Wednesday Night TV

I'm still way behind, but Lost and South Park have to be seen ASAP or else something will get spoiled for me the day after. And almost to prove my point, here's me writing stuff that would spoil both after the jump:

Lost: One of the things that struck me about Desmond's situation running around trying to save Charlie is that it reminded me of those old cartoons where a dog is left to watch a baby, and the baby wanders off distracted by something shiny into dangerous situations, but through sheer luck escapes from every peril completely unharmed, while the dog suffers endless torture trying to save the baby. So Desmond is like the dog, and Charlie the baby. I mentioned TV Funhouse a while back, a long since canceled Comedy Central show featuring crazy animated shorts among other things, and whenever I think of those cartoons, I think of the TV Funhouse spoof of them:


So I found it hilarious that Desmond leads around Charlie, the baby, Jin, the immigrant, and Hurley, who not only could pass for a guy on mushrooms, but actually mentioned them early on in the episode.

But that has nothing at all to do with anything... this was a pretty cool episode. Brian K. Vaughan, comic book god, gets his first co-writing credit this episode, so I had high expectations. Which usually means I'll be disappointed. While it wasn't the best Lost episode ever, it was still cool.

Desmond has a vision of Charlie's death, but also a parachute landing with a picture of Penny on board. But he's torn as to whether Penny arriving is worth letting Charlie die, and the episode draws the parallel to God asking Abraham to kill Isaac. It of course doesn't go exactly according to plan, Charlie lives, and the woman in the parachute is, I think, someone we've never seen before. But she does recognize Desmond before appearing to die. We also learn that Desmond had another fiancee, Ruth, who he left to become a monk (hence the whole "brother" thing), but that didn't work out either. The head monk though had a picture of the lady who told Desmond all about his flashes of the future on his desk (it's not too apparent in my crappy screencap, which I'm not sure is uploading right anyway, since blogger seems to be having issues, but the photoshopping of the two actors together was pretty lousy):


The episode was very centered on the Baby/Immigrant/Guy on Mushrooms story and the flashback, so everything else didn't get much attention. Though the whole Sawyer/Kate/Jack/Juliet love... trapezoid... is getting messy.


South Park: I'm not a huge fan of zombie movies, but I've seen enough to say that I'm pretty sure they hit just about every zombie movie cliche and managed to make it all pretty hilarious. The points about the homeless, the ridiculous overreactions by Randy, and Cartman's efforts to jump the homeless served to elevate a decent parody into one of the better episodes in recent memory.