Welcome back to the land of the living.

Honestly not sure how much I've got to say about LOST series 5, other than I have really been dragging my feet about watching episodes and I would probably bail here if it weren't for Dogen in s6 I didn't want to get to the end with CM.

It's not entirely without merit: I really like the ~1.5 of an episode you get past the 1970s timeskip—Sawyer and the gang having made a home for themselves in the past; Sawyer, particularly, having finally resolved the arc with the man who killed his father being allowed to grow, developing a relationship with Juliet. I love all that stuff. I like Rose and Bernard living out in the jungle with Vincent and not really wanting anything to do with the Adventure Gang (though I didn't like their "ah Jack's going to detonate a nuke is he? Who Care" position).

The rest was pretty dire, though:

• Attempting to make the death of Charlotte (a character who, in a team of already thinly-characterised characters, might as well be a sheet of paper) a big emotional beat was stupid;
• Daniel being murdered by his own mother is stupid;
• Locke getting murdered by Ben is stupid;
• Sayid shooting young Ben is stupid;
• Ben being bad because the Other Magic required to resurrect him made him evil is stupid;
• Jin meeting Rosseau in the past is stupid;
• Sun not being transported back in time with the rest of the gang is weird, and stupid;
• Jack's character having transformed wholesale from a guy whose whole deal is that he doesn't believe in Island Bullshit to a guy who is completely in the tank for literally anything anyone says to him about destiny or whatever is very stupid;
• Ben getting lawyers to try and get Kate to submit to a maternity test is stupid;
• The bathos of going from having Dharma logos be cool, mysterious things for stations to having e.g. Hurley with a knife-and-fork because he works in catering is stupid;
• The lads attacking Sayid, Hurley et al were stupid, and also annoying;
• Charles Widmore somehow having the time to be the head of The Others while also founding an international conglomerate is real sigma grindset ngl, but also stupid;
• Ben being judged by the smoke monster is stupid;
• The smoke monster being a dude is stupid;
• Blowing up a nuke to "negate the energy under the Swan site(??)" is stupid;
• I cannot stress this one enough: everything about Jacob is stupid. Once we got past two flashbacks where he just shows up to say hi to one of the characters in the past, CM turned to me and said "are they just going to do this for every character now?" They did.

There was at least one moment in every episode of this series where I threw up my hands and wanted to stop watching. Even the good episodes had some real crap in there too. And with the introduction of Jacob we formally introduce ~destiny~, the pre-ordained specialness of the characters–I'm sorry, the candidates—which I found to be way less interesting and compelling than when they were just a bunch of people in a plane crash on a weird island with troubled pasts and complimentary skills.

I feel like I've been saying this in every post, but it really is all downhill from here, folks. With one important exception: only one episode to go before it's Dogen time. I can't wait.