Originally, the OTI editorial staff was going to make this a break week for the Overthinking Lost series, as Mlawski is on vacation.  However, rather than finding out what happens when we let the clock reach zero, I decided to race to my computer and punch in the numbers.

In addition, it has been a while since I have Overthought anything, so I saw this as the perfect opportunity for me to go back to the island.

Now might be a pretty good time (or in fact a bit too late for some readers) to mention that I’m going to depart from Mlawski’s cardinal rule—there will be substantial Lost spoilers in this post, so only read on if you’ve watched through the end of season 5 or don’t mind learning things that will substantially bias your viewing experience of the whole series thus far.  There will also be major spoilers for The Wire.

Why would I gleefully break protocol after you’ve all been so careful not to reveal any of Lost’s big mysteries in the comments for the past few months?

Because I’m special—the rules don’t apply to me.

[Ed. Note: Seriously. There are substantial Lost spoilers after the jump, up to and including everything that has aired. And pretty substantial spoilers for The Wire as well, covering the whole series. Don't read on if you're not prepared.]

As we’ve established in parts #1 and #2 of this 48 part series, there are a lot of things I love about Akira Toriyama’s Dragon Ball. The disheartening arrival of the abomination Dragonball Evolution dulled my enthusiasm for a time, but I feel it flowing back into me, raisin’ the ol’ power level back up to arbitrary numbers.

Anyhoo, one of these things I really love about Dragon Ball is that its elegant, elemental narrative style and clear characterization make it easy to notice the wide variety of tropes, motifs and other devices that Toriyama uses to guide and develop his storylines. It has the epic Brechtian quality of a theatrical production where you can see the wires and the lighting equipment, without breaking the emotional identification and welcoming effortlessness of Stanislavski’s “Magic If.”

So, taking a bit of a break from using everything else I know to try to explain Dragon Ball, today I will use what I know about Dragon Ball to explain something else. Namely, one of the most useful and interesting distinction in parts of speech across poetical and literary systems, and also one of the most neglected in the casual enjoyment of art.

Today’s battle in the expansive desert, full of its elaborate rock formations that all produce prodigious dust clouds upon their destruction?

Metonymy and Metaphor. If these are things you’re not 100% solid on, read on, increase your literary power level, and actually learn something pretty simple that will help you enjoy art and lesser things you already like all the more. Because they’re certainly using it . . .

(Oh, and if you’re 100% solid on them, you’re clearly an enthusiast, so that is no excuse to turn away from the “Read More” button)

In tribute to this weekend’s release of Up, the latest sure-fire hit from Pixar, we’ve asked our Think Tankers about one of the modern world’s most enduring and picturesque fantasies:

“What is your favorite instance of somebody or bodies getting carried away by a balloon or balloons?”

And they have been, dare I say it, Up to the task. Make sure you weigh in with your choice in our poll or the comments — careful, not too much!

Hey! 5th Dimension! Play us to the article!

Eyes front, you maggots!

In this special Memorial Day Weekend Think Tank, Overthinking It takes a moment to honor the fictional sacrifices that fictional soldiers have made to defend our fictional country against its fictional foes.

But these noble heroes could not have made the sacrifices they did without a firm hand to guide them. Someone who was cruel to be kind. Someone who bitched them out like a New Orleans pimp but loved them like a father.

We’re talking about the king of the non-commissioned officers: the sergeant.

This week’s Think Tank: who is the best movie, TV, video game, cartoon, music or comic book sergeant?

The Internet is abuzz!  Watchmen is coming!  Watchmen is coming!  The early reviews are in: Variety hates it.  The Times (UK) loves it.  Kevin Smith thinks it’s a work of genius.  The Hollywood Reporter says it’s the first flop of 2009.

What are we, the people, supposed to make of these wildly divergent reviews?  How will we know if Watchmen is worth seeing or not?

The Overthinking It readers look up and shout  ‘Help us, Mlawski!’

And I look down and whisper, ‘Okay.’

This Internet is afraid of me.  I’ve seen its true face.

#10. Doc Brown, Back to the Future

We’ve seen a lot of discussion this week as to whether Marty McFly’s time travel was a good or a bad thing, the degree to which it was plausible, or what it might mean, and how it might work. Much seems obscured or inconsistent. There is plenty about the Flux Capacitor and its attendant DeLorean that is exotic and mysterious.

What is not exotic or mysterious is the method of its conception. Whilst changing a light bulb in the bathroom, Dr. Emmett Brown fell and struck his head upon the toilet. And then he saw it. The Flux Capacitor. Time travel.

A brilliant step forward in human progress, all made possible by what a great thing it seems to be to hit somebody on the head.

What nine other head injuries could possibly confer greater benefit to an individual or to humanity?

Head injuries are often wonderful things in the world of fiction, so there are a lot of choices. But the real top 9 are after the jump…

In preparation for the March release of its film adaptation, I reread Watchmen this week.  It had been more than four years.  Back then, I liked it, but it wasn’t the time for me to read it.  I hadn’t been exposed to as many “real” superhero comics yet, and the world, while sucky, didn’t seem apocalyptic to me at the time.  This time around, Watchmen hit me a lot harder.  I mean, “Who watches the watchmen?” could be talking about I-bankers, right?  And Dr. Manhattan is the market’s invisible hand?  No?

For years, Alan Moore (the writer of Watchmen) has been saying that his comics are unfilmable.  He has a beef with Hollywood that is easy to understand, especially if you’ve seen the god-awful adaptations of his League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and From Hell.  In the late 80s, Terry Gilliam approached Moore, thinking he’d direct the Watchmen film.  Instead, Moore told Gilliam that it was an impossible task, like finding the Holy Grail or filming Don Quixote.  Terry Gilliam agreed.  Watchmen was unfilmable.

But is it really?

Well, it’s official.  According to A.O. Scott, one of the main film critics of the New York Times, superheroes are SO OVER.  Well.  I guess there won’t be anymore superhero movies, then.

Okay, so we all know that’s not going to happen.  But I kind of have to agree with Scott on some level.  The Dark Knight may have been so good that it ended a certain type of superhero movie thread.  This is the thread that Scott describes in his article: the one where the superhero runs after the villain for the first two-thirds of the movie, then they finally have a showdown in which the villain and superhero are revealed to be “not so different,” and then the superhero kicks the villain’s ass.  I agree with Scott that the ass-kicking part is the least interesting part of this kind of film.

So where does this leave superhero movies?  Are they so over?  If not, what kind of superhero film will replace the Dark Knight model?  If so, what will take their place?  My ideas are below the fold…

Hendrik Herzberg, who is some sort of editor at The New Yorker (though that shadowy cabal never ever publishes a masthead, so aside from Remnick, it’s kind of unclear what everyone does), and my very, very favorite political columnist in Talk of the Town—I read him and Anthony Lane (and anything by Louis Menand) even when I don’t have time to do anything but look at the cartoons and recycle—has responded to the on- and off-line media generally shitting itself over the recent Obama cover.

He takes a couple pot-shots at the OTI demo, viz.:

As David Remnick and others (me, for example) have been pointing out every chance we get, the target of Barry Blitt’s image was not the Obamas. The target was the grotesque pack of lies about the Obamas that have been widely disseminated, not only by marginal right-wing Web sites and sicko viral e-mail campaigns but also by such nominally respectable outfits as Fox News.

That is the part that a lot of people—sophisticated people, non-irony-challenged people, people who watch Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert without a trace of bafflement [That's us! —Ed.]—fail to “get.”

The whole thing is worth a read, because he dissects, in a clearheaded way, the alarmist (and, in his view, condescending) hand-wringing that the cover provokes.

He actually addresses a point made in the comments on Stokes’s post about this—the difficulty of making jokes about Obama, or, in an unfortunate, non-equivalent restatement, whether Obama can “take a joke.”

His rationale, that Obama is not the target of the joke so that it’s really not forhim to take it well or not, is over-nice and a little disingenuous, and I don’t buy it. It’s like calling someone fat and then claiming you were satirizing the nation’s obesity problem.

I also learned that the next time I see Robert Downey, Jr. looking all pale and ragged, it’s because Jeff Daniels stole his nuclear heart, not because he was ODing on something and how dare you insinuate that.

Also, Wikipedia says Iron Man is from Long Island. WE WIN.