Last night's storms, and this week's LOST

Last night north-central North Carolina got severely thrashed by a line of thunderstorms, and that might be putting it too mildly. It was more like a series of supercells that rolled through the region. There were numerous reports of tornadoes that touched down, particularly in Guilford County directly south of us and there's been at least one death reported there. The local television stations were providing live coverage well into the early morning hours, including Reidsville's own WGSR Star 39: major props to Matt Smith, Mark Childrey and Charles Roark for all that they did to keep the viewers in this area informed.

For most of the evening our TV was tuned to WXLV, the ABC affiliate out of Winston-Salem, so we could catch this week's Lost. The teasers had implied that it was going to be a Locke-centric episode, which always means that it's going to be a good one. However due to National Weather Service bulletins breaking into the audio, the broadcast last night was darn near unintelligible! Not complaining mind ya: if it helped to save lives, then it was worth it. But the day after, with a few things behind me at the moment I decided to see what I missed, so I went to ABC's homepage and started the streaming high-def video of the latest Lost episode: "Cabin Fever".

I thought that the producers might have crammed a bit too much into this chapter, especially with regard to the action aboard the freighter. But the Locke flashbacks and everything that happened on the way to Jacob's cabin more than made up for any flaws that "Cabin Fever" had (and it was darned near flawless at that). The return of Nestor Carbonell to the fold of Lost's cast as the seemingly-immortal Richard Alpert was wonderful, and I actually screamed when I saw him looking through the window in the hospital. So too was the re-appearance of Matthew Abbadon (played by Lance Reddick), who became a disturbing presence on this show in the season premiere with that spooky-delivered "Are they still alive?" he asked Hurley.

So about that last thing that Locke says, right at the end of the show: was that not the most bizarre sentence ever uttered by a character on Lost? How are they going to do this?! One idea comes to mind, and it has nothing to do with physical relocation at all. If you ever read the original issues of Marvel's G.I. Joe comic then you might understand what I'm talking about. But I'm just gonna wait and see what happens over the next few weeks, and see if I'm right.

All in all, "Cabin Fever" is a very good episode that tremendously deepened the mythology of one of the most intriguing aspects of this story. And weren't the child actors who portrayed the younger John Locke perfectly cast? The teenage one looked exactly like how I would imagine Terry O'Quinn did around 14 or 15 years old... and he nailed Locke's attitude to a "T".

Now I get to watch this with Lisa, and enjoy seeing her reaction to it :-)

Categories: lost, north carolina, television, weather