Dr. Linus Recap

Mar 10

metalman777Lost recap, season 6 No Comments

“Dr. Linus” is the 7th episode of Season 6 of Lost and the 110th produced hour of the series as a whole. It was originally broadcast on March 9, 2010. Ben and Ilana deal with the consequences of an uncovered lie. Meanwhile, Jack and Hurleystumble across Richard in the jungle.  (from Lostpedia.com)

1. In ”Dr. Linus,” Ben Linus was exposed as a soul who only has himself to blame for his woe-is-me bad self, whose corrupt nature is an accumulation of freely made choices. Which also means that Ben is also fully capable of resisting evil and selecting virtue, as well. His Sideways story was the proof. We were presented with a new version of Ben that was a truly decent man — a smart, idealistic teacher who cared for his students; a devoted son who cared for his ailing father, Roger Linus — but also one who yearned for a grander station in life
2. But then Ben made another choice: He bared his soul. He told the truth about killing Jacob, shared his rage over feeling betrayed by his Island god andhis shame for choosing Island power over his daughter, and then offered this heartbreaking explanation for why he was joining Mr. Evil Incarnate (Allegedly): ”Because he’s the only one that will have me!” Then Ilana did something that left Ben gobsmacked: She forgave him. ”I’ll have you,” she said, and walked away. Ben shuffled after her, as if sucked in by the undertow of her grace. He came to the outskirts of the Beach camp, then stopped and considered his options. Stay and serve in this humble little patch of heaven, or join Devil Locke and coldly play for a shot at living the ”Vida La Vida” once again. You always have a choice. This time, Ben made the right one — fulfilling, perhaps, Jacob’s dying thought hope that Ben had the capacity for change
3. Sideways Roger presented himself as a sad old soul who viewed his son as an underachieving talent but only blamed his own bad parenting choices for Ben’s fate. An improvement over Island world Roger? Yes. But I was left to wonder what it must have been like for Sideways Ben to grow up burdened by his father’s ambition for him. Regardless, we saw the result: Ben the Overeducated, Overqualified High School Teacher, dogged by enough feelings of inadequacy to deem himself a loser. I got the sense Ben saw his father clearly — clearly enough to feel a little resentment, but not so much that he hated him, or, like, wanted to drive him out into the jungle and gas him to death. In a clever flick at ”The Man Behind The Curtain,” we got a scene where the Good Son changed his ailing father’s oxygen tank and doted on his comfort. Bottom line: Sideways Ben was more like Florence Nightingale, less like Heinrich Himmler.
4. Categories: Sideways Island Sinkage; Parallel World Historical Discrepancies.
   Analysis: Until last night, it had been safe to assume that both the Island and Sideways worlds shared the same history until 1977, which is when the time-traveling castaways detonated Jughead. But the Linus men of the Sideways world blew up that thinking. I took the story to mean that Sideways Roger and Ben left the Island prior to its sinking. But Island Roger and Ben were still on the Island when Juliet banged the bomb. Implication: If the two worlds share a common history, the fork in the road is sometime before 1977. Rebooted Theory: The divergence begins on that fateful night when some phantom stranger struck John Locke’s teenage mother, causing her to give birth three months early. That phantom stranger? I’m saying it’s Charles Widmore.
5. We got a reference to Napoleon in exile on Elba, neutered by the loss of his power. Island Ben would later link himself to the reference. But CharlesWidmore and Smokey also fit into Napoleon’s pantaloons. After all, Napoleon ultimately escaped from his Island prison and reclaimed France (if only for 100 days) — and both Widmore and Smokey are exiles wanting to get back to their respective kingdoms/homes. (Something to also think about: after Napoleon got booted out of power again, he was exiled to another, less desirable island, Saint Helena, where he would die of stomach cancer/ulcer/poisoning. Foreshadowing for Smokey or Widmore’s final fate?) (I’m telling you, that knife Sayid stabbed Smokey with last week? Dogen poisoned it.) (And didn’t Alex last night mention she was nursing a stomach ache while the principal and the nurse were… you know… ”doing it”?) Dr. Linus also spoke of the East India Trading Company, the powerful British business entity that was established to execute trade with India, but wound up ruling much of it. And we recall that Ben has long alleged that all Widmore wants to do is exploit the Island for his material gain… although I personally suspect what Widmore wants most the Island is to use it to cheat death.
6. Ben’s Sideways story mirrored his entire Island arc and even suggested many possibilities for the entire saga. You might even say Ben’s parallel world yarn works as a theory of Lost
7. Shortly after Rousseau had finished off the rest of her fellow French scientists and given birth to Baby Alex, Chief Executive Other Widmore ordered Ben to ”exterminate” both of them from the Island. He coldly dismissed baby Alex as an ”it,” as if she were an animal that would just be a drain on Island resources that needed to be devoted elsewhere. Yep: definitely sounds like a guy that ain’t about ”taking care of the kids.” So Ben balked. He couldn’t bring himself to murder. Ben clearly had developed a different vision for how the Others should be managing the Island and living their lives. Widmore dismissed Ben’s ”idealism” as sentimental and self-serving — about him needing to feel needed. But he didn’t stop Ben from taking on the project of raising Alex alone. Ben’s victory inspired him to dream bigger. And when he uncovered the truth about Widmore’s off-Island slick willying, he staged his coup and forced him into exile. He also moved the nomadic Others out of the wild and into Dharmaville. But Ben’s dream of settling down and playing house — modifying Others culture in such a way to service and fulfill his own desires and needs — was surely antithetical to the Others’ true purpose, and was most likely what earned the Others’ their baby-making curse from the Island/Jacob. Richard Alpert said as much when he encouraged Locke to make a play for Ben’s job. ”Ben has been wasting our time with novelties like fertility problems,” Richard said. ”We’re looking for someone to remind us that we’re here for more important reasons.”
8. While Ben and Arzt ate lunch and griped about Reynolds, it was the Substitute who spoke up and encouraged Ben to act on his dissatisfaction. ”Maybe you should be principal. It just sounds like you care about this place,” Locke said. ”And if the man in charge doesn’t, then maybe it’s time for a change.” When Ben wondered who, if anyone, would listen to someone like him, Locke raised his hand and flashed either his warm smile or mischievous, baiting one. ”I’m listening,” he said. I KNOW WHAT YOU’RE THINKING! I have no doubt the burning question that’ll be making the rounds in the Lost fan culture is going to be this: Is Sideways Locke actually…
   THE MAN IN BLACK/SMOKEY/FAKE LOCKE…
   Throughout his Others reign, Ben insisted he was hearing the voice of Jacob and heeding his will. He justified everything by putting it all on his Island god. But the time has come to begin wondering how attuned to Jacob that Ben has been — if he’s been attuned to him at all. In our real world, there are those who claim to know God and hear God’s voice in their lives, but they could be wrong. Doesn’t mean there isn’t a God, just that God ain’t talking to them. I suspect Ben is one of those people. ”What about you?” Jacob asked Ben last season. It sounded so dismissive. But Jacob could have also been challenging Ben on his self-deception, or basically saying, ”I’m sorry. Do I know you?” Ben’s either been faking his rapport with Jacob, or (and this is my theory) the supernatural entity that’s been speaking to him all along has been the Man In Black. Ben thought he was serving Jacob the Christ, but he was most likely the victim of a long con perpetrated by a snake oil-selling false messiah, Smokenstein the Anti-Christ, who was just using Ben in his master plan to escape the Island and live anew as a man in a separate reality, one with no Island and no Jacob to trap him: the Sideways world.
9. She called Jacob the closest thing she ever had to a father. Which means only one thing for certain: Jacob wasn’t her real father. He could have been her father in the God sense of father — a supernatural entity responsible for her existence and purpose. Maybe it’s more of a Godfather thing; she could beJacob’s consigliore (like Tom Hagen, a Ben-esque stray/outsider taken off the street and groomed into a top assistant), maybe his Luca Brasi. We have a few missing years on the Island — the three years between when the castaways began time traveling (late 2004/early 2005) and 2007. We also know that Ilana spent some time in the hospital with bandages wrapped around her face and Jacob visited her and tasked her anew with a mission. How did she get injured? I’m guessing she was on the Island during those missing three years fighting a battle that went badly, possible trying to keep Smokey bottled up. She is now charged with protecting the candidates to replace Jacob. Don’t ask her what it means: she doesn’t know or isn’t telling us. She was asked how many were left, she said six. Was she counting John Locke? Fake Locke? Jin and Sun twice?
10. While Ilana brooded and nibbled on mangoes, Fake Locke appeared to Ben and made him one of his Faustian offers: future management of the Island. I couldn’t tell if Smokey was being sincere; this promise would be the easiest to keep, but I was kinda getting the sense — or maybe just making the assumption — that the Monster had no desire to see the Island continue existing. Fake Locke’s screen time here was about equal to the amount of time Sideways Locke got with Sideways Ben. He also presented to Ben as a sympathetic, supportive ally. Ben’s survival instinct — and Somebody Wants Me!! instinct — kicked in. He ran to where Smocke had said he’d find a rifle. He got the drop on Ilana, but instead of shooting her, he was suddenly overwhelmed by a desire to explain himself — as if realizing for the first time what he really wanted: to be known, understood, and not rejected, even though he was about to reveal his ugliest inner bits. His confession was part self-laceration, part rage against the Jacob/Island machine: ”I watched my daughter Alex die in front of me and it was my fault. I had a chance to save her. I chose the Island over her. All in the name of Jacob. I sacrificed everything for him, and he didn’t even care. I stabbed him. I was so angry. Confused. I was terrified I was about to lose the only thing that ever happened to me, my power. But the thing that really mattered was already gone. …I can never forgive myself.”
11. Saved, the once-lost, now-found wretch made the first of two heroic choices that represent the proper response to such a gift. The first: renouncing evil. Ben became the first person this season to turn down a FrankenLocke bargain. That’s going to have consequences. The second: sacrifice. He entered the beach camp and offered Sun his help putting up the tarp, just as his Sideways version would have easily, effortlessly offered assistance to one of his students.
12. It was hard to hear the line and not think Lost was saying something about its two-track, parallel world structure. Then Richard showed up and offered a third path. Jack followed. When Hurley asked if Richard could be trusted, Jack said, ”At least he’s not stallin’.” It was another wink at the audience in an episode full of them. Combined with the line about Napoleon’s Elba being the place where ”everything became clear,” I wondered if Lost was addressing anyone griping about the pace of ”answers” and saying, Don’t worry. Trust us. Okay?
13. Ironically, then, Richard’s path ended with… a lie. He took them to the Black Rock, which was not where he said was taking them, although it was where we’ve been wanting Alpert to go for a couple years now as we’ve wondered if the ageless Others came to the Island via the slave ship. (Another reading of Richard’s third way as a metaphor for Lost’s storytelling: We won’t lead you astray, but we’re not going the way you expect. We’ll be doing this ”answer” thing our way. ‘Kay?)
    
14. But I remain suspicious of Jack. When we last saw him, he was furious over the Lighthouse revelations. Now, after a long gaze out over the beach, it seemed Jack had thought over a few things and was totally activated to chase after all of the Island’s magic white rabbits — whether they look like his father or wear eyeliner — and see where they lead. Does Jack want to know Jacob’s purpose so he can faithfully fulfill it… or so he can angrily subvert it? He crackles with so much crazy mania, it’s hard to know if he’s a true believer or a great deceiver. Is it possible the title of the episode hints at an even more provocative possibility: that Ben, a.k.a. ”Dr. Linus,” has replaced Dr. Shephard as the story’s hero, while Jack has replaced Ben as its villain? Consider that sentimental slow-mo reunion sequence that ended the episode. We saw everyone in their huts and tents — including Miles, inspecting the diamonds he purloined from Nikki and Paulo’s grave (all $8 million of it? No going dutch on coffee with him!) — as Jack, Hurley and Richard approached. This moment was staged to deliberately echo the scene from the season 3 episode ”One Of Us,” when Jack, Kate, and Sayid returned from New Otherton, bringing Juliet with them. When the beach crew saw her, the happy-huggy moment abruptly ended, and everyone gave her the stink-eye (especially, ironically, Sawyer) — just like Jack and Ben traded suspicious looks in last night’s episode. We learned at the very end of ”One Of Us” that newbie Juliet was indeed shady; she had been sent by Ben to spy on the camp. (The moment was mirrored, I think, by having ”Dr. Linus” end with Widmore’s submarine spying on the castaways.)
15. Why might Jack be so angry? Oh, I don’t know. The same reason Sally Brown was so angry after spending all night in a pumpkin patch with Linus Van Pelt waiting for transcendent revelation to arrive. This Island thing — Jacob, Ben, everything — has made a big mess of his life, and he wants someone to take responsibility for it. He wants payback. Sally’s cry is his cry: ”YOU OWE ME RESTITUTION!”  (1-15 from Doc Jensen at EW.com)
    ================
16. But hey, we get our first real reference to the island here – and that’s big. Roger Linus confirms what bad CGI has already told us this season: Dharma does exist (or at least did exist) in the alternate timeline. Not only that, but both Ben and his father have spent some time on the island. What made them leave is unclear, but Roger goes extra-crazy-special out of his way to pointedly wonder (aloud and for our benefit) just what life would’ve been like if they’d “stayed on the island”.
17. When Miles approaches Ben with bananas and beanpods, the subject of Jacob comes up again. Here, Ben echoes what many of us have already thought: that Jacob didn’t really care about being killed at all. Miles immediately corrects him however, telling Ben: “No, he cared. He was hoping he was wrong about you.”This is highly interesting, because it seems to go against the original theory of Jacob knowingly accepting his own demise. If what Miles says is true, Jacob’s last words to Ben about ‘having a choice’ now carry a lot more weight. At the same time however, I find it difficult to believe Jacob’s not still pushing Ben from beyond the grave. Through the use of Miles, maybe Jacob is allowing Ben to know his disappointment for a very specific reason. Perhaps Jacob is trying to appeal to the good within Benjamin Linus, because bringing that good back to the surface again is the only way to successfully recruit him.
18. Illana is as confused about ‘Kwon’ as we are. Whether the name of the candidate 42 refers to Sun or Jin, Illana explains she plans to protect them both. How she’ll do this with a single rifle is beyond me, but maybe she’s got a sick dagger buried somewhere that we don’t know about.I also found it interesting that Illana said there were “six candidates left”. She already knows John Locke is dead AND occupied by the man in black, which would leave five at most. It left me wondering if Illana knew of a sixth candidate, and whether or not that candidate was Kate.
19. From our standpoint, replacing Jacob’s role seems to be a piss-poor job. Maybe Illana doesn’t see it that way, which is why she talks about it so openly. Later on this episode, we see the MIB talking about enlisting a replacement as well. So does the island need two replacements? A ying and a yang? Or are Jacob and the MIB really just two halves of the same entity, waging an internal, Tyler Durden-like war of fate vs. free will? Great question. But sorry, not this episode
20. Perhaps it’s because Ben was so far disconnected from the island’s roots (again, the barracks), or maybe it’s because the MIB just assumes every leader of The Others is as inherently power-hungry as Charles Widmore… but it turns out the dark man doesn’t really know Benjamin Linus. Because of this, he mistakenly assumes Ben’s greatest wish is to rule the island. Just as Sawyer’s biggest desire was to leave, and Sayid’s only wish was to be with Nadia again, the dark man approached Ben offering the one thing he figured a deposed leader would certainly want most: to regain his power.
21. The beach camp is a sacred place for us, and with very good reason. It represents the origins of the show we love so much, and memories of a more mysterious yet simpler time. It makes sense that LOST would begin and end in the same place, especially with all the circle and loop references scattered throughout the show. So when everyone ended up back here, including Jack and Hurley (and even Richard?) – it wasn’t all that shocking. Cue dramatic montage, and bring on the hugging.
22. Standing just outside the circle of trust, Richard and Ben are the newcomers. They’re fallen defenders of the island who’ve finally come to the realization that everyone’s been pretty much on the same team all along. The sides are being chosen up very quickly, and they’d better be… because here comes the periscope of Widmore’s sneaky sub. What havoc will he wreak? What shenanigans will he be up to? Not really sure, but having been off-island for so long he’d better be damned good at playing catch up.
23. Okay, here’s a guess: Widmore will unknowingly end up following the wrong side. As leader of The Others, let’s assume he’d been doing Jacob’s will (or thought he was) for the entire time he was on the island. But what if he was actually listening to the MIB, without even realizing it? What if he were taking baby-killing direction not from Jacob, but from his nemesis instead?Knowing what we know now, Widmore’s words to John Locke about the upcoming war now contain a more sinister connotation: “If you’re not back there, the wrong side will win”. It’s as if he knew (or was coached) that John Locke’s body was necessary to the dark man’s ultimate plan. In a way, Widmore participated in the MIB’s long con, whether he knew it or not. (16-21 by Vozzek69 at Darkufo)

And unfortunately, I have to cut this post a little short.  Only 9 more episodes left!

Sundown Recap

Mar 03

metalman777Lost recap, season 6 No Comments

[note...not a whole lot of talk in the blog-o-sphere as of yet about this episode!!  very odd!]

“Sundown” is the 6th episode in Season 6 of Lost and the 109th produced hour of the series as a whole. It was originally broadcast on March 2, 2010. Sayid is faced with a difficult decision, and Claire sends a warning to the Temple inhabitants.  (Lostpedia.com)

1. And what’s really interesting — and perhaps hints at the future of the flash-sideways segments — is that unlike the last two weeks, when Alt Jack and Alt Locke found a measure of redemption, Alt Sayid finds no such thing. He tries to reject violence. He even goes so far as to physically remove himself from a violent situation. But the violence still tracks him down. It drags him back in. So does that mean the “fallen” characters are beyond saving, even in the alternate universe?
2. Instead of retribution, Flocke tempts Sayid with the possibility of “seeing” the departed love of his life, Nadia, once again. He’s a little fuzzy on the details, though. Does this mean Sayid could actually reunite with Nadia? Or is this a mere glimpse? Also unclear is whether Flocke’s proposal is the catalyst for Sayid’s slide into full-fledged evil. I’m thinking it may have been a little push, but Sayid was already well on his way.
3. Ilana, Frank, Sun — Can someone please explain to me how Ilana et al got into the Temple? They just appear as Smokey lays waste to the place? And now they’re … what exactly? The anti-Flockes? If this is the cavalry, my money’s on Flocke.
4. Ben — Ben is technically part of Ilana’s group, but the moment he shares with Sayid deserves special notice. It was the first time Ben has ever looked genuinely scared. Think about that. This is the guy who endured interrogation at the hands of Sayid but never flinched. And now, with one look from Sayid’s evil, evil eyes, Ben squirms away? That’s a huge shift
5. As I mentioned up top, the most intriguing aspect of this episode’s alt timeline is that Sayid doesn’t find happiness or clarity or personal fulfillment. He doesn’t ride off with Nadia (even though she’s married to Sayid’s brother in the Happyverse, I’m sure she’d be up for a divorce if Sayid forced the issue). He doesn’t forgive himself for past sins (he’s actually got a wicked martyr complex). And when push comes to shove, he can’t help but shove back. This almost makes me want to see how Alt Claire plays out. Is there a connection between a character’s state in 2007 and their alternate timeline? If you go evil on the island, are you doomed in the Happyverse? We’ll see, I suppose.
6. What I’m interested in seeing is how the castaways come together in the alt timeline. I’m assuming Alt Sayid will release Alt Jin, and perhaps they’ll tag team in some way. Combine the “knowing mirror looks” we’ve seen from the likes of Jack and Kate with all the path-crossing (Claire and Kate, Jack and Locke, Hurley and Locke, Locke and Rose, Sayid and Jin, etc.), and I get the sense the Alt Timeline is driven by some sort of gravitational pull. (1-7 from The Lost Blog)
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7. So what’s Smokey’s overall plan and what will happen to all his recruits?Now that the Temple dwellers have either been recruited or killed, one would imagine that the only thing left for Smokey to do is to go home, wherever that is. But how simple is that going to be? I imagine there’s probably only one way Smokey is allowed to leave and I strongly suspect it involves killing more people. Dogan said Smokey once killed every living thing on the Island which certainly doesn’t bode well for his recruits and I’m sure he has no intention whatsoever in granting them “anything they ever wanted.”My guess is if there is a literal “magic box” on the Island, Smokey’s going to want to use it to go home. But I also suspect that he can’t use it directly – he needs one of his recruits to use it for him. Now this is a scenario where I can see Sawyer totally pulling the Long Con on him.
8. How did Dogan’s presence in the Temple keep Smokey out? Wasn’t that the ash ring’s job?So what exactly kept Smokey out of the Temple? In LA X, we saw the Temple dwellers pouring ash around the Temple perimeter, but Lennon said that Dogan himself was the only thing that was keeping Smokey out.
9. Is Dogan’s “scale” the same one used in the Weighing of the Heart ceremony?I’ve long thought that the Island’s purpose was the ground for the Weighing of the Heart ceremony in Eygptian Mythology, with Jacob as Osiris, the Nemesis as Set and Smokey as Ammit. I discarded this theory after Smokey and the Nemesis were revealed to be one and the same, but Dogan’s scale analogy makes me rethink this. The reason I discarded the theory is that Ammit really isn’t on the same level as Osiris, more of a servant (or a pet) to the gods rather than a god himself.  Didn’t Dogan say that once Sayid’s infection reaches his heart he will be gone? Perhaps the reason Smokey is trapped on the Island is that he’s a servant of Jacob rather than a true rival. That’s why he could be summoned to protect the Island and that’s why he judged people – it was his job when Jacob was around. But now that Jacob’s gone, he’s free to devour all the hearts his little black heart desires. And I imagine in the Alt verse he’s been feasting for decades.
10. Where the heck were Sawyer and Jin during all this?Claire mentioned Sawyer and Jin before she went into the Temple, but where were they? Off on some super-secret Smokey mission? I’m looking forward to Kate’s reaction when she sees Sawyer again, provided Sayid or Claire don’t kill her first. Assuming she survives though, I do wonder if she’ll pick up on the fact that Sawyer’s probably conning Smokey and play along.The fact Jin is with Smokey and Sun is with the rebels makes me think Smokey’s going to eventually use him as leverage to recruit her. After all, you have to think Smokey will be taking out every potential candidate he can
11. Are all the Alt storylines starting to converge?Given the cliffhanger for this week’s Alt installment (Sayid finding Jin in his brother’s restaurant’s cold room), I have to imagine we’ll be seeing some of the Alt storylines come together since I can’t imagine they’d leave this one dangling. And if next week’s episode is as Ben-centric as the preview suggested, I have to imagine we’ll see some more of Alt Locke in his flashes.But now it seems to me that outside of Flight 815, the lives of all the people on the flight would have been connected even if they hadn’t crashed on the Island. Here’s a list of the familiar faces we’ve seen in the Alt verse storylines so far:

    Kate – Claire, Sawyer, Ethan
    Locke – Jack, Hurley, Rose, Ben
    Jack – Dogan, and likely Jack’s mystery wife
    Sayid – Jack (in a background cameo), Keamy, Jin

    So should we have an Alt Jin episode, we’ll probably get more of Alt Sayid. Alt Sawyer might bring more of Alt Kate, Alt Hurley might bring us more Alt Locke, etc. And the fact the lives of these people are so involved without Jacob’s influcence makes me think that might be the reason he chose them – since they were all going to be linked anyway, why not just bring them all along? Regardless I’m greatly looking forward to next week – I just hope present day Ben doesn’t die – we really haven’t seen much of him this season and his absence is felt.  (7-11 from Mistaking Coincidence for Fate)
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12. ”Locke” was stuck on the Island because Jacob was alive, now that Jacob is dead he’s free.  Not exactly news, but it’s nice that it was spelled out.
13. Dogen says “Locke” wants to destroy every living thing on the Island.  He seems content to leave his followers alive.  This is where we get into the old Lost hearsay conundrum.  What do we want to believe?  This guy was probably just trying to get Sayid to anger “Locke” into killing him.  So he might have just said these things to give Sayid a reason to plunge that knife in his chest.  Or maybe he’s saying that because it’s true.  Or maybe he’s saying it because that is what he was led to believe.  Every episode we face this same thing.  What do we want to believe?  “He is evil incarnate”.  Again, I tend to believe that, but it’s coming from a very biased and unreliable source.
14. Dogen’s death was very confusing.  “He was the only thing keeping (Smokey) out”.  I could have sworn that the ash was the only think keeping it out.  I guess Sayid might have messed up the ash, or Smokey managed to do it himself with all of his tree ripping.  But if Dogen was powerful enough to keep Smokey out then why was he afraid of getting killed by him if he left the Temple?  I think Dogen’s death was important in that it meant that Jacob’s power is crumbling, “Locke” is winning.
15. “Locke” promised Sayid that he could resurrect Nadia if Sayid would deliver a message.  He didn’t say that directly, but I think we all agree that that was what he meant.

16. Jacob promised Dogen that he would resurrect his dead son if Dogen would serve Jacob at the Temple or at least on the Island. This sounded a lot like the promise made to Juliet about her sisters cancer. Except that a resurrection is a lot crazier. I get why they had Dogen tell that story, they wanted to show the similarities between Jacob and “Locke” but I still really didn’t like that story. It makes things very complicated. I’m very tempted to not even believe that Jacob resurrected Dogen’s kid. But what’s worse, lying to a guy to get him to serve you or holding someones dead loved one over a persons head so that they have not choice but to serve you?

17. Here’s the thing, I know there are a few people that are slowly boarding the “Locke” train, but I think we should stop and take a step back. Here’s what we’ve seen him do so far. He’s held three different carrots in front of three different people. He told Sawyer that he would tell him why he was on the Island and he promised to get him off the Island, he promised Claire that he would get Aaron back from the Others, and he promised Sayid that he would resurrect Nadia. If you ask me all of those promises are lies. Maybe he’ll get off the Island, but it’s just as likely that he’ll stab Sawyer in the back in order to get off. It was a straight up lie that he would get Aaron back. He knew that Kate had Aaron, he has all the memories that Locke had. And if he could resurrect Nadia, then why didn’t he offer to resurrect Charlie and Juliet too? That would have been great incentive for Claire and Sawyer. He’s lying and you’re falling for it.

18. Here are the facts. Sayid was dead, and he miraculously came back to life. Since he came back to life he’s been through a lot, but at the moment he’s very evil. There’s no doubt about that.

    Claire was in a building that blew up. she may have died in that explosion, we don’t know. All we know is that after that she’s been acting odd. She is currently bat-shit crazy and also pretty evil (remember the axe? yeah).

    Dogen told us about the Infection, and although it’s easy not to believe him, I think we should believe him about this. These two were probably Infected and it seems as though both of them are now lost causes.

    In the last scene of this episode I wondered whether or not all The Others were infected too. That group was just very robotic and unquestioning. I wonder if the Infection can be spread like that. If so then I really worry about Sawyer, Jin and Kate. (12-18 from Not Confused Just Lost)

Lighthouse Recap

Feb 24

metalman777Lost recap, season 6 No Comments

“Lighthouse” is the 5th episode of Season 6 of Lost and the 108th produced hour of the series as a whole. It was first broadcast on February 23, 2010.  (Lostpedia.com)

1. In the Sideways world, Doc Shephard spotted his appendix scar in the mirror and struggled to recall the forgotten/suppressed memory of when the ruptured organ was removed. Again, he wondered: How did that get there? Again we wondered: What does it mean? This story ended with Jack looking into the episode’s most unusual and most miraculous of mirrors — the eyes of his son, David. What he saw in them was the very thing his Island self should have recognized in the Lighthouse: an invitation to let go of the past and move into the future.
2. You don’t have what it takes, Christian told Young Jack during a boozy stupor. That one left a mark. Father Shephard was actually trying to teach his son a lesson — that being a hero isn’t something you choose to be, but rather something that you just are, and that when you try to be a hero, and you fail, then what you become is a failure, at least in your own eyes, and that’s a mighty hard thing to live with, if you can live with it at all. If you’ve watched all of Lost, then you know the great irony of Christian’s harsh wisdom: Jack has pretty much proven his father correct. But did Christian correctly identify Jack’s fundamentally flawed nature — or did he nurture it with his problematic brand of parenting?
3. Anyway, this is all to say that the Sideways Jack that we got to know in ”Lighthouse” was a lot like the Castaway Jack we’ve come to know over the past five season, but also very different, in ways both obvious and not so obvious. (Has there ever been a less helpful sentence ever written than that last one?) We met him as he was washing a hard day’s work off himself and talking with his mother about the mystery of Christian’s missing coffin. Yep: still missing. Probably in Berlin, according to the airline, but nobody knew for sure. The Widow Shephard was flummoxed. How could someone possibly lose a dead body? The lack of resolution had left her proverbially paralyzed; she needed Jack’s help in settling Christian’s affairs. (In more ways than one.) It would be wrong to say Jack was unfazed by his father’s Lost-in-the-system corpse (he certainly seemed moved by his mother’s need), but at the same time I didn’t get the sense he was haunted by it, either.
4. But I wonder if the perplexing puzzle of Jack’s appendix scar told the real story of Jack’s seemingly mature serenity. Eyeballing the blemish, Jack suddenly realized he couldn’t recall when the damn thing has been cut out of him. His mother reminded him that it had happened when he was 7 or 8 years old, that he had collapsed at school and his father had wanted to perform the surgery himself but was denied. Now, we all know that the castaway version of Jack had his appendix removed on the Island back in season 4 (more on that episode in a sec), and I think Lost wanted us to once again wonder if these Sideways characters are psychically linked to their Island counterparts or possess their memories somewhere the backs of their fogged-up minds. Consider this: If we assume that Jack is about as old as Sawyer, then that means it’s very likely that Sideways Jack had his school collapse/appendix episode the very same year that a certain group of time traveling castaways were blowing up Jughead on the Island. What if Young Jack’s collapse was caused by Castaway Jack’s mind/soul getting blown into him? What if Young Jack’s appendicitis was reflexive a psychosomatic response to the appendix-free Castaway Jack’s sudden psychic migration into his mind? What if Castaway Jack’s mind/soul has lain dormant within Sideways Jack ever since, but now is starting to stir and take hold? What if Sideways’ Jack’s appendix confusion and other instances of spotty memory manifested in this episode are symptoms of an identity crisis caused by this trippy-tricky of mental operating systems?
5. For now, I’m going to say that the answer to every single one of those preceding ”What if…?” questions is a big fat NO. Instead, I’m going to say that Sideways Jack is a man who’s dangerously out of touch with his emotions and with others, because he’s a self-absorbed jerk, or because of pain he’s been spending most of his life trying to avoid, or both. As ”Lighthouse” progressed, we learned that Sideways Jack’s relationship with his father was also marked by fear and hurt; and so I wonder if a simple explanation for his fuzzy recall of the appendix drama was that he had suppressed the memory. The only psychic entity lurking within Sideway Jack is his own wounded child, and for his entire life, he’s kept him heavily tranquilized. His story in ”Lighthouse” was about choosing to recall and feel childhood pain, about rousing that sleeping, hurting kid… and then letting him go.
6. BURNING QUESTION: Who’s David’s Mom? Who’s the female participant in the creation of this inexplicably conceived Sideways child? Who’s this phantom woman that Sideways Jack was once with and now isn’t? Wouldn’t if be totally ironic and fitting if she was the Sideways iteration of Lost‘s resident fertility doc/Jack dumpette, better known to us as Juliet? And you wanna know why she wasn’t home last night? That’s right, kids: Going dutch on coffee with new boyfriend Sawyer. (Your goosebumps? That’s right, I did that.)
7. Christian Shephard left something for Claire. My thought: Well, that answered that question. Sideways Dad was an intercontinental horndog, too
8. Jack arrived at the audition. He followed the sign directing ”the candidates” to the auditorium. Inside, Father Jack bore witness to his piano prodigy son exercising his awesome gift. It took his breath away. It was all very end-of-Billy Elliot. Jack swelled with pride, with joy, with selfless happiness for his son — with life. The piece: ”Fantasia Impromptu in C-sharp minor” by Chopin. Last season on Lost, another child prodigy played the same number for us. I am referring to Master Daniel Faraday in ”The Variable.” We remember his fate: how his mother cut him off his from art; how she redirected his brilliance toward physics in a doomed bid to save him from her future bullet; how she drove him and rode him and smothered him. He died, anyway. A failure, anyway. I felt Lost was offering a belated toast to the late Faraday in Sideways Jack’s surprising cross with Sideways Dogen, whose son was also auditioning for Williams. ”They are too young to have this kind of pressure,” Dogen said. ”It’s hard to watch and be unable to help.” Rest In Peace, Daniel. Sorry your Mom sucked. (I look forward to getting Island Dogen’s backstory and seeing how much of it ironically synchs with this small peek into his Sideways world.)
9. There was more to the statement, but let’s just begin with that phrase, an extraordinary admission of humility from a once-proud man of science who spent years arguing for the strength and supremacy of his own agency. But Jack’s full statement was: ”I came back here because I was broken, and I was stupid enough to think this place could fix me.” Jacob would later suggest to Hurley that Jack couldn’t be more wrong, but the good news was that Jack had grown enough in his journey to summon a magical beacon, one that could to light the way to the his journey’s homestretch. Literally.
10. Hurley thought — or hoped — that he could summon Jacob by cranking on a chain and turning the dial to its 108 setting. (Though I didn’t see it, the Web consensus seems to be that the name attached to this number was ”Wallace.”) But before the contraption could reach 108, Jack saw something in the mirrors — images of buildings that shouldn’t be there. He then got a scary thought: What would he see if he turned the dial to his number, 23. He pushed Hurley out of the way and changed the ”channel” and there on the ”screen” was a live shot of his childhood home. Jack then came to some conclusions. He concluded that the Lighthouse was a mystical surveillance device. He concluded that Jacob had used it to spy on him all his life. He concluded that Jacob wanted something from him, and he angrily demanded that Hurley summon Jacob ASAP to explain himself. Hurley explained that it didn’t work that way, that Jacob was a ghost — a sometimes there, sometimes not non-entity.
11. Meanwhile, Hurley and Jacob debriefed. Jacob seemed to suggest that contrary to Hurley’s panic (and armful of inky instructions), everything had gone according to plan. Jack was supposed to look in the magic mirrors. Jack was supposed to see what he saw. And maybe most importantly, Jack was supposed to have the response that he had, even at the expense of his magical mirror, mirrors on the Lighthouse walls. The purpose, I think, was to correct Jack of one misconception: He was not stupid to believe that the Island holds redemptive purpose for him. It does. Jack just needs to keep his eyes open and look for it. He also needs to do one thing more, and I think it’s the thing that Lighthouse mirrors were designed to show him. Hurley and Jack got it wrong. The Lighthouse doesn’t cast light outward. It casts light inward, and reveals the state of your heart. For Jack Shephard, his heart is still locked up in his childhood home, his father’s house, his past, and he won’t be free and realized until he leaves all of it behind.  (1-11 from Doc Jensen at EW.com)
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12. But at least somebody at the Temple is making productive use of time. Hurley and Miles are playing X’s and O’s! There’s no ambiguity in X’s and O’s. Two sides: one is X, one is O. And their game plays out in a similar manner as the one being played between the Man in Black and Jacob – endless ties, one always blocking the other’s “three in a row”. Of course, if you play X’s and O’s enough times, someone wins a game, often out of sheer carelessness on the part of the other player. Is this what’s happened between Jacob and MIB?
13. Speaking of which, what was Jacob doing? I’ve rewatched it a dozen times, and he appears to be swirling a piece of string or a thin stick in the waters of the Spring. Honestly, it looks like he’s fishing. I’m not sure what to make of that, although if I was pressed to make some comparison, the first thing that comes to my mind mind is Jesus Christ, not just a fisherman but a “fisher of men”, who recruits his followers and gives them tasks that they often don’t understand and end up failing at.
14. From Justin and Claire we’re given two slightly different accounts of what’s happened to Claire over the last three years. I think it’s fair to say at this point that Claire didn’t do any time-traveling during the season 5 flashes, as the group from Dharma times only arrived in 2007 a day or so ago, which wouldn’t have been enough time for Claire and the Temple Others to establish their current relationship (nor would Claire have had ample time to build a shelter and set traps if she had only recently flashed to 2007). I can only assume that Claire wasn’t subject to the time traveling because of some sort of interference from the Christian Shephard apparition, which I’m 99% sure was actually the Man in Black.
15. So for the last three years, Claire has lived from 2004 to 2007, running from the Others and was at one point captured by them. She tells Jin that they tortured her, even showing him the scars. Based on this and what Dogen said about Claire being infected, it seems that she underwent a similar test as Sayid. I have no doubt that she failed, too, but I’m less sure that that means either of them are actually infected, as I have yet to see them become corrupted by the Smoke Monster the way that the French Team was (though it’s certainly possible that this did happen to Claire – we now know who she’s been buddy-buddy with lately.
16. For the record, I don’t think Claire recalls it happening that way. Remember her emotionless, zombie-like appearance with Christian in “Cabin Fever”? Christian must have brainwashed her or altered her memory somehow (which could very well be a side effect of becoming infected – Sayid doesn’t really understand what’s going on, either). If apparitions of Christian are indeed the Man in Black, it makes sense what he was doing. By brainwashing Claire into thinking that the Others had her baby, he turned her against them permanently, thwarting any future attempts on the part of Dogen to gather all the Losties at the Temple for the forces of good. This is why he continued to appear to her as her “friend”, deliberately feeding her lies, recruiting her in his efforts against Jacob and the Temple.
17. Last but not least in this story thread, Flocke shows up at Claire’s camp and is heralded as a friend of hers. A quick tally: Sawyer is with Flocke, Claire is with Flocke, Kate is heading to her doom, the Temple is probably about to be destroyed and Sayid is infected. Whoever Jacob wants Hurley to guide to the island better be pretty vital for the forces of good.
18. Anyway, Wallace could turn out to be no one. Last week I made a huge fuss about Kate not being a candidate and this week, there she is – not crossed off, no important number, just kind of there. My point is that there might be less rhyme and reason to these names and numbers than we suspect. Then again, Damon and Carlton know we’d be on the lookout for 108, so I have a hard time believing it says “Wallace” for no reason  (12-18 by Robz888 on DarkUFO.com)
19. I’m starting to think that all the candidates are pieces of a Jacob-constructed Rube Goldberg machine, one where if everyone is placed in the correct spot at the correct time Smokey will be defeated and a new Jacob will take the Island’s helm. The side-effect of all this is that all the candidates’ lives will have been made miserable up to that point because of Jacob’s machinations in getting them there; Jacob essentially sacrificing the good of the few or the one for the sake of the world. That’s why, without Jacob’s influence, everyone’s lives are better in the Alt universe (except for Kate, perhaps).
20. So let’s say that’s true – that Jacob essentially made everyone’s lives miserable because it was necessary to defeat Smokey. In that case, I can see Jacob being responsible for Jack fixing Sarah, Locke having issues with his Dad, Hurley thinking he’s cursed, etc… all these awful things that Jacob was actually responsible for in order to get them to the Island. Now with Jacob’s influence gone in the Alt, everyone is actually a lot happier, but the Island is destroyed. What the ramifications of that are for the world we just don’t know yet
21. Another nice nugget of info this provides, though, is that if totally all of the candidates were written on the lighthouse turntable, then there are only 360 total. Lostpedia has an updated list of all the candidate numbers from Jacob (or Smokey’s) Wall. Looking it over, there’s only one number above 360: Daniel Faraday. And even that could be wrong, given how illegible some parts of the wall were. Also note: Kate’s name is in the lighthouse at #51 and is NOT crossed out. Interesting, eh?
22. I really, really liked Claire this episode and props to Emilie de Raven for playing crazy as well as anyone on the show. The sickness has turned out to be one of the most interesting things about this season. Smokey’s appearance and the fact Infected Claire knew that he wasn’t the real Locke certainly suggests the sickness is something caused by Smokey.But what exactly does it do? In Sayid’s case, he definitely died and came back to life infected. In Claire’s case, we’re really not sure. It certainly seemed she died from wounds inflicted in the attacks on the Barracks, after all, the Claire Locke saw with Smokey in Jacob’s cabin seemed eerily calm – much different from this Claire. And Sayid certainly seems normal so far as well. Whatever is does there’s a definite progression. But are they really dead, zombie-like creatures or merely corrupted souls (something like a Ringwraith perhaps, an evil servant of Smokey)? (19-22 from Mistaking Confidence for Fate)
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23. The first time I watched this episode I was pretty sure that Claire revealed that Christian and “Locke” are the same people.  But when I watched it again she clearly says that first Christian told her that The Others took Aaron and then her friend told her.  Her friend was revealed to be “Locke” so if we’re going to believe Claire then they are still separate people.  I don’t know what to think.  If there was ever a time to reveal that Christian was “Locke” then that was it.
24. Jacob was watching Jack’s old house.  It was a white house so it was a light house.  Get it?   HA HA HA… anyways.  Jack was enraged when he found out Jacob was watching him.  But the truth is that he might not have been watching Jack.  Doesn’t it seem more likely that he was watching Christian?  Jack only lived there as a kid.  For Jack’s sake I hope I’m wrong about that.  (23-24 from Not Confused Just Lost)
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25. The Annotated Alice: Jack says he read it to David, and we saw him reading it to Aaron when he was living with Kate.
26. Claire isn’t just kinda crazy… she’s totally batshit bonkers creepy-skeleton-head-baby-lovin’ super crazy
27. Jack found the key under the rabbit, just like Miles reached under a rabbit in “Some Like It Hoth” to get into that apartment with the dead man when he was a kid.
28. Jacob says that Jack is here because he has to do something, and that he needs to look at the ocean for a while… Locke looked at the ocean for a long time before he sensed his destiny on the island. We also saw the Man in Black staring at the ocean when he returned looking like Locke.  (25-28 from Nik at Nite)
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29. There was an amazing number of black and white references this episode, and most of them were in LAX_Jack’s world. All throughout his home we saw black and white, especially amongst the paintings, photos, frames, and wall hangings. Ditto for Jack’s black and white office. And the icing on the cake? All those various shots of piano keys.
30. Figuring out Jack’s color is tough right now. Like Sawyer, he’s walked both sides of the fence. He’s been a man of science and a man of faith, and he’s also someone who walks “among us but is not one of us”. I suppose all of these references could be pointing out that Jack’s final role has yet to be determined, or that maybe he’s being played by both sides of LOST’s game.
31. We’re seeing a very distinct pattern in the LAX timeline, and here it is in a nutshell: the circle can be broken. People can change. Mistakes don’t need to be repeated, over and over again. Some examples so far:

    * Kate Austin is a fugitive on the run, only looking out for herself. She glances into a garage mirror and… BANG! Kate heads back to bring pregnant Claire her stuff, help her through false labor, and befriend her during a major crisis… all at great risk to her personal safety. Cue Claire’s credit cards and a makeover shopping spree.

    * John Locke is the same angry and defiant cripple he’s always been. Still struggling against his paralysis he calls Jack’s number, looks into a mirror and… BANG! Locke suddenly hangs up the phone and embraces his condition. Helen loves and accepts him for who he is, there’s a nice tearful hug, and everything is unicorns and rainbows.

    * Jack Shephard is a workaholic surgeon neglecting a son he only sees once a month. He looks in the mirror and… well, you get the picture. With some help from his mother Jack realizes the error of his ways, eases up on young David, and opens his loving arms to his son. Time for ice cream and some hair-rumpling.

    This is some exciting news, actually. It may be proof that Jacob is right. People don’t always have to fight, corrupt, and destroy. By stopping to take a good look at what they’ve become, people can actually reverse bad behavior and start making positive changes to their lives. Maybe broken people can be fixed after all.

32. Here’s a phrase you’ve heard me say before: “placed into being by requirement”. Charlie’s guitar, Locke’s knives, Jack’s sewing kit, Rose’s husband, Yemi’s crashed plane, the black rock’s dynamite, a shitload of heroin, the Swan’s washer/dryer, Christian’s coffin, the food drop, Sun’s pregnancy test, the marshal’s Haliburton case, Anthony Cooper, Jacob’s cabin, IM chats with Walt, batteries, radios, guns, canoes, explosives, medicine, a spinal surgeon, Aaron himself… and now, a giant stone lighthouse.

    The end of LOST is near. Answers are bigger, and they’re right in front of our eyes. The reason we never saw the lighthouse until now is because our characters never needed the lighthouse until now. So was it always there? Shoot me, but I say NO.

33. Listen to Dogen talk to Jack about his son David, and how it’s unfair that he’s under such a tremendous amount of pressure. “It’s hard to watch, and not be able to help”. This simple statement is one of the fundamental principals of LOST. It’s almost as if Jacob is speaking through Dogen here, looking on helplessly but hopefully. Jack and the other candidates are like his children: he can only sit back and watch as they walk their paths in life, unable to do much of anything to help. He can only push or nudge them in the right direction, but he cannot directly interfere.

    Dogen’s final statement, “How long has he been playing?”, is much more than an innocent throwaway line of dialogue. It’s a direct reference to just how long LOST’s game has gone on, and how many times Jack himself has been through the loop. Iteration after iteration, Jack has been playing damned near forever. Yet perhaps this time through, maybe he’s come further than ever before. As the dark man told Sawyer last episode, “it would be a shame to turn back now after coming so far”.

    David is Jack’s direct reflection. To say what’s real or unreal is getting irrelevant at this late stage in the game. Suffice it to say that the Jack of this timeline – much like Kate and Locke – is finally learning. My guess is he’s gaining the important knowledge needed to go back to the island, where he’ll eventually win the war against Flocke and his recruits.

34. It was interesting to note Kate’s name on the wheel, at number 51. Even more interesting, her name was not crossed out. This reinforces my opinion from last recap: that although she’s not assigned one of the big six numbers, Kate is still a candidate. In fact, she’s a secret candidate, because the dark man knows only about Locke, Reyes, Jarrah, Shephard, Ford, and Kwon.

    So who’s coming to the island? Who’s number 108? The name on the wheel reads Wallace. Before I’d even seen the name, my money was on Desmond. Even afterward, I still like the idea that Desmond is on his way. He’ll arrive by boat, just as he did the last time he came to the island, just as the Oceanic six had to return by way of an airplane.  (29-34 by Vozzek69 at DarkUFO.com)
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35. In 6×05, The Lighthouse, we got to see… a lighthouse. The numbers corresponding in degrees to the heading of the lighthouse were affiliated with names… many familiar, some not. This seems to be a match with the numbers seen in the cave in the last episode. Of course, we also see that a person’s number can be dialed into and be observed from the lighthouse. Does it make any sense at all? Hmmmm…. no.  Click here to see close up pictures of the dial at Sledgeweb’s Lost Stuff

The Substitute Recap

Feb 17

metalman777Lost recap, season 6 No Comments

“The Substitute” is the 4th episode of Season 6 of Lost and the 107th produced hour of the series as a whole. It was originally broadcast on Feb 16, 2010. Locke goes in search of help to further his cause.  (lostpedia.com)

1. Officially, there was John Locke the Island adventurer, now a ripe, sun-bleached corpse buried six feet under on Boone Hill after Captain Frank Lapidus declared the impromptu graveside service ”the weirdest damn funeral” he’d ever been to. There was ”John Locke,” aka the Locke-ness Monster, the fearsome Island entity now wearing the Ben-murdered castaway’s visage, who oozed sincerity as he/it/whatever downloaded oodles of noodle-expanding mythology… although can we really trust him/it/whatever? And there was Sideways John Locke, a tough and tender man, so superior to his dead Island doppelganger in many ways, save possibly one. We met him as he fell flat on his face, yet another humiliation for a soul who seems to be destined to suffer a daily diet of humiliations no matter which ”island universe” he happens to reside upon. But this John Locke can laugh when the fates make fun of him. This John Locke has the self-awareness and strength to grow and change. And this John Locke is loved, and better, he knows it, and we were reminded last night how much we need that kind of love, both to flourish and survive.
2. Sideways John Locke had self-confidence, self-awareness, and a genuine self. He also enjoyed the security of knowing he was loved by his soulmate, Helen. But I wonder if that’s part of the important point of these parallel world stories. Lost is creating the means for us to see these too-familiar people with fresh eyes. By presenting them as something profoundly different, as profoundly ”Other,” the castaways are revealed anew, or perhaps even for the first time, by the comparison.
3. We were told nothing about how this Locke and Helen met. But we were told they have an October wedding date, and given that it’s late September in the Sideways world, I’m predicting that their Big Day will serve as a key moment for the entire Sideways arc — perhaps the time and place when all the disparate story lines will converge. Does Sideways Locke have a better relationship with his father than Island Locke had? It’s possible. When Helen suggested they elope after a frustrating phone call with a caterer, she pitched him on the idea of bringing Papa Locke along for the ride. John didn’t respond to the mere mention of his existence by involuntarily punching her in the face, so I’m guessing Sideways Anthony Cooper had nothing to do with crippling his son. ARE YOU THINKING WHAT I’M THINKING? We know from season 1 that Boone Carlyle’s mother, Sabrina Carlyle, owned a massively successful wedding business, and that Boone served as the company’s chief operating officer. Methinks the Carlyle family biz will play a role in solving Helen’s catering crisis…
4. But this was a clearly a Locke who didn’t believe in higher power-directed fate like his dead Island world counterpart. I thought it was interesting the way he described the walkabout later in the episode. He called it ”an adventure” about ”man versus nature.” By contrast, when Island Locke described the Walkabout in the classic season 1 episode of the same name, he called it ”a journey of spiritual renewal, where one derives strength from the earth and becomes inseparable from it.” Island Locke wanted to be feel connected to the world, to something bigger than himself; Sideways Locke wanted to feel his own strength, to feel whole again — to feel like a man.
5. How to account for the discrepancies between the two Lockes? There were a couple moments when I wondered if Sideways Locke had learned a thing or two from the experiences of his Island doppelganger via… quantum entanglement? Psychic connection? Past-life memories? (”When we’re puzzled we have all the stories that have been handed down from people who had the same problems.” — A Serious Man) Still, this matter of cross-universe connection was hard to say this week. For the third straight episode, the episode’s lead character was given a conspicuous moment in the bathroom, looking long and hard in the mirror. Where Jack saw an explicable (continuity) flaw on his skin and Kate watched herself flutter through the déjà vu blinky-blinkies, Locke struck a more conventional, contemplative pose, absent of any hint that he might be aware of his Island self. Which makes sense, given that Island Locke is, like, dead.
6. he curious thing about both photos: Locke appeared to be standing. When and how did Locke become dependent on a wheelchair for pedestrian perambulation? TBD. Island Locke didn’t get thrown out of that eighth-floor window by Bad Dad leaving him below-the-belt paralyzed until after Helen dumped his father-fixated ass. So it appears that Locke’s loss of lower legs was a trauma that he and his soul mate experienced together.
7. Was it just me, or did you get a Jacobesque vibe from Hurley, all empathetic benevolence as he responded to his ex-employee’s prickly anger with patience and grace and supreme knowingness and the hooked him up with a new job via his temp agency, another division of Hurley’s financial empire? Watching this scene, I couldn’t help but think about Helen’s earlier line about destiny. And I found myself flashing back to this scene later in the episode, when Helen challenged Locke’s incredulity about miracles. Was the Locke-Hurley crossing total coincidence, quantum synchronicity, or divinely orchestrated appointment? An elemental faith/reason debate worthy of old school Lost.
8. Yep, he lied to Boone on the plane. Like his Island counterpart, Sideways Locke was denied his outback adventure. And like his Island counterpart, Sideways Locke raged in response: ”Don’t tell me what I can’t do!” But this John Locke is capable of reflecting upon moments and realizing: My god, I must have sounded like… a big douche! Interesting that in an episode that saw the Locke-ness Monster spout Locke’s famous catchphrase, Sideways Locke came to the same conclusion about his situation that Smokey articulated in the premiere. They were right to deny me the walkabout, because it’s true — there are things I simply can’t do. He told Helen he was sick of daydreaming about life outside his chair, tired of imagining himself walking her down the aisle on their wedding day. He wanted to move into the liberating grace of brutal truth about himself and move on with his life. He asked Helen to do the same: ”I don’t want you to spend your life waiting for miracles, Helen, because there is no such thing.”
9. For now, though, John Locke is a man of science. Literally. You caught that, right? He accepted a job as substitute teacher. Subject: Biology. First lesson: the human reproductive system. It also looked like he was either teaching physical education or coaching basketball. There were some deeply embedded ironies here. FLASHBACK WHOOSH TO… the season 4 episode ”Cabin Fever,” in which Teenage Locke was encouraged by a teacher to cultivate his natural talent for science by attending a summer camp run by Mittelos Biosciences, the Others’ company that recruited miracle-grow fertility doc Juliet Burke to The Island. But Locke didn’t want to hear that. He wanted to drive fast cars and play sports. When he was told his dreams were unrealistic, Young Locke bellowed, ”Don’t tell me what I can’t do!” What a difference a (Jughead-spawned?) parallel reality makes. Here in the Sideways world, Locke is teaching science, teaching sports, and looking very much like a man who just found his niche. Of course, there’s still ample time for his born again life to go horribly wrong. After all, he’s now working with Benjamin Linus….
10. I thought this was an interesting newsflash from Ilana: Smokey is losing his shapeshifting mojo. By choosing Locke has his avatar, he’s becoming stuck with it, and you really got the sense that this god-like entity was settling into his new skin, his new home. But I also wondered what else Smokey might lose as he becomes more human. Will he lose the ability to turn to smoke and snake and coil through the jungle? Too bad, because that effect was pretty damn neat. But did you wonder as I did if perhaps some vestige of John Locke that got absorbed by Smokey along the way might be ”infecting” him to ironically appropriate some Island parlance? I got that latter vibe from the moment when we heard Un-Locke bellow, ”Don’t tell me what I can’t do.”
11. Sawyer became a dark knight of faith, a sinister ”substitute” for the deceased Locke. Or so I think the show made it seem….
12. UnLocke is old
    He told Sawyer that he was a reader — but that Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men, published in 1937, was after his time.
13. UnLocke used to be a man
    ”What I am is trapped,” Fake Locke told Sawyer at one point when James grew frustrated and pulled a gun on the Monster. (I was like, SHOOT HIM! Just see what happens!) ”I’ve been trapped for so long I don’t even remember what it feels like to be free. Maybe you understand that. But before I was trapped I was a man just like you. I know what its like to feel joy to feel pain, anger, fear, to experience betrayal. I know what it’s like to lose someone you love….” My gut is that hardcore Lost theorists will be pulling these lines apart, looking for clues they can research in hopes of ascertaining the Monster’s true identity. My guess is that we won’t find it in a book… but if we could, I’m betting that Un-Locke is either… Cain or Abel. I’ll explain why next week in my Doc Jensen column.
14. UnLocke and Richard have a special relationship
    The Monster stated again that he wants to leave the Island and go home. He told Richard that he wanted him to come along. Richard adamantly refused. More than that, Richard was pretty damn confused by almost everything FLocke was telling him, most importantly the whole concept of ”candidates,” Jacob’s picks for replacing him as Island protector (again, provided we can trust Un-Locke).
15. UnLocke is haunted by a ghost
    Smokey saw and was deeply ruffled by a vision of a sandy-haired boy with bloody hands wearing Others garb. He was also deeply bothered by the fact that Sawyer could see him, too. (If the boy is dead and appearing in spectral form, does that man that Sawyer has developed Hurley-like see dead people powers?) The boy later ventured close to Un-Locke, this time with no blood in his hands, and warned him that he could not kill him. THEORY: The boy functions as a referee in the Jacob-Man In Black skirmish. He got that honor because the boy represents the first person the Man In Black ever killed
16. The White and Black Rocks
    What Smokey Said: Upon arriving in Jacob’s cave, Un-Locke spotted two large stones, one white and one black, sitting on a scale. He grabbed the white rock and threw it out into the sea. Sawyer asked: Huh? Un-Locke replied, ”Inside joke.”
    Percentage Chance I Believe Smokey: 100% Or maybe 0%, because I got the sense from Smokey’s angry toss that this so-called ”inside joke” wasn’t all that funny for him. My guess is — obviously — that the white rock represented Jacob, and that tossing that rock was symbolic of Fake Locke’s (apparent) victory, and, perhaps, his rejection of the white/black categorization of his morality and his relationship with Jacob. My guess is also that whenever and whatever was decided between Jacob and his nemesis — the nature of their conflict/game; the roles they would play; the rules they would play by — it was all hashed out and settled in the cave, and the deal was sealed with some ceremonial putting-rocks-on-a-scale thing.
17. The Numbers
    What Smokey Said: Lost fans, prepare to rethink your Valenzetti Equations. With a dramatic reveal of the cave’s ceiling, we learned that Jacob assigned each of his potential replacements a number. He wrote their digits next to their last names on the ceiling of his cave with chalk. Locke: 4; [Hurley] Reyes: 8; [James ''Sawyer''] Ford: 15; [Sayid] Jarrah: 16; [Jack] Shephard: 23; [Jin or Sun?] Kwon: 42. Why? Un-Locke shrugged. ”Jacob had a thing for numbers,” he said.
    PCIBS: 49% It’s not that I think Jacob doesn’t have a thing for numbers — I just think that Jacob has good reason for assigning numbers to his candidates, and more, that Un-Locke knows what that reason is and isn’t telling Sawyer. DEBATE! Where’s Kate? (1-17 from Doc Jensen at ew.com)
    =====================
18. I haven’t had a chance to totally go over The Wall frame-by-frame (but Dark UFO has screencaps if you’re interested), but it seems nearly everyone on Flight 815 (or at least everyone who survived) was a candidate to replace Jacob (which seems very Charlie and the Chocolate Factory to me – who’s going to give up theirEverlasting Gobstopper, eh)? The Numbers represent six of our favorites:4 – Locke
    8 – Hurley
    15 – Sawyer
    16 – Sayid
    23 – Jack
    42 – Sun or Jin

    Locke’s name is now crossed out and I imagine Sayid’s name will be too now that he’s infected. And if Sawyer goes along with Smokey and doesn’t double cross him (which is a distinct possibility, don’t forget), Sawyer will also be out. This leaves Hurley, Jack and Sun or Jin. As for the latter two, I’m thinking it’s Jin since Sun wasn’t transported back in time on Flight 316. Of course, neither was Frank and he’s a candidate according to Ilana, but perhaps she hasn’t seen an updated list yet. Another possibility: Jacob did touch both Sun and Jin – maybe they can only be a candidate together.

19. And moreover, why is Smokey stuck as Locke now? I guess he won’t be impersonating Christian again anytime soon. So what do we know about the rules so far:1) Smokey isn’t allowed to kill Jacob unless he finds a loophole
    2) Smokey isn’t allowed to leave the Island
    3) Smokey isn’t allowed to kill the candidates (at least certain ones)

    We can probably also add that Smokey has to protect the Island when summoned (as Ben did in the Barracks) and he needs help in order to leave the Island (which seems why he’s trying to “recruit” Sawyer and Richard).

20. So is the Island simply a giant prison for Smokey with Jacob as the warden?Seems like it right now. And this also explains Smokey’s snarky comment to Richard in LA X where he comments that it’s good to see him “out of those chains,” with the chains being his servitude to Jacob.
21. are the Numbers just related to the candidates or are they really part of the Valenzetti Equation as well?You can click the link above for the full lowdown on Valenzetti, but the short of it is:
    

    According to the 1975 orientation film in the Sri Lanka Video, the Valenzetti Equation “predicts the exact number of years and months until humanity extinguishes itself.” During the video, Alvar Hanso also states that the radio transmitter on the Island, will “broadcast the core numerical values of the Valenzetti Equation.” The numbers,4, 8, 15, 16, 23 and 42, are explained in the Sri Lanka Video, as the numerical values to the core environmental and human factors of the Valenzetti Equation. Alvar Hanso also states in the video that the purpose of the DHARMA Initiative is to change the numerical values of any one of the core factors in the equation in order to give humanity a chance to survive by, effectively, changing doomsday.

    Now these explanations are not mutually exclusive. I could easily see Jacob’s six candidates as being the variables that could prevent Doomsday (Smokey) from destroying the world. The interesting thing to me is that you need to change one of the variables to prevent destruction. Is this what Jacob is trying to do, get the candidates to change, possibly through redemption on the Island? I think that’s a really, really neat concept, don’t you?  (18-21 from Mistaking Confidence With Fate)

    ==================

22. “You know the rules…”
    Rules! They were first mentioned by Ben when Alex was killed and he muttered that Widmore had changed the rules. There’s always been a link between the Widmore/Ben war and the Jacob/MiB one, and in “The Shape of Things to Come,” Ben tells Widmore that he knows Ben can’t kill Widmore, and in “The Incident,” the MiB can’t kill Jacob. Here the mini-Jacob tells Not-Locke that he knows he can’t kill him. Does this mean that Jacob is only merely dead, and is NOT most sincerely dead?
23. Someone pointed this out in the comments: have you noticed, by the way, that the flashbacks are following the same sequence as S1? First ep a two-parter that covered off many of the survivors, ep 3 a Kate-centric one, ep 4 a Locke-centric one… does this mean next week is Jack-centric and the following week will focus on Sun? Presumably ep 7 won’t be about Chah-lie…
24. The loopy career counsellor who asks Locke what animal he would describe himself as was the fake fortune-teller that Papa Reyes hired to try to trick Hurley in “Tricia Tanaka Is Dead.”
25. I’m thinking Locke didn’t end up in the wheelchair because his father threw him out a window this time. Perhaps Cooper was still behind it somehow, but why else would Helen say they should invite his dad and her parents to a shotgun wedding? (Unless of course she meant that the shotgun was aimed at Cooper.)  (22-25 from Nik at Nite)
    ======================

to see some great screen caps about the mystery ghost boy, click here.

to see more screen caps of Jacob’s master list in the cave, click here.

Episode 5 trailer:

What Kate Does Recap

Feb 10

metalman777Lost recap, season 6 No Comments

"What Kate Does" is the 3rd episode of Season 6 of Lost and the 106th produced hour of the series as a whole. It was first broadcast on Feb 9, 2010.

1. I give the episode an admiring B, and if you ask me again in a few hours, I might add a + to it, because the more I think through this deeper-than-it-appears affair, the more I’m stimulated by it. Granted, it’s my job to think about Lost, like, a lot, but put the episode’s good stuff on a scale and I’ll wager it’ll outweigh the lame stuff.
2. Josh Holloway’s wrenching acting as he revealed the heartbreaking disclosure that he intended to propose to Juliet. The intrigue of “infected” and “claimed” Sayid. The hilarious irony of Dr. Ethan Goodspeed. Crazy-scary mother-gone-wild Claire. The notable camaraderie of the Temple castaways, determined to survive their latest ordeal with “live together, die alone” idealism and great, knowing humor. And don’t look now, kids, but is Jack Shephard actually getting likable again? I loved his sincere concern for Kate and Sayid, his willingness to accept Sawyer’s seething heartbreak, and his humbled self-awareness. I loved his smiles, his knowing laughter, his warmth. “You take care of Sawyer, I’ll take care of Sayid,” Jack told Kate, the castaway dad huddling with the castaway mom on how to handle their troubled castaway kids. When he told Dogen, “I don’t even trust myself,” Jack may have uttered the most heroic statement of his wannabe hero life, because it was so painfully honest. Superman of Science? No. Superman of Faith? No. Just Jack. And in the end, one wonders if that’s exactly what he needs to be to save the day for himself and his friends.
3. The Sideways world story line very clearly mirrored the Island world story line. Kate chases after Sawyer; Kate chases after Claire. Is there a physical, cosmic connection between the two realities? Still TBD, though we were again given a few moments that seemed to suggest the Sideways characters were either intuitively recalling their Island experience or perhaps even channeling it. We’ve been told not to view the Sideways stuff as an inconsequential ”What if…?” fairy tale about an uncrashed Oceanic 815. Yet most of ”What Kate Does” felt exactly like that… until the final act, when we got the great comic irony of Tom Cruise’s Evil Cousin serving as Claire’s perfectly decent OB. By the end of the episode, I accepted Lost‘s first regular episode Sideways tale as a simplified pitch of the entire conceit. Nonetheless, I wished we had gotten more. Specifically: a clarifying peek into Sideways Kate past. Did this Kate also have a childhood pal with a fondness for toy airplanes? Did this Kate also murder her father? Did this Kate also marry a cop that looks like the guy Castle? The episode decided not to dote on the past.
4. Now, all of this is neat. But is Lost doing this just to be all fancy-pants literary, or could it be that Lost is trying to tell us something? Could it be that the creative design of Lost‘s sixth season, embedded and suffused with past episode resonance, is a clue to resolving the mystery of its seemingly split reality? I am wondering — and perhaps you are, too — if these corresponding events across parallel realities are meaningful synchronicities. It’s almost as if no matter the world, these people are destined to intersect and to play out variations of the same essential drama. THEORY! It’s all about reincarnation. The Sideways world is basically the afterlife for the Island castaways. Their Sideways selves contain the experiences of their Island World identities within their genetic make-up/spiritual essence. Think I’m crazy? Then I refer you to last year’s anagram clue, the Canton-Rainier (aka ”reincarnation”) Carpet Cleaning Company. See? Totally settled!
5. Now here’s the crazy thought I had — an alternative to past-life/reincarnation theory. I submit that when Kate saw Jack at the airport, she established a psycho-spiritual circuit with her doppelganger self on he Island, and specifically the moment between Jack and Kate in Temple. This circuit facilitated a transference of psychic energy that flowed from Island Kate to Sideways Kate — or rather, from Redeemed Kate to one of her Fallen Kate selves in another world. That energy? Strength. Selflessness. A sense of sacrifice. A sense of ”You All Everybody” idealism. All qualities that Kate embodied in her Island story — and all qualities that Kate gained during her Sideways story.To put it more simply: Island Kate inspired Sideways Kate. Bottom line: The Sideways-Island relationship is a metaphor for our relationship to fiction. It’s about how fantasy redeems reality
6. Then she saw the plush killer whale. Stopped her really, really cold. Kate looked in the mirror. The ”déjà vu-or-guilt?” expression wrinkled across her face. It would totally make sense to me if that killer whale poked at her Island-past life memory, because after all, in the Island world… it was Kate who gave Aaron that killer whale, not Claire. FLASHBACK-WHOOSH TO… the season 4 episode ”Something Nice Back Home,” the episode in which Aaron’s killer whale made its most prominent (and I think its only) appearance. This was the story in which Claire disappeared into the jungle with Ghost Christian, setting in motion the events that would send Aaron off the Island with Kate. This was also the episode in which Sawyer began to step up as a selfless castaway leader, setting in motion the events that would lead him to his own kind of ”something nice back home,” domestic bliss with Juliet in the Dharma ‘70s. This was also the episode that Jack proposed marriage to Kate — and then drove her away with his suspicion that her heart still belonged to Sawyer. This was also the episode where a bleeping smoke detector led Jack out in the waiting area of his hospital suite, where he found Ghost Christian sitting there, waiting for him. This was also the episode in which Jin made arrangements with Charlotte to make sure Sun got a spot on the helicopter that would get her off the Island, setting in motion the chain of events that would separate them. In various ways, all of these plot points from ”Something Nice Back Home” were implicitly referenced in the Island-set portion of ”What Kate Does.” I’ll identify them as we go — just look for handy-dandy SHAMU ALERT!
7. Killer whales belong to a long line of fish references in Lost. In season 3, we learned that the Hydra Station experimented on dolphins and sharks in their aquarium. In the season 4 premiere, Hurley’s sanitarium was swimming in big fish imagery, from a drawing in the day room to the graphic on Ghost Charlie’s short. At the end of season 5, we saw Jacob eating fish for breakfast. And of course, now we have… the Locke-ness Monster. You laugh — but then, you forget Claire’s disturbing nightmare from her season 1 episode ”Raised By Another,” which was suffused with her Aaron anxiety and future foreboding, and in which she encountered a creepy looking John Locke, one eye black, one eye white. Killer whale colors. Interesting. Especially interesting given our cultural affection for killer whales. See: Shamu, Free Willy, and one of favorite movies from my youth, Orca, the Killer Whale!, in which this boy killer whale goes crazy psycho on evil whalers for killing his pregnant girlfriend killer-whale mate. So very damn sad. IMPLICATION: FLocke, the Locke-ness Monster, may look fearsome and scary, but really, he’s our protector and friend. Just like Willy. Just like Prometheus.
8. Many people suspect Sayid became imbued with Jacob’s spirit, like he became a vessel for some or all of Jacob’s soul — a living Harry Potter horcrux. Maybe Dogen was trying to jar Jacob loose, bring him to the surface of Sayid’s consciousness. Honestly, watching Sayid suffer last night, my first thought was that Sayid should have… well, died. It looked like Dogen was inflicting way too much punishment, and Sayid’s tolerance struck me as almost superhuman — and superhuman ain’t natural. And here’s this observation from my colleague and fellow Lost friend Adam B. Vary. He noted that for a guy who went into death convinced he was going to hell, Sayid sure didn’t act like he was being punished, be it fairly or unfairly. His only frame of reference for his experience was one he knew full well: torture. He told Dogen that he had no information to share, nothing that he was hiding. Was that the ”tell” Dogen was looking for? We must recall last season, when Richard indicated that one of the side effects of the holy hot tub process was forgetfulness. Maybe Sayid remembers too much; maybe if the spring had worked, he wouldn’t have processed his experience through the lens of his old, damned life. Regardless: Sayid said and did all the wrong things for Dogen. FAIL! Time will tell if his grading is correct.
9. Aldo got up in Kate’s grill and reminded her that he was the all-grown-up-now Stephen Hawking-reading Other-boy that she and Sawyer assaulted outside Room 23 back in season 3. In doing so, Lost was cleverly reminding us of a significant gap in the Island’s story. The Oceanic 6 left the Island on the same day that the LeftBehinders started time traveling. That was around January of 2005. The dating of the current Island drama: December 2007/January 2008. That’s about 36 months of Island history that we have not seen. During that time, Aldo grew up. What else changed during that window? Well, for starters, someone disturbed the circle of ash around Jacob’s cabin and ransacked the joint. Also: Richard’s tribe of Others set up camp on the beach. Perhaps season 6 will help fill in the blanks.
10. The last time we saw Claire in the Island narrative, she was hanging with her father, Christian Shephard, in Jacob’s shack. We suspected that like Christian, she, too, was dead, killed during Keamy’s mercenary raid on New Otherton. In light of the revelation that Fake Locke is Smokey, and knowing that Smokey can animate or take the form of the dead, we should be wondering if back then, Ghost Christian and Ghost Claire were Smokey manifestations, too. Then again, this frizzy-haired crazy Claire that we saw last night came off as human. We were told by Dogen that Claire had been ”claimed” by the same ”darkness” currently spreading within Sayid. So many pieces of info, desperately needing clarifying context. I’m still crunching it. In the meantime, I’m going to theorize that Scary-Pale Claire is the Solomon Grundy of the Island… or a golem. And I’m not going to tell you what the hell I mean by that either! (1-10 from Doc Jensen)
    ====================
11. For me the most important line is the one above, spoken by Dogen. “Claimed” suggests that Sayid’s body has been taken over by someone (or something) else. We all assumed last week it was Jacob, and maybe the Temple dwellers assume it’s the Man in Black, and that he’s the bad dude. Watching Sayid hooked up to the electrocution device and seeing him getting stabbed with a hot poker made me think, “Wow… karma’s a bitch.” But they were using these torture instruments diagnostically. How? Could they have been seeing if the thing that Sayid’s body is hosting would jump out? Did they think he’d start talking in tongues? Or was it something more physical and less supernatural than that?
12. So… is this a production error or a suggestion that in the new timeline, Flight 815 actually left a month later? Claire’s ultrasound readout clearly says the date is 10/22/2004, which puts the flight in October, NOT September. (It also says it’s 9:29 in the morning, and considering it’s probably been a few hours of Kate and Claire running around and it’s been broad daylight the entire time… this is probably yet ANOTHER prop error.) So… prop error or hint that even the date is different?
13. The killer whale doll! Do you remember that? It’s from “Something Nice Back Home.” As Jack’s going completely ballistic on Kate because of some phone call that he thought might have something to do with Sawyer and he’s about to leave them, just as he says, “You’re not even RELATED to him!” Aaron comes walking out into the kitchen and he’s standing there holding the whale doll. Kate would have bought that for him, and in this reality Claire’s the one who got it for him. (It’s a clear reminder of the black and white theme on the show.)
14. Dogen says to Jack that he needs to remain separate from his people, because it makes it easier when he makes decisions they don’t like. As much as I loathe having to remind anyone of the events of “Stranger in a Strange Land,” this reminded me of the Jack tattoo that “Woman From the Others Who We Never Saw Again and Seemed to Have Been A Mistake At the Time Before the Writers Had Truly Worked Things Out” said meant, “He walks among us, but he is not one of us.”
15. Dogen’s name comes from D?gen Zenji, who was a Zen Buddhist master of one of the three sects of Japanese Buddhism. He lived in the thirteenth century.
16. Kate’s used the name “Joan Hart” before. I think it was in the flashback where she dyes her blonde hair back to the original brown and then asks the guy at the hotel front desk for any letters to Joan Hart.
17. In the original timeline that we saw before, many of us speculated that there was no adopting family on the other side, and Richard Malkin simply knew that flight was going to crash and he put Claire on it, forcing her to have to raise Aaron on her own. Does the adopting mom on the other side suggest that Malkin really was telling the truth, or did this change as a result of the different timeline?  (11-17 from Nik at Nite)
    ========================
18. As Kate, Claire and the taxi driver make their break for it, Kate looks out her window and sees Jack. They share a lengthy glance that, in my humble opinion, tells us something important: she clearly remembers him. Now you might be thinking, “Of course she remembers him, she collided with him outside the 815 bathroom.” Yes, that’s true, but her expression is one of complete bewilderment, and that’s because she remembers him from somewhere else. Think about it – she’s desperately trying to make her escape, Arzt is blocking the taxi, all hell is breaking loose… in this situation, it would take something really out of the ordinary to make her forget all that for even a few seconds. When she sees Jack, she knows that she knows him from somewhere else.
19. Claire goes into labor and Kate, pulling a 180 from the desperate-to-escape convict we saw earlier, drives her to the hospital and even stays by her side. The doctor is none other than our good friend Ethan, which I thought was one of the episode’s more favorable developments. “I don’t want to stick you with needles if I don’t have to,” he says. I guess papa Horace got him on the sub in “The Incident” or else he wouldn’t actually be alive in this timeline.
20. Kate, Jin and two Others head out to recover Sawyer. And guess what – one of the Others is Aldo, vigilant guard of Room 23 (and I thought he was blown up at the beach raid in “Through the Looking Glass”!). I kind of liked Aldo showing up, mainly because he adds a degree of continuity to the Others, which is something the Others sorely lack most of the time. Apparently he’s been holding a grudge against Kate for knocking him unconscious three years ago, motivating him to spend the entire episode as an incompetent jerk. But he’s an Other, so I guess we shouldn’t expect anything other than constant, needless violence and threats from him.  (Ok, I just have to mention how weird it was to see Mac from It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia pop up as a character on Lost!!  The two shows could not possibly be more opposite.  Lost is intelligent and insightful and full of mystery.  It’s Always Sunny is the most irreverent and funny show I’ve ever seen. If you haven’t seen It’s Always Sunny, give it a try.  Just make sure there are absolutely no kids around!)
21. Kate finds Sawyer at the Barracks continuing to mourn Juliet. He even digs an engagement ring out the floorboards of his old house and, like Desmond in “Flashes Before Your Eyes”, he chucks it into the ocean. He won’t go back to the Temple with Kate, though it’s not entirely clear that she’s headed back there, anyway. If the Others’ goal is really to unite the “Touched”, they’re sure doing a lousy job.
22. Check out that ashy smoke that Dogen sprays on Sayid. Related to the circle of ash that keeps away the Smoke Monster? Quite possibly.
23. Since Dogen used the same words as Rousseau – i.e., “infected” and “sick” – I’m going to venture that this sickness afflicting Sayid is the same one that claimed the lives of Rousseau’s team. But this creates some inconsistencies. We pretty much know how Rousseau’s team got sick: the Smoke Monster did something to them. It would then make sense that ash is used in both the sickness “test” and to protect oneself from Smokey. But how did Sayid catch the sickness? We’ve known his whereabouts almost the entire time he’s been back on the island, and he never encountered the Smoke Monster. I guess going into the Spring could have something to do with it (on account of the water being murky), but Dogen and a couple Others went in there, too, and I’m assuming they’re not sick.
24. But instead of telling Jack anything concrete or meaningful about the sickness, Dogen sidesteps questions by revealing that it “claimed” his sister – Claire. Does this mean Claire is going crazy and leaving traps because she’s infected? That’s a little strange, as Claire is acting like Rousseau, who is the one verifiable person that didn’t get infected. Personally, I have trouble taking the Others at their word. But if he’s telling the truth, we’ll need to be shown some sort of flashback involving Claire and Dogen. But shooting Aldo doesn’t make Claire an “infected” person in my book, yet.
25. Deciphering the Others’ hierarchy has been a goal of Lost fans ever since Benry Gale claimed that bearded Tom was not the leader. That was four seasons ago. One would think we’d stop running into people claiming to be in charge of the Others by now.Tom, Klugh and Isabel were possibilities a long, long time ago. Stronger contenders included Charles Widmore, Eloise Hawking, Benjamin Linus and John Locke, who have all claimed to be the leader. And when finally it’s looking like the guy with the real authority has been Richard Alpert (on Jacob’s behalf) all along, Dogen appears. Is Dogen above Richard? I hope not, as that would really mess with my conception of the Others. I’d like to believe Dogen is lower on the chain than the “official” leader bracket, but I can’t really picture him taking orders from the likes of Ben.  (18-25 by Robz888)
    =================
26. Aaron has identity even before his birth.  This is a disturbing and wonderful and deeply mysterious truth, made more profound by the chilling then comforting presence of Ethan Goodspeed at Claire’s bedside.   Apparently, whether Claire gives birth on-Island or off, Ethan must lead the prenatal preparations.  This revelation was one of several instances of relational inevitability dramatised over the last three hours.  The recurring theme of inevitability seems fresh with each occurrence, seems a necessary aspect of the narrative.
27. His name must be Aaron.  “I don’t know why I said it,” Claire says to Kate.  “It was like I knew it or something.”  He is Aaron because his own flesh-and-blood mother must raise him.  And somehow, we know, even before Claire knocks on the door of the adopting family’s house, there is no way they can adopt the baby.  Of course the woman’s husband left her–the world is course-correcting in such a way that Claire, whether she likes it or not, will have to raise the baby herself.  That is her destiny, but more importantly, this is Aaron’s destiny.
28. The most terrible and exciting aspect of this entire sequence of scenes is the fact that every facet of the strange inevitability around Aaron revolves around the truth that he must return to the Island.  Yet we know, in the spacetime inhabited by fugitive Kate and pregnant Claire and the pleasant Dr. Goodspeed, the Island is submerged under a thousand metres of water.  There is no Island to which Aaron can return, and in this spacetime, he was never even on the Island.  Yet the connection to the Island is undeniable.  Aaron is tethered to the Island by an umbilical stronger and more real than the one connecting him to his mother.
29. Sayid and Jack place greater value on their trust of each other than on their own lives.
30. This is not a show about good versus evil.  It is not about free will versus determinism.  It is not about time travel or electromagnetic anomalies or spacetime displacement.  It is about our very humanity.  It is about who we are at the very centre of our conscious selves.
31. The interaction between the two women is as rich in its own way as the higher-stakes scenes between Jack and Sayid.  Claire ought to be frightened by the reckless fugitive who thinks nothing of pointing loaded guns at anyone crossing her path.  Yet Claire feels endeared to the woman and her genuine desire to help.  When Claire asks Kate to accompany her to the door of the adoptive parents’ home, we know the connection is firm.  And when they dash to the hospital, Claire protects her new friend.
    

Two sides:  One Jacob, one the Man in Black.  One says human beings are essentially good, that we seek perfection.  One says human beings are corrupt, that we can only be judged for our sins.

In the world of LOST–on the Island–they’re both wrong.  Human beings are good and bad.  But our humanity is only good.  It is our humanity–the fertile soil of our existence as complete human beings–that is worthy above all of our most reverent attention–even to the point of sacrificing health and life to secure for the common good  (26-31 from Pearson Moore)

============(I don’t know why my numbered list reset to 1.  Can’t fix it!!  aargh!)

1. The Others started freaking out about Sayid after he had mysteriously come back to life (yeah, I’d freak out too). But does the Sickness only infect dead bodies? And, more specifically, do they have to be unburied to infect them? Claire likely died somewhere in the jungle after the explosion at the Barracks. And remember that Christian’s body was unburied when the coffin crashed on the Island too. Boone, Shannon, Charlie, Eko, Ana-Lucia, Libby and Nikki & Paolo were all buried and we haven’t seen them walking around the Island ala Christian.But if Smokey is the one claiming them, can Smokey only assume the forms of unburied bodies? He’s appeared as Christian and Yemi to be sure (both unburied, Yemi’s body was burned and later disappeared). He’s also appeared as Alex, whose body I believe was left at the Barracks in the aftermath of the attack (Ben said goodbye, but I don’t think he buried her).I wonder if this has anything to do with the theory that Smokey really is one of the Egyptian Gods of the underworld. Of course, since we now know that the Nemesis = Smokey, Smokey’s got to be a more important god to rival Jacob. If Jacob is Horus, Osiris, orRa then Smokey is Anubis, Set, or Apep. Regardless, I think this is definitely worth keeping in mind.  (from Mistaking Confidence With Kate)

And here’s a promo for next weeks episode.  Is Sawyer going to team up with the Locke-ness Monster?

LA X Recap

Feb 03

metalman777Lost recap, season 6 2 Comments

SEASON 6, EPISODE 1: LA X

What can you say?  After an almost year long hiatus, Lost is back, kickin’ butt and takin’ names!!!  I thoroughly enjoyed these first two episodes and loved the big reveals, and of course, was frustrated at all the new questions this episode created!

Also, I just want to be clear, that the following ideas and theories are collated from about 10-15 different other blogs and podcasts I follow on a daily basis.  I figure that I’ll summarize all the great ideas out there for those of you who choose to just follow one blog, that being mine.  (click here to see a list of all the Lost people I read or click here to see a list of Lost fanatics I follow on Twitter)  This post is rather long, but well worth the read.  Lots of great theories ahead!

I’m going to start off this blog post by highlighting a very telling interview Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse (Lost’s main producers) gave to Entertainment Weekly.  (click here for full link)  I encourage to read it fully, as there are lots of tidbits spread throughout the article.

EW: The whole idea of flash-sideways and the plan to use season 6 to show us a world where Oceanic 815 never crashed — how long has that been in the works? Why did you want to do it?
DAMON LINDELOF: It’s been in play for at least a couple of years. We knew that the ending of the time travel season was going to be an attempt to reboot. And as a result, we [knew] the audience was going to come out of the “do-over moment” thinking we were either going start over or just say it didn’t work and continue on. [We thought] wouldn’t it be great if we did both? That was the origin of the story.
CARLTON CUSE: We thought just doing one [of those options] would inherently not be satisfying. Since the very beginning of the show, characters started crossing through each other’s stories. Part of our desire [in season 6] is to show that there’s still this kind of weave, that these characters still would have impacted each other’s lives even without the event of crashing on the Island. Obviously, the big question of the season is going to be: How do these [two timelines] reconcile? However, for the fans who have not watched the show closely, that’s an intact narrative. You can just watch the flash sideways — they stand alone all by themselves. For the fans who are more deeply embedded in the show, you can watch those flash sideways, compare them to what transpired in the flashbacks and go, “Oh, that’s an interesting difference.”
LINDELOF: Right out of the gate, in the first five minutes of the premiere, you get hit over the head with two things that you’re not expecting. The first is that Desmond is on the plane. The second thing that we do is we drop out of the plane and we go below the water and we see that the Island is submerged. What we’re trying to do there is basically say to you, “God bless the survivors of Oceanic 815, because they’re so self-centered, they thought the only effect [of detonating the bomb] was going to be that their plane never crashes.” But they don’t stop to think, “If we do this in 1977, what else is going to affected by this?” So that their entire lives can be changed radically. In fact, it would appear that they’ve sunken the Island. That’s our way of saying, “Keep your eyes peeled for the differences that you’re not expecting.” Some of these characters were still in Australia, but some weren’t. Shannon’s not there. Boone actually says that he tried to get her back. There are all sorts of other people that we don’t see. Where’s Libby? Where’s Ana Lucia? Where’s Eko? These are all the things that you’re supposed to be thinking about. When our characters posited the “What if?” scenario, they neglected to think about what the other effects of potentially changing time might be and we’re embracing those things.

That said, are you saying definitively that detonating Jughead was the event that created this new timeline? Or is that a mystery which the season 6 story will reveal?
LINDELOF: It’s a mystery. A big one.
CUSE: We did have some concern that it might be confusing kind of going into the season. To clear that up a little bit: The archetypes of the characters are the same and that’s the most significant thing. Kate is still a fugitive. If you were to look at the Comic-Con video, for instance, that now comes into play. There was a different scenario in that story. She basically blew up an apprentice plumber as opposed to killing her biological father/stepfather. Those kind of differences exist, but who the characters fundamentally are is the same. If it becomes too confusing for you, you can just follow the flash sideways for what they are. It’s not as though there’s narrative that hangs on the fact that you need to know that this event was different in that world, in the flashback world versus the sideways world. That’s not critical for being able to process the narrative this season.

Is there a relationship between Island reality and sideways reality? Will they run parallel for the remainder of the season? Will they fuse together? Might one fade away?
LINDELOF: For us, the big risk that we’re taking in the final season of the show is basically this very question. [Lindelof then explains the show has replaced the trademark “whoosh!” sound effect marking the segue between Island present story and flashbacks or flash-forwards, thus calling conspicuous attention to the relationship between the Island world and the Sideways world.] This is the critical mystery of the season, which is, “What is the relationship between these two shows?” And we don’t use the phrase “alternate reality,” because to call one of them an “alternate reality” is to infer that one of them isn’t real, or one of them is real and the other is the alternate to being real.
CUSE: But the questions you’re asking are exactly the right questions. What are we to make of the fact that they’re showing us two different timelines? Are they going to resolve? Are they going to connect? Are they going to co-exist in parallel fashion? Are they going to cross? Do they intersect? Does one prove to be viable and the other one not? I think those are all the kind of speculations that are the right speculations to be having at this point in the season.
LINDELOF: But it is going to require patience. We’ve taught the audience how to be patient thus far, so while they’re getting a lot of mythological answers on the island early in the season, this idea of what is the relationship between the two [worlds] is a little bit more of a slow burn.

Did Jughead really sink the Island? And is it possible that the Sideways characters are now caught in a time loop in which they might have to go back in time and fulfill the obligation to continuity by detonating the bomb?
LINDELOF: These questions will be dealt with on the show. Should you infer that the detonation of Jughead is what sunk the island? Who knows? But there’s the Foot. What do you get when you see that shot? It looks like New Otherton got built. These little clues [might help you] extrapolate when the Island may have sunk. Start to think about it. A couple of episodes down the road, some of the characters might even discuss it. We will say this: season 6 is not about time travel. It’s about the implications, the aftermath, and the causality of trying to change the past. But the idea of continuing to do paradoxical storytelling is not what we’re interested in this year.

Now, off to see what the blogosphere is saying about last night’s brand new Lost episodes.

1. Did Jacob want Ben to kill him?  I keep being reminded of Ob-Wan, “If you strike me down I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine”.  Of course we all know how that ended, Obi-Wan turned into a useless ghost.  But there do seem to be parallels.  Obi-wan/Jacob is killed way too easily by a lackey, Darth Vader/Ben, while the real Master, The Emporer/”Locke” sits on the sidelines.  Will Jacob be more useful?
2. Is it possible that Ben is feeling suicidal?  He’s back on the Island like he wanted, but Locke is there too, ready to snatch The Others away from him.  His own daughter accused him of her murder and now he’s killed his former boss.  I imagine that might be a little discouraging.
3. ”See you in another life” has new meaning now doesn’t it? (Desmond had told Jack that in Season 2 as they exercised at a local track)
   
4. Jacob says, “I was killed by an old friend who grew tired of my company”.  I’m definitely thinking a lot about the cave drawing of Smokey and Anubis. Beside that there is some slight significance to that line.  Apparently the Man in Black was annoyed with Jacob because they had to spend so much time together, presumably stuck on the Island.
   
5. Sayid was very concerned about what would happen to him after he died.  I think that raises the possibility of something interesting happening to everyone off the Island after these characters die.  Dying on the Island, in that timeline, might allow a character to pass into the other timeline.  I doubt the writers wanted to bring up heaven and hell at this point.
6. Charlie says “I was supposed to die”.  Really?  In the same way he was supposed to die at the end of Season 4?  Is Charlie aware of the past?  That would make him more interesting. (1-6 Not Confused Just Lost)
7. Free Will vs. Destiny
8. Again the show’s overarching theme was there in a big way. Charlie says he was supposed to die, and in the original timeline, that’s exactly what happened. When they find Montand’s body, he had on him one of Kierkegaard’s books. Kierkegaard believed in choice and free will and believed in experience over theory. Perhaps Smokey attacked Rousseau’s crew for those beliefs? (Interestingly, he also studied the personal and psychological reactions people had when faced with certain circumstances, as if he were the real father of the Dharma Initiative, who ran many psychological experiments that covered similar material.) There’s an idea in the episode that no matter which path you choose, the outcome will be the same. Jack will always be the guy rushing to someone’s side, and will be hated for it. Locke will continue to believe in his greatness, even if no one else does. Boone says he’d be by Locke’s side, just as he was on the island. When Kate knocks the marshall out, he incurs the exact same wound on the same side of his forehead that he got when the case whacked him in the head. When Kate runs into Jack as she’s stepping out of the airplane bathroom, she looks at Jack like she’s immediately taken by him, just like she did on the island. When Sawyer sees Kate’s handcuffs in the elevator, he’s immediately attracted by her bad-girl nature and helps her out.
   
9. So blowing up a Hydrogen bomb in the Swan caused the entire Island to sink.  Hmm, curious.  That kind of implies that they killed everyone on the Island.  I guess they considered that before they did it, but still, to see it makes a big difference.  All those people died to give Jack a second chance with Kate?  Of course this is all mostly just hypothetical, in reality those people only died in 50% of the show.  They lived in half of these episodes (well until the Purge)
   
10. Hurley’s also wearing a red shirt. Which has me REALLY REALLY worried. Please change shirts, Hurley. Soon! (3-5 Nik at Nite)
11. The questions you are asking are questions you should be asking. (2) You will get answers to these questions — but patience will be required. (3) The temptation will be to dismiss the sideways story as ”What if…?” trivia, but we should trust that we’re being shown this story for a reason, and so we should take the leap of investing in its reality. Interesting: Last night’s first of two conspicuous literary references was Salman Rushdie’s fantasy Haroun and the Sea of Stories. Its famous line? ”What’s the use of stories that aren’t even true?” The premiere’s second conspicuous reference? Philosopher Soren Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling, which challenges true believers to embrace the absurdity of faith. Combined, both books send this message to us: This absurd sideways thing has a purpose. It is ”useful.” Promise. Have faith. Just go with it..
12. o my eyes, the premiere, entitled ”LA X,” was filled with metaphors for afterlife possibilities, beginning with that bravura f/x shot taking us to the sunken Island — a figurative descent into the underworld, to a veritable city of the dead. The Sideways story line represented old, pagan ideas of reincarnation. The Island story line, with its deus ex machina plucked characters: the Christian rapture.
13. the episode continued to mirror the established Lostnarrative. Jack’s nicked neck RX was analog to pilot’s ”physician, heal thyself” moment when Jack excused himself to the jungle of Craphole Island to patch up the ugly gash on his side. One wonders if the entire season 6 side ways story line will model the general thematic thrust of the castaway story, but with different incidents and events — a gritty, more down-to-earth version of the mythic, larger-than-life Island epic, like how Dorothy’s adventure in Oz was a fantastical extrapolation of her life in Kansas.
14. But where did Desmond go? Later, when Jack returned to his seat from saving Charlie from a bag of heroin, Desmond had vanished. There’s probably a reasonable explanation for this, too. (That Jack was creepy. I’m going back to my other chair next to the snoring guy.) Still, I did have the thought that Desmond could be flickering in and out of this world, like Pariah in Crisis on Infinite Earths. And if that reference lost you, just pretend it didn’t. Maybe there’s something not quite ”set” about the Sideways reality, that it’s still in flux, and Desmond is an element moving in and out of the mix, like a supplementary story line to an epic film that may or may not make the final cut depending on the director’s vision.

14. Question: What sunk the Island?

Possible Answer: Jughead.
Does That Make Sense? I’m not sure. If the bomb was powerful enough to sink the Island, wouldn’t it also have obliterated the Dharma Barracks, which we saw were still intact?

Question: So if not Jughead… what sunk the Island?
Possible Answer: The Island’s electromagnetic energy.
Huh? In all my theorizing about Jughead since last May, I have pretty much neglected this pretty huge plot point. The Dharma Initiative was dealing with another crisis that had nothing to do with the time travelers or Jughead. Radzinsky’s ”Black Swan” team has been drilling into the Island’s pocket of electromagnetic energy. Doing so risked cataclysmic consequences, according to Dr. Chang. What if in the Sideways world, Radzinsky continued drilling, hit the EM pocket, and triggered a cataclysm that sunk the Island. Where do the castaways fit into this theory? They don’t. Or won’t. I mean they don’t have to, because this scenario doesn’t need them. The sideways world could have branched off from Island world many years earlier. It may not even be a branch at all.

15.  The question remains: What did Juliet mean by ”It worked”? Clearly, Lost wanted us to think that Juliet was acknowledging the Sideways World. Here’s just one possibility. Perhaps the Sideways World is the afterlife for these characters. Perhaps when they die, their consciousness or essence zips into their sideways doppelgänger. Perhaps what Juliet really saw as she was slipping away from the Island World was the dawning of a new life with Sawyer in the Sideways World. The show has given us precedent. I refer to season 3, ”The High Cost Of Living” — the episode where Mr. Eko was killed by Smokey. As Eko lay dying, we were shown a sweet little bit of younger Eko walking into the sunset with his brother, Yemi. Was Eko merely flashing on a happy memory — or were we being shown Eko’s afterlife destiny, i.e. his soul transmigrating back to a pivotal point in his past? In light of what we saw in the premiere, I would amend ”point in the past” to ”the sideways world.”

16.  So just in case you stragglers weren’t sure of this before, the Whispers = the Others. But perhaps a certain classification of Others, i.e. the hard-core Island mystics that hang in the spiritual heart of the Island, anchored by a ziggurat, a step pyramid more Mesopotamian than Egyptian, even though there were Egyptian hieroglyphics everywhere. I am beginning to feel Island archaeology is tangential to what the Island really is. The Island: the original and purest expression of the God idea, of God power. These ruins? The remains of those zealots who’ve attempted to claim, name, and tame this place over the centuries — those people the Man In Black spoke of last year: ”They come. They fight. They destroy. They corrupt. It always ends the same.”

17.  it seemed to me what needed to happen was that Sayid needed to not only be revived but stay alive for the entire course of the treatment in order for the full scope of its magic/effect to take. What is that magic/effect? And what were the ”risks” Dogen spoke of? We may look to Benjamin Linus for some illumination. Last year, after Sayid shot Young Ben, Richard Alpert brought the boy into the Temple for healing. We may now surmise that what happened to Sayid was what happened to Ben, albeit more successfully. But what did Alpert say? ”He’ll forget this ever happened, and his innocence will be gone.” The bottom line is that the spring’s affect on people may be more than physical — it could be spiritual, too.

18.  ”Hello, Richard. Nice to see you out of those chains.’‘ FLocke’s line to Richard after leaving the Four Toed Statue and Richard had finally figured out FLocke’s identity was a theory spawner. ”You?” Richard said. ”Me,” Flocked said, and then took him down hard. The popular theory is that FLocke was alluding to the Black Rock with his chains reference, as if Richard had come to the Island as a slave. What might be the reason for their bad blood? My hunch is that FLocke is bitter toward Alpert for conspiring successfully to keep FLocke locked up all these years. FLocke hoisted the unconscious Alpert on his shoulder and walked into the jungle, yelling before that: ”I AM VERY DISAPPOINTED IN ALL OF YOU. As he left, he passed the body of the real John Locke lying dead on the and. I yearned for this betrayed man of faith to take to his feet and walk again. That didn’t happen.  (10-18 Doc Jensen)

19.  This is also a good time to point out a strange line of dialogue from season one, during All The Best Cowboys Have Daddy Issues. After Ethan drags Charlie off and Jack is chasing after him, he tells Kate “I’m not letting him do this. Not again.” Is Jack referring to Ethan taking Claire earlier in the season? Maybe. At the same time though, it also seems as if Jack knows what’s happened before, and this time around he’s looking to change the outcome. If you ask me, Charlie was supposed to die at that tree. Jack brought him back through sheer force of will… call it faith, belief, or whatever. From that moment on, death always surrounded Charlie. As Desmond proved over and over in season three, there was just no saving him. Even now, in this alternate timeline, Jack is still trying to prevent his friend from dying. It might not be long before destiny course corrects by killing Charlie in some other way.

Examine Charlie’s many deaths a little more closely, and they all have one thing in common: not breathing. Desmond saw him drown (once in a dream, once in reality), Ethan hangs him to asphyxiation, and we see a vision in which he gets shot in the throat with an arrow. Now, in this episode, Charlie’s choking on a big bag of heroin. Whatever happened to kill Charlie must apparently happen again and again, in the same basic way, no matter where, when or what universe he happens to be in.

20.  Traditionally, mirrors have played a huge part all throughout LOST. In almost every case, they’ve reflected back the raw truth. Maybe they’ve even given us a glimpse into the elusive ‘other side’. Whatever happened to cause the wound on Jack’s neck, perhaps it only happened in the one “true” universe. It’s possible the mirror is reflecting back something that happens to Jack later on, or maybe even at the end of the show. It’s important to realize that we never see this wound directly, but only in the mirror.

21.  It was extremely significant that Locke gave Bram’s team a choice before killing them. He explained that Jacob was dead, and presented their situation in a straightforward, logical way. They were basically free to go, at least up until Bram fired his gun. Once that happened, judgment could be passed. This is also why Richard is so adamant that no one on the beach shoot Locke, screaming for them to hold their fire when he finally emerges from the statue.

Going a bit further, this also explains why the smoke monster doesn’t just kill anyone and everyone it comes across. We already know that the dark man disapproves of Jacob bringing people to the island. In keeping with the rules however, he seems unable to touch anyone unless he’s judged them first, or unless they’ve wronged him in some way. Not sure how or why it killed Seth Norris or Nadine… but both of those characters had just arrived on the island so maybe there was a exception clause. Or maybe the smoke monster hadn’t eaten in a while, and he was just plain hungry.

Bram’s circle of ash is something the monster apparently can’t cross. Perhaps this solves the mystery of Jacob’s cabin: it wasn’t Jacob’s at all. If the cabin served as a type of prison, then the circle of ash there was used to keep the entity or monster in and not out. This may by why Illana’s team burned the cabin to the ground upon reaching the island – possibly on Jacob’s orders. In any case, Bram’s plan A sucked, and his plan B was non-existant.

22.  Jacob’s lists have always been critical to LOST’s story. He’s not very big on communication, so these lists are all his followers really have to go on. I’ve long theorized that the people listed by Jacob are the ones integral to the end game – without every single one of them, Jacob’s final ending cannot be realized. This could be why the hippy with the wire-rimmed glasses tells us that Sayid had better pull through, or there’s going to be BIG trouble. As they called out their names, I also realized that we were cycling through every single one of the characters that Jacob had already touched during The Incident. Sawyer shows up later on, and he’s been touched too. But Miles? Uh oh

23.  So what happens now? Is Sayid still Sayid, or is he now a ‘candidate’ for Jacob? As much as I hate to say it, we’ve probably seen the end of the asskicking Iraqi we all know and love. Hopefully I’m wrong, but it would make more sense for Jacob to somehow inhabit Sayid’s body here, especially since he was the one who sent that body to the temple. Go back and look at Jacob’s face while he’s talking to Hurley and examining Sayid’s wounds. Even he knows the guy is too far gone. It’s unfortunate, and he looks a little sorry to even do it, but I’m pretty sure Jacob’s going to somehow live through this new version of Sayid

24.  While I’m not sure Jacob and his nemesis are a pair of fallen angels, there’s certainly a higher power above them. Maybe they’ve been placed on the island for a specific purpose: to serve a penance all their own. Perhaps their game isn’t a game at all, but a lesson that needs to be learned before they can move on. If this is the case, the island becomes their own personal Purgatory…. and yes, I said Purgatory

25.  After the crash, Jack has no way of knowing that his dad’s coffin wasn’t on the plane. As far as he’s concerned, it was. So when he starts chasing ghost-Christian through the jungle and “finds” the coffin, is Jack only seeing what he expects to see? Did he bring his father’s coffin – and even his Christian himself – to the island via the magic box, much like Sawyer unknowingly brought The Man From Tallahassee? Kooky idea, but we’re in season six. Ghosts, time travel, alternate timelines… the whole magic box thing goes down a lot easier these days.

Similarly, Locke’s case of knives was found amongst the beach wreckage early in season one. I’ve long speculated that those knives were there simply because Locke wanted them to be there, but now we find out that he really did pack them. Yet if they never made the plane and they somehow still showed up on the beach… magic box? Could be. Early on we saw a lot of things brought into being by requirement, usually whenever a character needed them most.

26.  After beating Richard like a prison inmate trying to make a statement, the monster stands up to address everyone surrounding him. “I’m very disappointed in all of you!”, he shouts. Not sure what he means by this, but it struck me that maybe he’s going topretend to be Jacob. It was probably that half-smirk he made at the end. The only conscious person who’d know that he’s lying would be Ben… and the last time we saw Ben he was looking for a second pair of shorts. Whatever the dark man’s next move is, you can be sure it involves an asskicking.  (19-26 by Vozzek69)

Lost at Comic-Con 2009

Jul 27

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Some big news for Lost fans:  The entire 2009 Comic-Con panel is online, along with two new Season 6 trailers!

Let’s start by looking at the new Season 6 trailers:

Obviously, the ramifications of these videos is phenomenal.  Hurley with incredible luck after winning the lottery?  Kate still on the run from authorities?  The time line has definitely been reset.

Another video played was this Memorial Video for all the characters that have died.  Are they just refreshing our memory for when we see these characters again?

Here are the videos from the actual Lost panel at Comic-Con:

Did you notice right at 7 minutes they said we’d see characters we hadn’t seen since Season 1?   Could the whispers we’ve been hearing actually be the Losties themselves as they observe the 2004 time line?

At a minute 34, they confirm that Farraday will be back.  Right at 5 minutes, Jorge Garcia (Hurley) asks a question that all of us are asking if the time line does get reset.  At 7 minutes, Michael Emerson (Ben) pops up and starts hecklin’ Garcia!  Great stuff!

One minute in, they confirm that we will hear the back story of the Black Rock and we will see a Richard Alpert flashback!   Two minutes in, they confirm that Juliet will be back in Season 6.  At 4 minutes, Michael Emerson almost confirms that the Man In Black is Esau.   At 5 minutes 25 seconds, Nestor Carbonell (Richard Alpert) makes a guest appearance.   Caution, he drops an F bomb!

Rhonda, just skip to 3:01, that’s when Josh Holloway (Sawyer) makes his entrance!  At 6 minutes, Michael Emerson reads the ending to Lost!  Again, another F bomb is dropped.

This panel did the trick for me.  I’m chompin’ at the bit for Season 6 (which we will be watching in HD!)  Booyah!

The Dharma Initiative Conspiracy

Jul 24

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Lost is gearing up for season 6 in a huge way!  Tomorrow’s panel at Comic-con should have some big reveals.  Until then, ABC is revealing some new Lost ARG facts.  LU, or Lost University was put online yesterday.

The following video was released today.  Is the Dharma Initiative that we know and love part of an underground conspiracy to rule the world? I absolutely can’t wait for Season 6!

Follow The Leader Recap

May 08

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Hey Everybody,

Just wanted to say that I’m glad to be back blogging, but I sure have been enjoying my time away from the computer.  My wife are on vacation and just got back from a 5 day cruise!  That was a lot of fun!  Tonight we watched the new Star Trek movie (directed by JJ Abrams, so it is Lost related!) and it was phenomenal.  We also watched this week’s Lost a day late, thus the late blog entry!  Just want to say thanks you to Nic for letting me use his laptop to write up this blogpost!  And this post is a long one, but keep reading.  There are some juicy tidbits in this episode!!

Soooo, here we go!  My initial reaction to this episode is that I need to watch it again. 

“Follow the Leader” is the fifteenth episode of Season 5 of Lost and the 101st produced hour of the series as a whole. After the death of Daniel in 1977, Jack and Kate wok with Eloise and Richard to follow through with Daniel’s plan to detonate the hydrogen bomb. In present time, Locke finally takes his place as leader of the Others and begins his new mission, with Richard’s help. It was originally broadcast on May 6, 2009. (Lostpedia.com recap)

1.  Richard’s building of what could be the Black Rock might be a clue that he was once tied to the slave ship… but I don’t think so. I’m pretty sure he’ll turn out to be way older than that. This episode, we finally learn more about Richard’s role in the story: he’s an ancient advisor. So we’ve got deputies of fate like Abaddon and Hawking, and we’ve got Richard in the role of camp counselor. With his book of laws and a rusty old compass, he gets to sit around building model ships until it’s time to help identify the next leader of the Others eternal campout. Oh yeah, and he gets to stay young forever too. Not that bad a gig, really.

   There are a few important elements to this scene. The first are Richard’s words to Sun, after she shows him the recruitment photo. The fact that he “saw them all die” doesn’t mean much here, because he could easily be talking about the Dharma initiative in general and referring to the purge. But if he’s not, it’s gonna make the finale a hell of a lot more interesting.

2. Locke’s words to Sun were also interesting: “I don’t think we went through all this for nothing, Sun.” This seems to indicate a definite sense of purpose; not just for him but for all of our main characters. Where old Locke was a follower, flowing along with the island’s stream of never-ending (and repeating) events, new John Locke is suddenly anti-destiny, striding purposefully through the island’s jungles and across its beaches in an attempt to make a difference. He’s instilled with both knowledge AND an objective. And his objective is the exact opposite of Ben and Richard’s, which I think I’ve finally figured out:
3. Since last week, I’ve had the impression that the Others have all been guardians of LOST’s time loop, living only to keep it alive. Somewhere down the line, a horrific event takes place that needs to be avoided. I think most of us can agree by now that the release of the island’s inner energy causes time to fold back on itself, looping over and over again. This loop of time must begin somewhere and end somewhere (the incident? the 815 crash?), but everything in between is the only thing that matters to the Others. This is where they reside, and this is what they protect.

   So these people survive on and on, living from generation to generation, making sure that everything happens up to and including the important point where time folds back upon itself. They have knowledge passed on from forever ago, and their agents (Hawking, Abaddon, etc…) use this knowledge to ensure that the everything happens in proper order. Richard is the Other’s constant. Since he never dies, he’s the keeper of all the advanced knowledge – he passes this on to each successive chosen leader. He knows what must be done and guides everyone accordingly. And if I were him, I’d probably be bored out of my skull right about now, too.

   I’m thinking the Swan hatch MUST get built in order to allow the time loop to occur. Everyone knows this. This is why the Others are allowing a full-blown construction team to dig in their territory. This also explains why they’d leave Desmond alone for all those years, so he could keep on pushing the button.

   When you consider that only the leaders really know what’s going on, the rest of the Others’ tribe members are resigned to lame tasks like fishing, hunting, sewing up those cool cloth tents, and getting shot every couple of episodes. They’re generations removed from knowing anything about what’s going on. Every once in a while a leader gives them an important task that will shape the future, such as clearing off the runway on the Hydra island, but they’re too much in the dark to even know why they’re doing such things. They’ve been followers for so long, they no longer even know who or what they’re following. Just look at how they all stumbled, zombie-like, into a line of well-behaved sheep when Locke announced he was taking everyone to the movies.

   So now, where does Jacob fit into all this? And why are they following him? The answer is that they’re not. Even worse, they never really were. More on that at the end.

4. Kate looks horrified at Jack’s suggestion that he erase their future past. From the face she makes when Jack mentions flight 815 landing in Los Angeles, some of it has to stem from Kate knowing she’ll be back in handcuffs. But from the rest of it, I guess we’re supposed to gather that Kate truly does love Jack. I never really doubted this, but I think she somehow loved Sawyer more. Can she love both? Not sure. But Kate seems to do the most soul-searching when she’s in captivity, and her love always seems conditional on her current situation. This is exactly the type of flip-flopping that dooms her character to ridicule.
5. We also learn a little more here about Widmore and Hawking: both of them seem to be on equal footing when it comes to ruling the Others. I was surprised at how little resistance he gave her after she explained what she planned to to. Watching him place his hand on her stomach, we can also assume she’s already pregnant with Daniel.
6. So why are the big bosses at Ann Arbor so obsessed with getting the Swan done? From what we know so far, its only purpose is to study a magnetic anomaly. This can’t be the case anymore – someone definitely knows something (or maybe even has advanced knowledge of that something). Hopefully Radzinsky will reveal this later on. For now though, we get to watch him beat up Sawyer – and see Phil slap girls. Not cool Phil. If I were him, I wouldn’t be doing that with the finale coming up and all.

   And don’t reduce Sawyer’s loyalty solely to Kate. Just because they did a freeze-frame on her tiny little butt doesn’t mean Sawyer wasn’t trying to protect all his other friends too. This was apparent when Juliet was about to say something and he told her not to get anyone else hurt. Sawyer won’t betray any of his friends. So when Radzinsky gives Sawyer pencil and paper, I’m pretty sure he’s going to get a diagram of Disneyland. This should lead Radzinsky’s team into a storm of trouble during the finale… and it might put the blast door map a little off, too.

7. The Variable is Hurley.

   Since the very beginning of LOST, this has been true. We’ve never seen it so clearly until now, because we’ve never really had reason to scrutinize it. But let’s examine the evidence for a minute, and then you guys can make your own assumptions. Here’s what I’m saying:

   * Hurley almost didn’t make Flight 815. In fact, the woman at the counter tells him: “I don’t think you’re supposed to be on this flight, dear”.

   * When Ben sees Hurley on Ajira 316, he looks him in the eye and tells him: “Hugo, who told you to come?”

   * In Left Behind, episode S3.15, Hurley stands on the beach with Sawyer sitting behind him. He then looks out into the ocean, and says “I’m not supposed to be here”.

   * In Locke’s vision where Boone’s wheeling him through the airport, Hurley’s the only person not getting on the plane. Everyone else is boarding the flight, but Hurley is not a passenger: instead he’s stamping tickets at the gate.

   * In S1, Hurley knew he wouldn’t die on the bridge. He just had a ‘feeling’ he’d be alright – and he was. At the end of S3 Hurley knew he could get that 30+ year old van to start… and he got it started. He drives the van into Pryce through a hail of gunfire, without ever taking a single bullet.

   * Jack, Kate, Sawyer, and Hurley all get captured by the Others. But Hurley was the one person they let go.

   Hugo has always been lucky: rolling the dice, winning at horseshoes, never missing at basketball, winning the lottery. He eternally makes his own luck… and if this is the case, it stands to reason that he can make his own future. Hugo makes his own kind of music – he’s been doing this both on and off the island. He’s untouchable, unreachable, and the island can’t affect him for a very simple reason: he’s not supposed to be here.

   Think about Hurley’s distractions, too. The island tried to bribe him with a storeroom of food, but Hugo blew it up. It tried to offer him romance, but then his potential girlfriend gets shot. It even tries to get him to kill himself… by using Dave to almost convince Hurley to jump off a cliff. Didn’t work.

   Outside of the island? Hurley’s in a mental institution, where someone is watching over him (because they can’t touch him) to make sure he stays put. He gets out anyway. Then he’s captured and imprisoned by the police. Somehow he gets out of that, too. No matter what happens, Hurley can’t be contained. Hurley can somehow even see Jacob’s cabin, because he’s not affected by whatever illusions or smokescreens the island puts up.

   Even now, it’s no coincidence that Hurley’s the one voice arguing in favor that things can be changed. He argues with Miles in Whatever Happened Happened, and he’s trying to rewrite history with his Empire Strikes Back script. Hurley’s seen more ghosts than anyone else. Charlie comes to Hurley as a ghost, telling him “They need you”. Who needs him? Everyone else in the story. The Hurley bird is even shrieking his name over and over in the finale. The answer is obvious to me: Hurley’s the one person who’ll end up changing things.

   What’s funny is that we’ve always thought the game changer would come from one of the bigger players: Desmond, Ben, Jack, Locke – but if you think about LOST in general, it makes sense that such changes would come from someone you’d least expect. Hurley is perfect because no one’s expecting him to matter. He’s done nothing but cook, divide up food, play ping pong, and make everyone else laugh – including us.

   Hurley is the island’s very big problem because he’s the one person who’s “not here for a reason”. And that’s the very reason why he’ll end up being so important: WHH can’t apply to Hurley, because he was never a part of the plan (timeline?) in the first place. In short, I’m saying Hurley is the variable. Just tossing that out there, so let’s hear everyone’s thoughts on it!

8. Here’s one to hate on: I think Ben’s not half as stupid as he acts this episode. Michael Emerson is an amazing actor, which is why you can tell when he’s intentionally over-acting. Ben’s comments throughout this episode ranged from false bitterness (“Why John, afraid I’ll stage a coup?”) to artificial astonishment (“What just happened? Where did you go?”) to over-the-top sarcasm (“Your timing was impeccable, John!”). If you doubt it, just listen to him when Locke mentions the Beechcraft: “What plane?!?!?!”. Yeah, right. Clearly he’s acting here, and not doing a very good job of it (Linus, not Emerson).

   The reason for this is pretty simple: Ben’s slow-playing the island. He intentionally wants the island (acting through Locke) to think he’s stupid, that way it doesn’t perceive him as a threat. Thinking pointedly back to Alex tossing him around that Egyptian chamber and calling him out on his murderous thoughts, Ben is attempting to keep the island out of his head. Acting dumb is the best way he can think of to accomplish this right now.

   But one thing I don’t think Ben’s lying on… when Locke calls him on never having seen Jacob? That’s the truth. I don’t think Ben ever has seen Jacob. Ben was never meant to be a chosen leader of the island anyway.

9. the Egyptians built one hell of an underground tunnel system. I’m not sure how or why the bomb got down there, but if it’s directly beneath Dharmaville this whole time maybe it explains why Miles’ mother seemed to be suffering from some sort of radiation sickness in her later years. She’s one of the only Dharma residents who reaches old age anyway, so it’s kind of hard to make a comparison.
10. Sawyer’s idea to buy Microsoft and bet on the Dallas Cowboys is probably one of the soundest plans on the whole show. With Radzinsky being led safely away to wherever Sawyer’s map sent him, everything’s looking good from all angles. He and Juliet get to leave the island for a sweet bell-bottomed lifestyle, and his friends can do whatever the hell they want… being in shackles absolves Sawyer of any responsibility toward them at this point. It’s totally win-win for him.

    But then, just like before, Kate arrives to screw everything up. Suddenly Sawyer is now one crazy landlord and a pair of short shorts away from starring in his own twisted version of Three’s Company. So much for his plans of eating popcorn and watching the 78′ Superbowl.

    With the finale only a week away, it’s obvious that the sub never gets to leave the island. I’m not sure how it happens, but if I had to guess? Kate convinces them to go back – which is a nice twist on Jack trying to convince her to go back two seasons ago

11. There definitely has to be a Jacob. Not only have we seen his cabin, but we’ve heard him speak. We’ve also seen him actually re-wind time: at the end of Locke’s first encounter with him, we saw that broken lantern (and the fire it started) instantly fix itself. We saw a ring of ash around Jacob’s cabin, which originally seemed like it might’ve been there to protect it from being discovered or seen. Later on though, it became more and more obvious that the ring of ash was probably there for the opposite reason: to keep Jacob IN. We also saw a very worried look on Ben’s face when he saw that the circle had been broken, almost as if he were worried that something had escaped. Incidentally, this is also when we started seeing quasi-evil Christian and Claire.
12. Now we find out Locke wants to kill Jacob. Perhaps he only wants to kill the illusion of Jacob – once he does that, he puts himself firmly in command. Or maybe he wants to free Jacob from whatever temporal prison he seems stuck in, and the only way to do that is through the same method he himself was resurrected: death. The only thing we can be sure of is that whatever spirit wants this done (the island? the smoke monster?) is now acting through Locke, and is probably trying to get rid of a long-standing island problem that both Richard and Ben were trying to hide or keep from it.

    To sum it up, maybe Jacob did exist at one point. If so, I’m guessing he was a realllllllly bad dude. Maybe he caused assloads of problems and was finally contained, similar to a demon or something along those lines. It probably took a lot of time and a lot of effort to finally put Jacob down, and now Locke’s talking about revisiting a very bad scenario. I think both Ben and Richard are genuinely afraid of Jacob – they don’t seem to be pretending when it comes to that. (1-12 from Vozzek69 at DarkUFO)

13. …the episode was steeped in veiled references to yet another fabled fantasy about young heroes stumbling into an enchanted otherworld — presuming, of course, that ”Follow The Leader” is indeed a direct nod to J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan. The game of the same name is central to the story line of the author’s play and book; a song of the same name is part of Walt Disney’s beloved 1953 animated musical adaptation. These various versions intersect with Lost in any number of ways: magical islands inhabited by peculiar tribes of people working at cross-purposes, death and resurrection, ticking bombs, lost boys, never-aging enchanted beings, and more. Peter Pan gives us ”The Peter Pan Complex,” describing maturity-challenged adults who can’t deal with reality and so try to change it (see: Jack), not to mention ”The Tinker Bell Effect,” which according to Wikipedia ”describes those things that exist only because people believe in them” — things like ”a rule of law” (see: Horace Goodspeed, ”We have a rule of law!”) and ”deities” (See: Jacob)
14. Confronted with the revelation that she had just killed her own son, Eloise agreed to help Jack destroy the timeline in hopes of rectifying her mistake. Interesting: She told Jack and Kate she was 17 years old when she escorted time-traveling Faraday at gunpoint to the Jughead drop zone back in 1954. That would make her 40 years old in 1977. So I’m going to say that Boy Daniel Faraday was alive back in the year of Adult Daniel Faraday’s death on the Island. Moreover, remember the 9-year-old Faraday playing the piano in last week’s episode? I’m going to say that that moment happened right after the Dharma-times events depicted in the last few episodes. In my recap of ”The Variable,” I wondered why Ellie entered the room in tears. Perhaps that scene represented the first time she had seen young Faraday since killing older Faraday; and perhaps her tears were an indication that her attempt at eradicating her mistake by helping Jack blow up Jughead had failed. We shall see next week.
15. ageless enigma that is Richard Alpert. For starters, we saw him building a ”ship in a bottle,” a type of mechanical puzzle known as ”an impossible bottle.” The moment will surely feed the well-heeled theory that Alpert is either a descendant of the Black Rock castaways, if not a miraculously death-challenged survivor of the slave ship’s crew. (Or one of the imprisoned human cargo.) Or perhaps it’s merely a metaphor for himself: something ancient, trapped inside the timeless bottle that is the Island. FUN FACT! ”Ship In A Bottle” is a famous Star Trek: The Next Generation episode from its sixth season in which an unreal Holodeck character — Professor Moriarty, enemy to Sherlock Holmes — takes over the Enterprise and conspires to find a way to exist in the real world. ALSO SEE: Doc Jensen’s first Lost theory, The Evil Aaron Hypothesis, which put forth that a powerful, disembodied supernatural agency had taken control of the Island and has been conspiring to bring about his or her physical incarnation.
16. Locke took the former Others power couple out to the drug plane so they could bear witness to a miracle: The sight of time-traveling Locke stumbling out of the jungle, wounded from Ethan’s gunshot. New (But Improved?) Resurrected Locke instructed Alpert to tend to Old Wounded Time-Traveling Locke and pass along his compass and some crucial instructions, like the whole thing about needing to die to save his castaway friends, and in this way one of the trippy mystery moments from the season’s fragmented first episode was rounded out and given context. Ironic: ”Follow The Leader” gave us one arc in which Jack in the past schemes to produce paradox, and also gives us another arc in which John hustles to prevent paradox from occurring. (Specifically, Locke was trying to avoid what is known as a ”bootstrap paradox,” involving the acquisition and replacement of objects and the receiving and imparting of information from future to past to future again. You can investigate at your leisure over at Wikipedia.)
17. What have I overlooked? A lot. I didn’t talk about Pierre Chang and Miles. I didn’t talk about the evacuation of the Island. I didn’t talk about the LOL funny history quiz administered to Hurley. I didn’t talk about why Dharma wants to drill into the electromagnetic anomaly at the Swan site. I didn’t discuss further the oddly quiet year for Sun and what it might have to do with the time travel novel entitled The Year of The Quiet Sun. And I didn’t discuss Alpert’s claim that he watched all the time traveling castaways die right before his eyes back in 1977 — a claim that I suspect is either totally bogus or doesn’t really tell the whole truth. But please, feel free to discuss these things for me in the boards below — and come back next Wednesday for very special year-end editions of Doc Jensen and ”Totally Lost.” (13-17 from Doc Jensen)
18. In fact, if you really want to follow me down the Whackadoo Well, consider the possibility that Jacob is fictional just like Dr. Moriarty. The precedents of zombies like Christian and Yemi suggest that Jacob is someone deceased. But what if the Island’s ghostly patriarch is really the product of so many people believing in his existence? Maybe the Jacob avatar popped out of the Island’s magic box like Hurley’s imaginary friend Dave did
19. Many, myself included, have been struck by the seemingly circular origins of Jacob’s influence on the Others. When Locke first invokes Jacob’s name back in 1954, it’s not entirely clear that anyone, including Richard, gets the reference. It’s possible that Locke unwittingly planted the seeds of Jacob’s legend himself. Like Richard’s compass, therefore, Jacob may originally be one big ontological paradox birthed by the time loop we’ve witnessed.
20. I think the foregoing possibility has occurred to Locke, as well. John doubts that Ben has ever spoken with Jacob because he suspects Jacob is a hoax perpetrated by Ben to control the Others. That’s why Locke is so adamant about taking the Others to see their leader. When John says he plans to kill Jacob, I think he expects to reveal the latter as a lie. What Locke forgets is that the Island is a place where even fiction can sometimes become reality.
21. Before closing, let me follow up briefly on my suggestion from last week that our Losties will cause the Incident by trying to prevent it. I’m increasingly convinced that the Island is itself the threat of human extinction predicted by the Valenzetti Equation. The DHARMA scientists are supposed to cause some cataclysmic — perhaps even extinction level — event by drilling into the Island’s pocket of exotic energy at the Swan site.
22. Our Losties will change what’s supposed to happen by substituting the less cataclysmic Incident in lieu of our total annhilation. But they will succeed mainly in delaying the inevitable, resulting in the button protocol, which will again threaten to destroy the world. Desmond will avert this threat by activating the Fail-Safe, but as I mentioned last week, I think Bram and Ilana’s presence on the Island has already restarted the countdown to Armageddon.

    All of this is building to the realization that the Island was never supposed to be on Earth. It crashed here long ago, whether from the future or the stars, disrupting the course of human destiny. No matter how many times someone saves the world, the change will only be temporary. As long as the Island remains on Earth, people will keep exploiting its miraculous properties, pushing us back on track for extinction. (18-22 from Eye M Sick)

Some Like It Hoth Recap

Apr 16

metalman777Lost 2 Comments

Before I get into the recap, I just have get this out of the way.  When we were shown Miles as a punk teenager, did anyone else shout “Rufio! Rufio! Rufiiiiiioooooo!”  I’m telling you, he was a dead-on ringer for that character out of the 1991 Robin William’s movie Hook.  Don’t believe me? check it out…

At the very least he looks like his character, Kid Omega, from X-Men 3: The Last Stand:

Anyways, on to the Recap!

“Some Like It Hoth” was the thirteenth episode of Season 5 of Lost and the ninety-ninth produced hour of the series as a whole. It was broadcast on April 15, 2009.

1. Tonight’s flashback spotlight falls on Miles Straume, the hot-headed hustler capable of talking to the dead. Will we learn the origin of his powers? Will we learn why his parents gave him a name that sounds like ”maelstrom,” a Nordic term for ”whirlpool?” Will we learn why he’s such a Mr. Snarky Cranky Pants? Recall earlier this season how Daniel Faraday wondered if his freaky freighter friend had been to the Island before; might Miles be Pierre Chang’s infant child all grown up? If so, did Young Master Sixth Sense spend any time in Room 23, à la Walt? FUN FACT FROM THE WORLD OF CONSPIRACY THEORY LORE! Time-traveling Miles is currently parked in 1977 — the same year that the Senate conducted an investigation into a secret CIA project called MKULTRA, which conducted research into brainwashing, mind-control, and even psychic powers. Heavy drugs were involved. And allegedly kids were used as test subjects. Very Room 23, if you ask me.
2. When I asked the Lost Super-Computer (i.e., Wikipedia) to crunch the word ”Hoth,” it came back with the fact that ”Hoth” also refers to a figure from Norse mythology sometimes known as ”Hod,” ”Hoor,” or ”Hotherus.” Investigating Norse mythology brought me to the concept of ”Hel-Shoes,” as well as some other intriguing possibilities for Lost.
3. You see, for eons there were two sets of Norse gods that were at war with each other: the gods of Aesir and the gods of Vanir. There was an attempt at a truce, which involved an exchange of hostages as insurance. One of the hostages was an Aesiran god named Mirmir, who had the ability to see future events. For various reasons, the Vanir felt they had been tricked, so they cut off Mirmir’s head and sent it back to Odin, who for a long time carried it around and asked it questions and stuff. Creepy. And it gets better! Eventually, Odin buried the head in a well under the Tree of Life and was able to continue asking it questions about the future — but he had to cut out his eye as a sacrifice. Anyway, the truce between the rival tribes eventually collapsed, there was a rumble, and when it was over…the bickering deities found a way to get along and merged pantheons into one big super-pantheon.
4. But back to this Hoth guy. Hoth had a distinctive trait: He was blind. He also murdered his brother, a god by the name of Balder. One might be tempted to forge a Cain and Abel comparison, but Hoth had a good excuse: He was tricked by the god of lies, Loki, into shooting a ”missile” (or spear) loaded with mistletoe, the only substance capable of killing Hoth’s otherwise invulnerable sibling. Yet despite being deceived, Hoth was punished severely. Odin sired a monstrous son named Vali for the sole purpose of slaying the sightless, accidental god-killer. At Balder’s funeral, Odin whispered something into his dead son’s ear. No one really knows what Odin said, and from that day forth, anyone who dared to challenge Odin in a battle of wits had to answer the Sphinx-like riddle: ”What did Odin whisper in Balder’s ear?” Finally, Balder’s death set in motion Ragnarok, or ”destiny of the gods,” a series of events that culminated with a final battle between various sets of gods and monsters from various corners of Norse mythology. One of the major players in Ragnarok was the Norse equivalent of Cerberus, the hound of Hell. Named Garmr, this wolfish creature was unchained during the final battle for the world and allowed to slaughter with impunity. Ragnarok ended with the death of the world (everything gets submerged in water, à la the Flood) and the birth of the new world and the rebirth of fallen gods — including Balder. Indeed, while Odin’s whisper was technically a mystery, most scholars believe that it was actually a single word: ”Resurrection.”
5. Might this wide swath of Norse mythology parallel or at least intersect with Lost mythology? Garmr? Smokey, of course. Missile? Jughead. Odin’s Resurrection Riddle? That brings to mind the Rainier-Canton anagram (”resurrection”) from earlier this season, plus the ”What did one snowman say to the other snowman?” riddle from season 2 and the ”What lies in the shadow of the statue?” riddle of ”Dead Is Dead.” (My answer: Mirmir’s head!) Balder? The slain, reborn god, could be John Locke, because, after all, Locke is…bald. And he has been resurrected. Ragnarok? ”There’s a war coming, John. And if you’re not on it when that happens, the wrong side is going to win.” —Charles Widmore. (1-5 from Doc Jensen)
6. Beyond the Chang hook, Miles’ backstory reveals two secondary connections that could emerge as vital components in the future story:
   I’m assuming Miles wasn’t born on the island (remember, Ethan’s on-island birth was unusual), but did the island “give” Miles his ghost whispering ability? If so, why? And is Miles connected to Walt in some way? To date (and if I’m remembering correctly), Miles and Walt are the only two characters who have built-in abilities. Desmond earned his by destroying the hatch, so I’m guessing he only has a Hall of Justice visitor pass.

   Miles is actively recruited by two warring groups: Team Widmore and a murky second faction. If Miles was merely a secondary character, why would Widmore throw $1.6 million at him? Why would a platoon of masked men toss Miles in the back of a van and plead with him to reject Widmore’s offer and join them instead? Clearly, the island has big plans for Miles … he just doesn’t know it yet. (Or I’m blowing this out of proportion because I think the dude’s funny and want him to stick around.)

   Sidenote: This anti-Widmore group is verrrry interesting. To date, the group’s only known characteristics are an open hatred of all things Widmore and a passion for that thing that lies in the shadow of the statue (“What lies in the shadow of the statue?” is this season’s version of the numbers — an adjacent mystery that may never be directly answered, but catalyzes events nonetheless). The safe bet would peg the anti-Widmores as Ben’s shadow organization — and we’re led to believe this is the case since Miles requests $3.2 million from both the anti-Widmores and Ben — but could the group be something entirely different: perhaps a resurrected Dharma Initiative (The Bloodthirsty Hansos? The Screamin’ Mad Degroots?)? Beyond affiliation, how do the Ajirans fit in? Is Ilana an active member (remember, she asked Frank the all-important statue question last week), or was she inducted post-crash?

7. Despite their long time-travel debate, Hurley still isn’t sold on the no-paradox rule. He’s been writing the script for “Empire Strikes Back” from memory — itself an act that falls within “no paradox” because, technically, Hurley could have always been the source of the script — but he can’t resist the opportunity to revise the story, which clearly violates the paradox block (sadly, paradox was powerless to stop “The Phantom Menace”).
8. In the closing moments of the episode we see Dr. Chang and Miles welcome a team of scientists at the submarine dock, and one of them is our shaggy-haired-Charlotte-lover, Daniel Faraday! I’ve been obsessed with Faraday’s role in the 1977 plot line (I seem to reference that unconnected Faraday/Orchid scene from “Before You Left” in every review), so his reappearance certainly piques my curiosity — and opens up a big can of questions: When did Faraday leave the island? Is he a legitimate Dharma scientist or did he con his way onto the sub? Is he working with his mother, Eloise Hawking? Is he still wearing that skinny tie? There’s lots to consider here. (6-8 from The Lost Blog)
9. Okay, now the meaty stuff. We get confirmation of two big things here: first, that someone (Miles) can absolutely positively exist twice in the same timeline – we already pretty much knew that, but there were still skeptics. Second, we learn that Chang is not only Miles’ father, but that he abandoned both him and his mother when he was just a baby. Daddy douchebag? Maybe. But then again, maybe not.

   All you ever really need to know about life can be found in the movie Point Break (this isn’t just opinion, it’s proven FACT). And all you ever really need to know about time travel can be found in Jean-Claude Van Damme’s Time Cop. Matter can travel through time and space, but it cannot occupy the same time AND the same space at the same time. And if it does – well, really bad shit apparently happens. Bill Murray would tell you that shouldn’t cross the streams, either.

   Assuming this is true, perhaps this is the reason why Pierre Chang shoots his wife and baby back to the mainland like he’s launching skeet. Let’s go out on a limb and say that in the next episode or two, Chang realizes that grown-up Miles is really his son Miles. Remember how wigged out he got with the double-rabbit situation in the Orchid orientation video? Miles changing his own diaper would probably have similar catastrophic results. Couple this with the fact that the Swan hatch is currently being built – which means that the incident can’t be far off – and all kinds of crazy discoveries are about to happen with the Orchid… and the DI timeline is winding up to some pretty hairy stuff. I’m willing to bet Chang simply wanted to protect his family rather than abandon them. In watching the loving way he was reading Miles that polar bear book at the end of the episode, I can come up with no other conclusion. I’ll bet it all happened so fast that his mother never really knew it either, which is kinda sad.

10. The Ewoks were a lot like Kate in that they totally ruined everything. Even as a child I knew those rocks and sticks weren’t penetrating stormtrooper helmets or armor, but somehow I suspended my disbelief long enough to swallow that whole 30 minutes of sappy kiddie-shit. Damn.

    The whole Hurley and Miles Star Wars scene was hilarious and awesome, but you should also take something a little bit more significant away from it. Hugo mentions having seen The Empire Strikes Back over 200 times. More repetition. More circles (Pierre Chang: “I wasn’t aware there were circles”). Then Hurley explains how he wants to send George Lucas a script with a couple of his own improvements. Miles tells him he’s being stupid. But is he?

    Just as Hugo knows the Rebel base on Hoth will be overrun by AT-AT’s (unarguably the best scene in any of the movies!) he also knows that Dharma will be overrun by the Others. He knows ahead of time that everyone’s going to die. Miles, Dan… both of these people have told Hurley that this is inevitable – it can’t be stopped no matter what they do. But here we have Hugo trying anyway, writing a new script, attempting to change certain things. Hurley’s silly belief that he can change this upcoming Star Wars movie is a reflection that he believes change can occur at all.

    Later on he tells Miles at the gas pump: “The best thing I ever did was give my dad a 2nd chance”. And while he is referring to Miles’ dad here, I’d suggest maybe Hugo’s also referring to the whole outcome of the Dharma purge. And do his words sink into Miles’ head? Maybe he somehow gets through to him, causing Miles to tell his father who he is. Maybe this leads to change… or maybe it leads Pierre Chang to hurriedly send his wife and kid off-island in order to avoid the ramifications of time travel, the purge, or anything else Miles might tell him about the near future. This makes Miles himself responsible for his own bastardization! Total craziness. (9-10 from DarkUFO)

11. We’ve all seen now that Egyptian influences played a fairly larger role in the history of the island. With tonight’s episode we also saw the first glimpse that Dharma may have caught on to those historical influences as well, and appear to be studying the history and culture of the Egyptians as well. And as we all know, Dharma will later incorporate Egyptian hieroglyphics into the Clock of Doom in the Swan Station, though for what reasons we don’t know. (from Sledgeweb’s Lost…Stuff)
    
12. One of the more interesting reveals in Some Like It Hoth was when Miles was Vannapped by good ole Bram, who we know from the Ajira plane crash. Bram seemed to make it quite clear that he was not working for Charles Widmore, nor should MIles work for ‘the wrong side.’ So if Bram isn’t batting for Widmore’s team, is he part of Ben’s ensemble? Or are Bram and Ilana part of a whole new group, with a whole new set of objectives for the island. I’m starting to get confused and lose track of who’s who here. Who’s side do you think Bram is on? (from Sledgeweb’s Lost…Stuff)
    
13. These new people are frightening.  First of all there’s Ilana who looks like she might randomly shoot anyone who gets in her way.  Then there’s Bram, who is a behemoth and surprisingly talkative, that was very interesting how they brought him into the show.  I didn’t even expect him to talk when I first saw him.
    Anyways the point is that these people are new and important and they aren’t loyal to Ben or Widmore.  That leaves Ms. Hawking as the main suspect.  It seems very likely that she’s behind them.  She’s the person who chose Flight 316 and she made sure that everyone was on the flight. (from Not Confused Just Lost)