Women Should Serve In Every Political Office. I'm Not Sure Her Bold Move Truly Does.

 

 

One of the oldest cliches in recent years is 'representation matters'.  I'd say that those who make that blanket statement are getting it wrong. Representation matters, yes, but only in a few critical areas. And the one where it matters the most  is elected office.

This isn't an abstraction to me because I live in New York  where women serve in the most important offices in the state and at a national level. Kathy Hochul is running for her second full term as Governor. Two years ago Kristin Gillibrand was reelected as Senator. And if the Democrats regain control of Congress this year – as looks increasingly likely – it will be because women such as Laura Gillen and Cait Conley were elected in swing districts.

All of these women have come under the same kind of brutal attacks from Republicans that are associated with members of the Squad (and yes a few more members of the Justice Democrats will likely be joining the Democratic caucus from New York this cycle). But it is my belief they represent the best of government because they understand who their masters are: their party, their country and their voters. 

In theory these are the masters that all elected officials are supposed to serve though it seldom works that way in practice. In recent years extremists of both parties have argued that there is a different agenda every elected official, regardless of party should serve, and they criticize those who don't meet those metrics. Having spent far too much time among both groups I feel safe in saying the far left has higher standard.

Both sides will actively hold those in office to an impossibly high standard. But those on the far right will always limit their attacks to Democrats whether they are in office or not and defend the Republicans. The progressive, by contrast, will attack both parties and will, if anything, be harsher on the Democrats then the Republicans. They will lambast them whenever they do something that they consider wrong and give them only faint praise if they do something they believe is right.

They believe the far left agenda is the only one that all elected officials should follow, even if they didn't run on it. And they have no use for an elected candidate serving any of those three masters. The only master they should serve is the progressive agenda, no matter how unpopular with the electorate it is.

For that reason I am wary of organizations who claim to be arguing for not only a left-wing agenda but who argue that it is the elected officials duty to serve only a specific group of identity politics. And that brings me to Her Bold Move.

I've been receiving missives from them for several years, as I have so many other Democratic candidates and left-wing missives but I didn't know much about them until recently. Her Bold Move was founded in 2021 as – and I'm quoting them – a PAC that supports women running for political office in the United States, with a specific focus on breaking male supermajorities and protecting reproductive rights in states with abortion bans.

As I said, I'm in favor of women hold political offices at any level, particularly a state one as well as protecting reproductive rights. Yet there are a couple of things in this that set off alarm bells.

The first is the timing. By 2021, as I've written before, the Justice Democrats had gone through two election cycles and had essentially failed as it mission statement. It had only managed to elect 6 representatives to Congress, no Senators and no governors and in most cases couldn't get past the primary. Furthermore many Democrats had tacitly endorsed parts of the Sanders/AOC agenda that year and the Democrats had suffered losses in Congress even as they took back the White House. The voters were endorsing a return to normality but not the left-wing agenda.

The second part is the tacit idea that female Democrat officeholders at a state level can serve the agenda of women better then Democratic candidates alone. There's a fallacy here because all elected officials, no matter their race, gender or sexual identification, have to win elections by getting the votes of everybody. A female candidate can't win elected office if she only gets the votes of women and that means she's going to having to appeal to issues that are not only limited to women.. Taken to the next level, if she wins elected office she is there to represent all the people in her district or state, not just the people who voted for her. Kathy Hochul is governor of New York and she represents all of them, not just the Democrats, and certainly not just all the women – some of whom almost certainly will vote for Bruce Blakeman in November.

These combinations, as with so many other progressive groups, seem to force Her Bold Move to run candidates with both hands tied behind their backs. Which is why it's not clear how successful they've been at their mission statement. That brings me to a different factor.

According to Google Her Bold Move reports that its endorsed candidates have won roughly 85-88 percent of their races." That sounds impressive until you read that 'it doesn't maintain a direct running list or a public directory'. And like many other groups it only highlights the candidates who win and ignores the ones who lose. Nor does it keep a static historical archive of past winners – or those who've lost.

You have to rely on other organization to check their record so I looked on Ballotpedia, one of the more verifiable sources for it. That site tells a different story then the one Her Bold Move trumpets.

They have endorsed high profile federal and statewide figures such as attorneys general and gubernatorial hopefuls, but the bulk of them target state legislative seats, county clerk positions and local school boards. Now I suspect that 85 to 88 percent success rate is built very much the same way our current President picks his endorsements for state and federal office: Her Bold Move will pick Democratic candidates (presumably all female), most of whom I assume are favored to win anyway and that counts them as part of their record.

Ballotpedia tells a different story. They list 84 candidates who meet Her Bold Moves standards Setting aside those who are currently running this cycle. At this point 11 of them  already lost their primaries. To this point I can only find 10 candidates who've managed to get somewhere since 2023. Two lost their primaries, three lost the general and two were nonpartisan.

Despite that I need to be clear I think more highly of Her Bold Move then the Justice Democrats for five reasons:

1. They're living up to their mission statement and running candidates in places that are absolutely much harder for progressives to win, such as Tennessee, West Virginia and Kentucky even after four years. The Justice Democrats stopped doing that at least three election cycles ago.

2. They're trying to win at state and local offices as opposed to the deep blue districts that the Justice Democrats have focused on and keep losing at.  Considering that I believe in a 50 state strategy and local offices at every level I approve of that.

3. They are running more candidates at every level in each new cycle as opposed to the Justice Democrats running far less than their initial cycles.

4. They are willing to embrace non-partisans and independents in a way organizations like the Justice Democrats aren't.

5. Their mission statement is far simpler than most progressive organizations and therefore more likely to have success.

For that reason despite their relatively limited success to this point I applaud on every level what Her Bold Move is trying to do.  The problem comes in their execution.

Because over the last two years I've been on their mailing list and its very clear to me that they would consider me and anyone who isn't a female, whether cis, lesbian or trans, as someone they do not want as an ally. And that's because despite the nobility of their mission statement the online missives they send out on a nearly daily basis are so blatantly leaned towards the most left-wing identity politics agenda it makes the missives I used to receive from Daily Kos and other progressive websites seem like exercises in diplomacy by comparison.

I think by far the best way to illustrate that is to relate some of the ones I got in regard to Graham Platner in July. Over three days they sent three different emails arguing – justifiably in this case – about how horrible a choice Platner was. To be clear I didn't receive any emails from them in regard to Janet Mills during that period  but let's let that go. Instead on July 9^th they showed the six candidates. Mills was there and they brought up the names discussed:

The women on this list are literal current STATEWIDE OFFICEHOLDERS on the same list as a former Congressional STAFFER and the co-founder of a beer company.

Women are held to a vastly different standard. Men often require less experience and far fewer credentials to be taken serious as political candidates. They are framed as 'fresh voices', 'outsiders', 'fighters' or 'the kind of candidate who can win."

To be clear this a truth that's being held to every single candidate who runs as an outsider including some progressives. I mention this because Her Bold Move was an early endorser of Annie Andrews who also has no political experience but is being framed as a fresh voice, an outsider and a fighter by organizations like Her Bold Move. In fact these are terms that are more or less used for every candidate who is running for office these days whether they are male or female, any race or sexual orientations.

And none of this, for the record, even endorses Mills or Shenna Bellows, the two women in the race. Her Bold Move is basically choosing the biggest mess up the left has made – and they're using it to advertise for themselves. They're not even backing a candidate in Maine this cycle.

The bigger issue I had – and one that inspired this post – was one I received this week. It said, "Can we trust progressive men with women's issues?" The post was more or less a slam on Ruben Gallego.

Gallego was elected to the Senate from Arizona two years ago, taking the seat of Krysten Sinema who for most of her term had been attacked by the left as to moderate. She'd eventually shifted from Democrat to Independent before choosing not to run for reelection. Gallego was one of the few major victories for the Democrats in 2024.

However like most elected officials Gallego started moving to the center when he was elected. As Google states, he has adopted a tougher approach to border security, start to emphasize cost of living and economic stress, and has positioned himself by saying Democrats must adjust their platform on public safety and border enforcement to win competitive swing states.

So just as the left always does when a progressive decides to govern for the center where the votes are Her Bold Move chose to attack Gallego as not being trustworthy. Their arguments were specious at best, saying that Gallego was a protector of Eric Swalwell in Congress and that Gallego was sexist because he'd introduced the State of Men's Health Act in Congress. Even worse he did so alongside Roger Marshall of Kansas who is not only man but – gasp – a Republican.

To put it very mildly Gallego only narrowly won election in Arizona over Kari Lake – a woman but because she's a Republican I suppose she doesn't count . He outperformed Kamala Harris in Arizona by nearly 93, 500, many of whom I can only assume were men. So it's clear who the voters of Arizona wanted as their Senator and who they wanted as their President. This was clearly done to slam Gallego.

More to the point Her Bold Move didn't even use this as an opportunity to push for two of their own candidates who are running for the Arizona House of Representatives: Mariana Sandoval and Deborah Howard. For that matter they didn't use it to grant support Katie Hobbs, whose running for reelection as Governor in Arizona. The post was done solely to argue that Gallego – and by extension all male candidates who ran under the label of progressive – could not be trusted when it came to women's issues.

These posts, I need to be clear, were among the mildest of the ones I've received from Her Bold Move over the past years. Almost all of them spend more time attacking elected men in office – sometimes Republicans, though as you can see that's not a given – then they do lifting up female candidates on the major issues they talk about.

At best, this is the kind of reductive thinking I see among the progressive all the time to the point that if taken to its natural extension argues that female candidates are only supposed to run for office to help women in their states or districts. By extension if Kamala Harris had won the Presidency in 2024 Her Bold Move would have wanted her to devote her administration solely to helping women and/or people of color and if she tried to do anything to help anyone else, it would have justified primarying her in 2028.

At worst, the position of Her Bold Move plays entirely into all of the arguments that right-wing media, conservatives, Republican office-holders and of course You-Know-Who have been making about the Democrats catering to the radical left who don't have the interests of 'real Americans' and heart. The Democratic Party is notorious for its problems with white working class voters: Harris' receiving barely 32 percent of them was an all-time low and its been our party's Achilles Heel in the 21^st century, if not longer.  Her Bold Move plays into the right's narrative so perfectly that were it not for the fact that it does endorse candidates and has had quite a few wins, one would almost think it was a false flag for the Republican party.

Last month I wrote an article where I directly asked a question I've wondered about since at least 2024: do left-wing candidates actually want to win elected office? As I put it

A huge part of the reason I take the far left in American politics far less seriously then everybody in the media and both parties do is because the last decade has done much to convince me that to them the one issue that is the only one that counts to both parties – can they win? – is at the bottom of priorities for the overwhelming majority of left-wing voters…The left has always believed far more in principles as a litmus test for candidates then electability. There's a joke in there about because they've never managed to have any real political power, the principles are all they have.

Her Bold Move is not the worst example of this contradiction but it's by far the most frustrating. On the one hand they have a very clear and simple goal that is worthy and should be accomplished. But on the other, their approach for achieving  it in their email blasts makes it clear that they care far more for that litmus test and arguing in the angriest way possible, even if it ends up pushing opponents into the enemy camp and making it all the harder to realize their own goals. With friends like them, the Democrats don't need enemies – and we've already got quite a few.

But I do support women holding elected office and even if Her Bold Move views me as suspect I'm still going to help women get there. I'm going to vote for Hochul for reelection as well as whatever women are running for state legislative office. And I'm already working to try and help Mary Peltola win the Senate in Alaska. I honestly don't know if Her Bold Move will go that far. Not only is Peltola a Blue dog Democrats she's got a history of reaching across the aisle. In fact one of her first jobs in politics was running Lisa Murkowski's write-in Senate campaign in 2010 which helped her after she was primaried by a Tea Party opponent.

Peltola, you see, actually does  support women holding elected office, whether they're progressive or not. Meanwhile Her Bold Move isn't running any candidates in Alaska this cycle. Maybe they should have asked Peltola who probably could tell her where to find them – and more importantly, how to get them elected.

Homicide: Lies & Other Truths

 

Teleplay by Anya Epstein & David Simon ; story by Noel Behn

Directed by Nick Gomez

 

It's tempting to look at the fate of Michelle Forbes on Homicide as part of the show's continuing struggles with female regulars. By this point Isabella Hoffman and Melissa Leo had already been written out of the series under less then ideal conditions and the fact that Forbes was departed less then a season after Leo's could make the show look bad.

However its also clear that the bigger problem was that Juliana Cox essentially was facing the same issue that Megan Russert had the first season she was a regular and Brodie his entire tenure: the series is primarily based on the murder police and anyone who is secondary to it will be lacking. While it might have been noble to try and increase the prominence of the M.E's role on Homicide as we saw in the four seasons before Cox arrived that's never been that big a role to begin with. And as an unfortunate side effect by putting Cox at the center of every medical examination the writers had been forced to reduce the roles of the several recurring characters who had recurring roles. The most obvious example was Alyssa Dyer who only made one appearance on Homicide during Forbes's entire tenure. It's not a coincidence that once Forbes left the show Harlee McBride and Ralph Tabakin began to appear more frequently.

With that avenue cut off the only avenue left for Forbes was love interest and in truth that never worked particularly well either because as much chemistry as Forbes and Reed Diamond had their relationship was derivative of other police dramas. What's more it paled in comparison to the first season relationship between Bolander and Dr. Blythe way back in the first season. That storyline worked because of Beatty's gift at playing the melancholy surrounding Bolander as well as the fact that both actors were playing divorcees in their late forties, neither of whom were conventionally attractive. For all the darkness that surrounded so much of Cox and Kellerman's relationship it really seemed like Homicide was trying to boost its ratings with it rather than genuinely explore something.

One can hardly blame Forbes when it was announced the series was renewed for a seventh season she made it clear she didn't want to be around for it. Her exit still came as a huge shock to be when 'Lies & Other Truths' aired in March of 1998 mainly because I hadn't seen anything in the press about it. Part of the reason it bothered me was for an episode ostensibly about wrapping up Cox's arc, it appears to end in something of an anticlimax. While that's keeping with Homicide as a series overall, I do think its slightly unfair that so much of what is her final episode has so little to do with Juliana Cox.

The main story of the episode is part of an interesting pattern for the final half of the season: for the next four weeks the detectives will primarily be dealing with cases that don't involve names going up on the board. It's part of the larger theme of Season 6 as a whole: we spent much of the first third of the season dealing with the living victims of murder and now we're looking at how detectives deal with actions that don't involve murder in the definition of the term. So in that sense the fact that Cox's last major story is not about the usual metrics of her job is keeping with that pattern.

 

The episode opens with the crime in question: what would now be referred to as a case of road rage. A couple driving a car start honking a truck, the car passes it, and then the truck gets on the car's heels. This leads to the truck causing the car to crash into a semi that's parked nearby, killing the driver and leaving the passenger paralyzed while the truck's driver is killed too.

Munch and Kellerman are called into look at this because there seems to be a clear sign of intent from a passerby.  The case really isn't Homicide's purview and even if it is, as both detectives point out, it's only a paper clearance with killer and victim both dead. The issue is that the driver is a state maintenance road vehicle and there may be issues of liability. That is where Cox's involvement becomes critical.

Munch seems more interested in this as a murder because he's the primary and he can get an automatic clearance. Kellerman argues that the one witness is unreliable. By the time Munch and Kellerman get to the survivor –  the wife of the driver – she's hired her attorney. Despite being paralyzed from the neck down, She confirms the husband accidentally cut him off but that the driver seemed to be trying to run them off the road. The autopsy reveals that the driver of the state vehicle had a blood alcohol level of .09, just below the legal limit.

Later that day Cox's immediate superior comes to the morgue, ostensibly to say congratulations but then to tell her about the Dietz case. He tells her that they have some information that says the blood alcohol level should have been higher. It's pretty clear to us but not necessarily Cox that the state wants her to fudge the results. At first they just ask her to check the results again and Cox is willing. Only then does she learn that the attorney is planning to sue Maryland for compensatory damages on behalf of Dietz's wife. Then the boss comes back and basically tells her to change the numbers so that Dietz is drunk, therefore taking the state of the hook. Essentially Cox's job is dangled in front of her so that she has to be a team player. We can see on Forbes's face how much this turns her stomach.

The scene between Kellerman and Cox for lunch is sweet because it’s one of the few times this season we see the old Kellerman. He doesn't like seeing the city pressuring Cox into doing something that will take them off the hook for liability. Kellerman genuinely doesn't want to see the woman he cares for be forced to sell out her integrity. Cox is genuinely afraid of losing everything because of what the bosses make her do. Its Mike who tells her that the best thing to do is to go to the press. Juliana knows that she could end up losing her job. Its sad to see her tormented and you can tell that Mike genuinely wants her to do the right thing because he knows her.

Cox then visits the hospital and sees Mrs. Deitz suffering. She then goes to see Al and asks him for advice. She tells him everything she knows and asks for advice on who to talk too.  The story is leaked but the result is still the same: Cox is called to the director is kept waiting for a long time and is fired via a message by the secretary.

In what is perfect symmetry Cox recalls that on her first day on the job she fired a M.E. for falsifying a report in order to make a detective look good. Now she's being fired because she didn't do the same thing for her superior. It's a message that Simon will carry forth in The Wire; those who try to do the right thing are the ones who are punished for their actions if they cross the bosses. Kellerman is upset, blaming himself for what he did

 

 

The thing is there's an actual murder that takes place involving Bayliss and Pembleton and its actually more interesting. They've been called to Fort Haliburton where John Dean did prison for Watergate (Pembleton knows this) but he remembers it was also something to do with armed services. The officers received an anonymous phone call about a body that had been buried alive. The victim is Ashley Ashford Akton of Chattanooga and it's clear that he was in a coffin that was splintered to death but he was also their with a high tech cell phone and a water bottle and flashlight as well as an air tube to keep him alive. However the coffin collapsed "and the grave became real," as Pembleton puts it.

Unlike the case Munch and Kellerman have called to this is a murder: the coffin has been tampered with causing it to collapse. They have a witness who says that five men arrived in a truck and four of them buried the fifth.  The case then gives a chance for Kotto to shine as Al Giardello – and insight into his character.  Giardello tells then that the fort was once used for CIA operations at the start of the Cold War, one of the largest in the world.

This leads them into a world of wannabes and real-life spies. The wannabes include Akton. His widow tells them she received the call on the answering machine, saying where she was and that 'I've been betrayed!" Her husband's father and uncle received their military instruction at that fort and Ashley was obsessed with the history. His wife honestly seems more annoyed at his death then anything else: "He was as secretive as he was incompetent." Ballard finds out his cell phone was sold at the Silent Service Spy Store.

This leads them to Nelson Broyles played by familiar character actor Jon Glover. Glover at this point in his career was still very good at underplaying his roles and you can see the subtlety when he shows them a dynamite vest used in East Germany. Broyles recognizes the phone and says he knows the owner only by his code name: Johnny B. Goode and that he demanded top of the line material including the cell phone. He tells the detectives that he called 9-1-1 when he monitored the call and her Goode/Akton suffocating. He was anonymous because it was a breach of his customer's privacy.

After going through the CIC groups and coming up empty Giardello says he has 'a contact with inside information'. At this point we think we know Al well but there's something impressive about how after Al calls the phone and says "Sam. It's El Diago" then meets with a Russian who says, "El Diago they haven't hanged you yet." The way Pembleton and Bayliss are introduced to Sam Dunn. Bayliss and Pembleton get a whiskey and get a crash course in 'wannabe spies', the people who were drawn to the skills that were taught at Fort Halliburton because of the skills there. "They wish the Cold War had never ended," Dunn says. (No one could know in 1998 that it would resume but that the skills involved would be very much 21^st century.) He says that Akton along with his fellow acolytes will likely have a string of failed applications to CIA, NSA, FBI and even local law enforcement and that they will likely have known Acton from childhood. These applications will be 20 years old so it says something that not only can Sam get the information but he does so after Al just asks.

They cross reference his graduating class as well as very law enforcement applications from 1972-1975 this leads them to three of his classmates and one of them is none other then Nelson Broyles. Bayliss then decides to try and lure them in. They still have the cell phone in evidence control and he decides to use it to make a bogus call to Danvers and talk about the imminent arrest of these four actors. Broyles is monitoring it and he'll panic and phone the other three spies. Bayliss is right about this part but wrong about what Broyles panic will cause him to do. "By spreading disinformation?" Frank asks. "It's a classic Cold War technique," Bayliss says.

The technique works – sort of. They find his three compatriots who call themselves the 'sons of the Silent Service'. Ash was on a training mission which involved burying him alive like the East Germans in the 1950s but then something went wrong. Someone switched the caskets and Nelson Broyles insisted they all leave. This is a very funny scene as we see a bunch of balding fortyish men who really do look like CPA's arguing "Do we have to tell you all are secrets?" and then getting upset when they're all arrested.

The episode's climax comes when Broyles comes into the squad room with the dynamite vest we saw strapped to his chest, his thumbs on the trigger. There's a perfect mix of comedy and horror in the scene as Broyles insists his innocence and is shocked that the other members have 'betrayed the cause'  He makes an impassioned plea for the Cold War and its operatives and argues "Better dead then a captive!" Bayliss and Pembleton make it clear that they just want to interview him: "Surely you can resist simple law enforcement techniques." They appeal to his sense of pride and they get Bayliss to cutoff the switch to the bomb.

"My mind has been trained to resist the most powerful brainwashing techniques known to man," Broyles says proudly. Cut to him in the box probably a minute later. "I confess," he says over and over. Akton was killed because he was a dilletante and a drunk who revealed his secrets to outsiders. He claims we are still at war "a war against our own complacency." (Considering what would happen just a few years later, these remarks seem incredibly prescient.) Yet despite Akton breaking the rules not even Broyles can explain why he called 9-1-1. Bayliss makes it clear that at the end of the day Broyles couldn't practice what he preached anymore than Akton could. Broyles is practically in tears as he signs his confession.

The scene that unfolds in the Waterfront with the detectives talking with Sam and Gee. Bayliss casually asks if there was anyone he couldn't break. Sam says: "There was only one man. His determination was inhuman…Al Giardello." When Bayliss asks if Giardello was a prisoner of war Al remains stone-faced. "I'd prefer not to talk about it." But Sam does. He was KGB in Hanoi and he tried his best for four months and not only did he fail, Al convinced him to defect. Asked how he did all Al says is: "Me and $300,000."

The show also wraps up Falsone's custody case which goes pretty much as the viewer and even Falsone expected. What's fascinating is that the custody hearing has gone on so long that even Falsone doubts whether his reasons for suing in the first place were the right ones. Its striking to see a character we've seen so certain professionally and personally actively expressing doubt for the first time and Seda does much to further humanize his character. After the arguments are done Paul and Janine are waiting and Falsone acknowledges what he sees on the street: "the mothers sometimes show up, but the father is never in sight." He talks about his father, who was an alcoholic (Janine tells him that) but says his father was there for him. "If today I'm a cop instead of a criminal HE gets all the credit."  And then he tells Janine that he just wants the best thing for his kid. "And if him staying with you is the best thing for that to happen, that's okay too." The custody arrangement remains the same but Janine decides to give him more opportunities to see his son regardless of the ruling.  

The final scene between Kellerman and Cox is beautiful. She tells Mike that she wants to smell something in the air that isn't formaldehyde. Over the TV they see the state has settled with Dietz for $45 million. Kellerman tells Cox: "You did good."  Asked if she leaves town what happens to us Cox says: "Much to my dismay there never was an us."  She kisses him goodbye and says, "Stay out of trouble, Okay?" She has no idea how much trouble Mike's about to get in.

In a scene of perfect symmetry Juliana Cox leaves the show the same way she came in: driving fast out of town with the same song playing as before. Regardless of how you feel about her character Simon and Epstein gave her a perfectly symmetrical exit.

 

NOTES FROM THE BOARD

Mahoney PTSD: Kellerman asks Cox out for lunch at the Waterfront and Cox reminds him just how badly he got drunk the last time she saw him there. He tells her that Meldrick got suspended and Georgia Rae was suing him. "I think I'm okay now," he assures her. You just can't stop lying can you Mike?

'Detective Munch': Munch is behind the bar at the Waterfront in Cox and Kellerman's final encounter. The fun part is that usually clued in John serves the two of them drinks, watches the report and sees Juliana leave utterly unaware of what has happened. "Where'd Juliana go? The night is young." "She had to leave," Mike says. Munch has no idea he'll never see her again.

Hey, Isn't That… One of the most gifted character actors of all time, John Glover was nominated for five Emmys all between 1986 and 1994. Twice for Best Supporting Actor in a miniseries or a special for An Early Frost and Nutcracker, Money, Madness and Murder, twice for Best Guest Actor in a Drama, for playing Paul Kohler, a doctor who suffered from Elephant's Man disease on L.A. Law and Dennis Atwood on Crime and Punishment, a very short live series by Dick Wolf and playing Ned Miller on the first season of Frasier. For the purpose of this article I'm only going to focus on his TV work and that's more than enough since this episode.

Following this appearance he would play the Devil himself in the short-lived cult series Brimstone. His most famous role to most viewers was playing Lionel Luthor on Smallville, a role he played as a regular for the first seven seasons of the show. He's had roles as Declan Gage on Law and Order Criminal Intent, Simon Craft on Numbers, Samson Gray on Heroes and Jared Andrews across four seasons of The Good Wife, He played Teddy Maddox on Fear the Walking Dead and Eliot on And Just Like That…

He also has a substantial career as a voice actor, most famously for playing the Riddler on Batman: The Animated Series as well as other DC related shows in the 1990s. He also did the voice work for Abraxas in Tron: Uprising and Rodey in Gremlins: Secrets of the Mogwai.

Needless to say he's had a substantial film career particularly in the 1980s and 1990s usually as heavies. Such favorite work includes Brother Leon in The Chocolate War, Brice Cummings in Scrooged and Daniel Clamp in Gremlins 2. He also recreated his dual role of John and James Jeckyl in the film version of Love! Valour! Compassion! In 1997 . His last film role of significance was Mr. Sivana in Shazam!

Constant Reader September 2026 The Works of Elle Kennedy

 

For much of the last fifteen years one of my pleasures – not guilty, only rarely shared here – have been romance novels. I've rarely shared those particular books at this site, though every so often I've been reviewing a few of the authors who work in the field.

I have no boundaries with this genre: YA, simply romantic, pretty erotic, friends to lovers, enemies to lovers, heterosexual, LGBTQ+, even the occasional walk on the wild side into polyamorous ones. I have a couple of qualifiers found after years of trial and error: the biggest one being that they have to be contemporary romances. I've never been able to get into the 'romantasy' genre but that's more because I have issues with the 'fantasy' part of it. That's the major reason I never became a fan of Starz's Outlander franchise – I read the first volume of Diana Galbadon's work but could never get into any of the others. It's the same reason I've never been able to get into Game Of Thrones or Vikings; it's just not my cup of tea but I don't judge the ones who are devoted to it.

What I've found surprising is given how streaming services and films have been lapping up every form of IP imaginable I've yet to see, say, any series or movies devoted to the works of Christina Lauren or Lynn Painter, both of whom have a huge readership and following. I have no doubt much of it has to do with it being viewed as a female-only genre which is a clear sign of institutional sexism in our society, yada, yada, yada, I just which they'd get over it. And it does seem in the last couple of years the world of streaming is.

Now though I cast a wide net for romance reading as with every other major book I am aware of what I like and don't like. Which is why I will eventually see People We Meet on Vacation but have no desire to see The Love Hypothesis. I've read my share of Emily Henry and Ali Hazelwood and I much prefer the former.

The main reason I've written nothing about the cultural phenomenon so big there are people up in arms that it didn't get nominated for Emmys this year: Heated Rivalry. And that's because I have to make a confession: until the series was greenlit I'd never heard of Rachel Reid's romance novels between gay hockey players. To be clear I was well aware of hockey romances and even gay hockey romances. But that's because over the last several years I've been reading the books of one of the most enjoyable writers in the entire genre: Elle Kennedy.

Because of my eclectic nature I didn't find out about Elle Kennedy until about four years ago when I read the first book in her Avalon Bay series Good Girl Complex. The majority of Kennedy's novels are set among woman who are in their twenties and either in college or on the verge of graduating. Like so many romance novelists she splits her narratives between the male and female perspective.  (Lauren and Painter, who I mentioned above, are two writers who follow this pattern but it's common to many writers in the genre.) I ended up finding Kennedy's first hockey romances when I was reading the 'Briar U' series which is by far her biggest franchise. And in my way of doing things I then ended up with the wellspring Off Campus.

For those of you who've not encountered them like so many of Kennedy's works the Off Campus series takes place in Briar University, a fictional Ivy League School in Massachusetts. Briar is part of the most dominant college hockey teams in the entire country and anyone whose part of the Briar Hockey Team is automatically the alphas on the campus. Every female college students wants to sleep with the hockey team – and the hockey teams is more than fine with it – and most of the male college students want to be the briar hockey team – and to be clear some of them want to sleep with the hockey team – which more than a few are open too.

The Off Campus series centers on four students who have been rooming together since freshman year and have become essentially brothers in every way. Garrett Graham, John Logan, Dean DiLaurentis and John Tucker. (To clear things up right away even Logan and Tucker refer to themselves by their last names and only use 'John' when they are angry at each other.) The series begins in their junior year while the new hockey season is underway.

What might strike many readers – and perhaps be refreshing to the average viewer – is the players and almost everyone on campus is only interested in the day-to-day details of their lives rather than outside factors. Everybody goes to class, they go to sorority parties, they go to pep rallies, after parties, they worry about their grades and their future out of college. To be very clear these books all acknowledge that they do take place during Trump's first term but none of them – male, female, or whatever – are terrified of the world outside. They're more concerned with what will happen each season, passing tests and what their future might look like post college.

And just to be clear nobody – not even the alphas on the Briar hockey team – is living a charmed life. Garrett Graham is wealthy because of his family name, but his father – a pro-hockey legend – is an abusive drunk who drove Garrett's mother away and is clearly doing the same to his second wife. Logan's dealing with a drunk father and comes from a very working class home and he thinks that once he leaves Briar his life is over because he's going to have to take care of him for the rest of his life. Tucker comes from a single mom family in a working class town in Dallas. Dean comes from wealth and privilege and is very happy about his life and he seems incredibly shallow. Naturally when we reach his novel we learn theirs more to him than meets the eye.

None of them are looking for love and long-term relationships – this is college after all. Hookups happen easier to them then most but it's also common for just about everyone else in Briar. Kennedy is wonderful because she makes it very clear in all of her books relating to Briar that the women are just as capable of wanting to get laid as men are and frequently aren't looking for relationships either.

To give the best example there is Sabrina James. If there was such a thing as an alpha female Sabrina would be that. The first time we meet her at a frat party she goes right to the Briar quarterback (football is important in Briar but the team isn't as good as the hockey team) and begins to make out with him. Dean is sitting across from her and the first thing she does is fix Dean with a look and say "Richie."

After Dean acknowledges her presence:

"I noticed you actually bothered showing up for class this morning" Sabrina smirks. "You realize the TA is a dude, huh? You poor thing. Can't fuck your way into a passing grade."

"Blow me, Sabrina."

(Sabrina) cocks a brow. "Yeah? Pull it out, big boy."

It should be mentioned that by this point its established Dean is basically the best looking man perhaps on campus and he just to look at a girl and they'll fall at his feet. By this point quite a few of the woman who've been narrating novels are non-plussed by Dean but Sabrina's the first one who seems to hate him. Not that she cares that much; within a minute she pulls her target away and they're clearly about to hook up as loudly and noisily as possible.

Most of the woman Kennedy has tell their side of the story are not as alpha as Sabrina but they are very sure of themselves in life and in a sense sexually. By far my favorite character of the Off-Campus series is Allie Hayes who we meet in the first novel. Annie is described as utterly confident in her sexuality, can be very focused and loud in her sex with her boyfriend and has a lot of energy.

One of my favorite lines in the entire series comes in The Score, which is the story of Allie and Dean. This is the enemies to lovers romance trope as Allie thinks Dean is a 'man-whore (which Dean will later sees proud of) After Allie breaks up with her boyfriend and Hannah is out of town, she orders Dean to look after Allie to prevent her from getting back together with her ex.

Naturally they end up hooking up (Allie initiates the encounter, for the record) and in the aftermath Dean is frankly put off why Allie doesn't want to have a repeat performance. So after he texts her and says what he wants to sleep with her again, Allie's response is simple. "Well, of course he does. I'm amazing in bed."

Allie's problem is that she doesn't like having one-night stands: she likes relationships. However she admits she remembers just how great the sex was and then proceeds to realize that she has to work this out logically. She wants to have sex with Dean again and he wants to sleep with her. So she comes up with the next proof:

Premise I: Casual sex makes me uncomfortable

Premise II: I just got out of a long-term relationship and am not ready for another one.

Premise III: Even if I was, I wouldn't want a relationship with man-whore Dean.

Conclusion: Um…?

I mean, you got give credit to any woman who decides to have casual sex with someone because she aced Argumentative Logic.

And Kennedy because she makes it clear that no one is an idiot in her books later proves that despite their efforts they haven't fooled anybody. In the concluding novel The Goal, which tells Tucker's story, makes it clear he can follow the clues:

Allie Hayes, the best friend of our other roommate's girlfriend, crashed at our place last night.

Dean is a man-whore.

Chicks love Dean.

Ally is a chick.

Ergo, Dean slept with Allie.

Followed by:

Plus, there were the clothes scattered around the living room because Dean is physically incapable of having sex in his bedroom.

That's another mystery that baffles everybody who knows Dean and of course Allie finds about it. To be clear she also remembers because she tells Dean "I want to christen it" and Dean has had sex there before, of course. Many, many times.

Even as a critic there are some things you turn to as comfort food not necessarily because they're the best things ever but because they bring you happiness when you need them such as Law & Order reruns or simply watching a few minutes of Big Little Lies every time I feel like it. When I need to unwind a little during the day I'll look at a romance novel much like Elle Kennedy. And this is, to be clear, coming from a cis white male. I can only imagine how many women have turned to it over the years.

Which is why I was happy to learn last year that Amazon was doing a streaming version of Off Campus and happier still when it was renewed for a second season even before the first season debuted last May. Don't get me wrong, I wasn't hanging on to see who was cast to play Garrett and Hannah in the first season (The Deal, the first novel in the series deals with their love story) but there was a period when I could understand why so many people might care when the next MCU trailer or the preview for House of Dragon came out.

Nor was I shocked to learn that the first season has become one of the most streamed series in Amazon's history and that practically overnight the cast of complete unknowns from Ella Bright and Belmont Cameli have become the kind of overnight sensation the same way the cast of Heated Rivalry did.  These characters mean something they people. Hell they mean something to me.

We turn to books like these in a complicated, messy world because they are formulaic but there's always room for variation in the formula and you still care about the characters anyway. This has been true of almost every romance novel I've read and it's definitely true for Off-Campus.  There are just small foibles and quirks that I truly love that you don't find in any other genre. I love the recurring gag, for example, how Logan keeps trying to come up with texting acronyms that make no sense to anyone but him when he says them but because Garrett knows his friend so well he can translate them without much effort. I love the bond that forms among the girlfriends of the Briar team that eventually becomes deeper that being in the same place and becomes a sisterhood itself overtime. (And if you've read your share of Kennedy you know these bonds last way beyond graduation.) And because I'm a fan of shared universe stories as a whole I always love how side characters you meet in a novel in one book will end up getting their own story three or four books later and the constant callback to earlier novels.

Now that my rush for the Emmys is over I plan to finally start watching Off Campus this week and perhaps even reviewing it for my blog at some point. Perhaps I'll go in depth the way for other series and literary adaptations, maybe I'll just enjoy the ride. And I do look forward to meeting who they eventually get to play just later characters as Sabrina and Grace and if they go a little later Hunter Davenport and Summer, Dean's sister whose even more attractive then he is and instantly gets a crush on one of the introverts on the team. I'm not going to be one of those nitpickers about how they're getting small details different because I don't care that much and I'm not that kind of person.

Oh and just in case there are some people who don't know: Elle Kennedy has written her share of gay hockey love stories. Most of them are done in collaboration with Sabrina Bowen, who like Kennedy has her own series of hockey romances that span the entire sexual spectrum. And if that's a little too much Lynn Painter's most recent YA novel is called Fake Skating and tells the story of two childhood friends who reconnect when she moves to Minnesota and finds her childhood friend is now the local town's hockey god.

I'm just putting that out there because some people might say those stories deserve TV series too. You know, some people.

With Season 43 of Jeopardy Underway We Can Now Officially Update The Roster for the 2027 Tournament of Champions

 

 

Those of you who read my columns know that when the 2026 Jeopardy Masters concluded I promised to be back this weekend with an update for Season 43 before it began Monday. And I was genuinely planning to do so – until I remembered my own history.

Ever since I began regularly covering Jeopardy in my writing intentionally or not, a pattern has been developing. In the post-Trebek era I don't start writing about each new season of Jeopardy until something of importance happens. (Or in the case of Season 40 when nothing of importance seemed to be happening.)

What was important? Basically someone qualifying for the next Tournament of Champions. Sometimes you had to wait for their run to end (as we did with Matt Amodio way back in the fall of 2021) Sometimes you needed to wait for someone to qualify at all and that could take a bit. But I figured I would be best served by waiting at least until the first week of the season was over.

With good reason. At the end of Season 42 Matthew Riggle, a community college professor from Madison, Alabama had won the last two games and $64,400. So if he could just make it until Wednesday then he would officially qualify for the 2027 Tournament of Champions.

Which he has managed to do, though he really made it look hard. In the season premiere he spent the entire game trailing Bryan Lee and when he wagered everything on a Daily Double in Double Jeopardy and lost it all, I thought it would end right there. But he managed an impressive recovery and on a tough Final Jeopardy no one got right, he left himself with enough money to win his third straight game. On Tuesday he was challenged seriously by Wesley Jalipa and Abby Mullen but maintained his lead throughout the game and ended up winning his fourth game.

So yesterday with $95,602 he just needed one more win to officially get to the Tournament of Champions. Unfortunately he proved to be his own worst enemy – though to be fair even if he hadn't he almost certainly would have still lost.

Matthew led throughout the Jeopardy round more due to the failures of his opponents Daniel Nicastro and Jen Spinoglio. Both of them were in the red for much of it and while they recovered Matthew finished it in the lead with $4800 to Jen's $2600 and Daniel's $400.

His odds improved as Dan got the first Daily Double in Double Jeopardy wrong. Matthew moved up to $9600 when he found the other Daily Double in UNFINISHED LIT. He wagered $7000:

Published posthumously in 1938, her 'The Buccaneers' wasn't about pirates but about love in the Gilded Age.

There was a long pause. Before time ran out he guessed: "Who is…Stein?" He didn't know what I did it home: it was Edith Wharton. He dropped to $2600.

After that Jen who'd been pretty quiet during this round went on a run of her own. She finished the round with 20 correct responses and only four incorrect ones and was helped by not finding a Daily Double to end with $10,600. Matthew had to struggle to stop her from running away with it and Dan, who at one point was at -$1900 had to fight to finish in positive. Both achieved their goals: Matthew finished with $5400 while Daniel got the last clue of the game correct to end with $100.

But it was irrelevant because of how Final Jeopardy went. The category was NAMES IN TECH NEWS:

This last name in A.I. news has the same origin as a Latin name meaning 'lover of God' or 'loved by God.'

Now I had no idea what they were talking about with this clue. Daniel wrote down: "What is Theodore?" That was wrong and he lost $98.

Matthew was next. He wrote down: "What is Amadeus?" Right idea but the wrong name. It cost him $5201, leaving him with $199.

Jen was in pretty good shape and she knew the correct last name. In fact she wrote it down almost immediately. "What is Amodei?" That was correct. The founders of Anthropic are Dario and Daniela Amodei. She added $201 to become the new champion with $10,801.

But despite that Matthew is now officially listed as the eleventh player qualified for the 2027 Tournament of Champions. So now is as good a time as any to remind of you of the lineup we have coming back for the 2027 Tournament of Champions:

Harrison Whitaker, 14 wins, $373,999

Will Riley, 4 wins, $77,403

James Denison, 4 wins, $99,400

Jamie Ding, 31 wins, $882,605

Tristan Williams, 10 wins, $221,902

Chris  D'Angelo, 8 wins, $194,201

Peter McFerrin, 6 wins, $147,399

Adam Remsen, 12 wins, $306, 415

Caleb Groen, 12 wins, $346, 698

Mina Kimes, Celebrity Jeopardy All-Stars Winner

Matthew Riggle, 4 wins, $95,602.

 

I mentioned in my wrap-up of Season 42 that there were three three-game winners who, if past was prologue, would be invited automatically to the Tournament of Champions. However, discretion being the better part of valor, I'm going to wait until the eligibility requirements for the 2025-2026 come to an end in November before I officially put them on the roster. A lot can change in two months.

Besides it's already a formidable lineup with five super-champions, one of whom is already a cultural phenomenon. Jamie Ding, now the fifth best player in Jeopardy history in terms of games and money one, has become a cultural sensation, appearing on Who Wants to Be A Millionaire with Ben Affleck this summer, among other places. However there are no guarantees in Jeopardy as Scott Riccardi ended up learning when he made it to the Finals this past February.

Will someone the level of Paolo Pasco emerged in the next two months? Will another super-champion rise during that period? Anything can happen and your humble scribe will be there.

And once again congratulations to Jeopardy for winning the Emmy for Best Game Show this year. Well-deserved.

Why Did So Many Fans Leave Lost 20 Years Ago, Part 1:Why I Stuck With Lost Through Season 3

 

On October 4^th 2006 I was one of over 18.8 million viewers who watched the premiere of Season 3 of Lost. I'd come to the show somewhat later than most (I'd watched the reruns of the first season during the summer of 2005) but by that point I was just as devoted a viewer as anyone who'd been there since the Pilot.

At the time I was 27 years old writing about television but still not really putting much of it online  and was still very limited in my viewing habits. This had more to do with the options available during the mid-2000s. Not only was there no streaming to speak of network television, by and large, was still the big kahuna. This was proven by the fact that it was still dominating the Emmys in both drama and comedy (and would continue to do so for the rest of the decade) and also because cable still wasn't as big a thing as it would be at the end of the decade.

At that point the only two real players in prestige TV were HBO and FX. (Showtime still wasn't quite there yet.) And I was still somewhat erratic in my viewing of it. I'd only started watching The Shield seriously during Season 3, hadn't watched Deadwood at all and by the end of Season 5 I'd given up watching The Sopranos. So like the overwhelming majority of Americans I was still following network TV and at that point I basically stuck with network dramas and comedies week after week, year after year.

I'd been infuriated by the fact that that summer the Emmys had ignored Lost for Best Drama and all the major acting awards. (I was also just as pissed they'd ignored The Shield completely and I wasn't exactly thrilled that Hugh Laurie had been ignored for Best Actor for House and Hank Azaria had been nominated for Huff instead.) But I'd moved past it and after that I was counting the moments until October 4^th.

I watched the next six weeks eagerly. I don't remember what I thought of the individual episodes at the time (I'll get to what I thought of them in hindsight) but I do know when the series had what we would now call a 'winter finale' in November of 2006 I was angry as hell I was going to have to way until February for the show to come back.

What I didn't know at the time – and wouldn't know until Nikki Stafford wrote about it in the Season Three volume of Finding Lost  - was just how frustrated the fan base was to the point that many of them never came back after that cliffhanger. Indeed it wasn't until I read Alan Sepinwall's The Revolution Was Televised that I learned the frustration was great not just among fans but the critical community at large.

There has never been a point in the twenty years since that this hasn't baffled me. Mainly because I've never been sure how frustrated that response really was. At the end of 2006 TV Guide put Lost on its annual top 10 list of the year in large part because of some of new characters we'd seen in the first six episodes of Season 3. The show was also nominated for a Golden Globe for Best Drama for the third consecutive year, something that never happened again even though the Emmys would deservedly nominate it for Best Drama for its final three seasons.

So who's right? The people who believed those six episodes were the absolute worst things they'd seen? Or the critics and awards show who thought it was  as good as ever?

Having rewatched the series multiple times since I will acknowledge that when it comes to overall quality Season 3 is by far the weakest of all six seasons of Lost. That's still a relative term and I'd argue even at its worst it was still better than quite a few of the shows that were on network TV during the 2006-2007 season.  

So to answer the question I need to be a bit more personal in my writing then I've been in the vast majority of these articles and talk about why I stuck with it.

I'll be honest much of it may have been due to the fact that when I was in my twenties I was more patient when it came to watching TV then I would be a few years later. Back then with almost every major series I was ride or die, even when it became clear to me that they were becoming shells of what they once were. By the time I reached my thirties I would be more selective and start bailing out on television shows when they had exhausting my patience.

In some cases, mainly because my home didn't have a DVR and there really wasn't any streaming to speak of, a lot of the shows I gave up on during this period were shows that conflicted with other series I loved. That's the reason I decided to abandon the CSI franchise, first the original and then the spin-offs, Without a Trace, Smallville and eventually Grey's Anatomy. (I stuck with the show through Season Five.)

Now it's not that I was naïve about how much a show could drop in quality from season to season. In fact during the interregnum when I was waiting for Lost to return I was about to get a far better example that tested my fidelity as a viewer far more.

As I've mentioned in other articles (and in a few weeks I'm actually going to give its own series) I was a rabid fan of 24. And in 2006 television was graced by not only its finest season but one of the greatest seasons in TV history. The fifth season was so remarkable that it was ranked Number 1 on the best of 2006 list of TV Guide and deservedly won the Best Drama Emmy that year, along with four others.  Like everyone else who was a fan I was eagerly anticipating Jack Bauer's return.

And when Day 6 came it very quickly showed not only was it not living up to the hype but it was the worst thing on television. And I'm being literal. Entertainment Weekly ranked it as one of the five worst shows of 2007 a full year having ranked it as one of the best shows of 2006. And they were right to do it.

Far more than what happened during the first six episodes of Lost Day 6 of 24 absolutely tested my willingness to stick with a show during a season. It was clear to me by the time we were a third of the way in that this was disastrous but I kept hoping that it would turn the corner and it would improve. Instead it kept getting worse and worse. By the time Day 6 finally ended I was seriously considering if I was going to come back for Day 7: something that would have been unthinkable to me  a year earlier.  (The reason I ended up coming back, interestingly, has an overlap with why many critics may have gotten back on the Lost bandwagon for Season 4 and I'll get to that in due time.)

Perhaps that's why I was much more forgiving then many fans. When Lost returned from the winter finale 24 was one third of the way through Day 6. By that point I knew that no matter how tiresome the daddy issues of the characters on Lost were becoming I would rather deal with them then the daddy issues Jack Bauer was dealing with that season. (And if there are any Lost fans who never saw 24, trust me: Philip Bauer makes Anthony Cooper look like Father of the Year.)

The biggest argument about the first third of Season 3 of Lost  is that it basically seems to be running in place during the first six episodes. There's certainly some truth to that. The manipulations of Ben and the Others really do seem ridiculously protracted, particularly when we finally learn why Ben has gone to all this trouble to abduct the three of them.  I had more patience for it then some but I get why others didn't.. The question is: why did I have more patience?

I think a lot of it had to do with having watched The X-Files as a teenager. Now I wasn't at the point where I could have put those feelings into words and I'm not sure it occurred to me until multiple rewatches of both shows. But I have a feeling that a fan of The X-Files might have had more patience to stick with Lost during the first six episodes of Season 3 then someone who'd never watched it the latter. (The comparisons between the two shows had begun even before the first season of Lost was over.)

I think the main reason I was giving Lost more latitude was because it wasn't making the same mistakes that The X-Files had with its mythology during that period. I'll illustrate some of the more pertinent examples below:

 

When Lost said it was going to change things it actually did.

One of the great frustrations any X-Files fan had of the mytharc was that every time we got to one of those two-parters during sweeps  the promos would promise 'This is the Episode that changes everything!" And at the end of it nothing really had. Mulder and Scully would always be on the verge of getting some new piece of the puzzle but by the end of the episode it was snatched away from them and by the next two-parter came along, they were either following a completely different piece of the mytharc or what they previous believed was completely reversed. And the longer the mytharc went the less our heroes seemed to have any control of it which was just as frustrating the longer the series went on.

Even after two seasons Lost  was more than willing to shake up the status quo.  When they found the hatch, they finally went inside it and we spent the next season trying to figure it out and the mysteries involving the Dharma Initiative. When the Others abducted Walt and blew up the raft, it signaled that we were going to start learning more about the Others and slowly but surely during Season 2 we did to the point that by the end of the season we'd met their leader.

To be sure the series did a habit of getting bogged down with some of the arcs of its characters. Charlie's troubles with heroin became tiresome almost immediately and the show's decision to have Sawyer manipulate Jack and Locke into taking the guns was a major step backwards for the show and the character. But there's a difference between getting bogged down on character arcs and the story and it helped matters that Lost had a big cast many of which were always more interesting to follow. That counted for a lot for me.

 

Lost was pushing  the boundaries of how network TV worked.

Back in the 2000s on network TV and very much still today TV shows upheld a status quo. This was true not just for The X-Files but really every drama to that point. A season ending cliffhanger had to be resolved with the characters back where they were at the start of the previous season. This was particularly tiresome with The X-Files where Mulder and/or Scully's lives were always in jeopardy at the end of the season but you knew that by the end of the first two episodes they'd be back to investigating Monsters-of-The-Week. (The fact that the show kept doing that in Season 6 when they were supposed to be banned from working The X-Files really became tiresome in that regard.)

Even by the start of Season 3 it was very clear Lost wasn't playing by those rules. This had happened at the end of Season 1 when the launching of the raft had some of the castaways leaving the island and even though the raft blew up, they didn't come back to the camp until Season 2 was nearly a third over. Season 3 took it even further. Jack, Kate and Sawyer were on Hydra Island in the hands of the Others. Sayid, Jin and Sun were on a boat trying to save them. The camp was still dealing with the implosion of the Hatch.

It took three full episodes to catch up on where everybody was at the start of Season 3. And Lindelof and Cuse took their sweet time trying to bring the family back together. Sayid, Sun and Jin didn't come back to the camp until 'The Cost of Living' at which point the show killed off Mr. Eko. Even after the winter finale aired it would be several more episodes before Sawyer and Kate ended up back at the camp with Jack still being held prisoner. Kate would then immediately turn around and bring Locke and Sayid back to try and find the Others. (I'll stop here because I don't want to spoil the rest of the season which I may deal with in further articles.)

To be fair Lost wasn't the first drama I'd seen that was fine disrupting the status quo: The Wire and Six Feet Under had already demonstrated how great they were at it. But for one of the highest rated dramas on television this was unprecedented and a foreshadowing of how other network dramas such as The Good Wife and to an extent Shondaland and Greg Berlanti's Arrow-verse would in the 2010s.

 

The death of a character meant something that it really didn't on The X-Files.

 I don't just mean the fact that after a character was killed, you could just as easily see them in a flashback or maybe a shape-shifting alien. Even by Season 2 Lost was making use of that trope as well (though to be fair it was going to mean something in the endgame.) I mean that the death didn't signify anything important to the series.

Deep Throat dies, X comes along. X is killed; Marita Covarrubias comes along. A shadowy villain from the conspiracy comes along, he's killed, another one shows up. The names change; the role doesn't. And those are just the ones the show stuck with; so many times the show appeared to kill off a major character (Smoking Man, anyone?) and he'd pop again a season later exactly where he was before.

By contrast the deaths of the survivors meant something in a way I'm not even sure they meant in other series at the time. There were memorials for them in a makeshift cemetery that kept getting subtly bigger each season. In a way we ended up learning that the deaths meant something to the Others as well during the opening of Season 3.

In 'The Glass Ballerina' Colleen Pickett, the wife of Danny, goes on a mission for Ben Linus and ends up getting shot by Sun in self-defense. Two episodes later in 'Every Man for Himself' Juliet pulls Jack out his cage to try and operate on Colleen and as shocked as the Others are by her actions, there are quite a few of them watching through a glass screen and they're clearly upset that one of their own is in peril. When Colleen dies on the table her husband is racked with grief and in a rage sets out to kill Sawyer in an eye for an eye. In 'The Cost of Living' Ben takes Jack out for the  memorial for Colleen where the Others put on white robes, play Brenda Lee's 'I Wonder', put Colleen's body on a raft and light a funeral pyre that will burn her body to ashes as it goes out to sea.

On a story level this arc shows that the Others are like the Oceanics in a critical way: they mourn the life of one of their own the same way the survivors do.  This does more to humanize them then it ever did the Syndicate, or for that matter many of the antiheroes or heroes we've seen on TV. We didn't get to know Colleen the way we learned about the overwhelming majority of the Others but by treating such a minor character with great respect in death it's a subtle and powerful moment - even if its undercut by the fact that this episode ends with the death of Eko by the Smoke Monster.

 

It was far too early in Lost's run to worry about the writers screwing up the mythology.

That may be the biggest reason I couldn't understand why so many fans chose to bail.

While responses always vary as to when the mythology in The X-Files went off the rails I think by the time Lost began I'd decided for me it was during Season 5. The way that the writers chose to complete reverse everything Mulder believed in at the start of the season – and then basically restore it even before the season was over – was in hindsight a bridge too far for me.  So it essentially took four and a half seasons for me to completely lose faith with Chris Carter and company with the idea the mytharc would ever make sense.

So the fact that when we were barely six episodes into Season 3 and a sizable percentage of the fanbase bid the show adieu really told me more about the viewership then whatever problems the show was having. We're only two seasons in and you guys want frigging answers now?!  Give me (or Darlton) a break!

There's also a clear contrast behind the scenes. Carter's original plan for The X-Files was to end the series after five seasons and then continue the franchise in films. But by the fall of 1997 the X-Files was being watched by 20 million viewers a week so the decision was made to essentially make Fight The Future and keep the fifth season to run up to it. The result permanently paralyzes whatever forward momentum the mytharc had and it never regained it.

Now compare this with Lindelof and Cuse who wanted to come up with an endgame for Lost but the show was one of the biggest hits on television. They were similarly paralyzed and it's clear quite a bit of Season 3 shows it in the stories that are being told. However they convinced ABC that they needed a definitive endgame and by April of 2007 the network agreed allowing them to announce the series would come to an end in 2010. By that point Lost had regained its forward momentum and headed into a magnificent stretch during the final half of the season, fully rewarding fans like myself who stayed the course.

So now I've explained why I chose to stick with Lost through the trials and tribulations of those first six episodes. The question is: were those who chose to leave after the winter finale right to do so?

The thing is, there are pros and cons to each side that even I as a die hard fan of Lost can argue. And in the next two articles I'm going to illustrate them.