the blast door map

because two episodes were aired back to back, i'm going to write on them separately - especially since it was not damon and carlton's intention that the episodes be viewed as a two hour block. there is a lot to discuss. this season is not for the uninitiated, not at all.

written by: damon lindelof and carlton cuse, the head honchos.
directed by: stephen williams, who, in the new shorter seasons, directs in rotation with chief director, jack bender. he's directed some classic episodes ('not in portland,' 'greatest hits,' 'confirmed dead,' 'there's no place like home, part 1,') but he's also responsible for some of the weakest last season ('eggtown,' 'meet kevin johnson,' 'something nice back home.')

of course, the general consensus seems to be 'what the fuck is going on!?!?!?' i have quite a lot of faith that damon and carlton are aware that most of the audience is scratching their heads, which is why they have most of their main characters doing the same.

1. the opening sequence
2. the first flash
3. the second flash
4. the third flash
5. the fourth flash
6. three years later
7. preboomer
8. points of interest
   
9. minor gripe

1. opening sequence.

fantastic. a wonderful play on previous openings: waking up, preparing for the day, and then realizing exactly who and when we are in the story as dr. marvin candle/mark wickmund/edgar halliwax/pierre chang is revealed, shooting an orientation film. some cool tidbits:

the first shot:



rather than begin with an opening eye (or exploding papayas), season 5 begins with a flip-clock turning from 8:14 to 8:15. "815" is of course the flight number of the ill fated plane and two of the numbers. but what this shot also says is that 'this season is going to be about time.'

what is also interesting about this opening is that chang and his wife have a baby. was this baby born on the island? if so, what exactly happened to change things? is that change related to 'the incident?' also, does this baby grow up to be someone we know? perhaps it's miles (hat tip to carla)? we know nothing of miles's past at this point, so...?



notice the orchid station under construction - a huge set to build for 2 shots (unless of course we're going to be spending a lot more time here this season..), but it was interesting to see the station's exterior in pristine construction after only having seen it in ruins. was the destruction of the orchid station the 'incident' that led to pushing the button in the swan station? in this opening, chang is wearing a swan station logo lab coat, which may be a continuity error if he's already filmed the swan station orientation film, in which he has a prosthetic arm. however, if it's not a continuity error, the prospect of learning the story of dr. marvin candle's missing arm this season is very very exciting.

so we learn that the chief purpose of the dharma initiative is to harness and exploit a 'limitless power' held underneath the orchid station. i think it's safe to say that the 'magic box' metaphor ben used when trying to describe the island's power to locke in season 3 is this very same power. if you can manipulate time, you truly can have everything. but of course there are rules.. rules that ben and charles widmore are bound by.

i wasn't shocked when daniel farraday appeared at the end of the scene - because this video from last summer's comiccon presentation had already primed us, not only for time travel, but also for a pierre chang/farraday meetup, as well as an important baby:



the opening sequences to seasons 2 and 3 followed desmond and juliet as they listened to music, and prepared for their days, only to be interrupted by outside forces. will chang, as the central character of the season 5 opening, become as integral to our story as desmond and juliet? how great to be that actor, huh? hired for a bit part in s2, integral part of the story in s5?

what i did find surprising was that this wasn't the end of the opening sequence - i expected the lost logo to fly by after chang said "then god help us all,' but two more scenes followed, jumping us from past to future, and then back to present, with the whole thing bookended by farraday. past, present, and future. cue up the 'house of pain,' cuz this season's theme is 'jump around.'



i jumped with die-hard fan glee to see that neil 'frogurt' had been surreptitiously planted on the zodiac raft next to farraday with no fanfare or attention. he was just there. and not referred to at all for the first hour. obviously, there will be more on frogurt in the next post.

so far, it seems my prediction was correct: no more traditional flashbacks - at least that's held true for these first two episodes. i thought this would also mean the end of the 'whoosh' noise, but the whoosh persists because we are still technically 'flashing' in time. the noise was traditionally used to highlight a character's inner consciousness - how their memory of the past transitions into the present. now we're no longer looking into consciousness in quite the same way, so the noise merely delineates a time shift.

i was (and others were) a bit irritated by the 'three years earlier' and 'three years later' title cards. part of the joy of the show is the disorientation that comes from trying to figure out exactly where and when we are, and all of the scenes following one of these title cards contained plenty enough information for us to figure it out for ourselves. i'm blaming network meddling, even though the cards probably made the show easier for casual viewers to follow.

2. the first flash.

much has been made about the similarity between these two events: desmond turning the failsafe key, and ben pushing the frozen donkey wheel. let's look at them. here's 'the anamoly' from when desmond turned the failsafe:



and here's the donkey wheel turn:



these are two similar, but also very different events. in fact, they are the opposite of each other. the failsafe is a distinctive low frequency hum, and the FDW is a high pitched, rising shriek. the key difference between these events is that after the failsafe event, the island suddenly became visible to penny's research team in the arctic, whereas the FDW moved the island completely, hiding it. i think we're going to learn some important things this season about how the energy in the swan station and the FDW are related, and i'm willing to bet that it wasn't a very good idea to move the island without the protective energy of the swan station in place, and the jumping around we're witnessing now is a result of that.

after the first jump, the survivors realize that their camp is gone and begin hiking towards the swan station. we weren't sure at this point, but it seems that locke is jumping to the same points in time as the survivors - he watches the african drug plane crash (a seriously genius OMG moment), which lostpedia's timeline places in the late 1990's.



the next OMG moment is when locke is shot and his attacker is revealed to be ethan. john tells him his full name, and ethan says his full name back to him shortly before the island whisks locke away. here's where it gets interesting. farraday says to sawyer very very clearly (in fact, damon and carlton have also said it to the fans very very clearly): what happened, happened. if it didn't happen before, it can't happen now. so. this means that ethan met john locke previously, and that when ethan encountered locke waaay back in season 1, he had met him before, and knew it. this is something that would not have even been dreamed about way back when they were shooting season 1, but because it's been established that ethan is one of the hostiles, and would be used to the idea of timeshifting, i'm still willing to buy the idea.



ethan's first scene on the show (s1e9, 'solitary') comes after he's been established as locke's hunting buddy. wow. a beautiful tie-in to ethan's introduction. we didn't get to see it in season 1, but i bet you we'll see ethan's first post-crash meeting with locke this season. i'm betting that we'll also get a nice little retcon scene where ethan runs back to the barracks and tells ben about someone named 'john locke' who said he was the new leader and then vanished into thin air. ben ponders it curiously, until one day, years later, a plane crashes on the island and guess who's on board - john locke. it would explain ben's strangeness and seeming foresight throughout his entire history with locke.

2. the second flash.

it's now nighttime, and the african plane is both fallen off the cliff, and burned. the hatch is imploded. richard alpert comes to locke's rescue and has knowledge of the moment john 'disappeared,' so it's probable that the survivors, at that moment were actually in their 'correct' time.

alpert's scene with locke here is crucial, and i cannot wait to find out how this all plays out. alpert tells locke that he has to get everyone back who left, and that in order to do it, he's going to have to die. the scene also employs a favorite device on 'lost,' which is the 'countdown crisis' preventing anyone from going into detail because events are imminent. alpert doesn't have time to explain, only enough to stress the importance of doing it.

so why is it so important that these people return? does the island, as a whole, require its own 'constant?' was something torn when they left, and what are their true destinies if so? if time is 'course correcting' itself - preventing people from dying, moving them around the globe to fulfill mysterious duties, what is the ideal endgame it's working towards?

one question that hasn't been answered yet - and i'm disappointed that it hasn't (damon and carlton addressed the question in a podcast over the summer, and promised it would be addressed in the premiere.. no dice): when ben says 'they ALL have to go back,' who exactly does that entail? does that include walt? lapidus? desmond?



alpert gives locke his compass, the same one from the test he gave locke as a child.



it makes me wonder if eventually we'll look at that scene from locke's childhood again with better understanding of what's going on. it seems that richard alpert doesn't age, but it's more likely, given the story direction, that he's simply been jumping through time. he's part of the 'indigenous' people of the island, so he probably has full control and understanding of its power. if he is jumping through time, what was it that made him decide to check out locke as a child?

i'm excited that alpert is on hand to be a major player in the story again. had 'cane' been a hit, nestor carbonell would have been unavailable, and the writers would have had to course-correct their own story and get these plot points out through a different character (probably isabel). (that said, i was completely floored by the number of guest star cameos they managed to line up for these first two episodes. on podcasts they talk about the difficulty of getting sonya walger (penny) and alan dale (widmore), who both work on other shows constantly (last year widmore scenes were actually filmed in london because dale was in the west end production of 'spamalot.') i used to have secret anxiety that the producers would be unable to get certain actors they needed in order to tell the story.. thankfully, 3/4ths of season 5 is already in the can and i can rest easy.

interesting tidbit: miles and charlotte have this little exchange:

CHARLOTTE: Do you think he's looking for us?
MILES: Who?
CHARLOTTE: Widmore.
MILES: It took him like twenty years to find this place the first time. I'll start holding my breath now.

..when was 'the first time?' i think we'll get a big peek into that backstory this season.

fun line: sawyer - 'son of a..

4. the third flash.

'...bitch.' the hatch is restored and undiscovered. desmond is inside. because of the dynamic of desmond's scene with faraday, it's likely that this flash places the action after desmond has killed inman - which means the plane has crashed, but very recently, because the hatch hasn't been discovered. i loved how sawyer marched right over to the hatch's back door, and how the scene was staged to give some feeling about the geography between the two locations. it's a small point, but man locke must have been so frustrated that he and boone went to so much trouble digging out the hatch when the back door was just down the hill and around the corner. doh!



but here's what i find interesting - fate will not allow desmond to open the door as long as sawyer is the one knocking. they didn't meet before, and they cannot meet now. desmond first met saywer in season 2, after returning from the tailies side of the island - they cannot meet sooner than that, no matter how hard sawyer pounds the door. it gives us some insight into how the writers use the idea of destiny: once faraday decides to start knocking, desmond will 'decide' or rather, 'be ready' to answer the door, simply because: it happened.

faraday's notebook has become a magical device, telling him, somehow that yes, at this moment, contact was made with desmond. who knows how he might have that in his journal, but of course he also had this:



i loved hearing on the audio commentary for 'the constant,' that jeremy davies has deep personal interest in quantum physics, and has some real knowledge of it - enough that he wrote all the journal pages himself, as well as the equations on the chalkboard in his lab.

this storyline is something of a replay of the plot from 'the constant,' where daniel implores desmond to make contact from another point in time. in 'the constant,' faraday told desmond to find himself at his lab in oxford. now faraday is telling des to find his mother there, her name is...

5. the fourth flash.

doh! we don't yet know exactly where the fourth flash has taken us, but it is clearly back before the crash, due to events in the next episode, which i'll discuss soon.

6. three years later.

what interests me is the overall decision to place 'future' events three-years later. the inciting incident was locke's death (as jeremy bentham) after visiting the o6, trying to get them to come back. but why does this 'memory' of faraday telling desmond to help them pop into his head at this point in time as well? probably it's just storytelling convenience.. and possibly inconvenient too.. if faraday's mother is ms. hawking (who i'll talk about in the next post), then she is quite clearly in los angeles, not in oxford. but when faraday told desmond about her, it was three years prior, so she easily could have been in oxford at the time. confusing, i know. bottom line: ms. hawking may or may not be daniel's mother, we don't know for sure yet, but probably she is.

again, the idea of 'the constant' is going to be extremely important this season, which is why 5 weeks of writing time went into writing that episode last season. if desmond is faraday's constant, he needs to get back to the island or faraday will die. and the rest of the o6 and the people who left are constants for the others, possibly the entire island - so when they finally return, some kind of equilibrium will be restored.



as far as what is going on off-island: sun is playing kate like a fiddle. what a bitch! 'i don't blame you. how's jack?' damn cold. oh, i jumped ahead - that's actually from the next episode. of course, sun's behavior is somewhat justified because she is out avenging jin's death - but i have a bad feeling that she'll go to extreme measures (is she truly her father's daughter?), and the karmic price she'll have to pay for becoming a supervilian megabitch is watching jin die again.

speaking of jin - and we're all pretty sure he ain't dead, i'm interested how they will swing it. he was on the freighter, which was visible from the beach, and given its disappearance, was outside the island time-travel radius, which means jin's 'survived' body is not jumping through time with them: it's been sitting out there for three years. unless he's on a piece of freighter debris that floated into the radius before the jump occurred. given his survival when the raft exploded, it's not impossible.

as many other bloggers have pointed out, hurley getting arrested feels like a contrived obstacle toward getting everyone back on the island. other than that, our off-islanders don't really know anything more than we do at this point, and it will serve the story best to get them back to the island as soon as possible. damon and carlton seem to know this as well. they understand that the show's dynamic works best when the cast is united - but in order to be united, they have to be split up for a while first. how else can we can get a nice slo-mo michael giacchino scored reunion scene? damon and carlton have promised us 'this won't be a full season about getting back to the island.'

the big question is: where is the show heading now? what is the objective to be reached in the grand conclusion? for as complicated as the 'harry potter' plot was, it remained simple: kill voldemort; live happily ever after. we don't yet know who the voldemort of 'lost' is - either ben or widmore, maybe even 'jacob,' but the grand finale will be the destruction of whatever force seeks to exploit the island, the placement on the island of all those to wish to stay, rescue for all those who wish to leave, and security that they will remain hidden forever. that is the end of the show. in classic 'lost' fashion, it will have soaring strings, redemptions and reunions, and one hell of a preboomer. speaking of:

7. preboomer.

i've written a separate, extensive post about preboomers: what makes them rock, what makes them suck. stay tuned for that. in the meantime i'll only say that this episode's preboomer...

DESMOND: We're leaving.
PENNY: Leaving to go where?
DESMOND: Oxford.
(boom)

...sucked.

8. points of interest:

• faraday's metaphor about a skipping record was a lovely tie-in to the opening montage.
• kate's first line is to aaron: 'oh, i think choo choo knows better than that. he goes in that tunnel, he's never coming back out.' which is probably pretty great advice for kate to follow herself.
• the worker's nosebleed down in the orchid station is gonna be important, as are all future nosebleeds.
• another fantastic sayid fight scene. the dishwasher knives. loved it.
• hurley's line about bentham: 'i need a cool codename.'
• charlotte. this actress is not like elizabeth mitchell, who can take nothing and make it intriguing. right now this girl has nothing to work with, and consequently has no character or presence in the show. she is in fact, entirely defined by jeremy davies' want of her and nothing else. here's hoping they tell her story, whatever it is, and then kill her. they can even go the libby route: kill her, promise to tell her story, and then don't!
  

9. minor gripe.

really just one. when sun's passport is scanned by security at the airport, we see this closeup. click to make it bigger:



now, come. on. COME. ON. any second unit director who's getting closeups for a show like 'lost' knows that closeups of documents are going to be freezeframed, analyzed, and scrutinized. every word can be read. it's why they've gone to the trouble to make sure that sun's birthday is correct, and that the korean is legit. so, their graphic designer went to all that trouble, and they shoot it on the screen in photoshop? look at the lower corner. not only that, rob k. points out that this oceanic desk lady has not yet installed her windows critical updates. and she's not connected to the network. sigh. still, not as bad as the tragic ms. hawking/monk photoshop composite. but perhaps they'll explain that too - maybe she's able to jump in and out of photographs!