The Cutprice Guignol

I knew that this was going to be bad.

Last week, with it’s fabulous misunderstanding of the continent of Asia, was rough, you know? But this – this is an episode about musicians. And you know how I feel about musicians.

Well, maybe you don’t, actually, but let me tell you now: musicians, especially musicians in fiction, are Awful. Anyone who has the nerve to get up on stage and perform? To assume that people might actually like and enjoy their art and want to share that in public instead of hiding out on a snark blog to piss their stupid opinions on to the internet? Untrustworthy. Fundamentally. Maybe you’re a musician reading this; I mean no disrespect, but yes, you too. Even when they’re played by someone as endearing as Dominic Monagahan, musicians are fundamentally awful.

And this episode, The Moth, has done little to prove me wrong. This was the first episode since the pilot that my dear and darling partner has watched with me, and, when I switched it on and he figured out that it was The Charlie One, he began writhing in abject distress on the couch beside me. Luckily, I had already thought ahead to lock the doors and bolt down the windows, so he was trapped to suffer this indignity along with me.

The Moth tracks Charlie’s rise from Godly Mancunian youth to…well, to falling out with his brother in Australia over still being on heroin, without much in between. Allegedly, this episode is meant to follow his rise to rock stardom as the bassist of his rock band, Driveshaft (read: penis penis), alongisde his exploitative brother. But, as with last week, this episode is just too compressed to really explore the rise and fall of the band, Charlie’s descent into drug addiction, and the tearing-asunder of him and his brother’s pseudo-Gallagher situation.

Not to mention the fact that – Jesus. This entire plot unfolds like Spinal Tap played dead straight. Charlie looks like a child in Gap Kids rock flares and sparkly scarves, the actually glimpses we get of his apparently epoch-defining songs so bland that they essentially play out as parodic, the “You’ve changed, man!” throughline so mind-buggeringly cheesy that it seems almost impossible that this was written with a straight face. Oh, and Charlie managed to trap Jack in a cave, as a Large Metaphor for his How Trapped Charlie Is in his Own Mind. The less said about the cocooned moth that Locke uses to metpahorize Charlie’s withdrawal, the fucking better. Damon Lindelof, I will come to your house and fight you personally. When I’m done, there’s going to be nothing…left over. Ha. Get it? Watch The Leftovers, guys, seriously.

Anyway. Elsewhere in the episode, Syed is putting together a plan with Kate to track down the signal that is coming from somewhere on the island. I have been vocal about how much I love Kate and Syed together, but this episode really just secured that for me; she’s meant to be stuck in between Sawyer (who I shall only accept on-screen when he is vocally shitposting Jack to his face) and Jack in a love triangle, but really, it just doesn’t make sense. Jack and Sawyer, I suppose, are meant to represent the two sides of Kate – Jack the good, Sawyer the non-specifically criminal.

But that’s just so fucking boring. Kate makes more sense with Syed because they reflect so many of the same qualities in each other – tenacity, intelligence, idealism, focus – both having developed them for different reasons and in different backgrounds. I know that the show isn’t that invested in their relationship, but God, I wish that interesting and dynamic platonic relationships like this one were given the same space to breathe and the same weight as romantic ones, you know? Just because Syed and Kate don’t want to bone down on each other doesn’t mean that Sawyer and his fucking bleached tips are automatically more interesting.

I knew that this was going to be bad, and I was proved right. So, there’s that. Charlie’s Driveshaft fiasco was bad enough, but to tease me with the promise of how good Kate and Syed are together only to drag her back to Matthew Give-No-Fucks by the episode’s end? Ugh. Bring on next week. It couldn’t possibly be worse than this. Not unless it was, I don’t know, a Sawyer episode or something. Right?

If you liked this recap, and want to see more stuff like it, please feel free to jump into some of my other recapping projects – the Fifty Shades of Grey book series, the first Harry Potter book, Doctor Who, Game of Thrones, and American Horror Story, to name a few. I also write about movies with my brilliant co-editor over at No But Listen. If you’d like to support my work, please consider supporting me on Patreon, or buying my books!

(header image via Doux Reviews)