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!
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!
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)
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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
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.
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)
…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)
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.
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.
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.)
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)
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
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.
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.
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.
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)
“Dead Is Dead” is the twelfth episode of Season 5 of Lost and the ninety-eighth produced hour of the series as a whole. Ben, Locke, and Sun travel to the Temple so that Ben may be judged by the monster. In flashbacks, the origins of Ben and Widmore‘s troubled relationship is revealed. It was originally broadcast on April 8, 2009.
1.How many half-truths, obfuscations, and outright lies did Linus lay on us this episode? Part of the brilliance of Michael Emerson’s performance is that it’s hard to really know, and it forces you take a stand and make an interpretation that just might be totally incorrect. Here is mine: ”Dead is Dead” was the story of how one of Ben’s most ambitious fibs backfired big-time on him. His downfall began the moment he awoke in the Hydra Station and found Locke sitting by his cot sporting yet another one of his classic Season 5 grins. Hiya. Remember me? The guy you strangled to death? Yeah, that didn’t really work… Ben told Locke that he knew his Island magic would bring him back. The surprise etched all over his face certainly suggested otherwise, but silver-tongued Ben explained it away by evoking his Doubting Thomas Sunday school lesson from ”316:” ”Because it’s one thing to believe it,” he said, ”but it’s another thing to see it.” Then Ben told Locke that he had broken the rules by returning to The Island and claimed that he had a desire to be judged by Smokey. (”We don’t even have a word for it,” Ben clarified, ”but I believe you call it ‘The Monster.”’)
2.At the risk of impugning Ben’s honesty… oh, wait, that’s impossible. Anyway, my theory is that Ben really was totally shocked to see Locke alive again (Alex’s line ”I know you’re already planning to kill him again” would seem to confirm that Ben wanted Locke dead dead, not temp dead), and I think he was trying to buy himself some time with Locke by dropping an idea that he knew would capture Locke’s imagination: The prospect of The Island giving Ben cosmic comeuppance.
3.Charles Widmore, circa 1977: A cool fantasy hero stud saddled with atrocious hair. I asked my wife what he looked like to her. Response: ”A mushroom.” Widmore was pissed that Richard had brought Young Ben to The Temple. Richard neutralized him with four words: ”Jacob wanted it done.” This is pretty significant: We now know this unseen entity has held sway over The Others since at least 1977. Why did the mention of ”Jacob” shut Widmore up? Probably because he felt threatened. It’s been suggested that Jacob likes to play favorites, so Widmore probably realized right away that Ben represented a rival. You know what they say: Keep your friends close — and your future replacements closer.
4.One of the episode’s blockbuster revelations was that Charles Widmore had ordered Ben to kill Rousseau shortly after her arrival on The Island. Perhaps it was a leadership evaluation, akin to how Locke had been challenged by Ben and Alpert to murder his father back in Season 3. (Was Ben being assessed to fill Eloise ”Ellie” Hawking’s shoes? After all, she was mysteriously MIA from all the flashbacks.) Anyway, arriving at Rousseau’s tent, Ben discovered that the frazzled Frenchie had given birth to a child. Suddenly, all of his snakey heartlessness slithered away. Behold Ben’s Achilles’ Heel: Moms. Which makes sense. His own Bad Daddy had pumped him full of guilt for his mother’s death during childbirth. Mamas are the line that this Locke-killing, Dharma-purging fiend just can’t cross.
5.Yes, Widmore played the jerk in this drama. Yet we must ask ourselves: Was he correct? It all depends on if you think everything that has happened during the Ben era of The Island was supposed to happen. And for now, I am taken with the notion that it wasn’t. Benjamin Linus was a stop-gap for John Locke who outlived his usefulness, a mistake that won’t go away, and his ongoing struggle to remain essential to The Island’s story (if not simply survive) has created history that deviates from destiny. We know, of course, that Fate can correct an altered course, but either its repair job is following a long-term, slow-developing plan, or Survivor Ben, cockroach resilient, has been outwitting, outplaying, and outlasting Fate at every turn.
6.We also found out why Ben boarded Ajira 316 all battered and bloody. He had gone to the marina to fulfill his promise to kill Widmore’s daughter in retaliation for Alex’s death. Classy as always, Ben gave Chuck a jingle to let him know that his runaway child and mother of his never-seen grandson was about to get pumped full of lead. He dropped the name of Desmond’s boat, ”Our Mutual Friend,” named after the Charles Dickens’ novel that housed the love letter that kept the Hatch-trapped Scot going during his darkest days. The book, which I have not read, chronicles the consequences of an inheritance that is ceded to other people after the intended heir goes mysteriously MIA and fails to pick it up — which sounds an awful lot like the theory that Ben somehow usurped the Island destiny originally slated for Locke, a mistake that The Island has been madly trying to correct
7.We saw Ben pop a cap into Desmond. Right? We agree that we did see that? Okay, so a bag of groceries got in the way, but unless Desmond had some bulletproof cans of haggis in that bag, bruthuh should have been dead, or at least severely wounded.What was most interesting about this scene, though, was what we didn’t see — namely, what happened afterward. How did Desmond survive that near-point blank shooting? Did The Island intervene from afar as it did with Jack and Michael’s suicide attempts? How did Ben get fished out of the water? Who fished Ben out of the water? How did his damaged arm get put in that sling? Because Ben was sporting that sling in the episode ”316” when we saw him calling Jack from a pay phone at the marina. Perhaps Desmond pulled him out the drink in order to ask him some ”Why did you do that, bruthuh?” kind of questions — but that would blow a hole in the prevalent fan theory that Desmond is now en route to The Island to finish off Ben in order to protect his family from future attacks. If that’s what Desmond wanted, why didn’t he just make sure Ben was dead at the docks?
8.Ilana — the bounty hunter who was bringing Sayid back to Fiji when he got zapped back to The Island — teamed up with some other toughs on the plane and cracked open a giant steel case full of weapons and staged their takeover of the Ajira Airlines castaways. Looks like somebody came to The Island prepared for a hostile takeover, if not a war — perhaps the very same war Charles Widmore spoke to Locke about. Ilana gave Lapidus a sphinx-like riddle test that made her sound as if she was intimately acquainted with The Island’s ancient mythology. (He flunked, and got hit over the head for his trouble.) No doubt the statue refers to old Four Toe, aka the Egyptian god Anubis. What lies in its shadow? For now, my money is on Jughead. Regardless, I’m hoping upcoming episodes will reveal more about these radicals who have infiltrated The Island via Ajira 316 and what kind of perspective they have on The Island. (Doc Jensen)
9.Locke kept Christian’s shoes. They showed him taking them in and out of his bag. They might still have some significance.
10.Locke insists that he’s that same person he was before. But something has changed. He “knows” a lot more about the island, and his new perspective is interesting. “Now you know what it was like to be me.”
11.Richard speaks for Jacob, interesting. As usual, I wonder why he isn’t in charge. It seems like Charles doesn’t speak for Jacob though, or else he could have countered Richard’s decision to save Ben.
12.Rewatch that scene with Ilana and Ben in the beginning of this episode. She’s crazy-and-a-half, and confident. Dangerous.
13.I think we can guess who the people with the Ajira water bottles, shooting our time-travelers are. They’re going to be trouble for a while now. Also It’s safe to assume that this group is going to be the threat to Locke that we heard about from Walt.
14.This could be the answer to the big question. We saw a very clear carving of Anubis supplicating Smokey. It seems likely that the Statue is Anubis. It hasn’t been confirmed, obviously, but showing the god in te show is a pretty obvious tip-off.
The similarities between that carving and Locke’s childhood drawing is obvious. What that means, I’ll leave for another day.
15.Smokey really seems to have a purpose now. He is a judge. Not a novel idea true, but it’s quite provable now. We’ve seen two of it’s judgements now. One when the subject repented and the other when he didn’t. Eko was asked by his brother to repent, and he wouldn’t. Ben was given the same chance and he clearly did feel badly for his actions and he was spared. But his ghost, Alex, didn’t leave it at that. I wonder what Eko’s ghost, Yemi, would have commanded. If only we could know. (Not Confused Just Lost)
16.So in season 2, the countdown clock rolled over when it got to 0 and we saw Egyptian hieroglyphs, throwing fans into a tizzy. It took less than 24 hours before one of them figured it out by finding the particular grouping in a textbook of ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs. Then Ben went to summon Old Smokey in “The Shape of Things to Come” and he pushed open a door covered in them. Just before turning the wheel, there were more. In this episode, he steps back from the door and I could just hear the fans who have been translating the hieroglyphs either squealing with delight or moaning at all the work they had ahead of them. And then he dropped through the floor and landed in a room covered in them.
But the biggest moment was when he stood in front of the Egyptian drawing of Anubis, the jackal-headed Egyptian God of the Dead, summoning Smokey. I had suggested in an earlier post that perhaps that big statue is Anubis (but its ears are a little short to really be him) but here he is now. In one episode in season 3 (I think it’s “Left Behind”) Juliet rushes through the sonic fence and then Smokey hits it, and as he comes at it he looks like Cerberus, the three-headed dog that guards the gates of Hell in Greek mythology. Now we see he’s connected to Anubis. Anubis was the god of mummification, and rather than being some harbinger of death, which he is not, he was the one who protected the dead. We were discussing last week on the boards the idea that the Others are very caught up in keeping their dead bodies (they ask for Paul’s body… Christian’s body disappears and then he’s walking around… they ask Locke to bring his father’s body to them… Locke is now back from the dead… Amy makes a comment that they need to bury the bodies deeply in the ground). Perhaps they’re bringing them here for Anubis to protect them… or bring them back from the dead. Anubis is often portrayed holding an ankh, which Paul is wearing and Amy takes (and Horace freaks out that she’s kept this token of his).
17.Maybe I’m off-base on this one, but I screamed when Ben and Widmore had their showdown on the dock (not least because I thought those two were electric on screen in “The Shape of Things to Come,” and I’ve been dying for another scene with Emerson and Dale). Ben appears to be in charge now (it’s post-Purge, seeing as Alex is about 8 and the Others are living in New Otherton) and while Charles is hissing that if the island wants Alex dead, she’ll be dead, Ben is countering that he simply broke the rules. Therefore, he believes Widmore is wrong, the island never wanted Alex dead, and rules are rules. You do not go off the island and start a family, you stay on the island.
Now fast-forward to “The Shape of Things to Come,” and Alex is dead. Ben’s first words are, “He changed the rules.” On the dock, he insisted that Widmore broke the rules. We’ve been trying to figure out ever since what Ben meant in that death scene. Could it have been a reference to this one? Maybe it’s showing us that in that scene, Ben is thinking, “How could this happen to me? It was WIDMORE who broke the rules, NOT me, so why is my daughter dead? How could the island really have wanted her dead, when I’ve followed the rules and he broke them?” But why say he CHANGED the rules, not broke the rules? I’m thinking he is really saying that the island didn’t want Alex dead, so Widmore simply sent a vigilante to the island to make it happen. He changed the rules in forcing a death and not letting the island decide who lives and who dies. Rather than Smokey bringing the judgement forth, Widmore did it, thereby changing the rules. (Nik at Nite)
18.Ever since Sun and Frank went back to Othersville a couple of weeks ago, and we got to see the condition the barracks were in, plus the fact that there were apparantly still Dharma photos hanging up, people started to cry alternate timeline. I mean, how else could the barracks look SO different than when we last saw them. The theory was that something must have been changed in the past to cause the difference. But tonight when Ben entered his old house he looked at a Risk board laying on a table, a subtle clue that nothing has changed.
Last season, just before Keamy shot Alex, Hurley, Sawyer, and a few other people were holed up in Ben’s house. While in there, Hurley and Sawyer played a game of risk while having a little snack. As you can see from the images below, the Risk board is still there, just the way they left it more than 3 years before. (Sledgeweb’s Lost…Stuff)
“Whatever Happened, Happened” is the eleventh episode of Season 5 of Lost and the 97th episode of the series as a whole. It was originally broadcast on April 1, 2009. Kate struggles to save a young Benjamin Linus from a gunshot wound at all costs.(Lostpedia.com)
Kate’s big season 5 flashback episode aspired to reveal why Kate was so emotionally invested in Aaron and managing the lie that he represented. Certainly time played a role. Funny now to think that Kate had been Aaron’s mother longer (three years) than Claire had ever had been (a couple months). Yet ”Whatever Happened, Happened” revealed that Kate needed to be Aaron’s mother. To fill her Sawyer void. To assuage her guilt over abandoning the Left Behinders.
The marina sequence — a nexus point of destiny for the Oceanic 6, originally depicted in ”The Little Prince” and ”This Place Is Death — was revisited yet again in last night’s episode, as it was last week for Sayid’s flashback episode. And once again, we saw that boat with the word ”Illusion” emblazoned on the side. For the Oceanic 6, the marina = ”this place is death.” It is the place where the mirage of their after-Island happy endings — poof! — faded away
Sawyer’s all Mr. Respectable now, the kind of ”Live together, die alone” leader Jack used to be. Meanwhile, Jack is back on the Island searching for destiny and his fulfillment, and while I don’t make that bad (not yet, at least), last night he came off looking a little…well, a little like Old Sawyer to me.In the same way Jack used to go barging over to Sawyer’s tent on the beach demanding help from the con man (Band-Aids, pills, etc.) and instead only getting bad attitude and ”What’s in it for me?” selfishness, now it’s Sawyer barging into Jack’s home, demanding that he apply his surgical skills to Young Ben, and getting a big self-centered ”No” in return. Yeah, yeah, there was a little more to Jack’s response to that — there always is, with anyone — but let us note this conspicuous role reversal. Jack is the new Sawyer. He even went shirtless last night! Wonder where that may lead? Sweaty cage sex? A Dharma library card? Crazy nicknames?
Last night, there was that bit of business about knowing that Sawyer and Kate were coming to him. But how? Psychic powers? Hyper-attuned jungle senses? A Desmond-esque flash from the future? And why not let them come to him? Is that just not the Others way — or did you get the sense, as I did, that Richard didn’t want them to know anything about the Temple, aka The House of Smokey? So far, we only know of one castaway who is aware of the Temple’s existence: Jin. (See: The Affair of Montand’s Severed Arm.) I’m going to hazard a guess and say that his knowledge of this mysterious Island landmark is going to play a crucial role in the season’s endgame. And while we’re on the subject of the Temple: Do you think Richard and Smokey are roommates?
Again, we are prodded to ask: What exactly is Richard’s relationship to the Others and his role in the leadership structure? My current take on Richard is this: He is like an angel to be wrestled with and overcome, like a sphinx to be solved and beaten, and should you be successful, you get the keys to the kingdom, the Island, and as part of the deal, he serves you faithfully until someone else comes along and knocks you off the mountain.
the castaways are being made to understand that their participation in past events is shaping the future that they have already experienced. They have themselves to blame for the thing that is Benjamin Linus. We are the causes of our own suffering. Think about your life. At the same time, I didn’t quite know how to interpret this idea that Ben would be getting a memory wipe as part of his healing treatment. Did Richard mean that Ben would only be made to forget how Sawyer and Kate helped save his life? I hope so, because if Ben’s whole childhood is about to get erased, it really makes me look stupid for insisting to the whole world that Adult Ben remembers growing up with the castaways in Dharmaville. (Doc Jensen)
Miles describes time as being relative to oneself. For them, the years go 197? (whenever they were born) to 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 1974, 1975, 1976, 1977… For Ben they go forward, and the “past” they’re in right now is Ben’s present. Miles is convinced that whatever happened, happened, and you can’t change it. Hurley, the lover of comics and reader/watcher of several stories of going back in time to change the past, isn’t so convinced. Is Miles right, and if so, where did he get his information from? Is it possible that THIS is his real usefulness?
There are a couple of lines from season 4 that I can’t stop thinking about. One of them was when the psychiatrist tells Juliet that Ben is obsessed with her because “you look just like her.” His mother? A girlfriend? Now I’m starting to be convinced that the person she looks just like… is herself. Roger stands in the room where Ben is struggling to breathe, and tells Kate that what a boy really needs is his mother. Cut to Juliet standing over him, looking concerned and leaning down to help him. According to Alpert, he’s going to forget everything that happened up to the point where the Others took him, but maybe Juliet mothers him in some way after this moment, and he’ll remember that and become obsessed with her years later.
The other line is one Charles Widmore delivers to Ben when Ben comes to visit him in the night and tells him that he’s going to kill Penny (Shape of Things to Come). I’ve always been unnerved by Widmore saying he knows WHAT he is, and he also says that they both know Widmore can’t kill Ben. In this episode, Alpert takes Ben to his camp and says Ben will never be the same. Then the one hostile says to Richard that Ellie and Charles will freak out if they find out, they being Eloise (presumably) and Charles Widmore, whom we saw as young soldiers in 1954. Is whatever Richard’s about to do going to render Ben immortal in some way?
Did You Notice?:• There didn’t appear to be a noticeable exit wound on Ben’s back. Maybe it went through his side and that’s why there’s no blood?• Kate’s got her Patsy playing again. An interesting choice, since Kate’s got Sawyer’s picture in her mind, but Juliet’s got him. (not that Kate knows that yet…)• Kate sings “Catch a Falling Star” to Aaron, which is the song that Christian always sang to Claire when she was a baby.
• After Sawyer and Miles took off with the janitor’s keys, leaving Horace and Phil behind in the cell room, Phil had a look on his face like something wasn’t right. I think he’ll be the one to eventually unravel Sawyer’s happy little fairy tale.
• For all his snark, Miles seems to fall into the role of being Sawyer’s underling pretty easily, and takes orders from him without ever talking back.
When Kate goes up to the guy to ask where the juice boxes are, he looks directly at her, and never do his eyes go down to look at Aaron. Then when she goes back to him to ask if he saw her son, he looks at her like she’s kinda crazy and says, “Your… son?” and as she runs away, he looks behind him as if to say to someone that she was nuts. Did anyone else think for a moment that Aaron was invisible in that scene or something? That grocery stock guy was very strange.• Kate and Aaron are wearing the same clothes when they go to Cassidy’s, as if they hadn’t slept at all the night before.• In the awesome smackdown scene between Juliet and Jack (did anyone else detect that maybe IF Sawyer has been pining for Kate, Juliet has been equally pining for Jack?) Jack says that he came back because he was supposed to, but doesn’t know any details. He sounds EXACTLY like Locke in this scene.
• I don’t mean to be unfair to Sun, but Kate looked far more broken up over leaving Aaron than Sun looked about leaving Ji Yeon. (Nik at Nite)
It’s interesting how the “Lost” crew is using the time travel component — and the paradox/no-paradox question — as a lens for character development. Sayid is blindly driven to change the future by killing young Ben in the present; newly-mellow Jack seems to subscribe to Faraday’s theory that events will transpire as they’re supposed to transpire, so his involvement is irrelevant (and convenient, because you know he doesn’t want to crack Ben open again); and Kate, Juliet and Sawyer believe it’s inherently wrong to let a young boy die, regardless of his future actions. In past seasons, Jack would have acted/reacted, Kate would have avoided making a decision, Sayid may have considered the long-range implications (he wasn’t always cold-blooded), and Sawyer would have shot the kid himself.
Charles Widmore and Eloise Hawking are both on the island in 1977 (I’m making the wild assumption that “Charles” and “Ellie” refer to these two). Richard claims he doesn’t take orders from either of them. So what gives? Was Widmore a recognized Other leader, or did he adopt that title? And I’m assuming that if Young Ben is assimilated into the Others, he’ll come to know Eloise Hawking … but what sort of relationship will he forge with her, where will her allegiances lie (With Widmore? With Ben? With Alpert?) and how will the Ben-Hawking connection lead to old Mrs. Hawking helping Ben and the Oceanic Six return to the island in “316″? And who is Daniel Faraday’s father? (The Lost Blog)
Hurley and Miles started a new, special kind of friendship tonight that I hope we see more of in the future. Of course, it does make me worry for Miles a little. After all, people who come in contact with Hurley don’t always fare so well. But in Whatever Happened, Happened there was some fantastic dialog between the two on the specifics of time travel. Hurley definitely represents many of the feelings the fans have had this season. (Sledgeweb’s Lost Stuff. Click here to see video of the above conversations!)
Do You See What I See? Probably Not.
Not me, mind you… but the characters on LOST. Know what they see? Only what they need to see. Or more specifically, only what they need to be shown. Which is why when Jin turns little Ben over, the bullet hole in his zip-down hoodie is now on the exact opposite side of his chest – on the other side of the zipper. It’s not even close, it’s a complete mirror image of the spot where Sayid drilled him precisely through the heart.
Continuity error? Maybe on 24. But this is LOST, and we’re seeing exactly what the island wants us to see, through Jin’s eyes. But through the eyes of Sayid? For him the bullet went right through the kid’s heart – no need for a coup de grace. And this, my friends, is how the island isn’t so much manipulating the events or happenings we see from week to week. What’s being manipulated are the perceptions and experiences of the characters on LOST, and yes, even the flashbacks. I’ll go further nuts on this at the end of my review, but for anyone still dangling from that last thin thread of the continuity argument? It just snapped.
Jack put it all very well: he’s been here before. He’s already operated on Benjamin Linus to save his life. He’s already taken that shower that he’s about to take, he’s already stepped out in that towel and been reflected in that mirror… we’ve heard this song already. The only difference is that this time, Jack’s on the Locke side of the coin. “Maybe the island just wants to fix things itself” – this is something S1-4 Jack Shephard would never have said. Months, years of trying to deny the impossibilities of what’s been happening to everyone has finally give Jack a front row in the first pew of the church of faith – not science. This, plus his talk with Sawyer seems to have sunk in: Jack’s taken the time to examine all the actions he’s taken since flight 815 crashed, and he’s determined that nothing he did really accomplished anything. Whatever was going to happen would be unfazed by Jack’s intervention… and when Jack did intervene, it was simply because he was meant to. Totally maddening. Imagine realizing such a total loss of control – that nothing you ever did, or would do, really mattered at all. THIS IS WHAT JACK’S MEANT TO THINK. This is what the island has been trying very, very hard to show him. When Jack mentions he’d been “getting in the way” it’s because he HAD been getting in the way.
And although Kate came back because the island summoned her, one cool thing to note is that Kate came back with a purpose: Claire. This seems pretty important considering that, other than Sun, no one else came back to the island with any sense of purpose whatsoever. Sayid came back unwillingly, and Jack and Hurley’s most popular answer: “We just gotta go back”.Also important, it seemed Kate couldn’t go back to the island until she’d resolved something: her lie. This was part of the whole redemption-before-getting-on-the-plane process. Jack, the inventor of the lie, had to finally (and besottedly) admit to himself that they weren’t supposed to leave. Hurley spilled the entire can of island beans to his mom at the kitchen table, absolving himself of his own lie. Sayid’s big lie was apparently trying to be a carpenter instead of a killer. And at the end of this episode, Kate finally tells Cassidy and Carole everything: all about the plane crash, Claire being alive, and how she assumed custody of Aaron. Her lie is now over, and that’s when she gets on the plane. Maybe Sun ended up in 2007 because she never resolved her lie? Dunno.
Regardless, Richard makes a point to tell Sawyer and Kate that Ben will ‘always be one of them’. Unlike Juliet who could be easily excommunicated, Benjamin Linus would be forever initiated into the Others secret club. I get the impression that Ben is about to go through a subterranean, more personal version of island baptism than the rest of the Others have gone through (with Richard maybe being the exception). In exchange for his life, poor unconscious Ben is about to sacrifice his future ability to choose any kind of destiny all his own. Later on in life, I think Ben learns this might even be worse than dying.This is the reason why, above all else, I’ve always believed Ben not to be evil. He’s never been his own person, and has spent his life doing the island’s work. Just as the old John Locke has always been a puppet whose strings are constantly being pulled and manipulated by others, Ben’s own destiny has been unwantingly placed before him at an age where he could nothing about it. It sucks, and it’s always sucked. He knows this, and I think it’s why Ben shouts down the island with his whole “I hope you’re happy” speech and leaves via the donkey wheel. He wants to change things. Ben is thoroughly finished doing the bidding of this fickle bitch – he finally wants to have his own life. But in order to accomplish this, I think Ben knew he had to sneak back onto the island via some very shady means. Ben’s helping the O6 these past two seasons may have seemed to be according to the island’s plan, but I think Ben just had to make it look that way.
Humor me for a minute, and watch Kate and Aaron in the supermarket. She asks where the juice boxes are, gets distracted by Jack’s call, and then loses Aaron. Watch the look the stockboy gives her when she tells him she lost her son: as he says “excuse me” his facial expressions register confusion, not concern for someone who just walked by with a little blonde boy in tow. Rewind to when Kate first asks the question, and the stockboy never even looks at Aaron. In fact, no one looks at Aaron in the supermarket at all, except for Kate. As she frantically runs through the aisles the next scene is shown, not surprisingly, in the store’s giant mirror.
Suddenly Kate sees Aaron again, this time seemingly being led away by Claire. We know Claire is supposed to raise Aaron, and the island is showing Kate this. It’s slapping her in the face with the fact that she’s living a lie. It leads Kate back to Cassidy’s house, where Clementine answers the door. “Hi Auntie Kate!”, she says. She doesn’t say hi to Aaron. She doesn’t even look at Aaron. Strange too, because Aaron apparently rang the bell.
Later on, Kate gives Carole a picture of Aaron on a tire swing. Immediately she asks “Where is he?” Kate answers her question with “two doors down”, but Carole continues to stare at the photo. Where is he indeed.
Okay, let me back up a minute. Am I saying that I believe Aaron’s nothing more than a figment of Kate’s imagination, and that he never existed at all? Nope. Aaron is as real as reality gets – on LOST, anyway. There are lots of people who see and interact with Aaron – Cassidy for one. But I am saying this: Cassidy’s words this episode were all about how Kate needed Aaron, instead of the other way around. The minute Kate began wondering if Aaron wouldn’t be better off without her, he suddenly and instantaneously disappeared. (DarkUFO)
“He’s Our You” is the tenth episode of Season 5 of Lost and the 96th episode of the series as a whole. It was originally broadcast on March 25, 2009. The DHARMA Initiative struggles to discover the identity of Sayid Jarrah, while Sawyer tries to make sure that his secret remains safe. (Lostpedia.com)
But we must strongly consider the possibility that Sayid’s discovery of heroic will was actually nothing of the sort. According to the ”whatever happened, happened” theory of time travel, history is fixed. It can’t be changed. This means Ben grew up with the castaways living around the corner from him in Dharmaville, and more, that his list of Greatest Hits (Not!) includes ”The time that captured Hostile in the purple shirt who promised to take me to live with Richard in the enchanted forest betrayed me and shot me.” Seen from this perspective, the Ben-Sayid relationship takes on a provocative new spin, because it means that while Ben was ruthlessly cultivating Sayid into a seething ball of I HATE BENJAMIN LINUS! during those off-Island years, he did so keenly aware that one day, Sayid was going to fall down a wormhole into his childhood and try to kill him. Which, in my book, makes Ben complicit in the assassination attempt on his own life, and maybe even the plot’s chief architect. He wanted this to happen. And suddenly, I am reminded of one of the maxims in the Dharma brainwashing film that Kate and Sawyer stumbled upon in Season 3: ”We are the causes of our own suffering.”
”He’s Our You” was certainly fixated on the theme of free will and the lack thereof. We saw the idea expressed through the abundance of handcuffs, restraints, and prison bars; through psychotropic drugs that eliminate choice and compel obedience; through the Dharma leadership sweating the interference and control of ”Ann Arbor,” as in the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan, homebase for Dharma founders; through Ben’s bitter, angry father, blasting his son for bringing Sayid a sandwich and yelling, ”I’ll tell you what to think!”
The challenge of personal transformation and the competition between material security and spiritual evolution is at the heart of the conspicuous literary reference that Lost gave us last night. ”A Separate Reality” should probably not be interpreted by us as a clue nodding toward an alternate reality theory, because that misses the point of the book. Of course, its author, Carlos Castaneda, is a controversial guy, and the serious Lostologist would be wise to apply his work to the show with extreme caution. (Doc Jensen)
So Ben never sent Sayid after Widmore. I expected him to. I thought that would be Sayid’s turning point. I thought that Sayid would fail and Widmore would convince him to turn against Ben. (Ben also didn’t send Sayid after Abaddon, but I don’t think that means anything.)
I don’t think Ben’s dead. I don’t think I actually have to say this, but if I don’t then it might come back to bite me in the ass. I believe Ms. Hawkins and Daniel, you can’t change the past and all that you will cause is “course corrections”. So somehow Ben didn’t die. Maybe he had a bible in his shirt pocket. Maybe he had his heart removed and the bullet passed through his body (it would explain a lot, but it might cause a few problems). Perhaps it was all staged, maybe it was a blank in the gun and Ben had a squib on him. I really have no idea how Ben didn’t die, but I’m sure he didn’t. (from Not Confused Just Lost)
In fact, the whole episode is geared toward showing us exactly how Sayid is forged and tempered into a heartless killing machine… the writers have 40+ minutes to really, really convince us of this if they want to pull off the cold-blooded shooting of an innocent kid.
But in reality, it’s not the viewers who really need the convincing: it’s Sayid. And as this episode unfolds, it quickly becomes obvious that Sayid’s hunting down and killing of Widmore’s golfing buddies never really meant Jack or Squat in the grand scheme of things. Not only were these killings unnecessary, they might not even have been related to anything other than planting the seeds of murder deep within Sayid’s brain.
We’ve seen many, many record players throughout LOST, but none as antique as Oldham’s Victrola. This means something, and I think it’s a not-so-subtle clue as to how this creepy new character is in keeping with the island’s ancient ways. He’s living very oldskool, deeper in the jungle, dwelling in a tepee with no electricity far from the civilized Dharma compound. He’s using old methods and listening to old music on an old recording device, and he even has ‘old’ in his name. Go figure.
I think the closer you get to the island’s spiritual roots, the more attuned you are to it’s true nature. Even more important, the deeper into subconscious a character’s mind can journey, the closer they get to achieving the island’s true enlightenment. All throughout LOST, the island has spoken most directly and pointedly to those who have been unconscious, semi-conscious, or drugged out of their minds. Boone tripping out on Locke’s magic paste… Eko’s dreams of Yemi while half-conscious… Locke using his sweat-tent to commune with the island. Last season I pointed out how Jack even took a nice trip to see dad after being knocked out during his appendectomy. These things are highly important.
So what do we have? We have Ben sending Sayid all over the world to kill people for three straight years. Did these people really matter? Did their deaths really keep Sayid’s friends safe? Shit no. I’m even sketchy on them being related to Widmore at all, but if so I’m sure Ben was just playing fun games inside Charles Widmore’s head. The deaths of these men meant nothing in the grand scheme of things other to reinforce one thing that I’ve always said: Sayid Jarrah is an absolute death-magnet.
Then we have Ben reminding Sayid that he’s a killer… telling him that he’s a killer… over and over, beating it into his skull. We also have Sayid driven to an intense hatred for Ben and a complete mistrust in him by the time he gets on the Ajira airways flight. Add all of this together and what do you get?
Alright, I’ve built it up enough: Ben wanted Sayid to go back to the past and shoot him. He fine-tuned Sayid into enough of a killing machine and instilled enough hatred in his heart for him so that Ben knew he would shoot even a young child version of himself. Yeah, I know it’s crazy. I know it’s out there. But if you examine this episode and really delve into why Ben spent so much off-island time honing Sayid into the killing tool he’s now become… it makes a lot of sense.
Notice I said ‘shoot him’ and not ‘kill him’. I’m pretty sure young Benjamin Linus will live. But I think Sayid shooting Ben is going to have serious repercussions on the 1977 timeline that might result in big changes to the way things originally would’ve played out. Maybe Ben getting shot in 1977 will somehow delay or prevent him from joining the hostiles? Maybe the purge will be avoided? I won’t pretend to know those answers, but somehow 2007 Ben understands that getting shot in the past will cause ripples through time that will change things in a direction favorable to his master plan. (DarkUFO)
“Namaste” is the ninth episode of Season 5 of Lost and the 92nd episode overall. It was originally broadcast on March 18, 2009. The return of his old friends to the Island forces Sawyer to struggle to keep his lie concealed. (Lostpedia.com)
Although Ajira Airways Flight 316 travels through a time flash (going from night to day) just before landing, the plane and its remaining passengers are implied to still be in 2008 because a title card in the episode states that the 1977 scenes take place “Thirty Years Earlier”.
As the plane’s co-pilot issues a Mayday call, he picks up a transmission of a voice reading The Numbers. The origin of this transmission is a mystery, as DHARMA’s original radio message was replaced by Rousseau‘s distress signal in 1988, and that broadcast was subsequently terminated in 2004 during the events of “Through the Looking Glass“. (1-2 from Lostpedia.com)
This episode’s ’70s segment formally introduces / reintroduces a number of secondary characters:
Radzinsky — A balding, cranky Dharma scientist who spends his downtime constructing scale models of the Swan station’s computer room. Radzinksy’s involvement in the Swan’s development has a whiff of irony since we know he eventually uses a shotgun and his own brain matter to redecorate the Swan’s ceiling decor.
Ethan — Last week, we saw Juliet rejoice at delivering Amy’s baby boy. This week, she throws up in her mouth a little when Amy reveals that her new son’s name is Ethan … as in Ethan Rom … future Oceanic faker, Claire kidnapper, and Charlie hanger. The most intriguing part of this revelation is this: How does Ethan go from being Dharma born-and-bred to a homicidal Other?
Pierre Chang — Jack is formally processed by Dharma’s instructional video host.
4.Little Ben — We first met innocent Benjamin Linus during the flashback sequences of “The Man Behind the Curtain,” but Little Ben is bumped into the direct narrative with a foreboding scene at the conclusion of this episode. A simple sandwich exchange between Little Ben and Dharma’s latest prisoner, Sayid, suggests that Sayid will soon put Daniel Faraday’s “you can’t change the timeline” theory to the test.(3-4 from from The Lost Blog)
I know how the time jumping baffles some of you. So let’s establish temporal context. It seems those Ajira 316 castaways and the Oceanic 6/Left Behinders are separated by 30 years of time. While there’s always been some debate as to when exactly the Oceanic 6 left The Island, I’m going to take the conservative estimate and say it was late December 2004. They spent three years away from The Island before boarding Ajira 316 to head back. Hence: The Ajira/Hydra castaways are in 2007. The time travelers are in 1977.
In the opening sequence, we saw that after the Island beamed Jack, Kate, Hurley, and Sayid off of Ajira 316, Captain Frank Lapidus spied a makeshift runway on Hydra Island and successfully executed a landing.
I f I am recalling the Lost lore accurately, the Others were working on the landing strip during the time that Kate and Sawyer were stuck in the polar bear cages. In fact, I think Project: Runway was the hard labor the fugitive lovers were assigned during their imprisonment. Sure, the Others may have been making the strip for their own use. But I’m liking the idea that they were making it because they knew — or more precisely because Ben knew — that it needed to be there in the future for Ajira 316. It certainly fits my long-held contention that Ben’s machinations have been informed by knowledge of future events.
7.Sun and Lapidus took one of the Hydra Station outriggers and paddled their way to the Island. As they approached, we heard Smokey’s distinctive rattle — and then the monster retreated. Arrrgh! Who dares waddle onto my beaches?! Oh. You guys. Yeah, you’re all right. Welcome back. Help yourself to the Dharma beer in the barracks. A supernatural entity will be along in a minute to download some crucial intel. And sorry about the mess. Mercenaries, you know?
8.Said spectre was Jack’s poltergeisty pop. Although Ghost Shephard seemed to be slightly more tangible than your typical Casper, didn’t he? And interesting how he turned on the lights in that cabin and then led the way with the flashlight into the old Dharma orientation center. Does Christian actually need that light, or was he just being hospitable for his more conventionally humanoid guests — part of his duty as an otherworldly psychopomp, lighting the way for afterlife travelers? (PYSCHOPOMP! PSYCHOPOMP! PSYCHOPOMP!)
9.One other thought: Was Lost trying to suggest a connection between Christian and Smokey by having the two in the same vicinity at roughly the same time? Could Jack’s father be the monster in human form? (5-9 from Doc Jensen)
10. Okay, so we hate to make it seem like anytime there’s a small amount of smoke in an episode of Lost that it means that Smokey was there, but rewatching the scene where Christian opens the door in Othersville, there is obviously quite a bit of what looks like smoke behind him. Then, as they enter the house, the door opens to a strange squeaking sound and the smoke swirls through the rooom. So is this Smokey, and proof that somehow Smokey is involved in the Christian sightings? Or is this mearly a smoky room and the wind is blowing through the door, making it swirl? I, for one, think that its Smokey. (from Sledgeweb’s….Lost Stuff)
11. If you rewatch the scene where Christian takes Sun into the house, at the end of the scene, if you watch very closely, you’ll notice that there is another woman in the room. At the very end, just after Christian says “You have a long road ahead of you,” and it goes to a tight push in shot on Sun. Over Sun’s shoulder you can clearly see a figure, that appears to be a blond female, move her head. So are we to believe that Claire was in the room with Christian?
12. All of this reminded me of my wild theory, proposed two weeks ago, that season 5 of Lost is running parallel to season 2. Because this bit of business totally evoked for me the Henry Gale storyl ine of the show’s second season, when the castaways nabbed themselves a man they suspected to be an Other. And they were right. Which leads me to my big theory of the column: I think that the Others/Hostiles got their hands on Sayid prior to his capture by Jin. I think they’re blackmailing him into doing something for them that will prove detrimental to the Dharma Initiative and put Sawyer’s standing at risk. And remember how Sayid was allegedly feuding with Ben? How he made that big show to Hurley about how he was never going to trust Ben ever again? Well, I’m entertaining the notion that that was all a ruse, too — all part of Ben’s scheme to manipulate and herd the Oceanic 6 back to the Island. Crazy? Totally reaching? My guess is we won’t have to wait too long to find out….(11-12 from Doc Jensen)
“LaFleur” is the eighth episode of Season 5 of Lost and the 91st episode overall. It was originally broadcast on March 4, 2009. The fate of those left on the island after Locke turned the wheel is revealed, as Sawyer, Juliet, and company meet the DHARMA Initiative. (from Lostpedia.com’s recap)
At some point — we don’t know when — Dharma and the Others declared a truce. Sawyer and the crew land just as the truce falls apart. In the hazy moments following Locke’s departure, the group wanders back to the beach with a rough plan to rebuild the camp (or find the camp … whichever comes first). But they stumble upon a picnic gone horribly awry.
You’ll recall that Daniel Faraday’s Rules for Time Travel dictate that the future cannot be changed by tweaking past events. Or, as Faraday himself puts it: “Whatever happened, happened.” If Faraday is correct, Amy was always saved. Something or someone intervened. But here’s where my brain starts to pulse: Does that “someone” have to be Sawyer and Juliet, or is the outcome more important than the details? And if outcomes carry more weight, who/what determines which outcomes will be most important in a person’s (or island’s) existence?
Sometime during the group’s three-year stay, Amy marries Dharma leader Horace Goodspeed (the moron who invites little Benjamin Linus to the island). Amy gets pregnant and Juliet is called out of retirement to deliver the child. The birth of Amy’s baby boy (and Amy’s survival) marks the first time Juliet has ever successfully delivered a child on the island. The baby is still an anomaly, however. All Dharma babies are born off-island; Amy popped her’s out because she went into labor earlier than expected. So the question is: who will that baby grow up to be? (1-3 from The Lost Blog)
The statue is clearly Egyptian, and it’s holding the rounded loop of an Ankh in the right hand. The elf-like ears jive well with many of Egypt’s gods, who were often represented as crosses between a man and another animal. I had mentioned Anubis in my review two weeks ago, but the Jackyl-God’s ears would be taller. Another good guess would be Horus, Egyptian god of the sun (and of war?). There are some good arguments for him being the best candidate, the first being that this episode had a whole lot of ‘Horace’ in it to begin with. The popular eye of Horus symbol could also be a reference to the glass eye found in the arrow station back in S2. Horus was even half falcon, and falcons have four talons on each claw. But there’s also a big argument against Horus: falcons have no ears
On the subject of falcons, another bird made two solid appearances in last night’s episode: the owl. First we see a wooden owl in Amy’s house, during the scene where she’s going into labor. Later on we see another wooden owl hanging from the wall in Heather’s home. After 90 seconds of research, I’ve uncovered nothing important about the owl in Egyptian mythology, other than that it represents the letter ‘M’. So if anyone else can come up with something, me and the 4-toed statue are all ears.
Faraday’s assertion that he’s “not gonna do it” obviously refers to his future/past warning to young Charlotte. Yet going by his own rule of ‘whatever happens has already happened’, he knows inwardly that he’s going to warn her anyway. Mourning aside, this is the real reason he’s going crazy right now. Daniel’s fighting the urge to grab that little red-headed girl and shake the island out of her… but at the same time his ever-logical mind knows he can’t stop it from happening
Sawyer has always been in the front-running for the most transformed character on the show, but after this episode there can be no doubt. We’ve watched his name go from Sawyer to James, and now even his last name is adjusted to LaFleur. He’s gone from a loner with no accountability to the head of Dharma security, and he’s taken on an extremely Jack-like leadership role. Traditionally, Sawyer’s trudged around the jungle following everyone else, grumbling complaints, and dropping sarcastic/hilarious remarks. Yet LaFleur leads others, makes quick decisions, and takes decisive action – and with all the funny comments to boot.
The hooking up of Sawyer and Juliet was surprisingly awesome, made even more great by all the tough stuff they’ve been through together. While the O6 were off boring me to death in the real world, these two have been time-jumping and dry humping. Juliet turns out to be the type of girl who can drill someone through the heart from 50 yards away, deliver a baby with a #5 scalpel, and then go out and rebuild your transmission. Let me tell you guys something… when you find that type of girl you STICK with her.
Reaction-wise, Kate’s return is certainly going to throw Juliet for a loop. And although the Sawyer/Juliet hookup will surprise Jack, no one’s going to be more pissy than when Ben finds out. In fact, it got me thinking: Maybe Ben already found out. Is this why Ben mated Kate and Sawyer at the Dharma beating zoo in the first place, like a pair of wild animals? Because he was hoping to get Sawyer so involved with Kate that he wouldn’t want Juliet later on? This would imply Ben knew in advance that the two of them would play Dharma house together. But then again, I think by now Ben knows he’s going to end up alone… a bitter, single old man popping pringles and watching
Twilight Zone episodes while sneering at their predictability
Compared to a motor-driven ship, a submarine would be pretty damned slow and it’s carrying capacity downright sucks. So what’s the deal?My guess: the ‘window’ to the island lies underwater. At least currently, while the island is in its present time and position. We’ve seen reference to certain compass bearings in order to get on and off the island, but those have always been two-dimensional representations of a 360-degree circle. What if the island’s radius of accessibility is a three-dimensional sphere, and the window that allows entry (which Dharma has determined is open only once every two weeks) happens to lie on a plane of reference that is beneath the surface of the water? That’s my new sub theory and I’m sticking to it
So then who is the son of Horace? We won’t find that out for a while. But consider this: was he supposed to be born at all? If Juliet hadn’t been there, would he have died otherwise? The other doctor looked like a total goofball. Was having Juliet travel back to Dharma time necessary for the birth of this kid? And if so, did Ben Linus knowingly recruit her to the island in the 1990′s for this sole purpose… the whole ‘solving the fertility problem’ thing being something he knew she couldn’t fix anyway? If so, I think we just saw something really important.The brilliant part of the show is that none of us know what the hell is really going on. Half of us could make arguments for predetermination: nothing anyone does really matters because it’s already done, determined, and finished. The other half could argue that, in fact, everything has changed. (4-11 from DarkUFO.com)
The screen shot of the statue from tonight’s episode along with the ankh necklace that Paul wore in the episode has turned up a strong connection to the Egyptian God Anubis. In fact, SWLS is saying that the four-toed statue IS in fact Anubis. (from Sledgeweb’s…Lost Stuff)
It could be Anubis, but the long jackal ears aren’t there. Instead, as I pointed out in my post, Set was the mortal enemy of Horus, and was the god of chaos and destruction. He was eventually banished to the desert. Horace seems to be the enemy of the Others (who presumably worshipped the statue in their earlier days) and when you go off the island, you are banished to the desert.But one of my readers, Chris Temple, emailed me making a case for another Egyptian god. This is Taweret:
She is the Egyptian goddess of sagging breasts pregnancy and childbirth. She has small ears, like the island statue, and that flat hat on her head. And… she has four toes. But more importantly, her importance is a goddess of fertility, and when we know what happened on the island, could the Others have always had fertility problems and they once called upon gods and goddesses to help them? (from Nik at Nite)
Egyptian themes continue with Paul’s Ankh necklace, seen in “LaFleur”. We’ve already seen hieroglyphs, an egyptian-esque statue, Guyliner Alpert, and a character named Horace… what’s will all the Egyptian nods? According to my good friend, Wiki, the symbol means “eternal life”. That didn’t seem to work out for Paul, but perhaps Guyliner took his body in order to resurrect him and then kill him a second time to make up for the death of two Others.(from Sledgeweb’s…Lost Stuff)
When Horace heard that Richard might be able to find the bodies of the dead Hostiles he tells one of the Dharma guys, “Call the Arrow, tell them we’re at condition one, take the heavy ordinance, and make sure the fence is at maximum.” That’s a lot of vague info.
In the premiere Pierre told us that The Arrow was used to create defensive strategies against The Hostiles. You could say that they were creating a security system. Heavy Ordinance could mean any number of things, but putting the sonic fence at maximum seems to imply one thing, Smokey. Could the Heavy Ordinance be the activation of Smokey? If Dharma had the ability to control or at least trigger Smokey that would explain how Ben summoned it in season 4.
A big “thank you!” to reader DS, who messaged me with this idea about Ageless Richard and made me laugh out loud… until I realized he could be onto something: “With all the Egyptian mythology themes in the show I couldn’t help but wonder if Richard Alpert (R.A.), with his Egyptian eyeliner eyes, is really RA the Sun God.” Now, I don’t want to go as far as to say that I agree Ageless Richard might actually BE an ancient deity in human form, but having Sawyer call out his eyeliner might have been meant to serve two purposes: 1) an in-joke for fans, and 2) a hint — another connection to the Ancient Egyptian culture where both men and women were known to pretty up their peepers. (from Long Live Locke)
I’ve been thinking about Radzinsky for a while now. He was the guy who killed himself while in The Swan. I’m worried that it’s going to be one of the people who go into the past. The most likely, an most tragic, choice would be Daniel. I could see him going crazy down there and shooting himself. SO I’m really hoping that we meet someone named Radzinsky real soon. (14-15 from Not Confused Just Lost)
This episode is unique in its handling of time in two different ways. Firstly, while title cards have been used in the past to indicate times or places, this is the first episode which has used them for this purpose for both the present-day and flash segments. Moreover, while “Ji Yeon” utilized both a flashback and a flashforward separately, this episode was the first to have a story segment which was both a flashback and a flashforward. The 1977 scenes were a flashforward because the depicted events three years after the preceding episodes’ on-Island storyline (continuing from the end of “This Place Is Death“); they were also a flashback because they immediately preceded the events at the end of “316“. In a way, they were also present-day scenes because the final parts took place immediately after Jin finds Jack, Kate and Hurley in “316“. (16-18 from Lostpedia.com)
“The Life and Death of Jeremy Bentham” will be the seventh episode of Season 5 of Lost, and is scheduled to be broadcast on February 25, 2009. (from Lostpedia.com’s recap)
“…there’s a war coming, John. And if you’re not back on the island when that happens, the wrong side is going to win.”
The War: Widmore vs. Ben?
So who’s the good guy and who’s the bad guy? Are there clear sides? Are they both bad?
By the end of the episode, I couldn’t help but worry that poor Locke is just a pawn – no, maybe a knight – in the game of chess that Ben and Widmore are playing. Widmore says he sent his freighter to the island to wipe out Ben so that Locke could lead. Ben says he moved the island so that Widmore couldn’t find the island so that Locke could lead. They’re both saying the very things that Locke wants to hear. They both give him just enough hints to get him on-side, and confuse the hell out of him. Locke has no idea who to be loyal to… who would? (from Nik at Nite)
Locke tells Ben about his promise to Jin, and knowledge of Jin’s survival activates the overdeveloped manipulation node in Ben’s brain. It’s as though the rules have changed, and Ben sees a way to reclaim the island throne. Locke then tells Ben that Mrs. Hawking can help them return to the island. Again, the buggy brain behind Ben’s buggy eyes activates … and that’s when he loops the extension chord around Locke’s neck and chokes him to death! Ben then methodically arranges Locke’s room (and body) to make it look like a suicide.
I think Ben’s motivation switched during that conversation with Locke. Previously, his focus seemed to be on saving the island — hence the importance of Locke’s life; and perhaps Ben really was “protecting” the Oceanic Six. But Jin’s miraculous survival and/or mention of Mrs. Hawking flipped Ben’s megalomania switch, and suddenly Locke and the Oceanic Six became means toward his desired end. (2-3 from The Lost Blog)
When Caesar is in the rec room in New Otherton, there’s a skull on the desk that looks like a miniature verison of the polar bear skull that Charlotte found in Tunisia. There’s also a Life Magazine on the desk with the cover story, “Color Pictures of the Hydrogen Test.” (from Nik at Nite)
Searching through the Hydra, Caesar comes across some old magazines. An Issue of LIFE dated April 19, 1954 catches his eye. The cover features an image of a Hydrogen Bomb exploding during a test.
That issue also featured an article called “Julia in Jeopardy”. Julia is Julia Adams (I believe), an actress in The Creature from the Black Lagoon – which the article reviewed, and of which we also see a pic of. The Black Lagoon being a “paradise that no one has ever returned from” could be seen as another thematic LOST reference.
the actress from The Creature from the Black Lagoon, was on LOST! She played one of the Others in the 3rd season premiere- the one that came to Juliet’s door after Juliet burned her hand on the muffins if I’m not mistaken. (5-7 from Sledgeweb’s Lost…Stuff)
The Bonneville of Death is back!!! Well, OK, I couldn’t see if it was the Bonneville, but it was definitely a tan car that LOOKED like a Bonneville that hits Locke the second time. (This is the car that hit Kate, hit Michael, hit Locke in the parking lot, and has been involved in most accidents on the show.)
Westerfield Hotel can be anagrammed to “Die Where Felt Lost.”
Locke bought his suicide cord from “Angels Hardware.”
the ABC site is confirming that the plane, in fact, landed on the Hydra island, so they’re looking at the bigger island from the beach. Duh. I can’t believe I didn’t figure that one out. So Caesar’s not rifling through the rec room in New Otherton, but the office on the island where Kate, Jack, and Sawyer were held captive.
Why did Caesar hide the gun from Ilana? How do they know each other? Ilana refers to someone named Roxanne like she’s also someone they’ve known for a long time (the survivors weren’t really on a first-name basis for the first couple of days).
Ilana says “the pilot and some woman” took one of the boats in the middle of the night. Since Kate is with the others, the other woman must have been Sun. Where were they going? To the other side of the island? Why does Sun trust Lapidus after he’s the one who flew away in the helicopter?
• What happened to the plane? It’s just sitting on the beach, doesn’t look like it crashed or anything. It’s not smouldering, it’s not in pieces, it’s just sitting there like it set itself down gently. Were Kate, Jack, and Hurley sent to another era? Or are they all in the 1970s or whatever time that was when Jin came bombing along in the new and shiny VW van? If they’re in an earlier incarnation of the island, does Ben run the risk of meeting his younger self?
• Was Penny born on the island? I would hazard a guess that she’s probably about 30, and if Widmore was on the island until he was about 47, he can’t possibly be 77 now. So that would suggest that she’s been on the island before. (8-13 from Nik at Nite)
Caesar locates some files in The Hydra station that includes Dan Faraday’s map and one of his journal pages concerning time travel. Also included is Rousseau’s map. We’ve seen that Dan will eventually go to the Orchid station during Dharma’s final days. Now, we also know he makes a trip to the Hydra (or someone takes his papers there, anyways). Those papers are still there 30 years later when Ajira 316 crashes on the island (if we assume the crash occurs in 2007). Now, let this blow your mind. Before Rousseau even begins drawing her map, before she even conceives of it, there is already a finished version of that map laying in the Hydra Station. Therefore, once she does draw her map, there are then two identical copies of it on the island. The same applies to Dan’s map and his journal page. (from Sledgeweb’s Lost….Stuff. follow the link to see screencaps!)
Tonight we saw John Locke talking with Caesar, and the other survivors of Ajira flight 316. We saw from the wreckage of the plane that they crashed on the small island that houses the Hydra Station. The station appears to be abandoned, and if Locke and company are indeed in the same time as Jack, Kate, and Hurley, during Dharma’s heyday, then why would the Hydra be abandoned. The answer, John Locke and company (including Frank and Sun) crashed on the present day island, while Jack, Kate, and Hurley “flashed” to the island’s past. (from Sledgeweb’s Lost….Stuff)
Damnit, Widmore is so good at making me think twice about whether he’s evil or not.
Widmore didn’t seem to respectful towards Richard. when he heard that Widmore told Locke that he had to die, he brushed it off and told Locke that he would prevent that. Not too clever.
Abaddon died for a few reasons. His mystery was unnecessary. The writers didn’t need that kind of intriguing character running around off the island. By killing him they solved his mystery (kinda). Also the actor has a full time job on Fringe so they couldn’t keep bringing him back to do guest spots.
Walt’s been having dreams eh? So it wasn’t just the island that made him special. He can actually see the future. This could potentially go along with my Walt’s Powers theory. I believe that Walt can manipulate the past to shape the present and the future, not unlike Desmond’s specialness.
Why does Widmore think that Locke is “Special”? He doesn’t say why in this episode. I thought that Richard saw something in him as a baby, that’s why. But it turns out that that was nothing more that circular logic. Locke told Richard to go there because he was special so Richard did, the Special part of the equation cancels out. Now I’m afraid that Widmore thinks he’s special because Locke met him when he was 17. And we know that that indicated nothing. As usual Locke “special”-ness is unprovable. (16-20 from Not Confused Just Lost)
Locke accepted Widmore’s financing, plus his suggestion for an off-Island alias: Jeremy Bentham, another philosopher name, just like John Locke. Widmore: ”Your parents had a sense of humor when they named you. Why can’t I?” Why does ”Jeremy Bentham” amuse Widmore so?: And might the name hold a clue to Widmore’s sincerity? Consider:
A. The real Bentham and Locke were ideological opposites. Bentham considered Locke’s belief in natural law ”nonsense on stilts.” Is that how Widmore views Locke? As silly nonsense? A fool? If so, then Widmore is a jerk.
B. Bentham pioneered a school of thought call Utilitarianism, which evaluates the morality of an action based on the amount of good that said action generates for the most amount of people. Ergo, Widmore is using Locke — but to facilitate a greater good. If so, then Widmore is a good guy.
C. After he died, Bentham’s corpse — per his instructions — was (get this) entombed inside a cabinet called an Auto Icon. Whenever his followers gathered, they were supposed to wheel him out so he could hang with them. Creepy? Oh, yeah. Application to Locke? Widmore was lying when he told Locke he didn’t want him to die. He wanted Locke to wind up in a box. Meaning: The Coffin. Or maybe… Jacob’s cabin! After all, isn’t that ghost shack basically a rustic extrapolation of Bentham’s Auto-Icon, a vehicle that allows this ”Jacob” — i.e., Locke — haunt the Island? Maybe this is the ”destiny” Locke is being set up for: An eternity of ”Help me” flickering. If so, then…Huh? (from Doc Jensen at ew.com)
“316” is the sixth episode of Season 5 of Lost and the 89th overall. It was originally broadcast on February 18, 2009. The way back to the Island is revealed to members of the Oceanic 6, but there’s trouble ahead when not all of them wish to return.” (Lostpedia.com’s recap)
Kate shows up babyless at Jack’s place, and once again we play the all-too familiar game of “Where’s Aaron?”. I think the answer here is simple, with complex roots. Most likely, Kate’s given the baby to Claire’s mother, Carole. Aaron’s grandmother sure would seem the most logical choice to raise him at this point. Then again, Kate’s never been all that logical. So this also leaves the possibility that she sought out and hooked up with Cassidy, as Sawyer requested. She could’ve passed Aaron off to either of them for safekeeping before deciding to go back to the island. Whichever way it happened, giving up the baby is catastrophic for her – Kate loves Aaron and has fully been a mother to him.
Not so surprisingly, the reason behind the hand-off is once again Benjamin Linus. After pointedly telling Kate “You’re not his mother” last week, those seeds must really have grown fast. Those words seem pretty hypocritical of Ben, considering the whole Alex debacle. Ben was never really Alex’s father, and the whole situation ended badly because of his selfishness in wanting to raise her. I think in his own tactless and pretty harsh way, Ben was imparting this lesson upon Kate last episode. He was not-so-subtly letting her know that she shouldn’t make the same mistake he did. No matter how much she loved him, no matter what she did, the island wasn’t going to let her be his mother. A quick drive and some heavy thinking later, Kate resignedly admitted to herself that the island would never let go of her. Placing Aaron out of harm’s way was the type of sacrifice only a true mother could make. And now without him, there’s nothing to keep her from going back to the island. She’s not even doing it for the island, she’s doing to keep Aaron safe… Kate knows she couldn’t exist in the real world without wanting Aaron back.
It’s not enough to just want to go back to the island – I think the island has to want you back as well. Jack’s trans-Pacific flights always failed because he never had faith that they’d work in the first place. Hawking asks him to take this leap of faith, and for Jack that leap is to put his father’s shoes on Locke’s feet. For Hurley it was listening to those inner voices/visions, realizing that he’s NOT crazy, and denying the big lie. For Sun it was believing that Jin is alive. For Kate it was giving up Aaron. And maybe for Ben, it’s *not* knowing everything and letting someone else take the reins for once. He all but asks Jack what Eloise said to him in the church, but later on he leaves Jack in peace to read Locke’s suicide note. Ben’s always been omniscient, manipulative, controlling… but now he must let go and let things play out the way they’re supposed to. That’s his penance for returning to the island.
And speaking of Locke, his own act of faith was dying so that he could return to the island. Back in S2, Locke explains to Eko that Boone was “the sacrifice that the island demanded”. Now he himself is this very sacrifice, acting as “proxy” (Hawking’s word) in parallel to Christian Shephard’s corpse from flight 815. What happens when Locke returns to the island is going to be very big and probably just as weird.
Sayid is now Kate – Shackled, sullen, and accompanied by some type of law enforcement official. The male/female roles are reversed here, with Sayid’s captor even looking somewhat like Ana Lucia. We don’t know who has Sayid or why, if he’s truly captured or just acting that way. But why the hell would anyone be shipping him to Guam, and with only a single woman to guard someone as dangerous as Sayid is? It’s a straight-up recipe for a classic headbutt/escape.
Hurley is now Charlie – Based upon the real-life holes in our existing judicial system, it’s (sadly) not too far of a stretch to say that Hurley got out with Ben’s kickass lawyer and some sick bail money. I’m just glad we didn’t have to watch a Hurley prison-break episode. As he shows up with the guitar case, it seems pretty obvious that Hugo probably had another sit-down with ghost Charlie. I’d even bet that the guitar actually belonged at one point to his late friend. Maybe Hurley met up with Liam, or maybe he bought it on Ebay. Either way, the guitar got beamed down to the river along with him… the island seems to be trying to put a band together.
Ben is now Hurley – Or at least he arrives that way. Ben is last to board the plane at the very last second, having just made the flight. It had me bemusedly wondering if Ben experienced the same S1 antics that Hurley ran into in his journey from the ticket counter to the gate. Remember that Hurley “wasn’t supposed to” make the original flight. A few seasons later there was even more evidence of this, as Hurley stands on the beach, looks to the ocean and claims “I’m not supposed to be here”. The actual context of that scene has Hurley ‘secretly’ talking to Sawyer, but I always suspected it had double meaning. Perhaps Ben is now the person who’s not supposed to make the flight – after all, he’s not one of the O6. Hurley even uses the words “He’s not supposed to be here!” Ben’s words to Hurley are interesting also: “Who told you to be here Hugo?” A knowing nod toward his probable brush with Charlie’s ghost, but also something more.
Kate is now Claire – Broken, confused, and torn over a decision she just made regarding her child. It’s not too far of a stretch here to assume Kate might even be pregnant, too. The plane needs a pregnant chick, and I’m pretty sure Sun hasn’t had any hookups. Dunno about coach.
Jack is now Locke (or maybe Ben?) – Suddenly Jack is somewhat of a believer. When Hurley’s outburst threatens to derail his position on the flight, Jack reins him in and keeps him calm. Jack’s taken some measure of authority here. Okay, maybe I’m stretching it.
Sun is now Vincent – Hehehe… alright, I totally couldn’t think of a parallel for Sun. Maybe she’s Rose, who after the crash somehow ‘knew’ her husband to be alive. You guys come up with something. And hey, where the hell is Vincent anyway?
I think Ben went back to the dock for an entirely different reason: to convince Desmond that he needed to go back to the island. I’m pretty sure Ben knows at this point that Desmond is the game-changer; in the grand scheme of things, getting him back to the island would be like having his own secret weapon. So either Ben tried talking Desmond into returning, or Ben showed Desmond what would happen to him or his family if he didn’t go back. And then Desmond proceeded to beat the living piss out of him.
Before you wonder why Ben and Hawking didn’t chase Desmond out of the church and try to convince him to stay, keep this in mind: Desmond never arrived on the island by plane crash. Desmond came by boat. And handily enough, Desmond has a boat. And Ben just came out of a whole basement chock full of longitudes and latitudes and projected plot-points as to where they island will be in the future. If Desmond is to return to the island, his own leap of faith will be leaving his family behind. Ben went to sow more seeds, and to leave Desmond with the means to return to the island himself… the way he did the first time. (1-5 from Dark UFO)
Hurley’s reading Y: The Last Man. Great shout out to Brian K. Vaughan, my favorite Lost writer. If you haven’t yer, I encourage you to read that series, it’s grrreat. And I believe it would make a great TV series (but it won’t happen). Not a very encouraging issue though. SPOILER , it’s the one where the space station crash lands and two of the astronauts die, it kinda made me worried about this crash. Bu the more I think about it, there weren’t any encouraging issues of Y: The Last Man.
Sayid also had quite the reaction to Ben. Here’s a hypothetical situation. Ben goes to kill Penny, but guess who’s there to protect him, Sayid. Sayid beats him up. Ben finds some way to punish Sayid by blackmailing him to come on the plane. Ben realizes that he’s running out of time so he has to get to the plane before he can kill Penny.
So Jin joined Dharma, $10 says he can speak fluent English. It seems like a pretty obvious, if surprising, series of events that led to the Dharma-ized Jin. Locke fixed the Wheel during the Dharma era. Everyone was stuck in that time period. The Hostiles wouldn’t accept them so they were forced to go undercover in the Dharma Initiative. Tadah! (6-8 from Not Confused Just Lost)
Thematic literary references related to LOST often pop up in the show. In “316″, we get a long glimpse of Hurley reading a spanish version of “Y: The Last Man”. The story is about “the only man to survive the mysterious simultaneous death of every male mammal on Earth. ” Find more HERE. We also see Ben reading James Joyce’s Ulysses on the plane. “Almost every variety of human experience is crammed into the accordian folds of a single day, which makes Ulysses not just an experimental work but the very last word in realism. ” More on that one, HERE. (from Sledgeweb’s Lost Stuff)
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• Kate and Aaron are wearing the same clothes when they go to Cassidy’s, as if they hadn’t slept at all the night before.• In the awesome smackdown scene between Juliet and Jack (did anyone else detect that maybe IF Sawyer has been pining for Kate, Juliet has been equally pining for Jack?) Jack says that he came back because he was supposed to, but doesn’t know any details. He sounds EXACTLY like Locke in this scene.
11. If you rewatch the scene where Christian takes Sun into the house, at the end of the scene, if you watch very closely, you’ll notice that there is another woman in the room. At the very end, just after Christian says “You have a long road ahead of you,” and it goes to a tight push in shot on Sun. Over Sun’s shoulder you can clearly see a figure, that appears to be a blond female, move her head. So are we to believe that Claire was in the room with Christian?
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