"To Jack: My Hero."

This was our first weekend in awhile where we didn't have a bunch of stuff planned (other than our Friday night activities).

We had planned to go to the Hardly Strictly Bluegrass concert in the park, but by the time Saturday rolled around—and then, inevitably, Sunday—we were feeling pretty lazy. Too lazy, in fact, to do anything other than sit around & watch television.

To be more specific: on Saturday, we watched 12 straight fucking hours [1] of Season 1 of "Lost," to the point where, at midnight, I was walking around seeing scary shit all over the house in my peripheral vision. It was pretty freaky. And then, tonight, we watched 8 more hours of the show. We still haven't finished all of Season 1, but we're getting close now.

It's a pretty astonishingly interesting show, what with the topics—monsters, numerology, etc—and just the characters in general.

But so, as an obsessive watcher of "Party of Five" a number of years ago, what's funny to me is how similar Jack, Matthew Fox's character on "Lost", is to Charlie, his character on "Party of Five." In fact, from a Matthew Fox point of view, it could basically be the same show, except "Lost" has monsters. [2]

Of course, "Party of Five" had Owen, so maybe that evens it out.

But so anyway, with Jack/Charlie, it's basically that flawed nobility, that reluctant hero quality: the tendency to always try to be the hero, but have everyone begrudge you for being the hero, and to kind of resent being a hero in a really passive-aggressive sort of way. Seriously, we were just watching "Do No Harm" (episode 20)—which is like a veritable compilation of Jack as hero montages—and there was this quote, where Jack said to Boone, "I'm going to save you." And it's like, it couldn't be much clearer than that!

Some fond (or otherwise) Po5 memories:

• God, I hated Owen. What an obnoxious whiner. And he was always running away, or getting abducted, or just generally being a pain.


• Ned! Crazy, crazy Ned, and his daddy issues & Julia abuse.


• When Bailey showed up at Owen's birthday party drunk in a clown costume. Which led to the Intervention.


• Todd, Claudia's incredibly creepy & sleazy boyfriend in the final season.


• When Charlie got cancer and had chemotherapy, but never lost that fucking stubble that he'd had for the entirety of the show. Why didn't the stubble go away? I think it might be a bigger mystery than anything on "Lost"!

[1] Interrupted only by about the first 45 minutes of 13 Going On 30, a guilty pleasure if there ever was one. That choreographed "Thriller" scene is awesome.

[2] Or something. We haven't gotten to the point yet where we'd know, I guess, what exactly that thing in the jungle is.

Comments

[Mena Trott]

I just have to say that the guy who wrote this post is a complete fucker. We watched all the episodes from the season -- all except the last one! Like 20 hours of Lost and he can't stay up for one more hour. Ben claims he's too tired to watch the final fucking episode and wants to go to bed! And I can't watch it by myself because the Others will get me downstairs. Fucker.

[Justin Williams]

I win. I spent all of LAST Saturday watching Season 1 of Lost. I finished at 3am like a zombie.

Sadly, now that i get only one episode a week from Season 2 I feel cheated.