TVSquad

(S01E06) I've never been a big fan of gritty crime drama, which is why "The Fifth Quarter" has never been my favorite short story of Stephen King's. It's a very bare bones tale of a man whose friend is killed over a buried stash of millions of dollars and his subsequent quest to retrieve four pieces of a map, each belonging to a different "bad guy." It's not really typically "King" and even he acknowledgers in the Notes of Nightmares and Dreamscapes that the story is more like something that would have come from Richard Bachman (his occasional nom de plume) or even Richard Stark, the malevolent writer from his novel The Dark Half.

Of course, I can't really blame King for wanting to try something a little different once in awhile, but in a lot of ways the story works much better in a visual medium. The problem is, one hour isn't enough for a story that is this involved. Screenwriter Alan Sharp fleshes the story out by giving the protagonist (Jeremy Sisto) a wife and kid, and everyone in this episode plays their parts well, trying to convey a lot of backstory in a short time so we can get to the blood and guns. If anything, the episode suffers from trying to cram way too much drama into a short amount of time. I think this would have worked much better as a feature film, following Wilie (Sisto) as he hunts down the men who killed his friend and begins to piece together the map that will lead he and his family to a better life. That could still happen, I suppose, it's not like they haven't done multiple adaptations of King's work before.

After weeks of idling, Lost finally gave us a juicy nugget in last night's episode. It came in the form of a glow-in-the-dark map on the inside of a blast door. It appears to be a map of all the Dharma Initiative hatches on the island, and something in the middle signified with a giant, pink question mark. It looks as though all the hatches were meant to lead to that middle spot, but they weren't finished or were blocked off (as marked with X's). Maybe that's what the concrete is that Jack and Sayid found.

According to this guy, who evidently stayed up all night decoding the map, it has several phrases, such as "Sursum Corda", and "I Am Here" on the Swan hatch (where the characters are). There are several other phrases that I'm guessing are in Latin.

Here's another, deconstructed version of the map with a lot more text (somebody has Hi Def TV!).

What do you see?