the blast door map

written by: carlton cuse and damon lindelof.

directed by: jack bender.

director of photography: edward pei. part of the decline in photography this season may be due to the show working new dp's into the fold. after last week's mediocre footage, i'll be watching who shoots what episodes from here on out. edward also dp'd 'the little prince.'

in short: deeply disappointing. i nearly broke my brain trying to squeeze these scenes into the timeline. my faith is shaken. 'jeremy bentham' too much resembles 'meet kevin johnson.' if you watch passively, though, it's a great episode.

1. disappointment.
2. continuity.
   
3. kill me once, shame on you..
4. fresh arzts and frogurts.
5. the big question.
   
6. podcast tidbits.
7. appreciations.
   
8. preboomer.
   

1. disappointment.

i placed a lot of hope on this episode's ability to flesh out and smooth over the sins of last week. but instead it stoked a secret fear that builds up in me when 'lost' begins to lose its way: that what damon and carlton think is great about the show are not the same things i think are great. this episode held enormous potential to unveil tantalizing missing pieces of the larger puzzle. unfortunately, it reminded me that 'lost' is most disappointing when the mystery proves to be more interesting than the revelation.


why would abaddon withold this info, when it would only strengthen locke's resolve to return to the island?

this episode's flashbacks bore the weight of revealing the incidents that drive the entire off-island storyline. we've seen so much of what came about from these scenes that they took on a mythic quality. in the end they failed to live up to that standard. most unfortunate is that this failure rendered the entire 'getting back' storyline inert. this is the episode, more than any other, in which we needed an answer to the big question: how will bringing them back save everyone on the island? until we understand this key point, we cannot dramatically engage with the show's core objective. and the longer they hold off giving this answer, the more i fear that there is no real answer at all.

don't get me wrong - the payoff can still come. i'm just worried. if that answer isn't satisfying, i think we'll look back on 'lost' and say that the show ultimately lost its way when it started flashing forward: a jaw-dropping revelation at the time, but one that may contain no further intrigue beyond its initial brilliance.

on the positive side, we've seen the show pay off on high expectations before, and the episode by itself stands up well enough, thanks to great performances from michael emerson, terry o'quinn, and matthew fox.

but, as ryan mcgee says, the show is sinking under it's own narrative weight. please prove us wrong. please!

2. continuity.



in last year's finale, the name 'jeremy bentham' took on hyper-serious importance - for whatever reason, the O6 chose to refer to him by that name, and never as locke, for fear of being watched, or overheard.. where did this fear come from? i expected that locke's appearance would rattle everyone he came to see. except for jack's scene, all locke really did was mildly irritate them. but if you look at the whole story, these ho hum conversations were supposed to have..


do we care anymore what compelled sayid to 'rescue' hurley?

• ..somehow compelled sayid to leave habitat for humanity, decide that 'hurley must be protected,' kill a man sitting outside hurley's asylum, and go on the run.

• ..shaken up walt enough to fly across the country to visit hurley merely to ask 'why are you guys lying?'

kate's not really upset. she just wishes she'd twisted the 'you're an obsessed old man' knife a little harder while she still had the chance.

• ..disturbed kate enough to burst into tears because jack thought she might go to bentham's funeral.
  

locke's meeting with sayid was puzzling. he's now building homes in the dominican republic, when everything we've seen of him before and after this point off-island has cast him in a james bond role. what is it that caused him to go back into mercenary mode to rescue hurley from the asylum? clearly it's not the result of this conversation. i had thought that ben had sent sayid on the hurley rescue mission, but now it's clear ben had nothing to do with it (in 'the little prince,' ben asks sayid why he broke hurley out of santa rosa - sayid said only that he 'had to make sure hurley was safe.') i'm now completely mystified about sayid's motivation and direction as a character. unless a new conflict is introduced soon, i think he's in danger of becoming monster food.


hey walt, remember that time you appeared on the island and told locke he 'had work to do?' no? well, locke doesn't remember it either.

'wrong,' is probably the best way to describe locke's new york encounter with walt. it felt like the writing staff that never really knew what to do with walt, was relieved when they finally wrote him off the island, and are now adding this half-hearted coda to be done with him for the rest of the show. it's the 'lost' equivalent of chrissie calling jack and janet from her aunt's house. it would be extremely disappointing if this is the only payoff we get for walt, who has been told as often as locke that he is 'special,' who scared ben and the others enough to have him sent away, and possesses powers of foresight, telepathy with birds.


dear 'lost,' remember how you reminded us about walt's power in 'room 23,' from the missing pieces?

we wanted a spark of the fascinating relationship between these two that grounded much of season 1. we wanted locke to say that he had seen walt's image on the island. we wanted walt to have more to say than just having had a weird dream. have walt's powers increased? gone away? does walt give a shit about vincent anymore? or anyone else on the island?

in 'the little prince,' sawyer asks locke:

SAWYER: Hey, Locke? What are you gonna say to her?

LOCKE: Sorry?

SAWYER: Kate. What are you gonna say to her to get her to come back?

LOCKE: I haven't figured that out yet.

clearly locke didn't spend much time thinking about it while recuperating in the tunisian hospital either. here's the problem with locke's worldwide rejection tour: every scene was an errand. locke did no convincing at all. he merely stated a request, and then left after being given the answer. dramatically inert. i understand how one by one, each rejection builds up to locke's attempted suicide, but on the obverse, the scenes don't explain the other character's actions.

my friend spencer called me up after the show and ranted 'how many times do i have to watch them be convinced?? aren't they already convinced??'

it's disheartening that we are still not done seeing them 'be convinced.' the missing pieces from '316' are still going to be filled in. even though i no longer care, we'll find out why kate gave up aaron and changed her mind, why hurley changed his mind, and how sayid was arrested. if those scenes are are trite as 'the life and death of jeremy bentham,' i'd honestly just rather not know. let kate say 'oh, i saw a ghost,' and move on. i don't care. they are back on the island, the entire 'leaving the island' plot arc was jumbled and misguided, feels trivial, and i'd rather the show just moved on to whatever it's going to be about now that they're back.

other continuity problems (from lostpedia):

• In the Season 4 finale "There's No Place Like Home," Jack told Ben that Jeremy Bentham visited him and said that Ben was off the island.
  
• Jack also said Bentham told him that after the Oceanic Six left the island, "some very bad things happened. And he told me that it was my fault for leaving."
  
• Also in the finale, Jack told Kate that Bentham said that returning to the island was "the only way that I could keep you safe - you and Aaron."
  
• In "Because You Left," Jack further told Ben, "Sawyer, Juliet, everyone from the boat... and everyone we left behind - John said that they'd die, too, if I didn't come back."
  

Locke (Bentham) said none of these things when he visited Jack in this episode.

• Last season Walt told Hurley he had been visited by Jeremy Bentham. Locke never referred to himself as Jeremy Bentham during his conversation with Walt in this episode.
• Santa Rosa Mental Health Institute is portrayed in earlier episodes as a place Jack can stop by after work to visit Hurley. However in this episode, the Santa Rosa Mental Health Institute is identified as being in Santa Rosa, CA which is over 400 miles from the hospital where Jack works in Santa Monica, CA.

ultimately, this one episode tried to cover too much material at once, and required a level of narrative compression that isn't usually employed on 'lost.'

3. kill me once, shame on you..



the only portions of the show that provided compelling new information were those taking place post-resurrection. what did we learn?

• jacob knew a plane would be landing on hydra island - and had the runway built specifically for that purpose.
• some people vanished off the plane, and others didn't.
• the plane appears to have landed in the same future time period where sawyer discovered the ajira water bottle on board one of the outrigger boats.
• lapidus took one of the outriggers with 'some woman,' who i think must be sun, who for some reason did not vanish.
• locke was murdered by ben, for some reason.
  

ben has now killed locke twice. c'mon locke. stop getting killed by ben. it's lucy, charlie brown, and the football. omg, 'lost' is one giant metaphor for 'peanuts.'



4. fresh arzts and frogurts.


here, this mango will make you forget all about that off-island story.

i was so excited that nearly all the socks were finally killed - and now here we are with a whole new planeful of socks! gahhhhhh. can we just nuke hydra island? please?

5. the big questions.

why did ben kill locke immediately after hearing the name 'eloise hawking?' up until that point, ben was going to work with locke in getting the O6 back together. ben knows how to collect people, and as soon as he got news of jin being alive, you could see the wheels cranking.. 'ok, we'll use jin to get sun back.. i'll use aaron to get kate back.. we've already got jack.. hurley is easy..'



clearly ben knows hawking from the island days - and probably what we'll see play out in future episodes is the exact nature of the young ben/widmore/ellie island feud. did ben trick both widmore and ellie into pushing the wheel? is ellie penelope's mother? or charlotte's mother? does faraday have an 'oops i liked my sister' skywalker complex? is everyone on this show somehow related to each other?

i had such different expectations for this scene. i expected ben to actually talk locke into hanging himself. i thought he would convince locke that his purpose was to be christian shepard's proxy on the plane, with the promise that he'd be resurrected once they land on the island. i think it would have been more interesting than yet another ben-allegiance flip-flop.

why did only hurley, jack, and kate get whooshed off the plane? i have no idea. it falls into the same category as why is juliet time-jumping if she wasn't on flight 815? we're gonna get answers right? it will all be clear right? 26 episodes to go, and it's all gonna make sense, right?

6. podcast tidbits.

the podcast is often very funny, and i recommend checking it out. but if you just want to know the main points, here they are:

• yes, we will find out what kate did with aaron. meh.
  
• no, we are not yet meant to know whose side to be on: ben's or widmore's. erm.
  
• damon and carlton fully debunked the theory of sawyer losing his toe, becoming an ancient island hero, and having the four-toed statue built in his honor. hmm.
  

7. appreciations.

since i've spent so much time griping about this episode, here are things that impressed me:

• better photography and pacing.
  
• production design got a huge workout this week. this episode had as many sets and locations as a feature film.

• seeing the ajira plane landed on the runway was a fantastic payoff

• egyptian influence in the island's ancient history has been hinted at for some time. now hurley is drawing the sphinx.
  
• flash structure: now that everyone is back on the island, will we now be flashing between the 815ers in the 70's and the 316ers in the 'present?' if sun wasn't sucked into the past, will she and jin have to communicate à la 'the lake house?'

8. preboomer.

CAESAR: You know him?
(slow burn)
LOCKE: Yeah. He's the man who killed me. (boom)

the timing on this preboomer was different. it was an instant boom instead of a (pause) boom. and i think a good choice. the pause boom gives us a moment to take in the holy shit moment, jin's wtf-face, or the revelation. the instant boom is more like the sopranos finale, cutting off mid-moment. nice change. but how about this:

CAESAR: You know him?
LOCKE: (shoots ben through the head) I did. (boom)

i know a lot of people liked this episode. i hope i haven't been a debbie downer. i'm just upset that these last two episodes do not withstand the scrutiny that's justified this blog.