Two Unrelated Things About Beaches

SPOILER ALERT: If you haven't seen Top Design and Lost for the week ending February 17, you might want to come back later.

Becky and I are big fans of Project Runway, Top Chef, and now Top Design. We follow those shows religiously, and have gotten to the point that we can frequently determine in the first five minutes who's going to be eliminated. So my hat's off to the story editors this week for completely faking me out.

Carisa showed all the signs of being eliminated this week. She was featured in the interview segments saying how well she thought she was doing. She commented that she wasn't ready to go home. She displayed lousy teamwork in the week's challenge, and was portrayed more negatively than her arch-nemesis teammate Ryan, who is no prize himself where teamwork is concerned. Seemed like a done deal. Goodbye, Carisa. Then, when elimination time came around, they eliminated Elizabeth from out of nowhere.

The design challenge this week was to build a beach cabana based on a destination city assigned to each team. Elizabeth's team got Miami, and they built a pretty cool little structure that had both an indoor part and a little deck outdoors. It looked a lot like a traditional type of Puerto Rican shack that they built once on an outdoor episode of While You Were Out. Elizabeth chose the colors, which were a really bright acid green and electric purple. The judges hated the colors, and seemed to eliminate her on the basis of that, saying it didn't look like Miami. I thought it looked like a pretty good interpretation of art deco and Little Havana meets South Beach, but what do I know, right?

The thing that irks me is that they gave the appearance of eliminating Elizabeth on the flimsiest of excuses because she's the oldest contestant, by far. Carisa and Ryan were tied for worst individual performers, I thought. Ryan was coming off two straight bottom-group performances! Though if I had to choose, I would have eliminated Carisa because when she's having a conflict with another contestant, she just huffs "fine, whatever" and sulks off, while Ryan gets a little more exercised and makes some good TV.

Though, now that I think about, Elizabeth did use the word "agreeance" with no hint of irony whatsoever, so maybe the judges made the right decision after all.

Meanwhile, on some other beach, this week's Lost was a bit of a mind-bender. It was mostly composed of flashbacks from Desmond. Or were they flashbacks at all? Not only does Desmond not get the customary "whoosh" noise when he starts his flashback while choking the stuffings out of Charlie, that sound isn't heard anywhere in the entire episode! Does that mean that it actually isn't a flashback, and that Desmond is linearly experiencing all that stuff in the eyeblink between when we cut away from his asphyxiation outburst and when we see him get hold of himself instead of Charlie's neck?

That had better be what it means, or I'm afraid I may have to be done with that show. Not because I want the plot to work out that way and I'd be miffed if they wrote something else instead. It goes deeper than that. The "whoosh" sound is one of the rules of the game. You get the sound, you get a flashback. If they've carelessly forgotten to put the sound in, then they're no longer paying enough attention to the show to make the game work. There's no fun in watching a show for detail and trying to figure out mysteries if you can't be reasonably sure that all the details are intentional. Heroes is a good example of a show that's obviously aware of that. A couple of weeks ago when we caught a glimpse of Claire's father's Texas driver's license, his name was printed as "Bennet." No first name. Same with his signature. It was just flashed for a fraction of a second, but they knew that some of us would sic the freeze-frame on it, and rewarded us with a playful middle finger. I love that show.