The Lost Room
Title: “The Eye and the Prime Object”
First Aired: 12/13/06
It’s 11:00. You know what that means: It’s checkout time at The Lost Room. Joe’s daughter Anna is still trapped God-knows-where. Joe is on the lam, framed for murder by whack-job Martin Ruber. Various forces are moving into position for the final showdown at Room 10 of the Sunset Motel, as the best miniseries since V: The Final Battle concludes its three-night run.
“The Eye and the Prime Object” opens with Joe and Jennifer in the motel room. As Joe ponders the photographs he got from Stritzke while out in Las Vegas, Kreutzfeld visits The Sood, another dealer in object-related information. The Sood has gotten his hands on a first-edition copy of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest that belonged to John Clark, a member of The Collectors, the original secret society before cabals like The Order and The Legion came into power. The book contains Clark’s instructions on how to access The Collectors’ treasure trove, the storied Vault. This repository, sometimes referred to as the Tomb, is rumored to contain the powerful glass eyeball object, vital to Kreutzfeld’s plans to save his son’s life. Joe believes the Vault also contains the body of the man in the photograph, the purportedly omnipotent Prime Object who should be able to bring Anna back from the ether.
In addition to the clock and the key, Joe and Kreutzfeld must lay their hands on the scissors, presently in the hands of a crack dealer. Drag-queenish Margaret Cho reveals that the scissors have the power to rotate things, which doesn’t hold much punch for Joe until the crack dealer spins him around like Storm from X-Men. Kreutzfeld suffocates her by uncapping the flask, which sucks all the air out of an enemy’s lungs. With the scissors in hand, he and Joe resume their hunt for the Vault.
Elsewhere, Detective Lee has been having strange visions since Ruber dazzled her with his painful card trick. Speaking of the little cretin, when last we saw that psychotic CSI man, Joe had hard-checked him out of Room 10’s door to parts unknown. Ruber wakes dying of dehydration in the desert, clutching at the photograph object. Roberta Milne (Harriet Sansom Harris, perhaps the creepiest she-devil actress alive) has been demoted from control of The Order for allowing Ruber to am-scray with two of their holiest objects, and vows to deal with him.
Jennifer cleans up the old movie reel that shows the manager getting sucked into Room 9 at the real-time motel. That failed experiment, Jennifer realizes, tore a hole in the fabric of reality and very nearly destroyed the entire Earth. Even more frightening is the next connection she draws — according to The Legion’s records, all of the objects used in that experiment from the 1960s are now in Kreutzfeld’s possession. And that’s no coincidence.
Joe and Kreutzfeld locate the Vault, hidden beneath an abandoned Nevada prison where John Clark once worked as a guard. After a few missteps, they enter the shadowy crypt. There, objects not seen in four decades lurk within glass cases. Among them are a man’s shoe, a dress shirt, and a bottle of foot powder (wonder what that one’s magic power is!). Also collecting dust are the powerful glass eyeball and a wooden casket. Joe briefly reassumes the identity of undertaker Nate Fisher from “Six Feet Under” and lifts the lid, but the coffin is empty.
Kreutzfeld huskily announces that he’s reached the end of his journey, now that he’s located the glass eye. He then withdraws the quarter, an object that brings life to a person’s memory when swallowed. Kreutzfeld gulps the quarter down and suddenly, in a genuinely eerie and unanticipated scene, the ghostly image of his son Isaac materializes. It turns out that the boy actually died nine years ago, and what we’ve been seeing is merely the motel room’s version of a temporary cardboard cutout. Using the eye and all the objects from the first botched experiment, however, Kreutzfeld plans to alter reality, thus restoring his son to life.
Joe does his best to stop Kreutzfeld, but is wrestled down when his duplicitous ally envisions one of his guards into existence. Kreutzfeld steals the key, and Joe is left trapped inside the Vault. Luckily, Joe went in armed with Wally’s magic bus ticket. He taps his head and poof — he’s in Gallup, New Mexico, where Wally and Jennifer await. Jennifer has discovered that the Occupant seems to have been the one who stopped the ill-fated ’60s experiment. With no key, and the situation spiraling toward disaster, Joe must track down the Occupant. The return destination on the bus ticket points him toward Willowbrook, Arizona, so that’s where he heads.
Near death, Ruber has a startling vision while staring into the photograph. If he reunites all of the objects inside the motel room, he will become the Occupant — in effect, God. Lee, growing more unhinged, tracks down the location of the real-time motel. Meanwhile Joe, after dancing with the Sood and our old friend, the Weasel, locates the Occupant in idyllic Green Valley, New Mexico, where he’s lived at the local funny farm for the past forty years. He’s played by none other than a one-eyed Tim Guinee, late of the short-lived Strange World and most recently seen as fanatical Ori stormtrooper Tomin on “Stargate SG-1”. The Occupant flips out on Joe and performs oral sex on his pistol, hoping to end his miserable existence. But just like Brandon Routh’s recent Superman Returns eyeball shtick, he’s indestructible and spits out the bullet.
Kreutzfeld is lining all of his ducks in a row — his objects, that is, for the big bang encore. First, though, he plucks out his own eyeball, replacing flesh for glass. Shudder. Soon after that gory bit of elective cosmetic surgery, The Legion’s foot soldiers storm Kreutzfeld’s stronghold, unaware they’re being led into a trap by a turncoat Legionista, “24”‘s Nicholas Guilak. Using his new eyeball, Kreutzfeld fries the interlopers into dust faster than Tripods from last year’s “War of the Worlds”. Only Jennifer survives the slaughter. Kreutzfeld muscles her to the motel’s real-time venue to bear witness, armed with the key, the eyeball, and his other powerful talismans.
On their way to the motel, the Occupant — whose real name is Edward — tells Joe that his only hope of getting Anna back is to kill him inside Room 10, where objects are no longer invulnerable to destruction. Joe resists the notion. But when they arrive, all hell is breaking loose thanks to Kreutzfeld, who has unleashed the unholy power behind the objects. The Occupant arrives just in time to seal the portal and cool the big bang. Kreutzfeld dies, and Joe races into the room behind the Occupant. Revelations time! With no other choice, Joe kills the Occupant. He rescues Anna, and after a tearful reunion, we are given the only tidy ending of the miniseries.
Ms. Milne readies to inject Ruber with sleepy juice of the permanent variety, but stops short when he tells her about his messianic vision. When Ruber confesses to Lou Destefano’s murder, Lee is about to arrest him — until he pulls on the glasses, thus rendering her service pistol inert. Milne and Ruber walk away arm-in-arm, and Lee is left looking kookier than ever. Joe is still a fugitive, and though we see him tossing the key into Room 10 and resetting it. Later, a ghostly desert wind blows the door open again. Voila, there’s the key, ripe for the taking. Can you say sequel?
Of the three installments of The Lost Room, “The Eye and the Prime Object” is the weakest. The blame for that can be pinned completely on the lack of concrete answers and a seamless resolution. By the time the final credits roll, we still have no solid understanding of what really happened to create Room 10 and its powerful talismans. While the miniseries was obviously left open-ended to insure continuation, should ratings warrant a return visit, The Lost Room would have benefited from a solid conclusion. The concept of magical motel room objects is fresh this first time around. But the danger exists that it could quickly grow staler than the air inside one of those dives along Route 66 if we linger there too long.
tllgrrl says
“Drag-queenish Margaret Cho…”
OK. Is it because you’ve never seen a drag queen before? Before I read another word, I have to tell you:
A Woman Can NOT Be A ‘Drag Queen’.
If you look closely at her make up and nails and jewelry and dress-style, she’d remind one of the art/punk chicks that work in funky/eclectic shops in L.A.
If Kang was being played like this by, oh, Garret Wang, then…and only then…would the character be a Drag Queen.