Lost, Season 1

Koko: Okay, you know what, if you're gonna play the faith card, you'd better be Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Carl Dreyer, or Jesus of Nazareth. As my student said of Hemingway's "Big Two-Hearted River," not everyone gets to write the sentence "he liked to open cans."

Shame on this show for using the supernatural as an excuse for things not adding up and then retreating back into the braying self-indulgence of clever television writing. This show could work. It has promise. It uses early Willie Nelson songs effectively. But none of that matters when it insists on drawing us into the frumpy land of "maybe" only to avoid making sense--and the responsibility of real beauty.

Ass-Headed Bottom: Damn, Koko, just wait until you watch season 4 of this choose-your-own-adventure extravaganza! Earlier this year they actually invented one character whose sole purpose was to take Desmond and Said from one ship's compartment to another; when he had outlived his usefulness, they offed him with a brain aneurysm (admittedly to my delight). Incidentally, what's with that casting picture up there?