Last guy with four girls, and just destroys them in the immunity challenge, and he lets himself gets talked into giving up the immunity idol.

I haven’t been following Survivor much, but damn… he totally got schooled.

Cirie - Survivor Jedi Master

Finale should be fun, a total cat fight…

Cinco de Mayo means birthday in the Stueve household. Danny turned 9 (9?!?!??!? yep, nine!) So we went to our increasingly traditional birthday dinner joint, Pei Wei, which given the traditional holiday atmosphere in the southwest on this day was surprisingly empty when we hit the joint shortly after 5PM.

Quick dinner, and back home to open presents, drum machine and lego blocks what else does a 9 year old need. So an hour or so of drum sounds and 30 minutes of putting together Indy Jones lego set, and then it was time for me to take 3 of our kids to the after dark pediatrician.

Yeah, you heard right, 3. The non-birthday Stueve’s staged a mini-revolt and wanted a medical review. After we stormed the waiting room, and then gave the nurses a chance to practice triage techniques, we holed up in an exam room to await the doc. In our case it was a nurse practitioner, and after two swabs and a positive ear infection, we grabbed our three scripts for antibiotics and headed for the pharmacy. Yep, we hit the bacterial trifecta: MJ - strep (win), Brenna - ear infection (place), and Lauren - uncategorized infection (show) (aka pre-strep).

So Jonny will take tomorrow off and sleep all day with three sick kids, and the birthday boy gets to go to school by hissef. I wonder if he’ll mind walking?

I can handle all that, I’m a saavy watcher of television, and I understand with the writer’s strike there is a lack of quality programming. But falling back to this reality genre is such a predictable ruse, and its got my 11 year old daughter, totally captivated by the drama, unable to sleep as the ideas these shows (and there is no escaping them they are on all the local networks) germinate in her mind.

Its not even good television, like Lost or The Office. Just the predictable dreck that the networks always start previewing in the spring. Maybe we should just do something else. Anything would be better than this… screen shots after the fold.

Disclaimer: the preceding was an attempt at humor. The weather alerts in Texas are serious and important to follow, for you and your family’s safety.

You’re welcome.

UPDATE:  I never got back to finishing this recap, so I’ll stuff the unfinished rough draft in the appended section, and just write a few comments that I gleaned from the episode:

This episode really just gave us a refresher on the characters were dealing with.  Helpful for new viewers, but re-tred ground for the old veterans.  We know now that:

• Juliet had an affair with Goodwin (we knew they had a relationship before, but didn’t know that Goodwin was married)
• Ben has an unhealthy attachment with Juliet, though we still don’t know why she kicked him out of her book club.
• Ben is the master manipulator, and Locke is a zen master manipulee.  Srsly, is there anyone that CAN’T take advantage of Colonel Locke?
• The Freightees are still in a grey area, neither black or white.  That Daniel rendered the gas that Goodwin was making inert is a good thing, Ben’s just creepy enough to have let them fail, then point and say, see … they tried to kill us!
• Old man Winthorpe is embroiled in this whole mess, how much he’s pulled strings to get to the island is unknown, and perhaps Penny and her old man are working at odds with each other.

The rest of the recap is below the fold.
But on with the shoooow.

Lets handle flashback separate from island time, as I get tired of flipping back and forth.

Flashback: (and they did a bit of trickery in for the first few minutes were disconcerted about whether we’re flashing back or forward. We get a directorial wink/nod as Juliet explains that she, “doesn’t like being treated like a celebrity,” and as half the audience takes the head fake and runs with it to the ‘Juliet is one of the Oceanic Six!!!’ exit, the other half sits and is rewarded with good old Benjamin Linus bringing his girlfriend flowers. Well except she doesn’t get that she’s a girlfriend, but she really feels the, “I don’t like you,” vibe coming from her assigned therapist, Harper Stanhome.

Good to see ol’ Tom, the murderous, yet friendly, bastard. Creepy Benjamin also pulls out all the stops and gives Jules a first rate bungalow in the center of New Otherton.

Later Jules meets Goodwin for the first time when he’s skulking around her medical stores looking for a band-aid. Jules is a bit distraught over losing her first patient, and after getting a good consult from Goodwin to use Harper as a confidant, Jules lets out that she think Harper is a no-good skank. Goodwin agrees, since it turns out he’s married to her. Jules and Goodwin share a secret, Goodwin won’t tell his wife that Jules thinks she’s a skank, and Jules won’t let anyone know that Goodwin’s been playing with his chemistry set.

Jules is explaining the difficulties of having babies on the island to Ben. Jules is a bit unconfortable being so close to a humanoid reptile, but gets cheery when Goodwin pops in with an extra lunch. Which makes Ben and his 5th grade social skillz mind a bit leery of competition.

In a therapy session, Harper gets a bit forward and tells Jules that she knows Jules is practicing the art of island baby making with Goodwin. Harper wants the relationship to end, because she doesn’t want Goodwin to get hurt. She isn’t talking about a broken heart, she’s talking about Ben, ripping out his heart and feasting on Goodwin’s still beating heart.

Island time, whatever that might be. Daniel and C.S. have slipped the beach party, and went off to go neck in the woods, or whatever those two do. Jack, Sun & Jin, and Jules head out in the rainy jungle to find them and bring them back and force mai-tai’s down their throats. But as the separate Jules hears the whispers of the island and is confronted with her nemesis, Harper. Where she came from? I dunno, ask Walt.

Harper has instructions for Jules from Ben. How she got instructions we aren’t sure. But Ben’s sure that Daniel and C.S. are headed to the Tempest, and they’ll kill everyone if they figure out how to deploy the gas. Huh? Wah? Gas? too many tacos? burritos, Maui onions? Oh, the gas that Goodwin was messing around with. Harper suggests that people point guns and pull triggers. And pursuing that route, the writers fill the rest of the episode with a whole lotta gun pointing, but thankfully a bit short on the whole pulling trigger part.

Jules tells Jack that their heading to the Tempest, while very low on details, Jules tells Jack that Tempest is an electrical station that powers the island, and to please help her. Jack, never one to freak out and yell at people, at least not pretty blondes (brunettes are okay to yell at, so long as their fugitives.), silently agrees.

Faraday and Lewis are perusing a map, at a small stream while collecting water. (Aside: they are always collecting water, and drinking water, perhaps the whole island thing is a dihydrogen monoxide hallucination!) Their map, upon closer inspection has a lot of ‘unknown’ locations, that if I were using it to find where this Tempest station was, I’d be like totally LOST! Dan is having a bit of a confidence problem, wondering if he can actually do something. They run into Kate, or Kate runs into them. Kate tells them that Locke’s troop now as Miles, (um… didn’t they already know that). Lewis tells a spectacularly bad lie about what the two are doing in the middle of the jungle. Kate who knows a bit about lying, gets suspicious, and searches their bag. Kate, also being spectacularly bad at watching her back, ends up getting walloped over the head by Lewis, leaving Daniel to gape helplessly at his companion.

Back to Jack and Jules, and Jack is being a bit passive aggressive in his lack of knowledge is questioning Jules about the woman, Harper. Not too concerned that she appeared and disappeared at will (that kind of thing happens way to often, I blame the H2O. She explains she was her therapist, but they didn’t get along to well, and that Jack’s probably has things in his past he doesn’t want to talk about. Jack, being PA at the moment, because he LURVES Jules, snarks back, “Yeah, I read em all in my file.” Jules, because she can, snarks back, “Believe me Jack, you don’t want to read my file.”

In Locke’s backyard in New Otherton, Claire gets all up in Locke’s grill about the hostage Miles, and thinks she’d be a better person to drag information about the boat, and his mission, than the obviously hostile Locke. And we all wonder how egg-grenades taste, but we don’t get to see Miles this episode, so the green-grenade and ham episode will have to wait. Locke decides to pay Ben a visit. Ben’s finally reading the book Locke gave him last week, but puts it down to feast on Locke’s prepared rabbit, after querying if there were any numbers on the rabbit *Heh!* Which is just the start of Ben’s manipulation of Locke, and Ben starts to commiserate on the trials of leadership, then jabs Locke between the ribs with a mocking, “when they find out you still don’t have a plan.” Ben always has a plan, and Locke finally gets to jab Ben back with a donation to his 3.2 million fund raising effort. Ben parries with a plea to be able to help Locke as they both have a shared interest in keeping the boat people off the island. Locke doesn’t trust Ben, perhaps because Ben shot him in the missing kidney, or his word. So Ben promises to ’show’ Locke.

Desmond: Answers

Amen, you and me both, Brutha.

It appears that Desmond’s magnetic implosion survival has put his brain squarely in the middle of a tesseract (or perhaps more properly a wormhole, but I prefer Madeleine L’Engle’s terminology, and need to start scraping the bottom of the Lost easter egg basket for a copy of A Wrinkle in Time to appear in Sawyer’s hands — found it Sawyer read it in Deus Ex Machina back in season one. ). The complications of a brain square in a tesseract are evident when the brain moves outside of the arc of protection that surrounds our favorite island. While zooming along the same bearing that Michael and Walt crusied away from Ben’s island, 305° T, Frank Lapidus pilots the helicopter into a thunderhead and perhaps in the turbulance drifts of the bearing a bit, and Desmond ends up drifting 8 years in the past, in the middle of boot camp in 1996, a few months after taking a picture with Penny, then ditching her as so much worthless copper. After the stress of 100 crunches have stressed our favorite time-traveling messiah a bit, his addled brain ends up back in 2004 in the chopper, but only remembering 1996.

Oh this is gonna be fun!

Back in Isle de Camazotz, Daniel Faraday and Charlotte Staples Lewis are chatting with Juliet and Jack about the paradox of a helicopter with limited fuel being lost for more than a day. Juliet keys on the fact that C.S. has no worries about it, which perhaps she should being that might be the only way our new lostees may get back off the island. Daniel lets slip that, “your perceptions of how long your friends have been gone its not necessarily how long they’ve actually been gone.” Which puts Jack into a whole batch of confusing thoughts, looks like our ‘Man of Science’ needs to bone up on his theoretical physics, though I must give a nice bow to the writer’s in filling us hapless viewers with some of the more arcane things regarding time travel. And the hints on the whole time travel mess have been dropping like rain in a Texas thunderstorm, if you’ve been paying attention to the clues. Daniel lets on that their might be side-effects if Frank strayed from the bearing.

Speaking of side effects, back on the helicopter, Desmond is in full on FREAK mode, while Frank manuvers for a landing on our ‘freighter’, pretty small thing actually, with a make shift helo pad on the stern. (aside: convenient as that may be, totally not happening, a helicopter needs maintenance and even more in an at sea environment, and maintenance without a hanger, there in the salty air… sorry, isn’t conducive to well constructed flight ops. Which may have something to do with how poor the helicopters have fared in the two times we’ve seen them. (1 crashed at sea, and 1 crashed on land though was still flyable) But lets leave it to the professionals to poke holes in Lost’s avionics exploits.) and we meet some of the cheery crew. In the middle of being taken to sickbay (in which the crew seems to be totally nonchalant about his loss of memory of the present) Desmond heads back to ‘96. ‘96 Desmond has good memories of his boat experience, and he remembers his lucky Penny. Heading off to a payphone (yeah, they still existed in ‘96) Desmond gets bumped by another solider and gets shoved back to ‘04. He gets the name of the helpful crew members (Keamy from Vegas, and Omar from Florida) and their present location (somewhere in the Pacific last port Fiji), then is shut in the ’sick bay’. There he meets another person trapped in the tesseract, George Minkowski (we know of him from the phone calls on the island).

Meanwhile, on the fantail, Sayid is pacing while airdale Frank is getting reamed by the OOD. Frank comes down and Sayid starts asking questions (like “why we took off at dusk and landed in the middle of the day?” which frankly is a good question). Frank tells Sayid that he want to help him, and Sayid says help me by giving me your phone. Frank end up trading his phone for Sayid’s sidearm, and Sayid phones Jack back at the beach. Sayid relays the problems that Des is having, and Jack queries, “Side effects?” Which launches the good doctor Faraday into a frenzy of thought and activity. “Has he been exposed to large amounts of radiation or electromagnetic forces…?” Um yeah, a hatch implosion might count. “Going to and coming from the Island, some people may get confused” … and “No this is not amnesia” are salient points.

Back to the boat and Desmond in the sick bay with Minkowski who is catatonic while having a er… side effect. Doc comes in and sticks Minkowski with a needle, then turns on Desmond. Doc flashes a light in Desmond’s eyes, then Des is back next to Bill & Ted’s telephone booth, trying to make a call to Penny. The call doesn’t go well, Penny is pretty darn mad to be dumped by the likes of Desmond. Frankly, Desmond isn’t very convincing in his explanation, and Penny has moved on, emotionally and physically out of Desmond’s life. annnnnnd *poof* were back to the freaky doctor. Who notices that he, um, left for a bit.

The examination is cut short when Frank and Sayid burst in with the satellite phone, Daniel has to talk with Desmond immediately. Daniel asks Des what year he thinks it is, and Desmond is thinking its 1996. Daniel continues to question Des, asking where he physically is in 1996, and then has him go to Oxford to find Daniel who is a professor there in 1996. Daniel finds his notebook, conveniently still in his carry-on bag. And gives some obscure adjustments that Desmond is supposed to relay to his past self, and gives him the code Eloise. Security arrives in sick bay, and Desmond escapes to 1996, Queen’s College, Oxford.

Daniel is a professor reaming out some undergrad for “aboriginal thinking” in his rather thick ‘Thesis on Quantum Theory: Quantum Physics and Wave Mechanics’ (the joys of HD and screen caps) and Daniel is not impressed. The conversation with Desmond convinces 1996 Danny that his colleagues are playing a prank, but the notebook hints get old Danny on board, and we’re clicking on to Danny’s lab, complete with rat-maze and a cuddly rat named Eloise.

Danny gets on his mad-scientist getup complete with lead apron, none for Desmond, because he doesn’t do it twenty times a day like Danny. Desmond ask what about for your head, and the nervous Danny laugh might make us better understand his memory problems of last episode. Eloise does with a carefully calibrated dose of radiation maneuvers a new maze that she won’t learn for another hour. Which to me begs the question, does she really need to go through the process of learning it if she already know it. The answer to this question become moot later when Eloise ends up dead in the cage… so she ended up running a maze she never learned. Excuse me, need to get ice for my overheating brain.

Back in the timeline, or wherever, the thugs drag Frank and the phone out of sick bay, leaving Sayid and Des with Frank, the troubled communication officer has been getting prank calls from a Penny Widmore that he never answered.

Aand were back again, a five minute jump in 2005 takes 75 minutes in 1996, which explains rap music … I’m sure… somehow. Danny provides some dialog about what’s happening to Desmond, and says that he thinks the brain gets short-circuited since she had now anchor to be able to lock into which time one is as their consciousness shift back and forth. Desmond needs a constant to be able to break out of the shifting tesseract of time, and decides to elect Penny as a constant. But Penny moved, the number doesn’t work.

Shifting back to 2004, Minkowski relates that the communication room is busted up, and Desmond can’t call Penny (which is now his highest priority, contacting his Constant to fix his shifting mind). And so we go back and forth. In the past Desmond finds Charles Widmore and after Chuck grabs the last remaining log of the Black Pearl Rock (lot 2342) for a cool 380,000 pounds sterling. In the john, Chuck gives Desmond Penny’s new address, hoping, I think, that Penny will tell Desmond to sod-off, in her best English accent.

In the present they get back into communication room, and find it a mess of wires, but don’t worry, it’ll only take Sayid a minute to fix it. Minkowski goes into his tesseract, but before he joins Eloise on the planet Uriel (i.e. Dead) he relates that he and another crew member got bored anchored at sea, and tried to take the ship’s tender to the island to see what it looked like, only Brandon went mad, and ended up dying. As does George in a spastic effort stating, “I can’t get back”. Sayid needs a number, and Desmond doesn’t know it… so we

shift back to the washroom, where Desmond takes the address and heads off to Penny’s, and explains the mad scenario, and in the most unbelivable pickup line victory EVAH! scores her digits to make a call on Christmas Eve 2004. srsly, if I ever need a gals number, I’m using desmond’s line promising not to call for 8 years. And man, Penny needs to stop giving out her number to every freak that enters her door.

Back in the comm room, the digits flow off Desmond’s tongue to Sayid’s fingers and we get a patched ship-to-shore call to casa de Penny, and the odd British ringer tone. After way too many rings (Penny doesn’t have an answering machine apparently… maybe she primarily uses her cell, which is amazing, because I don’t even know where my land-line phone IS) The time/star-crossed lovers catch up in a cheery conversation, before the batteries die, and at the end of the call, Desmond’s brain is back where it belongs, and he remembers where he is, and who Sayid is.

Back on the isla de muerta, Danny is reading his diary, and finds out that if anything goes wrong he should use Desmond Hume as his constant.

And we’re set for next week… see you then.

Angie laughed through the whole exchange, but I really heard her bust up (I was sitting with my team) when Melvin told the audience that wives need to keep honoring their husbands even when their, “Abs of Steel have turned to Abs of Meals.”  I turned around, and looked at her and rubbed my belly.

Melvin spoke a lot about being able to achieve your dreams, by relying on God.  His stint in professional basketball, and other higher profile events, led him to rise past his humble beginnings, and realize that happiness only comes from the Lord.  He’s seen and related stories of people that had it all, wealth, pretty wives, fast cars and big houses, but still feeling empty inside.  Trust in the Lord, was his message, and the cool thing was it was apparent that he lived by that mantra as well.

After getting their basketballs signed by Melvin (and everything else, Brenna got a Melvin Adams original artwork on the back of her Upward t-shirt, Michael got his autograph on the toe of his old school Chuck Taylor shoes, and Danny pretty much had Melvin sign everything he had on him.  We went back home to get the kids into bed on time.

Then we settled down to watch the TV shows that occupy our Thursday nights.  Watched as I got 1 out of 3 right on AI (off my game, but its still early in the season), then the awesomeness that is LOST.  But we gave it up before we watched Eli Stone (or as I call it, Elijah Rock!) and went to bed.

Lets start with the danger zone for the boys:

• Jason Castro - just kinda muddled through for me
• Danny Noriega - mostly hairstyle for me… that says enough about what I feel about his singing.

High points for the doods, two singers that tempt fate by trying to sing old standards

• Luke Menard - Killer Queen is a song only Freddie Murcury can do 100%, Luke gets in the B+/A- range though.
• David Archuleta - Imagine totally different arrangement, but the kid hit the vocals just right, honoring John Lennon’s lyrics.

The rest of the guys were just aiight.  But I do admit to just barely tuning into their songs. 

The girls

No Good (i.e bad):

• Amanda Overmyer - sadly the outfit and hair might come back and bite her, the song wasn’t strong at all, could hear the background vocalist more than her most of the song.
• Alexandra Lushington - not strong vocals, and a disconnect between song and outfit.  Sorry if that seems superficial.  We are talking AI though, they say its a singing competition, but it is an image competition.

So Vain (i.e. they probably think this post is about them, and they’re right):

• Carly Smithson - hit it with the Heart standard, and its her dream.  I hope she gets to stick around more.
• Brooke White - though she forgot she was playing guitar halfway through, her vocals were good, and the judges were right about oozing the Carly vibe.

GIANT BOOK SALE

I thought to myself, how discriminatory, a book sale only for giants, what normal sized people aren’t allowed?

then…  Oh, maybe its a sale on gigantic books, the bigger the book the better, for oversized bookshelves only.

Did I invite you to my wife’s Super Bowl Party?

Kate’s son, Aaron. Hey, wait! Aaron is Claire’s son, not Kate’s. Well, yes, but we don’t yet know the dark story of what’s befallen Claire, as Miles Straum might say, maybe she never survived the crash. But Kate wasn’t pregnant when she was on the plane, and she was under the watchful eye of the now-dead Marshall, how can she pull off the illusion that Aaron is her son. Well I don’t know, but its seems common knowledge that the ‘world’ sees Aaron as Kate’s; her lawyer wanted him in the courtroom for sympathy; her mother wanted to see her ‘grandson’ with all appearances being that she believed it to be Kate; and Jack has some reluctance in seeing the poor boy post rescue. Could Claire, or what happened to Claire (remember she is Jack’s half-sister) be part of what haunts Jack about the island. Its also fairly clear in Kate’s devotion to (as we know him) her adopted son, that Aaron is the ‘he’ that Kate said would be, “wondering where she is…” at the end of last season. So even while we sprint towards answers there are plenty of new questions popping up.

I’m loving the new pace of how things are moving.

On to some mythos. This weeks allusion to myth is Hurley’s selection of movie, the great muscial Xanadu with a feature song sung by Olivia Newton John. The last time we heard such a song was ‘Road to Shambala‘ by Three Dog Night. Both are semi-mystical places. Wikipedia, though, lists Xanadu as the winter home of Kulbai Kahn, and has no reference to a Xanadu myth (at first perusal). Shambala has a more mystical background, and seems to also call in the topic of Shangri-la, and digging in at Wikipedia on those brings up that Shangri-la was the locale for a 1933 novel by James Hilton titled (get this) Lost Horizon. Read the synopsis, and I gotta believe that J.J. Abrams and Damon Lindelhof had some prior exposure to this book while crafting the larger Lost mythos.

Lyrics may have something to play in this as well, besides ONJ’s lyrics (with ELO’s music) the rock band RUSH also had a song with lyrics alluding to KK’s Xanadu.