Lost Season 4 Finale Is The Best Episode Yet

Off the island they go

Desmond finally reunited with Penny

I've just finished watching the Lost season 4 finale, and it was by far the best episode yet. Every time Penny makes an appearance, the episode is surely going to be good, but this episode is almost perfect. It shows the actual rescue. The season started by implying that they're going to get rescued, but the actual rescue was only shown on the final episode. The so called rescuers that appeared at the start of the season weren't there on a rescue mission, but in the end they played a part in the rescue.

It shows how only 6 of them manage to get off the island. Desmond is finally reunited with Penelope. It was the most satisfying moment of the entire series. After showing them searching for each other for several seasons, to see them finally together was very fulfilling.

These Lost writers really are geniuses. They manage to find the perfect balance between resolving some story lines and to continue with some to make you want more. The show started with flashbacks, then this season, it's mostly flashforwards, but after the events of this season, it's hard to figure out how the format is going to be next season. It may very well be without any "flashes", showing events on and off the island as they occur. But that itself is going to be tricky, because the time on the island is different than time off the island. It's all about this space-time continuum.

So after being rescued and living off the island for 3 years, circumstances have all the 6 rescued to want to go back to island. And how they do that is what season 5 is going to be all about. And going about doing that isn't going to be easy because Ben has moved island.

Lost Is Back!

Finally, something that can take them off the island.

Lost returned with it's 4th season last week, but the first episode was underwhelming for me. It didn't start with a bang. Things that happened were expected to happen. Nothing much revealed.

Somebody's carrying this photo of Ben.

But this week's episode really hit the mark. The rescuers finally manage to get on the island, but they aren't really there to rescue the lost bunch. The rescuers, there 4 of them, with their stories (they have their own flashbacks), really sets up what season 4 is going to be about. And it's looking good.

The Strike Is In Full Swing.

The WGA strike is in full swing. A lot of tv shows have stopped production. Shows that matter:

• 24: Production shut down with 8 episodes taped. Show on hiatus. Premiere has been delayed until such a time that the Day 7 season can air continuously with no or few interruptions.
• Lost: 8 episodes out of 16 ordered taped. In event of protracted dispute, the 8 in the can could run as a mini-season starting in the New Year with remaining shows held back for 2008-09.
• House: 12 episodes have been completed. Repeats to air after American Idol in January.
• The Simpsons: 22 of this season's 23 episodes will be completed.
• Heroes: Heroes: Origins spinoff suspended. December 3 episode to serve as finale of volume two.

And all the talk shows have stopped production and airing reruns. The surprising thing is that they are actually ending Heroes early. Not that this season has much to shout about, but still. The conclusion I have come up with about all this is, "this sucks".

Just give the writers their damn money. At first I was somewhat against the writers and their strike. But after watching this video, I think it's fair game for them to have this strike. Whether they actually get what they want is another matter. Just give me back my tv shows.

Amazing Race 12

The Teams

The best reality show on tv, The Amazing Race, will be starting it's 12th season on November 4th. I went throught the teams compteting this time, and the only team worth following is the "sisters" team of Marianna & Julia. A double dose of hotness. I hope they win the 1 mil prize just because they're hot.

The Sisters

There's also another hot chick from the "dating for almost one year" team, Rachel and some guy with 2 letters as a name. Who gives a shit who the guy is.

The Hot Chick and Nobody

The other teams are just extras. They replaced the obligatory gay team with a goth couple. The "minority" team is now an Asian father/daughter team. I know the term "Asian" can be vague and I hate to use it, but where in Asia wasn't mentioned in the article. They're the sepet kind of Asian if I have to further drill down. Just look at the damn picture on the site.

New Season

Well, it's time again where good tv shows start their new season. And there're a few new ones too. The new shows that people are saying is good is Pushing Daisies, Journeyman, and Chuck. Of the three, I've only watched the first episode of Journeyman. I'm not sure about Journeyman after reading that the creators are going to focus more on the weekly time travel escapades rather than unraveling the mystery of why he's traveling through time. What got me interested is the mystery, not the lame weekly outings. I just haven't got around to watching the other two shows.

What I'm actually downloading and watching is House, Heroes and Smallville. I know, Smallville is kinda lame, but I'll watch it until 24 or Lost returns, or until one of the new shows really makes a breakthrough. Kristin Kreuk makes it worth the download. If you don't know how hot she is, then you're really missing something. And there's a new set of pictures that show that she is one of those girls who get more beautiful when they're upset. These pics prove it. There hasn't really been any "breakthrough" shows yet this season. Last season's "breakthrough" was Heroes. I don't think there'll be one this season.

Of the three shows I'm currently following, House is easily the best. This season's House is hilarious. I find the chemistry between House and James (James is the friend, not one of those docs who works for him) just perfect this season. The banter between them just hits the right spot for me. And Heroes, the first season wasn't great, it was just good. And this season looks like its going to continue being good, not great. I've figured out a way to heighten my enjoyment of Heroes. The trick is not to take the show as seriously as 24 or Lost. If you do that, you'll just get disappointed. You need to see it as a show like Smallville with a slight touch of mystery like Lost, but not as deep. If you can manage that, you will surely increase your enjoyment of the series.

What I'm really looking forward to is Lost, but it ain't coming until next year. Other shows to look forward to 24 where rumors say there'll be no CTU, and Battlestar Galactica. And the fact that the coming season being the last season of Battlestar, it is surely going to be EPIC. But there are rumors that say that the final episode of the season will be pushed to 2009. It'll really suck if it's true.

Journeyman

There's a new tv show called Journeyman that's going to be shown soon on NBC, but as usual they leaked the first episode on to the internets to get the buzz going. There has been a lot of leaked first episode new series that has come out, but the only one that piqued my interest was Journeyman. I gave it a go, and it was somewhat entertaining.

Basically, Journeyman is Quantum Leap recreated for the 21st century. There's this guy who goes back in time to help certain people. But unlike Quantum Leap, he's not stuck in the past, but goes in and out of it throughout the episode. And to give it the 21st century touch, they added some mystery and drama. First, why he time travels is made a mystery. He has no control over when he leaps into the past and back, so his life is turned upside down, sometimes disappearing from the present for days. And for the drama part, he meets his ex-fiancee who died in a plane crash during his escapades into the past, but he's already married in the present. And to top things off, plus spoiler warning, the ex-fiancee is actually not dead, but is alive and well, and she has something to do with the guy time traveling. He actually met the future version of his ex-fiancee in the past.

But the show has its flaws too. First of all, the dialog/script needs a bit of work. There were too many cliches. I know it's the first episode, you need to introduce the characters, so it's hard not to fill a few cliches in, but there was just a bit too much of it. The acting ain't that good either, but I don't know if it's the actors' lack ability, or the script that made the acting look not so good. The only good acting came from the journeyman himself and his ex-fiancee. The others just weren't into it.

Aside from that, overall, I enjoyed the show and will keep watching it to see how it develops. There needs to be a deeper plot than going into the past saving another person each week. The unraveling of why he time travels should be a good tactic to keep audience wanting more, but it better be a good reason and reasonably paced.

Mmmmmmmore... Natali Del Conte

Natali Del Conte

She keeps getting hotter. The green outfit from episode 68 has a lower neckline, but was loose and doesn't show the contours much. The outfit in this episode is tighter, but doesn't show as much cleavage. I can't decide which one I like better. But this time I know how to optimize YouTube videos, so you can see her in all her glory in better quality.

Natali Del Conte... Mmmmmmm...

Natali Del Conte

Natali Del Conte on Cranky Geeks episode 68.

Natali Del Conte On Cranky Geeks Episode 68
Update:
Another cute video of here from Cranky Geeks episode 77 can be seen here.

2007 MTV Movie Awards

I just finished watching the 2007 MTV Movie Awards. This year's host, Sarah Silverman, was great. Her jokes were the highlight of the show.

Sarah Silverman has good jokes.

Mike Myers got one of those lifetime awards. At first I thought it was going to be lame, because he hasn't been very funny in his past few movies, but surprisingly it was good. The gag about not being a sell-out was really funny.

Mike Myers selling out to Pontiac.

And Cameron Diaz, who presented the award to him, wore this ridiculously short skirt. It'll be very hard to not see her panties (if she's wearing any) when she's sitting down. She'll need to cross her legs constantly.

A short skirt and Cameron Diaz.

Other things that happened, Jack Nicholson's acceptance speech was incomprehensible. Jerry Bruckheimer is afraid of his writers, specifically the writers of his Pirates movie. You can see/hear him whispering to Johnny Depp telling him to thank the writers of the movie. And speaking of Johnny Depp, he's still stuck in the 80s, at least in his fashion sense. He wouldn't be out of place if he walked in on the set of 21 Jump Street dressed the way he was. And the flailing hand gestures of Captain Jack Sparrow is actually natural to him, and not something he made up for the character. You can see it during his acceptance speech.

Depp stuck in the 80s. Torn-at-the-knee jeans & shirt tied around the waist.

Depp with Bruckheimer.

And this year, they have user submitted video spoofs thing. They are trying to get on teh user generated content bandwagon, and all 3 of the user submitted videos they showed were lame. The one they did themselves was very funny.

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MTV Movie Awards 2007 spoof video.

And Rihanna performed live, and I was really impressed by it (the performance). She can actually sing, and the song was good too. The other performance was from Amy Winehouse. I've heard her name before, but never knew that she was a singer. She's not that hot, and I couldn't care about her music. Her performance, with her 60s hair and moves, with tattoos all over her arms, to be honest, she looked retarded. And she has bad teeth too.

Rihanna: Good.

Winehouse: Meh..

Then they presented the awards for the Best Summer Movie for this summer, and Transformers won. I'm more excited about The Simpsons Movie than Transformers. Of the all the 8 nominees, the one's I'll go watch at the theater will be Transformers, Rush Hour 3 and Harry Potter. I wish I could watch the Simpsons Movie at the theater, but I doubt it will ever be shown in Malaysian theaters, and even if it was, it'll be censored to death.

Joost

I've been hearing about Joost for weeks now, but have never really been interested in it. The thing that got me to try it was a Slashdot post about ISPs spoiling online video. Having first hand experience with TM's crappy broadband service, the last100 article intrigued me.

Almost all the methods that they describe on how ISPs are saving their bandwidth, TM is doing it, and the worst part is Malaysians don't really have an alternative ISP. Sure there's Maxis broadband, but I've heard it's almost as crappy as TM's but with better customer service and higher monthly rates. And don't get me started on how far behind we are compared with other countries in the region.

Anyway, let's get back to Joost. Joost is an online tv service. It has channels like normal tv, and it's free just like normal tv. Joost is still an invitation-only service, but you can get an invite fairly easily. Just do a Google search, which I did, and the easiest link I found was this: Joost - Please invite me! Give an email address, click on the link, download it.... you know, the usual stuff. It installed without a hitch.

The first thing I noticed about it was the video quality - it is incredible. For streaming content, the quality is just amazing. This is no YouTube or Metacafe or any other of those short clips, low quality video sites. Joost holds true to their claim, it's actual TV, only on the net.

It started off with some video showing what's on tv and stuff, but they set the volume at full blast by default. That's not good. The user interface is fairly intuitive, it took me a few seconds to figure out how to hide/show the UI controls.

After messing with the UI, I looked to see what channels were available, and low and behold, one of them was Sports Illustrated Swimsuit on Demand. What more can I say. I watched through the first model's profile, then they showed that the next model was going to be Ana Beatriz Barros. I'm a huge fan of her, so I continued watching. But once she started talking, I wasn't as compelled to watch it anymore. I should stick to looking at her pictures, and avoid her videos. I switched to the Gamestar channel. It all went fine but after a few seconds, the stream started to be choppy. Maybe it's because it was a higher quality stream or maybe a longer show, I don't know.

Ana Beatriz Barros

Overall, I'm really impressed with Joost, and I may get around to watching it again, but it may cause my ISP to cap my bandwidth usage. It really felt like tv for some reason, not like when I'm watching a video file. While I was sitting and watching it, something in my brain gave out a signal that this is tv. I don't get that feeling when watching tv shows that I've downloaded. This could very well be the future of tv, but will people of the future would want to watch tv? Who knows.

Season Finales Roundup

I managed to catch up on my tv watching this weekend. Tis time of the year when the good shows have their season finales. I'll start off with Scrubs.

For scrubs, the season finale is a 1 hour episode, and actually the funniest episode all season. They try to add some serious drama element into this episode for the cliffhanger ending, but it didn't matter. I don't watch Scrubs for the drama, I watch it for the gags, and this episode in particular was chockablock full of 'em. And they were even funny too, unlike some of the ones in other episodes of the season.


JD has is getting child, and Elliot is getting married. At this important turning point in their lives, they look for each other for comfort. Yadyadya.. who cares, the important thing is its a very funny episode. If you're looking for a "dramatic" episode, the one where Laverne dies has more impact than this one.

The next one is 24. I've got to say right off the bat, the stupidest ending ever. Oooh.. Jack's all shaken up. Yeah, yeah yeah... whatever. It's like, you've seen one season, you've seen them all. They seriously need to reinvent the show. If they don't show any significant change in the first 2 episodes of next season, I'll stop watching. It's not even worth it. And, the theme of the season finale seems to be: Jack Bauer is always right, everybody else is wrong.

Jack Bauer survives to live another day.

The problem is that each season, they try to make a shocker episode to bring in ratings, and the shocker is always: somebody's gonna die. Everybody dies except Jack. The only character you're allowed to get attached to is Jack. So, if you don't like Jack very much, there's no reason to watch this show. Plus, this season, Jack is extra emo. I don't want to see Jack get all emo. I mean, the girl can walk already, thanks to Linderman. Just move on.

And speaking of Linderman, the next season finale I watched was Heroes. That was the greatest segue ever. I must say, it was great. I was expecting more of an all-out heroes brawl in the middle of New York, but what they did was okay too. They tied loose ends but they created new ones too for next season. I honestly expected more from the season finale. It felt as if they rushed things too much, there was not enough buildup. It would've been a lot better if they made a double episode season finale.

Peter goes BOOM!

Plus, a few things didn't add up in the story. I mean, why couldn't Sylar stop Hiro. Hiro was running towards him, but he didn't do anything. And how come Parkman didn't die immediately when he was "shot" by so many bullets.

Yattaa!

However, it was great, but I expected more. And one more thing, they need to improve the dialogue in the show. Those kinds of dialogues are okay in comic books, but if you put it in live action, it just sounds cheesy.

And I'm saving the best for last, it's Lost's season finale. First off, if there was a Pulitzer for tv writing, the writers of Lost should get it. Lost has consistently been good throughout. Even during season 2 when people start saying that it's going nowhere, I personally felt it was going somewhere, and somewhere great for that matter.

Going somewhere?

And this season proved it. Throughout this season, they've been revealing more and more, and the best one they've saved for last. The previous season's ending (season2), they finally revealed that there was actually an outside world looking for the island, in the form of Penny. For me, that was one of the greatest moments in tv history. I've never felt more satisfied with a tv episode than that moment. This season's finale didn't actually change that. I still feel that the season 2's finale was still better than this one's. But in terms of overall season enjoyment, this season is the best one yet.

Penny makes an appearance, just like season 2's finale.

They did Charlie justice by killing him in a very meaningful and respectful way. One the best main character deaths on tv. But I'm not sure if he's really dead. I mean he (Dominic Monaghan) is getting married to Evangeline Lilly, so he'll still be around the set in Hawaii. It'll be a waste not to bring him back in some way for next season.

Goodbye Charlie.

Another reason why this season has been great - Kate (Evangeline Lilly) is hotter than ever this season. And the amount of skin she has shown throughout this season really contributes to this season's enjoyability.

Somebody's jealous.

Oh, that's why.

And for the first time ever, and the biggest shocker of all, the flashbacks in the 2 final episodes weren't really flashbacks. We find out that it is actually the future after they've been rescued. And future Jack has regrets about being rescued. Is this good tv or what!

Future Jack with future Kate.

But one minor detail that bugged me right from the start of the episode was how terrible was future Jack's fake mustache is. The makeup guy/girl should get fired for this shoddy job. The beard was fine but the mustache really looked fake. And future Kate looks as if she had a facelift with too much lift.

Bad fake mustache.

Overall Heroes and Lost made this a good year of tv watching. Battlestar Galactica was a disappointment, but I hope the next season is the final one. 24 was a disappointment too, but who cares. Lost more than made up for the disappointments. And all the talk about the next 2 seasons of Lost will only have 16 episodes was really disheartening, but you can be rest assured that all 16 will be great. I hope they make some of the 16 episodes a 2 hour one.

The Simpsons 400th Episode Double Feature.

Two episodes of The Simpsons were relesed this week to celebrate it's 400th episode. The first one was a "24" spoof that was somewhat amusing just because they actually had Kiefer Sutherland as Jack Bauer, together with all the "24" montage and stuff. However, it wasn't a really funny episode. I nearly stopped watching it because the main attraction of The Simpons its "plotless" nature. You can start with one story, but end with a whole different one that's barely related to the one before. The "24" spoof made it predictable, you know what's coming next. They are banking on the parody stuff to make it entertaining, but it didn't actually hit the mark.

The second one was really funny. It's about the Fox network's conspiracy/hypocrisy thing. And the fact that Fox is actually airing this episode makes it even funnier. I never archive The Simpsons episodes I download, but considering these two episodes are somewhat different from the normal ones, I'll just burn 'em to CD just the sake of it. I'll probably never watch it again, but one thing about The Simpsons is that it has a very high "rewatchability" value. Star World show reruns of The Simpsons every weekday at 6, and I'll watch it and still be entertained. However, the old episodes where the animations were still "raw" aren't as enjoyable.

You can see how the characters have evolved over the years not only in animation, but also their behavior. Even the nature of the jokes have changed over time. In the old show, everybody was more aggressive. If Lisa were to behave now like she did in the early days of the show, it would be really obvious how out of character she is. I think these 2 episodes were the season ender too, so it'll be a while before I can get my Simpsons fix again. Looking forward to the movie.