LOST My Mind

5x13, "Some Like It Hoth"

2009-04-15T20:40:00.000-07:00

It's funny: Damon and Carlton on their latest podcast said this episode would serve as a breather, a chance for some laughs, right before things got really serious on the road to the Finale. Well... somehow despite focussing on a character with father issues (on LOST? NO FRAKKIN WAY!) who can talk to the dead the show did indeed deliver on a couple chuckles. It's an odd choice to make Miles' centric the humorous one of the season... I wonder if his episode was a part of the strike shortended Season 4 as planned how his backstory would've been told. EVERYONE having daddy issues or mommy issues) is getting tiring but it gave us a chance to see Miles soften up and better get to know Candle/Waxman/Pierre Chang.

*So... the hatch is being built yet it's already doing it's thing, causing someone's filling to dislodge and kill it's owner from the inside out. Hate to say but I think that would've made an interesting visual if we got to see it. But what does this mean: is the crazy magnetism of the Swan already in full effect? Does it just get worse when the hatch is built over it?

*Still not quite sure what to make of Jack... he seems to really just be hanging around for the sake of hanging around.

*I think the crazy would-be kidnappers were just Ben's people. Shame they cost Miles that fish taco. I love fish tacos.

*Now after finally getting the Miles episode, is anyone disappointed? I mean, I thought we'd get a lot more. I would've had him wander around the Island just talking to dead people, just filling the whole episode with cameos by former cast members. Maybe throw a twist in at the end with some spectacular reveal from a dead corpse. I mean imagine if he hung around the Caves and listened to Adam and Eve or went to the Black Rock. There's tons of stuff that could've been revealed here. I'm not going to call it a lost opportunity because these moments could still come. But with fewer and fewer episodes left it'll probably just be random moments.

*Next week: CLIP SHOW! They teased it'll be done in a way we've never seen before which usually means it'll be painful to watch.

*Two weeks from now: "The Variable" apparently starring Farraday.

5x11, "Whatever Happened, Happened"

2009-04-01T22:46:00.000-07:00

And now:

YOUR reigning, defending, undisputed champion of worst LOST line ever is....

"He will forget this ever happened and his innocence will be gone."

I think they could've just gone with, "Oh, the Temple healed Ben, but then he became embittered by Sayid betraying him and turned evil and he kept quiet in Season 2 about having ever met Sayid in his own past just to fuck with him even more."

I mean I feel like we've dealt with equally annoying bullshit before.

Instead, the writers knew they'd backed themselves into a corner and turned The Temple into a two-in-one plot device/deus ex machina that not only raises you from the dead but erases your memory, too.

There's a reason that soap operas are always made fun of for using amnesia storylines: it's easy and a cop-out. LOST typically doesn't go the easy route so why go there now?

What else has been (or *will be*) conveniently forgotten in the history of the show? The mind reels at the possibilities...

What annoys me the most though is how they're saying Ben was given his diabolical personality by having his "innocence" (WHAT?) removed, as if he just couldn't become a dick the regular way: by being born one. Benjamin Lynus has been one of the most fascinating villains in television history because you almost couldn't believe how consistently manipulative and self-serving he always acted. Yet you could because you've met people like that or people who could've become like that if certain paths had been followed, certain choices made. Again, it just feels like another cop-out.

*Meanwhile...

Kate thinks abandoning Aaron to his grandmother after telling him she was only stepping out for a bit is OK? I mean how fucked up will Aaron be when he grows up?

I can almost accept her seeing Aaron walk away so easily with someone who sort of, kind of looks like Claire as the moment when she realizes she'll never be his mother. But it's just not that strong enough a moment for me to buy. After seeing her broken on Jack's bed I thought something tragic must have happened, maybe Widmore or Ben blackmailed her, maybe she saw the ghost of Claire.

And the Cassidy/Kate storyline really needed more time. I can't believe it was compressed into this one episode. Easily could've been two or even three.

*Overall, a second disappointing episode. I think the season is careening headlong toward the season finale with plot development taking precedence over character development. I also think a very scary ending is being set up when amnesia and turning evil can get so easily exported out of The Temple.

5x10, "He's Our You"

2009-04-01T22:45:00.000-07:00

We're staring in the face of two scary possibilities:

-Ben Linus is dead thus changing the history of the Island. The Purge likely never happened and the DHARMA Initiative was never destroyed. It makes sense now that DHARMA signs were still hanging up in Othersville in 2007 because they were never taken down by The Others. Yet: why was Ben still alive in 2007 when Sun and Lapidus left him?

-Ben Linus will be risen from the dead by the island, Locke and Christian style. OK... I can accept the resurrection of Locke but you'd think that if Ben had been shot in the chest by Sayid as a twelve year-old and then rose from the dead later he would've said something about it at some point along the way. In true LOST fashion, Ben could just go, "Oh I couldn't tell you because then it would change the past," but that just feels like a deus ex machina than a well executed plan.

Both of these options are really bizarre, yet I think they've been preparing us for this moment all along by repeatedly stating the past can not be changed. I've been thinking they've been meaning to say that, "You can't change the past unless you were always meant to change the past." This would now be the case if Ben is dead and DHARMA un-purged. But I think it'll end up being the latter, with his resurrection serving for Ben as evidence of The Island's power the same way Locke regaining the ability to walk did.

*I expected a far more dramatic parting of ways between Ben and Sayid. We've seen Sayid act toward Hurley as if Ben did or said something that convinced him definitely of Ben's duplicity. So how could Sayid really just have let Ben go after killing all those people for him? You'd think Sayid should've asked why they just don't go after Widmore himself then. How could he have just accepted, "Ok, we're done here" as the end of his killing spree?

Overall, I thought this was the weakest episode of the season. It didn't really break new ground so much as remind us that what Sayid was capable of. Even with all that, I still didn't think he'd pull the trigger on a twelve-year old so the episode managed to plant enough doubt about Sayid's killer instincts. I think I just expected a lot more out of an episode that was supposed to fill in the blanks of Sayid's backstory. It did that, just not in any particularly memorable way.

5x09, "Namaste"

2009-03-18T21:28:00.000-07:00

*There was a moment watching the episode tonight and K. turned to me and went, "You know this season has been REALLY good." And I can't put my finger on it but I have to agree. In terms of coherence and overall quality Season 1 is still the best. Season 2 has a fond place in my heart for The Button metaphor that everyone hated. Season 3 had some bright spots and a great run at the end. And Season 4 had some of my very favorite episodes ever. I can't really say any of that about this season -- it's been all about relentless momentum toward something HUGE, tying up as many loose ends as possible along the way. All the pieces seem to be falling to place: Jughead, the building of the Swan, the Losties there to witness it, DHARMA at its height and the constant references to a truce it seems everyone can't wait to break.

This episode was really interesting in that we really got to see the tables turned here: Sawyer is THE MAN and he's not playing. Over the last three years he's learned to be the leader Jack has always wanted to be. What sets him apart is he seems to have conquered his demons while Jack is still chasing his. How is Jack going to deal with that? And how does that impact what Kate feels about the two of them, now that one seems hapless and the other is more self-assured than ever?

*This has been brought up on The Fuselage, but the Othersville Lapidus and Sun retruend to appeared subtly different than the one last seen. For one thing there's still DHAMRA signs hanging that clearly should not have been, unless I'm mistaken. Supposedly there's no alternate timeline shenanigans going on with LOST, so I don't know if it's just that those signs were never taken down even after DI was destroyed. Or it could be a sign that, yes, the past has been changed and DHARMA lasted longer than it did before.

*Is it safe to assume one of the big questions in the coming weeks is whether or not to kill Ben the Kid? Obviously it won't happen, but does that mean that a coruse correction of some sort will get in the way of anyone who tries? (My money's on Sayid.)

*So where is Farraday? Has he figured out a way to travel out of 1977? Remember this video that aired at Comic-Con? You can hear the camera man speak and it sounds like Farraday.

*And believe it or not the fake band Geronimo Jackson that's been popping up constantly throughout the show's run has put out a single available on ITunes titled "Dharma Lady." It played in the DHARMA van Jin was driving when he first found Jack and company. They also played it again during the welcome picnic tonight at DHARMAville.

It's almost exactly based off a song by The Donkeys titled "Excelsior Lady" and apparently is played by The Donkeys, too.

*Next week: "He's Our You"

5x08, "Lafleur"

2009-03-04T20:57:00.000-08:00

*Imagine if this episode aired before the Locke and Oceanic 6 Return episodes. Imagine if we didn't know who Sawyer, er, Lafleur was going out to meet. Imagine if we didn't know with certainty that he was going to be reunited with Kate after three years apart.

Knowing that tinged everything about this episode with delicious (or painful) irony. Sawyer has his shit together in a way we've never seen: respected by the DHARMA Initiative, the go-to guy to solve their problems, at peace in a beautiful book filled home and in love with Juliet. Together, Sawyer and Juliet, looked more in love with each other, and more contented with their relationship, than either ever looked with anyone else. For us three years hasn't passed. It's our natural inclination to want to see things go back the way they were. And that gives what's going on now some added punch: Will Sawyer now leave Juliet for Kate? Will Kate fight for him? Will Kate draw closer to Jack? Will Juliet try to get together again with Jack? It's soap opera, yes, but one that's now got the added weight of time.

*The return of the Four-Toed Statue! Well, as expected that was one hella tall statue. But is that all the explanation we're ever going to get? Who built it? How did those people get to the Island? Will all these references to Egyptian culture finally add up to something more than an Ozymadias/Watchmen inside joke?

*Sawyer makes the comment that maybe whatever started causing pregnancies to terminate early hasn't happened to the Island yet. Might this be the impending arrival of Ben?

*Speaking of which, what will happen if and when the Losties meet Ben as a child? How much debate will there be over whether or not to influence him in some way? Might the Losties themselves ultimately lead Ben to destroy the DHARMA Initiative?

*And finally: JIMMY BARRETT! LOST and Mad Men: united at last.

*In two weeks: "Namaste"

5x06, "The Life and Death of Jeremy Bentham"

2009-02-25T21:20:00.000-08:00

*Wow... that was the some of the most violent television I've watched since The Wire. This episode just went... there. I don't quite know what else can be talked about other than what the hell must be going through Ben's mind.

"Is he evil?" is too simple a question.

It's incredible that despite everything we've seen Ben do he's still even a little trustworthy. Yet he gets nearly everyone at some point to trust him and his character was at a place where even a lot of the audience had come to peace with him.

Even if his motives were selfish, his actions were being employed toward a noble end: serving the Island. It's that sort of consistency that has somehow allowed us to excuse or at least better tolerate his actions. The rarely seen moment last week when he lost his temper with Jack and Sun drove home his earnestness.

He was the villain everyone loved to hate. Now he's back to just being hated.

Clearly, he meant to save Locke when he busted into his hotel room. It was the moment Locke told him about needing to find Hawking that everything changed. There's something... insane about a person so quick to make a life and death decision.

Meanwhile it brings up a ton of questions about exactly what sides are vying against each other:

*While the contours of "The War" are defined by Widmore and Ben, it's still really unclear where Locke, the Oceanic 6 and Eloise Hawking fall.
-Widmore and Ben both seem to think Locke is special and necessary to their needs. Yet they both seem to both threaten and nurture him. Locke seems more like a pawn than a crucial piece of the puzzle.
-Hawking's association with Locke (and Widmore's telling Locker about her) was so poisonous to Ben that he killed Locke over it. Yet Hawking seemed perfectly fine working with Ben and he with her. Did she even know Ben killed Locke? But would that have ever mattered to her? What seemed to change here was instead of Locke being the shepherd who brought everyone to Hawking it was now Ben who did so. Might the original plan have been that Ben was going to be in the coffin and serve the role of Christian in the Coffin? Might he have been afraid that the Island wouldn't resurrect him the way it most certainly would Locke? Did all this suddenly become clear to him when Locke told him Widmore wanted him to find Hawking?

*I didn't realize this until I saw it on Sledgeweb, but Ajira Airways 316 crashed on the Hydra after the Island's station has been abandoned. So it crashed in the present day. Lapidus and Sun appear to have taken a canoe and rowed to the Island, leaving the canoe at the camp where it was found by the Left Behind a few episodes ago. Meanwhile, Jack, Kate and Hurley are in the same timeline as Jin, likely in seventies.

So we now have a scenario where Locke, Ben, Lapidus and Sun are in 2009 while Jack, Kate, Hurley, Sawyer, Juliet, Faraday and Miles are all in the seventies. WACKY!

*More time travel craziness: Cesar is looking at a page out of Daniel's journal, meaning at some point in the past Daniel visited the hydra and left his journal there.

*And just for the hell of it:Waaaaaaaalllllllllltttttttt!

*Next week: "LaFleur"

5x07, "316"

2009-02-18T21:22:00.000-08:00

The stupidest theory I ever heard was one that held the Island moved, as if it were on a conveyor belt making it's way around the world. That's how it was able to pick-up the Black Rock, the Nigerian Drug Plane, etc. Hawking didn't exactly say the Island moved like that (really if it moves in space at all it appears to be within a small portion of the Pacific). But I know it's just going to revive theories like that.

*Then there was a once stupid theory that I long subscribed to: that time loops were going to be a huge part of the show, that the entire show might even end as it began with Jack waking up in the jungle. Well now that they did it here, I guess that won't be the the finale. But it still wouldn't surprise me to see something like that, maybe with a crash involving the children, like Aaron and Walt.

*Annnnnd finally: what Hawking said all but confirmed that the VIle Vortice theories have some truth. There's supposedly pockets of electromagnetism all over the world where wacky shit goes down (healing, disappearances, possible teleportation). The Bermuda Triangle is supposed to be one as well as Ayers Rock, featured in the Season 2 episode S.O.S.

*Does the episode's title, "316", also refer to John 3:16?

*There's a DHARMA station in Los Angeles? Really? And if it's so hard to figure out how to get to the Island how come The Others could do it so easily with their submarine? And the Freighter was able to find it? Hmmm....

*It's evident we're going to get more Real World 06 flashbacks:
-We need to find out what convinced Kate to come along, what left her crying on Jack's bed, and why she left Aaron behind.
-What convinced Sun to come along and why she left Ji-Yeon behind
-Why Hurley's with a guitar case and what convinced him to actually do what Ben wanted
-How did Sayid get arrested and why is he on the flight? Why is that woman worthy of coming to the Island with the O6?
-Did Ben go after Penny? Did he kill her or just get his ass beat attempting it.

So that's at least five episodes just rehashing the 36 hours or so of the 06's life before they boarded the plane. Plus we need to learn more about the two people who look to be new cast members: the woman who accompanied Sayid and the man who was also in the first class cabin with the rest of them

And what happened to Lapidus?

*So when are they now? I'd bet they're around the time that started the season, right when DHARMA was first building its stations. I'm also betting that everyone is now in the same time and we'll be seeing some Jack/Kate/Sawyer triangulation soon enough. The story of how the Left Behind got assimilated into the DHARMA Initiative will certainly be interesting.

Next week: "The Life and Death of Jeremy Bentham"

5x05, "This Place is Death"

2009-02-11T21:20:00.000-08:00

There was a moment as Jin, Young Danielle and the rest of the French science crew trekked through the jungle that I felt a sense of deja vu. For the first time maybe since Season 1, I actually felt a sense of dread. For whatever reason we've watched our Losties walk back and forth through the jungle so many times that we no longer expect it to be dangerous. It's just a place to walk through to get from one landmark to another. But through the eyes of the crew everything was all of sudden wild and new again. When one suggests they actually go into the Monster's tunnel to retrieve Montand, you almost want to laugh at their naivete. It was just a great few segments where you remembered why the Island used to be so scary, because anything and everything could happen. It also makes Danielle's line in the first season, "This is where Montand lost his arm" morbidly funny.

*Then there was Charlotte's death, one of the more well executed and meaningful deaths on the show in a long time. I'd read in some interview that if it weren't for the writers' strike there would've been an episode exploring Charlotte's Island roots. That would've made her passing even more powerful as it still feels like we barely got to know her. Yet there she was doing her own "constant" travel through time, giving us her life's cliff notes. When she starts spewing out her life story to Daniel, more as a confession than a revelation, we know she's got little time left. So when Daniel asks, "Why are you telling me this?" we know what he doesn't: that Charlotte is right and this place is death.

*So was Charlotte always destined to die a horrible death from Constant Disease? Farrady seems to have warned her a child never to come back to the Island, yet it's her leaving that leads her to want to return so badly. What else might Farraday do in his future flashes that he shouldn't do, all in the remote hope that he could still save Charlotte?

*For once the flashes weren't annoying sound effects and harsh lighting but really communicated how much pain the Left Behind were going through.

*The big question I'm starting to have is just how much Ben is saying is the truth. We all know he can't be trusted yet he's positioned himself in such a way that he's never been more trustworthy. He's got half the Oceanic 6 following his lead to get them back to the Island. But what if he's just trying to hitch a ride that he doesn't deserve. Let's really look at what's going on here: 1) Ghost Christian now says that Locke should've turned the Frozen Donkey Wheel he should never have listened to Ben and let him do it in his place -- meaning Ben wouldn't have left the Island; 2) We have Ghost Claire, Constanting Charlotte and I think at least one other saying that some people, like Aaron, should never return; 3) I really don't buy that he happened to get Jin's ring from Locke, especially since if Locke had given it to Sun and told her Jin washed up on shore she'd more than ever have no reason for returning. It just feels like an elaborate scheme to get revenge on Widmore by getting off the Island, hiding it from him, killing his daughter and then returning back to the Island, still out of Widmore's reach.

*The Donkey Wheel, the Monster, Danielle, heiroglyphics, Ben actually losing his cool and, of course, Finnoula Flannagan. It was just a buffet of awesomeness.

*Next week: I actually have no idea what the title of the episode is, but from the preview it looks ridiculously mythology heavy. ("Windows" -- what?)

Can't we flash forward to next wednesday?

5x04, "The Little Prince"

2009-02-04T22:12:00.000-08:00

*JIN! And here I thought if he survived we'd have to wait all season to see him again. His hanging out with Young Danielle will certainly be interesting, but I'll get back to that in a second.

*I have to admit, prior to that reveal the episode felt... off somehow. It was a lot of interesting stuff that I'm sure really cohered:

-Sawyer sees Kate helping Claire give birth and suddenly accepts his inability ot change he past? Not quite sure I buy it, but I think it's meant to to sort of remind him why he loved her in the first place, a last memory to keep before he starts shacking up with Juliet. I mean it's pretty clear that's where they're going, yes?

-Someone is stalking Kate... and it's exactly who we thought the entire time. Who else could it be but Ben. He, once more, worked everything perfectly and other than Hurley everyone's at the same place at the same time, ready to be rounded up and go return to the Island. The swerve of "It's Claire's Mom!" was interesting, but also predictable as a swerve.

-The missing camp and the mysteriously appearing canoes.

I think what's bothering me is LOST had such a great formula, one that guaranteed at least some attempt at giving each episode a character arc. The new format presents a host of opportunities, but I still feel like we're just trying to get from one plot point to another without any grounding in what made the show great, the character-centric episodes that seemed both intimate and epic all at once. Now it's just all epic.

*Interesting exchange between Sawyer and Locke. I have to rewatch it but what's interesting is how the Left Behind are beginning to realize their timeshifting is an opportunity to gain perspective on their past in a new light. I wish the episode was entirely about this. The makings of a joint Locke/Sawyer centric episode were there.

*Oddly enough though the episode really was Aaron-centric:
-On the Searcher, Kate decides to keep Aaron
-Ben makes Kate think someone is trying to take him from her so he can reunite her with the O6
-We see his birth
-He's sort of a pawn of Sun
What's so odd about this is that things seem to almost happen around the "-centric" than the "-centric" serving as the instigator of the action.

*I can't help but be disturbed that Ben's evil lawyer was the cool dad from My So-Called Life:

*Sledgeweb, of course is on top of the "Little Prince" references from the episode, all leading into the big reveal:

*DANIELLE! I wish they hid it a little more as anytime someone says something is French on LOST you almost always have to connect it to Danielle, long known as simply, "The French Woman." What was really nice was making reference to Montand who Danielle in the Season 1 Finale says lost his arm in a region of the Island she called "The Dark Territory." Might we see Danielle and her crew succumb to the sickness? Might we even see a young Ben kidnap a newborn Alex?

*Ajira Airways is going to be a big part of LOST. It was first reference in a quick shot of the logo in a music video by "The Fray" that was also a Season 5 promo piece. A very well done site was soon found for the company. (Lostpedia has all the site's easter eggs.) Might Ajira be the way the Oceanic 6 return to the Island?

NEXT WEEK: The ominously titled, "This Place is Death."

5x03, "Jughead"

2009-02-02T14:10:00.000-08:00

Now, then: that's better. They spent too much time explaining how this season was going to work in the premiere and too little time doing anything neat like they did tonight. It's also clear now how little I give a shit about the Oceanic 6.

*The only spoiler I'd known going into this episode, other than the title, was that the Oceanic 6 weren't going to appear at all. I didn't know why at the time, but that created a huge sense of relief. I'm just so bored with them, really. Once you discovered who The Six were exactly and once you saw how miserable they all were, it became clear they had to get back to the Island. Instead of being done in any sort of interesting way, it's this scavenger hunt by Ben because the Six are all fucked up in their own unique ways. For whatever reason that just makes for some boring television.

It's like watching a show entirely based around parents trying to drag their kids to the dentist. The kids really don't want to go, but you know for their own good they eventually have to. So there's a lot of running away and dragging back and on and on. I really want everyone gathered together again and just get it over with. The Island is just so much more fun than the real world.

*It was brought up to me last week that Ms. Hawking could be Farraday's mother. I didn't believe it since Farraday told Desmond she's at Oxford and the last we saw Hawking she was in Los Angeles. But now it's becoming very clear to me that not only is Ms. Hawking Farraday's mother... she was also the woman pointing the gun at Farraday's head for most of this episode. Sledgeweb has the details.

Do you know what's the most awesome part of that: the remote possibility we may see Fionnula Flanagan as a bad-ass wielding a rifle.

*I knew Farraday was going to say he loved Charlotte. I think its something they wanted to develop much more in Season 4 but due to the writers' strike couldn't. So they had to take big dramatic steps in that romance like they did here. Also: a geek like Farraday would of course believe that the strongest weapon he has is love. Awwww.

*So Desmond's kid is named Charlie. Interesting. We have a very solid foundation for LOST: The Next Generation: Charlie, Ji-Yeon, Aaron, Clementine and of course, their version of Locke, Walt. I really believe this generation of kids is going to be a very big deal eventually. Might we see them as grown-ups? Might the end of the show be this new generation crashing on the Island themselves, oblivious to how their parents and thus they are connected?

*Once a dick, always a dick: Charles Widmore is a piece of work. Seeing him as an Other really puts an extra spin on his backstory though. How did he go from humble Other grunt to one of the richest most powerful men in the world? And how did he leave the Island? Was he exiled? Was he supposed to be the Ben until Ben came around? All very interesting stuff. However the thing that most gets me is this:

*In a way you can say that Ben killed his own daughter. Think about it like this: Locke did not shoot Widmore because he said Widmore was "one of his people." He only believes that anyway because Ben made him the leader of The Others. If Ben hadn't done that, Widmore would've been shot in the back and died there in the jungle and never sent the Freighter people and Keemy to kill everyone on the Island.

It's stuff like this I think we're going to see a lot more of. Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse like to talk about Lost as a mosaic, with a lot of missing pieces that they'll be filling in as the show proceeds. Except now we're not just seeing plot holes get filled, but we're seeing linear time becoming irrelevant toward causes and effects. It's not that one thing must follow another. It's that everything is holding together across time regardless of what came first. In that case, who is to blame for something, whether it is good or evil, becomes a blunted question. And I think as the show wraps up by the end of it we won't see anyone as particularly good or evil and everyone as just... BEING.

Next week: "The Little Prince"

5x01: "Because You Left" & 5x02: "The Lie"

2009-01-21T23:26:00.000-08:00

I'm confused. Very confused. And I don't say that lightly as I know I have a designated role as "Explainer of Lost" in my office.

Damon and Carlton have given a number of interviews in recent weeks explaining that time travel was a big part of Season 5. They also went out of their way to point out that this isn't the time travel of Back to the Future and Heroes. They claimed they worked it out so there's never time paradoxes on Lost, that it doesn't matter what you do in the past it will never change the future.

This isn't really true. I was watching "The Constant" from Season 4 with the commentary track on. Damon, Carlton and the episode's editor were all on hand. D&C went into their "No Paradoxes" spiel and the editor asked for more clarification since obviously Desmond was changing the past and the future. They did so again admitting to certain things they hadn't before and the editor, in a moment of clarity, went, "Oh, so you can change the immediate future but not the long-term future." D&C agreed.

Here's the problem with that: where's the dividing line between the short-term and the long-term? It's not clearly defined.

You're left with time paradoxes after all, but told they don't matter in the long run. Any that seem to matter won't, you just have to wait till the end of the show to see how irrelevant they become.

But paradox is self-evident. It's not something you can ignore. Yet that's what is now being asked of us.

Worse, we're being given exceptions to these rules that we're unaware of until they are revealed, like the bizarre scene where Farraday convinced Sawyer he couldn't change the past, only to then try to change the past himself. It's like playing a game while new rules are introduced, and others changed on the fly. What's the point of playing then if you never really know what you're playing? Do you even know how to win or lose?

That's what's getting lost in all this: this stakes, the drama, the emotional arc of the characters.

Do we know what's happening to those left behind on the Island? No, though it appears Charlotte is going though Constant Disease and may soon go the way of Minkowski. Are we to assume that's the dire fate that awaits all the Left Behind and the main reason why the Oceanic Six have the return? We're not sure. And what about those soldiers who attacked Sawyer and Juliet at the end of "The Lie"? Are they the real threat to the Left Behind? Who knows, everyone could just time shift away from them at any moment.

Again, the stakes can't be defined because the game can't be defined.

Lost has always been more about a state of mind than a state of location. That is more true now than ever before: we are completely lost, without a guide and all we can do is just put our faith in these showrunners.

*Sledgeweb has an HD screencap of Mrs. Hawking's map. Most of the lines seem to converge on an area in the Pacific Ocean north of New Zealand roughly where you'd expect The Island to be.

*Have any of the visions, ghosts, etc. we've seen over the years merely been timeshifted characters much as Locke randomly appeared to Ethan? Is that what Christian really is: not so much a ghost but because he died on the Island now has the ability to timshift? Is Locke even really dead? Will he come back to life on the Island due to death's relationship with time?

*Is Ben at least telling the truth about the Oceanic Six needing to get back to the Island? It appears so, especially since Mrs Hawking seemed to trust him. If that's the case and Sayid told Hurley to not trust anything Ben had to say, what is Sayid doing?

*Is Sun using Kate to get to Ben?

*How many pieces of the past will now be filled in by this timeshiftng device? Are we going to finally know what The Incident was that changed the Swan station? Will we go back far enough to find out who built the Four-Toed Statue? We will see the Black Rock get to the Island?

4x13, "There's No Place Like Home, Part 2"

2008-05-29T22:53:00.000-07:00

First off, there was a fake commercial for the DHARMA Initiative right before the last segment. Go to http://www.octagonglobalrecruiting.com/ and register. They say that something will happen in San Diego during the dates of Comic-Con. I'm assuming it's the launch of the next online viral marketing game. Ugh. And here I was planning on not going.

1) The Big Mo vs Jogging in Place: What made the Season 3 finale feel so special was the sense that the show was moving forward. This episode despite answering major questions like how the Oceanic 6 got off the Island and why everyone else was left behind, who was in the coffin, how Ben got off the Island, etc., etc. didn't propel the story significantly in any new direction. Really it asked more or less the same questions that it attempted to answer, so we end up asking the same questions just in new ways. The Oceanic 6 have to get back to the Island. Why? We still don't know after an entire season. They just do. We know Locke's dead, but why? Now we probably have to wait an entire season to find out how and why Locke left though probably it's the same thing: he had to move the Island again. We know the Oceanic 6 have to lie, but it doesn't make any sense. Why couldn't they have just stayed with Penny? Exposing themselves to the public lets Widmore know they're alive and are lying and could at any moment decide to tell the truth. Really doesn't lying about it in such a public manner elevate the danger? And how are the people on the Island in any danger from Widmore? It MOVED. It's easier now to find the Oceanic 6 than it is the Island.

2) Characterization: "Through the Looking Glass" served to closely examine Jack in every way. It treated getting off the Island as a test of Jack's leadership abilities and whether he was prepared to live with the consequences of his decisions. "No Place Like Home" was a mish-mash of updates on the Oceanic 6 that didn't feel Finale worthy. Did any of the characters grow? Was there significant play between the present and any of the flashforwards? Were any of the flashforwards fundamentally necessary? Instead of serving characters the episode served plot.

3) Payoffs or scams:

-The entire season the Oceanic 6 acted as if they had personally done something they were ashamed of and tried to cover up. But really they got rescued by accident.

-The Island moved, but why? All the bad guys were already dead.

-Ben wore a jacket when he appeared in Tunisia. But why did he need a jacket just for the few minutes it took to move the wheel? Wearing the jacket made it seem as if the entire Island had already moved to a cold climate.

-According to Jack, Sawyer "chose" to stay on the Island, making it seem as if he made an explicit decision for personal reasons, even personal gain. The way he said it to Kate made it seem as if Kate should be angry at Sawyer. Yet in reality his decision saved Kate. But the circumstances are almost so ridiculous it's not rehashing. There's any number of ways Sawyer could've made a sacrifice to save Kate, but jumping out of a helicpoter to make it lighter is one of the less interesting and more contrived ones I can come up with.

-Michael. Good god, please tell me they did not bring back Harold Perrineau just for that. Please tell me Christian whisked him off to the Island. Please tell me we're not going to be seeing him as a random ghost ala Christian. Did Ben know that's how he had to die when he recruited him? Does this really make up for killing Ana-Lucia and Libby?

-Claire. OK, enough. Is she dead, alive or what? Aside from Hurley worried about leaving her behind and Jack half-heartedly saying he'd go back to get her, her fate was more or less swept under the rug and forgotten, her appearance in Kate's dreams just muddying up the waters more.

-The Orchid. Treated almost like an afterthought. Instead we get the reveal that there's essentially a black hole underneath it that can be activated... by turning a frozen donkey cart wheel a third of a revolution. Seriously... even for a show that claims nothing you see wouldn't also be in a Michael Chrichton novel, the magic yellow light that makes the Island go "Yoink!" is crossing the line.

-Locke didn't move the Island. He just didn't. Sure, Ben says Locke had to be the one who was told to do so by Jacob, but then why did Locke have to even accompany Ben to the Orchid after he told him? And did Ben know he could give himself up and would then be freed so he could get back to the Orchid?

*Is Sun teaming with Widmore to get revenge on Ben? Does she blame Ben for the death of Jin? She should, but how would she know? Are we going to get a whole episode devoted to her finding out?

*The biggest problem LOST has is not that it's showrunners don't know what they're doing, it's that they have the show plotted out too well. But that's a much longer rant that I can't get into just now.

4x12, "There's No Place Like Home, Part 1"

2008-05-15T21:47:00.000-07:00

*Honestly: not much to talk about. We're introduced to The Orchid, though if you haven't watched the orientation video you have no idea why it's important. Everyone seems to be moved into place. And we see some of the supporting beats of the flashforwards (the Nadia/Sayid reunion, the Camaro getting fixed, Jack learning Claire's his half-sister). You get the sense the trap is being set again and starting with the first scene in Part 2, it'll be sprung, the show going non-stop action till The O6 get off the Island.

*So the Commander of the Battlestar Pegasus is now repping Oceanic Airlines? WHAT.

*Hmm... so Sun has now taken control of Paik Industries. In the LOST universe Paik and Widmore supposedly know each other (this is from one of the LOST novels) so does this put Sun now in direct contact with Widmore? And does she use her father's company to find the Island next season?

*Is Jin really dead? Sun seems to think so, saying "two men" were responsible for it, one being her father. I'm beginning to think more and more that he's actually not because...

*Locke's going to move the Island with the Orchid. (Check out Faraday's notebook: "TimeLike"?) And I think what ends up happening is he moves the Island while the O6 are just not on it.

*The timing of how it all happens though is going to have to come together quickly. The O6 are all over the place, with Sun and Aaron on the Freighter, Kate with The Others and Hurley at the Orchid. I can't even remember where Sayid and Jack are at other than trying to find each other. I wonder if the 06 aren't actually together, they're just left behind all over the place and end up getting picked up randomly by Penny or something.

*With Michael reappearing it feels as if he's still being considered an after thought despite returning supposedly a full-tome cast members. What exactly is he supposed to be doing for Ben now? Will he actually make it till next season or die in the Finale to redeem himself? That'd be a cop-out but I see it happening.

IN TWO WEEKS: THE GRAND FINALE! The Island Moves! Or... not. It's Part 2 of "There's No Place Like Home"

4x11, "Cabin Fever"

2008-05-08T22:22:00.001-07:00

*Move the Island? How does one do that? Now, on the special "Access: Granted" featurette included on the Blu-Ray editions of Season 3 DVDs, Damon and Carlton are asked specifically if the Island is indeed an Island.

Damon Lindelof: If an Island is defined by land mass surrounded by water they are on an Island.
Carlton Cuse: Right. That’s good.
Damon Lindelof: Right.
Carlton Cuse: Yea. I don’t think we should say anything more than that.
Damon Lindelof: Yes. That’s how that’s...
Carlton Cuse: That’s right.
Damon Lindelof: This is about definitive answers. We have defined the term Island we’ve confirmed that we are in fact on one.
Carlton Cuse: And it's surrounded by water.
Damon Lindelof: It is.
Carlton Cuse: But everything beyond that is kind of up for grabs.

So... that doesn't really mean the Island is, you know, attached to anything.

I nearly crapped my pants when Locke said it because for the longest time the Grand Unified Theory that had most annoyed me was "The Island Moves". It was just too hard to accept and could be made to answer a lot of questions like how the Nigerian Drug Plane, the Black Rock, etc, etc. ended up there.

This also has led to speculation that Locke will move it someplace in the arctic (thus Hurley's igloo drawing and Ben's breathing out crystalized air when he, um, appears in Tunisia wearing a parka).

If the Island does move I think it won't be in a way we expect. Maybe it'll be... teleported.

*Claire is dead. Christian acted as if there was no time to explain why she was there when he could very simply have said, "I brought her here." She seemed way too satisfied being in Jacob's cabin. I've already seen some speculate she's met the spirit/ghost/electromagnetic after-image reanimated by The Monster of Charlie and is now perfectly content to be where she is.

*I guess Christian is not Jacob... but he speaks for him? What does that mean? I feel like we're in an episode of the Prisoner: "Who are you?" "The NEW Number 2!" "Who is Number 1?!"

How many people do we have to go through to actually get to someone or something that can reliably name itself "Jacob"? Maybe we'll never get to him?

*How great would it have been if Locke chose the comic book? But knowing he considered himself "The Hunter" it was obvious he was going to pick the knife. What's interesting is Alpert thinks that's the wrong answer, yet apparently recruits him again when he's in high school. What changed from one age to the other? And did each object correspond to a particular role? For some reason the tube of dirt looked awfully familiar...

Meanwhile, Sledgeweb points out a similar test is used to pick the successor to the Dali Lama.

*Plan B appears to be a DHARMA station and may indeed be The Orchid.

Next week: The time has come... and wouldn't you know it with the finale music they whipped out for Sayid's boat ride! It's Hour 1 of the three hour Season Finale, "There's No Place Like Home"!

4x10 / "Something Nice Back Home"

2008-05-01T22:11:00.000-07:00

*There's already some dissatisfaction on the Fuselage about this episode's heavy Jater emphasis. Do people seriously think the Jack/Kate/Sawyer soap opera is irrelevant? I don't mind it one bit. I was thrilled actually when Kate stepped out of the shower and kissed Jack. I threw up my hands and proclaimed, "The Good Guys Won!" Jack then proceeded to prove himself a complete asshole. Really there was a lot of interesting subtext here with Jack once again coming across as the obsessed Mr. Fix-It, in this case trying to fix whatever it is he has left with Kate:

Sure there was no drama about whether Jack was going to survive his surgery. That wasn't the point despite some chatter to the contrary. What was really going on there was Jack using the occasion to get closer to Kate, even while Juliet was saving his life. He could have a relationship with Juliet, but that's too easy... there's nothing there to fix. (And Juliet's aware enough to recognize that even if Jack himself doesn't.) Meanwhile in the future when things finally look right with Kate he can't let himself be satisfied with that, he needs to break that relationship to have something to fix, too.

*I guess Karl and Danielle are indeed dead. Ewwww.

*I assume the smoke detector reference was a hint that Christian was the smoke monster. Some people have pointed out that the detector was beeping only because the battery was dead, but still there could've been any number of ways to get Jack to step out of his office and they went with a smoke detector. Me'thinks that is no coincidence.

*Now what exactly was Christian doing with Claire and the baby? Remember the last time we saw Christian he was in Jacob's cabin in Jacob's chair. Could Christian be taking Claire to Jacob's cabin?

*And assuming Christian was the monster, are we slowly connecting the pieces that Jacob = Monster = Christian?

*Bonus Easter Egg from last week: On the latest podcast, Damon and Carlton did indeed confirm that when Ben lands in Tunisia he breathes out a vapor, indicating he'd just come from a cold environment. Hmm... any connection to Penny's listening station in the arctic or Hurley's igloo drawing?

4x09 / "The Shape of Things to Come"

2008-05-01T21:49:00.000-07:00

I believe this is the first episode where Brian K. Vaughan was credited as the lead writer and it showed. On it's face this was the Wacky Adventures of Benjamin Lynus, globetrotting around the world acting as super-spy assassin. But really it was about a simple question: what would you do when you've lost everything. The answer is "Anything." What Ben's gong through though takes it further: he seemed to believe he was never going to lose Alex. Never. Those were "the rules." So he not only is capable of anything, but he wants his enemy to know what that feels like, too. An absolutely incredible dynamic, done neatly, quickly and efficiently - dare I say it - as only someone who knows how to work a 22-page script can do it. Bravo, Brian, Bravo.

*An Emmy for Mr. Emmerson?

*I may have missed a crucial part of dialogue, but I think it's safe to assume Ben and The Monster are on the same wavelength. I still don't think Ben controls the Monster outright but probably knows exactly what to tell it to get it pissed.

*They keep teasing Claire's going to die.

*They're setting something up with dead people not being dead because of timey-whimey, wibbly-wobbly shananigans. Could this set-up a return of Christian, Libby or even Charlie?

Next week: "Something Nice Back Home"

Darlton Grades Fan Theories!

2008-05-01T12:19:00.000-07:00

Fans submitted theories to USA Today which handed them over to show runners Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse. The two of them graded ten of the submissions, as well as giving each some of their patented smarmy commentary. Below are the highest graded ones with commentary excerpts:

The Diabolical Experiment
Lindelof: A
Cuse: A

Matthew Abbadon (the thin man who recruited the freighter crew) gains control of Aaron. This brilliant boy is fated to grow up and eventually work in a secret “Area 51” military laboratory on a remote Eniwetok-like island. A diabolically powerful experiment goes very wrong and Aaron is trapped in another dimension, eternally unstuck from space-time normal and only partly able to contact this dimension (as through Ben and the dead, like Jack’s dad and Charlie). We know Aaron — as an adult after the disaster — by the name “Jacob.” Everything which happens in Lost is part of a desperate millennia-long effort orchestrated by Jacob to alter the flow of events such that his original fatal error in creating a space-time rift is averted at the critical moment. Across centuries Jacob manipulates forces to gather the interconnected Lost-ies; their fates are all bound together with his fate. Jack the healer exercises free will and — thanks to eventually working together with Locke, and most especially thanks to the love and sacrifice of Kate — rescues and cures Jacob, so healing the space-time rift and saving the world. Jack and Kate will live the rest of their lives together in love, ultimately becoming the island’s Adam and Eve at rest in the cavern.

Cuse: “The fluidity of space-time is something which is very much on the right track in this theory. Even if some of the specifics are not quite right, there’s a lot of free thinking in this theory.”

Lindelof: “It’s not exactly the most accurate theory in the world. But there is a lot of supporting evidence, a lot of thought. Obviously, this person watches the show very closely.”

*****

Dharma Chameleon
Lindelof: A
Cuse: A

There is an off-island presence for Dharma that is working to get back onto the island to finish their work with the Valenzetti Equation. Ms. Hawking (the white-haired time-traveler who crossed paths with Desmond) was a former Swan worker and developed the same ability Desmond has. Ms. Hawking accidently got this ability during the original incident. She survived by finding her constant — Brother Campbell — and left the island. After leaving the island, her visions developed, and she has seen what needs to take place in order for Dharma to regain control of the island.

Her visions include a complicated pattern of people that are required to be on the island in order for a set series of events to occur for Dharma to return to the island. With the help of others, including Christian Shephard, Richard Malkin, Nadia and Libby, the group ensures that specific people are on the plane in order for the series of events to occur.

Desmond must reach the island to cause Flight 815 to crash; Locke must locate the hatch to keep Desmond alive. Desmond must influence Charlie to turn off the jamming device. Jack calls the freighter.

Cuse: “This is a very evolved theory that has a lot of stuff in it that’s pretty close to the mark. We really responded very strongly to this theory.”

Lindelof: “We liked the way it was worded, so concisely. And because it does contain the aforementioned theories of time travel and manipulation of space-time, this theory gets a solid A.

Cuse: “As a matter of fact, we can’t even comment on it too much because there’s a lot in here that’s pretty accurate.”

Lindelof: “We’re not going to explain why we’re giving it an A. Hopefully, the writer of this theory will take their A and be very proud, put it up on their refrigerator.”

Cuse: “It’s not all correct, but we kind of responded to the way this person thought.”

Lindelof: “It’s not all correct, but it could be correct.”

Cuse: “Or parts of it could be correct.”

Lindelof: “That’s correct.”

Cuse: “I will say that this person is going to really respond to Season 5 and feel very superior to everyone else.”

Lindelof: “Then, in Season 6, we will crush their spirits and prove them wrong. And until then, they should enjoy the ride.”

*****
The 6 and the Sickness
Lindelof: A
Cuse: B+

What do Jack, Kate, Hurley, Sun and Sayid have in common? None of these five were anywhere near the Swan station when it imploded and the sky turned purple. So what does this mean in relation to the Oceanic 6? Very simple. They are literally the only survivors of Oceanic 815 that can safely leave the island without dying.

We know that the ‘Sickness’ is actually the form of time travel that Desmond experienced when leaving the island on the helicopter. But Desmond didn’t die when he left the island because he found his constant in Penny Widmore. But more importantly because he had been injecting himself with the Dharma vaccine since the day he entered the Swan.

This brings us to Aaron Littleton, the last member of the Oceanic 6. Aaron has been injected with the same vaccine in the womb and after being born. The vaccine seems to curb the effects of the sickness when leaving the island.

We know at least some of the 815 survivors are still living on the island in the future. Meaning only those who can leave the island will. The rest of the Lost-ies are left behind (unwillingly) due to the effects of the ‘Sickness’ they will experience when leaving.

Cuse: “In ‘The Constant,’ we obviously saw that it’s important to stay on the right bearing going on and off the island. As the freighter got closer to the island, people started experiencing sickness, and we know that Rousseau’s people suffered from a sickness when they came to the island, so this person is in the house in certain areas.”

Lindelof: “The causal relationship between the sickness and the strange fluctuations in space-time is a good catch. As far as the Oceanic 6 being the only ones who can leave the island, that is incorrect, so we’re going to say it’s a wash.”

4x08, "Meet Kevin Johnson"

2008-03-21T10:21:00.000-07:00

I gotta admit: I didn't feel this episode. If this was truly meant to be Season 4's finale had the WGA strike canceled the rest of the season, I'd have to say it falls far short of finale standards.

*Sledgeweb summed it up best at his site when he said, "Too much Michael, too little Walt." In one of my rare complaint threads at the Fuselage, I posted how jarring it was to have a stand-in for Malcolm David Kelley at the window, despite seeing the real deal in "Through the Looking Glass" and Cynthia Watros as Libby again in this episode. If you couldn't get Kelley, why bother? And if you couldn't get Kelley, why not just CGI some old footage of him in. They know how much we dissect every screenshot of this show. There's no way we would've confused this actor for Kelley and after waiting for him to reappear for so long it just feels odd that we get a stand-in.

*I think my major problem with this episode was they spent so much time explaining stuff and it's stuff I didn't need to hear explained. It's already unbelievable that anyone even with a ridiculous amount of money could've pulled off the faked Oceanic 815 wreck. But when they went about actually explaining it -- exhuming over 300 bodies from Thailand, recovering scrap metal, dropping it in the ocean -- it sounded even more implausible. I really wanted to see Harold Perrineau's full arsenal of acting displayed here and instead he was forced to pretty much ask variations of "Why?" and "What?" throughout the episode. Actually seeing him tell Walt that he was crushed with guilt over murdering Libby and Ana-Lucia would've been more effective than seeing Tom guess it.

*The anthrpomorphing of The Island continues in earnest. A thread titled, "Scientifically, how does the island have power over people off the island?" was started which points to the show's biggest problem with the mainstream audience. The Island's been billed as this entity with a will all it's own since Season 1 though the biggest proponent of that has always been Locke, the man of faith. I think a lot of "men of science" in the audience wanted to believe that Locke was crazy and there was a scientifically based reason for everything going on in the show. Well there is, but it's not the kind of science they're accustomed to seeing, it's the sort of pseudo-science one finds in a Michael Crichton book. Basically saying the Island grants immortality to whoever it wants has been something people have thought about since the Losties openly questioned how they survived the crash with just scratches. But this is really stretching that to the point that the Island can pretty much do anything, that it's essentially God. I don't know if I can buy that, really because I still cling to the season 1 rules of the Island being this place cut-off from the rest of the world that in and of itself was a locus of weirdness. If the weirdness can be so easily exported it makes The Island actually feel less special as a place and more generic as a god.

*So much of LOST's plot is now dependent on characters believing Ben that's it's getting harder and harder to accept it. Every character by this point has experience enough of The Lynus Treatment to know that at best you get a half-truth and at worst you get stone cold dead. The only time someone didn't fall for Ben's manipulations that I can remember was when Jack went all UFC on him in "Through the Looking Glass" and nearly pounded his face in. That was one of the most exciting moments of the season because everything till that point had been built around how successful Ben's manipulations were. Yet a season later and we're in the same spot, with characters who should no better continuing to fall for his traps. Frankly, it's getting annoying.

*Is Danielle dead? I would assume so. Though that now makes giving her her long promised flashback/origin story so much harder if not impossible. But it's the kind of shocking cliffhanger I wasn't expecting, in a bad way. Danielle and Alex have been virtually persona non grata this season that to have them suddenly the focus of the cliffhanger was out of left field. I don't think the shooter is anyone significant, it's probably just the freighties.

*By the way, I am in love with Tania Raymonde. That is all.

See you April 24!

4x07, "Ji Yeon"

2008-03-13T21:58:00.001-07:00

*That was really painful stuff. Not only did they introduce a format I'd been expecting (the Flashforward/Flashback mix) but used it to fool us into thinking Jin was still alive to see the birth of Ji Yeon. I knew something was up that Jin went so far out of his way to get the panda. Unless the sight of panda bears would be found to cure the Island's Curse on Pregant Women by the end of the eppy, it would have nothing to do with Sun. There's A LOT of conflict over whether Jin is actualy dead. The tombstone reads his death as 9/22/04, the date of the crash. As a result some have speculated he's still alive on the Island and Hurley and Sun were just mourning that he couldn't escape and is for all intents and purposes "dead" to the two of them.

But it's clear to me from the way Hurley and Sun reacted that he was dead. I'm guessing he'll die during the rescue and they went to this grave site as it's the last remaining remembrance of him.

I gotta say, Jin and Sun were the characters that first got me hooked on LOST. The very first full episode I watched was "...And Found" about how the two of them first met. It was astonishing to see two fully realized asian characters on network TV, characters who spent a significant amount of on screen time not speaking English. That was one of the first signs to me of just how special this show is. As I watched the entire show from the beginning though I fell in love with them as human beings whose struggles could be universally understood. They were the soap opera element and while a lot of people over the years have found their episodes to be tedious and tangential to the overall mythology, I've always treasured them as little oases amidst the twilight zone.

Oddly enough he chatter at the Fuselage sounds much like lot the mourning after Charlie died. But the fact is Jin isn't dead -- yet. Much like Desmond, the wheels are now in motion for Jin to die during the rescue, which still seems a little ways. So I figure we have until at least the end of the season to enjoy Daniel Dae-Kim.

*Oh and... MICHAEL!!! If ABC hadn't announced it at Comic-Con, if they weren't contractually obligated to put his name in the credits since the first episode of the season, this would've really been a shit your pants reveal. As it was almost everyone knew he was going to reappear this episode. Still... I couldn't believe it until I really saw him up close. It is absolutely great to have Harold back in the fold.

*Did Ben plant the plane and the bodies? Is he that rich and powerful? What. The. Fuck. if we're to believe Michael, assuming he left Sayid and Desmond the note not to trust the captain, then it's all a lie and a set-up by Widmore.

4x06, "The Other Woman"

2008-03-06T20:02:00.001-08:00

*What more can be said about Benjamin Linus? He's so damned good at being so evil you just want to applaud. I think almost everyone could call Ben sending Goodwin to his death as the payoff of Juliet's flashback. But just the way that Ben was so proud of it -- fucking chilling. To top it off to see him amble back to the snug confines of his house in full view of the incredulous Hurley and Sawyer.

Hurley knew it. Sawyer Knew. And Ben lives it -- there's nothing definite on this Island except for one thing: BEN WINS.

*Whose Side Are You On? If Widmore wants to wage war on Ben, then who exactly is the good guy here? In true LOST fashion I assume neither is and everyone else is caught in the middle. The Freighties probably have no idea what kind of a man Charles Widmore is. Meanwhile it's clear that Ben thinks that the Freighties may be more a threat to himself than the Island. Maybe he thinks that in the process of fighting the Freighties he'll end up killing everyone on the Island with the Gas of Doom again?

*I think it's safe to assume the "her" Juliet reminds Ben of is Annie, his childhood sweetheart who I suspect died in childbirth. And Ben's attempts at being romantic were just too cute.

*Umm, who are you again? So what was up with Harper? Was she real? Was she dead and just the monster? I just realized, she essentially came and went, whispers and all, as Walt did in Season 2. Maybe where the Others ran off to features the capability to project oneself, and that's what Walt was just doing the same thing back then. Otherwise, if it ends up Harper is dead and Juliet didn't act shocked at all, that's just awkwardly done.

*Interesting theory I just read at The Fuselage: The Gas of Doom may be distributed throughout the Island using the Cerberus Vents. Those vents were first referred to in the Blast Door Map from Lockdown in Season 2. Supposedly the vents are how The Monster gets around.

*Phillip K. Dick's Valis makes a second appearance this season.

The main character in VALIS is Horselover Fat, an author surrogate. "Horselover" is English for the Greek word philippos (Φίλιππος), meaning "lover of horses" (from philo "brotherly or comradely love" and hippos "horse"); "Fat" is English for the German word "dick".

Even though the book is written in the first-person-autobiographical, for most of the book Dick treats himself and Fat as two separate characters; he describes conversations and arguments with Fat, and harshly if sympathetically criticizes his opinions and writings. The major subject of these dialogues is spirituality, as Dick/Fat is/are ostensibly obsessed with several religions and philosophies, including Christianity, Taoism, Gnosticism and even Jungian psychoanalysis, in the search for a cure for what he believes is simultaneously a personal and a cosmic wound. Near the end of the book the messianic figure, incarnated by the child Sophia (a name associated with Wisdom in many Gnostic texts), cures him (temporarily), and the narrator describes his surprise that Horselover Fat has suddenly disappeared from his side.

*And I love Elizabeth Mitchell. All the Jaters can just cry themselves to sleep tonight.

NEXT WEEK: Episode 7 was to act as a season finale if the WGA strike killed the rest of Season 4. So it;s supposed to feature one of this season's biggest Oops, I Crappped My Pants! moments. I think we can all guess if the glorious return of Michael.

4x05, The Constant

2008-02-28T22:57:00.001-08:00

I was going to wait till after I rewatched the episode to post. But it really packed such an emotional high that I'm gonna ride it and just let it rip:

*Lost's Holy Trinity of Carlton Cuse (Writer), Damon Lindelof (Co-Writer) and Jack Bender (Director) pulls off another masterpiece. "The Constant" belongs up there with some of the finest of Season 1 and I dare say may even crack my all-time Top 5. What makes it even more spectacular was just how perfectly directed and edited it had to be to work. One shot or out of place cut and the feeling of being "unstuck in time" is lost. I've seen a lot of talk about Emmys coming the way of this episode, but clearly it has to get the one for Best Editing.

*As a piece of writing it was a perfect blend of story and mythology. When I heard the title was "The Constant" I figured there'd be something science related serving as a "constant" in (presumably) Desmond's time traveling. But knowing how Damon and Carlton always try to use science fiction as metaphor I guessed the point of the episode was to state that "The Greatest Constant is LOVE." But how to do that without seeming too cheesey? Well, Carlton and Damon did it. The key was Farraday not stating what sort or strength of emotional attachment there had to be for something to serve as a constant. Left up to Desmond that could only be Penny. But for Farraday it was knowing that all his work and sacrifice was meaningful, represented by Desmond, both in the past and in the future. The Constant is indeed "love" but not just romantic love, but the love we can have for each other as members of one interconnected and interdependent human family.

*"The Constant" also presents what amounts to a Grand Unified Theory of LOST. A lot of these points aren't mine:

-The Sickness: Sort of cast-off into the background and generally forgotten as a red herring, the sickness returns! Is "The Sickness" suffered by Danielle's crew, the one warned about with the quarantine tags on the DHARMA station doors, is it really just the result of going through the Island's snowgloble incorrectly and going crazy from all the time displacement? Was the injection given to Minkowski similar to the one Desmond was giving himself? Did DHARMA mistake people going crazy for a biological disease, thus creating a vaccine that really prevented nothing?

-Are the flashbacks really flashbacks or time displacement that the Losties just aren't experiencing as happening right now? Think about it: the only difference between Desmond's time displacement and a normal flashback was he began to understand what was happening and used it to his advantage. Could there be an episode where, say, Jack realizes this, exposes himself to a heavy dose of radiation or electromagnetism, flashes back and apologizes to his father before he dies? Couldn't any of the Losties then resolve their past issues, in the past simply by getting a jolt?

*Demond's gonna die! And he knew it, too. That look on his face that said he finally unburdened himself: he saved the world and told Penny he loved her. As he said, everything was now "Perfect." What else is there left to do?

*Me'thinks Widmore is looking for the Island and needed Maguns Hanso's notes to get there. In the LOST tie-in novel "Bad Twin" (yes, I'm a sucker and read the thing) Widmore is on the board of the Hanso Foundation. So he obviously knew his colleague Alvar Hanso had this Island all to himself but had no way of finding it for his own nefarious purposes. The Lost Experience online game gave the impression Hanso wanted the Island kept secret so the DHARMA Initiative could conduct their experiments in private. And now we know how Widmore eventually knew where it was.

4x04, "Eggtown"

2008-02-25T19:58:00.000-08:00

*"Eggtown's" received some of the strongest negative reviews on The Fuselage since the beginning of season three. Much of the dissatisfaction originates from Kate's trial, called in one Fuselage thread, "The Worst Television Trial Ever!" That's harsh, there's certainly been worse. But it still went against the audience's expectations of what a televised trial should look like. Now for a show that already and proudly bucks every convention of network television, this shouldn't have been a problem. But there was a few too many story beats that on first glance stretched the trial's credibility, seemingly at the expense of getting to a new status quo of Kate being stuck in California.

This is what I've seen a lot of people point to: The prosecutor came across as ridiculously inept. Next, how could Kate really get off that easy? If the case against her was so strong she was the subject of a global manhunt, shouldn't there have been more evidence than just the testimony of her mother? How about the death of her childhood sweetheart, the poisoning of her ex-husband, the aiding and abetting of the robbery in Albuquerque, etc, etc. Was it realistic to believe all of that may have been forgiven by her newfound celebrity as one of the Oceanic 6, but the murder of her abusive father just couldn't? And even if the prosecutor believed that was not the case, why didn't she just risk going to trial anyway as Kate could've been nailed on at least one of the more minor counts against her.

I would agree all of those are valid knocks against the story, except the week before I'd seen something pretty similar go down on The Wire. Not to give too much away, a character who'd been the subject of an investigation for at least two if not three seasons of the show's run was finally brought to trial. Despite a mountain of incontrovertible evidence against him, he was acquitted by a jury sympathetic to his life story. The difference between the two trials was that Kate's was done in just four segments of one episode while nearly five episodes (really five seasons) of groundwork was laid in the Wire to justify the sympathies of a jury.

I think the biggest mistake may have been doing the trial story at all. I think they could've skipped it altogether and gotten to a plot point that just showed Kate got off due to her celebrity without actually needing to show a trial. Or they could've stretched out the trial to at least two episodes where a believable world was established in which she had just the amount of sympathy on her side to get off.

But really, I think it's just another case of expectations being set so high. LOST has been able to capture the flavor of nearly every genre on television. If they missed the mark with one I think that can be forgiven.

*A lot of people are pissed at Locke's new self-proclaimed dictatorship. Really I think it's the completely natural next step of his evolution: he's special, full of potential, but still raw and unfocussed. He hasn't been this groundless since his time with the Button, and the opening scene between him and Ben mirrored perfectly the time in the hatch Ben was most successful at undermining his self-confidence, all the way down to Locke breaking some dishes. I think Locke's progression may be mirroring what Ben went through before he became the leader of the Others.

*There had been a definition of an Eggtown on Lostpedia but it's since disappeared. It was a pretty good one too about eggtowns being salesman lingo for a place where you're damned if you do and damned if you don't.

*Aaron, huh? There was a point I knew Kate's "son" just couldn't be her own. Too much of the episode was built around denying it (with Kate not sleeping with Sawyer, Sun and Jin talking about their own baby and Kate reluctant to hold Aaron). You sort of knew the child would have to be either Aaron or Jin and Sun's. Really, it makes a ton of sense: Charlie sacrificed his life to save Claire and Aaron. Desmond's vision was correct, but the unintended consequence was somehow Claire didn't end up finishing the journey. Maybe she dies on the Island. Maybe she dies during the rescue. Maybe she's around but for some strange reason has to pretend the baby isn't hers. Regardless, Kate's former status quo as "The Runner" has been supplanted with a new one that keeps her firmly rooted. And she seems to be happy about this, the biggest reason she doesn't want to go back to the Island: she finally has a reason to stay put.

*I have no idea what's up with Farraday's card game, but some speculate he's not really crazy but maybe has a "beautiful mind" that could understand the Island's unique physics.

*Me'thinks this week's episode will focus on the now lost helicopter and what happened to it. I'm placing my bets it's a Desmond-centric episode. The title: "The Constant". Hmmm...

4x03, "The Economist"

2008-02-17T23:07:00.000-08:00

I am going to take a stab at what happened in the last episode involving you know what with the clocks. But it's not going to be very good so I may revisit this in a separate post down the road as we learn more. I think it'll end up being THE defining mystery of the season, for better or worse.

But first... the stuff that doesn't need a more than basic knowledge of quantum physics to understand...

*This episode's garnered the most negative reaction on the Fuselage, and I think that's to be expected. (Now that only means about a 35% negative opinion as opposed to the mircroscopic amount of negativity the first two received but it's still worth noting.) If you leave aside Farraday's Experiment, nothing of great consequence happened on the Island. People moved around, people got captured, people got released. But really the status quo hasn't so much changed as just settled down a bit from the last two episodes' frantic action. Catching our breath isn't a bad thing, except there was something missing in the scenes that didn't so much move the story forward as just ask the same questions we got the last episode: So why are you with Jack/Locke?

*By far the best beat was Hurley playing bait. We know at some point Hurley makes a break from Locke and their exchanges here laid the groundwork for that. But knowing Hurley was actually a willing participant in Locke's scheme shows just how far on Locke's side he still is. Whatever event breaks them apart must be something heavy and irrevocable.

*Meanwhile we got a flashforward that was so removed from what we know should be the way of the world, we're kept in suspense waiting for an explanation. Except we don't get it. We just get the huge reveal that Sayid is now in fact working for Ben, confirming just how far he's turned to the dark side. Apart from that the flashforward wasn't so meaty. Really it stalled until it got to the big reveal, something the show has to be careful it doesn't do so often people get numbed to it.

Knowing LOST well enough we're aware seeing is never believing and after enough flashforwards we'll probably agree with everything that Ben told Sayid and it'll turn out they're the good guys after all. But how much story really is that going to take? We're already waiting for how Jack got from the autograph signing hero we saw in "Beginning of the End" to the drunk, pill-popper from "Through the Looking Glass". Yet Sayid's flashforward arc is much more ambitious than even Jack's and we're left wondering just how many flashforwards it's going to take to fill in those blanks. My guess: Ben is right and whoever hired the Freighties threaten the island and everyone on it. Now off the Island, the Oceanic Six have to stop these people at whatever cost, though how they came to that conclusion will probably take a long time to reveal. While the rest of the world views the Oceanic Six as celebrities and heroes, the guy Sayid killed on the golf course obviously knew they were people he in particular should fear.

*Much Ado About 31 Minutes: In the last episode Locke said he thought Walt was "taller" hinting the Walt he saw wasn't one who left the Island just a few months prior but one who had noticeably aged. Coupled with the Farraday Experiment LOST is paving the way for... something big to happen. I don't think it'll be a reveal so much as an event: the way the experiment played out time becomes an issue not so much if you're on the Island or not, but how you get there. And the flashforwards suggest the Oceanic Six will return to the Island. That may involve questions not just of how they're going to do it, but when.

Time Dilation has been thrown around in a lot of theories, but it's gotten more traction in light of the Farraday Experiment: the clock in the rocket spent 31 more minutes traveling that it should've:

Gravitational time dilation allows time to pass at different rates in regions of different gravitational potential. The higher the local distortion of space-time by gravity, the slower that time will pass. Time dilation due to gravity effects would allow for two objects to stay at a constant distance from each other, but would require the people near the slower-running clocks to be close to something with enough mass to generate such a gravity field. This form of dilation would also allow for real-time communications between the two regions of different time in that the electromagnetic waves are not affected by gravity.

So it's not that time on the Island and time in the outside world is actually different. It's exactly the same, which is confirmed by the boat and Farraday being able to communicate in real time. It's how the rocket entered the Island's "snowglobe". Farraday took pains to tell Lapidus to follow the proper heading out. This may be the exact heading Ben told Michael to take to "find rescue". Perhaps this heading is the only one that involves no time dilation. Anything that differs from it however gets affected. The most interesting thing I've read about this actually hints that the further away from the heading, the more time is lost, and that there's even the possibility of traveling back in time. It is no coincidence that the man left on the boat is named Minkowski, after the scientist who first coined spacetime.

4x02, "Confirmed Dead"

2008-02-07T23:11:00.000-08:00

I really have to start getting used to these hyper-compressed episodes -- there's way too much going on every segment to keep up with and process. A number of stories that would have been set-up over six or seven episodes in Season 2 and 3 have basically been compressed into two. I think it's safe to say this episode may have topped the season premiere in the inexplicable department, but I never really felt confused. The again It's like I didn't have time to be confused. The show's relentless momentum, like The Wire at its best, makes you feel as if you're juggling a bunch of balls in the air and you don't care if and when they'll ever fall so long as you can keep it going.

On a side note, co-creator Damon Lindelof stopped by the Fuselage this evening, his first interaction with the fan base since the WGA strike began. This was part of his self-imposed "radio silence" in support of the strike. I'd take this as a very positive sign that indeed the strike is over and barring a last minute mutiny this Saturday a deal will be approved and LOST may yet be able to complete the final eight episodes of this already breathtaking season.

*A headcase, a ghost buster, an anthropologist and a drunk: these, my friends, are the newest full-timers on LOST. What was interesting was how the episode overall portrayed them collectively as screw-ups instead of the looming menaces they've been set-up to be. So will whatever tragedies befall the Island actually be their fault or will it be a complete accident? Also, between the four of them I think each is going to end up resolving some outstanding issues about the Island's make-up: the Physical Laws of the Island, the Dead, DHARMA and Why Someone Ends Up On the Island.

*For me the most interesting are definitely the headcase and the ghostbuster. First off both very quickly got their characters over almost by body language. They also hold a lot of promise: the headcase is a physicist and that may come in handy considering the Island's bizarre properties. And the ghostbuster -- that speaks for itself. Through him we may finally get an answer to how and why the dead don't stay dead on the Island.

*I'm a little less enthused about the anthropologist and the drunk but I think that's mostly because I just dug the actors who played the other two more. (And clearly Ken Leung's turn as a mental patient in The Sopranos was definitely what caught LOST's eye). The anthropologist seemed to know something about the DHARMA Initiative. I'm gonna guess we'll learn more about their experiments (and what off Island applications those may have) though her. The drunk pilot appears to be almost a control case: what happens if someone's who's supposed to be on The Island never made it, but gets a second chance. We may get a clearer picture of why our original Losties ended up on 815 by learning more about why the drunk didn't end up on it himself.

*I think if Locke keeps inexplicable leading his group all over the Island, it'll become clear very quickly why Hurley in the future thinks he made a mistake by choosing his side.

*FAKE! This was actually brought up in the previous episode thread and LOST is apparently going in the direction that many dread: that a vast and rich conspiracy has planted a fake Oceanic 815 with fake corpses in the bottom of the ocean. So who was it? The leading candidate would be Widmore, but why would he want to do this? Is it to keep people from searching for the plane and thus stumbling on The Island? And now that we know six get rescued, how will their being alive be explained to the rest of the world? Are they going to say somehow the Oceanic 6 escaped a planed that had crashed in the middle of the ocean?

*DHARMA in Tunisia? This was what really blew my mind. There's some speculation this means that what's going on on The Island is in the distant past and that it's actually located in present day Tunisia. Really, I think the simplest explanation is the right one: however Eko's drug plane ended up on The Island will end up explaining how one of the DHARMA bears ended up in Africa. I think this'll have bearing on how people get to and from The Island.

*Oh, just kill him already! So why is Ben wanted by Matthew Abbadon? And when was that picture of Ben taken? When did he leave the Island and for what purpose? Might we see a flashback off-Island with Ben?

*Where doesn't Ben have a mole? Seriously, the man's network is more far flung than the CIA.

*Name Game for the Freighties:
-Daniel Faraday: There's a physicist named Farraday who made important discoveries regarding electromagnetism

-Miles Straume: A play on "Maelstrom"?

-Charlotte Staples Lewis: Reference to C.S. Lewis

-Frank Lapidus: The word "lapidus" is hebrew for "torch" or "candle" recalling the DHARMA orientation film host Dr. Candle/Hallowax/Wickmund.

*BONUS EASTER EGG for 4x01, "The Beginning of the End": Shortly after I posted my last, recap a theory appeared on the Fuselage titled, "HO, HO, HO". Now I had also noticed how odd it was that "HO" kept appearing in the episode: Hurley sees Charlie near the ho-ho's in the store and he and Jack stop playing HORSE right after Jack got "H-O". Later I found out that in the background at the mental institute some kinnex had been assembled an "H" and "O". At first I thought this was an inside joke that according to the timeline it's December 24, 2004 on the Island. But someone also found that "HO" is the chemical symbol for an Holmium, an element formerly known only as Element X. Holmium is used to create the strongest artificially generated magnetic fields.

4x01, "The Beginning of the End"

2008-01-31T22:21:00.000-08:00

Watched tonight's premiere at the site of the NYC Lost Meet-up, Professor Thom's near Union Square. It was a mistake. The group was only supposed to be about fifty people but it was clearly double that over the two floors, maybe even much more. Seating was limited so lots of people were left standing, including a few who kept getting in the way of the people seated, like myself. LOST is definitely something to be enjoyed as a group, but it felt like woodstock in there. Anyways...

WHERE TO BEGIN?

Overall, a great, great episode. It felt like vintage first season LOST with non-stop action, great character conflicts and just bizarre moment and after bizarre moment. With the cemented 48 episode structure, Damon and Carlton could speed the story along, abandoning what they'd done in the beginnings of Season 2 and 3: splitting the group up and covering the smaller groups piece meal until an eventual reunion. The real purpose was to drag the story out since there was never enough to cover a twenty-two episode season. But here the residual threads from the Season Finale were dealt with immediately. Yet the deck was immediately reshuffled and the cards re-dealt: the show's now about Locke vs Jack but with the stakes the highest they could be.

*The future is becoming clearer and clearer: The survivors of Oceanic 815 are apparently known as the Oceanic 6. We can count Kate, Jack and Hurley among that group. Unfortunately a poorly concealed spoiler on the Fuselage led me to find out who the remaining three are but I can hold my tongue on that. It's unclear exactly what the Oceanic 6 are famous for: Just surviving, period? And if so did they tell anyone they were saved from a mysterious Island where inexplicable random shit kept happening? What does the rest of the world know about the other Losties? Or does the rest of the world think the only survivors were the O6? And what is it that the Six seem so desperate to conceal? Matthew Abbadon, played by the great Lance Reddick, asked if "they" are still alive. Could this mean everyone left behind could be dead or of unknown status? How could the O6 leave the Island in such a state, with their friends dead or dying?

*I have a feeling Abbadon will be making his way to the rest of the O6. Already chatter on The Fuselage links his name to the devil. Might someone be making a deal with devil, if he or she hasn't made one already? And whose side is he on? Obviously not Oceanic's since he didn't produce a business card.

*And I can't believe Jack would've killed Locke so coldly. Such an incredible moment, but one where I had to mourn the death of a Jack I could sympathize with.

Easter Eggs:

*Yes, that was Christian in Jacob's rocking chair. Does that mean Christian is Jacob? Not necessarily... in the last LOST Missing Piece, I think the Monster took on the form of Christian, so The Monster could be Jacob.

*The consensus seems to be that was Locke's eyeball in the window, but I dunno.

*Charlie had "They need you" written on his hand in Hurley's vision.

*And I really don't know where to begin with Hurley's chat with, uh, "Dead, But Here Charlie". My guess: if the Monster was Yemi and probably Dave and Christian, I believe it's Charlie, too. How it got off the Island is a big question though. If it's not the monster, there's something else very, very weird going on. Could it be that the wackiness of the Island isn't necessarily confined to the Island, but maybe has more to do with the characters themselves? I dunno.

LOST / 3x22, "Through the Looking Glass"

2007-06-07T12:52:00.000-07:00

Oh, jeez, this one's late. But it's the last one about a (new) episode I'll be doing till, oh, February so you can forgive me for dragging this one out.

Upon second viewing I'm almost willing to proclaim this episode one of the show's best ever. Like Sixth Sense, they had to be sure the episode could withstand repeated viewings and it does remarkbly well. There were moments when they were trying not to date themselves (like Jack constantly referring to his father and the use of Nirvana's "Scentless Apprentice" from the early nineties) and moments when they were almost trying to give it away (Jack using a RAZR-type cell). There was always enough to think maybe this wasn't a flash forward and just barely enough to hint that it may. I thought it might be when we saw Sarah very pregnant -- I wasn't sure how long it was between Jack and Sarah's separation and the crash but I was sure it wasn't anywhere near long enough for her to get that pregnant. The RAZR was a giveaway but I wasn't sure if it was just a continuity/prop error. I couldn't figure out what the use of a flash-forward might be -- until the final scenes both on the Island and off.

For the mainstream media the biggest question about LOST may be if the Losties will ever get rescued. But for me it was always more character based: Will the Losties ever discover the Island's purgatory-esque properties and use them to their advantange? Jack himself was the first to reailze the Island granted everyone tabula rasa. Yet he never quite took that to the next level: if the Island grants a clean slate, does one actually learn from what was erased to form a new, better identity?

The final two scenes of "Looking Glass" proved that Jack had learned nothing. He repeated the same mistake he had always made, trying to be the hero at all costs, and by doing so earned himself a future where he was just like his dad -- drunk, alone and in search of closure a world away. Now instead of being a show about getting rescued off an island, Gilligan's Island in the Twilight Zone, we have, finally, a show more focussed on what makes that Island so special and what it does for those who find it. We've been given the impression that the Island was indeed worth staying on and fighting for, but it's never been clear if we were to just take that on faith. Now we've got proof, in the plaintive cry of Jack, "We have to go back!"

It was a shocking twist that rebooted the show and set a new course.

Now the big question: Will Season 4 be set off-Island? Will each episode reveal what the Losties are up to post-rescue and flashback to the Island and the events of the rescue itself? I think so: some of the last flashbacks of Season 3 scraped the bottom of the barrel and there wasn't much left about these characters to go back to. The show needed another layer of history to peel back and got it by leaping ahead into the future. Are we going to see the other Losties in similar dire straits as Jack? Will each be consumed by the past they were running from? Will Sawyer fully turn to the dark side and become as ruthless as the man he killed? Will Jin and Sun's marriage fall apart again? Will Claire fail as a mother? As was strongly hinted in "Looking Glass", will Kate stop running only to be tied down by a man, probably Sawyer? Will they learn from their parents mistakes or just repeat them?

*Notice that Kate was all done-up, living in LA and driving a fancy car -- What the hell happened to Kate Austen? I'm willing to bet post-rescue she quickly became the most "marketable" of the Losties and got swept up in a whirlwind of instant fame and fortune. And that may have nabbed her an awkward but quickie "feel good" pardon.

*What was Ben thinking? Did he really expect to stop all the Losties by himself? If this was Ben's ultimate test as master manipulator, he failed miserably. His biggest mistake, one repeated over and over again by every character, is he believed too much in himself at the expense of others. He always walked that thin line between supporting the existence of free will and then subverting it with hs machinations. The two ceased to coexist when it ran up against Jack who was in no mood to negotiate.

*Save the Junkie, Save the World: Oddly enough, I was OK with Charlie dying. Just as Charlie resigned himself to his fate so I was prepared to let him go. Now I see that the unfulfilled promise of "Greatest Hits" was really just to set-up the payoff an episode later. While we spent all of "Hits" expecting Charlie to get whacked (or at least drown), him surviving felt like a cop-out not just to the viewers but Charlie himself. By "Looking Glass", Charlie just wanted to get it over with and have his lasting heroic moment.

RIP Charlie Pace. You all... everybody.

*Here's a Fuselage post about who was in the coffin and what was written in the obit. I'm pretty sure who died isn't important. It's that Jack failed the Losties by getting them rescued off the Island and this person's death, whoever it was, was just another nail in his own coffin.

*And I'm almost completely certain Christian Shephard is dead as disco. His son's rantings about him being alive were drug and alcohol induced. Actually, it might just be that Jack's totally lost his mind: he did say he flew over the Pacific every weekend hoping his plane would crash on the Island.

*OKAY: So Season 3's over. What next? Well, I'll be guiding the LOST Rewind, a "viewing club" rewatching the entire series from the beginning and focussing on all the plot and thematic elements that have been illuminated after three season worth of show. It'll be housed at the Fuselage though I hope it grows to something every LOST fan can take part in. Details and schedule to come shortly.

LOST / 3x21, "Greatest Hits"

2007-05-21T23:37:00.000-07:00

OK... I'm going to cheat here. A poster at the Fuselage named Todell (who happens to also write a LOST blog for the Houston Chronicle) posted this which I'm copying and pastung in lieu of any actual recap from me. I really had nothing to say about this episode so I was surprised to see someone draw so much meaning out of it, and especially using the Hero's Journey which was my virtual college thesis.

Charlie's list? His greatest hits? They're the steps of the mono-myth:

1. a call to adventure, which the hero has to accept or decline
2. a road of trials, regarding which the hero succeeds or fails
3. achieving the goal or "boon," which often results in important self-knowledge
4. a return to the ordinary world, again as to which the hero can succeed or fail
5. application of the boon in which what the hero has gained can be used to improve the world
1. A call to adventure = #5 Charlie hears his Driveshaft song on the radio for the first time, and realizes he will be a "bloody rock god" = Charlie learns that Claire can be rescued.

Charlie has lost hope with the band and is ready to quit when the group hears You All Everybody on the radio, and hope is reborn! Charlie will be a rock star after all! On the island, this scene is shown shortly before Desmond tells Charlie that Claire and Aaron will be rescued via the helicopter. Hope is reborn!

2. A road of travails = #4 Charlie's father teaches him to swim = Charlie learns he will drown to death.

As a child, Charlie is frightened to learn how to swim, but after some encouragement from his father, Charlie overcomes his fear and dives in. On the island, this scene takes place just before Charlie learns that to be the hero, it requires that he drown to death. Which, of course, is a nice bookend to the flashback -- Charlie must learn to swim, only so that he can drown.

3. Achieving the goal or "boon," self-knowledge = #3 Liam gives Charlie the family ring = Charlie telling young Aaron that he loves him.

Liam gives Charlie the family ring, the symbol of their lineage. The ring is the symbolic "boon:" it represents Charlie's specialness, is bestowed upon him because he's the "different" one, the one that will have a family. And he does have a family: Claire and Aaron. To whom he bestows the family "boon."

4. A return to the ordinary world = #2 Charlie saves the woman from the mugger = Charlie accepts the mission and says his goodbyes.

Charlie saves Nadia after Driveshaft has broken up, and he has returned to the ordinary world where he is no longer a "rock god." And he passes the test. On the island, Charlie has to say goodbye to his family and friends, the members of his ordinary world, before he can complete the mission.

5. Application of the boon = #1 Charlie meets Claire = Charlie goes on his mission to the Looking Glass.

Charlie has finally found his great purpose in life: loving and saving Claire, and he accepts it. The child in Claire's womb will be the inheritor of Charlie's boon, but for the child to carry on Charlie's inheritance, Charlie must commit an act of sacrifice and heroism.

There are plenty of heroic characters on the show whose stories also follow the mono-myth pattern, but the difference here is that the writers are literally drawing the comparison out for us on that list that Charlie creates.

***

The thing that really bugged me about this episode was that it felt REALLY manipulative, that exactly all the right buttons were pushed to get the audience to react a certain way. And these weren't subtle moments either. Then again it was called "Greatest Hits" and any band's greatest hits are never their most subtle works. But, yeah, it worked: there were moments I was on the verge of tears and there was that bit at the end when I thought Charlie was done for and had comitted the noble sacrifice.

BUT... as I wrote that monring only three things were going to happen: 1) Charlie was going to die; 2) Desmond was going to sacrifice himself to save Charlie once and for all (very nearly done); 3) Deus Ex Machina.

And of course... we got #3.

The episode served as a bridge to the end game. The problem here was that the previous run of six of seven episodes have been so good that this one felt like it pulled the breaks and served as a breather before the whole thing got going again. Now all the pieces are in motion and we'll finally get that epic confrontation between the Others and the Losties that's been building since the coming of Ethan.

Easter Eggs:

*Yup, that was Nadia.

*The Bunny Rabbit Hatch

*And the mysterious sticker on Charlie's guitar: "I was here moments ago." WHAT.

NEXT: This is it! LOST's Season Finale, the Jack-centric "Through the Looking Glass". And be sure to tape it... supposedly the epsiode will require immediate rewatching, especially the final five minutes...

ETA: At my personal blog, a commenter was intrigued by my thinking that Ben was more a monster now for being amoral, than being immoral. Really I shouldn't have used the word monster. Here's my response:

Oops... I actually don't mean monster in a "bad" way, but that Ben was no longer operating by the traditional rules of good or evil, so instead of being "human" he was now something else entirely. That kind of philosphy can lead to benevolent or harmful acts depending on where it's newly rooted. In Ben's case it's not really rooted at all, just where it needs to be so he feels right. He's never a liar, until he is and then he's not again. He's not a killer, until he is, but then he's not really. He's a good person, but the person handing out the "good" label is himself.

LOST / 3x20, "The Man Behind the Curtain"

2007-05-21T22:38:00.000-07:00

"Helllllp... Me...."

And so goes our first meeting with Jacob (aka "HIM"). In case you didn't see him, it wasn't a Psycho-esque delusion of Ben, Jacob was most definitely there.

Now who could he be? At first glance, the forehead looks distinctly like Terry O'Quinn's except according to Lostpedia, he was being played here by one of the show's prop masters. I am willing to go out on a very, very long limb and say that they deliberately picked a dude to play Jacob who looked like O'Quinn, just so they could eventually reveal that Jacob is indeed Locke.

How can that be? Well, if all the theorizing about lost time is correct, then perhaps Locke is somehow caught in time, and everyone is going through a time loop, but only Locke is standing still in that particular place for some reason. Notice in the above pictures Jacob's hair is as long and his clothes as tattered as Richard Alpert's when we meet him in Ben's flashback. Richard doesn't look like he's aged a bit. Perhaps this similarity is not coincidental and there's a hint here that what seems to have caused Alpert's agelessness is also affecting Jacob.

Or... Richard Alpert is Jacob. (cough.) But that would just be lame, yes?

*While the episode was full of little bits of show mythology, the one that stood out for me was the subtle way they explained why Ben (and thus the Others) are so obsessed with kidnapping pregnant women. If I'm reading the episode correctly, Ben believes he may have brought a curse to the Island that causes all pregnant women to die at around seven months, just as his own mother did. This was in no small part because his father kept blaming him for his mother's death and their misery ever since. Ben told the Others he was born on the Island to deflect any hint he brought this "curse" with him, while also making him look special as supposedly the last on-Island birth.

Meanwhile, the girl who grew close to him seems to have disappeared from his life later, the crude doll she made for him the only reminder of her presence in young Ben's life. What happened to her? Did she perhaps die in childbirth, too? Was this what finally snapped Ben and turned him into a mass murderer?

This is just another case of the writers taking a seemingly bizarre mystery and resolving it not just by answering a question, but illuminating a character's dark past. Really, instead of sympathizing with Ben, it made him seem even more like a monster, not because he's evil, but because he's beyond notions of good and evil. He acts purely out of self-preseveration, with lies being the truth if it suits that purpose.

His special relationship with Jacob was all he had left to hold onto. And with the coming of Locke, with Locke hearing what even Ben couldn't hear, that relationship was threatened, and so, too, Ben's place within the Others and more importantly his view of himself.

*Smokey = Whispers? It sounded like whispering around Ben as he approached the sonic fence and spoke to his mother. It's now widely assumed that Ben's mom was the Monster. Is Smokey also the cause of the whispers then, too? Indeed the Monster may be the closest thing to a grand unifying theory of Lost, explaining everything from Dave to Christian Shepherd to the Whispers.

*Actually, there's also a theory out there that Jacob is the Monster and that the circle of ash or gunpowder is the smoke we see when it is out and about. So when it reenters that zone the ash just falls away and rejoins the circle while he retakes his seat. Or... not.

*Did someone say "Volcano"? Well... you know they never bring anything up without it coming back later. Island go boom?

3x19, "The Brig"

2007-05-13T15:10:00.000-07:00

Was this the beginning of the end for John Locke? Even though he'd get shot and apparently killed the following episode, "The Brig" really was part 1 of a two-parter. Across the two Locke finally let go of the all-consuming anger toward his father and thus left his past before The Island behind him. John Locke is a new man. And you know what that means:

Purgatory Rule -- everytime a character resolves his pre-crash issues he or she gets whacked. Usually this is within that character's respective episode, but I think we can treat "The Brig" and "Man Behind The Curtain" as one whole.

Actually, we got a two-for-one in this episode with Sawyer resolving his own father issues. But while the original Sawyer is dead, the scars te left on his namesake are still evident. Somehow this is not a rebirth for James Ford... there's more yet to resolve as his puking and misery afterwards attests to. What does Sawyer become now that the object of his vengeance has been destroyed? Does he move on to resolve the damage he himself left behind, starting with his daughter Clementine?

Resolving both these issues within the same episode points to the spirtual brotherhood Sawyer and Locke share. Really this was the only way Locke could get past his anger, knowing that someone else shared his pain, perhaps even felt it worse than he did. Live Together, Die Alone...

This was a masterpiece of an episode, with everything from the writing, to the directing to the acting, editing and lighting clicking together to create a thrilling and even moving hour. One of the best episodes ever.

*The Master Manipulator: Nearly everything Ben said to Locke was a lie, intended to manipulate him into a humilating situation. Locke posed the greatest threat to Ben's hold on the Others. Ben would do everything he could to keep it, even if it meant kidnapping Cooper from Florida and putting John in a position to kill him, which Ben knew would never happen. Meanwhile, he created false expectations among the Others and looked stronger for it when Locke failed to live up to them.

*"A little hot for Heaven": So it's not purgratory... IT'S HELL! Cooper's little "theory" added an extra special kick to all the other ones out there that the Island was purgatory. Instead of thinking about it in literal terms though I think this episode shifted a lot of fans' minds toward thinking about it metaphorically.

Bits & Pieces:

*Naomi Dorrit: A reference to the Charles Dickens novel, Little Dorrit. According to Lostpedia the book "is a work of satire on the shortcomings of the government and society of the period."

*"An Old Pace": The ancient-looking column Anthony Cooper gets tied-up to seems to be from the same civilization that built the Four-Toed statue. Who were these people and where did they go? Were they the ancestors of the Hostiles?

*Why is Cindy there? Me'thinks there's a flashback in Cindy's future. There's definitely a lot more to learn about how she went from Taillie to Other.

Locke's healing transferrable? So how did Ben heal so quickly once John was with him? Does Locke's "specialness" extend beyond himself? If so how has that been affecting the Losties all this time? Did Ben actually try to keep Locke with him primarily to heal himself?

*Free Will: Ben brings up free will again as a major component of the Others' beliefs. He even says one needs a "full commitment" to it to be a true citizen of the Island. Problem with that is we see so little of it in practice. Every decision Ben claims could be made by free will (going all the way back to earlier this season with Kate falling for Sawyer because of the conditions of their captivity) has been manipulated by him.

*Everyone Loves Sayid: This run of episodes strongly casts Sayid as the Wise Man of the Losties. Everyone trusts him, everyone believes him, and everyone looks to him to solve their problems. And... these are all reasons why I think we may be seeing the last of him. A guy like that can not be allowed to survive on this particular Island.

*Interesting that Sayid has never seen anything as sophistocated as Naomi's satellite phone. Is this another hint that time on the Island and time in the outside world are operating differently? Perhaps in the outside world it is actually 2007 (or maybe 2010 when the show ends).

*Significance of Sawyer walking barefoot? Maybe it's nothing, but you'd think Sawyer would at least have gone back to his tent and grabbed some foot gear. I think this was a subtle way to hint Sawyer was going on a spritual journey of sorts.

*The faked crash: I think it's safe to assume Ben had a crash faked so the search for Oceanic 815 would end. The Hostiles and Ben are definitely being backed by someone or something and I think it has nothing to do with the Hanso Foundation. Maybe Mitellos Bioscience is not a front for DHARMA but really a new entrant into the show's mythology.

*Guest Starring: Rousseau: Hilarious little cameo by everyone's favorite Frenchwoman with an eastern European accent. I think running into Locke and grabbing the dynamite is going to come up again during her long promised flashback, now looking likely for Season 4.

3x18, "D.O.C."

2007-05-12T15:01:00.000-07:00

Rewatching the episode after seeing the last two draws out all the interwoven subtleties of the show's plot overall: without rewatching I'd still be obsessed over what Juliet is up to and what the hell Naomi meant when she said "there were no survivors".

Juliet's storyline, with the tape recorder as the connecting thread, portrayed her first as a mole, then a reluctant mole and now, perhaps, a double agent. Her fate has swung with each passing episode, depending on who had the recorder at the time.

Naomi's bizarre news also set-up "The Brig" perfectly. Without the entire world believing that the passengers of Flight 815 were dead, Anthony Cooper wouldn't have thought he was in hell, something that allowed him to finally be himself, as well as give the "It's Purgatory" theories an extra special twist.

*"It is he who will bear this debt." What may be lost with all the analysis of those two issues, is just how well the episode filled out Sun and Jin's backstory. Now we know Mr. Paik didn't make Jin his goon out of spite but because he felt Jin owed him for helping out Sun.

Another dimension's also added to Sun's compulsory lying. She tells her father that she covered for him all his life, and that she would continue to do so as long as he covered her this one time. It's a wonderful twist that shows Sun's lying in a different light: she does it so easily not because she's a weak, craven character but because she had to do so for herself and her family's welfare. This ironically carries on elsewhere as she lies to Jin about wanting to have a fancier honeymoon and living arrangements. While Sun thinks she's protecting him, she's instead giving him the impression she's materialistic, which we saw during Sun's first flashback in Season 1. Turns out she's not that way at all but continued the ruse to cover her first lie to Jin.

*Mikhail and the Island's healing properties: I crapped my pants when Mikhail emerged our of the jungle. Sure, it's a bit of a cop-out to say the Island just healed him (and they referred to that a bit in "The Man Behind the Curtain") but again, it subtly sets up how even the most deadly looking injuries can still be cured. Are they setting up the return of Locke?

*The episode also quietly laid the groundwork for Kate being pregant: Juliet informed Sun all men were five times more fertile the average man. Considering how much nookie Kate and Sawyer have been having lately (and seriously... I think it's safe to assume Sawyer's sex drive is in a bit more hyperdrive than the normal male) there's a very good chance Kate's with child. BUT... how's this for a possible twist: what if the Others used the captivity on the Hydra to impregnate Kate... with JACK's sperm. It could all come out in the raid when the Others take the pregant women.

*Jin, LOST Action Hero: Daniel Dae-Kim is a black belt in Tai Kwon Do and choreographed the fight with Mikhail with the director.

*"Thank you... She said 'Thank You'": Umm, check that Mikhail. The parachutist actually told you, "I am not alone." Sneaky Others....

BUT... if she's not alone... who else is with her? Penny? Maybe even -- GASP! -- Walt?

*More father issues: So... Jin's father doesn't even know if he's Jin's real biological father. Nearly every character on the show appears to have father issues. In this particular case, is it just a recurring theme or something pointing to a larger connection among the Losties?

LOST / News and a Proposal

2007-05-05T23:16:00.000-07:00

*Rumor has it ABC will announce LOST's end date at this coming week's upfronts. Further rumors speculate LOST will get two more seasons, though late breaking reports modified that to mean the second one may not be a full 22 episode one. That fits in with Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse's long stated desire to end the series after 100 episodes, possibly meaning the show could terminate as early as the November 2008 sweeps.

*Rumors also speculate LOST Season 4 will begin in January 2008 and run non-stop from there ala 24.

*To make the long hiatus between season go down easier I'm going to propose a LOST watching club: The LOST Rewind. Each week beginning the one after the season finale, the "club" will rewatch three episodes, beginning with "Pilot" and going from there. At that pace every episode of LOST will have been rewatched by the time Season 4 rolls around. Discussions will focus on what we may have missed the first time around, what storylines and clues have been paid off and how character arcs have evolved. I'm also hoping the show's complexities will be easier understand when ingested in such a dense schedule.

I'm going to propose it to Karri and Artz at the Fuselage so it could have an official home. Who's with me?

LOST / Quick and Dirty

2007-05-02T20:04:00.001-07:00

"Written by Damon Lindelof
& Carlton Cuse"

-- has to be my favorite phrase.

Just absolutely awesome.

3x17, "Catch-22"

2007-04-22T20:17:00.000-07:00

This is one of those flashbacks that I'm sure many fans saw as "more filler." Instead I was struck with how they managed to seamlessly blend biblical references (Abraham's sacrifice of Isaac), literary references (Catch-22) and comic book references (Superman vs Flash) into a rumination on faith and love.

The show's unique internal logic made Desmond's catch-22 possible:
*On any other show, Desmond's choice should've been really simple: he'd save Charlie just as he's saved him several times before.
*BUT... LOST's internal logic means that Desmond's unique archetype ("the coward"), his power to see the future, his basic goodness needing to save Charlie and his love of Penny all clashed together making that decision anything but simple. It's bizarre if you think about it: he believed the love of his life would be delivered to him if he led Charlie to his death. Delivered by whom? God? The Island? And where does this surety come from? "Flashes" before his eyes? On paper that's a recipe for some maddeningly bad writing, but somehow it all clicked and clicked wonderfully. It's as good as magical realism can get on TV without getting too esoteric.

It also leads to one of the more bizarre questions in the show's history: Was it originally Penny in the flight suit -- and if so, did Desmond change that by saving Charlie?

And just who is this new woman? According to the latest podcast she spoke Portuguese, the same language the two arctic station dwellers spoke at the end of Season 2. Has Penny hired an entire crew of Portuguese to find Desmond?

*Just how awesome were the two major teases of the show? First, by bringing up the story of Abraham and Isaac, we're led to think Desmond's going to sacrifice Charlie, his love for Penny overruling all. Eh-eh. Turns out he's still too good even under these circumstances to let that happen... (Makes you wonder what he would do if he weren't caught in such a catch-22.) Does that make Desmond a current for not going through with the sacrifice? Or does it prove Desmond anything but a coward because he was so willing to go against his flashes and write a new destiny for himself (and Charlie).

Also, by dragging out Sonja Wagner's appearance as much as possible, we were left thinking that, yeah, her first appearance might very well be in the flight suit. Showing up at the end of the flashback instead of in the Island story suddenly gave the flashback potent meaning -- it was the story of their first meeting, set-up by his random meeting of the monk on the street. Notice, too, that the picture on the head monk's desk includes Mrs. Hawking, the woman who "course corrected" Desmond in "Flashes Before Your Eyes." The monk and Hawking have thus been instrumental in guiding Desmond toward Penny and then away from her -- a path that led relentlessly to the Island, the Button and saving the world. To Desmond that path is confused, nonsensical. But taken as a whole it makes perfect sense.

*Brian Vaughan was most definitely in the house. It's hard to place but the pacing, the cute dialogue and some random character moments were definitely BKV touches. The Superman/Flash references were possibly a nod toward his comics background though some on the Fuselage have speculated that Flash's ability to vibrate may somehow tie into what the Island is. Is it any coincidence that the comic book from Season 1 also included The Flash?

NEXT: The Jin and Sun-centric "D.O.C" (for "Date of Conception")

3x15, "Left Behind" & 3x16, "One of Us"

2007-04-12T21:18:00.000-07:00

I'm gonna bang these out for reasons I'll get to in a bit. Unfortunately I'm a bit too hazy on "Left Behind" to give a full accounting of it, but I'll do my best.

3x15, Left Behind

While officially this was a Kate episode, it was really all about Sawyer: on the Beach, Hurley conned him into softening up, while in the flashback we saw one woman he already left behind and another he would eventually leave behind come together.

The connection among the three is deceptively rich. Ignore the linear order of events and look toward the meaning the future can give the past. In a roundabout way, Kate not getting over her mother issue redeemed Sawyer's leaving Cassidy. Not able to get the apology she needed from her mother, Kate told Cassidy she'd never forgive her for turning her in. That gave Cassidy solace that even if Sawyer would never forgive her she could still live with it, the way Kate's mother does. But by doing so, Cassidy placed Sawyer in the position he would eventually use to win the reward he would leave for her child. So while in Island time, Kate and Sawyer were on the outs, she unknowingly ended up helping him in the past. It's one of the finest examples of a "LOST Connection" -- one that has more to do with the meaning of live together, die alone than any conspiracy theory.

*The Monster: Have we finally seen how the monster can be beat? Might someone activate the sonic fence just as the Monster crosses it, disrupting it into pieces? Notice also three separate strands of smoke came together to form Smokey this time around, further backing up the theory that the Cerberus mentioned on the Blast Door Map is indeed the name of the Monster since in Greek mythology Cerberus has three heads.

And I'm finally all caught up....

3x16, One of Us

*I usually hate the episodes dedicated toward giving answers, but this one was great:
-How do they know so much about the Losties?
They watch TV (and probably use The Google.)

-How did Juliet or anyone for that matter get to the Island?
The sub.

-Why do they kidnap the children?
They can't have any of their own.

-Why did they kidnap Claire?
To continue Juliet's experiments.

-Is Juliet a spy for The Others?
Yes... but she probably has her own agenda and will end up betraying both Ben and Jack to get off the Island.

*The story itself was also pretty straight-forward but elevated by Michael Emmerson and Elizabeth Mitchell's superb acting -- restrained when it needed to be, just about to boil when it was appropriate. I really hope Mitchell's character doesn't die anytime soon.

We got to see the tipping point in Ben and Juliet's relationship when she finally had enough of him after he tantalized her with footage of her sister and nephew, only to take it away and force her to continue the experiments. A great moment, just like the three minutes Michael has with Walt, that communicates exactly what's at stake for Juliet -- and prepares us that she'll do anything to get it.

*"I'm not a liar!" Ah, so we've finally found Ben's weakness: call him a liar and he'll do everything he can to prove you wrong. I wonder if his "archetype" is the liar and he'll only resolve his own issues once he truly realizes what a monster he is.

Next week: I HAVE NO IDEA! (I'm on a spoiler fast.) I'll be out of the country starting Friday night and not coming back till the following Saturday morning so I will be totally missing out on next week's episode. Brian K. Vaugahn's is either the next one or the one after that. Go Team Comix!

3x14, "Exposé"

2007-04-09T21:17:00.000-07:00

OK... I reacted too harshly to "Exposé" the first time around. After watching it again, I realized what I'd missed. The first time I was mostly disappointed because Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse had led me to believe Nikki and Paulo's awkward insertion into the storyline would lead to something important. They even used "iconic" to describe how we would view the pair afterwards.

Well, I think their deaths were certainly iconic, as I will never be able to forget that.

But was it worth it solely for an ending -- albeit a spectacular one -- to just one episode? Damon and Carlton had been saying they wanted to do a "redshirts" story, showing what the other background characters were up to while the leads went off on their wacky adventures. Supposedly, they thought an episode about random characters we'd never met before would be too jarring so we needed to be introduced to them somehow. I disagree with that. If this had been our first real introduction to Nikki and Paolo, the episode may have actually worked better within the context of the show.

It's the running gag in all genre shows that redshirts are disposable and always manage to get themselves killed. This episode definitely played into that. But really, by bringing them forward from the background, Damon and Carlton made them more than redshirts, only to dispose of them as if they still were just that. For whatever reason, Dr. Artz's sudden appearance and death made more sense -- probably because he actually contribued something useful to the overall story, while Nikki and Paolo at first appeared to be there as just set dressing. Introducing them so awkwardly though made Nikki and Paolo seem like intruders. Lindelof said as much in a short post-mortem interview with TV Guide, saying he realized fans perceived the two as "crashing the party."

Maybe the best redshirts episode I've ever seen was, appropriately enough, one on Star Trek: Next Gen. It ignored all the other stars and just focussed on five lower tier officers. We'd never met them before but each was a subordinate of one of the leads. It showed all facets of how these background characters lived, better still it compared their lives to the more exciting ones of their superiors. They were less important, knew it and struggled with it and against it. One of them died when she was given the opportunity to actually do something meaningful. That ending was inevitable, but somehow made every redshirt death on the show a little more poignant.

I didn't really get that so much in "Exposé". Instead a lot of their crossover appearances in the show's past seemed forced and contrived. Meanwhile, I was waiting for appearances that would have made more sense and shed some light on things still in the dark -- like how Scott (or Steve) died.

But by itself Exposé was quite a piece of work, which is why it should've been treated like a stand alone episode, with little build-up.

It's no coincidence the diamonds were hidden within a matryoshka doll. "Exposé" was a show, within a show, within a show. It deftly mocked network TV's over abundance of crime procedurals (CSI: The Island!) by turning LOST into one. A few posters at The Fuselage even made comparisons to Hitchcock. While I think that's going too far, Exposé definitely headed in that direction with its pulpy tone and film noir inspired structure. And, bless 'em, they followed that forumla all the way to its logical conclusion with a macabre ending perfectly suited to such an episode. If LOST really is a stew of all genres of storytelling, this will go down as one of the prime examples of it.

This was all set-up beautifully by the opening segment, establishing Exposé as a show mocking Baywatch (or maybe Baywatch Nights). So even for those who'd never seen anything like it, they now had a baseline to come at the rest of the episode.

*Now, there's a couple really interesting Exposé related nuggets to keep in mind for the future:

-Locke was actually watching Exposé in "The Man from Tallahassee"
-Hurley's comment about waiting four seasons to find out who The Cobra is could be a hint we'll have to wait till Season 4 to find out who Him/Jacob is or was.
-And keep in mind that The Cobra was apparently one of the lead good guys of Exposé... could the real "Cobra" be hiding in the midst of the Losties on the beach?

*One last thing that Dean pointed out: it's again no conincidence they replayed Jack's pivotal "Live Together, Die Alone" speech. Nikki and Paolo behavior contradicted that entirely from the very moment they crashed: Nikki wanted the diamonds, Paolo wanted Nikki and each cared for little else. Paolo could've saved a lot of people by sharing what he overheard about Ben's plan.

The "Box" that gives you everything you want continues to work in mysterious ways. While the Losties will never know, Nikki and Paolo both ironically got what they most wanted: Paolo will never be separated from Nikki, while she will never be parted from the diamonds.

3x13, "The Man from Tallahasee"

2007-04-03T21:16:00.000-07:00

Had to rewatch the episode to jog my memory... glad I did as it's one of the most rewarding ones of the entire series. The talk around the office the day after its airing was it's potential place among the Top 5 all time. I'm not going to go that far, but I think a strong case is being made that Locke episodes are generally the best "centrics".

This was a perfect example why: Locke's character arc has itself been the arc of the series. He served as the gateway into the spiritual side of the Island in Season 1, giving the show's mysteries added philosophical weight -- serving as LOST's anchor and assuring us that, yes, it all means something.

Locke's struggles with himself over the Button in Season 2, reflected the audience's own doubt that the series was going anywhere and if any of it would prove worth the effort. But in that moment when Locke confesses to Eko that he was "wrong" -- all doubt is shed and the Man of Faith is reborn, stronger than ever.

It all pays off this episode as Locke reanchors the series' spirtual roots, pointing out the hypocrisy of retaining the amenities of modern living while trying to enjoy the benefits of the Island. Clearly, this is not what It wants. And if there was any doubt, as Locke and finally Ben point out, all you had to do was see who was in the wheelchair -- and who wasn't.

*I have never hated a fictional character more than I hate Anthony Cooper. OK... that may be an exaggeration. But over the two and half seasons I've had to put up with the guy he only seems to get worse and worse. If he was just a con man, like Sawyer, I could maybe find something in him not to hate. But this episode he proved himself more -- he's a craven. Wild guess of where this is going: Locke resolves his father issue as the Island's reward for putting up with The Button, and he paves the way for the same happenning to Jack and everyone else in Season 4.

*The Box: as I'd complained about in an earlier post, the most intense discussion about this eppy at the Fuselage centered on whether Ben's "box" was real, metphorical or something else. Carlton put that to rest in the most recent podcast (dated 3/30) saying it was metaphorical. But what exactly is the metaphor then? Is it for the Island? Is the secret of the Island and thus the show as simple as it gives you what you most want? That obviously can't be true as no one on the Island gets everything that they want. Instead, as the Stones would say it, "You get whacha need."

*On Jack Bender: other than JJ, Bender is the show's best director. The script's subtle complexities were brought out, the acting was pitch-perfect and the shots complimented the story. A key moment was the dueling POV shots of Locke being placed in the wheelchair: you could just see a million emotions play out on Terry O'Quinn's face as he was brought to it, seemingly as if he were about to be thrown into a bottomless pit. It was ultimate despair, the moment he thought he'd lost himself for good, contrasting so starkly with his finding himself on The Island.

3x11, "Enter 77"

2007-03-12T21:09:00.000-07:00

*So did Sayid really torture the woman? I think it's one of the typical Lost mysteries that is open to interpretation and won't ever have a definitive answer. I'm going to go with no. The telling sign was Sayid saying, "I see your face every day." That's also what her husband told Sayid she experiences herself, that she sees HIS face every day since she left Iraq, which is why she was certain of his identity. Sayid was so moved by her story that, thinking he was a dead man anyway, the least he could do was give her some closure. More than that she needed someone to tell her that her pain and suffering was actually shared by the person who caused it, otherwise she'd be just another victim, another notch on that torturer's belt. Sayid restored her self-worth and dignity and in the process his own life. This does fit into The Watchmen Approach, where I wrote that each character has his or her own (often self-declared) archetype or role to play. Sayid has said many times in the past now that he's a "torturer." Ironically, declaring it again here, even if it was a lie, actually makes him more noble.

*The Man of Too Much Faith? Yes, Locke acted like a dumbass the entire episode. While, I've seen a lot of crticism about this, it's all been perfectly set-up by the events of Season 2. After his expierences with The Button, losing faith in and then getting it back, Locke more than ever is a devoited to the Island and whatever tasks it lays before him. Oddly enough that still comes in the form of orientation video from Dr. Candle. If he happens upon another video with Candle telling him to save the world by sucking on his big toe for twenty-three straight minutes every forty-hours, I'm sure he would do it. He lost his faith once, and he may never lose it again. This looks ridiculous, but it's actually been properly set-up by LOST's unique narrative logic.

*I've got your stinkin' answers! Another of the biggest criticisms lobbed at LOST is a supposed lack of "answers". I don't know if that's a legitimate criticsm as most of the mysteries on LOST are essentially MacGuffins meant to generate plot. Case in point: the cable on the beach. Everytime I'd read a post or article talking about dropped storylines or forgotten plot points, one of the favorite examples was the cable. Now we know it was a power or data cable for a sonar beacon off-shore. That's definitely the sort of thing that deserved the low impact reveal it got on this episode. But for those waiting since the middle of Season 1 for a spectacular reveal to be associated with it, they were sorely dissappointed. They got an answer, it just happened to be a dull one. Maybe it's just that Damon and Carlton were too good with their MacGuffins in Season 1, but it's become an all comnsuming thing with the show's detractors that the MacGuffin's are more mportant than the plot, the characters and the themes -- and that's a huge problem that may now never be fixed.

*Whither "Jumbotron"? Oh, ho! This is gonna be good. In story time, Sawyer's week long fast from nicknames may last the rest of the season or at least a very hefty chunk of episodes. His names have acted as double edged sword, keeping the Losties at a distance and acting as a way to get over an inferiority complex by putting himself over everyone else. Will this be a unique moment where Sawyer actually has to connect with the group, on a level he never has before? or will he act out even more harshly to make up for his lack of "arms."

*Next up: The Claire-centric, "Par Avion"

Alan Moore and Time

2007-03-07T21:08:00.000-08:00

Some great quotes from Bill Baker's recently pubslihed book length interview wth Alan Moore, titled Alan Moore's Exit Interview.

I think what Moore says here has a lot of relevance to what happened in "Flashes Before Your Eyes".

Time, if I understand correctly isn't actually passing except in our perception of it. In fact, as far as a I understand it, every moment in the universe, fromt it's most remote past to the most distant future is all happening at once in some permanent, eternal kind of globe of space time in which the beginning and end of the universe are both there at the same time, along with every tiny moment in between...

This kind of leads me to the idea of life as an endless recurrence that, if those moments of our lives are unchanging forever, then one of the things that was conspicuous about them was that we were alive and thinking during them.

If the past hasn't got anywhere to go, it's still there isn't it? And it must just be our consciousness moving through the solid of space time that gives us the illusion of passing time. It strikes me that there really isn't any need for life after death, because life before death is very probably, eternal...

3x10, "Tricia Tanaka is Dead"

2007-02-28T21:07:00.000-08:00

And thus a new entrant into the Top Ten (well, almost).

Yes, the title was a spoiler.

Hope -- it's funny how much I missed it. LOST's first season in many ways was about hope. Each episode someone seemed to find some sort of resolution or at least a direction of growth that pointed to a resolution. Season 2 had the meta-storyline of The Button which shifted the hope conversation into one about faith: how does one maintain hope in the face of contrary evidence? While I've enjoyed Season 3, it has been a relentless psychological mindfuck. (And should we expect anything less from The Others?) We needed some sunshine, and this eppy was it.

From the first scene, we knew what would really be weighing Hurley down: the memory of Libby. Everything that came after that was just a stand-in for that loss. Worse was the seeming inevitability of everyone around him dying. Charlie telling him Desmond's prophecy didn't surprise him, just further confirmed for him what he come to accept his own fate to be.

*Fate, free will, destiny, faith -- a lot of the major themes were played around with in very subtle ways. We've been set-up to believe the NUMBERS are cursed and there's nothing that can be done about them. Father issues tend to be major factors in each character's backstories, usually resolving with the father or father figure abandoning his son or daughter. Here both LOST "traditions" were teased and subverted. Even Charlie staring death in the face as the DHARMA Bug plunged down the hillside ended up being a life affirming moment rather than just another case of fate and destiny having its way. Is that all we need to really change our bad fate: to stare it in the face and dare it to bring it's worst?

*The bug was everyone's escape: Sawyer getting away from Kate, Jin getting away from Sun's pressure to learn English, Hurley getting away from the memory of Libby and Charlie avoiding his fate. Brilliantly executed. Bringing everyone back to camp, newly restored, just emphasized that. Everyone, except of course for for Sawyer.

*Kate/Sawyer -- another brilliantly executed bit. Right when you think they'll make up they don't... they're just not like that.

*It's interesting that Hurley's bad luck didn't hold. In the Lost Experience online game from the summer of '06, it was made clear the NUMBERS are universal constants factoring into The Valenzetti Equation, a formula that predicted the exact time the world would end. Basically: yeah, dude, the NUMBERS are cursed. So, Sawyer, you are wrong: hope lives on this Island. Indeed, was the Island selected by Alvar Hanso, The DeGroots and The DHARMA Intiative because it is the ONLY place on earth hope definitely lives, the last chance to change the Equation and save mankind?

*Time: oddly enough the weird Time stuff going on may be reflected in the DHARMA beer still being drinkable after all these years. Either that or Sawyer has a senseless tongue and iron stomach.

*Was it just me, or did the Push the DHARMA Bug scene remind anyone of Little Miss Sunshine?

*Poor, Roger. I kept thinking this was a reference to the Amazing Screw-On Head. I wouldn't be surprised if in the future we see Roger's backstory crossed with someone else's only to know he would go to The Island and die while transporting recylcing.

*I need to compile a Top Ten of the eppy's best lines... but there were so damned MANY of them.

NEXT WEEK: The Sayid-centric "Enter 77"

3x09, "Stranger in a Strange Land"

2007-02-21T21:02:00.000-08:00

It's Creative Writing 101: Show. Don't tell. And unfortunately this episode was more about telling us what a hero Jack is rather than showing it.

The flashback lacked a narrative arc. It felt almost like the first two segments were for the sole purpose of showing off Bai Ling. The revelation that she's a tatoo artist instead of a prostitute isn't much of a payoff for the flashback... really it didn't pay off much of anything. And what she sees in Jack: that's pretty much what everyone's already gotten from just watching the show for two and half seasons. Yes, Jack is a Leader. Yes, he is a hero. If that indeed means, "He walks among us, but he walks alone," then SHOW it in scene. Getting beat up on a Thailand beach doesn't count. Really, the arc would've worked better if he was rejected by people who should've welcomed him, like family or other doctors back home or the Losties back at the beach. Instead the tension between the loneliness of being a hero and strength that drives one to charting his own course was merely brought up in the last bit of dialogue exchanged between Jack and "The Sheriff".

It's funny though that this came up... several months ago I was talking with JBS about LOST and we got to Jack and she pointed out that Kate can not possibly choose he because as the hero he must walk alone. Now that's been steadily established through the course of the series. This could've been the capstone for it, but instead it felt like a wasted opportunity.

Overall, the most disappointed and outright bored I've ever been watching an episode. Shame, too, especially after last week's, one of my very favorite of the entire series.

3x08, "Flashes Before Your Eyes"

2007-02-15T21:01:00.000-08:00

I'm under the weather right now so forgive me if this doesn't make sense. Managed to get myself together enough to post this at the 'Lage.

This isn't time travel.

A number of things could've happened. Among them:

*The flashback and the flashes are all in his mind, a "vision" given to him by the Island to understand the nature of fate.

*He is indeed living his life over and over again in a loop, much like Groundhog Day.

*There is no loop. Turning the failsafe key allowed him to see all time -- past, present and future -- as one ever present moment. Thus there is no past or present or future. But he's not in the proper state of mind to undestand that and perceived events as still occurring in a certain order. But if he were to see events as ocurring all at the same time, much as Billy Pilgrim does in Salguhterhouse-Five and Dr. Manhattan does in The Watchmen, then cause and effect are irrelevant.

I think it's the third option because it also ties in with the references to Buddhism (such as the Bagua, use of the word DHARMA and the "Only Fools Are Enslaved to Time and Space" backwards audio in the Brainwashing video, which is a Buddhist saying). Moreso, I think yesterday's episode was all about "nirvana".

In my amateur studies of Zen Buddhism in high school and university I came to the conclusion that nirvana isn't what most people think it is. It's isn't a state of total bliss or happiness. It is freedom... freedom from an endless cycle of births and deaths caused by our attachment to the things of the world. Once that attachment is dissolved, there is nothing tying onself to the cycle any longer... and the cycle is ended.

This attachment isn't limited to objects... more importantly it is attachment to a mindset that views the world in terms of cause and effect. If one were to live in the present, "Be Here Now", one is not burdened by the past and one does not fear the future. One is set free.

And we've seen this as a fundamental narrative structure of every episode of LOST: people burdened by their pasts, given a clean slate, a tabula rasa, on the Island. This is why the most popular theories about LOST describe the Island as purgatory. In many ways it isn't purgratory, it is nirvana.

What's interesting here is that Desmond, because of what happened to him when he turned the failsafe key, can start seeing this pattern for himself. He is going through exactly what Dr. Manhattan went through in The Watchmen. The difference here is a matter of perspective. Dr. Manhattan wanted to be a watchmaker so he grew up understanding the universe as a well-oiled machine where a number of different parts work together in precisely the right way for the entire machine to work correctly, and in cycles. Desmond doesn't understand that, so the Lady in the Diamond Store needed to tell him that he can't deviate from his course, or else the machine, the universe, wouldn't run correctly.

What's interesting about "Flashes" was it portrays predestination as something to despair. In Watchmen, that is a point of despair, too, until Dr. Manhattan realizes the amount of happy (and unhappy) accidents it took to bring together the parents of Laurie, his love.

So Desmond may not actually be caught in a cycle, it's just one he perceives. How he breaks out of it, ends the flashing, may have everything to do with how Charlie does (or doesn't) die and may finally be his "great man" moment, one even greater than sacrificing himself to push the button continuously for three years to save the world.

Here's another thing: Desmond saw his life flash before his eyes... but I think what we saw was indeed what happened the first time around. But how is that possible if he's referring to events during the flashback that haven't happened to him yet? It is possible if you view past and present as one moment.

Interestingly enough, someone on the episode boards pointed out that "McCutcheon", the name of Widmore's whiskey, is also the name of a folk-singer who wrote a song in 1989 called "Waters from Another Time" Part of the lyrics, perhaps a line that could be apporpriated for The Island: "The past & future are wedded there."

Indeed.

Easter Eggs:

*Charlie's middle name is "Heironymus". Check out this link for Heironymus Machines. Is there a link to The Monster?

*The painting in Widmore's office depicted a polar bear. "Namaste" was written backwards on it.

*There's Apollo bar and Oceanic Airlines ads on the sidelines of the soccer game.

*The book Hurley found in Sawyer's stash was Laughter in the Dark by Vladimir Nabokov.

Quick and Dirty

2007-02-14T21:00:00.000-08:00

I worship at the feet of Damon Lindelof. That is all.

3x07, "Not in Portland"

2007-02-09T20:59:00.000-08:00

Kubrick would be proud.

While it was a great episode, one that probably would've served as a much better ending to the fall mini-season than "I Do", I still can't help but feel this wasn't the showcase for Elizabeth Mitchell it could've been. I don't doubt we may see another Juliet flashback eventually, but this particular one seemed more about advancing the mythology of the show than about Juliet's character development. We were supposed to think of her sister getting pregnant as her "White Rabbit" moment when she finally recognizes her potential as a leader. But it wasn't properly set up enough for me to buy the pay off. I would've wanted to see more failed attempts to get her sister pregnant, more attempts in the face of hopelessness. Parallel to that, we're supposed to compare her repression at the hands of her ex-husband with her treatment from Henry. The problem is we still don't know why she's beholden to Henry in the first place. And while the Bus Gag was surprsing and quite frankly a deserving end to such a miserable man (did you catch him chewing out his mom on the phone?) it meant Juliet acquired her freedom by accident or conspiracy and not through her own strength. Granted, they could be saying she's a weak leader, with a ways still to go till she finally topples Henry, but then there'd be no reason to fear her now. There's definitely a big gaping hole here where she went from timid fertility doctor to the Girl with the Gun who turned Pickett to swiss cheese without hesitation. This episode should've plugged that hole and instead it brought it up and then made it wider.

With that out of the way, I can't say enough about the momentum of the episode... just a relentless torrent of action. The Clockwork Orange-esque brainwashing segment almost felt like a breather. And despite it being predictable, I was still caught off guard by Juliet shooting Pickett. That's all about pitch-perfect editing and directing.

Then cap that off with one of THE emotional high points of the series, Kate recounting the fear story to Jack. I'd initially thought Jack telling her to recall the story was a way to reconnect with her one last time before she'd be out of his life forever. What better sendoff than remembering that beautiful, intimate moment they first met as strangers who just survived a plane crash. In this episode however, the meaning of the story actully gets restored: It served as Jack's lifeline... you could almost see him counting to five again as he worked to save Ben. And that of course made Jack and Kate's parting even more bitter. Awesome, awesome moment.

Next week: Desmond. "3x08: Flashes Before Your Eyes"

YOUR BRAIN WILL BE FRIED. Be prepared.

Easter Eggs (and by gawd there's a ton of them):

*Brainwashing screenshots

*Time stuff: Damon and Carlton have been hinting at a "brain frying moment" and stuff about how time works on the Island. I think the two are connected (and next week we may get some further insight). There were no less than four big clues as to what we may be dealing with.

1) Mittelos: the anagram stands for "lost time". Carlton said in the recent EW.com Q&A that the anagram would be a clue about Adam & Eve, the skeletons found in The Caves.

2) The guard was reading A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking. Someone at the Fuselage claims the very page he's reading is one about wormholes.

3) In the brainwashing video, there's hidden audio that if played backwards actually says, "Only fools are enslaved by time and space", a quote from the Dharmapada. I SHIT YOU NOT.

4) The x-rays the Mittleos recruiter showed to Juliet were of a 26 year-old with a 70 year-old womb. WHAT.

Add that all up and it seems to point to time moving differently on the Island in relation to the rest of the world. The nature of that difference will be a big reveal. Is time moving faster or slower? Is it looping somehow. Is it perhaps not even moving forward at all, but in stasis, in a wormhle or pocket universe where there is no time, period?

*"Not quite in Portland": I'm gonna say that Ethan and the Recruiter arranged the bus accident. It wasn't a coincidence... it was indeed a conspiracy. But does that mean that DHARMA conspired to bring anyone else to the Island? I think that's a no. There's too many variables and it's a hell of a lot easier to just ask someone to come, as they did with Juliet, than arrange for a plane crash... or as some at the 'Lage have speculated, arranged for the plane to land on the Island, only to crash because of Desmond failing to pres The Button.

*9/11: According to Lostpedia, the date of "Not in Portland" is December 3, 2004. If you count backwards to find when Juliet got to the Island it's September 5, 2001. Is it a coincidence? Will it be part of the plot (and this is keeping in mind they just brought in Brian K. Vaughan who wrote the 9/11 centered Ex Machina #1)? Or is living in a "Post-Island World" similar to living in a "Post-9/11 World"?

*Is Alex Ben's bilogical daughter?: I think Rousseau didn't give the whole story about her boat crash landing on the Island. It was strange that when she let Ben enter Sayid's custody, she told him he'd lie "a long time". How would she know? Of course it's a lot more logical to assume Alex doesn't even know about Rousseau and has been fed a lie her entire life, raised by Ben as if she were his child.

*Deadwood Trifecta: Juliet's sister was played by Robin Weigert, the third actress from Deadwood to guest. Liz Sarnoff, a prominent producer on the HBO show is now on board with LOST.

*Pregnancy Test: Her test appears to be another Widmore Labs one. Remember, these are the tests previously used by Kate in "I Do" and Sun in "The Whole Truth".

On the Lost Connections

2007-02-07T20:56:00.000-08:00

I wouldn't have posted till tonight, but in a fascinating Q&A on EW.com, Damon and Carlton say there's an anagram hidden somewhere in tonight's episode that is a clue to who or what Adam and Eve are.

The article also includes this amazing quote where Damon explains the "lost connections" as explicitly as possible:

Did Desmond's failure to press the button REALLY cause the plane to crash — or is there more to this story?

LINDELOF: In terms of the pragmatic reality, Oceanic 815 never would have crashed had Desmond pushed the button. But is there a larger, more faith-based, spiritualized reason that these people happened to be on that plane when he failed to press the button? If Desmond hadn't run into Jack at that stadium, would he have made the same choices that he made in his life? They all impact each other's lives. The fact that that guy is on that plane up there, and Desmond brings that plane down, it speaks to an interrelatedness among characters, why these people, why do they all connect. No amount of mythological answers will ever speak to this. That's the one thing that when the show ends, you won't have a causal explanation for why did all these people interconnect. Why some, why not others? The answer is just that they just do. The show is a massive Rube Goldberg device, in which all the components of the machinery are humans.

MORE Than Halfway There?

2007-01-15T20:55:00.000-08:00

The creators of Lost want to end the show after 100 episodes, meaning a full fourth season and shortened fifth one:

"From the word go, it always felt to me that [if we ran] somewhere in the neighborhood of between 90 and 100 episodes... we never [would have] to do a bad season," says cocreator Damon Lindelof. "We knew Season 1 was going to be the introduction, Season 2 was going to be into the hatch, Season 3 was going to be the Others...

"I don't want to tell you what Season 4 is gonna be," he continues. "And then there was a shortened wrap-up season that would put you somewhere in the neighborhood of 100 episodes. At the end of season 4, we will have produced 93 hours of the show, and I imagine that would be very close to where it would end ideally."

What the hell could Season 4 be about???

Halfway There?

2007-01-15T20:54:00.000-08:00

The return of Lost and its run of sixteen non-stop all-new episodes is still a month away, but ABC is already discussing how to schedule Lost next year, as well as when the series will end.

Stephen McPherson, the president of ABC Entertainment, told a meeting of television writers here on Sunday that after the experience of several failed or mediocre new serials this year — including “Day Break,” “The Nine” and “Six Degrees” — the network has fewer of those types of shows in development.

And for “Lost,” the biggest of the ABC serials, the network is now discussing with the producers how and when to end the series, Mr. McPherson said.

Damon Lindelof, one of the executive producers of “Lost,” said that the show’s creators had always viewed it as lasting about 100 episodes, and that he still believes that will be the case. Fifty-three episodes have been broadcast so far, with the show in its third season, meaning that it is likely that the fifth season will be the last.

“We’re no longer going up the hill,” Mr. Lindelof said. “We’re starting to come down now.”

Mr. Lindelof also said that while ABC has the ability to extend the series as long as it wants, with different producers and even different stars, he believes that the network is unlikely to do so.

“We don’t want to produce those episodes of ‘Lost,’ and we are not going to,” Mr. Lindelof said. He cautioned against such a move, pointing out that as series like “The X-Files” and “Alias” extended their runs by making dubious creative decisions, their ratings suffered greatly as fans abandoned the shows in droves.

He said the network and the producers would announce the decision soon after it is made, to make sure that fans understand that the show has a definite endpoint, and that outstanding questions about the mysteries of the island will be answered.

...Mr. McPherson said he believes that the next season will run for 22 consecutive weeks, either in the fall of 2007 or the spring of 2008. Production requirements and scheduling necessities caused ABC to break up the series this season, he said.

What's The Monster?

2006-12-09T20:52:00.000-08:00

Interesting theory up at Numbers Forum. Claims THE MONSTER is...a Djinn. Don't laugh. The theory actually makes a lot of sense:

1) It eats bones. Thus that's why the bodies of Yemi and the drug lords were gone.

2) It can take shapes including people.

3) It can take the form of "smoke without fire"

4) It whispers.

5) The actor who played the Djinn in The Wishmaster films has been cast as Patchy. If he's in the Flame Station he may be controlling The Monster.

It's a hell of a lot more interesting than the most popular theory: NANOBOTS! (Even with Damon shooting that down again and again people still believe it.)

The Origins of Conspiracy

2006-12-03T20:51:00.000-08:00

Someone posted at the 'Lage that they're taking a college class on conspiracy theories (yeah, I dunno) and asked what we thought about the convergence of LOST and "conspiracy theory culture." I posted this in response:

I've been thinking about how conspiracy theorists are drawn to the show. I don't think that's an accident... that's really by design. Damon and JJ are well aware of the power of a good conspiracy story to hold an audience's imagination. Moreso, they know what kind of storytelling conventions generate conspiracy theories. The Hanso Foundation, the NUMBERS (which were inspired by the Illuminati's fasicantion with 23), the Lost Connections in the flashbacks... all these create the uneasy sense that there's an underlying nervous system to the world that we are not aware of... usually these are dismissed as products of conspiracy, but here they appear to be products of fate. I think it's one invaluable part of the show that they've made conspiracy theories and faith in fate two sides of the same coin. You see this reflected in the theories that spring up around the Kennedy Assassination and 9/11... that's because these are totally nonsensical tragedies that every fiber of our being tells us shouldn't happen. But our need to make sense of the nonsensical leads a few to think that these events not only shouldn't happen but that they really couldn't... not without outside help, usually in the form of a conspiracy. That to me is the origin of virtually all conspiracy theories: the need to bring order to chaos (often tragic chaos). Otherwise we feel vulnerable and powerless. Conspiracies restore that power ironically by saying that the fate of the world doesn't rest in our hands but at least it does rest in someone's instead of God, fate or no one and nothing at all.

3x06, "I Do"

2006-11-09T20:50:00.000-08:00

Sometime in Season 1, LOST fans who cared about the Jack/Kate/Sawyer love triangle split themselves up into two camps:

THE JATERS who wanted Jack and Kate to be together and THE SKATERS who wanted Sawyer and Kate to be together. Well, Kate made her choice last night and while I had believed myself to be too invested in other parts of the show to care, I couldn't help but react way more strongly to that choice than I expected.

I guess I'm a JATER.

I got PISSED that Kate chose Sawyer... not even because of the choice itself but how she revealed it. She basically told Jack when she told him that saving Sawyer was more important than Jack being his own man. It reminds me of that classic moment in The Simpsons when Lisa and Ralph go to the Krusty Special together and Lisa screams at the camera that she is most definitely NOT Ralph's girlfriend. Bart replays a tape of it to Lisa and points out that you can see the exact second Ralph's heart breaks. "Rrrright.... THERE!"

Same thing with last night. You could see Jack's heart breaking RRRIGHT... THERE!

I felt for the guy way more than I thought I would. Why? Because once again the nice guy loses to the outlaw. OUCH.

More later....

3x05, The Cost of Living

2006-11-03T20:45:00.000-08:00

On vacation me and B. have been ripping through Lost Season 1 again. It's very weird watching the show and seeing things seeded then blooming NOW in Season 3.

Anyways...

This was a very moving episode for me. I'd spent twelve years in catholic school. At some point during that time I essentially lost my faith in the traditional Judeo-Christian god for reasons related to what was taught to me, complicated further by what my mother expected me to believe. It's taken a long time to redevelop the sort of Zen Agnostic spirituality I now subscribe to. In between was a wilderness that often left me depressed and angry at myself for never being as "good" as I knew I should be. I didn't find peace until I realized I shouldn't ask myself how "good" I should be -- but how "good" I COULD ACTUALLY be.

And that's where Mr. Eko's fateful decision last Wednesday really hit home. As he so eloquently put it:

"I did not ask for the life I was given but it was given to me nonetheless - and with it I did my best."

Confronting the Monster, he was asked to repent. And he refused. And he paid with his life.

Was this a character who turned to the dark side? Or did he instead accept his limitations, that he could never be as good as his brother Yemi -- that he would always be, as he was on the steps of the church, a priest with blood on his hands? It was this contradiction that wracked Eko with guilt all his life. He sought forgiveness for something that could never be forgiven, not as long as he was trying to be his brother, one who believed in absolute morality. Instead he could only be himself -- not a contradiction, but something else... a happy medium where he could accept murdering a man to spare his brother from doing so himself.

It's a shades of grey morality, yes, but not a relativistic one. It's one that brought peace, one I tried my "best" to develop and ended up being even harder to accept. But that's what Eko's death was about in my mind: acceptance of who you were, the smoke and the light.

*Was Yemi the Monster? I'm pretty sure he was. As I may have pointed out earlier, the Monster downloaded scenes from Eko's life in last season's "The 23rd Psalm". So it could have manifested itself to him as scenes from his past, including his brother. I'm pretty sure this explains Jack seeing Christian alive in "White Rabbit" from Season 1 and Hurley seeing his imaginary friend Dave in "Dave" from Season 2.

*Why did the Monster kill Eko? I guess it comes down to something this season is revealing itself to be about: free will. What's the use of Eko repenting for the sake of repenting when he knows in his heart it does no good. But to the monster, who may indeed have an absolute moral code, this was unacceptable: Eko killed -- he must feel sorry or he must be punished.

BTW, apparently AAA wanted off the show and the producers, tired of him being a nuisance on set, let him go.

*What's the connection to Ben? Ben reveals his plan: to make Jack want to operate on him instead of forcing him to. In Ben's mind he'd rather not have the operation at all than have Jack do it against his free will, or at least Ben's conception of it. Juliet has been making sarcastic comments about free will still existing on the Island. Perhaps Ben has transformed the remnants of the DHARMA Initiative into a Cult of Others (explains the white robes). So what's better: the illusion of free will or seeking a genuine freedom of will that may be impossible to find? Which side is Ben and which is Juliet?

****
Additional Notes on "Every Man for Himself"

*The Bunny Rabbit with the 8 painted on it was a Stephen King reference. Here's the quote from On Writing:

From the chapter entitled:

WHAT WRITING IS

"Telepathy, of course... Look - here's a table covered with red cloth. On it is a cage the size of a small fish aquarium. In the cage is a white rabbit with a pink nose and pink-rimmed eyes. In its front paws is a carrot stub upon which it is contentedly munching. On its back, clearly marked in blue ink, is the numeral 8.... Do we see the same thing? ...I think we do... The most interesting thing here isn't even the carrot-munching rabbit in the cage, but the number on its back. Not a six, not a four, not a nineteen-point-five. It's an eight. This is what we're looking at, and we all see it. I didn't tell you. You didn't ask me. I never opened my mouth and you never opened yours. We're not even in the same year together, let alone the same room... except we are together. We're close.

We're having a meeting of the minds.

I sent you... a cage, a rabbit, and the number eight in blue ink. You got them all, especially that blue eight. We've engaged in an act of telepathy. No mythy-mountain *beep* real telepathy... there is a point to be made."

So the writers just linked writing with conning and telepathy BRILLIANT!!!

3x04, Every Man for Himself

2006-10-25T20:44:00.000-07:00

I didn't like the episode. It was built on Sawyer being conned, a tough challenge. Except he wasn't conned... he was told a lie (he had a pacemaker installed) and took it at face value without questioning it. I think we're supposed to accept the thing with the bunny and being drugged up would lead him to be persuaded, but this is SAWYER we're talking about. His two cons from "The Long Con" were both painstakingly planned out and well executed. Ben did nothing like that here, unless I'm missing a subtext. I seriously doubt a majority of viewers believed for one second Ben was telling the truth.

First off, it was BEN for chrissakes -- he's never told the truth.

Second, it just looked like Sawyer hadn't even been moved let alone had an operation to install a pacemaker. He had a cut and a bandage over it. If anything the whole setting screamed, "LIE."

Third, he should've known after Pickett beat the hell out of him.

Sure, it led to some cute scenes where his heart was racing seeing Kate half-naked. But all in all, I could never buy the con and so could never buy any of the emotional beats they were trying to hit during the show.

And TWO ISLANDS?! Oh, Christ Jesus -- that's been the heart of so many lame theories. Now I'm going to have continue putting up with the stuff about how the plane was supposed to land on Island Two and The Hanso Foundation orchestrated everyone onto the plane and Desmond ruinned the plan by not pressing the Button. I'd say that would be riduculous even for this show -- but then again I am supposed to believe that Sawyer believed Ben.

Ugghh.

*I can't remember enough of Of Mice and Men and I've, umm, never read Animal Farm so I'm missing subtext there.

*Was that really Sawyer's kid? Again, why am I supposed to believe that? Why should Sawyer?

*Juliet's a Fertility Doctor?! GOD! Even more ridiculous theories get some added fuel.

*OK... I get they took Jack now to work on Ben's spinal tumor. But I am starting to suspect Kate's there just as eye candy. There is a reason for Sawyer to be there, but we haven't gotten that yet.

*In the preview, we see a man with an eye patch. That's probably the guy who owns the glass eye found in The Arrow station. And the Losties are probably seeing him in The Flame Station only referred to so far on the Blast Door Map.

Random Thought

2006-10-22T20:42:00.000-07:00

I've been meaning to write two short prose pieces, one about Carlos Beltran striking out looking and another about repetitive beggars on the F train. That was all inspired by reading Chuck Klosterman III: Killing Yourself to Live. (Some people have Sedaris. I have CHUCK.)

Instead though, as usual, I've been writing at the Fuselage. I am actually trying to wean myself off of it because I KNOW something's going to happen later this season that will fry a lot of people's brains and turn many, many people against the show. I don't even know what it is yet, but if Damon Lindelof himself says it'll cause people to cry "Jumped the Shark" then something wicked this way comes. I don't want to be in its way. I'm already wasting too much time defending the damn thing to people who are supposed to be fans. (Sounds like the comic industry, huh?)

Anywho I just had to respond to this comment:

Here is the sad fact though guys. I do not believe there is any grand theory. This show is becoming "The Lost World". All of the things that happened on this Island have happened in other such movies and shows. Time events, monsters, others, ancient civilizations, weird animals, phenonenon that escape science as we know it. If anyone has seen the TV "Lost World" series you know how this cheesy stuff is just being presented in million dollar form with a few new idea's mixed with some Pop culture drama

And I responded with this:

I do not believe there is a grand theory, but I do believe there is a grand message or theme that Damon and Carlton and JJ are trying (albeit in their own way) to impart. Incorporating all the world's "Time events, monsters, others, ancient civilizations, weird animals, phenonenon" has long been a storytelling device in genre fiction as you point out. But I believe here it's more than a gimmick... here they're trying to say that the Island is a locus of the world's imaginary phenomenon. (Much as, say, the Dreaming was in Neil Gaiman's The Sandman.) On the surface that just drives the Losties crazy or scares the pants off of them. Below the surface though, the Losties are being forced to face concrete manifestations of universal human fears. Just as they were running away from these things in the "real world" they now have to confront them on the Island in the form of polar bears, smoke monsters and The Others. What happens when the real and the imaginary collide? What do the Losties become then? How do they adapt? How do they change? How do they evolve from traumatized people to people who come face-to-face with their traumas?

3x03, Further Instructions

2006-10-21T20:41:00.000-07:00

LISTEN:
Desmond David Hume has come UNSTUCK in time."

The Polar Bear! Nix that: THE EINSTEIN OF BEARS.

Overall, great episode. One could argue the flashback walked over well-worn ground. But I'll put forward that this was the first time we saw that the Losties are the "family" Locke was always destined to be part of, perhaps now head of. He also declared himself "The Hunter" -- another type to add to the Watchmen thread.

*Did anyone find it odd that Locke waking up in the jungle is shot in virtually identical manner as how Jack woke up in the Pilot. Hmm... you don't think what saved the Losties during the plane crash was the same thing that saved Locke, Eko and Desmond from being imploded along with the hatch, eh? Nah....

*So what was up with the "Deja Vu"? Does Desmond now have superpowers? Can he predict the future? Did he time travel? Well... as the Terminator taught us, you time travel in your birthday suit or you don't time travel at all. My guess: he very briefly came "unstuck" in time ala Billy Pilgrim in Slaughterhouse Five or perceived past and future as one moment like Dr. Manhattan in the Watchmen. (And yes, I had to explain Slaughterhouse Five to the newbies at The Fuselage.)

*Why was Desmond the pilot in Locke's vision quest? Maybe because he brought the plane to the island by not pressing the button.

*Note too, Kate and Sawyer looked chummy while Jack hung back behind them forlorn. Foreshadowing of Kate and Sawyer getting together with Jack on the outs?

*Locke picked up something in the cave that has the Pearl Station logo on it. Were the last Pearlies eaten by Einstein Bear? Was that why it was abandoned?

*I thought it was interesting that after the first two episodes of the season where you saw Jack and Sun show much darker sides to their characters than previously revealed, we were give a scene where Locke could've actually killed someone... but didn't. I know with the way the flashbacks have been going I seriously thought Locke would pull the trigger.

*What were the "Further Instructions"? Were they from The Island itself? What does the Island really want Locke to do?

*Next week: Sawyer goes to Gitmo in "Every Man for Himself".

Oh, that Charlie...

2006-10-18T20:39:00.000-07:00

"Einstein of Bears" has to be one of the best lines of the show's history.

Some folks at the Lage are already complaining that Desmond can see the future and thus has "powers". There's been a strong "everything can be explained through science" feeling among LOST fans for a while -- all of it not entirely justified. My quickie theory on it is Desmond, Locke and Echo were thrown out of time briefly and Desmond could see the past, present and future as one moment.

And we got our first looks at the new full-timers: Kiele Sanchez and Rodrigo Lopez (aka "the Tom Cruise of Brazil" -- the Cruise before he went crazee).

And I pray Desmond doesn't wear that shirt much longer. MY EYES!

Guess they DO know what they're doing...

2006-10-16T20:37:00.000-07:00

The creators of LOST planted the seeds of the final scene of last week's episode 1 1/2 years ago!

So, NO, they are not making it up as they go along...

Most of the time. :-)

3x02, The Glass Ballerina

2006-10-14T20:35:00.000-07:00

Whoa... I'd been wondering since the very beginning what Sun's archetypical character was since everyone else seemed to have one. Turns out she's a version of the Trickster. But while Sawyer is certainly a Trickster, too, he seems to be sorry that he can't help it, while Sun is an unapoligetic and habitual LIAR. And as this episode shows every lie of hers has a direct negative effect on the people around her... and she doesn't seem to care as long as it preserves her desired way of life. The one big lie she keeps perpetrating, that she never slept with Jae Lee and that her baby is most definitely Jin's, is sure to have HUGE implications down the road. I think it was all hinted at when Pickett kissed Colleen, the woman Sun later shot in the stomach Darth Michael style. Pickett's going to be PISSED and seeking revenge and Sun's lies may finally come back around on her own head.

*Michael Emmerson... Geebus what a great actor. He keeps nailing this Mr. Rogers meets Hannibal Lecter thing with each epi. Someone at The Fuselage referred me to this Variety article on Emmerson where he describes his acting technique:

Michael Emerson calls it stillness, a trait he's developed as an actor that audiences are instinctively drawn to.
Whether on Broadway or broadcast television -- where Emerson can be seen on ABC's "Lost" as the creepiest of the Others -- he has the ability to create tension with only the slightest head movement or, sometimes, just by blinking.

"Audiences react to something. Maybe it's those intense eyeball-to-eyeball scenes, which have a lot of nuance," Emerson says from Hawaii, just a few days after shooting the final episode of the cult-followed series before heading back to his Gotham home. "I continue to play the role instinctively, and that (creepiness) is what people think of me."

*The Glass Ballerina: The meaning of the title has been getting a lot of debate at the 'Lage:
-Is this a comment on the fragility of the Losties amidst their bewildering circumstances... and more specifically the fragiity of Jin and Sun's relationship?
-A reference to "The Glass Managerie"?
-Putting The Others manipulation of Jack, Kate and Sawyer (J/K/S) into the context of making them go through an elaborate dance for still unknown reasons?
-Or, the one I agree with, that the Ballerina was a symbol for the effects of Sun's lying and foreshadowed Jae Lee's own fall?

*So is the baby still Jin's? For all intents and purposes Sun will treat it as such because the Island gives everyone the chance at a new life. But what the Island giveth, the Island can take away. A price will be paid for her actions.

*The Others didn't know about Desmond's boat?! Do they even know Desmond was/is on the Island at all? It's funny, there's some complaint about this since the Others seem to know everything else. Of course, as the US government has proven again and again, even with eyes and ears everywhere, even the biggest dangers can still be overlooked and missed.

*Did Jae leap or was he thrown off the balcony by the dude who always shadowed Jin? Hmmm... I'm gong to say he jumped. He was still clutching the pearl necklace, a symbol of his love for Sun. What's ironic is by sparing his life and telling him to leave Korea and never return, Jin was telling Jae to follow Sun's own advice to him. Except the effect on Jae was devastating not liberating -- he would be condemed to a life without Sun, weighed down by the shame that Jin knew what he and Sun had done. What's even more ironic is Jin DIDN'T know and was just doing this to please Sun's father, which he thnks would strngthen his marriage to Sun. Amazing, multi-layered writing going on there.

*RED SOX WIN! RED SOX WIN! One of the greatest scenes in the history of LOST and not just because I hate the Yankees and LUB the Sox. Remember, Jack is a Sox fan, as his father apparently was. Christian even said to his son at one point something to the effect of "Life is suffering... that's why the Sox will never win the Series." Showing that scene killed Jack. Even setting aside the stuff it brings up between Jack and his father, it was the ultimate reminder of the kind of wonderful, miraculous moments Jack is missing in the "real world"... as opposed to the kind of moments he has to deal with on the Island: deadly polar bears, monsters and Others. It was basically showing him a glimpse of Heaven, while trapped in Hell.

3x01, "Tale of Two Cities"

2006-10-05T20:32:00.000-07:00

Overall: not as good as last season's stunning opener, but very good nonetheless. As Doc Jensen at EW points out, this Jack flashback recontextualizes his trip to Sydney. It was him trying to REDEEM himself and not just a desperate try to save his father. Asking about whether his ex-wife was happy and not about the real identity of the man who stole her away from him shows how much he's moved on and grown since crashing on the island.

You probably couldn't have started off Season 3 any better than those first five minutes. They were so good in fact that The Fuselage crashed and has not come back online since.

Stuff backed up by the scene:

*The Others did not expect nor did they cause the crash (though Henry Gale's immediate response that there may be survivors indicates he knows a thing or two about the Island and it's mysterious ability to save crash survivors).

*Henry Gale is most definitely the leader of The Others.

*The Others live on the Island and not elsewhere on a nearby island, underground or underwater.

Other stuff backed up by the rest of the episode:

*The long rumored underwater hatch indeed exists. This was first theorized by people wondering where the cable that led to Danielle's old home connected to if you followed it back into the water.

*There's indeed a zoological station where the polar bears came from.... and it had dolphins, too! (And apparently the polar bears are smarter than Sawyer!)

*The Others are the remnant of the DHAMRA Initiative.

*Elizabeth Mitchell, lover of Angleina Jolie in the legendary Gia, lover of Kerry on ER, is now a full-time cast member on LOST... and hotter than ever! Whoo-hoo!

*Kate doesn't look that bad herself.

*The sixth DHARMA Station is The Hydra. The other five then are The Swan, the Pearl, The Flame, The Arrow and the Staff. The Door was a ruse.

*If I heard correctly Henry Gale's real name is Ben.

*Biggie Easter egg: The song playing on the radio as Jack stalks his soon-to-be ex-wife is the same song Sayid and Hurley hear when they fix their radio on the beach in Season 2. This is interesting because that cute but seemingly pointless scene was included in the latest LOST recap special. Why include such a scene when you're trying to compress nearly fifty hours of show down to 45 minutes? Well, at the end of that scene Hurley wonders where that music is coming from -- it sounds old. Sayid says radio waves at the frequency they picked up bounce off the ionisphere and could be coming from any place. Hurley then chimes in, "Or another time.... just kidding, dude."

Just kidding? Now we know it was a song from a flashback... Hmm....