THE TATTOO
OK, one thing I forgot to mention about Lost -- what's really the deal with Jack's tattoo? In one of the flashbacks, we learn that he spent about a month in Phu Ket, Thailand, living in a hut on the beach and bouncing some hot Thai chick around the bed. The woman's brother is perfectly fine with this arrangement, or maybe he is just keeping the "imperialist running dog" rhetoric to himself. Anyway, Hot Thai Chick has a secret. And Jack has to know what the secret is; 90 percent of guys would have said, "Secret, huh? What were you born a guy? No? Cool. So we're still on for sex tonight, right?" and let it go. But not Jack. He tails Hot Thai Chick one night. His sleuthing (if you can call it that; HTC might as well left him a neon trail to follow) leads to discovering that HTC is a tattoo artist. OK, so, HTC plies a somewhat seedy and plebeian trade, and might not be a suitable date for that formal at the yacht club. But that's not her secret; her secret is that she can see what fortune has in store for her clients and tattoos that judgment on them. This talent, however, is reserved for her own people, some of whom apparently have no trouble walking around with ink that says, "I'm a big loser." Anyway, HTC butters up Jack by saying that he is a born leader and a great man, and he figures that that is good stuff to put out there with permanent body art. So he gets the tat: something in Asian characters. Well, Jack probably doesn't speak any Asian language with any fluency, so he can't be sure that HTC is actually putting something flattering on his arm. And we as viewers don't know until the end of the episode, when somebody asks Jack whether he knows what the ink says. Jack puts on his best man-of-destiny look and says that yes, he knows. But here's where things would have been better if I had written the episode: Jack's questioner would have said the ink said, "I find great pleasure in the embrace of teenage boys." An astonished, bug-eyed Jack would have spluttered that the ink really said, "he walks among us, but is not one of us." No, the questioner would have said, you're wrong. The questioner would have then called someone else over and asked what the tattoo said. The new arrival would have read it and then looked at Jack and simply said, "Pervert." For the rest of the show, a running gag would be Jack and his pains to hide that tattoo.
Yeah, that's what I would have written.
OK, one thing I forgot to mention about Lost -- what's really the deal with Jack's tattoo? In one of the flashbacks, we learn that he spent about a month in Phu Ket, Thailand, living in a hut on the beach and bouncing some hot Thai chick around the bed. The woman's brother is perfectly fine with this arrangement, or maybe he is just keeping the "imperialist running dog" rhetoric to himself. Anyway, Hot Thai Chick has a secret. And Jack has to know what the secret is; 90 percent of guys would have said, "Secret, huh? What were you born a guy? No? Cool. So we're still on for sex tonight, right?" and let it go. But not Jack. He tails Hot Thai Chick one night. His sleuthing (if you can call it that; HTC might as well left him a neon trail to follow) leads to discovering that HTC is a tattoo artist. OK, so, HTC plies a somewhat seedy and plebeian trade, and might not be a suitable date for that formal at the yacht club. But that's not her secret; her secret is that she can see what fortune has in store for her clients and tattoos that judgment on them. This talent, however, is reserved for her own people, some of whom apparently have no trouble walking around with ink that says, "I'm a big loser." Anyway, HTC butters up Jack by saying that he is a born leader and a great man, and he figures that that is good stuff to put out there with permanent body art. So he gets the tat: something in Asian characters. Well, Jack probably doesn't speak any Asian language with any fluency, so he can't be sure that HTC is actually putting something flattering on his arm. And we as viewers don't know until the end of the episode, when somebody asks Jack whether he knows what the ink says. Jack puts on his best man-of-destiny look and says that yes, he knows. But here's where things would have been better if I had written the episode: Jack's questioner would have said the ink said, "I find great pleasure in the embrace of teenage boys." An astonished, bug-eyed Jack would have spluttered that the ink really said, "he walks among us, but is not one of us." No, the questioner would have said, you're wrong. The questioner would have then called someone else over and asked what the tattoo said. The new arrival would have read it and then looked at Jack and simply said, "Pervert." For the rest of the show, a running gag would be Jack and his pains to hide that tattoo.
Yeah, that's what I would have written.
posted by John Parnell at 12:32 PM
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