what's going on. I think about each episode long after it's over, as I try to figure out what I just saw. You can't say that about Two And A Half Men.

I have an uneasy feeling that the series finale can't possibly live up to everyone's expectations, but that's OK. To use a hackneyed cliche, this show's more about the journey than the destination.

Hurley

It's everyone's favorite smoke monster-guarded, polar bear inhabited, time-traveling island resident!

Mr. Reyes gave me a lot of trouble as I was drawing him. I wanted him to have an animated look, and I could draw his body just fine, but when it came to his face, I just couldn't get it to look right. If I made it too cartoony, then it didn't look like him, and if I made it look more like him, then he didn't look cartoony enough. I went through a ton of revisions before I found the right balance.

The secret was to shrink his face inside his head, so that his features were smaller than they should be. Once I did that it seemed to click.

Originally the color scheme was much more garish, but I didn't think it was working. So I desaturated it quite a bit and that seemed to help.

Drawn in Photoshop on the graphic tablet.

By the way, Jorge Garcia has a blog too. It's a fun read. He seems like a nice guy.

Here's the original sketch of Hurley. Like I said, I was having trouble nailing the face. The eyes and mouth aren't bad on this one, but that nose is way off. The shape of his head isn't right either.



Here's another attempt. Getting closer, but there's still something off.



And lastly the final sketch. I finally figured out how to draw the shape of his head, and the face is pretty close and it's cartoony. Moral of the story: don't fall in love with your first attempt.

UPDATE!: I just looked at this drawing again and noticed that I messed up "the numbers." I had the last two in the sequence wrong for some reason. Either no eagle-eyed LOST fans noticed, or everyone was too polite to point out my stupidity. I fixed them, so they're right now.