I cried a lot as a child until I didn’t. I would cry about anything and everything. If I thought we’d be having something different for dinner, I’d cry. If I couldn’t find my pencil sharpener, I’d cry. If I couldn’t watch something on TV… ok that one happened a lot. Adults were telling me that I needed to stop crying so easily and toughen up. When I was ten years old, I remember crying in front of everyone I knew at school, mostly because people kept picking on me for being a little weird (wonder what was up with that), and it got embarrassing. It got so embarrassing that I decided, there and then, that I would stop crying. I would “man up” and deal with it.

And so I did. A little too well. I pretty much never cried once I hit my teenage years. I successfully shut all those feelings down. This seems to be pretty common among trans women, whether that’s because of dysphoria numbing your emotions, or the chemical effects of testosterone, or whatever. I’m not here to diagnose a medical cause here. I’m just observing what happened.

That didn’t make people stop thinking I was weird, far from it. People have thought that my entire life. Being kind of emotionless at times was no better on that front. I remember my grandma died when I was 12 years old. I loved my grandma, and missed her dearly in my teenage years. But I was sat there when I was told she was about to pass, and I was sat there at her funeral, and I just couldn’t feel anything. I wanted to be very sad about it, but I just couldn’t feel those feelings, and it wasn’t because I didn’t care.

This happened over and over again. I couldn’t feel, and I couldn’t cry. The only thing I did consistently feel was anxiety, and that tended to bubble into meltdowns and freakouts. In my adult life, I only once had a serious, proper cry over something once when I was very drunk, and I can’t even remember what that was about. Until the night when I’m writing this paragraph, and I just bawled my eyes out.

I knew it was coming at some point. Every post I’ve read, and I’ve read them all, said that being on hormones will make you cry. And I was growing frustrated that it hadn’t happened in just over a year on HRT. My testosterone levels were a touch higher than they needed to be until around late March (though still far, far lower than before), and maybe that stopped me getting there. I don’t know. But it finally happened. I finally had the ugly cry I’d been waiting for. And I cried about that waiting.

A lot of trans women talk about kind of thresholds of revelation. There is so much writing online about realising you’re trans, starting to transition, taking the hormones, and being able to reevaluate your entire life in a different context. All of that has happened to me. But it was split over two completely different periods. The experience is so bifurcated for me that I find it hard to totally relate to the way most trans women talk about it.

I realised I was trans over a decade ago now. I fully accepted my gender along time ago. I understood what was happening in my head. I recognised exactly who I was. I saw all of my own past behaviours reflected back through a lens of gender dysphoria and it all made sense. I had aced the theory portion of the exam without ever taking the practice portion. I was an astronomer, able to see the constellations clearly without ever going into space.

The best “window” for transitioning in my life was probably when I was 21. I was at university, I could’ve started doing it pretty quietly without anyone in my family finding out until I was ready. I could’ve been anyone there, and I ended up being no one. I just… never quite managed to do it. I graduated and, shockingly, a degree in film studies did not exactly lead to a string of employment opportunities. So I flitted between living with each of my parents (they’re not together), ultimately failing to hold down a part time minimum wage retail job. I really didn’t know how to progress in those years. I felt completely paralysed with what felt like almost no hope of transitioning.

I was visibly trans online. It was pretty much my only escape. But I’m not sure how much it helped. The contrast between being Grace on Twitter, and being a hollowed out shell of a human being known by another name in real life, felt worse and worse as time went on. Even if brain fog dysphoria meant that I usually didn’t believe them, plenty of people did genuinely like me on there. I didn’t like me much, but hey, dysphoria and all. There were a few times when people wanted to be friends beyond twitter, whether they lived nearby, were visiting, or just wanted to chat over video or something. And the answer I could never quite give was: “I don’t know how to be this person outside of a text-based medium”.

So I sat inside alone. I read a lot of posts. A lot of trans people end up building comfortable but ultimately unfulfilling lives for themselves. They end up with careers they feel totally detached from, with partners and/or children they can’t be entirely there for. I already knew I was trans in my 20s, so I didn’t do that. I didn’t want to create even more barriers for when I did eventually transition, oh, any day now. So I made my life as small as possible. I had no friends, no relationships, nothing of any connection to in real life outside my family. I didn’t exist.

I did exist online, so inevitably that was how I broke out of the rut. I got popular enough writing about football that I, somehow, was able to build enough of an audience to make a living out of it. That’s right, kids, if you want to make (some) money, start writing on the internet. It took me time to do it, and the economic privilege of not having to pay much in rent at the time, but I was able to get to a financial position where I could move into my own place, with some money in the bank, and be Grace Robertson for real, not just on the computer.

That was last year. In all that time, I don’t know how many friends of mine on the internet themselves turned out to be trans. Some of them told me that I helped them figure out who they were. And many of them started transitioning pretty quickly after that. All of them were doing better for it, all of them living better and more valuable lives as their true selves. And I wasn’t. I’m not proud of this at all, but in some of my worst moments, I couldn’t help but think “I’m delighted for you, I truly am, but I cannot process another of my friends getting better while I’m still here wanting to kill myself”. It felt like it was never my turn. I know all of this is ridiculous and petty and selfish, and I can now say I truly am happy for every single one of my friends. But it was hard.

It was harder still because I couldn’t actually process any of those emotions properly. I just felt anxiety and dread over it all. A lot of what I’ve written here is pretty basic early trans girl stuff of the sort many of my friends moved past a long time ago. And I should have moved past it. There’s a version of me in some alternate universe who transitioned when she was 21, and she moved past all of this years ago. I have no idea what she’s doing now, but she got to live a decade of her life as a real person. I’ll never get that.

And then, tonight, all of those feelings just kind of came pouring out of me. I can’t turn the clock back. I can’t get all those years of my life back that I’ve lost forever. I can’t change that I’m having extremely basic trans feelings at age 32 when it could’ve happened such a long time ago. I know that I’m here now, and that’s what matters. God knows how many trans people are driven to suicide in that pit of dysphoria in a world that hates us. I made it out alive, and that has to count for something, even if it took me a lot longer to get out than I thought.

I have no idea how long I’ll live for. I lost a decade, but I should have plenty more. It hurts. I’ll probably cry about it some more. But at least that’s proof that I’m alive right now, that these things really are happening to a real, tangible version of me. At least that’s something.

This article contains spoilers for I Saw the TV Glow. Proceed with caution. The film is finally coming out in the UK and Ireland on the 26th of July, and is currently available via video on demand in North America. Everyone else… you’re on the internet, that’s all I’ll say. I’m not really going to bother explaining the plot here, so you might get a little lost if you haven’t seen it, but you know what to do.

“I try not to think about it”

What happens if you spend your whole life refusing the call?

This is not how dramatic storytelling is “supposed” to work. Hollywood filmmaking has internalised Joseph Campbell’s rules to the point of death. I think everyone has taken the Hero’s Journey far too literally, as these are descriptions rather than prescriptions, but the notion has spread through to every mainstream film you watch: the protagonist will be called to adventure, then refuse the call before deciding to take the leap. The refusal is the “boring” bit, the part where the hero is standing in the way of the cool stuff we bought a ticket to see, and gets condensed down quite a bit.

All of us want to narrativise our own lives. You can argue that real life doesn’t work that way, that it’s just a whole bunch of stuff that happens on your way to the grave. But that’s not how people experience it in the moment. Trans people, I think, particularly like to do this. The moment your egg cracks, the moment you self-actualise and accept who you are, your entire life becomes reframed about getting to that moment. Once you accept the call, your entire journey thus far was about getting there.

When Neo takes the red pill, everything he ever did in his life becomes about reaching that point. The original Matrix presents this as a choice we can all make, but the most recent entry in the series, Resurrections, redefines this. “When somebody offered me these things”, the character Bugs says in the film, “I went off on binary conceptions of the world and said there was no way I was swallowing some symbolic reduction of my life. And the woman with the pills laughed because I was missing the point. The choice is an illusion. You already know what you have to do”.

Resurrections is the only Matrix film made after Lana Wachowski transitioned (her sister Lilly was not involved), and it shows. It’s the first time the notion of the series as a trans metaphor seems to be tackled head on. It’s the film that actually deals with the fact that Wachowski did take the red pill after making the original trilogy. But here’s the thing: she made Resurrections well over a decade after making those decisions. This is a retroactive narrative of someone’s own life. It’s not about how it feels to make these choices in the moment.

Once you know you’re trans, it seems obvious, but up until that exact point it feels impossible. I can look back at my own life and say that, obviously, I was a trans woman who didn’t realise it, and that’s why I thought a particular way or did a particular thing. But right there, in the moment? It wasn’t on my radar at all. If someone had told me as a teenager that they thought I was trans, I would have looked at them like they lost their mind. That’s not something I could possibly be, don’t be so ridiculous. Even if I secretly wanted to be a girl more than anything, the idea of being transgender seemed so patently ludicrous until, one day, it wasn’t. But I had to figure that out for myself. I couldn’t have been told it.

I Saw the TV Glow captures that problem better than any artwork I’ve seen. Maddy lays out everything to Owen and he completely rejects it. He does what any rational human being does if told they’re actually a character from a TV show trapped in an alternate dimension, and dismisses it as obvious nonsense, even if he feels it’s true on some level. You cannot simply go up to someone and tell them they’re entire life is a lie. They need to be given a choice. They need to be given enough to make the right decision when asked to take the red or blue pill. But what if it’s still not enough? What if every clue has been left in someone’s life and they still don’t see it? What then?

Take a look at the very first shot in I Saw the TV Glow. It’s a tracking shot, so a still doesn’t quite do it justice, but we’ll make do.

Ok, that’s a little hard to see. But as the movie’s tagline says, look a little closer. Let’s zoom in.

It’s the ice cream truck. Ok, I would call it an ice cream van, but this is an American film and so the characters would call it a truck. The very same ice cream truck from The Pink Opaque. It’s right outside his house. All the answers Owen wants are sitting there on his street and he can’t even see them. He’s trying not to think about the thing staring him in the face. It’s always easier to ignore the idea that you could be trans, especially as more time passes. You might be wearing the wrong shoes, they might be digging into the soles of your feet and causing them to bleed, but you’ve worn them in at this point. The more that time passes, the comfier that cis identity gets, and the harder it is to throw it away in order to live your life as the person you really are. And so what do you do in that situation? You don’t think about it. You ignore the ice cream truck outside your house. You close yourself off to the gender feelings in your head and just get on with day-to-day monotony. As a trans woman friend of mine put it, “you keep doing things. You watch your favourite shows. You don’t think about it.”

A whole lot of people have argued on the internet about whether Maddy’s explanation is “true”. The movie is obviously built to make you ponder that question, giving you just enough reason to believe without ever providing the definitive evidence either way. Personally, walking out of the cinema I had the most annoying response possible: it doesn’t matter either way. Regardless of whether Owen/Isabel is literally trapped in a hell dimension or not, the point is that they’re suffocating. They (pronouns are hard here lol) know that their life is “wrong” and that they’re not making a choice about that. It’s the feeling of living a hollowed out life that matters, and that’s what the film is about. I spent a lot of time in the last newsletter discussing how the film evokes season six of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and you can definitely interpret it as in conversation with the episode “Normal Again”, in which Buffy is trapped between the show’s world and another dimension where she’s in a mental health institution and made the whole thing up. I don’t think it’s a great episode of Buffy, but I do love the way it sidesteps which world is “real”. What matters is that Buffy decided to live with her friends and keep fighting. The same can be true of I Saw the TV Glow. As someone who realised I was trans in 2012 and didn’t start doing anything about it outside the computer until 2023, it speaks to me.

I don’t think there’s a “correct” reading of the film either way. But the more I reflect on it, the more I find the idea that it isn’t real a little bleak. I am more often on the side of rational and grounded takes on these kinds of stories. I think Nora is lying at the end of The Leftovers, for example, and I’ll never be persuaded otherwise. I am temperamentally someone who tends to side with hard facts in these situations. But I can’t quite get there this time. I want to believe.

People arguing the case that it’s all true like to put forth the following theory: I Saw the TV Glow, the film we are watching, is in fact the sixth season premiere of The Pink Opaque. After Isabel and Tara get trapped in the Midnight Realm, we watch them play out their fake lives in what they think is a town called Void (ha ha). The movie directly references this. About halfway through, Owen finds a weird crater in the middle of the road with a collection of ephemera from the TV show. It’s hard to make out, but he reads a page from an episode guide for the show, describing the sixth season premiere in which our heroes are trapped in a fake world where the only sign of what’s really up is “the weekly transmissions of a dumb TV show”.

This gets at what I thought was an irrelevant and question I had watching the movie: is The Pink Opaque supposed to be a good show? On first glance, the answer is pretty clearly no. Owen watches the show back as an adult and it’s “cheesy and cheap, dated, and not scary at all.” That would be that. But the movie has such a genuine affection for the real shows that influenced it. Jane Schoenbrun clearly thinks these shows they really loved growing up have some merit. Maybe it’s just that I love Buffy the Vampire Slayer too much to have it besmirched even tangentially. But the idea that The Pink Opaque, which so much to Owen and Maddy, was all empty trash is almost as grim as the notion that Maddy is completely deluded. Maybe these hormones are just turning me into a complete sap (they definitely are), but I don’t want to believe that.

If I Saw the TV Glow is indeed the sixth season premiere, then it’d be one of the boldest and most ambitious episodes of television ever made. The cheesy version of The Pink Opaque Owen watches near the end of the movie would not be capable of it. So what’s going on? Buffy did its fair share of ambitious format-breaking episodes, and those feel like an influence here. But this is not an episode of TV that could have aired in the late ‘90s or early 2000s. This has knowledge of the world stretching all the way into mid-2010s streaming technology. This is something different. Then it hit me.

It’s Twin Peaks. We’re watching the third season of Twin Peaks.

If you haven’t seen Twin Peaks then I don’t know why you’re deciding to spend your precious time on earth reading this newsletter instead of watching it. You should watch Twin Peaks. But I’ve got you now, so stay with me. Schoenbrun cites the second season finale, the last episode of the original run, as a “mild inspiration”. In the episode, the show’s protagonist Agent Cooper (or “Coop”), becomes trapped in the Red Room, a kind of alternate dimension waiting room accessed from the middle of a forest, that plays home to BOB, a kind of mythical being and the series’ main villain. In the show’s very final scene, we learn that over in “our” world”, BOB has taken over Coop’s body, right as the real Coop is trapped in that other dimension. I know many people were disappointed that the episode answered so few questions, but I’ll never understand this mentality, as I find it a very haunting and fitting ending to the show’s original run.

It’s a pretty clear influence on Isabel and Tara’s fate in the finale of The Pink Opaque. I could summarise the fictional TV episode, but Owen already does that in the movie:

“Isabel follows the sound of Tara’s voice in the psychic plane, back to their old sleepaway camp. She finds her at the dock by the lake, the place where they first spoke five seasons ago. But then, as Isabel approaches, she picks something up. A stray signal from the psychic plane. It’s a desperate message from Tara. The real Tara. She’s buried underground in terrible danger. Mr. Melancholy had got to her first.”

The film then shows Mr. Melancholy capturing Isabel and subjecting her to the same fate.

“They cut out her [Isabel’s] heart. They feed her the Luna Juice. And then he makes his entrance. Mr. Melancholy, the big bad.

From there, the movie depicts Mr. Melancholy toying with Isabel in her last seconds before getting trapped in another dimension. “You’re gonna love the Midnight Realm. It’s such a wonderful, wonderful prison”, he explains, as he traps Isabel in a fate that definitely feels inspired by Twin Peaks.

He says all of this while holding a snow globe containing Owen in front of a TV screen. He shakes the snow globe pretty aggressively. It’s an obvious reference to the last episode of St. Elsewhere, another famously provocative finale that bends reality.

Schoenbrun described feeling almost “assaulted” by the Twin Peaks finale. “There was something horrible unresolved in my subconscious”, they explained. Owen has that kind of response to the end of The Pink Opaque, his consciousness getting sucked into the TV screen as the fictional character he may or may not be gets buried alive and sent to the Midnight Realm.

“They bury her… alive. And then… it just ended”

That’s how The Pink Opaque ends, and that’s how Twin Peaks ended. Until it didn’t. Laura Palmer told us she’d see us again in 25 years and, well, running a little late at 26 years later, she did.

The third season of Twin Peaks (I know a lot of people call it by its subtitle The Return, but to me that feels like a marketing invention since it never appears in the show) is a challenging, knotty and stunning work of TV. In its sparseness, it was able to evoke a kind of emptiness in the modern world. It’s not particularly attempting to comment on the 2010s but, like a lot of David Lynch’s work, evokes a feeling of truth better than anyone could actually articulate it. The town of Twin Peaks no longer feels like a soapy hub by the show’s vaguely 2017 timeframe, and that drift towards alienation made the world feel colder. It swaps the warm celluloid hues of the original run for a kind of aggressively realistic digital look that I would normally hate, but here it just added to the distance the show evoked. It’s very hard to write about because it resists analysis. Great show. You should watch it.

It’s also an exercise in delayed satisfaction. We spend most of the season not with the “real” Coop but with another doppelganger, “Dougie Jones”, a kind of mentally childlike facsimile of a real man who comically stumbles through life. “Lynch and series co-creator Mark Frost”, Vikram Murthi wrote halfway through the season, “are teasing Cooper’s eventual return by taunting the audience’s desire for something familiar, turning the most recognisable avatar of Twin Peaks into a childlike figure who has yet to fully awaken to reality […] Lynch and Frost have created the single most compelling character of The Return by refusing to provide the audience with what they ostensibly crave. Dougie-Coop represents Twin Peaks at its best — an unpredictable vision that challenges and provokes its audience rather than appeases them.”

Twin Peaks didn’t exactly invent this, so I can’t put all the credit here, but it spends a lot of time dealing with people being split between their bodies and their consciousness. By the third season, Kyle MacLachlan has played three different characters: the “real” Coop, BOB controlling Coop’s body, and Dougie. I Saw the TV Glow takes those ideas and bends them into the trans metaphor of feeling disconnected from your physical self.

The third season is how I imagine the sixth season of The Pink Opaque would feel. Bear with me while I go down a rabbit hole about the movie’s timeline.

The film opens on election night, giving us a hard date for the inciting incident: Tuesday November 5th, 1996. Owen goes to a sleepover at Maddy’s house the following Saturday, watches the show that would change his life, and then heads home the next morning. That’s the first timeframe of the movie.

We cut to “two years later”, which would put us in late 1998 or, as I think is more likely, early 1999. I promise you I’m going somewhere with this. This section at least feels like it takes place over a longer amount of time. Owen gets into a routine of watching the tapes Maddy leaves for him before finally bringing himself to talk to her. They’re both as lonely and alienated as each other, using the show as a coping mechanism for the emptiness they feel inside. We only get to see one more sleepover, though I feel like it’s at least implied it happened a few more times, and we’re watching a curated telling of the story. Then in what I think is July 1999, Owen’s mother dies of cancer, Maddy disappears, and The Pink Opaque gets cancelled at the end of its fifth season.

Eight years on, Owen is a twenty-something adrift in a dead end service job he seems to hate. All of this takes place years after the show was cancelled, so if this is the season six premiere, it was either made a long time after 1999, or it’s stunningly insightful about what the world would look like. We see a clip from Transmorphers, a 2007 “mockbuster” from ripoff slop factory The Asylum trying to cash in on Michael Bay’s first Transformers movie. It feels important that Owen’s life in this world is so soulless and bereft of meaning that he doesn’t even get the real Transformers, just a cash-grab copy. He meets Maddy again in a supermarket drenched in displays of the American flag, a clear visual symbol that this is post-9/11. He gets told everything and decides not to take the leap. The world around him is becoming coarser and more alienating as he becomes less and less of a person in a pit of dysphoria.

Maddy/Tara1 takes the leap and Owen/Isabel does not. Owen lives with that lingering thought for the rest of his life. He believes, on some level, even if he can’t rationally justify it. “The movie theatre closed the next fall”, presumably a victim of the 2008 crash, Owen moves to a different dead end job, and time just keeps passing. “Years pass like seconds” because we’re so far removed from any true version of himself that he’s numb to everything. By the time he’s watching The Pink Opaque on streaming again it’s, oh, 2017 or so? If this is the season six premiere, the numbness of watching an old favourite back on a streamer feels like a shot at nostalgia-addled fans and whatever platform hosts The Pink Opaque.

Ok, so this is season six, episode one, airing about 18 years after the show first got cancelled. Like Twin Peaks, the creative team have less than no interest in giving the fans the nostalgia they crave. Instead, it’s interested in alienation in an increasingly cold and cruel world, as fans of the show form unhealthy attachments with the work the creators made two decades ago. And sure, let’s say someone involved high up has transitioned since 1999, and wants to return to the show exploring those themes.

Knowing what we do about Twin Peaks and TV in general, we can imagine how the season will play out. Isabel will be trapped in the Midnight Realm for most of the season, perhaps Tara has returned to their world and things are increasingly broken and distant without the two of them united. Isabel might finally return very late in the season, before confronting whatever menaces the world now for a new ending that offers just as much cathartic horror without much in the way of resolution.

At least, that’s what I want to believe. I know I just made it all up, and it’s not much more than an interesting thought exercise. I want to believe it because I want to believe that Owen is going to be ok. I need some kind of narrative redemption here in a work very intent on not playing by those rules.

In reality, actual reality, neither reading of the film is real. This is the narrative we’re given, and Schoenbrun decides not to give us that closure. What we get instead is a middle aged Owen 20 years later, looking in the mirror and seeing the TV glow inside of him, before returning to his hollow shell of an existence at the menial job he still works in. He does the single most egg-coded act of apologising to literally everyone just for existing, and then the movie cuts to black.

Watching that ending, I felt stressed and saddened that I couldn’t get the closure on a fictional character I was relating to so intensely. But I, personally, felt a sense of closure in myself. The movie is a warning, a lesson I had already heeded. I am here transitioning. I had avoided Owen’s fate. Every day I’m on these hormones and getting closer to my transition goals, I feel less like an empty shell and more like an actual human being.

“Gender dysphoria” is a weird and confusing thing that I don’t think any of us fully understand. It’s not even clear this is something that actually exists, rather than a convenient fiction borne out of lies trans people tell healthcare professionals in desperate acts to get the treatment we need. But having lived with it for 32 years, I’m entitled to some thoughts.

I think most people imagine it as a kind of intense dissatisfaction looking in the mirror, a desperate longing to have a different body from birth. And that’s part of it. But for much of my life, I never thought of it like that. I wouldn’t have registered that as being my experience before I realised I was trans. I didn’t really perceive much about my own appearance at all. I tried not to think about it. I just kind of ghosted through life as though none of it was really happening, feeling like the world was less real than it was supposed to be, disappearing into fictional narratives because that was so much easier.

If you spend time online looking around in trans spaces, a lot of people questioning their identity ask the same question: “do I need to have dysphoria to be trans?” They don’t feel like they’re experiencing actual, honest-to-god pain at being their assigned gender at birth, so they can’t really be trans, right? And if they ask it, the answer always comes back the same: lots of us felt like this. I certainly did. When I first started poking around this stuff, my thought process was “well I think I’d prefer to be a woman, but I’m not screaming in pain with dysphoria, so maybe I’m not trans”.

Folks, I was screaming in pain with dysphoria. I just couldn’t see it. I didn’t understand at the time, but the emptiness with which I moved through life all stemmed from that dysphoria.

There is a word for this: depersonalisation. It runs through just about any trans experience. “Everything always seemed like it was somehow less real than it ought to be”, put one very prominent account of this experience. “Each day was like checking off a box, knowing that eventually the days would run out, but not really knowing how else to spend the time.

“You live for a while, and then you die, and that’s that. I didn’t think there was anything else to life. So why bother with any real long-term goals? When I did set goals for myself, it was just for the sake of it – not because I was motivated by any purpose that I genuinely cared about. Nothing made me feel truly fulfilled, like I was accomplishing anything meaningful. So why bother?”

I Saw the TV Glow is the great artistic depiction of depersonalisation dysphoria. It captures that exact feeling of malaise, of emptiness, of pointlessness just drifting through a life in the backseat that doesn’t feel like your own. This is the film’s real achievement: depicting something so acutely that we can all point to it when we’re trying to describe to people what this feels like.

We’re over 4,000 words into my ramblings about this film I liked so much. If you’ve made it this far, maybe I’m just that brilliant a writer, but for some of you, I have to think you resonated with at least something in the movie or what I’ve said about it. And this film isn’t subtle in what it’s trying to say. And if you felt even a little bit of the alienation and emptiness in this movie… I don’t know you (unless I do, but play along, here). I can’t tell you what you feel. But if you’re engaged enough to read this deep into a trans woman’s thoughts about this film, I’d at least ask the question.

I genuinely think everyone should at least consider their gender identity at some point in their life. The worst case scenario is that you are the gender you thought you were, at which point, congratulations for knowing yourself better! But if you feel any kind of mix of feeling like you’re drifting through life and even an inkling of ambivalence about your gender, all I’ll say is there might be something there.

Gender dysphoria is like the Earth’s rotation. You can’t feel it because you’ve never known anything else. And yet it’s at play in everything you ever do, every thought you hold. If you’re in its grips and don’t know it, you cannot truly be happy until you confront it. It’ll eat away at more and more of your life the longer you let it run its course. But you can always turn things around and take action. You can always decide to live the life you want to be living, the life you need to be living. As the movie says, there is still time.

“There's an extended ending”, says Justice Smith, who plays Owen, “where he comes out of the bathroom, he's apologising to everyone for his panic attack, and as he slowly picks up speed, he runs through the arcade and the [light], and essentially, gets out. And Jane decided to cut that and just end it on him apologising for his existence. And so it creates this dynamic of, Will he ever get out?”

As for the actual ending that exists, Smith insists that “Jane and I think it's actually hopeful. Because it's more vague, because you see his expression in the mirror, he's very happy and he's moved by the light that he sees, and there's no denying it. And so, obviously, he's apologetic to everybody, but at least he's closer to who he truly is. At least he's accepted now who he truly is because he's seen it.

“[But it] is bleak. It's something that a lot of people experience. There are people who are lying in the graveyard right now, who never, ever lived their truth. There's a lot of people like that who will never accept who they are out of fear.”

For a very long time, I was one of those people.

I remember lying in bed, after months of thinking about it. I remember deciding that I was going to count to three, and on three, I would stop denying it and just admit I was a trans woman. I got to three and felt such relief at accepting who I was, then that was that. It was January 2012. I would turn 20 in two months.

By the time I finally got the hormones and started transitioning for real, it was July 2023. I was 31 years old. Time moved fast in those days. The years passed like seconds.

I could give you a bunch of excuses as to why I didn’t transition for all those years. The barriers did exist. But I know that I could’ve pushed through them. There were times in my life when I could’ve escaped the Midnight Realm, I could’ve crossed over, but I didn’t. I’m doing it now and I finally feel like I’m really alive, which is wonderful. But still, I should be further along. I should be beyond the phase that other trans women insist I’ll get over where I’m thinking about this stuff constantly. But I’m not. I spend every day thinking about those years that just didn’t happen, that I’ll never get back.

There is still time, but only so much of it. At moments in the past, that made me feel defeatist enough to never want to try. But now, having felt what it’s like to actually live your own life, it just makes every second more precious. There’s no going back, but you can always make things count today. I wish I had lived more of my life. But one second of my life is worth more than a thousand years of the life I was living before.

For that, I am grateful.

This article contains spoilers for I Saw the TV Glow. If you haven’t seen it and really want to savour the experience, it’s fine, just bookmark this and come back later. But I put my whole heart into this newsletter, so it would be nice if people did read it. There are also spoilers for Buffy the Vampire Slayer, but come on, the show ended more than 20 years ago, the warning has expired on that one.

“Time wasn't right. It was moving too fast. And then I was 19. And then I was 20. I felt like one of those dolls asleep in the supermarket. Stuffed. And then I was 21. Like chapters skipped over on a DVD. I told myself, ‘This isn't normal. This isn't normal. This isn't how life is supposed to feel.’”

It was late 2015. I was 23 years old. I had known for a couple of years by that point that I was, almost certainly, a transgender woman, but I had done precisely nothing with that knowledge. I wanted to at least accomplish something on that path, so I decided to come out to the only people in the world I knew would definitely be cool with it, a community of people whose friendship probably saved my life: the nerds on Twitter who I obsessed over TV shows with.

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Jane Schoenbrun’s I Saw the TV Glow follows Owen (Justice Smith), a lonely and intensely dysphoric adolescent who bonds with Maddy (Brigette Lundy-Paine) over their shared love of The Pink Opaque, a kid-friendly fantasy-horror show about teenagers Isabel and Tara (an obvious reference, considering Amber Benson’s cameo), who fight supernatural forces through their psychic connection. The Pink Opaque has a few real-life analogues, but it’s most obviously borrowing from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the supernatural teen show about Buffy Summers and her friends fighting the forces of evil.

I remember the first time I watched Buffy. I was 16 years old and, in one of my dumber life decisions, decided to start watching a 144-episode television series the day before school started again after summer. In the film, Owen has to rely on Maddy’s VHS recordings to watch The Pink Opaque. I was doing this in 2008, so technology had advanced a fair bit beyond video tapes. I, well, pirated the show, and watched the whole thing within about two months. From then onwards, I was obsessed. I did that a lot with TV, but this show held a stronger grip on me than perhaps any others. Sometimes, Buffy felt more real than real life.

This happened a lot to me. I always felt like a narrator in my own life rather than a protagonist. Things would happen to me without feeling like I was the one making them happen. I think this is arguably the most core facet of gender dysphoria: feeling as though real life isn’t as “real” as it’s supposed to be. If you talk to a lot (but sure, definitely not all) of trans women and transfeminine people, something becomes obvious pretty quickly: we’re absolutely huge fucking nerds. I think a big part of that is a coping mechanism for how empty and detached the real world feels. When real life barely registers as though it’s actually happening, disappearing into fictional narratives is so much easier. The movie talks a lot about not being able to separate fact out from fiction, and my god did I do this in my life.

This makes up a lot of what Emily St. James calls “egg cinema”. For those of you unfamiliar with online trans discourse, an “egg” is someone who has not yet realised they’re trans, or is in denial about this. “Egg cinema”, films that feel like they accidentally capture a truth about being trans and in denial, often obsess over the world feeling less real than it should do. The most famous example of egg cinema, The Matrix, is obsessed with this. I Saw the TV Glow is not egg cinema, and Schoenbrun had already started transitioning when they wrote the script, and that means it’s coming from a different perspective. While The Matrix presupposes that everyone feels this disconnect from reality, one of I Saw the TV Glow’s quietly brilliant strokes is that it never suggests this is a universal condition. Owen and Tara are not experiencing life the way everyone else does. That kind of alienation is not normal, and the movie knows it.

TV shows are like dogs. You might love them hard, but they’re not going to keep going forever. A human lifespan will outlive them. The Pink Opaque was cancelled after five seasons, and that was something that seemed to bother Owen as much as his own life spiralling out of control (this is, admittedly, also how I felt when Lost ended right as I failed my A-Levels and drifted into unemployment). It ended on a cliffhanger. The “Big Bad”, Mr. Melancholy (and truly, if there’s a better nickname for dysphoria than that, I don’t know it), captures both Isabel and Tara, rips their hearts out, and buries them alive in coffins to suffocate. This is the movie’s trans metaphor realised: the idea that you’re drifting through life feeling empty inside because the real you is trapped somewhere else suffocating in a coffin. It instantly feels destined to become the next “egg crack” in online trans terminology.

Buffy did not end after five seasons. It very nearly did, with the show’s original channel, The WB, deciding it was time. But another outlet, UPN, decided to resurrect the slayer from the dead. Quite literally. The fifth season of the show centres around Buffy having to protect her sister, Dawn, from the season’s main villain, Glory, and her plan to kill Dawn in order to rip a whole in the universe and escape this dimension (it’s a whole thing). She refuses to do the logical but devastating thing of killing Dawn, instead figuring out she can save the world by sacrificing herself. “The hardest thing in this world is to live in it”, she tells her sister in her final words. “Be brave. Live, for me”. That was supposed to be Buffy, and Buffy’s, final words.

But fans, audiences, and capitalism couldn’t accept that it was over and move on. Another channel paid up the cash, so Buffy and Buffy had to be resurrected. Season six of Buffy is messy, heavy handed, and wildly inconsistent, but it’s the boldest thing the show ever did, and certainly the season I most often find myself thinking about. Her friends, much like the fans, just cannot live without Buffy. They concoct a plan to resurrect her, on the spurious grounds that she could be trapped in hell. Except that’s not what happened. “I was happy”, she explained. “At peace. I knew that everyone I cared about was all right. And I was finished. Complete. I don’t understand theology or dimensions… any of it really, but I think I was in heaven.

“And now I’m not. I was torn out of there – pulled out – by my friends. Everything is here is hard, and bright, and violent. Everything I feel, everything I touch… this is hell. Just getting through the next moment, knowing what I’ve lost…”

She had crossed over to the other side. And then she was dragged back.

In a sequence surely on Schoenbrun’s mind, Buffy has to claw her way out of her own coffin. She feels detached and empty and depersonalised. I don’t think anyone making this season had gender dysphoria on their minds instead of good old fashioned depression, but seeing her feel like life isn’t really happening as she drifts through life and a dead-end job certainly spoke to me. She was meant to be in another place, as something else, and here she was dragged back down, going through the motions.

In the film, crossing over through the coffin is presented by Maddy as a means of escape and becoming one’s true self. She comes back into his life believing that the two of them are not Owen and Maddy but Isabel and Tara, the heroes of The Pink Opaque, trapped in another reality while their real selves suffocate. This is all ridiculous on the surface of it, and Owen says as much. But, well, that’s how it feels realising you might be transgender! You realise your entire life is a lie based just on feelings inside your own head. Everything in the world is telling you that you’re one thing, while you alone know that you’re something else. It’s very difficult to talk about without sounding like you’ve lost your mind.

Maddy’s solution to “return” to the world of The Pink Opaque is to bury herself alive. That is how you cross over to the other side in her mind, the route that Buffy took and was brutally dragged back from to the mortal realm of dissociation. Like a lot of trans people, I’ve had some suicidal thoughts over the years. Feeling like it’s the only way out is the natural response when transition feels inconceivable or impossible. When life doesn’t feel like it’s really happening, just ending it all is certainly a way out.

The film really articulates that dysphoria gets worse as you age. Things were already bad as a teenager, but once I got past school age, it just became more and more intolerable. Through that bleak, bleak darkness, I figured out I was trans, but the darkness was so great to stop me doing anything about it for a long time. It just seemed an impossible mountain to climb. In those years of my early 20s, the only thing really keeping me hanging on was TV shows. My friend Sonia Saraiya once said that “TV is great for depressed people, sick people, bored people. People who are trying to ignore some material condition of their life, or someone else in the room.” My god did that apply to me.

But the one thing that helped was building connections with other people. I became obsessed with reading the website The AV Club, particularly the TV section (if I’m honest, a lot of my football writing is just ripping off the style and tone of that place). I made a lot of friends with people who loved reading that place, people who commented there, even people who wrote articles there. It’s the only time in my life I found a like-minded community who felt so alienated and distant from the real world that they disappeared into fictional narratives.

I came out to them on Twitter because I knew they were good people who wouldn’t cause a problem. I didn’t realise how many of them would later come out and transition themselves. And it just felt impossible for me to take those steps. It would’ve probably been fine. I could’ve done it if I had more confidence in myself. But at the time, it just felt like it was a mountain I could never climb. The years drifted by and I felt deader and deader inside. I was Grace Robertson on the internet, but every day the toll of having to be something else in all other facets of my life grew harder.

The only way I dug out of the hole was to somehow will myself into a career writing about football where I never had to meet anyone or talk to anyone in person. I could just be Grace online without my family knowing the truth. It was a stop gap measure. The mission was clear: earn enough money writing about football to be able to move out, then start transitioning. It took me over 11 years from the moment I realised I was trans to the moment I was holding the hormones in my hand.

Owen never gets that moment in the movie. He doesn’t take the leap with Maddy and drifts further into an empty life. He never leaves his parents’ house and spends decades working as an assistant in a kids’ arcade. He never treats his intense and acute dysphoria, or even registers that it’s there. His final words in the movie are to apologise to absolutely everyone around him simply for existing, because he hates who he is so much that he naturally assumes everyone else must feel the same way. He’s still in pain he doesn’t even know he has because his real self is suffocating in a coffin. A butterfly flaps its wings differently a few times and that would’ve been me. It would’ve been every trans person I know. I don’t know how many people will read this, but it’s probably at least a few of you right now.

I started hormones in July 2023. I was finally doing this for real, outside the computer. About a month in, a strange thing happened: I didn’t hate existing anymore. I don’t really have words to describe the difference here, but I just stopped dissociating. I hadn’t even made any other changes to my life yet, so all I can think is that changing the hormonal balance just shifted my brain chemistry. For the first time in my life, my brain isn’t floating off in Sunnydale, or in the Tardis, or on the Island from Lost. I am here right now. I am present.

I don’t think it’s totally accurate that only trans people can emotionally relate to I Saw the TV Glow. Maybe something else caused you to dissociate in your life. Maybe you have other issues you need to work through. Maybe you just really love TV.

Or maybe you’re suffocating in a coffin and you don’t know it.

Life doesn’t have to be like this.

There is still time.

This contains spoilers for Spider-Man: No Way Home and, like, all the other films before it.

As stories go, Spider-Man is pretty far fetched.

We all intuitively understand this. You ask anyone seeing Spider-Man: No Way Home whether they think any of it would really happen, and you’ll get funny looks. Obviously, it’s ridiculous. But people buy into the storytelling logic. That’s easy with comic books or cartoons. Those are already several layers removed from reality, and no one is going to sit here and complain a cartoon is “unrealistic”. Live-action films have a little more work to do.

The first attempt at a Spider-Man film sat in development for decades before anyone figured out how to do it properly. Even James Cameron, director of two of the three biggest movies ever made adjusted for inflation, a man who never delivers a flop, couldn’t figure it out. Such names as Tim Burton, Tony Scott, Barry Sonnenfeld, David Fincher, Ang Lee, Michael Bay and M. Night Shyamalan were all considered, but Sony Pictures decided on Sam Raimi to direct.

Raimi was a lifelong fan of the property, which meant he had a very specific take percolating in his head for decades. That mostly meant filtering the early years of Spider-Man comics – those published during Raimi’s childhood – through his splatstick sensibility. If you’ve watched the Evil Dead films, you know he wasn’t exactly going for realism. He leans into the ridiculousness of his premises by adding surrealist elements of horror and comedy.

That’s how he approached Spider-Man, and it delighted for two films. Raimi tried to capture the feeling of reading those silver-age comic books he loved, and in doing so created a world that felt removed enough from reality that you could buy Peter Parker getting bitten by a radioactive spider and waking up with superpowers. He did this through some really imaginative direction to create a distinct larger-than-life world, along with some out-there performances to really blend with the fabric of the movie.

But the most important tool was grounding it in character motivations. These weren’t the most emotionally complex films of all time, but building around genuine emotion sold the whole thing. Peter loses his powers in Spider-Man 2 for no apparent reason, but we buy it because it makes emotional sense for the character at that moment. On the other hand, Harry Osborn getting amnesia in Spider-Man 3 makes no real character sense, and immediately feels cliched and forced, taking us out of that reality.

They’re nowhere near as out there (and much better in terms of pure quality), but Raimi’s Spider-Man almost feels akin to the 1960s Batman TV series. While that show had a reputation for not being “serious”, it took the Batman comics of the era very seriously, and simply tried to present something as close to the source material as possible. If you’re literally transposing a comic book into live-action, you’re inevitably getting something ridiculous. Raimi took that approach and made it better, building a cohesive world where you really could believe comic book nonsense would happen.

The whole thing came tumbling down with Spider-Man 3, a misguided film that doesn’t know what it wants to be. Sony and former Marvel executive Avi Arad wanted a darker tone, insisting on bringing Venom to the party. Raimi pushed back against that by adding even more out-there elements, most notably the infamous dance sequence. The scene itself is actually a delightful bit of Raimi-style filmmaking, but it fails because it clashes with the darker and more serious elements of the film. Spider-Man 2 had an equally ridiculous montage set to “Raindrops Keep Fallin' on My Head”, but that film understood its tone perfectly. Spider-Man 3 was serving too many masters, so it wasn’t a huge shock to see Sony reboot the project afterwards.

In some ways, The Amazing Spider-Man director Marc Webb along with writers James Vanderbilt, Alvin Sargent and Steve Kloves had an even harder task than Raimi and co. A reboot only five years after the previous film is going to raise eyebrows from audiences. That they – presumably at Sony’s behest – started by repeating the origin story only made things harder. So they had to find every way they could to make this film feel different to Raimi’s trilogy.

That meant nixing the more out there tone. Raimi’s New York City was one that elt equal parts 1960s and 21st century. This one needed to be today’s New York (or, looking at it now, the New York of a decade ago). Whereas Raimi created an unreal world to make the audience believe a man would get bitten by a radioactive spider, Webb’s film would bring that story closer to the world we know. While Tobey Maguire’s Peter embraced the down-on-his-luck nerd aspect of the character, Andrew Garfield’s take was cooler and easier to look up to. This isn’t my preferred approach for something like Spider-Man, but they were trying to break with the past, and I’m not sure I’d have a better idea.

It didn’t really work. It did more than solid numbers at the box office, but Sony was unhappy enough with the final product that the sequel went in a totally different direction. It kept the one element everyone liked – the chemistry between Garfield and Emma Stone – and changed almost everything else. The Amazing Spider-Man 2 is a bigger, louder, much less realistic work than its predecessor. It’s actually a much more visually interesting film, with cinematographer Dan Mindel bringing a far more exciting and comic book-like look than his predecessor John Schwartzman. The score – composed by a motley crew of seven different people including Hans Zimmer, Junkie XL and Pharrell Williams – combines with those visuals to make something that looks and feels really bold for a blockbuster. But the screenplay, as usual for Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman, feels thrown together and constantly chasing the next shiny thing.

The first Amazing Spider-Man went for a more realistic tone that clashes with the comic book plotting, while the second opted for something much weirder that I kind of respect, even if it ultimately falls apart. At the end of the day, these films never found any kind of consistent tone, so it makes sense they’re not as beloved as what came before and after.

The third reboot of Spider-Man didn’t really need to build its own tone at all. This one takes place in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, so the template is set. There’s still plenty of work to do, but Peter Parker should be able to coexist in a world with Tony Stark and Steve Rogers fairly naturally.

The Marvel Cinematic Universe house style isn’t my favourite. Producer Kevin Feige and his team of writers and directors tend to compensate for the stranger elements of the comics with bland and unobtrusive filmmaking. It’s been widely noted that the MCU favours bizarrely muted colours and almost unnoticed musical scores. As Patrick Willems pointed out, the blacks in Marvel’s colour palette are literally dark grey.

If I’m feeling particularly uncharitable, that feels like a metaphor for everything they do. The source material is already pretty out there, so this is countered by making the safest adaptation choices possible at every turn. Interesting filmmaking choices are flattened out. Function is prioritised over form. You’d never see anything like the absurdist humour in the Raimi films here, lest someone on the internet call it “cringe”. Feige and co understand the basic meat and potatoes of classical storytelling very well, so it works. The old complaint about Hollywood executives not knowing what they want doesn’t apply here. The Marvel team know exactly what they want every film to be. It’s just never going to be my favourite thing.

Maybe some of this is just on me rather than the films. I grew up with the Raimi trilogy. I remember being heartbroken when the first film controversially got a 12 rating in the UK while I was just 10 years old. I remember when that move led to the creation of the entirely new 12A rating, to my delight as I finally got to see the film. I remember downloading the Spider-Man 3 promotional photo of Peter in the black suit as the desktop background to my family’s computer. I lived and breathed those films.

And then I grew up. By the time 2017 rolled around, at age 25, films from that year like Phantom Thread or Call My By Your Name were much more my speed than Spider-Man: Homecoming. Had I been an adult in 2002, I would’ve surely preferred Punch-Drunk Love and Far From Heaven to the first Spider-Man. Maybe the films didn’t change as much as I did. Maybe many of the young people who love the Tom Holland films today will be older and grumpier like me one day. I just don’t know.

Marvel already took the liberty of introducing this version of Peter Parker in Captain America: Civil War, so Spider-Man: Homecoming could skip the introductions and get right into it. After that, writers Chris McKenna and Eric Sommers1 alongside director Jon Watts also wanted to build something that didn’t feel the way the five previous Spider-Man movies did. “When the screenwriters of Spider-Man: Homecoming sat down to come up with the third big-screen iteration of the character”, the YouTube channel (and friend of mine) Captain Midnight put it in his now-famous video essay on the film, “they created a laundry list of things they felt they had already seen over and over again in Spider-Man films. The list had obvious stuff like the spider bite moment or the death of Uncle Ben, but it also included some things that’d be easy to overlook, like the fact that every Spider-Man movie has included plenty of scenes of the character swinging around downtown Manhattan”, he explained. The writers, therefore, “made the decision from the very beginning that their film wouldn’t include any of that stuff.”

Figuring out what not to is one thing. Deciding what to do is a much greater challenge. By far the most lively scenes in Homecoming are of young Peter and his classmates hanging out and experiencing normal high school problems. I really do wonder if Watts has an excellent teen romcom in him that we’re not seeing because he’s making franchise movies instead. But cute high school scenes does not a $200 million blockbuster make. Every time Homecoming moved further towards the superhero side of things, it felt a tired and stale working of the standard Marvel formula.

The other big problem in Homecoming and its sequel, Far From Home, was the series’ relationship to class. Spider-Man has always been Marvel’s most famous street-level hero. While the Avengers and the Fantastic Four are off dealing with problems on an intergalactic scale, Peter Parker has been a friendly neighbourhood Spider-Man, dealing with paying the bills from a low paid job with the tasks of day to day superhero-ing. The MCU’s Spider-Man didn’t have those problems in Homecoming and Far From Home. He used a multimillion-dollar suit gifted to him by his mentor, one of the richest men on Earth. If he had any serious ground level problems in his and Aunt May’s life, he could just call in a favour.

This was emphasised by both films using nominally working-class villains. Far From Home is especially guilty of this, making the main threat a group of disgruntled tech workers badly treated by Tony Stark. These films, it felt, increasingly had no room for anything other than an embrace of the winners in capitalism. “The Marvel films can never think too heavily about the amount of power a character like Tony Stark accrues”, Emily VanDerWerff explains, “because to do so would require contending with the degree to which Marvel has run almost all of its closest competitors out of the game.” Perhaps as a consequence of Marvel’s cultural dominance, it feels incapable of telling stories about anything other than powerful people winning out. The movies even shy away from showing the effects of superhero events on ordinary people, in stark contrast to Raimi’s films.

To my pleasant surprise, No Way Home directly addresses a lot of these problems. It presents Peter with a genuine moral problem where he doesn’t rely on calling in technical support. There’s something really quaint about seeing MJ and Ned help him out the old fashioned way. It’s become common to suggest the Marvel Cinematic Universe and particularly its dialogue is straight out of the Joss Whedon playbook. I don’t think this is true at all, mainly because bad Whedon dialogue is deeply uncomfortable for all involved, whereas Marvel is terrified of making you feel uncomfortable. But this movie felt like it borrowed heavily from classic Buffy the Vampire Slayer episodes, as a teenager tried to rectify a spell gone wrong metaphor for life troubles, hit the books with his friends, and had to make a serious sacrifice and step towards adulthood to put things right.

The film had to bring in two other Spider-Men while maintaining the existing tone, and that meant bending certain things. In that sense, it was the ideal time to bring back a lot of classic Spider-Man tropes missing from the previous two entries, and give audiences the kind of film they hadn’t been getting for some years now.

I don’t think Watts, McKenna and Sommers intended for this to be an origin story trilogy. I think Homecoming and Far From Home were made to function as proper Spider-Man stories. But the smart thing about No Way Home is the way it retrofits this arc for the trilogy. When we see Peter alone with his hand-made suit at the end of the film, he is no longer a tech bro, “Spider-Boy” or “Iron Man Jr”. He is, finally, Spider-Man. And that felt right.

I’m hesitant to overpraise No Way Home, a solid 7/10 blockbuster. This is in part because it’s doing very, very well, and it doesn’t exactly need my help. But the main reason is that another recent blockbuster attempted so many of the same things while executing them much, much better.

And that will be the discussion for next time.

Yeah, it’s been a while. My bad, but we haven’t exactly been missing the show at its best here.

Latin American and Spanish football has a concept called pausa. As the linguistic clue would suggest, it’s all about pausing and waiting for the right moment. Everyone expects the player to do something straight away, but instead they just put their foot on the ball for a moment, take a pause, and wait for the right opportunity to play the pass. “Time stops, and everything makes sense”. It’s about letting the chaos happen all around while you take a moment to provide clarity.

Henry Gale has pausa.

His arc in these episodes is one of those delightful TV tropes the show can explore with the hatch. Lost has a set, an indoor space to keep the budget down (which is probably why we haven’t seen the caves at all this season), but it opens up so many possibilities. There’s a physical place where lies and deceit can happen, destroying the relatively tranquil nature of season one. And what fits that better than holding a secret hostage captive? It’s great. It means the show can compartmentalise certain things with spaces only certain characters enter. It means Michael Emerson can just sit there with his knockout performance, dominating every scene he’s in, and the rest of the show can go on as usual without him taking over.

He impacts Locke the most almost by necessity. This works out great because Emerson and Terry O’Quinn sparkle in every scene they share. Locke’s arc all season has been about gradually turning back into the man in the box factory before the crash, and Henry is really the catalyst to fully break him. I mentioned last time (all those years ago) that this season is about characters reverting to type, not taking the blank slate and turning back into the broken people they once were. The show weaves this really nicely with Locke by simultaneously showing us perhaps the breaking point in his pre-crash life at the same time. He’s been conned by Anthony Cooper and now he’s being conned by Henry. The destination is the same. His leg injury is a crude metaphor, but you get the picture.

The theme of “no blank slate” is even something that hits the new characters. They make a really wise choice that Eko got his fresh start before the crash. He spends his life as a criminal (great job conforming to the worst stereotypes about Sub-Saharan Africa, Lost writers!), ends up with the brother switcheroo to become a priest, and several years down the line crashes on the island. It lets the show hammer the religious theme of the character. He’s not discovering his new life, but instead fighting to stay the course, to follow the righteous path even without any signs. It both feels true to Eko and also avoids the show thematically repeating the questions of season one.

This is something that the writers have done well to avoid, but it hasn’t been without its pitfalls. It’s ironic considering the discourse around the show “making it up as they went along”, but I think Lost is at its creative best when it’s flying by the seat of its pants, constantly inventing new ideas and story possibilities. Season one was a fairly anarchic process, but that sort of thing is lightning in a bottle. It’s natural that the show would bring more structure into the workflow, but it’s frustrating to see it show up onscreen. The tailies get to the beach at this point. Henry arrives at this episode. It’s going to pay off in a pretty big way very soon, but the set up is quite frustrating, and leads to plenty of filler along the way. Remember “Fire + Water”? I’m sure the show would rather you didn’t. But it speaks to a broader creative problem. Everything is so signposted right now that the show is boxed in for every story. The flashbacks can’t really tell us something new about Charlie because we’ve already seen most of his life. We can’t really have anything too surprising happen to the characters on-island because they’ll need to be in certain places later on. There’s a lot of stasis this year. Season three has its fair share of filler as well, but it feels much freer to surprise us and explore different things. This is all very stale.

I’ve tried to think about what season two would need to be more successful, and the only thing I can come up with is “get there faster!”. Lost, my friends, has hit the network TV serialisation problem. There are only so many storylines a show like this can burn through before it becomes an endless repetitive soap opera, and so it has to slow itself right down. It knows that big things will happen... at some point down the road. But there’s a loooooooooot of time to kill before we get there. Lost is a behind the scenes miracle because it gets an end date halfway through the third season and suddenly accelerates its storytelling in all sorts of exciting ways. But we’re not there yet.

I really built up a backlog of episodes because this just isn’t an exciting stretch to talk about. The first six hours of season three are famous for being the series’ low point, but I don’t think there’s ever a ten or so episode stretch as poor as this again. Fortunately, things are about to happen on the island.

Big things.

The system will fuck you over. But you already know that.

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Former Premier League manager Sam Allardyce is a curious figure. What we see on the pitch feels very old fashioned and backwards, but his methods of achieving this were truly innovative and cutting edge, at least by the standards of the 2000s. Allardyce loves stats. He pioneered the use of primitive data analysis at Premier League clubs, asking some col…

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Here’s something about me you may already know: I love American teen shows.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer? Pantheon level work, beloved by David Simon just as much as me. Gilmore Girls? Nothing better if you’re in that sort of mood. Legacies? Just about the only currently airing show I still really look forward to (when we don’t have a pandemic at least). Giv…

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Everybody who’s anybody in 2005 wanted to know about the hatch. What was it? What would we see inside? What was it for?

The start of season two mostly gives us answers to this, in a way that raises many more questions. The hatch is a bunker with a button you have to press every 108 minutes or the world ends. You have to type in the numbers in this process. It was built by the Dharma Initiative to control some kind of electromagnetic incident. A man called Desmond lived inside who pushed the button for three years.

But what is the hatch for? What purpose does it serve for the television series Lost? What does it all mean, thematically?

The hatch, at least in my head, is about bringing the real world back to the survivors. Season one was about the characters finding who they are when cut adrift from the world, being offered the blank slate of starting over. But the blank slate was always more of an aspiration than a certainty. Without spoiling anything, much of season two is about the other side of that coin: what if they didn’t take it? What if they can’t escape the past of who they are? What if they’re destined to make the same mistakes over and over again? Or what if they’re not? What if they don’t have to become alienated with the power of controlling the potato chips?

The hatch really lets the show do this. It’s quite literally modernity, albeit 70s/80s modernity so it looks cool on TV. When Kate says “at least we have jobs now”, the implication is “we have a power structure”. People can fail now. Time has passed. Things have happened. Most importantly, that button is going to need to be pressed every 108 minutes or else. That means they can’t exactly all leave and get rescued. They’re more permanently settled on the Island.

And there’s the other side of the hatch: it’s a story engine.

No one expected Lost to become a breakout hit of 2004-05. Everyone from ABC execs to Disney bigwigs Michael Eisner and Bob Iger to Damon Lindelof himself was totally unconvinced this show could generate new stories for over 100 episodes. But, you know, that’s the job. Like pushing the button. It just needs to be done forever and ever in perpetuity or the world ends. I’m not saying the hatch is a metaphor for making the second season of Lost, but I’m not not saying that.

The tail section fills the same purpose. Here are three new series regulars capable of providing brand new flashbacks to come. God that must be a relief for the writers considering the five stories they have here. Jack and Locke’s attempts are fine, even if they’re kind of in the middle of big emotional arcs. We can’t expect the flashbacks to be the definitive statements on characters now, so this is the best they can hope for. Hurley and Sun/Jin’s stories are kind of sweet companion pieces to the on-Island action which, again, is fine. It’s nice. It’s not adding a lot of meat to the bones. Michael’s flashback feels the least worthwhile. It paints itself as this dramatic encounter while telling us exactly nothing we do not already know about the man. Shannon’s is, I guess, technically her first episode, but it mostly exists to fill in blanks from Boone’s flashback last season. And in doing that, it’s just trying to make us feel sorry for her before she bites the bullet. It’s getting a lot harder for the writers to tell these stories.

As the episodes go on, there’s a kind of soap opera element to the show emerging. I absolutely do not see “soap opera” as a derogatory term. Perhaps the show’s greatest influence, Twin Peaks, was a pure soap 90% of the time (in its first incarnation). What matters is that it’s a story engine TV has known how to exploit for decades, so it’s useful to the show right now. But Lost’s execution of the soap opera tropes is kind of, well, bad. Charlie and Claire are having relationship difficulties while he hides a heroin addiction. It’s fine, as these things go, but what does it mean? Why are we telling soap opera stories? It feels like it’s just to kill time.

Killing time is the thread that runs through the whole second season of Lost. I’m being quite harsh here, as I think “Man of Science, Man of Faith” and “Orientation” really are good episodes. But it’s all very structured, very preordained stuff to start setting off from Point A but not yet arrive at Point B. The show teases us about the Others before revealing that these are a totally different group of people. The forward momentum isn’t there.

Lost season one was lightning in a bottle and the show spent the next two years trying to figure out how on Earth you can recapture that feeling again. It’s never exactly the same show. The first season had a spontaneity to it with a sense that the show could really shift gears episode to episode. The double header of “Deus Ex Machina” and “Do No Harm” might be the most powerful example of this. That all came from a chaotic writers’ room as a bunch of talented people with different sensibilities brought varying things to the table. In order to work as a long running show, Lindelof and especially Carlton Cuse brought a more disciplined writing process to the show, in which there was less room for experimentation.

The “new” Lost would emerge from this... eventually. They had to figure out some things along the way, succeeding where most buzzy first season shows fail. But it’s a process and they’re not there in season two. The season is a little overthought and contrived, when part of the magic of Lost is in its ability to go anywhere. The answer to what’s in the hatch is season two. Just as the button has to be pushed every 108 minutes, every day, in perfect routine, so does the show feel a little too set in a pattern this year. But just hang on in there, ok. Better things will come.

What does The Wire have to say about power?

I’ve written a lot about the show’s fairly obvious critiques of institutions. If The Wire has a central thesis, it’s that the structures of early 21st century America fail the people who live there. I didn’t necessarily expect this before watching the show, but it has an almost David Graeber sense of anarchism.…

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Any long running, ongoing story will eventually become about itself, at least a little bit.

Take Star Wars as a very high profile mainstream example. The original film just wanted to be a good time at the movies, going for the kind of good old fashioned escapism George Lucas grew up with. You can argue it’s about the Vietnam War or whatever, but that’s a…

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Hi, I know this one is late. But the good news is it means you’re getting two The Wire reviews this week! My write up for the start of season three should come out in a few days.

The Wire is a system show. It’s the most famous and acclaimed system show of all time. What I mean by “system show” is that the ideas it’s exploring about institutions and socie…

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The penultimate scene of “Exodus”, the first season finale of Lost, gives us everyone right before the crash happens. Right before their lives are transformed forever and the Island sucks them into its world. Right before everything changes.

The last scene of “Exodus” gives us Jack, Locke, Kate and Hurley right after they’ve blown open the hatch but before they’ve gone inside. Right before their lives are transformed forever and the hatch sucks them into its world. Right before everything changes.

If this episode has one big thematic statement, it’s that the chapter is coming to an end. The show is more or less done telling the story of how these survivors came to board Oceanic 815 and how they struggled to survive. They’ve changed the game forever by blowing open the hatch. They’re no longer passive observers but active participants in the story of whatever the hell is happening on this island. They’ve gone native. Season 2 is going to play by different rules.

The other big cliffhanger of the episode, The Others kidnapping Walt, plays into this as well. If you’ve ever watched TV in your life, you knew that the survivors weren’t getting rescued in season one. But having it fail like this, with an active threat, changes the game. It means there’s now good reason for the characters to stop attempting to get off the Island. They really are stuck here.

The third major story of “Exodus”, Charlie and Sayid rescuing Aaron, doesn’t quite have the same heft that the other two offer. Some of that’s unavoidable as it’s deliberately built as a red herring. But it still feels a little underwhelming when it wraps up. Charlie’s very whiny here, and though he has some reasons, his hotheadedness is never the most fun thing on Lost.

But let’s get back to the hatch. The threat of the Others has Jack galaxy brain himself into opening the thing in order to keep everyone safe. That there’s no good reason to think it really provides this safe shelter doesn’t matter to him because at least it’s a strategy. He needs to be doing things to protect the survivors, otherwise he’d get angsty. Locke obviously has very different reasons, but fate puts them on the same side this time. A thing this late stretch of episodes really emphasise is that Jack against Locke is now the central conflict in the show.

John sees it as a debate of science against faith, but I don’t think that’s really true. It’s much more fate against free will. Way back in “Outlaws”, We hear Jack talk about his dad way back in “Outlaws”, stating the following:

“‘That's why the Red Sox will never win the series’. It's just something my father used to say -- going through life knowing that people hated him. Instead of taking responsibility for it, he just put it on fate. Said he was made that way.”

Thank you, Jack, for summing up your own point of view better than I could manage. Jack doesn’t reject destiny because he’s purely a man of science. He’s not against believing in things. He even tells Michael they will see each other again for certain, because he wants to believe the raft will work. If anything, he’s a “God helps those who help themselves” kind of guy. He wants to take control of his own destiny and believe in he and his fellow survivors’ ability to achieve things. Locke believes in magic and mysticism and predetermined truth.

I don’t think there’s a character I’ve changed my mind on over the years more than John Locke. The first time I watched this season as a teenager, he seemed this incredible figure, kind of the ancient wizard type of the Island. You know, like Obi-Wan or Gandalf or whoever. But watching today, it’s really clear how much he’s just bullshitting his way through it all. He suggests staying still in sight of the smoke monster (side note: thank god I can finally call it that). How can he possibly know that? He can’t. He probably just saw that scene in Jurassic Park and he’s taking a punt that smoke monsters work like dinosaurs. He acts like this expert hunter when he’d never once done it before meeting his father, and that was with a shotgun. John is absolutely a man of faith, if we understand faith as the belief in something without evidence. He knows he’s on a journey, and he just doesn’t need any outside knowledge to guide him beyond the Island.

He’s totally wrong about the conflict being science against faith because it doesn’t explain the hatch divide. Jack wants to blow it open for practical reasons. Sayid is terrified of blowing it open for practical reasons. And then Hurley doesn’t want it open because he thinks the numbers are cursed. If Locke was correct, no one would be more strongly aligned with him than Hurley. This is someone who is a total believer in supernatural powers even before he crashed on the Island. And here he is, terrified to open the hatch. It might be a bit of a cheat for the show to have Hurley along for the ride just so he can see the numbers right before they set off the dynamite, but damn if it doesn’t work. I don’t know if it was the intention, but this really establishes Hurley as part of the so-called “A-Team” in a way that, say, Charlie just isn’t.

Then there’s Kate, who the show frustratingly can’t get a handle on at this point. She seems to join the hatch mission mostly because Sawyer is mad at her, so... she’s hanging out with Jack now? Ugh. Lost is interested in Kate as a tabula rasa test case, to compare two possible versions of who she could be. That’s all well and good, but it’s so frequently just defined by which boy she likes more. Of the four people at the hatch, she’s the one with by far the most opaque motivations for being there, and I don’t think that’s by design.

Over on the raft, the episode is in a bit of confusion about what to do until the big twist at the end. There’s a whole incident about a part breaking off into the ocean which seems mostly there to kill time. But it’s fine. The show has successfully built up Sawyer (James Ford!) as someone who would credibly want onboard where it would seem implausible earlier on. He doesn’t have things to go back to so much as unfinished business, and he’s convinced he can’t have his blank slate until he does the deed and kills the original Sawyer. If he didn’t, people on the Island would be calling him James.

Jin is... also on the raft? I get that it’s hard for the writers to find things for him to do. He’s finally ok with Sun and he seems to view getting rescued as the real fresh start. He can’t see that he has everything he needs to heal his marriage already. He’s definitely the member of the raft gang who has the least to gain from being rescued.

Michael and Walt certainly have the most. They’ve done it. They’ve taken the tabula rasa and rebuilt their relationship to be ready for the real world. Walt through whatever psychic powers he has is convinced the Island is no longer safe and they need to get the hell away. I mean, he’s not wrong, but maybe his powers could’ve told him what was coming. The kidnapping means that Michael is suddenly the character who wants to leave the Island least. He’s lost everything. All so the show wouldn’t have to worry about how quickly Malcolm David Kelley was growing up.

Both arcs are really emphasising a shift in the show. The table setting is done. Shit is going down with the hatch and with the Others. And possibly Michelle Rodriguez, but that would be saying too much.

See you all down the hatch.

François Truffaut is often claimed to have said it’s “impossible to make an anti-war film”. I can’t find an actual source of him saying this, but let’s just assume he did, since it’s a good quote.

The implication is that the image of war in cinema is just so enjoyable, so entertaining, that it cannot be countered. You can make a movie absolutely showing …

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There’s no question The Wire was intended to be a politically relevant TV series. The thing was obviously always built to speak to the issues pulling apart society. But when the second season aired in 2003, people probably didn’t sigh and recoil at hearing these three words over and over again for the past few years:

“white working class”.

Yeah, I’m afrai…

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Early last week, I watched The Big Lebowski for the first time. To say I hated it would be an understatement. It got under my skin and unsettled me more than any good horror film ever could. It unnerved me.

Several days later, I watched the film again. I finished the second viewing certain I had just witnessed a masterpiece. The funny thing is, I don’t even think I was watching it “wrong” the first time, and my initial extremely negative response actually speaks to the movie’s power.

Aw hell, I done introduced this article enough...

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When I was a teenager, I’d be sat watching TV and sometimes my dad would walk in the room. He’d say something like “you’re so laid back” or “you’re so chill, not a care in the world”. It couldn’t be further from the truth. I was stressed out of my mind, worrying about every possible thing worth worrying about and plenty more that aren’t worth it at all. I’d have a look on my face that appeared totally at peace when I was really falling apart.

At university, I’d often be terrified of receiving feedback for the work I’d handed in. We’d have to go to an office in the department to pick up the essays we’d previously handed in, and it was an experience I dreaded. I’d often go a long time before picking them up, and there are some still sitting there that I never had the courage to read the feedback on (yes, I am aware this is a terrible practice for a student to have). The thought of what they’d say filled me with such dread.

One day, I was emailing a professor about an idea for my next essay and he mentioned that I was the only person who still hadn’t picked up my last one. Then the terrible truth hit me: he thought I didn’t care. He thought I was just drifting through my degree without wanting to put any effort in and really learn, when the truth was that I was absolutely panicking about the whole experience and sticking my head in the sand.

Both my dad and this professor looked at me and saw the same mask I didn’t even know I was wearing: a laid back, no care in the world guy who didn’t give enough of a shit to try or put in any effort to work. They had no idea of what was underneath: a confused trans girl absolutely terrified of everything she was doing and what anyone might have thought of her, constantly stressed out about every little thing.

In other words, they saw “The Dude”.

In case you’ve been living under a rock, The Big Lebowski is about Jeffrey “The Dude” Lebowski, a laid back, lazy guy who doesn’t have a care in the world beyond bowling. A former hippie who just watched on as the establishment won the war, he finds himself in middle age just drifting through life, and drifting through the plot of the film. While he doesn’t have anything like the good fortune of the other Jeffrey Lebowski’s inherited wealth, his privileges help keep him just about afloat to continue his life of not doing much work in Los Angeles. In some ways it feels like a great work of capitalist realism, showing how a man once involved in dreams of changing the world forever has basically given up, and is now content to find enjoyment in his ultra low ambition lifestyle. It can certainly sit alongside something like the TV series Party Down as great art about what it means to live in LA and just give up on dreams.

The first time I watched the film, it terrified me that this is who people saw me becoming. I became so fixated on who this guy was and how weirdly content he was living my nightmare. The film seemed so filtered through this perspective that it felt like the Ghost of Christmas Future, lest I change my ways. I felt almost physically ill by the end of The Big Lebowski.

But here’s the thing: it struck such a chord with me because it was so well crafted. A film in which The Dude and the world he lived in felt less true would not have had the same effect. The Big Lebowski is one of the best movies I’ve ever seen at building an authentic world filled with real people to hang out in, and that’s why it scared me. It felt like something that could happen. It was something that made me feel sick to my stomach.

But here’s what made me feel better about the film: The Dude is happy with his life. He’s doing what he wants to do and enjoying himself. Things could be better, yes, but his low-ambition lazy life isn’t a failure. It’s something he’s comfortable with. This is who he really, authentically is. It could never be me because it’s not who I really, authentically am. A mask is just a mask and that’s not who I am if I say so.

I had to watch the film again just to get my thoughts straight on it. What I found were some things I already knew to be the case: this film has the most beautifully precise visuals beyond what’s expected of any hangout comedy. It has a deliberately nonsense plot but nevertheless not a second of it could be changed without losing something relevant. What I didn’t appreciate was how much of an ensemble piece it is, and how it has truths about all of its characters. The other Lebowski is just as much of a layabout as The Dude. Walter isn’t comic relief but someone really broken after the trouble from a war The Dude probably protested against. It builds such a rich world of vivid characters, and none of it ever feels meandering. You could not give a single note to the Coens about the film that would improve the final product. However you feel about the story being told, it is the best imaginable telling of that story.

I had to take myself out of the film to appreciate it. We all love to observe how fictional characters relate to our realities, but sometimes we need to remind ourselves of how they differ. The Big Lebowski is the truest possible tale of The Dude and the Los Angeles he lives in. It is not about my life, and thank God it isn’t.

“Deus Ex Machina” to “Born to Run”

If there’s one thing these episodes do, it’s show the kind of tonal variation Lost can produce.

While this series obviously owes a huge debt to that one, “Deus Ex Machina” might be the most Twin Peaks episode of Lost ever made. This is the one that really takes all the weirdness on the Island and leads into it. Then the show follows it up with “Do No Harm”, practically an episode of ER set on a desert island. It’s not just that it has a medical focus; every story turn is propulsive, fulfilling ER’s promise of a blockbuster movie pace in an hourlong drama. “The Greater Good” and “Born to Run” then settle back into the show’s normal rhythms, and feel like they’re holding back a little before the finale.

For all that Lost is one of the key shows in pushing TV towards more serialisation and more “cinematic” qualities, this is something where its power is very much rooted in television. Every episode of Lost feels like its own thing even as the overarching narratives are very serialised. This felt like it was from another planet while the show was airing but looks a little quaint now (in a good way). This is a big part of why the “Golden Age of TV” was so potent: it hit that sweet spot of embracing serialised and cinematic elements while still having the grounding of traditional TV storytelling. Lost has both, and you need both to do episodes like this.

Let’s start chronologically. “Deus Ex Machina” is the latest in a trend of flashbacks to avoid giving the definitive story, and instead create room for further flashbacks. It helps that this is the best one of those. But for a few nodding winks, the flashback essentially ignores that Locke ends up in a wheelchair and tells a new story about him being conned by his father. The implicit idea in “Walkabout” was that the chair was not the root of his personal problems, but rather a symbol. “Deus Ex Machina” makes this explicit. Locke is the oracle on the Island, he’s the guy who knows everything and casts himself as the spiritual leader. He’s engaged in long conning everyone else into his grand visions because he was once the conned himself. Maybe the greatest tragedy is that he’s come to believe the chair was always his curse and the Island his savior. As the episode shows, his problems go back much further than that. He believes his legs give him the power to be a kind of just version of his father.

That might be more true than even he realises. Locke gives up his kidney for Anthony Cooper, and Boone gives up his life for the hatch. I don’t know how far back the show had planned to kill Boone, but it doesn’t feel like much was left unsaid with him (other than his last words which were, literally, unsaid). Boone was desperately looking for a purpose on the Island, from stupidly thinking he could challenge Jack for a leadership role to trying to save Joanna out in the ocean. Consciously or not, Locke cons Boone into being his pet. Whoever Boone is or was, he now exists only to further John on his destiny. It’s really gross manipulation that I don’t think either man really understands.

Maybe Jack does. John carefully omits information about the accident because Boone’s life is less important than his destiny. Jack might not know exactly why he’s being lied to, but as soon as it happens, he’s read Locke’s intent. Whatever John is doing out there, he’s prioritising that over basic safety. In Locke’s mystic quest logic that’s perfectly justifiable. He’s playing by biblical rules. But to Jack it’s unforgivable. Jack is living in the real world and the number one priority is keeping these people alive. He’s right, obviously. But Lost is good at raising it in such a way that it feels like a philosophical debate and not “fucking hell, this guy is letting people die in his cult leader ramblings”.

Jack’s backstory also gets retconned here a bit. It’s not exactly a shock to learn that a guy who looks like that has taken a girl home before, but an entire failed marriage arc is a hell of a thing to drop in. This will get expanded on in season 2, but for now it’s just kind of a thing we’re introduced to.

“The Greater Good” is, unfortunately, not as good as those episodes. It fails to answer the single most important question any episode of Lost can have: “why is this a Sayid-centric?” The action of “Do No Harm” suggested it should be Shannon-centric. The biggest event of the hour is Shannon pointing a gun at Locke. The entire story is broadly about what Shannon does, told through Sayid’s eyes. It makes no sense! Give us the Shannon material!

The Sayid arc we do see again denies us the definitive take on the character. This feels like the start of a rot that would really set in during the second and third seasons, before the show would intelligently change course and reinvigorate itself. This time, it mostly mirrors his arc in the episode, challenging on how far he’d go for love. It’s a kind of typical Sayid-centric in that his great love for Nadia is stated over and over but never depicted. I don’t think Lost ever really articulated why Sayid loves her. It simply told us he does. To be honest I’ve been long inclined to read their relationship as Sayid pining over this fantasy woman he’s constructed in his head more than the real Nadia who actually existed.

“Born to Run” is another treading water episode, and that’s a little frustrating. We see a third Kate flashback but, again in fitting with this new mode of withholding information, we still don’t find out what she did. The idea the show is building is that each character’s flashback is essentially a running story that we might check in on every dozen episodes or so. They’re going to hit a hard ceiling in terms of the stories they can tell in this mode, but that’s another newsletter.

Kate’s past adventure does pay off a mystery we dealt with in “Whatever the Case May Be”, as we meet Tom, the “man I loved/killed”. This kind of serves to show Kate the kind of life she could have had if not for whatever it is she did. Lost has spent all season asking us which is the “real” Kate: the useful Islander or the fugitive. Here it offers her a glimpse of the “other” version of herself, the one who settled down and lived a normal life. But that was never her. The impulse to run predates her crime. Whatever she did, however she drove her mother to be terrified of her, she would’ve done it anyway. Sometimes you have a choice, and sometimes you were always going to do the thing.

On-Island, the meat of the episode is in the writers trying to construct a way to get the important conflicts to happen in time for the finale. Many serialised shows have to do these moving the pieces episodes every now and again. The two big events the audience has been waiting for are opening the hatch and setting sail on the raft. The show deals with the first one relatively easily here, with Jack discovering the hatch and taking a firm “open it” position. Locke had been convinced for a while that Jack would be a thorn in his side, but this is a misread. Jack is concerned about practicalities, and the practical evidence says open it. The case for not opening it is fear of what goes bump in the night.

The raft needs a bit more action. Redshirt Dr. Arzt gives us a deus ex machina (you know, like the episode title) that the raft needs to set off soon. Just in time for the season finale! Subsequently, Kate wants on the raft and will do whatever it takes, just as Michael gets poisoned. Everyone points the finger at her before the reveal that it was Sun, in a failed attempt to keep Jin safe. This is all a little hokey, but it does serve the purpose of really isolating Kate and raising tensions with the other survivors (as well as clearing the house on the question of who knows whether she’s a fugitive).

Of these four episodes, two of them are sure fire hits while the others have their moments. This, my friends, is what a 25 episode season of television looks like. In the modern landscape, the desire would be so strong to whittle it down, to make every episode as good as “Deus Ex Machina”. But you can’t have “Deus Ex Machina” in a 10 episode season. It’s the little diversions, the chances for experimentation, that make TV great. Lost had that. Few current shows do.

When we say “all cops are bastards”, we’re talking about Jimmy McNulty.

He’s exactly the kind of co…

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Does everyone really get a new life on the Island, as Shannon says?

In the four episodes we see here, the answer seems to be “not really”. Charlie can make a case that he does, yes. For the first time since his addiction began, he’s seemingly able to make decisions for himself without the drugs deciding for him. But addiction is a cycle, and we’ll have to see whether he can live up to that for long. For now, though, he’s the closest thing we have to a success.

The others? Not so much. Sawyer has spent his entire adulthood carrying the same letter with him and has shown no signs of letting up. He doesn’t want a new life. He wants the life that was taken from him. It’s an open wound for him. He hasn’t yet realised that he can never get back what was taken from him, and until that happens, no blank slate for you James.

As for Jin? He’s outright given the chance to “just start all over” and says no. He believed completely that his father-in-law was the source of all conflict in his relationship, which may be true, but taking him out of the picture cannot heal everything between Jin and Sun. It just can’t. The fracture still exists even if the source has been removed.

Hurley is slightly different, as he doesn’t have the same level of agency in his issues. He can’t get away from the numbers, even if he thinks he can. But he can’t run away from his mental health issues, either. A blank slate does not mean ignoring everything that happened before. One first has to confront the issues in order to become a new person.

The first, and weakest, of these four episodes focuses on Charlie. I have some sympathy with the show in that his flashbacks were probably a nightmare to write with the drug addiction. When someone is an addict on the level that Charlie is, that becomes part of every aspect of their life, and every story is an addiction story. But for the television series Lost, that leads to every Charlie flashback telling the same story over and over again. This time, he’s trying to steal from his girlfriend Lucy (and her terrible, terrible British accent)’s father in order to buy more heroine. Or something. The point seems to be that he can never take care of anyone, but he now has a new opportunity with Claire. Who apparently needs taking care of, despite showing no indication that she’s asking for that.

The meat of “Homecoming” is frustrating because this really feels like it should be a great episode of Lost. It’s the one where Ethan dies! But its two primary plot points are acts of delay: Claire has amnesia, so she can’t say anything, while Ethan is murdered, so he can’t say anything either. The show had kind of written itself into a corner with the prospect of revealing too much, too soon. Anyway, it’s not very good, and we can all move on from it.

The other three episodes all deal with characters in some way failing to start over. “Outlaws” tackles this head on with Sawyer trying to kill the man he took his name from. Sawyer’s entire identity has been built around this revenge kick to the point where it’s a crux: it’s how the conman gets conned. Wherever this “original Sawyer” is, he couldn’t be further away from the Island. “Our” Sawyer will never be at peace with this until he finds him. He can’t start anew because his whole identity is built around having baggage.

For Hurley it’s the opposite. He’s desperate for his tabula rasa. Sawyer wants revenge on his curse, but Hugo just wants it to stop. The Island isn’t even giving him a chance to make it go away, and this is where I quibble with “Numbers”. Having 4 8 15 16 23 42 etched on the side of the Hatch is a cool twist, but I’m not sure it plays nicely with the themes of the show. It denies Hurley his second chance. For the most part, characters on Lost are offered a fresh start but often fail to take it. With Hurley, it feels like he doesn’t get that choice at all.

For Jin, the question of starting over is much more complicated. He wanted to run away with Sun and got exactly that. What he didn’t bargain for was Sun being her own person with legitimate agency. He totally believes that all his problems are down to Mr. Paik, but life doesn’t work like that. Hearing Sun speaks English shocks him to his core because it’s a realisation that he doesn’t understand how broken their relationship is. Sun says that she was going to leave him in English, but it doesn’t matter. He already knows. The real tragedy in their relationship is that they’ve blown their chance to heal already. The blank slate is well and truly dirty now.

On a grander level, these four episodes give us the show having to become a long running TV show. Lost was already a big hit by the time the second half of the season was made, and it was a sure thing to get renewed for another year. Suddenly the series had to find ways to build out rather than move forward, to explore new avenues rather than push on with the ones that existed. This would wear thin, and it’s a godsend that Lindelof and Cuse negotiated and end date during season 3; But right now it really is quite interesting to watch them branch out and evolve the show into something more sustainable.

The opening act of Lost was glorious anarchy. This is something different. There have been many, many, many heavily serialised shows since this one to burn bright early on and then fall apart. The gut response from most viewers has been to claim these stories need definitive endings, that closed loops are the way to go. I’ve never believed that, and I’d hold Lost up as an example why. It took its energy early on and properly understood how to build something much grander. Many others simply don’t know how to do this.