Episode Report Card Erin: C | 1 USERS: B- YOU GRADE IT Blowback? Blow me.
By Erin | Season 3 | Episode 14 | Aired on 03.06.2004
Lisbon. We're on a docked ship. Syd peeks over the edge and shoots some guard in the neck with a tranq dart. He drops, and Syd and Vaughn head onto the deck. She tells Dix and Marshall that they're on board, and Marshall tells her to fire up the sniffer and go hunt them some boom-boom. And not the kind that involves nudity and handcuffs. Syd quickly locates the charge as being in the engine room. As Syd and Vaughn make their way to the door leading below-deck, two black-masked figures scoot up behind them. Vaughn senses this and turns, only to have one of the figures shoot him several times in the chest. He goes down, and Syd starts firing on the enemies. She manages to drag Vaughn out of the line of fire and locks the below-deck door. "Vaughn?" she gasps. "You okay?" We'll have to wait until after the commercials to get the answer to that question. But I think it's safe to say he's not going anywhere.
I am SO seeing Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. That shit looks brilliant. And my new favorite commercials are all the CitiBank spots. That lost hamster ad? Utterly hilarious. Although the Burger King spots are quickly winning over my heart in the advertising game. I think I watch too much television. While drinking. In my underwear. Sigh.
Okay. We're back. And when I say "back," I really mean "back at the beginning of the episode." Because tonight's clever "mess with time" narrative structure isn't the "let's start at the end and lead up to it" format we've seen time and time again over these three seasons. No. Instead, it's the "let's see the same story only from a different POV except without really paying careful attention to the editing or actual POV because we're just too damn lazy to do that" format. See, after the break we join Lauren and Vaughn, in exactly the same spot they were in the beginning of the video. Exactly. And it's the exact same shots, the exact same dialogue, and if you'd gone off to get a snack or something during the break and come back to this scene, you totally would have thought that ABC had somehow rewound the episode to the beginning and was having some technical difficulties. A little futzing with the angles and character perceptions would have been nice, is all I'm sayin'. Two words: Pulp. Fiction.
So, anyway, it's the "I'm going jogging to avoid my true and honest hatred for you" scene. The only thing that's different is that a bit of dialogue is missing (what, from Lauren's point of view, that dialogue didn't exist? Or does she just regularly ignore her husband?) and, after Vaughn leaves, Lauren picks up the phone and calls back the person who'd called her. It's Sark. He's somewhere in Europe, I think, because where Lauren is, it's a little bit before the crack of dawn's ass and where Sark is, it's a nice and rainy noon. Lauren's not only pissy with him because he's calling her so damn early, she's also bugged that he's calling her on her NSC phone and that those records are checked for incoming calls. Fortunately, Sark's phone is untraceable. Sark's just meandering along a walkway somewhere, looking devilishly handsome in his black leather coat and low-slung black pants. He obviously shops at Angry Ed's House of Evil. And it looks good on him.