the blast door map

update!

2010-08-26T19:00:00.000-07:00

i am currently rewatching the show in chronological order via this website:

www.chronologicallylost.com

because of the timeflashes, i wasn't sure if this would be a worthwhile way to take in the story, but after several episodes i've been completely sucked in. it's turned out to be a great way to take in the full scope of the story.

my response to the series finale is postive, but mixed. i stated in my last post that if the reveal of the finale blew me away, i would need to rewatch the entire show to evaluate it. initially i didn't think i would need to do this, in fact i initially felt that the finale didn't cast much light on the entire series at all. but the more i pondered it, i realized that the finale does cast new light on the entire series - not in an m. night shamalayan kind of way, but in a deeper, spiritual, and thematic way. because the narrative is so fractured, the chronological rewatch has turned out to be the best way to really process the entire story we've been given. i've written quite a lot about the finale already, but i will complete the entry and post it after i've finished my rewatch.

i will also post a separate response to 'the new man in charge' epilogue that has been released with the dvd's.

last weekend all key props and costumes from the show were auctioned off at santa monica airport. the exhibit was a fan's dream come true. check out this video showing how much work went into creating it:

it's a shame that all these items are being spread among the fans and not going into a permanent exhibit. i want to revive that petition to convert tom sawyer island into LOST island at disneyland. the chance to run around for a day, peer down the hatch, push the button, hang with roger linus, sit on flight 815, and inspect the amazing iconic props from this show was an experience as overwhelming as the actual finale. it was the perfect way to say goodbye.

interestingly, the blast door map was not up for auction.. i wonder which lucky cast/crewmember got it..

you can check out my photo album from the event here.

on the chronological rewatch:

if revisiting the show interests you, i highly recommend the chronological viewing. i am only at the halfway point (amazingly, the halfway point in the entire epic story is when the tailies reunite with the beach camp), but so far, it it smoothes over an amazing number of narrative bumps that occurred in the traditional episodic viewing. many plot points that felt shoehorned or retconned into the timeline (like nikki and paolo) now play perfectly smoothly as part of the great, whole story that is 'lost.' even jack's tattoo episode is improved (slightly).

some observations from watching the show chronologically:

it begins with the hated 'across the sea.' so right away, it's out of the way. i wish i could say that this helps the episode, but it doesn't really. however, it does set up the scope of the entire story, and gives a glimpse of the source, which we won't see again until the final moments of jack's life.
what is interesting is that after mother and mib have been laid to rest, the next scene is the timeflash that took the season 5 survivors deepest into the past, when they saw the back of the statue. so narratively, man in black tells mother he's going to build a wheel - then only a few scenes later we see him in christian shepard's form (he was able to carry that manifestation through time as well?) instructing john locke to push the wheel in order to stop the time flashes.
the next episode is richard's incredible story in 'ab aeterno.' it sets up the epic scale of the story quickly, and the next few episodes follow richard's point of view as he remains ageless and the island changes around him. it's really great to see this story from richard's pov - since in the end, he is the most constant character through the entire series.
visitors from the future pop in and out of the early years of the show - and their chronology is all out of order. which makes viewing 'lost' chronologically not entirely unlike show's original fractured narrative. the visitors arrive in 1954 and meet richard. this time around, it is richard we identify with as we take in the story. locke comes to him, gives him a compass, says that he's meant to be their leader, and that he'll be born in a few years. the next scene shows locke's birth. then we see richard's attempts to check out locke through the years.
we next learn about dharma through the story of ben, who's mother died in childbirth, and whose father was given a job out of pity by horace goodspeed.
the timejumpers appear again - and infer that this person named locke was successful at preventing their deaths by stopping the timejumps. unfortunately they are stuck in 1974, and we follow their adventures as they decide to stay on the island and join up with the dharma initiative.
after three years of peace with dharma, the people from the future are joined by four of their own - and they throw everything into disarray. one of them, jack, realizes that his purpose is to undo a plane crash that will occur in 2004. he drops a nuclear bomb down a construction site. juliet falls down the hole, and hits the bomb.
there's an interesting new tension in the chronological version, because if you're taking in the story for the first time, events that unfold after the detonation of jughead have new mystery behind them - you keep wondering 'did it work?' the day of the incident, we see pregnant eloise hawking, working to help jack detonate the bomb. one of the first things we see after the bomb goes off, is eloise redirecting young faraday to study science. the stakes for her are amazingly high - she doesn't know if the bomb worked either, but she does know that her son will hold the key to whether or not it does, and knows that if he's to be successful, his journal must contain the necessary instructions to guide them in the past.
what follows are the childhoods of all our major characters. i had forgotten how many childhood flashbacks we saw, and sometimes a childhood flashback was only one act of an episode, like sun's 'i got the maid fired and i loved it' bit from 'the glass ballerina.' we get a peek at the childhoods of charlie, sun, kate, jack, juliet, sayid.
next we get the bulk of the main character's flashbacks from the first three seasons of the show - some of the stories are stronger than others, but episodes occurring at roughly the same time have been smartly intercut with each other. it's refreshing to see these stories laid out in order, and some interesting new juxtapositions occur. jack and kate got married at roughly the same time, both with unhappy endings. jin accuses sun of hiding her inability to conceive around the same time that claire's boyfriend accuses her of getting pregnant to force him to stay with her.
the events leading up to the crash are emotionally breathtaking. every character had a major story arc coalesce at the airport, and it's incredible to see them all cut together. even outside of the airport, the emotional buildup to juliet's book club, and desmond's ultimate failure to push the button is intense.
once the crash is over, the island adventure is presented mostly straight, though the adventures of the tailies, nikki/paolo, the schemes of the others, and the mobisodes (of varying quality) are seamlessly woven into the story.
it's interesting to have the flashbacks removed, because it's impossible to remember exactly which facet of the person's past was originally juxtaposed with certain island moments. so those lingering shots of characters remembering their pasts, for once, includes their entire past history, not just the convenient or ironic bit sometimes manufactured by the writers. in many ways this plays better because we have the whole of the person's past already under our belts, and we can draw our own conclusions about what trauma is motivating their current actions. in season 2, when sun asks kate if she's ever taken a pregnancy test, we've already seen the scene from kate's past where she broke down in the bathroom crying over her test results - in the show structure, we didn't get that scene until the middle of season three when the show was in the late stages of treading water. any reference to a character's past becomes a potential 'flashback' moment.
the island story races by - i'm at episode 53 of 101. sun finds out she's pregnant, sayid is about to find 'henry gale's' balloon, and the blast door map has fallen on locke's oft-abused leg.

i will write more on my chronological rewatch as i continue through it. i'm very much looking forward to seeing the flash-forwards in order, as well as the season 6 island story without the interruption of the flash-sideways. conversely, i'm looking forward to enjoying the flash-sideways as a full-on emotion-filled epilogue to the series.

lost 6.16 'what they died for'

2010-05-23T03:25:00.000-07:00

written by: eddie and adam and liz. a wonderful sendoff for these writers. sarnoff has been with the show since season 2, rising from supervising producer to executive producer over the course of 5 years. eddie and adam started on season 1's 'born to run, and have co-written 4 episodes each subsequent season (with the exception of the truncated season 4). eddie and adam are responsible for much of the comic sensibility of 'lost,' as well as the larger universe (they developed backstories for all of the socks, bringing us nikki, paolo, frogurt, and arzt) and lobbied for years to bring in 'helicopter pilot frank lapidus.'

directed by: paul edwards, whose career with 'lost' began with season 1's 'what kate did.' his other episodes include: 'two for the road,' 'the glass ballerina,' 'par avion,' 'cabin fever,' 'this place is death,' 'the variable,' 'what kate does,' and 'the package.' he's described by jorge garcia as being an incredibly fast director who knows exactly what he wants and gets it very quickly.

cinematography by: stephen st. john, who has done several episodes in a row now. does he sleep? the color and lighting in the parallel was designed to take us from morning to afternoon, beginning with jack's wake-up (a shot meant to evoke the opening of the series - no eye-opening shot yet has managed to match the dynamic of that first image) and ending with the late afternoon-meeting at the docks.

ok then: the shot of jack's eye opening signals that this episode is really the beginning of the finale. this was another stellar episode of the show, giving each character moments to shine, and hurling both the original and sideways timelines towards their conclusions.

1. the overall parallel
2. the overall island
3. deaths
4. preboomer
5. final thoughts before the finale

1. the overall parallel

loved it. absolutely loved it. the opening scene with jack shows that the mysterious cut on his neck from the season premiere has re-opened itself. i can't imagine that this bodes well. since jack has stepped up to take jacob's place, i have an awful feeling that the price for taking on this responsibility will be that in order for all the redemed lives in the parallel to continue, he must give up his existence in it. this would truly be a tragic/bittersweet end to the series. i can image that he'll be faced with a horrible choice but will have to side with allowing everyone to stay with the loved ones they've so recently been reunited with in the parallel. it's going to be an emotionally wrought episode for a lot of reasons.

david tells jack that his mother is going to be at 'the concert tonight.' is david playing at this concert, or is it the same event that miles is heading to at the museum? (how many concerts/fundraisers/events take place at this museum? this will be the third one!) is juliet david's mother? will saywer join miles at the event? will sawyer and charlotte have an awkward moment? will faraday and drive shaft be playing at this concert? will sawyer finally be reunited/meeting juliet and go dutch for coffee? will jack and sawyer become like ultra bff's? where is hurley going with sayid? will sayid end up with shannon? boone with mr. friendly? why isn't ana lucia 'ready' to be awakened yet? it is the same reason eloise felt desmond wasn't ready?

the next section of the parallel showed ben confronting desmond for having run down locke - i loved how desmond casually said 'you want to wake up?' and just started wailing on ben - i wasn't expecting to feel such a thrill from seeing these characters wake up, but so far it's been exhilarating. the implications of having each person 'awake' to find themselves simultaneously in a new body, with a different life, with full recollection of the previous life is amazing. i wish a little more time could have been spent in the parallel establishing the rules of 'waking up,' though i'm sure the finale will focus on that in order for us to fully transfer our emotional connections from the characters in one timeline to the other.

it appears there are different 'levels' of awakening in the parallel - and one of the most thrilling revelations was that hurley has been (perhaps?) entirely awake since kissing libby, and has conspired with desmond to get the rest of the oceanic survivors to wake up.

the other, just beautiful moment of this episode was the payoff scene with ben and rousseau. earlier this scene season in 'dr. linus,' i felt that rousseau's absence was the only missing beat in an otherwise perfect episode - but i see now that they were saving it for the end. her presence at the end perfectly bookends her position as an introductory force (via the french transmission) in the island's mythology.

not only that - the emotional resonance was compounded by seeing her 1) looking great 2) happy 3) and miraculously having an entire lifetime with her daughter restored to her. her off the cuff delivery of 'you're coming to dinner even if we have to kidnap you' was perfect. a big question here is: how awake is ben at this point? when he looks out at alex studying, is he crying because he's remembering his alternate history with her and her tragic loss, or is he just simply touched by the sentiment? when rousseau comes around to comfort ben, and he looks up at her, is he (in addition to forming a love connection) beginning to fully recognize her from the previous timeline? when ben talks to locke it doesn't seem like he's fully awake yet, but perhaps during that scene with rousseau he was experiencing some dawning revelations.

at this point it became crystal clear that the ultimate message 'lost' is going to leave us with is one about love. that ben and rousseau would be brought together over their mutual love of alex is beautiful and totally unexpected. perhaps its 'cheating' that the alternate timeline was created in order to do this (and tie up many other narrative loose ends), but so far it's paying off in emotionally resonant ways that actually strengthen the themes of the original storyline.

i'm certain now that the point of having sun lose her english for two episodes was to foreshadow that both she and jin in the parallel will not only regain their previous island memories, but also their ability to speak english - very handy for a life on the run from daddy.

it took all season for him to get here, but locke is finally ready to get out of the wheelchair - and it didn't even require him finding out that his father is a murderer! locke tells jack the crazy coincidences that led him to this point (they don't even know the whole story yet..) and jack says a phrase we've heard on the show twice before: 'do not mistake coincidence for fate.'

mr. eko first said this to locke in 'the cost of living,' after locke's amazement that mr. eko had a bible from the arrow station containing the missing piece of film from the swan station orientation video.

locke himself said the phrase to desmond during the journey to the pearl station to find mr. eko in 'the cost of living,' the episode that killed him off. this was after the hatch disaster that seriously shook locke's faith, causing him to take mr. eko original words to heart.

i can't help but wonder where locke and jack's parallel story will end. will we actually see locke on jack's operating table again? will we see locke take his first step, or at least see his toes wiggle (echoing the beautiful scene in the season 2 premiere in which jack restored sarah's mobility)? is there time to cover this? the penultimate episode has set us up with a momentum that feels like the events of the finale in both the sideways and original timelines will coalesce and resolve within a 24 hour period - as every finale of 'lost' has done. wherever it takes us, this story point is one of the triumphs of season 6 - that both a miracle and science can be responsible for allowing locke to walk, and that i didn't see it coming for 5 years. dudes, sunday, i'm ready to cry.

2. the overall island

we pick up on the beach the next morning, as stuff from the submarine washes ashore. the music cue, the photography, the feeling is much the same as the aftermath of the original crash of 815. in a nice reversal, jack sews up kate, the grief for sun and jin continues (though no love for lapidus!) and both resolve that they must kill locke.

there's a brief scene between jack and sawyer that establishes an interesting dynamic. sawyer realizes that he is, in part, responsible for the deaths of sun, jin, sayid, and lapidus. now he and jack are even. they both took huge risks, they both have blood on their hands as a result, and now they both must find a way to resolve the guilt.

the survivors are finally confronted by a physical manifestation of jacob, apparently made possible by placing his ashes in a fire.. hmm ok. it seems like jacob has been gradually working towards an ability to make himself visible to everyone and not just hurley and man in black - later, his appearance as a child is visible by sawyer.

so jacob has managed to appear in earnest, and the big question/answer powerpoint presentation we've been waiting for has finally occurred. jacob's explanation for why he brought them to the island is an echo of what he had already told alpert in 'ab aeterno,' but this had extra impact because he's actually telling it to the people who's stories and backstories we've watched for six years. 'i didn't pluck any of you out of a happy existence. you were all flawed. i chose you because you were like me. you were all alone. you were all looking for something that you couldn't find out there. i chose you because you needed this place as much as it needed you.' this alone explains why we've never seen any of the stories of 'the socks' or other background characters who were also on the flight. yes, dr. arzt, we know there were other people on the plane too, but the show isn't interested in them because jacob isn't interested in them, and he's not interested in them because they are not 'lost' in their lives.

the simplicity of the explanation for kate's name being crossed off the list was also beautiful - though interesting that kate and claire were likely crossed off for 'mothering' the same child. it's possible that claire wasn't crossed off until she went crazy and jacob said 'no thanks, already had one crazy mom protecting this island.'

and jack steps up. we knew this was coming for a while, and it was pretty much cemented in my mind when he took a 'leap of faith' off the boat and swam back to shore. this is what jack was meant to do. the show has framed itself again and again around jack vs. locke, and now, amazingly, we have megajack and smokeylocke battling it out in the final episode. how effin cool is that? i hope they grow into giants and fight each other like this:

some people have expresed doubt that jack has truly become leader because he didn't drink form the same wine bottle that jacob drank out of when taking his vow. in an interview, mark pellegrino, who plays jacob, revealed that in 'across the sea,' it was originally written that mother gave jacob water from the stream, and that in that episode it was changed to the bottle instead, thereby shifting the 'magic' of the ceremony to the incantation uttered by both of them rather than the actual water or wine itself.

3. deaths

the show is seriously cleaning house now. and i jumped at all the deaths. totally loved that zoe was killed for being 'pointless,' an act no doubt met with cheers across the geekverse. whether or not you liked it, you have to admit it's appropriate, and possibly the most honest disposal of a tangential character in the show's history. i really liked zoe and felt similarly about her death as i felt about charlotte's - each of them were specialists in something that could potentially reveal a lot about the island (cultural anthropologist and geologist) and both were killed before they ever got to really use their specialty. i was also hoodwinked by interviews given by sheila kelley, in which she had invented an entire backstory for herself, and purpose for being there, none of which (it turns out) was relevant to the show. ha!

richard took a hit to the neck from smokey that sent him flying across the dharma lawns. the best thing about richard's death(?) was ben's pause, slow turn, and sit down. is richard dead? just like that? can smokey kill him just like that? of so, why didn't he do it earlier? will richard pop up later and save the day, or is he finally reunited with isabella? in jorge garcia's podcast it's revealed that the language in the script is ambiguous about whether richard has actually died. let's hope he's not, because the only way i can see him appearing in the parallel would be as the skeleton hanging in dr. arzt's science lab.

the other big death was of course widmore. we've been waiting for a widmore/ben showdown since season 4 built its entire story arc around their rivalry. when that scale is taken into consideration, this small scene in ben's dharma house might not be the most satisfying end to that conflict, but some questions about widmore have been answered: jacob did visit him and changed his goals toward the island. we don't know exactly when jacob visited, but i think it must have been before locke pushed the wheel and ended up in tunisia. at that point only locke knew that he was going to die in his efforts to bring back the oceanic 6 (thereby providing the man in black with a body to inhabit), and so widmore at that point wasn't knowingly assisting the man in black, but was doing everything he could to help jacob get his candidates back. an important thing to remember about widmore, though he was a stellar villain for season 4, is that he is originally one of jacob's people. for jacob to appear to him off-island is huge. widmore's background is established as a follower of jacob, up until ben manipulated him off the island. in the grand scale of things, protecting jacob's interests is a much bigger deal than a petty rivalry between himself and ben. which made ben's murder of widmore all the more surprising - we'd been totally taken by ben's absolutely truthful tearful confession to ilana - so, has ben turned back to the dark side?

i think ben is just surviving, and can't imagine that the show will actually have him kill someone that we like or are emotionally attached to. i also can't imagine that ben himself isn't conflicted about what he's just done, though he's been wanting to kill widmore more than anything else for three years. right now he has to prove himself useful to smokey just to stay alive, and he's done just that. i can easily see him flipping back when the opportunity arises. i can also see him doing a darth vader/throw-the-emperor-down-the-energy-shaft maneuver when the time comes.

4. preboomer

locke: because i'm gonna find desmond, and when i do, he's gonna help me do the one thing that i could never do myself. i'm gonna destroy the island.
(boom)

this preboomer is very very reminiscent of season 4's pre-finale episode 'cabin fever,' in which our original beloved locke was instructed by man in black himself (in the guise of christian shepard - with sidekick claire). locke leaves the cabin and tells ben, in the penultimate preboomer that he must 'move the island.'

this time around the man in black is wearing the guise of john locke, and once again he's planning to use someone else to do something he can't do himself - and he's telling ben his plan in much the same way it was revealed to us in 'cabin fever.'

locke also reveals to ben that desmond's purpose in returning to the island is to be a 'failsafe' in case all the candidates die. with this new information from widmore, locke seems to realize that desmond can be used to his advantage - what is it that desmond must do? rip the wheel out of the wall?

though the show has never fully answered what happened on the day that desmond first turned the 'failsafe' key in the season 2 finale, we do know that turning the key:

made a distinctive low frequency noise, that has not been heard on the show before or since.
turned the sky purple
exposed the island to the search efforts of both penny and charles widmore
imploded the hatch
'unstuck' desmond in time
made desmond immune to the effects of a 'catastrophic electromagnetic event.'

i love this idea that desmond himself is now the failsafe. it's another example of how the show thematically repeats itself by raising the global stakes - by turning the failsafe key, desmond himself became the failsafe in the larger story. it also fit beautifully in with the idea that jacob's 'job' on the island is essentially the same as desmond's was in the hatch - and it makes perfect sence that both jobs would have a failsafe.

i have no idea what's going to happen on the show, but because the final image of the teaser in 'la x' was of the submerged island in the parallel, i think we can be pretty certain that we will in fact see the island destroyed in the season finale. that shot is essentially the same as seeing john locke in the coffin at the end of season 4 - it says to us that yes, a beloved character is going to die. now we'll find out how.

5. final thoughts before the finale

as i watch the tribute videos and compilations that people have put together in the last few weeks, it's really starting to hit home just how much this show has meant to me. at its best, it returns me to the childlike joy of pure escapism. it makes me feel like i'm twelve years old, watching the indiana jones and star wars trilogies on repeat. it makes me feel like i'm there, gawking in amazement, it rewards my attention, it address my incredulity, and when i least expect it, it wrenches my heart.

what i once thought was one of the weakest episodes of season 5, 'the life and death of jeremy bentham' took on incredible new meaning after we came to understand the truth of what was happening in that episode. my hope for the finale, is that once we've been given 'the big reveal,' we can look back on the latter half of the show with newly opened eyes - that when we sit down with a friend and introduce them to 'lost,' and we watch them go on this journey for the first time, we can assure them 'it's worth it.' that when jack shouts to kate 'we have to go back!' we'll know exactly what it was he had to go back for, and what he sacrificed to do it. though we obviously won't get all the answers in the final episode, what i'm expecting to get is the final narrative piece that explains the drive to bring the oceanic 6 back to the island (in my opinion, still the weakest section of the show). i need an answer that's bigger than the candidates, that's bigger than the light in the island - i'm happy to accept that whatever it is allows them to be 'found,' 'resolved,' and 'redeemed' in the parallel, but i want to know how. if that answer blows me away, i might start rewatching the entire series on monday.

there's nothing better than the feeling that the writers are still holding big cards in their hand. when they play their final ace tomorrow, will we find that they've been bluffing, or will they win the game? in order to balance the pilot episode, it must be spectacular on a level that matches, and possibly outdoes that initial crash sequence - what will they do? three years ago they landed a deal to tell the story on their terms. this final episode is their love letter to everyone -

the characters, who we've seen explored in incredible depth over 6 years
the actors who have brought incredible life to those characters
the island of hawaii, making this the most cinematic television show ever shot
the fans, whose support has driven the show to an unprecedented level of detail

no other show has been as bold, and as brave as 'lost.' i feel like i've hit the last chapter of 'lord of the rings,' or 'harry potter,' and in my left hand is a thick, battered stack of worn pages, and in my right hand are the few remaining moments left to spend in this world i've disappeared into for 6 years. it has been an unforgettable journey. see you on the other side of 'the end.'

lost 6.15 'across the sea'

2010-05-17T14:42:00.000-07:00

written by: damon lindelof and carlton cuse. what we got is what they wanted us to get.

directed by: tucker gates. star director of the season, with 'ab aeterno,' and 'the substitute' under his belt. i think he was just totally unable to connect to the emotional core of this story, which should have been an incredibly complex triangle of love and hate between two brothers and their 'mother.' i should have been crying for them. there should not have been a flashback at the end.

cinematography by: stephen st. john. some beautiful shots in this episode, even if the cave of light was embarrassing. the sea turtle, the star wars sunset, the circling shots around man in black as he rages discovers uncle owen and aunt beru's charred bodies..

hoo boy: i've ridden a roller coaster of emotions over this episode, ranging from full on hatred to finally coming around and appreciating the ideas and information contained in it (despite questionable choices in the execution).

1. the real problems
2. the story in focus
3. the new game
4. the missing history
5. echoes of the future/past
6. other problems
7. preboomer
8. next episode

1. the real problems

yes, there were so many problems with this episode. i could go on and on about them. it got to a point where i began deeply questioning whether damon and carlton would actually be able to write a satisfying finale. what most people claim to be bothered by are not the same things that bothered me. i love lost because the storytelling choices are always bold. to exclude the entire main cast in the episode before the finale suite? amazingly bold. to give us the largest mythological download we've ever had on the show? fantastic idea. give us 'the beginning' before sending us into 'the end?' genius. i'm glad that damon and carlton continue to stand behind their choices in conceiving this episode, because everything about it on paper is brilliant. after the success of 'ab aeterno,' i was ready to come out of this episode with my faith in the show fully renewed, perhaps twitching in ecstasy from having witnessed the most amazing episode of lost, ever. i can easily fall into the endless loop about what was wrong with this episode, but first lets talk about the intriguing ideas at play.

what has frustrated so many people is that, according to damon and carlton, 'this is what an answers episode of lost looks like.' and for an 'answers episode' it pretty firmly establishes the idea that no one on this island actually knows anything about what makes the island what it is. there is no answer to that question. but, and this is a capital b but, the reason this episode takes us to these specific events in history is because this is the true origin of the story of lost. that is the 'answer' we get. nothing before this point matters, and if it does, well, it doesn't.

another reason people hated this episode is because it is very cagey and mysterious about how it gives us those answers. like every episode, it has a larger picture that we're only getting a tiny glimpse of. at this point, the audience wants to see the whole damn picture already. my friends can attest that my faith was shaken, deeply. i was angry, annoyed. i thought 'wow, damon is so sensitive to criticism.. he must feel awful that this episode was such an abysmal failure..'

but after having watched it a few times, and after letting go of the problems in the execution, there is a nice little mystery story hinted at here. i'm going to re-tell the story of 'across the sea,' based on hints dropped, and my own theories.

2. the story in focus

we begin with claudia, washed ashore after a shipwreck, and speaking latin. is she egyptian? based on the beach photography, i think it is safe to assume that the events we're witnessing take place before the building of the statue, temple, and all other egyptian ruins.

claudia meets 'mother,' who delivers her twin babies then kills her. we see that mother does not age during the course of the 40 years covered in the story, so it's safe to assume that she has been acting as protector of the light for a very very long time. she distrusts people, which seems to be the reason she a) lives like a hermit, and b) hasn't found a replacement for herself.

when claudia washes ashore and has two babies in her, mother must have felt a tremendous amount of relief - 'finally, two little people i can mold, and if one does work out, i'll always have a backup!'

mother's life on the island has clearly included other people, otherwise she wouldn't speak the language, and she clearly seems to have personal experience with them given her speech later echoed by mib himself, 'they come, destroy, corrupt, etc..'

mother must have known that there were other survivors of claudia's ship, but for some reason, decided to let them live and build a village on the other side of the island. if she's the fierce protector of the light, why would she allow this? since she possesses mass-murder super-powers, why not just kill them all upon arrival? does she have her own candidacy-system that keeps her from abusing her powers?

boy in black finds the game 'senet' and convinces jacob to sit and play with him. gameplay becomes a bond between them. boy in black asks jacob not to tell mother about the game, but jacob is so incapable of lying that he spills the beans immediately. in the next scene we learn that mother thinks of boy in black's ability to manipulate and lie as his gift, it makes him 'special,' - and it's probably because of this character trait that she feels he is best suited to become her replacement as protector of the island.

once the boys discover other people, mother is forced to show them something they were not quite ready to see: a stream leading into a cave of illuminated midichlorians. apparently this cave is an entryway to the source of the energy of life. she tells them it is their 'reason' for being there, that she is the protector of it, and one of them will have to take over some day. it seems like a mighty vulnerable treasure, what with how it glows yellow light all day and night, but apparently it can only be found by the anointed protector of the island. boy in black will spend his next 30 years walking every inch of the island in search of it.

the next revelation is that boy in black shares hurley's power of being able to see the dead - claudia appears and tells him his true origin, causing boy in black to suffer a kind of 'truman show' syndrome in which he begins a quest to find the true world 'across the sea.'

right then and there, mother probably should have hit him with the same rock she used to kill claudia. instead, mother allows him to go. perhaps he'll learn the true nature of men and decide to come back to her eventually? or perhaps she likes him so much more than jacob that she can't give up hope on him becoming protector of the light just yet? or maybe she sees a spark of hatred in him that will come in very handy one day..

30 years pass. boy in black is now man in black, and has been living with the other people the entire time. we only get a few clues about who these people are and what they've been up to, but we can probably assume a few things: they are smart, they have tried to sail away from the island, and were unsuccessful. they have used every resource available and nothing has allowed them to escape the perimeter of the island's power - the same way desmond was unable to sail away in his boat. boats can only approach and leave the island on the proper heading, and seeing as how magnets seem magical, the technology to devise that heading probably doesn't exist yet.

another key point is that man in black develops his manipulative attitude towards men while living amongst these people. he sees that they embody all the things mother warned him about, and yet remains with them because they are 'a means to an end.'

when confronted by mother, man in black says that 'we're going to make an opening.. one much bigger than this one; and then i'm going to attach that wheel to a system we're building. a system that channels the water and the light. and then i'm going to turn it. and when i do, i'll finally be able to leave this place.'

we can only assume that these people have been doing experiments with the light for decades, much like dharma had done - and however it is that man in black came to 'just know' that attaching a wheel to a system that channels the light and the water would send him home, we do know that his proposed machine actually works, and spits the user out in tunisia.

man in black has finally done the thing he should not have done: tamper with mother's precious light. mother sweet-talks him into a hug and uses the proximity to ram his head against the wall. at first it appears that she has killed him, and the next time we see her, she's practically forcing jacob to drink the wine that cements his place as her successor. mom is doing some serious damage control.

when she gets jacob to the cave, she makes him promise that 'no matter what you do, you won't ever go down there.' is this possibly because mother has been down the cave herself, and is trying to save jacob from a fate worse than dying? how else would she know what happens? clearly there is no smoke monster running around, or else mother would be focused on protecting her sons from it - unless at this point in time mother herself was the smoke monster.

there is a big visual moment when mother pulls out the very same wine bottle jacob used with alpert to illustrate the island as a cork containing evil. her removal of the cork is a big moment because what we're seeing here is the truth of what the island is - at this point in time, the island is not a prison, and it's not a cork. the wine swirling around beneath isn't evil, it's the light of the earth, and it's meant to be protected. jacob drinks the wine in order to seal his place as her successor. mother tells him 'you don't really have a choice,' thereby shaping jacob's entire philosophy and approach for finding his replacement: he grows so resentful of what his mother burdened him with that he creates an elaborate system to ensure that the person who ends up taking his place has actively chosen to do it.

next, mother is murdered - stabbed with the same knife that man in black will eventually give to alpert, who will use it to try and kill jacob. jacob will later give it to dogen, who will give it to sayid, who finally gives it back to the man in black by ineffectively stabbing him in the chest. when the man in black tells alpert how to kill jacob, his instructions are based on the successful murder of his mother, who also did not age. he tells him that jacob must be stabbed before he says a word, otherwise it will be too late (dogen says the same thing to sayid about killing the man in black, though mib managed to get out 'hello' before being stabbed. did this save him?).

it seems like whether or not the intended target actually gets words out is not as important as 'the rules.' jacob says plenty of words to ben before being killed - jacob was successfully killed because his brother had 1) gained an audience with jacob and 2) manipulated someone else into killing him.

so how is it that mother was able to be killed? mother doesn't seem to have a candidacy system in play (does she have a cave with two names written on it, jacob and the prince symbol?) - i think once a successor has been anointed, the previous protector becomes susceptible. after leaving man in black alive and then burning the village and filling in the well, i think she was only waiting for him to come back and kill her. and, perhaps mother actually used her favorite son as her escape route - much like man in black had to manipulate ben into killing jacob, mother orchestrated her own death by driving her favorite son to enough hatred to make the act a certainty. mother saw in the birth of the twins a perfect opportunity: she could mold these boys into becoming her successor and murderer, respectively.

jacob, upon discovering mother's murder, does something mother could not have anticipated - he drags his brother to the cave of light, perhaps critically injures him, throws him in, and out comes smokey. later, jacob find his brother's discarded body - and lays it to rest next to his mother. two thousand years later, jack takes off his shirt.

3. the new game

the death of mother and the transformation of brother into smokey is the true start of the story of 'lost,' because before these events, the struggle of life on the island was simpler: there was a light to be protected, and there was one person assigned to protect it. the protector possessed two supernatural powers, imbued upon them by the light itself: agelessness (or a kind of immortality with limits), and (though we didn't see it directly) a smoke-monster-like ability to quickly kill an entire village (purge #1) and fill in a very deep well without any assistance.

before passing her powers on, mother was the smoke monster. the smoke monster's job is supposed to be to protect the light - but when brother started expressing interest in leaving the island, mother had to seriously reconsider her choice of successor. she had no choice but to give the job to jacob, even though she knew man in black would be better suited to exploit the powers that would come with the job. the story of mother and man in black is the story of a parent discovering utter disappointment in the choices of a child in which so much hope had been placed.

when mother gave jacob the wine, she transferred to him the powers of agelessness and the ability to locate 'the source.' perhaps she intended that the smoke entity, an existence 'worse than death,' die with her, but when jacob threw his brother into the cave, i believe that this manifestation of her power was reborn, essentially splitting the numerous powers of 'the protector' between the brothers. the result was that the primary goal to protect the light became overshadowed by the rivalry between the brothers, both of whom now have powers originating from the same source, preventing them from harming each other. the new game is that jacob must find a successor before his brother finds a way to kill him. jacob came to see himself as smokey's warden, rather than the island's protector.

the great irony is that jacob was able to leave the island many many times in order to recruit his candidates, (it's likely mother did this as well, bringing claudia's shipwreck) an act that must have driven his brother mad - if only the brother had known the truth about the source, the limits of the job and the purpose of it, he might have accepted the responsibility of becoming protector at the cost of only being able to visit the places across the sea.

many questions have been asked about 'the rules' that govern jacob and the man in black - what forces uphold these rules? it seems that the answer truly is the island itself. this source, the light, has its hands in both jacob and man in black, and because they are 'cut from the same cloth,' they cannot harm each other - a rule that only became true once the two were imbued with mother's former powers.

4. the missing history

though we don't see them there are many missing discovery beats to the story of jacob and his brother that we can fill in using our knowledge from the show's history:

man in black discovers that his shapelessness is actually capable of resuming his previous form.
perhaps accidentally, man in black discovers that he can also take the shape of other dead bodies on the island.
man in black appears as mother in order to freak jacob out. jacob probably cries.
jacob likely has a similar journey of discovery that jack had regarding the visions of his dead father. jacob probably chased the ghosts around the island before finally deducing that his brother is behind it and did not actually die. that must have been a very weird day.
a good amount of time probably passed while the two tried very hard to kill each other in various ways. similarly to how jack was prevented from jumping off the bridge, or how michael was prevented from shooting himself in the face, or how keamy was prevented from shooting michael in the face, fate (or the island) intervened in every murder attempt. this is probably known as the 'groundhog day' period in island history.
jacob realizes that he needs to figure out how to find a willing successor before his brother figures out how to kill him. does jacob even care about the light? jacob somehow begins travelling off-island, touching people, and bringing them to the island.
for centuries, people are brought to the island by jacob, who, eternally bitter at his mother, never interferes with the actions of the people he brings.
the initial group of people brought to the island are egyptian, and exposed to the two forces at play. they take sides. the statue of tawaret is built in honor of jacob. those who join the man in black complete construction of his frozen donkey wheel. they dig the tunnels underneath the dharma barracks. the system developed by the man in black to channel the light and the water is used by his followers to create the lever that summons him when pulled. the inscription is carved depicting the battle between the monster and the statue.
once construction on the wheel is complete, man in black realizes that 1) it works! and 2) it doesn't work on him. d'oh. i suspect that purge #2 happened around this point.
jacob uses magnus hanso and his ship, the black rock to bring the next group of people to the island. they all die. richard alpert becomes jacob's spokesperson - it is at this point that 'the others' as we know them are officially formed.
'the others,' or jacob's people, grow in numbers throughout the years, many of them candidates, many of them not.
1954: the us army finds the island while doing nuclear bomb tests. jacob orders that they be purged (purge #3). jacob's people procure their tents and equipment. young charles widmore and eloise hawking are among jacob's people at this point.
1960's: the dharma initiative arrives on the island to research its properties. it is unclear if dharma's presence is connected to influence from the man in black. they clash with jacob's people, but also have a fence designed to keep smokey out - they are perhaps a neutral third party with purely scientific goals.
1973: truce between dharma and jacob's people is reached.
1977: last known successful on-island-conception birth: ethan
1977: the incident
1992: purge of dharma (purge #4?), ordered by jacob. were they getting to close to messing with the light? that whole detonating a nuclear bomb wasn't grounds for purging?
1992-2004 ben becomes leader of jacob's people, who move into the dharma barracks and continue the project operations.

5. echoes of the future/past

many images in this episode are meant to evoke earlier motifs - the structure of the episode also loosely mirrors the structure of the six seasons.

the boys discover that other people are on the island in a way meant to evoke our first discovery of the others in season 1. the primary narrative complication of season 1 was the discover that 'we are not alone.'

the light emanating from the top of the source cave is meant to evoke the light emanating from the hatch.
the revelation that the island houses an energy source needing protection and a line of replacement protectors evokes desmond's job and trial at the hatch in season 2.
boy in black's decision to join 'the others' is reminiscent of the narrative turn in season 3 when the show suddenly shifted to their perspective.
revelation of the origin of the donkey wheel recalls the biggest surprise of season 4

the scene depicting the construction of the well is deliberately meant to recall the hatch construction site, where 'the incident' occurred at the end of season 5

a major question we should be asking now is: if smokey's true purpose is to be the guardian of the light, is it really such a bad thing if he gets off the island?

6. other problems

allyson janney. girl can rapid fire the sorkin dialogue but cannot latinspeak her way out of a wet paper bag. the role was conceived for and written specifically for her - damon and carlton were thrilled that she made time in her schedule to do it. whether you like it or not, hers is the face they envisioned as 'mother.' i would like to have seen someone with more otherness and mystery, someone like isabella rossellini.
the kids. i think part of the problem with this episode is that it all just felt too modern and too midwestern american - whereas a strength of 'ab aeterno' came from having the bulk of the episode in spanish. yes it was a big, bold choice to set this episode in the time and place they chose to do it in, but the three central actors kept bringing us back to wisconsin. the kids could not carry it. the whole thing would have been immensely better if everyone was at least a foreign actor speaking english with an accent.
the cave of light. also known as the midichlorian toilet. a wholly unspectacular visual to anchor the show's central struggle to. in the geronimo jack's beard podcast they reference that the source is described as a waterfall, not a cave - and man in black's line even refers to it as a waterfall.. was it just not possible to find a suitable location? are there no spectacular waterfalls in hawaii?

7. preboomer

jacob: goodbye brother, goodbye
(boom)

yes, the flashback to the scene in 'house of the rising sun' is horribly frustrating - really its inclusion cemented the episode as a failure in everyone's mind. it's irritating to see a show that so often relies on subtlety succumb to such blatant pandering. they have used other flashbacks this season in ways that didn't bother me because they were relevant to the characters - in 'the substitute,' as locke is showing sawyer the names scrawled in the cave, the show flashes back quickly to the moments that jacob touched each person, culminating in sawyer's realization that jacob did indeed touch him.

the problem with showing this flashback is that the identities of the bodies are totally inconsequential to kate, jack, and locke - it doesn't matter a whip to any of them who these people are. it seems like the intended effect was to have a big revelatory feeling of 'woah, so that's how the puzzle fits together' but instead it felt like 'see? see! we planned it! we did!' it treated us like idiots, which makes this perhaps the most hated preboomer in the entire history of 'lost.' damon and carlton have tried to defend the choice of showing the flashback by saying that they wanted to remind us how far the characters have come - but this interviewer pointed out quite well that the entire sideways plot serves that very purpose just as well.

the inclusion of the flashback is, i believe the weakest aspect of the episode - and based on the vitriolic reaction of jorge garcia's girlfriend in their latest podcast, the flashback scene was not in the original script.

8. next episode

is titled 'what they died for,' and is the beginning of the 'finale suite,' meaning damon and carlton consider this and the finale to be all in one. we don't know the full details, but i'm expecting that we will discover in retrospect that we did in fact need to know the events in 'across the sea' in order to fully understand what happens at the show's conclusion. will the island sink? does this mean the light goes out? is the parallel world the result of the light going out? is the sinking of the island actually a solution to a problem? does it free the island from needing a protector and finally allow smokey to go home? does smokey going home blink everyone into the parallel? or does the parallel blink itself out of existence?

it was extremely difficult to come to terms with this episode. at one point i was so disillusioned i said 'mission accomplished, damon and carlton: i'm ready to leave the island.' they didn't quite lose me, but they nearly did, and they have definitely lost others who are not so willing to give it a second (and third) look. but now the major mythological download is over. all that is left are our characters and the final fate of the island, and them. a week from now, all this will be over.

lost 6.14 'the candidate'

2010-05-11T11:58:00.000-07:00

written by: elizabeth sarnoff and jim galasso, who also cowrote this season's 'recon.'

directed by: jack bender.

cinematography by: stephen st. john. there really were two shows here - a quiet parallel drama and a crazy balls-out battle with bombs, planes, and sinking subs. both looked great, and even the cgi sub looked much much better than it did in season 3.

quickly: wow, sad. an exciting, epic episode that wipes away half the candidates on the island, while in the parallel, jack gets only slightly closer to finally giving locke the operation that will inevitably allow him to walk.

parallel jack and locke
what smokey wants
echoes of the past
the dead
preboomer
next episode

1. parallel jack and locke

the parallel story was focused almost entirely on revealing the details of the (alternate) accident that put locke into his wheelchair - the question comes loaded with a lot of mystery: is anthony cooper still a ruthless con man? does parallel locke still have his kidney? was locke pushed out the window?

and the answer (that locke crashed a plane as an inexperienced pilot) raises even more questions: why would the sinking of the island so dramatically alter the relationship between locke and his father? the changes we've seen go deeper than evacuting dharma from the island and removing jacob's touches from the timeline. did jacob also touch cooper at some point in the past? will we ever get full understanding of how the parallel works?

i think it's an important point because the parallel must have strict rules governing the variances between it and the original timeline. it would make sense that sawyer chose a less destructive path if jacob was never there to give him a pen when he needed it, or if kate learned her lesson about theft as a child instead of much much later. i want to know exactly what is happening in the parallel, and it sounds like damon and carlton understand that is the primary question of the season - half of this years' storytelling has taken place in this alternate world. perhaps once the entire cast wakes up to it, they will finally start asking these same questions.

i loved the way the parallel story existed in a quiet, calm and peaceful space - where there were nothing more than quiet dramas and small revelations, and how it was juxtaposed with full-on island war. it was especially jarring to see the flash that jumped from jack and claire listening to the music box to ratted-out crazy rifle-wielding claire picking off widmore's goons at the dock.

the parallel story existed to get us to one place: a full-on parallel reversal between jack and locke culminating in jack echoing locke's final suicide-note message: 'i wish you had believed me.' the moment almost redeems the original hollowness of locke's letter when we first discovered it. it also properly paced the storytelling so that locke can end up on jack's operating table in time for a final act 'resurrection.' perhaps when sawyer finally finds anthony cooper, realizes he's a vegetable, he will awaken locke to the truth about who cooper is, and it won't be so hard for locke to let go of the guilt for injuring his father.

we were again reminded of a mystery still open in the parallel: where is christian shepard's body?

bernard's lines, 'pretty weird, huh?' and 'of course i do [remember cooper and locke's accident three years ago], jack.' seem to indicate that bernard is already 'awake,' and he and rose probably have been since the moment he returned from the airplane bathroom.

2. what smokey wants

man, he had us going. he had jack going, too. if the show knows anything, it's how to play ambiguity. now with the death of four characters there's no more doubt: smokey lied about needing to leave with all the candidates. what he needs is for all of them to be dead, and then he can leave - a feat he can probably accomplish without aid of any vehicle, or assistance. after the sub sank, he knew instinctively that not all the candidates had died - once they're all dead, he can probably just smoke away to 'home' or wherever he wants to be..

what's odd is that locke didn't just allow everyone to get on the ajira plane and have it blow up the way widmore had wired it. was it all just a ruse to win additional trust from jack and sawyer?

are the rules against killing the candidates different from the rules for killing jacob, because man in black seems to be having a pretty easy time picking off the candidates, when it took him over a hundred years to finally kill jacob. there were also the rules governing the power struggle between ben and widmore, which based on widmore's easy violation (via the killing of alex) seem to be more of a gentleman's agreement rather than the fundamentally inviolate axioms that govern jacob and mib.

3. echoes of the past

not only did we revisit the cages from the early days of season 3 (no fish biscuits again!?) - widmore's pointing of the gun at kate was a callback to when juliet used the same move to tame sawyer when he and kate were tasked with building the runway.

this is also the first episode that features the entire main cast in the same place at the same time since the season 4 premiere, when everyone met at the front section of the plane to choose sides between locke and jack.

many elements were reminiscent of past season finales:

the bomb was made of the exact same brand of c4 as the massive explosive wired up on the freighter in the season 4 finale. sayid's analysis of the bomb mechanics was also similar to his diagnostic skill in the same episode.
whether or not to touch the bomb was an echo of the central argument of the season 2 finale in which desmond, locke, and eko debated whether or not to push the button - both choices with disastrous outcomes.
the sub departing the island, heading for home happened in the season 5 finale, with sawyer, kate and juliet on board.
sayid blew up while holding a bomb, as did arzt in the season 1 finale (though ilana's death was much more in that vein). the self-sacrifice is an echo of michael's death in the season 4 finale.
underwater explosion and major character death by flooding: season 3 finale, when charlie died.

4. the dead

we lost sun, jin, sayid, and lapidus. a word on each:

sun and jin: after one poignant scene in which sun returns jin's wedding ring, the couple is tragically disposed of. what has bothered me more than anything are the missing beats in every sun and jin scene. missing beat #1: sun's discovery that jin has learned to speak english, which would fuel their english speaking scenes with an emotional weight instead of audience puzzlement as to why they're not just defaulting back to korean. missing beat #2: acknowledgement that jin is actively choosing to orphan ji yeon by staying with sun. in the last podcast, damon and carlton addressed this issue, saying that they as writers were faced with the same choice as jin, and ultimately chose to have him choose to stay with sun rather than face eternal separation from her - which is fine - but, have the characters address it. the scene would have been much much more powerful if both jin and sun took the time to lay out the full consequences of the choices made. it made me think of the similar (and much more emotional) scene in 'the abyss' - that scene worked because the characters dealt with the situation in the smartest way they knew how, and actively exhausted every possible option before succumbing to the inevitable. i wanted so much more from this scene - i should have been crying through the whole thing, not just when the other characters began to mourn.
sayid: this one was interesting, because we already watched sayid die at the beginning of the season - since then we've had to question whether or not this resurrected person was actually 'sayid.' his actions seemed in line with who sayid has always been: someone caught between good and evil. he made a choice to prove to dogen that he was good, but then found that the task was a trap and chose the dark side almost out of spite (and because smokey promised him he would be reunited with nadia). despite all the zombie jokes, sayid seemed to still retain his humanity by being conflicted (as he always was) about the choice, and proved to be 'himself' again by not killing desmond in the well. his final self-sacrifice (if you can call it that, since he was kind of already dead) seems meant to solidify in our minds that yes, sayid was resurrected to full health by the temple and was indeed 'himself.' his is such a strange death on the show because we've kind of already mourned his loss. i'm disappointed though that resurrected sayid was killed without answering the basic mystery about his resurrection: what exactly brought him back to life if it wasn't the temple spring? why has there been no other instance of true resurrection from death on the show before sayid? also, all this business of being 'claimed' was raised as a major plot-point in the first third of the season, asking us to question whether or not claire and sayid were still 'themselves.' if it turns out that they were in fact always themselves (which it seems to be, given how they've disposed of sayid), then the temple stuff truly was 'filler,' padding out the early season with inconsequential plot-points.
lapidus: so much for taking the ajira plane home.. lapidus' death felt like ilana's in that it seemed to come out of having no other plan for the character. it seems like lapidus has only been on the show out of coincidence (he happened to sleep in the morning of flight 815, and he also happened to be piloting flight 316). his character was kept alive for the majority of the season only to give plausibility to smokey's plan to take the ajira plane off the island. now that we're entering the final phase of the story, we know that smokey doesn't need a vehicle to get off the island, rendering lapidus useless. his loss is also part of the 'empire strikes back' storytelling model, in which the characters need to be backed into the worst corner possible before being allowed to find their way out in the endgame. i'll miss him, though i'm sure he'll pop up in the parallel.

5. preboomer

locke: it sunk.

claire: what, the submarine? they, they were all on it, everyone.. what? they're, they're all dead?

locke: not all of them.

claire: wait, where are you going?

locke: to finish what i started.

(boom)

the preboomers for the last several episodes seem to occur one beat after when the preboomer would traditionally occur - in this episode, it could have ended with the shot of jin's hands drifitng out of sun's - or it could have ended with jack crying on the beach. but instead the show is focused on keeping the forward momentum going, so it's not booming after resolutions but instead in the midst of rising action. it's certainly more 'intense,' but one of my favorite things about the show has been when it would occasionally use the preboomer to emphasize an emotional moment. there has been almost none of that this season. while many episodes end with emotional catharsis, nearly every ending has been punctuated by either a declamatory statement from smokey, a submarine poking out of the water, or some other mid-action suspense-builder. i would have preferred this episode to have ended with the shot of the hands, and a single harp-pluck with the 'lost' title card - sun and jin's episodes often ended this way, and giving them that moment would have helped make up for the mess of 'the package.'

but here we are. smokey somehow 'knows' that not all the candidates are dead, and is going to continue to work toward getting all those names crossed off. what are the rules for candidate disqualification? why are kate and claire crossed off the list even though both of them are still alive? is it because aaron's existence makes their desire to leave the island a given, and there's no chance that either of them would choose to take jacob's place?

6. next episode

if reports are to be believed, we are in for a treat - the next episode comes with much advance pre-buzz and promises to explain a lot of the show's larger mysteries. none of the principal cast will appear, and it will be an epic mini-movie, similar to 'ab aeterno,' showing us jacob and man in black's past.. will it also explain the origin of the frozen donkey wheel? will it show us who built the statue of tawaret? will it take place in egyptian times? will we learn about man in black's crazy mother? will we learn how man in black had his humanity 'taken' by jacob and became the black smoke? will we understand what's at stake for man in black and exactly what it means for him to 'go home?' will we finally understand what the stakes are for our characters if man in black defeats them? we better!

lost 6.13 'the last recruit'

2010-05-04T13:00:00.000-07:00

written by: paul zbyzewski and graham roland. these guys also wrote this season's 'sundown,' and 'the package.'

directed by: stephen semel, who is primarily an editor on the show but has also directed the season 4 sun/jin episode 'ji yeon.' stephen's inherent understanding of pacing really helped this episode feel less like last week's ho-hum bridging episode and more like the steadily rising action and tension required to get us to the big finish.

cinematography by: stephen st. john. i'm starting to think that the variances in picture quality have less to do with who is actually behind the camera than the cooperation of hawaii's tumultuous weather. this episode was graced with beautiful, clear blue skies, and the return of desmond/libby's boat! there were also several very nice crane shots in the jungle, which coupled with the driving action of the plot gave the whole episode a nice sense of momentum that was missing last week.

basically: i really liked this episode - it paid off all the planning that went into plotting the parallel story threads, finally showing us how the alternate picture weaves together. in a way, the season 6 parallel story is a microcosmic mirror of the structure of the entire show. this episode also reminded me of the season 1 finale, giving each character a moment to shine.

the weave of the parallel
great musical moments
the sun/jin reunion
smokey's motivation
jack's jump
preboomer

1. the weave of the parallel

so many things got me excited in the parallel. locke is finally on jack's operating table - a seed that was planted in the season premiere. sawyer and kate's interaction was terriffic (i love kate best when she's playing a card). sayid's been arrested now. claire has coincidentally found jack! desmond continues his quest to awaken the 815ers.. i can't help but wonder about the other people on that flight. desmond has a list of 324 people to get through! only 71 of those people actually survived the crash, and only about 20 of them are important. at this point, desmond doesn't know jack from doug or gary - so what happens when doug or any of the other people on the flight 'wake up?' do they just have irrational fears about being sucked out the back of a plane?

jack and david could now be cover models for balboa bay window magazine. after 6 years of nearly every character on the show having daddy issues, it's shocking to see a healthy iteration of this relationship. we were reminded again of david's mother, but given no clues about who she might be (juliet???). i'm anxious to find out how the parallel is going to wrap up - because once everyone 'wakes up,' what is left to do? in that world, the island is underwater. is that truly the end of the show - an 'it was all a dream - in that we lived this complete other life and then erased it, but we still remember it' kind of way? the parallel has been building towards the reunion of the characters all season, but with four hours of show remaining, what remains to happen in the parallel? will everyone truly go on 'happily ever after,' armed with memories of an alternate experience?

2. great musical moments

i think this episode and 'ab aeterno' had the best music of the season so far - some great moments:

the 'coincidence theme' as ilana discovers claire has walked into her office
when desmond asks sayid 'what will you tell her?' the music is a dark, tremulous variation of one of the show's classic love themes
a new adventure theme when kate and sawyer swim out to the elizabeth

3. the sun/jin reunion

my only complaint about this episode was the handling of this reunion. before i tear the scene apart, i'll first say that yes it made me cry. but that's despite everything that these two actors (and characters) had to work against in the show that seemed determined to ruin and undermine their moment.

first: jin just randomly is walking to the beach along with armed zoe and nerd brigade? why?
second: zoe gets on her walkie and requests that the sonic fence be turned off - we get no confirmation that the fence is off as sun and jin run toward each other - also, there's a big wide shot of them both running directly for the sonic pylon standing between them. why didn't kate, or hurley, or anyone shout 'wait!!'?? so, everyone standing on that beach was perfectly happy to watch sun and jin run to their deaths?

i have to wonder if some moment dealing with the fence was cut from the final version. the lost opportunity is upsetting - it could have been funny, frustrating, and great if sun and jin ran towards each other and then had to stop suddenly, wait for the fence to be turned off, and then get their reunion moment. it would have at least added something a little more clever and interesting to this event we've been waiting for nearly as long as the characters have! to finally decide to allow them to coincidentally meet on the same beach feels lazy to me. both of them worked tirelessly to find each other (when the writing allowed for them to do those things) but the eventual meeting required nothing of either of them other than to just be present.

also - sun gets her english back, giving her plot contrivance handicap a duration of exactly two episodes. i will forgive this on one condition: that sun's loss of english on the island is foreshadowing that sun and jin might regain their english in the parallel once they fully 'wake up.'

4. smokey's motivation

i loved the scene between jack and locke that finally, officially laid out some ground rules about how smokey operates. we now know that yes, smokey requires a dead body on the island in order to assume the form of that person.

which means that the 'enhanced' airing of 'ab aeterno' from last week was operating entirely on assumptions (as it often does.. sigh) when is stated quite frankly 'this is not isabella. this is the smoke monster taking isabella's form in order to manipulate richard.' wtf, enhanced episodes?? i don't know why i watch them. they do nothing but infuriate me, especially when the enhanced commentary could actually help casual viewers understand the show better. instead, it's confusing them. arghrhag.

back to smokey - smokey tells jack that when he appeared as his father and led him to water in season 1, he was trying to 'help' him. uhh.. really? it's a nice idea, but i'm not sure we can truly trace this kind of 'helpful' motivation through all of smokey's appearances as either ghost or smoke. if smokey wanted all the candidates to either die or leave the island, why didn't he prevent the freighter from exploding? he was perfectly capable of appearing on it in christian shepard's form.. that freighter could have taken every last candidate off the island instead of just the o6.

another thing that's puzzling about smokey - is whether or not the parallel is actually the result of smokey getting off the island. several things are evident in the parallel that are in line with what we're told will happen if smokey gets off the island: 1) 'everything in this world will end,' - the parallel presents an entirely different universe. 2) sayid will be reunited with nadia - which happens in the parallel. but! jacob promised dogen that he would see his son again if he joined him, and voila, in the parallel dogen is back with his son.. hmm.. what if at the end of the show everyone gets on the ajira plane, and as it exits the perimeter of the island, it flashes right back to the start of season 6, with jack and company back on flight 815 in the parallel, and jack discovering that strange cut on his neck?

5. jack's jump

another scene with jack that i loved. jack is basically going through and winning back each character. he has had trust-building conversations with sun, hurley, kate, claire, and sawyer. now that he's back on the mainland, i'm sure he will be winning over the b-team of ben, miles, and richard who are still planning to blow up the ajira plane.

jack proves to sawyer that he can follow orders, and goes a step beyond by jumping off the boat with the same decisiveness that sawyer showed when he jumped out of the helicopter three years earlier. i love how there is no fight between these men anymore. jack's guilt over juliet's death is as deep as any blame sawyer might lay on him. i also love how jack has 'joined' smokey purely to oppose him. it seems pretty clear now that it is jack who is meant to take jacob's place. it makes me wonder what jacob's original story was - how did he end up being smokey's watchman? was there a previous list of candidates? if jack stays on the island, will he have to rebuild the lighthouse mirrors in order to find his successor?

6. preboomer

locke: you're with me now
(boom)

man, another episode that felt about 15 minutes long. no wtf-faces or major revelations here, just pure cliffhangery rising action. the music on this preboomer is great - it perfectly punctuates the line before the boom.

why did widmore go back on his deal with sawyer, and why are the candidates now being held by him at gunpoint? is he planning to use them as leverage to get desmond back? i think it's pretty clear that sayid did not kill desmond - hurley hinted at it by referencing anakin's return from the dark side. i think we'll also see a big payoff when sayid 'wakes up' in the parallel and finds himself actually faced with the conundrum desmond proposed to him: what will he tell nadia that he did in order to be reunited with her? how would nadia react when sayid says to her, 'i don't deserve to be with you because in an alternate timeline i was in a plane crash on an island and i tortured a guy because i thought he had an inhaler that belonged to a whiny blonde girl who i banged.'

7. next episode

it's billed as jack and locke centric. i imagine we'll finally see locke's father at the hospital, which might also draw sawyer into the picture. i would love to see juliet, but i have a feeling she is being saved for the finale, to bookend the season. on the island.. i have no idea what's going to happen.

lost 6.12 'everybody loves hugo'

2010-05-03T21:14:00.000-07:00

written by: eddie and adam, who continue their tradition of hitting and missing with this exciting but uneven episode.

directed by: daniel attias, who has only directed one other episode of 'lost,' hurley's first centric ep, 'numbers.' perhaps his unfamiliarity with the show is part of the reason for the episode's tonal failure in the island scenes. it worked to have a newcomer direct ben's episode because it was a simpler character-based story, but this episode had an incredibly difficult task of balancing comedic and dramatic tones, unexpected explosions, and character motivations that require deeper understanding of the show. the pacing of scenes was strange, music cues felt rushed - the reunification of the two camps should have been a much bigger moment, instead it felt squelched.

cinematography by: john bartley. some really interesting choices here - for the first time in a long time, the island wasn't candy green, but set in more pastel tones, and it's hurley's perfect life in the parallel world that is now set in bright, saturated, mr. clucks colors.

quickly: though i liked a lot of things in this episode, there are a lot of elements that were not handled very skillfully. for the most part it is a bridging ep that served to position the players for the 3rd act. jack and locke are now face to face, finally!

parallel hurley
ilanna
desmond
michael
more
jack and locke
what went wrong
what went right
preboomer
next episode

1. parallel hurley
i loved the way the writers used the parallel to close out libby's story in a satisfying way - it acknowledged that she was originally in the mental health institute with hurley, but shifted her reasons for being there. this was way more satisfying than cynthia watros' previous appearance as a blanket-carrying nurse-ghost who haunted michael and had two inconsequential lines.

i love libby, and though this episode had problems, i found it hugely satisfying to see her character back, to get some closure on her backstory (even if it's a parallel backstory), and to get full closure on the dangling story arc the show left us with and then teased us about for 3 years after her character's death. of course the lingering questions about her past - why does she hate her ex husband, david? why did she give her boat to desmond? why was she originally in the institution? - are now rendered moot.

a huge part of the post-island parallel world apparently converges around the golden state natural history museum: miles' dad works there (loved that pierre chang narrated the opening montage), charlotte works there, eloise's fundraiser is there, daniel is performing there with drive shaft.. is it a natural history museum or comiccon?

at first i thought that in the parallel hurley wasn't a lottery winner at all, that it was purely hurley's 'love of chicken' that catapulted him to success - but jorge garcia's podcast makes reference to a bit that was cut, detailing how parallel hurley picked his winning lottery numbers off the serial number of a dollar bill.. interesting.

also interesting is that leonard simms, hurley's original source of the numbers is not in the parallel institution with libby. if the island is gone, then there was no numbers transmission, leonard and sam toomey never heard them, and a bunch of bad stuff probably never happened to them. leonard and sam probably have completely different lives in the parallel. there is however a guy who looks a lot like leonard playing leonard's game of connect four in the parallel institution.

parallel hurley's story revolved entirely around his meeting with libby and eventual recovery of some of his island memories - which is confusing, because everyone who 'wakes up' in the parallel world is actually 'remembering' things that haven't yet happened in any timeline - we're still only seeing events in the parallel within one week of flight 815 landing, and in the original timeline hurley doesn't even meet libby until a month after the crash. desmond 'remembers' that he has a son named charlie, who wasn't even born until late 2005.

so it seems more like when the characters 'wake up,' they remember their entire other life.. somehow they're able to carry memories back and forth. hm. it's a tricky conceit, and difficult to get behind dramatically.. i'm still holding out hope that they can pull it off, because connecting these two strands is the greatest challenge the show has ahead of it.

what's most troubling to me is that the show set up an entirely new concept to resolve in one season, when there was no shortage of existing open mysteries. i think the audience wanted to see a full season of strands coming together, not a bunch of new strings trying to weave themselves in. damon and carlton do love to challenge themselves, and they certainly haven't shied away from reinventing the show before. all we can hope for at this point is that the pieces will lock together in a way that not only justifies, but reverses our frustration with the parallel - such that we'd watch it again happily, this time knowing exactly what is going on.

2. ilana

i was surprised and shocked by her explosive departure - it didn't bother me at first because i didn't see it coming, but on rewatch i'm irritated that the writers chose to dispense with her this way - they turned her into a shannon-level hysterical idiot lunatic. it's fine to decide to kill her suddenly and unexpectedly, but don't have it be because she randomly becomes a different, incredibly stupid person, literally throwing water bottles into the bag with the dynamite. all that buildup and intrigue, a character we were just getting to know and like, then blammo? kill her using a miscommunication, or an unavoiable accident, or even kill her the way arzt was killed - in the midst of being very very careful. it felt random and pointless - yes, some characters pointed out that maybe that was the point, but it's not a very skillful execution in making a point of pointlessness. she deserved much more. i really liked ilana - and had real hope that she would do something terribly difficult and brave to bring about the endgame.

3. desmond

some people are thinking desmond ran over locke as a sort of retribution for pushing him into the well in the original timeline. i don't think so. i think desmond knows that locke is supposed to walk - and that this is the only way to get him back on the operating table.

it's vague. it -could- be that desmond is acting out of retribution, and it will just turn out that his actions result in locke being able to walk again.. but i think it's similar to how charlie didn't want to kill desmond by driving off the pier, he just wanted to 'wake him up.' well, it looks like what it will take for locke to wake up is having his spine cut into by jack.. several pieces are in place to converge at the hospital.

it's still unclear what desmond's role/missions in the original timeline are: we don't know what widmore was planning for him to do yet - the well that locke pushed him into was definitely not the same well as the frozen donkey wheel well. this well is in a clearing, not surrounded by trees like the donkey well - also, this well is very clearly made of styrofoam. and now that desmond has had a vision of the parallel timeline, is it something that he working toward or against? if he's working toward it then he's essentially leaving his wife and child in order to re-meet and re-birth them respectively.

4. michael

argrhghr i hate michael!

5. more

the idea of michael is always so much better than actually seeing his petulant whiny performance on screen. since the episode featured libby heavily, it made a small bit of sense to include him in this story, but every time the character appears there seems to be a multitude of disconnects that happen: the writer's don't seem to have any clear idea of who michael is, other than one of the most unlikable characters ever written this side of ana lucia. he's bossy, he's self righteous, he's a know-it-all, he's completely self centered. add to that harold perrineau's performance which only makes those qualities worse. plenty of characters on 'lost' have immoral and questionable motives, are gleefully unlikable, but perrineau seems to be the only actor who actually judges his character while he's performing. i can almost hear him saying 'god i hate hawaii, i hate this awful show, why am i back here? didn't i die?'

if michael is going to be brought back into the mix in the final season, then the focus should have been walt, who played a much bigger thematic role in the early stages of the show. why didn't michael ask hurley if he'd seen walt off the island (which he had)? why not have hurley confess to michael that he lied to walt, allowing him to believe that his father is still alive? does ghost michael even remember that he has a son? do the writers?

it doesn't make any sense to me why hurley would ever listen to anything michael says, ghost or not. i feel like the show works best when it makes connections i didn't realize were there, and when it has a steel-suspension bridge continuity of emotional drive for each character. yes, hurley asks michael 'why should i believe you?' but michael doesn't say anything that would have anyone convinced.

the show is most frustrating when it does this:

character a: you have to do this.

character b: why?

character a: because you have to.

(pause)

character b: ok.

the real unanswered question here is: whose side are the ghosts on, and are the ghosts true representatives of the people they once were?

why not have ana-lucia appear to hurley again? she has some actual ghost-history of helping him. by throwing michael into the mix, the ghost logic is thrown all out of whack - and up until now, there was a very clear pattern. nothing is more frustrating to me than when the show proves itself guilty of the randomness that casual viewers accuse it of. i love defending 'lost,' though the job becomes more difficult when the writers throw in stuff like this.

5. the reversal of jack and locke

ok. i hate michael but i love jack again. i loved jack's scene with hurley, which addressed that jack has made a concerted effort to let go of the leadership position through almost all of season 5. this scene was about jack taking control again, perhaps this time with a better understanding of how leadership should work. it reminds me of harry potter's revelation in the final book, when he's told that only he could be the leader, because he has no ambition for power - it's his unwillingness to lead that primes him for control. for jack, leadership is totally about trust. jack gives hurley his complete trust despite knowing that hurley is lying. the result is that hurley can now easily give that same trust back to jack. again, it's important to remember that two weeks prior, jack attempted suicide. he has absolutely nothing to lose - he's kind of the opposite of sayid now; his previous self is gone, he's someone new and he's becoming the ultimate version of this new person. he's taken locke's previous role as believer in the mystical power of the island.

i have a feeling now that we'll see jack successfully operating on locke in the parallel, allowing him to triumphantly walk again. meanwhile, island jack will be engaged in a battle to the death with smokey/locke. maybe the best thing about this episode was that it finally got our iconic heroes face to face again.

while jack had a character-based reversal, locke's reversal is purely plot-based. really, locke's reversal doesn't count as a reversal because there is literally a different person wearing his appearance. i love this quote from damon lindelof: 'locke is now the voice of a very large subset of the audience who believes that when 'lost' is all said and done, we will have wasted six years of our lives, that we were making it up as we went along, and that there’s really no purpose. and jack is now saying, 'the only thing I have left to cling to is that there’s got to be something really cool that’s going to happen, because I have really, really fucking suffered.''

more than anything, that quote tells us whose side we should be on - damon and carlton have sided with jack, and they are essentially telling us, 'you will not feel that you've wasted your time. something cool is coming.' unless of course they're using locke as a clever way to excuse any dissatisfaction with the finale..

there was an interesting moment when locke asked desmond who he was and des replied simply 'you're john locke.' i'm not sure what to take away from that, though. why did locke decide that desmond needed to be pushed down the well? does smokey know that desmond is a threat given his electromagnetic resistance? why didn't he ensure that desmond died?

6. what went wrong

the episode had sporadic narrative focus. hurley's parallel story worked best because it had the clearest sense of beginning middle and end - but between michael's appearance, ilana blowing up, the black rock blowing up, hurley pretending to see jacob, and the hackneyed explanation of the whispers, it was all over the map.

but tonal problems aside, the absolute dumbest thing to happen during the episode was when the whispers are heard, and hurley randomly says 'hang on, i think i know what these are,' then walks ten paces to a clearing where michael appears and tells him 'oh yeah, the whispers are ghosts who 'can't let go.' kthnksbai.'

ghosts who can't let go?? i want to hit some writers over the head for that bullshit. i'm seriously worried for the show if this is the kind of 'explanation' we can expect from upcoming episodes. it's a textbook example of bad exposition: revealing information without any character engagement whatsoever. darlton always talk about how they want their info to be revealed through action - so instead of having desmond tell us 'wow i just flashed to some other weird timeine,' we actually go on the journey with him. instead of having things explained, we see the motivations behind the actions.

what we needed, in order for the ghosts to be satisfactorily explained was a real motivation behind the specific placement of those sound effects. why do they whispers always preceed the others and not the crash survivors? does it have something to do with being dipped in the temple? can the island ghosts almost speak to those who have been temple dipped, and thus spend eternity chasing them around, hoping that they'll be heard? the point is, they're writers, their job is to come up with a story, and this was pure bellyflop. i can think of a million ways it could have been better - which is when the show frustrates me most, because usually it blows my mind by brilliantly executing things i never would have conceived of.

underwhelmed by the destruction of the black rock - mostly because i had no emotional investment in it as a 'savior' for our camp. hurley's camp doesn't know what move to make next. richard wants to blow up the plane. hurley decides (randomly) to listen to michael and thwart richard's plan. hurley blows up the ship, along with all the remaining dynamite. then he decides that the best option is to talk to locke. about what exactly? the episode asked us to get behind someone who has no idea where he's going, why he's making the choices he's making, or what the goal is. hurley's island story was literally an hour of 'hurley's random choices as an experiment in leadership.' now, if this felt more deliberate - and it used the parallel story to juxtapose it in a cool way, it could have worked. if parallel hurley is totally on top of things, a natural leader, a go-getter.. meanwhile island hurley is a trainwreck who can't make decisions.. with clearer thematic underscoring, the episode could have been more successful as a character study.

7. what went right

i was totally satisfied by the parallel storyline. in the island story, i gasped several times - ilana's demise was infuritaing but still surprising. could not believe that desmond was pushed down the well, and was totally surprised by the locke-run-over incident - great stunt! overall, things happened at a quick enough pace that i generally wasn't distracted by the lack of craftsmanship in the writing - where was the style and grace of eddie and adam's 'dr. linus??' it was a fun, fast-paced, emotionally inconsequential episode, and that's the best i can say about it.

8. preboomer

locke's wtf face after being hit by desmond's car
(boom)

pretty damn good, i must say, and the second preboomer to take place in the parallel - perhaps focus will start shifting more towards the parallel now that all the main characters have had their featured episode. the shot of locke's face was deliberately similar to the shot of his face when jacob touched him after he was thrown out the window - which raises the question: how did locke end up in the wheelchair in this timeline? if he was still thrown out the window by his father, why are they on good terms with each other?

9. next episode

it's a mystery! no centricity has been announced - damon and carlton said in the last podcast that it will deal with a variety of characters.. hmm.. we have six hours of show left, and then it's all over. i enjoyed this episode, but i didn't love it. if i got the script, it'd have red all over it. fingers crossed that it is a return to form.

lost 6.11 'happily ever after'

2010-04-13T17:53:00.000-07:00

written by carlton cuse and damon lindelof. they write all the game-changers

directed by: jack bender. he directs the big ones

cinematography by: stephen st. john. the trick of the shooting in this episode was that it managed to evoke every iconic desmond scene we've had on the show. we got a car diving off a pier, an underwater rescue, a crazy electromagnetic event, widmore's office, and the stadium scene, which was beautifully lit.

so: here's the second big game-changer of the season, beginning to explain the parallel timeline, and launching the show into the season's 3rd act. this does not top 'the constant,' but as an homage to desmond's character and function in the long great story of 'lost,' i can't imagine it being any better. it was like desmond's entire history in fast forward bizarro-world . this episode was a gradual unravelling of one surprise inversion after another.

parallel desmond
a violation
desmond's plan
widmore's plan
preboomer
next episode

1. parallel desmond

this episode was structured very similarly to 'flashes before your eyes,' with an initial setup on the island, and then a long, unbroken 'flash,' during which desmond has some consciousness crossing-over throughout. when desmond touches penny, he makes an instant, silent transition back to the island timeline, seemingly with full consciousness and memory of what he saw while 'away.' the episode then uses the newly-established 'parallel timeline whoosh' to take us back to the scene with penny at the stadium after desmond has apparently passed out in front of her. it's unclear how much knowledge parallel desmond now has of his original self - did touching penny restore complete memory of everything he'd been through originally?

but let's start at the beginning - without the island, desmond's life is completely altered. now he's successful, single, (despite the continuity error of putting a wedding ring on him in 'la x') and has everything except the 'spectacular, consciousness-altering love' of penny, who is a stranger to him in this world. he works for widmore, and in a fantastic, crazy reversal, widmore pours desmond a glass of macutcheon telling him 'nothing's too good for you.'

an interesting aspect of this new timeline is that it appears desmond has been manipulated by widmore in a way similar to how widmore originally 'used' him - only this time the manipulation is more underhanded, and doesn't appear malicious on the surface. originally, both widmore and eloise needed desmond to go to the island, push the button for three years, and then turn the failsafe key. apparently this action makes him a key player in the final battle between good and evil. in the original timeline, events must occur that propel desmond on course toward the island, and both widmore and eloise did their part in making sure it happened by keeping desmond away from penny. much is made of the futility of desmond's time spent pushing that button, and one of the themes of his larger story is that perhaps it was all worth it so that he could truly be with penny and have a child at the end.

in the new timeline desmond 'has it all,' but his life is still empty in a way he can't even realize. whatever his situation, desmond's theme is that life is meaningless without true love. yes, in the parallel he hasn't endured any of the suffering and pain of the original timeline, but he also hasn't experienced any of the joy of it either. when season 6 is at its smartest, it truly asks the question: what are the consequences of the choices we make?

analyzing this parallel timeline requires making a couple assumptions - so i'm going to assume a couple things:

jughead was in fact detonated in 1977 by juliet's rock smash
the detonation, in combination with the island's properties, did not result in a nuclear blast, but instead began to sink the island, forcing everyone there to leave.
eloise, still pregnant with daniel, left the island with charles widmore.
though they stayed married, widmore managed to find the exact same woman that he originally had an affair with during his abuse of the dharma sub in the original timeline, and still managed to father penelope - who in the parallel timeline is named 'penelope milton.'

so much was covered in this episode - and desmond met so many characters, it was almost like an inversion travelogue. hurley, claire, charlie, jack, widmore, daniel, eloise, penny, and minkowski!

in both timelines, minkowski served as a kind of 'guide' for desmond. in the original - he showed desmond his inevitable path towards death if he did not find his constant in time. and in the parallel, minkowski is literally cast as desmond's driver, taking desmond on the opposite path toward redemption.

desmond and charlie bond over a drink, as they did in 'flashes before your eyes.' the inversion here is that in 'flashes before your eyes,' it is desmond who has the unpleasant task of informing charlie that his death is inevitable. in the parallel, it's charlie who informs desmond that his life is meaningless.

goodbye at the stadium
desmond meets penny while she is running a tour de stade. this is of course the location where we first met desmond on the show, as he was preparing for his race around the world to win widmore's favor, and eventually penny. i loved this reversal, and the photography was beautifully matched to the original scene. we've been to this stadium twice before - once in the season 2 premiere, where we see jack meet desmond, then again in the season 2 finale - when we see the scene that took place just before desmond began his run, where penny tearfully promised him 'with enough money and determination, you can find anyone.' the original penny/desmond scene at the stadium was their heartbreaking final goodbye. in the parallel, it's the beginning of their new lives.

hello at the stadium
henry ian cusick and sonya walger are so amazing together - their chemistry is undeniable. it just floors me every time they have a scene, how well they play first meetings and reunifications. it makes it shocking to see walger on 'flashforward,' where the writing isn't as strong and she and her husband played by joseph feinnes both have american accents and no chemistry whatsoever.

2. a violation

if the parallel timeline is an expression of the success of eloise and widmore's plan, then both of them are trying to ensure that nothing ever undoes what they worked so unbelievably hard to make happen, even if both of them are unaware of the full scope of the sacrifices they originally made.

creepy eloise with the giant poofy hair is the same woman who shot and killed an adult version of the child she was still carrying - a guy the same age as the one now prepping for his concert with drive shaft. everything about her life, and the existence of daniel as a person who looks exactly like the guy she once shot (right down to his fashion choices - minus the hat) confirms that detonating jughead was absolutely the correct course of action.

what's puzzling to me is why she would attempt to keep desmond away from penny in this timeline, and why she would call desmond's curiosity 'a violation.' what can this eloise possibly know about how desmond and penny originally interacted, and what kind of danger can their reunification pose to the timeline? clearly widmore is also in on the secret, or else desmond would have known instantly who 'not penny's boat' might be referring to.

it's unclear if daniel's journal jumped forward in time with jack, kate, sawyer, hurley, juliet, sayid and miles - but if it didn't, then it's possible eloise and widmore recovered it and used it to learn details of the entire original timeline, specifically desmond's connection to daniel, and also desmond's connection to penny as his constant.

it seems like eloise is now trying to do the exact thing she first told desmond was totally futile: undo course correction. eloise doesn't wan't the universe to course correct itself back, so she's doing what she can to make sure that certain connections never get made.

what's also strange is that if preventing course correction is so important, why did widmore put desmond on flight 815, where he would surely make some connection with the original timeline?

3. desmond's plan

the biggest question i have at the end of this episode is: what exactly is desmond fighting for in each universe? charlie tells desmond that 'none of this matters,' but will charlie's opinion of the futility of the parallel change if he's reunited with claire?

some analysts have taken this episode to mean that yes, the parallel is indeed a false existence for our heroes - it eschews 5 years of storytelling and audience investment in favor of sometimes too-easy resolutions. but i don't see that at all - we've been getting hints along the way that there is more going on here than just an alternate timeline - it's building up to something, and it's taking the time to give emotional resolutions to most of the featured characters. by the same token, those resolutions won't mean anything if the parallel is undone. the show has an incredibly difficult task ahead of it in putting these two timelines together without betraying the investment we've placed in either of them.

what exactly does desmond want to show to the people on oceanic 815, and what will happen when does? in each timeline, is desmond trying to prevent or protect the parallel? after having met penny, he seemed euphoric - it doesn't seem likely that he wants to show everyone that they're living futile, pointless lives. it seems more like he knows that they have all lived other lives, and that the lost connections from that existence can be regained. perhaps what desmond wants to show them is that for each person on the flight, there's some kind of similar connection to be made - and we've already been watching those connections unfold on their own for 10 episodes. now, with desmond actively seeking our heroes out, it finally feels like this whole parallel story device is building towards something important. will the series end with the parallel world fully replacing the original timeline, or will it end with those in the parallel somehow making eloise's worst nightmare manifest, and course-correct the whole thing?

will the 'sides' in the jacob vs. smokey war ultimately break down between who wants to trade for the parallel world and who wants to keep the original timeline? it's a tough argument to make - overall things are much better for almost everyone on the parallel, though not perfect. if sun dies in the parallel or perhaps loses her baby, i can't see that she'd be very interested in backing a plan to trade timelines. locke doesn't get to walk, but he does get to be alive.. so do boone, shannon, artz, all the tailies, and nikki and paolo. i would love to see some passing reference, maybe on a tv screen in the parallel showing nikki and paolo arrested for murder and theft, and sentenced to death.

the other strange thing about desmond's new perspective is that he doesn't even care who's 'side' he's on in all this - he calmly joins sayid. sure des doesn't know about smokey, jacob, the epic battle between good and evil, or that sayid is an animated zombie, but he does know sayid, and he does know that widmore is pretty much an ass. so for sayid to jump in, snap some necks and say 'come with me,' yeah, i'd probably just go with him too.

4. widmore's plan

widmore's office once featured the painting of the black rock from the auction - it now features a model of a boat much like the one desmond used to sail in widmore's race, and a painting of a balanced scale with a white rock and black rock on it

it's very interesting to see the writers go to such lengths to make widmore's new operation look like a mismanaged joke. zoe captures jin too early, zoe gives desmond too much sedative, widmore orders the electromagnetic test a day ahead of schedule, resulting in the microwaving of one of his men. i think it's part of an attempt to now set widmore up as an underdog in the big battle - he knows how to use guns, but he's tremendously unprepared for the task ahead of him.

and was that big elaborate setup just to 'test' desmond? wouldn't it make more sense to test him on the mainland before going to all that trouble of bringing him to the island just to put him through a test that might kill him? it doesn't seem like widmore has any knowledge of desmond's ability to jump around in time - all he needs in order to get his job done is someone who can withstand a 'catastrophic electromagnetic event.' i was hoping this episode would finally explain what happened when desmond turned the failsafe.. is it still coming?? is desmond's job going to be to dismantle the frozen donkey wheel? or will the series end, once again with an incident at the hatch site?

5. preboomer

desmond: can you get me the manifest for my flight from sydney, oceanic 815, just the names of the passengers?

george: sure i can. do you mind if i ask what you need it for?

desmond: i just need to show them something.

(boom)

wow, best preboomer of the season, and if you don't count the end of 'la x part one,' then this is also the only preboomer to take place in the parallel timeline. filled with mystery, suspense, and promise. the best.

6. next episode

hurley! in the jacob/smokey battle, hurley is a key player given that he's the only person who has direct contact with jacob. doesn't seem likely that he'll switch sides. hurley can also talk to a plethora of other ghosts, and it seems that any ghost, regardless of whether he knew the person, or if they died 100 years ago is fair game. i expect we'll see some faces from the past, alive and in the parallel, and dead as hurley ghosts.

quick hurley recap:

hurley won the lottery by playing 'the numbers' which he learned from leonard, while he was in the mental institution. leonard got the numbers from sam toomey, who heard them playing on a loop 16 years ago from a listening station in the pacific.
hurley was originally in australia to learn the source of the numbers from sam toomey's wife.
a laundry list of bad stuff happens to hurley and his family after winning the lottery, culminating in the crash of flight 815.
in the episode 'dave,' hurley forges a friendship with libby, who it turns out was also in the institution at the same time. hurley says she looks familiar, but doesn't make the connection. in that same episode, hurley's imaginary friend 'dave' appears both on and off the island. some have theorized that dave's appearance is actually the first manifestation of hurley's ability to see and talk to ghosts - and that dave is actually libby ex-husband, the one she hated, and whose boat she gave away to desmond so that he could run his race around the world.

lost 6.10 'the package'

2010-04-06T11:19:00.000-07:00

written by: paul zbyszewski and graham roland. this pair also wrote this season's 'sundown,' which teased us via its title and season 1 centricity pattern into thinking that episode would be this season's sun/jin episode. the title was ominous - and apparently foreshadowed the dire events soon to befall sun in both the parallel and original timelines.

directed by: paul edwards. well, edwards has done some good episodes in the past (the variable), but he now has the distinction of directing the two episodes i'm most disappointed in this season - 'what kate does,' and this one. there are certainly aspects that i loved loved loved (most of the island story), but as an homage to the two most overlooked characters on the show, i feel it failed both on writing and directorial levels. it's hard to follow up the sweeping epic of 'ab aeterno,' but that episode really highlighted how flat the show had become, and it was unfortunate to see it return standard tv lighting and coverage.

cinematography by: john bartley. man, it felt kind of flat. a lot of standard interiors in the parallel, shot in standard tv ways. where is the cinematic inspiration? the island featured some nice shots - sun by her beachside campfire, and the shot of windmore's pylons stretching all the way across hydra island beach.

basically: this episode gave me a lot of what i wanted to see - in the island story. i even cried.. twice! once for sun and once for jin. the island side of the story also featured every single major character on the show for the first time since 'la x.' while it felt like old-school 'lost,' i'm puzzled and annoyed by the decision to take sun's english away from her. on top of that, the parallel story left me as cold as jin in that meat refrigerator. however, once i let go of my expectations and accepted the episode i got, there is still much to appreciate.

a sun/jin retrospective
parallel sun/jin
criticisms
the button
zoe and widmore
aphasia
jack vs. locke
choices
great lines
preboomer

1. a sun/jin retrospective

i think it's really important to revisit sun and jin's backstory:

• in 'house of the rising sun,,' we learned that sun married for love, below her class, and that jin accepted a mysterious job with her father, one that resulted in him coming home late at night with blood on his hands.

• in '..in translation,' we see the story from jin's perspective - sun's father has shifted him from a factory job to being his personal hit man. jin goes to visit his fisherman father, who tells him to do one last job for sun's father: deliver the watches to sydney and los angeles, and then run away together.

• in '..and found,' we learn how jin and sun met by chance, their paths finally coming together after sun was set up with jae lee, who would teach her english, and who she would have an affair with later. jin worked as a doorman at jae lee's hotel, and quit when the job required him to turn away a poorer man and his son from using the hotel bathroom.

• in 'the whole truth,' we learn that sun and jin are incapable of having a child. the doctor says that sun is infertile, then privately tells her that it is in fact jin who is the problem. the episode ends with sun discovering that she is pregnant on the island. she tells jin - then she tells him the truth about the doctor. and then she tells him that she's never been with anyone else. jin says that the baby is obviously a miracle. obviously..

• it's not until season 3's 'the glass ballerina' that we learn of sun's true deviousness. as a child she told a lie that got a maid fired, and she expressed no remorse. we learn that she did in fact have an affair with jae lee, who was teaching her english, and that her father discovered the affair, and asked jin to personally kill jae lee without telling him why. jin doesn't kill jae, but scares the crap out of him, causing jae to take a suicidal dive off his hotel balcony. on the island, sun shoots colleen in the stomach, an injury she dies from, and escalates the conflict between the others and the survivors. sun is all kinds of destructive here.

• in 'd.o.c.' we discover that the details of sun's affair and jin's infertility were all crucial information, since sun's date of conception will determine if her on-island pregnancy will kill her. the other crazy thing we learn is that when jin and sun were newlyweds (when jin was still working in the factory for her father), jin's prostitute mother attempted to blackmail sun. sun asked her father for the money with no questions asked. her father made a deal with her: he would give her the money but if she took it, it meant that jin would have to truly start working for him. which means that sun took the envelope of cash from her father's desk knowing full well that this action would transform her husband into a killer. wowzers.

• when sun becomes one of the oceanic 6, sun blames both ben and her father for jin's death - if the writing was more consistent, her father would have reminded her that she made the choice that turned jin into a hateful goon.

• 'ji yeon' established that getting off the island did indeed save sun from death by pregnancy. a flashback story about buying a stuffed bear served only to trick us into thinking jin was also a member of the oceanic 6, and to build some foundation for what sun might be willing to do to avenge his death.

'woah, i just realized that three years ago, i peed on one of your sticks.'

• will sun's previous alliance with widmore assist her in getting off the island safely with jin?

the core of their original backstory was unraveling the circle of lies this couple built around each other. both actors play their scenes with such earnestness that each revelation was a genuine surprise - mostly because the actors played the lies as truth in each episode because at the time they had no reason to think they were lying. turns out they were being manipulated by the writers into becoming a pair of the best liars on television.

upon boarding flight 815, jin was planning for them both to escape sun's father once they reached los angeles, a plan that sun would be able to help facilitate since she'd learned english as part of her plan to escape jin. their backstory is so complicated, and we've spent so much time away from them as characters and as a couple, that i wish their parallel story wasn't so drastically different.

2. parallel sun/jin

rrrgrgh 'v' countdown clock..

it appears that in the parallel, for some reason, sun and jin have made very different choices about how to pursue their relationship. one of the problems i had with the parallel is that this path was so different from the original, that it bordered on confusing. it raised too many questions about the alternate timeline that i didn't want to be asking while watching our first real sun/jin story in, what, two years?

so, in this timeline, sun and jin kept their relationship a secret from her father. sooo many questions:

is jin still infertile?
is sideways sun's pregnancy jin's or jae lee's? someone else's?
how did jin get a job working for sun's father, when he's of such lower class? how would he ever get the job of being her 'bodyguard?'
was an assassination attempt also awaiting sun and jin should they have arrived in los angeles in the original timeline?

as i hoped, the parallel has reintroduced all of the key villains from the show's history: ethan, mikhail, keamy - even danny got a shoutout! (keamy describes mikhail as 'danny's friend'). while ethan ended up on a better path, it seems some people are still tipped toward the bad side even without the influence of the island.

the parallel works best when it contrasts the characters we know with who the characters could become - it also works best when it acts as an homage and emotional closure for each character. the juxtaposition for sun and jin is that in this universe, the couple that has been defined by their marriage for six seasons is now not married. it shows us a couple who attempted an alternate route to be together, and it's pretty much a toss-up as to whether the parallel is an improvement over the original timeline for them. while their relationship is happier (jin isn't controlling - in fact, she's totally in control), they must face equally difficult obstacles to remain together, and sun may perhaps even pay with her life, or lose the baby.

in any universe, sun and jin are about the tests a relationship must face - as keamy says, 'some people just weren't meant to be together.' i expected that sun and jin might get a happily ever after in the parallel, but face ultimate tragedy on the island. will we instead have the reverse? or will they face similar fates in the two worlds, regardless of the decisions they make?

3. criticisms

• neither character was really faced with any kind of choice in the parallel world - yes, they spent the entire time dealing with the consequences of choices they made in the past, but it felt like these are 'characters' who events happen to, but never make anything happen for themselves.

• i would love to have seen a much simpler parallel story that focused more directly on the dynamic between them as a couple. in the original timeline, it took their experiences on the island to eventually trust each other again. i wanted a story that more simply expressed their emotional shift. my ideal jin/sun parallel story would have shown how each of them harbors a lie, but then shows how each reaches a new level of maturity by truly, finally, choosing to come clean with each other - because ultimately their love is unconditional. that to me is beautiful, and that's what jin and sun should be about. they may still be about that - it's just not what we got in this episode.

so i hope parallel sun's baby is actually jae lee's. i hope parallel sun is still a liar. i hope parallel jin has secrets too. they need a place to go emotionally. they can be about so much more than just separation.

i think my favorite sun/jin episode is '..and found,' which has perhaps the simplest island story: sun loses her wedding ring, allowing each of the main characters to visit her and share a story about loss. it's simple, but the brief stories revealed to her, and us, what each character was about. meanwhile, in the flashback, we discovered how sun and jin eventually 'found' each other through an elaborate combination of luck and timing. the simplicity was gorgeous, and when sun finally found her wedding ring (by not looking for it, as locke had suggested), the relief and joy on her face is real and beautiful. i know the show is still capable of delivering that level of emotional punch.. i'm just disappointed that they chose to throw an excess of plot at sun and jin in lieu of character exploration.

4. the button

there was some fun mystery in the way the episode unfolded - and it answered many questions that were hinted at in 'la x,' like whether or not sun and jin are married, or if sun speaks english and was choosing to lie to the customs agent.

in the first scene we leared that jin still works for sun's father - then we quickly found out that they're not married, and jin seems insistent that they not be mistaken for married. are they divorced!????

my mind suddenly raced to wonderful places the episode could have gone. are sun and jin here on a business trip as co-workers? will they have a snappy irene dunne/cary grant divorce battle between them before finally realizing that they love each other, like in the awful truth? that could have been wonderful!! - give them the same scheming, somewhat unlikable character traits, but put them in a smaller scale setting, and then have the characters prove they love each other by making them fight. oh, i would have loved to have seen that.

but we learn that jin and sun are actually a secret couple - and sun seems to have ridiculously thought that booking a 'shopping trip' to the exact same place and on the exact same flight and in the seat next to an employee of her father's wouldn't raise any suspicions. parallel sun seems pretty naive. girl can't even hide a bank account.

sun teases jin by unbuttoning her top. it is simply amazing how much character and weight can be contained in a single button. the beauty of the writing in this scene was in how it recognized the symbolic implications of the initial 'button moment' and then completely subverted them. the original moment painted jin as a villainous husband, and revealed the controlling, borderline abusive nature of their relationship, not to mention sexual repression. the new button moment established sun as completely in control of the relationship, teasing him for having the audacity to give her an order while on the plane, and the unbuttoning became an expression of total sexual freedom.

it was fantastic setup. i was really excited to spend an entire episode with these people, finally! even the scene the next morning was great - sun is fast asleep, and jin is wide awake, worried - pretty much the girl in the relationship. inversion of traditional sexual roles - bravo parallel universe! but then that knock on the door and in comes the money plot and the hitman plot and a string of events that lead to sun being shot. will she die in the parallel? will juliet save her baby? will ethan come back into it? this time around, will juliet have to give sun 'bad news?' ugh, that would be heartbreaking. where are they going with this parallel world?

5. zoe and widmore

some interesting things here. widmore has tasked zoe with capturing jin - but is really pissed that she did it ahead of schedule - 4 days ahead of schedule. we've only got 8 more hours of story, so whatever's going to happen in 4 days is probably going to be whatever happens in the series finale. some questions:

at what point did widmore figure out that jin was alive?
did widmore know that jin was still alive when sun went to him to form a pact to kill ben as retribution for jin's death?
is widmore using desmond's foresight ability to form his plan of attack against smokey?

sun clearly doesn't know that widmore is coming - or else she would have no problem with richard's plan to blow up the ajira plane.

we learned that zoe is a geophysicist. which means that we are about to get a geophysical explanation for the island's properties - finally! is widmore's goal to sink the island? is zoe here to facilitate the sinking of the island? was this widmore's same goal in season 4?

in season 4, widmore sent the freighter specifically to capture ben linus, and purge the island of his followers. widmore's mission seems different now. as zoe sarcastically pointed out, he has not hired mercenaries this time, and his tactic for extraction is very different than it was three years prior. now he's using tranq darts and making non-lethal extraction. if he wanted to, he easily could have wiped out all of smokey's followers. why didn't he? what changed him? the deliberate shift in his motivations needs to be addressed.

i just love zoe's character. she feels like a lost fan inserted into the show: someone like the fans who waited in line at comiccon to ask damon and carlton who ordered the season 2 food drop. zoe seems like an analytical conspiracy theorist who has followed a mysterious trail that doesn't make total sense, but has an elusive deeper structure. she's a science geek, but she's also a little bit like marion from 'raiders' and a little bit chloe from '24.' she's been put in charge of the whole operation, but she's only actually good at one thing: science. it's quite interesting that widmore has put someone like her in charge.. big contrast from keamy.

6. aphasia

why the decision to suddenly afflict sun with a very specific form of aphasia? did she look in the mirror too long and have a piece of her alternate consciousness transferred through the stream of time? are the writers trying to poetically 'punish' her for the lies she told and secret advantage she held during the first season? the plot turn disappointed me, but i do have to give the show credit for dealing with it well - jack's scene with her by the beach where he gives her a notepad and pen was beautiful. it echoed '..and found' in that though sun isn't reunited with jin by the end of the episode, she still experiences both a loss and a recovery, giving her (and us) hope that she will also recover jin.

7. jack vs. locke

this episode so clearly laid out that the season is building toward the reunification/rivalry between jack and locke. like sun and jin, the show is very deliberate about keeping them separate, and slowly lays groundwork to bring them back together again. let's look at the history between jack and locke:

the two first butted heads after boone's death, and locke finally revealed that he had been secretly trying to get into the hatch for weeks.
their next confrontation occurred near the start of season 2, when they feuded over whether or not to continue pushing the button in desmond's absence.
tension between jack and locke really escalated in season 3, after locke blew up the submarine the day before jack was supposed to go home in it.
locke devoted all energy to preventing rescue, throwing a knife into naomi's back
at the cockpit, the survivors took sides over whether to join jack's group - who will meet the freighter rescue party, or whether to join locke's group - who would remain on the island, and begin living in the dharma barracks. jack puts a gun to locke's head and pulls the trigger. it doesn't work.
the two do not see each other again until a week later, the day that ben pushed the frozen donkey wheel. locke asked jack to stay on the island - telling him that he has a destiny there. jack tells locke 'it's an island. it doesn't need protecting.' jack walks away, gets on the helicopter.
jack watches the island vanish.
three years later, jack's life has fallen apart. he's seeing the ghost of his father. he's on drugs.
locke suddenly appears in jack's hospital. locke tells him, again, that jack needs to go back, that it's his destiny, then tells jack that his 'father says hi.' jack walks away, shaken. this is the last time jack saw locke alive.
jack realizes locke was correct, and begins flying across the ocean, hoping the planes will crash, hoping to go back to the island. on one of these flights, jack learns that locke has killed himself.
jack, believing his only way back to the island is gone, attempts suicide.
he spirals, yells at kate 'we have to go back!'
ben tells jack that he knows how to get them back to the island: jack must collect the oceanic 6.
jack is told by mrs. hawking that he must use locke's body as a 'proxy' for the body of his father on the original flight 815.
jack swallows all logic, chooses blind faith, and puts his father's shoes onto locke's dead feet. this is the last time jack saw locke.

the thing to remember about jack's relationship to locke is that jack was driven to suicide upon hearing that locke had died. everything jack has done since then has been because he finally put his science aside and allowed himself to believe that what locke had told him was true: his destiny and purpose in life is to return to the island.

once jack figures out that this same blind faith is the exact cause of locke's murder and avatar abuse - it must fall on jack to avenge the wrongs done to locke by jacob's nemesis. if jack can't defeat nemesis, then locke's entire tragic life was nothing more than an endless cycle of being used and taken advantage of because of his willingness to believe in something. if jack can't defeat nemesis, then both locke and jack's lives were meaningless.

this could be the genius of the endgame: locke will actually have saved the world by having converted jack into a man of faith; the same philosophy that subjected locke to so much abuse, and positioned him to become the vessel for evil. jack's purpose in returning to the island will be to ensure that locke did not die in vain.

jack will simultaneously be fighting against the false 'locke' in the name and spirit of the true 'locke,' in order to administer cosmic justice. post-island jack was willing to die for locke - i feel certain that he will show that same willingness again.

the reversal is fantastic: now it's nemesis (in locke's form) who says 'it's an island, it doesn't need protecting,' and it's jack who believes he's 'here for a reason.'

8. choices

thanks but no thanks!

while sun and jin weren't given many choices in the parallel, they did have choices to make in the island story - locke approaches sun in her old garden, and says to her the same thing he said in '..and found' when he saw her rip it up, tearfully searching for her lost wedding ring: 'bad day?' that original scene is so great, it's worth examining:

locke: bad day? [he hands her a handkerchief] it's clean.
sun: thank you.
locke: you mind if i sit? [she motions for him to sit.]
sun: did you see me?
locke: rip apart your garden? no. [she laughs.] sometimes i wish i had a garden to tear apart.
sun: i don't think i have ever seen you angry.
locke: oh, i used to get angry all the time. frustrated too.
sun: you are not frustrated anymore?
locke: i'm not lost anymore.
sun: how did you do that?
locke: same way anything lost gets found -- i stopped looking.

will sun find jin as unexpectedly as she found her wedding ring? when she's not looking?

this time around, locke comes to her offering the exact thing she's lost. he stretches out his hand for her to take. he is perhaps evil incarnate, but he also has jin.. that is one tough choice. fortunately, sun saw the carnage at the temple first-hand, and decides to run - everyone is asking 'why didn't locke just turn into smoke to catch up with her?' i think it's because locke makes a point of giving her a choice, the same way jacob does. he needs her to choose his side willfully, the same way sawyer chose it - she may or may not be a candidate, and her potential candidacy protects her from interference from him. unfortunately, her candidacy doesn't protect her from running straight into trees.

sun tells jack that her 'v(oice)' will be returning in three minutes, thirty-six seconds.

later, jack comes to sun with a curiosity about locke. jack doesn't know exactly what or who locke is yet (he didn't see the temple destruction), and it sounds like he's willing to give locke the benefit of the doubt. jack even seems surprised that sun didn't just up and run off with locke. jack has finally figured something out: other people can be right! after the failure of jughead, jack won't be playing leader again without some very clear direction of what needs to be done.

jack extends his sand-covered hand to sun, offering her the choice to join him. because sun chooses to put her faith in jack, his promise to reunite her with jin comes from a place that has nothing to do with his pride, or need to fix anything - it comes only from a desire to live up to the faith she's willing to place in him. jack's promise to her was a beautiful expression of a new jack who is finally finding peace.

9. great lines

'hey, don't talk about bacon'

'because that would be ridiculous'

'because you're speaking'

'asks the man who communes with the dead.'

'a wise man once said that war was coming to this island. i think it just got here.'

10. preboomer

desmond is revealed.

seamus: how much did you give him?
zoe: obviously i gave him too much but we needed him knocked out for the trip. i'm not a nurse. come on, get him up.
seamus: let's go mr. hume.
(boom)

ok! not surprising that desmond was in the sub.. i love zoe's line about not being a nurse. she can't do anything right. this preboomer is really just a teaser for next week. most sun/jin episodes end on hopeful notes, either with silent preboomers, a single pluck of a bass harp string. the best one was '..in translation,' where after finally revealing that she speaks english, she allows the wind to blow her towel away, no longer imprisoned by jin's controlling behavior. i get the feeling that the show wants to do another preboomer like that, but needs to keep the momentum going as we head into the home stretch. i think they're saving the quiet, hopeful ending for the grande finale.

11. next episode

coming up is desmond's final episode, which is a whole hell of a lot to live up to, since desmond has been the force behind some of the greatest episodes in the show's history. is there any possible chance that 'happily ever after' could out-do 'the constant?' it will be extremely difficult, since 'the constant' provided an emotional payoff after two years of building up the struggle between penny and desmond. ever since the couple was reunited, their involvement has felt tangential.

but here's what i'm expecting: answers. desmond became 'special,' and an 'exception to the rules' after he turned the failsafe key. it's time for the show to tell us exactly what happened when the key was turned - why did the sky turn purple? what exactly happened in that moment? what was going on before the purple sky, and what exactly changed after the purple sky? it's also time to answer basic questions about the failsafe itself: if you can just turn a failsafe to make everything ok, why did dharma go to such extreme trouble to keep the hatch operating, and the electromagnetic energy at bay? did the island become unstable after the failsafe? is it about to sink into the ocean on its own accord?

desmond's episodes usually feature narrative rulebreaking - will we see more of this? was he actually on the plane in the parallel? what is his alternate story? was penny even born in the parallel? will his consciousness bounce between the parallel and the original timelines? will we get a clearer picture of the relationship between the two timelines? we betta!

i do want to remember desmond's amazing story. here are his episodes:

his introduction in the season 2 premiere, as button pusher, who also once met jack while training for a race around the world.
the season 2 finale, in which the failsafe key was turned, and his love for penny was revealed.
'flashes before your eyes' which revealed his consciousness time-traveled after turning the failsafe. he met eloise hawking, who told him that he must not change his path - he must go to the island and push the button.
'catch-22' in which he has a vision of penny arriving by parachute. instead, it is naomi.
'the constant,' where desmond finally makes contact with penny again.
'jughead,' in which desmond suddenly 'remembers' that faraday visited him years ago when he was manning the hatch. at faraday's request, he goes in search of eloise hawking. faraday didn't realize that eloise had already been working her whole life to prevent the terrible things that would happen.
in '316' eloise told desmond 'the island isn't through with you yet.' which apparently means 'my old boyfriend is going to kidnap you.'

we last left desmond in the marina del rey hospital, recovering from having been shot by ben. both eloise and widmore were at the hospital - is eloise also on the sub? how was the sub able to find the island when it took all kinds of crazy shoe-swapping and proxy-ing to get ajira 316 back to the island? answers! i am wanting them.

lost 6.9 'ab aeterno'

2010-03-29T21:48:00.000-07:00

written by: melinda hsu taylor and greggory nations. melinda co-wrote this season's 'the substitute' with elizabeth sarnoff. greggory nations is the script coordinator on 'lost,' which means he's the god of continuity. here's last year's nytimes article on him. this episode took us further back in time than any other character-centric story. it also has an interesting timeline inconsistency that i'm sure was deliberate, and not a mistake on gregg's part. the writing in this episode was fantastic; a beautifully executed, complete mini-movie.

directed by: tucker gates. wow. this was not just an episode of 'lost.' this was a full-on, unbroken, epic period drama, and almost completely successful on those terms alone. save for the pilot episode, this is the biggest, most ambitious episode of 'lost' to date. the show once again felt truly cinematic, it was a gift to the talents of actor nestor carbonell, and answered a plethora of mythological questions - a feat done through the prism of one man's personal, emotional story. this is 'lost' at its best. each scene of the 'film' was beautiful, and was a complete, mini story - i loved how the episode took time to focus on richard's struggle with both the miniscule (spending days digging a nail out of the wood), and the major (becoming instrumental in the ageless battle between good and evil with the fate of the world in your hands). also, the music in this episode was especially good, establishing yet another beautiful love theme for richard and isabella. the opening whoosh to ricardo's horseback-riding, buoyed by a new new musical theme, did a great job of establishing the period, urgency, tone, and mood for richard's story.

cinematography by: stephen st. john. another big bravo here. not only were the period elements expertly handled, the whole episode, island scenes included, felt bigger and more beautiful than they have in a long time. it's particularly impressive to see new island locations when it seems like we've seen every shootable inch of hawaii by now. even the effects shots were fantastic. the destruction of the statue! and the new shots of the shipwreck look much better than in the previous episode.

frankly: possibly the best episode of the season, certainly one of the best in the history of the show. if damon and carlton can adequately justify and explain the parallel timeline in a way that causes irritated fans to invest in it, then this season will stick the landing.

rulebreakers
heaven and hell
good and evil
ghost rules
history of the black rock
origin of the others
origin of dharma
some things
preboomer
next episode

1. rulebreakers

right off the bat this episode establishes itself as a format-breaker, by showing us additional moments from jacob's scene with ilana at the russian hospital. the scene uncharacteristically flashes back and forth between the campfire scene and the hospital scene without use of the flashback sound effect. then, once the basics of alpert's story are rehashed for new audience members, the story whooshes (via the traditional flashback whoosh used in seasons 1-5) in one long, unbroken flashback that is bookended by the current island story.

only a few episodes in 'lost's' history have broken the rules in this way. desmond's 'flashes before your eyes' was structured this same way, with over half the episode taking place during a continuous flashback bookended by island story. desmond's story also broke the rules by having him 'conscious' during his flashback. richard's story remained unbroken, which really allowed me to invest in the story without having to bounce to another narrative. by keeping the flashback story linear, alpert's often-confusing timeline is made simple - which is another thing to love about this episode; the show is allowing itself to be simple again.

this episode is a perfect example of what damon and carlton mean when they say 'the only mysteries we will answer will be those mysteries that concern the characters.' there simply isn't time to checklist every minor story in the history of the island. remember when eloise hawking launched into a monologue about how the lamp-post station was built? - one of the worst moments of season 5. the thing the writers understand (thank god they do) is that though the audience clamors for answers, it's not actually answers that we want. what we want is closure. and that closure will come from explaining the origin and purpose of everything we, and the characters have endured. closure won't come from knowing where the food drop in season 2 came from (though they have promised we'll find out - if not in the show directly ..whatever that means..). i'll say it again: based on the strength of their 5 season finales, they know how to write endings. and now that we've crossed the halfway point of the final season, i have more confidence than ever that the show is going to give us a full-on catharsis of closure.

2. heaven and hell

so the first big piece of info revealed is that richard believes that the island is hell, and that everyone on it is dead. hm.. nestor carbonell talked about this a bit on jorge garcia's podcast, and i think i agree with him - he said that it seems like richard is frustrated, is being metaphorical at this point, and is speaking of his own personal hell. richard may have believed for many decades that he was 'in hell,' but as science progressed, he lost his accent, and got to the point where he understood modern science enough to recruit a fertility doctor. richard likely revised his world view right along with the changing world. he seems like a very adaptable guy. jorge garcia said that during the filming of the scene where richard syas they are in hell, he was thinking, 'shit, if this is hell, i actually got off this island for three years. d'oh!'

one of the things i love about the show is that though it may sometimes extinguish a popular theory, it later finds room to allow a multitude of theories to be 'right.' for some people, the island is hell. for others, the island is purgatory, and for a select few (rose, bernard, and vincent) the island is heaven. for some people the island is a snowglobe, and for the scientists, the island is a pocket of electromagnetic, energetic anomalies that effect the fabric of space and time. it's kind of like 'fantasy island,' in that it becomes whatever it 'needs' to be for each character.

this episode gave us the full-on religious interpretation of the island - it did this by plunging us deep into its past, and revealing it to us through the perspective of a deeply religious man. the episode also showed us how the two inhabitants of the island manipulated that man's religious devotion to their own ends.

by season's end i think we'll be exposed to a number of explanations for the island, all of which could be considered 'correct,' but also incomplete. widmore's team of what looks like world of warcraft aficionados will undoubtedly be heading straight for the orchid station to do some wheel spinning.

i loved the image of the island as a cork containing the evil of the smoke monster - the island is a prison, and jacob's job turns out to be much like desmond's job in the hatch: jacob is manning 'the station' that keeps the world safe. but who is truly evil?

3. good and evil

jacob says that nemesis believes that all people are corruptible, and we've seen evidence of how he operates, when he downloads information from his victims - he's looking for that person's moral breaking point. jacob says he can't interfere with people's choices, and that everyone he's brought to the island thus far to prove his point have all died. wow, how many people was that, and why does jacob keep trying? finally this explains some of his strange behaviour - he reminds people that they have a choice, sometimes bullys them into making certain choices, but the point of everything he does is to allow people to prove that they are 'good' by nature.

many people seem frustrated because they still don't know who to root for. 'who is good and who is evil!?,' they complain.

well, the good vs. evil analogy is perhaps not the best fit for jacob vs. his nemesis. each believes the other is evil, each is bound by certain rules, each has a goal they are determined to reach, and each is searching for loopholes around the rules they've been given. the better analogy is the one very simply stated by locke in the show's premiere episode: two men playing a game, one light, one dark. it's an epic game with the fate of the world at stake. we may find out who to truly root for - but right now, the point is ambiguity. the characters don't know either! richard certainly doesn't know! it could very well turn out that the (overall) better world we're seeing in the parallel universe is in fact the result of the 'evil' of smokey finally being let out, undoing all the meddling jacob had done over the years.

it's hard to argue for nemesis, who flat out murdered everyone who stayed behind at the temple, and also seems to recklessly murder anyone who isn't a candidate. but how different is he from jacob, who has also committed mass-murder. is jacob less guilty because he relied on the choices of other people to carry out his plans?

if jacob has been around since the time of the egyptians, it's apparently taken him thousands of years to figure out that using a proxy is an ideal way to work around his philosophy of non-interference. whether or not jacob is still playing within 'the spirit of the game' is another question - he's meant to represent the 'good' side, but clearly he's just as manipulative as nemesis is. jacob is pretty much the patron saint of passive aggressive behavior.

i will be über impressed if the show takes us even further back in time to the origin of the nemesis/jacob conflict. they are teasing us in this direction, and if they can pull it off.. man, then we haven't seen anything yet. i hope its an epic avatar style motion-capture extravaganza featuring nemesis' crazy hippopotamus-faced mother.

4. ghost rules

isabella's appearance on the black rock was verrry very interesting. the timing of the visit was such that it happened immediately after smokey downloaded info from richard's brain, so i thought, 'ah! is this smokey taking isabella's form to manipulate richard the same way he manipulted ben by taking alex's form?'

but no, i don't think so. isabella's body is not on the island - and season 6 isn't the time to start playing fast and loose with the rules smokey has abided by for 5 seasons. also, isabella's behavior in this ghost form isn't consistent with nemesis' motivations. she was terrified of the thing, felt it was confirmation they were in hell, and tried desperately to get richard out of the chains. the words she speaks to richard are also echoed in her final scene when she speaks through hurley. somehow i think this was a true ghost of isabella that was able to manifest physically in the same way that kate's horse appeared, and she was able to touch it.

in the last podcast, damon and carlton were asked a question about the ghost rules. their answer was encouraging. 'these are excellent questions. in the near future one of the charcters on the show will be asking these same questions, and they'll be asking someone who knows the answers, and that person will provide the answers.' wow. i mean, that's pretty much the convergence of three things we have almost never seen on this show:

person asking questions the audience wants answered
person being asked knows the answer!
person being asked will give the answer!

it's like 'when single shines the triple sun' in the dark crystal.

5. history of the black rock

the fuselage is overflowing with nitpicky 'fans' berating greggory nations for placing alperts journey on the black rock at 1867, when the auctioneer selling the black rock ledger in 'the constant' had this to say about the ship:

'the black rock set sail from portsmouth, england on march 22, 1845 on a trading mission to the kingdom of siam, when she was tragically lost at sea. the only known artifact of this journey is the journal of the ship's first mate, which was discovered among the artifacts of pirates on the ile sante-marie off the coast of madagascar seven years later. the contents of this journal have never been made public, or known to anyone outside the family of the seller, tovard hanso.'

so, why is there a 22 year gap in the history of the black rock?

i want to believe, that because this is an episode cowritten by gregg nations, that this kind of glaring discrepancy is deliberate. so much discussion must have gone into the setting of the period of this episode. shooting period is not cheap, and the decisions are not made arbitrarily. costumes are made, sets are built, tons and tons of research is done by skilled artists to make it happen. though, after the ultrasound date mixup and sayid's iranian passport screwups, i'm hesitant to once again place my once unshakable faith in the show's finer details, but hopefully this isn't a mistake. if it is a mistake, i would consider it a colossal script coordination failure.

i think it's possible that magnus hanso, owner of the black rock, discovered the island in 1845, and then 'stole' his own ship to be used as 'the sub' for jacob, to bring his candidates to the island. it would be much easier to keep a ship at sea hidden in a time before satellites and radar. it's also interesting that the eponymous blast door map itself has written 'final resting place of magnus hanso/black rock.'

the other weird thing, though is that in the season 5 finale, jacob and nemesis are sitting on the beach, looking at the black rock sitting on a perfectly calm, daytime ocean, just a few miles off-shore. how can this possibly be the same ship? did it suddenly turn from day to night and from calm to storm? or was that day on the beach in 1845, the first time the black rock came to the island?

6. origin of the others

when richard asked jacob what happened to all the people he brought over, jacob says 'they're all dead.' clearly some of them lived long enough to build the temple, the statue, the tunnels, and other egyptian ruins - but it appears that smokey was eventually able to infiltrate, corrupt, set them against each other, and wipe them all out. architecturally, it seems the only structures on the island are either egyptian or built by dharma in the 70's, so i think we can infer that 'the others' as we know them did not come into existence until jacob placed alpert as his right hand man. how did eloise and widmore first come to the island? how did they come to follow richard, and how was leadership established? it seems quite odd that a society based on jacob's faith in the goodness of man would require locke to publicly murder his father in order to become their leader. ..yeah, jury's still out on whether jacob is truly 'good.'

in 1954 alpert says that he was 'ordered' to kill the us army soldiers, and infers that jacob gave this order. by the same token, we can infer that jacob ordered the purge of dharma in 1982. what exactly is going on here? why does jacob bring groups to the island and then periodically purge them?

7. origin of dharma

sometimes you just need to lie down, wherever you are.

dharma's history goes way back, given that magnus hanso was captain of the black rock, alvar was his great grandson, alvar began the hanso foundation, and the hanso foundation funded dharma. many portions of the 'lost experience' have been confirmed by damon and carlton to be canon, so i think it's safe to believe that magnus is alvar hanso's great grandfather. did alvar start the dharma initiative in attempt to find his great grandfather's ship? or was the creation of the dharma initiative something more imbedded in jacob's plan? did jacob feel it was necessary to bring scientists so that the stability of the island's geological powers could be ensured? was jacob's plan always to allow dharma on the island, allow them to build their stations and set up shop, then once they've been established, wipe them out and replace them with his own people? is this why the truce between dharma and 'the hostiles' was established?

8. some things

nemesis gives alpert the same knife that dogen gave to sayid. did richard give this knife to dogen at one point, complete with ironic (and useless) instructions on how to 'kill' nemesis?

richard gives nemesis a jagged white rock.

when jacob sits down with nemesis later, the rock is smooth and polished. at last! it all makes sense! that cranking noise.. smokey is one of these, only eeevil.

9. preboomer

nemesis smashes the metaphor on the log, creating another metaphor for what he's gonna do.
(boom)

my only problem with this preboomer is that the episode was clearly edited to end with the shot of locke overlooking the beautiful tree where alpert had his beautiful isabella moment, right after hurley said 'if you don't stop the man in black, we'll all go to hell.' the music crescendos, and locke turns around, nearly looks into the camera, and holds the pose. ..boom? no. not that the jacob/nemesis preboomer isn't great - the show can't be any clearer about the objectives of our two main characters. ibut the false ending diminished the potential power of the true ending. i think it would have played stronger if the shot of locke just held on the back of his head and didn't make such a big deal about him turning toward camera. keep the energy of that moment open, so that it can pass into the next scene, and the closure of the true final scene will feel more complete. the shot of locke was probably how the episode was originally supposed to end, when cut to time - but i can see how damon and carlton might have won a fight with abc to run the episode long, so additional scenes could be added in.

10. next episode

this week's episode is called 'the package,' and is a sun/jin episode. i have very high expectations for this, because the show must, in one episode, redeem the shafting they have given these two characters over the past two years. it's been so long since they had anything to do, that it's easy to forget where they started - true love destroyed by sun's criminal father, who allowed them to marry on the condition that jin work for him, then turned jin into his personal hit man. the stress turned jin into an asshole, which pushed sun to learn english to escape, and eventually have an affair with her english teacher. jin and sun were in sydney to deliver a watch to one of sun's father's business associates, and were on route to los angeles to deliver another watch. jin is a hit man, watch-and-stuffed-animal delivery service. sun is passive agressive liar, adultress, schemer, and murderer, if you count her pretty cold-blooded shooting and killing of coleen, pickett's wife. there could have been an amazing story about sun having to face pickett - or sun dealing with the fact that she's killed someone - but it seems like sun gets a free pass for all her past sins. she's become a blank slate that the writers throw things at and nothing sticks. jin on the other hand, has finally been given the gift of speaking english, but of course gets nothing to say. he should be talking all the time! we saw emotional development in all the characters who spent three years with dharma, except for jin. there could have been a story about jin leaving something in dharma specifically for sun to find 30 years later.. there could have been.. so much more.

at their best, the show has used the pair to comment on the triumph of true love over innumerable obstacles - infidelity, deceit, emotional separation, physical separation, temporal separation, and being-ignored-by-the-writers. sun was first separated from jin when he got on the raft at the end of season 1, and when the others blew it up, we were allowed to believe for several episodes that he had died. the scenario was repeated when jin was on-board the exploding freighter, launching sun into a three-year fit of rage interrupted by the birth of their daughter, ji yeon. since season two, the show has defined this couple through their separation. even in their marriage vows, jin says 'blah blah blah separation.' what did jin believe had happened to sun during his time with dharma? their season 4 episode, 'ji yeon,' was an hour-long trick meant to, again, underline their separation. how will the show finally reunite them? will it reunite them? does the show have the balls to kill jin for real? will sun join nemesis? whatever happens, i'd better be crying about it.

there are some interesting things to toss about: without the island, it will be next to impossible for ji yeon to be born, since jin is sterile, and required the island's fertility boost for sun to conceive. in the parallel, we don't know yet if sun was lying about speaking english or not - is her reboot relationship with jin the same as before? sun's father is golfing buddies with charles widmore. in the parallel, if the island is underwater, is widmore even alive? if he is, how has the nature of his business changed, and how would that change ripple out to sun's father? is it possible that without the island, sun's father requires jin to be merely a tough guy bodyguard, and not a full-on murderer? how much has changed? how did jin end up in the meat refrigerator? is keamy still connected to widmore in the parallel? will keamy be making more eggs?

what i want to see, if the show reunites them finally, is the unspeakable joy of finding someone believed to be dead for three years. that should be the simple description of the episode's essence. it has to be a huge emotional moment, and if it's done right, yunjun kim will slay the performance. i want to feel like i'm being reunited with the characters, too.

lost 6.8 'recon'

2010-03-22T10:07:00.000-07:00

written by: elizabeth sarnoff and jim galasso. elizabeth co-wrote this season's 'the substitute.' jim galasso is new to the writing staff, but was hired as production staff last year. it looks like darlton are giving a lot of staff members first-time shots at writing this year.

directed by: jack bender. i think jack is just calling dibs on his favorite characters' episodes.

cinematography by: john bartley. i liked the look of this episode, especially the slight golden-hour tint on the hydra island scenes. i wonder if there's a subtle color adjustment happening to differentiate nemesis' camp from jacob's. even in daylight, nemesis camp scenes have higher contrast and deeper shadows. nemesis followers are all wearing burgundy and earth tones, where jacob's are in brighter primary colors. this episode had some nicely done effects shots showing both hydra island from the main island, and the main island from hydra island - also the set built of the ajira plane is a pretty impressive construction job. the ajira plane would have remained a digital effect (as it was last year) if it wasn't going to figure heavily in upcoming episodes..

basically: this is about as good as a bridging episode can get. it's not a gamechanger, it's not a jawdropper, but it's a well executed step on the larger path, with exciting prospects for what's to come. i finally feel like i'm writing love letters again.

parallel sawyer
parallel miles
parallel charlotte
mid-season 6 review
kate and nemesis and crazy moms
with widmore comes tina fey and..
ways off the island
memory tour
costume commentary
preboomer
next episode

1. parallel sawyer

i'm totally overjoyed at the revelation that parallel sawyer is a cop - and that the secret word to reveal this was 'lefleur.' brilliant! nothing makes me happier than when the show surprises me with a choice i never saw coming, yet makes absolute sense. the opening was perfect, right down to josh holloway's wink-wink 'surprise!' line. in some ways sawyer's story is embodying the 'light and dark' thesis of the show by giving him these two disparate yet totally logical paths for his character. now that he's chosen the dark(er) side on the island, it makes sense to give him a fundamentally opposing trajectory in the parallel. the opening of the parallel gave us sawyer's classic 'pigeon drop' scene that we've seen play out twice before.

in 'confidence man,' we see the pigeon drop plan executed perfectly on jessica - sawyer only backs out when he realizes his victims have a young son, and he refuses to do unto the kid as was done unto him by anthony cooper.

the second time we seen the pigeon drop, saywer is with future mother of his child, cassidy phillips, in 'the long con,' who laughs in his face at the con and asks him to train her in the ways of con artistry. cassidy later meets kate at a gas station where she's pulling sawyer's fake jewelry con.

and this third variation smartly shows us a sawyer who is fundamentally the same person but simply made a different choice in his life. he's still the same guy - clearly not the most ethical cop, if he's bangin his way towards suspects. still, this is how saywer's parallel life finds the same redemption, responsibility, and adulthood he found as head of security during the dharma years.. all he's missing is a princess leia-style strangle of anthony cooper, and juliet..

one of the show's original postulations was that if you took any plane full of people and explored their stories fully, you would find numerous connections between the people on that plane. now the show is proposing an idea about destiny that's different from the way it works in most time travel stories: the show is essentially saying to us that no matter what happens to us in our lives, our character is what matters most, and it is our core character that will compel the same people into our spheres, whatever the circumstances.

we still don't know if what we're seeing is the result of jacob's touches being undone, or jughead being detonated, or radzinsky deciding to finally pull that secret lever labeled in hieroglyphics 'do not pull: sinks the island.'

one of the charms and amazements of watching season 1 for the first time was discovering that each character, in the flashbacks, is in their very own show - and that each character is in fact in a different kind of show. saywer is in a crime drama, locke is in a relationship drama, kate's episodes are all inspired by the flight of marion crane in psycho, hurley is in a slapstick comedy, and jack is perpetually in 'er.'

what i loved about this episode is that it renewed that season 1 feeling by once again surprising us with a distinct genre choice: sawyer is now in a cop show. damon and carlton met each other working on 'nash bridges' and crafted this episode as an homage to the don johnson/cheech marin buddy cop formula they mastered together in those days.

loved that parallel sawyer's reading the same books he found on the island. disappointed though, that the fully published version of 'bad twin' was not on his dresser. though, as a cop, he would have found the book's detective horribly inept. would love love love to see any kind of gary troup reference in the parallel. mostly i just want to see my die-hard season 2 fandom rewarded for going out and purchasing that great idea of a book, awful execution of a promotional concept.

loved that sawyer's big emotional moment in the parallel was brought about by an episode of 'little house on the prairie,' which kate teased him for calling 'little house' in season 3's 'tricia tanaka is dead.'

2. parallel miles

ken leung is a great actor - able to fundamentally nail every line given to him no matter how tiny. i loved his relationship with sawyer in the sideways, and how it is entirely based on trust - to the point where any lie, no matter how insignificant or not, is a dealbreaker.

during the apple store event last week (where i got to meet damon and carlton!), they discussed how fun it was to craft these scenes not only because of darlton's cop show roots, but also because on the island, three years were skipped without any flashbacks depicting the period where sawyer became head of security. the off-island story filled in the skipped time via the flash-forwards, but the new dynamics between sawyer, jin, and miles were left unexplored. by making miles sawyer's partner, they were able to show the essential relationship the two characters had together during those years, only in a different setting.

no indication that parallel miles still has his special power - since it's likely he was still born on the island, does his power require the island to be above ground? or, like dogen's protection of the temple, and nemesis' ability to change forms, does miles' power require someone like nemesis or jacob be alive in order for it to work?

it sounds like dr. pierre chang is alive and well in the parallel, working (with both hands?) at the same museum with..

3. parallel charlotte

it looks like charlotte's parallel existence is just as ill-fated as her original - if she's still hopping the globe in search of the island. though, perhaps she's working with pierre chang to try and figure out how to get the island back?

i loved this scene - the writing was clean, it had one great joke, and a beautiful, honest moment.

• great joke: 'i'm exactly like indiana jones.'

• great moment:

sawyer: i got to a point in my life where i was either going to become a criminal or a cop. so i chose cop.
(charlotte falls in love instantly)
sawyer: ..what?
charlotte: you know what.

from now on sawyer is going to drop the 'bullitt' line and jump right to the 'criminal or cop' story because it clearly gets you laid, fast.

there's been a lot of debate over whether or not charlotte was searching sawyer's apartment, or if she innocently stumbled on the file. i think it's a good question for darlton to answer, because if they truly intended for her discovery of the sawyer file to be innocent, they could clear it up right away.

if she was searching, then i suppose that charlotte's island-centric research has possibly, somehow led her to the list of candidates, and she's systematically sleeping her way through all of them until she eventually gets to the island? bit of a stretch, but maybe that's the spinoff show abc has planned..

sawyer brought the same sad sunflower to charlotte that he brought to juliet in 'lefleur.' just a subtle hint that the writers know we're hoping for juliet, and an winky way of toying with our expectations of seeing her.

4. mid-season 6 review

while the parallel story is trying the patience of many viewers, i'm starting to see the pieces come together, and i have (for the first time this season!) complete faith that it's going to converge in an amazing way. all the survivors are connected in the same ways that they were originally, and now we're learning of a few new connections. some force is compelling them to help each other, as they're being drawn together. we don't have season after season of parallel stories to tell - only 8 more episodes. so the structure of writing the parallel stories must be coming to a head rather quickly. here's how i see it:

2 hour season premiere: establish the starting point for each character in the parallel world
13 or 14 character centric episodes: (excluding richard, nemesis, anyone who might get a centric episode but won't appear in the parallel) each episode focuses on how each character is launched from the starting point to their final target.
2 hour series finale: detail how all the characters will collide, find final redemption and/or damnation. meanwhile the island story will explain exactly how the parallel timeline was created, by way of revealing the exact nature of the island's power. boom. 'lost.'

so how could the parallel stories converge?

jack is going to be searching for claire, who happens to be in los angeles..
jack's search for claire could lead him to kate, who's been using claire's credit card..
sawyer has just banged kate up against a metal gate (again!)..
sawyer is searching for anthony cooper - who will be attending locke's october wedding, only a couple weeks away..
in the season 1 episode 'hearts and minds' we learned that boone's mother owns 'the largest wedding business in the united states,' and boone is the chief operating officer of the wedding clothing subsidiary..
sayid's experience as a chef in france lands him the job of replacing keamy's sous chef position, making eggs for locke's wedding..
ben will weasel or blackmail his way to becoming locke's best man..
could the wedding be held at mrs. hawking's church? could mr. eko have been on his way to los angeles to accept a post there, and officiate the ceremony?
hurley donates chicken entrees for the reception..
frogurt turns out to be helen's cousin and is accidentally skewered by flaming bbq, like that guy in the opening of 'temple of doom..'
ok, i'm running out of ideas..

most seasons of 'lost' are launched with a defining scene between jack and locke, and this year is no exception. will the end of the show give us locke and jack in the parallel as ultimate redeemers of each other. in the original timeline, jack was determined that his future wife sarah be able to dance at her wedding - in the parallel, sarah may not even exist. will this gift of wedding mobility be transferred to locke? should jack accept the mantle as jacob's successor, will we see the two men as both ultimate allies and ultimate enemies?

i have nothing but the highest expectations for the big ending because damon and carlton know how to write endings. i've said it a lot on this blog, but if there's anything that they are masters of, it's deliberately frustrating the audience and then surprising us with the carefully paced revelation of the master plan - and this is a master plan they had to pitch to the network three years ago in order to secure the end date for the show. it's a televised novel, and we've got 8 chapters to go.

5. kate and nemesis and crazy moms

hey, hold my hand. hey hold my knife. in your neck!

loved the way kate and claire were dealt with in this episode - the show gave kate the time to grieve the extreme risks she took to get back to the island, only to have claire try and shiv her. kate chose an interesting spot to sit and cry - it's very similar to the spot she broke down after first seeing the smoke monster in the pilot episode..

smokey joins her for an interesting chat, where he wins some favor with kate by drawing comparisons between kate's crazy mother, locke's crazy mother, aaron's crazy mother, and nemesis' original crazy mother. for a show featuring tons of daddy issues, it's a surprise that the key villain's got mom-probs.

which raises the question: who is nemesis' crazy mother? well, after doing a little reading, i think it's someone with a pretty ugly, but familiar face:

different egyptian mythlogy sources have varying stories about the egyptian goddess taweret, symbolizing childbirth and fertility with the head of a hippo because she is a fierce protector of her children. the wikipedia page goes on to say 'when paired with another deity, she became the demon-wife of apep, the original god of evil.' hmm.. a demon-wife sounds like someone a kid might have some 'growing pains' with. taweret also had two children, osirus and set. here's where the connection between the mythology and the show gets muddled, but the legend of set involves an epic battle between good and evil fought between the two brothers - and a change in worship for set, once popularly worshiped, he suddenly became a god of evil. is the smoke monster a misunderstood god-child of taweret locked in a sibling rivalry battle with his brother jacob?

6. with widmore comes tina fey and..

who's locked up behind the door in the sub? was richard locked up on the black rock for similar purposes? with the looking glass station out of comission, can you only get to the island on a vessel if someone 'destined' for the island is on board? six days ago, desmond was here:

meanwhile, outside that same marina del rey hospital, this took place:

widmore would have to have gotten on the sub pretty quickly after being smacked by eloise - did he take desmond with him? did he take eloise?

my theory last week was proven completely wrong! widmore is clearly not on the same side as smokey, as evidenced by his portable sonic fence. does this mean widmore is on jacob's side? is widmore, (or whoever's locked in the room) the person jacob told hurley was 'coming' to the island? widmore's team seems totally different from the freighter mercenaries he sent originally - these guys look like scientists, zoe included. what is their exact mission? did widmore kill the ajira folk, or did smokey?

btw i totally loved tina fey. some were annoyed at the introduction of yet another new character, but i got a fun thrill from the meta trick of neatly turning the tables and treating the ajira survivors as clueless outsiders the way the 815ers were when they first crashed. nemesis sends locke on a recon mission identical to the one ben sent goodwin and ethan on after the 815 crash. then, when sawyer finds zoe, she says 'we... we crashed here. and we were all just waiting for someone to rescue us.' for a moment, her character was the audience proxy for all those poor, confused people who've joined the show this season and have no idea what's going on. loved that bit of writing.

7. ways off the island

these are currently the three ways (we know of) that characters can use to get off the island: donkey wheel, ajira plane, and widmore sub. the wheel will likely come into play when we see the island's sinking in either the original or parallel.. though widmore isn't on smokey's side, it seems most likely that smokey and his cohorts will try to escape using the sub, and the ajira plane appears to be in working condition, but can only be piloted by lapidus, who seems pretty firmly entrenched on jacob's side with ilana.

at the paleyfest event recently, damon gave a one-word hint about the grand finale of the show: water. to me that points to the sinking of the island, and it's likely the finale will be a race against the rising water to get off the island in time.

8. memory tour

i love the that show is taking us back through the journey of the last five years, like jack's revisit to the caves in 'lighthouse.' hopefully we'll revisit more places we've forgotten about: tempest station? looking glass station? pearl station? arrow station? if it's done well, the revisits will happen organically, like sawyer discovering kate's infamous breakfast-with-ben dress.

the dress ended up where it is during the period where saywer was conned by ben into believing he had a pacemaker installed (in 'every man for himself.') kate changed her clothes in the opposite cage, causing sawyer's heartrate monitor to start beeping. all this had better not be any kind of resparking of kate and sawyer, however. they are done with each other. please, show - acknowledge, yes, but don't force something that shouldn't be there. juliet died two days ago. yes, have a look at the dress you boned kate in, because who wouldn't, but the show can't earn a sawyer/kate love connection in the original timeline anymore.

in jorge's podcast it was discussed that in the script, sawyer activates the fish biscuit machine. they never mention if it's for kicks, for a snack or for both. hopefully the sequence was shot, and it's something we'll see in the deleted scenes.

9. costume commentary

i watched the show with a friend this week and he made a comment that i, being a gay man, would never have noticed, and i'm curious about the general consensus on this. he said that this season, 'kate's bra sucks.' aparently it's too padded, or too supported for his tastes and provides none of the 'movement' or 'natural shape' enjoyed in the earlier seasons. has anyone else noticed this? i made the argument that kate's original bra was probably the same one worn for the entire 108 days, and would have worn out, whereas she's now wearing a new bra that's only 6 days old.

while on the subject of costumes, i wonder how the costuming decisions are made, since the characters are so often dressed in solid, primary colors. how is it decided what colors each character will wear? seeing as how the character may be stuck wearing that same outfit for (usually) the entire season, the decisions can't be made lightly.

10. preboomer

kate: so what are you gonna do?
sawyer: i'm gonna let them fight it out. and while they got their hands full with each other...you and me are getting the hell off this island.
kate: even if we could get on that plane, who's gonna fly it?
sawyer: we ain't taking the plane, freckles. taking the sub.
(boom)

well, this was kind of a lackluster, servicable preboomer. the boom is best when it punctuates either a brand new piece of information, or cements a choice made by a character - and the new information in this beat reveals that sawyer is attempting to play both sides against each other for his own benefit. i feel like there could have been a better way to reveal that. i was so disappointed that he told the truth to nemesis about his 'deal' with widmore, that this beat really needed to identify him squarely as a lone agent. whatever mode of transport sawyer is planning to take is not that important. what's important is that he's working for himself, for his own goals, which include kate. i would have reordered the lines this way:

kate: even if we could get on that plane, who's gonna fly it?
sawyer: we ain't taking the plane, freckles. taking the sub.
kate: how are 'we' gonna do that?
sawyer: i'm gonna let them fight it out. and while they got their hands full with each other...you and me are getting the hell off this island.
(boom)

11. next episode

i think we can expect more answers than we've ever had before, seeing as we will get richard alpert's story! he arrived in chains on the black rock, the day jacob and nemesis sat on the beach and watched the ship approach. will the episode begin at that same moment? will it go back even further and show us when jacob touched richard? for this one, i have no idea what to expect. i want to see the original relationship between richard and both jacob and nemesis - i don't even know how to expect the episode to be structured! will it be like 'the other 48 days,' flashing back to the earliest event and then moving sequentially forward until the episode's narrative is caught up to 2007? or will it start in 2007, and then give us traditional flashbacks (complete with the original flashback sound effect) to richard's past? the only thing i'm expecting to have explained is why richard looks exactly the same for 100 years except for one period where he grew his hair long. i'm not even sure what to watch as prep. richard is such an enigma - the only episode really ascribed to him, 'follow the leader,' offers no real insight into his character, though he is the through-line in both the 2007 and 1977 stories. will this episode show us the incident from his perspective!?

here's the richard timeline i posted last week, with a couple things i left out:

1845: arrives with the 'black rock'
1954: meets locke, faraday, miles and charlotte
1956: checks out locke's birth
1961: tests locke to see if he recognizes the compass
1972: tries to recruit locke to 'science camp' through the mail
1973: lets his hair grow out
1974: meets sawyer, who surprises him with knowledge of jughead.
1977: meets kate when she brings ben to him after being shot by sayid. he later meets jack for the first time, after faraday was shot by eloise. richard parts ways with jack after deciding to keep eloise safe. jack proceeds with the plan to detonate jughead.
2001 leaves the island to recruit juliet to fix the pregnancy-problem
2004: locke meets richard for the first time. richard suggests sawyer should kill locke's father. richard has had sawyer's entire lifetime to collect that information.
2005: (100 days after the crash) richard and the others ambush kate and sayid, assists them in overtaking keamy's helicopter, which gets them off the island. ben pushes the wheel, leaving locke as the leader, who vanishes in front of richard's eyes.
2005 - 2007: richard is bored, builds a ship in a bottle.
2007: locke returns as nemesis. jacob is killed. nemesis ties up richard, then sets him free. richard finds sawyer in the jungle, then he finds hurley and jack. richard hasn't seen sawyer or jack since the helicopter, 3 years ago. jack saw richard yesterday.

lost 6.7 'dr. linus'

2010-03-16T12:19:00.000-07:00

written by: eddie kitsis and adam horowitz. this is the best episode they've written, which helps make up for their lackluster 'what kate does' earlier in the season. this episode was not only a great example of how the parallel structure can be used to maximum dramatic effect, it was a gift and tribute to emmy-winning actor michael emerson, who nailed every scene.

directed by: mario van peebles! a first time director on 'lost,' but no stranger to directing and acting. watching this episode again, it's filled with nuances, and i hope it's one of the episodes on the dvd box set that gets a commentary track.

cinematography by: stephen st. john. there was a distinct pastel palette to this episode's parallel story, as well as some interesting lighting choices on the island. it was great to get back to the beach camp again, even though that location seems dramatically scaled down from its original setting. richard's monologue about losing his purpose in life was lit in an odd way, that pulled me out of the scene the first time, but didn't bother me on rewatch. let me quickly illustrate the change in photographic quality on the show. here's the effects shot of the black rock from this week's episode:

and here is the original black rock reveal in season 1:

the ship in the top photo looks about half the size of the lower one. i know, time, budget, everything is tight, especially where effects are concerned. i just don't understand why the jungle has to be candy green in every shot now.

nutshell: i think this is the strongest, most character-driven episode of the season - almost no new mythological information was revealed to us on the island, but the episode remained taught with the choices faced by both island and parallel ben.

parallel ben
jack and richard
the slow-mo reunification
preboomer
next episode

1. parallel ben

this episode made exquisite use of the parallel world format, and the interplay between the two worlds was like a finely choreographed dance. the parallel story found a way to encapsulate the key conflicts of ben's entire story arc into a handful of scenes; his desire for leadership, his relationship with his father, and his relationship with alex - everything was redeemed. it was also chock full of subtle and not-so subtle ironies and juxtapositions.

what was surprising to me was that island ben was also redeemed. i fully expected him to join nemesis after choosing the good path in the parallel. this episode shows us that not only can redemption can happen in both worlds, it showed that on island world, it doesn't necessarily have to happen at the cost of your life (though island ben could die at any point now that his character arc is fully wrapped up). i felt his final speech started out pushed, but by the end he had achieved an amazing and brutal honesty. the moment when he said he was joining locke 'because no one else will have me,' was heartbreaking, and ilana's followup 'i'll have you' pretty much sums up what 'lost' does best. casting william atherton as ben's nemesis principal was genius.. (..'real genius' since both he and jon gries (roger linus) starred in that film..) great, simple performance by an incredible actor who is every bit of equal calibur as emerson. theirbrinksmanship chess game with alex's future was riveting.

each parallel story features the centric character staring into a mirror image of themselves - and here ben stares into his reflection in the microwave, as he prepares a dinner for his aging, ailing father.

the scene between ben and his father was beautifully done. it revealed that in this timeline, ben and roger did join dharma, and did go to the island, but left at some point for an unknown reason. man, they are going to tease us with the alternate history of the island as long as they possibly can, aren't they? the great irony of this scene is that ben expertly changes his father's oxygen tank, giving him relief - a wonderful counterpoint to the scene in 'the man behind the curtain' where ben ruthlessly murders his father by opening a similar canister filled with deadly gas.

so it seems that ben's original history is the same - his mother probably still died in childbirth, horace and olivia still picked them up on the side of the road, and they still went to the island, but i'm doubtful that this ben was shot by sayid, or taken to the temple. we just have to wait to find out what happened to the island.

this episode also featured more dr. arzt than we've had since season 1, or even expose - and the on-island revisit to the black rock was a nice callback to dr arzt's original fate. i can see how eddy and adam wrote this not only as a tribute to ben, but also to arzt, and i'm impressed that they fit him into the story in a completely logical way. it's also fun that arzt and ben would be allies, when on the island, the two never met. i love that his introduction to the episode was complaining about a formaldehyde stain on his shirt, when in the original timeline, arzt exits the show as a stain on a shirt.

loved seeing alex again, and loved seeing a ben/alex scene that retained the love the two characters have always felt for each other, but removed the sinister machinations that island life forced both of them to employ on each other. it's an absolute shame that mira furlan was not available to reprise her role as rousseau in the parallel, though the character was at least mentioned by alex as working two jobs to pay the bills. it would have been great to see the shifted dynamic between parallel ben and rousseau, both wanting the best, and both making sacrifices for alex.

in the parallel, arzt says to ben 'you had me fooled, you're a real killer!' then it whooses to this shot of ben digging out his grave - it's a crane shot very similar to the one in season 3 which revealed the dharma mass-grave, the greatest example of ben's capacity for murder. can ben ever really be redeemed for instigating the purge?

i think this is the most interesting aspect of the parallel story - it asks a pretty serious philosophical question about the meaning of character. are we who we are because of the things that have happened to us, or are we who we are because our core wiring is unchangeable no matter what the circumstances are? is freedom of choice a moot point if the nature of our characters will direct us towards the same, inevitable end? in past seasons, lost has asked this question by showing us choices the characters were faced with in their past, and juxtaposed those choices with decisions made on the island. with the parallel structure, the show is questioning whether the island really changes anything at all in our heroes lives, and the answers are as complex as the characters. for locke, the paths couldn't be more different - but i also have a feeling we haven't seen the end of locke's parallel story. will the outcomes of both timelines eventually coalesce to the same essential ending?

- as ben says to lapidus 'the island still got you in the end.' is the parallel story merely a gigantic-scale course correction?

2. jack and richard.

richard was in chains on the ship? exactly what kind of slave ship was the black rock? episode 9, we'll find out..

wow. finally loving jack again! the only thing that irritated me about the richard/hurley/jack scene was that the one question i needed asked was unaddressed. either hurley or jack needed to ask richard what happened on the day of the incident? richard told sun that he 'watched them all die,' which makes sense, if he saw something that looked like a nuclear blast, or any kind of explosion - whatever it was that happened.. but i felt like richard's reintroduction was missing a few steps: jack was nabbing jughead with richard and eloise yesterday. there needed to be some establishment that this richard did not jump through time along with the rest of them. it was sort of implied in hurley's questioning 'are you a cyborg? vampire?', but i wanted more solid answers. (interesting note, in jorge garcia's podcast, it's revealed that the 'vampire' line was an adlib thrown in by jorge, and kept by the editors.) richard's experience with the survivors has been completely out of order. let's look at richard's linear timeline:

1954: richard meets locke, faraday, miles and charlotte
1974: richard meets sawyer, who surprises him with knowledge of jughead.
1977: richard meets kate when she brings ben to him after being shot by sayid. he later meets jack for the first time, after faraday was shot by eloise. richard parts ways with jack after deciding to keep eloise safe. jack proceeds with the plan to detonate jughead.
2004: locke meets richard for the first time. richard suggests sawyer should kill locke's father.
2005: (100 days after the crash) richard and the others ambush kate and sayid, assists them in overtaking keamy's helicopter, which gets them off the island. ben pushes the wheel, leaving locke as the leader, who vanishes in front of richard's eyes.
2005 - 2007: richard is bored, builds a ship in a bottle.
2007: locke returns as nemesis. jacob is killed. nemesis ties up richard, then sets him free. richard finds sawyer in the jungle, then he finds hurley and jack. richard hasn't seen sawyer or jack since the helicopter, 3 years ago. jack saw richard yesterday.

this scene also recalled the plot point introduced along with the flashforwards - that once touched by jacob, you cannot die until the island 'allows' you to die. jack's attempt to kill himself was thwarted, as were michael's numerous suicide attempts. what doesn't make sense to me however is the sudden appearance of christian shepard to michael moments before his demise - if smokey is taking the form of christian there, then does smokey have some control over when people can die? according to the ghost boy, nemesis isn't allowed to kill the candidates - though nemesis may be able to set up situations in which the candidates can die. why is nemesis appearing in that moment, and not some form of jacob instead?

3. the slo-mo reunification

this episode gave us the classic 'lost' reunification montage, complete with soaring michael giacchino music. the scene nicely juxtaposes last week's similar, but sinister slo-mo montage depicting the reunification of the 'dark side' camp. i loved sun's 'where the hell did you guys go?' look. there have been several of these montages in the show's history:

season 2: the tailies arrive at the beach. this is probably the best one, since it features the reunification of both rose and bernard, and sun and jin.
season 3: jack, kate, and locke return to the beach camp. the mood is quickly spoiled when sawyer sees juliet is with them.
season 4: the oceanic 6 arrive in hawaii. each reunification montage ends with its focus on an outsider, someone who has no one to hug - in this one, it's kate who has no family to greet her. sayid is also alone, though hurley quickly brings him into his family.

so we're now coming up to the halfway point in the season, and we've seen the gathering of each of the warring tribes, good and bad, nemesis vs. jacob. to close it out, a periscope pops out of the water..

4. preboomer

'proceed as planned,' widmore says to the man at the periscope.
'yes sir, mr. widmore.'
(boom)

since widmore has no interest in joining jacob's camp, i suspect his 'plan' is probably to be joining nemesis and his followers at hydra island.. does this mean that widmore has been assisting nemesis this whole time?

wow! so this answers some questions, namely, one that's been bugging me for two years: why didn't widmore just get on ajira 316 if he wanted back on the island so bad? the answer is finally becoming clear - widmore has made a deal with nemesis: bring him transport off the island in exchange for leadership after nemesis leaves. widmore doesn't want to just get back to the island, he wants to ensure that when he does come back, it's his.

i also think nemesis' promise to ben that he would become leader was a bold-faced lie, pandering to ben's greatest weakness: power. ben would arrive at hydra just in time to be executed by widmore, perhaps another condition of widmore's deal with nemesis. widmore sent the freighter purely for the purpose of wiping out ben. if he's coming back to the island, maybe he has to know that ben is out of the picture.

we need to find out exactly how nemesis has been communicating with widmore - somehow nemesis made it clear that widmore must assist locke in bringing the oceanic 6 back to the island. did widmore know that locke's body would eventually host nemesis himself? is widmore fully aware of what's at stake on the island? if richard doesn't know anything about the candidates, how much does widmore know about jacob and nemesis? questions questions questions..

another question is how desmond is going to be written into the show, after being shot by ben and hospitalized just 6 days ago. but! widmore was at the hospital, and now here he is on a submarine. is desmond on that sub with him?

5. next episode.

sawyer!

is he going to be wanting his stuff back again?

the episode is titled 'recon,' which of course means 'reconaissance' and well as 'to con again.' i will be rewatching season 1's 'confidence man' as prep.

an episode that pays homage to sawyer must, by default, include some kind of con game. sawyer's parallel story might involve sawyer attempting to con hurley out of some of his millions - or it could reveal that parallel sawyer is a very different person, who might never have written his revenge letter. i think we absolutely must see juliet in the parallel as well, perhaps revealing that she's the mother of jack's son.. and if juliet returns in the parallel..

..will she return in the timeflash on the island? will she meet sawyer in the parallel and thenwhoosh shoot and kill him inadvertently during the timeflash as nemesis' gang is journeying to hydra island? either way, this episode is also an opportunity to do juliet's character justice in the parallel world, just as ben's episode also served dr. arzt. i want classic elizabeth mitchell moments.. because there are none of those on 'v.'

i can't wait to see exactly how sawyer's relationship with nemesis has progressed. its likely we'll spend the entire episode with the nemesis camp as they make their way back to hydra island.. i think those innocent people on the ajira flight are about to meet some smokey deaths..

lost 6.6 'sundown'

2010-03-08T18:10:00.000-08:00

written by: paul zbyszewski and graham roland. paul has previously co-written 'jughead,' 'namaste,' and 'follow the leader.' paul was also the co-creator of the short-lived, lost-inspired 'daybreak.' graham roland joined the show this year as story editor, and has previously written two episodes of 'prison break.'

directed by: bobby roth. it must be tricky being a director on lost (or any tv show, really). you would want to bring your own visual style to the episode, but your primary job is to deliver the ultimate version of a 'lost' episode that you can. it has to fit with everything else. this episode had some great pacing, exciting action sequences, nice shots, and killer performances. great job.

cinematography by: john bartley. what i've noticed, as i look back on season 1, is that the lighting in season 1 was much more realistic and subtle. but since season 3, the lighting has been getting cartoonier, tilting the show more towards the stylization on heroes. take for example the way the caves were lit in season 1 - a beautifully executed set that truly looked and felt like an outdoor/indoor setting. last week we revisited the cave, and the difference in the lighting schemes is very clear. jack and hurley were lit more traditionally for tv, whereas the original caves were often scenes about characters being backlit. at least it's been a uniform transition in the show's visual style, but i really miss the way it used to look. it helps keep the fantasy sci-fi elements grounded if the look is consistently realistic.

nutshell: here was sayid's tribute episode, and i think it handled the task really well. in the bigger picture, it feels like we've exited the expository phase, with one of the strongest final moments of the season. the battle is beginning. wow, lots of people are going to die.

parallel sayid
the offer
gewd and evel
some questions
some moments
preboomer
next episode

1. parallel sayid

the theme that has surrounded sayid from the start has been the question of good and evil. 'sundown' presented two scenarios in which he's faced with the question, and in both timelines, is thwarted by his best intentions. sayid has already once 'gone evil' in nadia's name when he became a hitman for ben. in this episode, in the original timeline, we're seeing him make the exact same choice on the bigger scale. ben's evil has been replaced by that of the nemesis, and it's interesting to see nemesis use many of the same tactics. it's also really interesting to see nemesis in locke's body, playing many of the same cards ben used to play on locke.

i was worried about how nadia was going to be handled, given that the girl has barely been given more than three lines in the past three years. i think the show even teased us a little by initially making us question whether sayid was actually coming home to nadia, his wife. fortunately sayid's story hasn't been skewed to quite that degree, but it is still pretty different. in the original timeline, the day before the flight, sayid watched his friend put a bullet in his head after discovering that sayid was a spy sent to infiltrate a terrorist group - a job he took on the promise of being reunited with nadia.

but here, sayid's job is translating contracts for an oil company, and has kind of been avoiding nadia - she writes him, but he doesn't write back. he loves her, but knows that because of who he is and what he's done (i supposed we're meant to presume sayid and nadia's torture history is the same), he doesn't deserve her. that scene alone satisfactorily closed out the emotional arc of sayid's character for me. n the original timeline, sayid got three months of bliss with nadia at the price of her death, and in the parallel he gets a (possible) lifetime of her in his life, but with the well-founded resolve that he does not deserve to be with her. they can do anything they want with sayid now; his larger story is done.

he makes good eggs. also: makes good corpse. will we be revisited by each season's primary villains? s1: ethan s2: friendly s3: mikhail s4: keamy s5: radzinsky? ..please let there be just a little more radzinsky..

i was fully ready to say goodbye to sayid's character by the end of this episode, but what we got was more chilling. i think we can consider the character, like claire, dead. that look in his eyes when ben finds him with the knife in his hand - and then ben's slooow backaway.. amazing tension. sayid has gone full on bad guy.

what's sad though is that he did everything dogen asked him to do to prove himself good. sayid wants to be good, but in the parallel timeline, the situation forces him to become violent, and on the island, sayid is made 'an offer he can't refuse' by smokey.

2. the offer.

it's pretty interesting that smokey tells sayid that nadia's death can be undone, and that jacob made essentially the same promise to dogen regarding the death of his son. and now that we know dogen's backstory, we see that he and his son are, in a sense, reunited in the parallel timeline. are both smokey and jacob promising people the alternate timeline? it's sounding to me like 'jughead' didn't 'work,' but something that's going to happen in the final battle will actually accomplish the things jughead was meant to do, and thereby create the alternate timeline.

up until this week, we were still meant to feel some doubt about what side to root for, but after this episode i think there can be little doubt that smokey = the bad guys. jacob's methods may not always be altruistic, but his job seems to be to save the world by keeping the smoke monster entity contained. successful execution of that job would certainly require some underhanded tactics.

there's a popular theory going around that the parallel timeline is in fact an 'epilogue' that will connect seamlessly to the final moments of the finale. others think that the timelines truly are 'parallel' and there will be some kind of crossing back and forth as we get closer to the finish.

right now i'm more in the 'epilogue' camp.. i may change my mind after desmond resurfaces, but for now, given the information we have, it seems like what we're witnessing in the parallel are the results of a jughead-like event, that worked, which we'll see either in the finale or close to the finish.

3. gewd and evel

so, it's time to take control of the island! how are the remaining cast going to break down on the two sides? one thing i love about the sideways story is that it shows us who each character really is at heart, without the influence of the island in their life.. which leads me to start thinking that the island itself is actually a repository of evil, and that the problems that have stretched through this particular set of character's lives is an extension of the island's evil reaching through their lives. the parallel timeline shows how their lives 'should' be, without that darkness tainting it.

of course the parallel timeline isn't all flowers and sunshine - rose has cancer again, walt probably still has michael as his dad, and i hate to say it, but nikki and paolo are once again roaming the earth. but on the large scale, because of its depiction of a place where characters (for the most part) seem to be able to find peace. the parallel is the antithesis of the island. in fact, if the parallel were a show by itself, it would be called:

it seems like the show is dividing itself into good and evil through the sideways flashes. when the characters connect, they don't know why, but they want to help each other. the parallel seems overtaken by a mysterious force that's working in opposition to the force that brought them to the island.

lines are being drawn. people are taking sides. who's going to end up where? here's my thoughts:

nemesis:

claire - a given. i think we'll find out that she actually died in the explosion that blew up her house in new-otherton. check out the deleted scene from that episode, that showed claire complaining of visions of her father immediately after that explosion. claire even says 'are we dead?' seems pretty clear.
sayid - we know he died from both the gunshot and drowning in the spring meant to save him. it's interesting that he didn't instantly turn evil. characters still have choices, but after killing dogen and lennon, there's no going back for sayid. he could be saved in the parallel, but not here.
sawyer - the first recruit. i'm curious to see his parallel story. i'm wondering if that version of himself ever wrote that letter to 'the real sawyer.' did jacob give him the pen in that timeline? are all of jacob's touches removed form the parallel?

sun - yes, i think sun is going to join nemesis. we saw her turn into a villainess after she witnessed what she thought was jin's death. she quickly became nice again (she also became a total non-character) once she discovered jin was still alive. but i think sun is going to witness jin's death again. this time it's going to be jin's real death, and this time sun is going to turn evil for real. for me, the only way to pay off the short sun-as-villain arc in season 5. the show has teased us with jin's death twice already. it's time they go all out. sun's turn could also be foreshadowed by her expressed distrust of ilana. the great thing about the parallel story is that it can totally oppose the island story - whichever story gets the happy ending, the other story will get the most tragic one possible, and i think a lot of tragic things are going to happen on the island. the death of john locke was just the beginning.
miles - i'm just throwing him in here because more people will need to join the dark side, and miles' ghost-talking power may be necessary against hurley's similar power. miles clearly has some conscience, and jacob's people actively attempted to recruit him based on his conscience in 'some like it hoth,' but in the end he chose the extortion route to the island, rather than the altruistic one.

jacob:

hurley - jacob can actually talk to hurley, so it's not very likely that hurley is going to stop being his spokesperson. also, hurley is probably the most fundamentally 'good' character on the show. his story is entirely about his situation, and he provides a kind of centered, stoned-out commentary on the goings on around him, whether his life has been cursed or blessed.
jack - he's got demons in his closet, and he's certainly not the most mature person on the island, but i think we can agree that he's, at heart, a good guy. the questionable things he's done (pointed a gun at locke's head and pulled the trigger) have mostly arisen out of the extraordinarily stressful circumstances of the island.
kate - though she's currently marching in with the nemesis gang, that dismissive look from locke i think says everything. he'll take her if she wants to join, but he is completely ambivalent about her. it's an interesting parallel to the real locke's attitude toward kate. in season 4's 'eggtown,' locke banished kate from the barracks. locke had always felt uneasy about kate's history. i think we can agree that kate is 'good,' though her backstory is riddled with crime, she stood trial for those crimes (even though her lenient punishment was based on the oceanic 6 lie), and has matured into, aside from hurley, the most balanced person on the island. now that she's found claire, i'm worried for her. 'balanced' people don't last long on 'lost,' and now they've closed all of her open story arcs. love connection with jack? over. love connection with sawyer? no way. who else is left for kate to hook up with? unless she finds something fast, kate is going to die. don't cry though, she'll meet jack in the parallel and be the coolest step-mom ever.
ben - it has nothing to do with whether or not he's 'good.' after being used by smokey, i think ben will be joining jacob's side mainly because it's against nemesis. i'm so excited for this week's ben episode, though i'm worried for him as well - his arcs are closed, and the character thrives on having secrets and power. it took four seasons, but it seems like the show has finally exploded the last of ben's secrets. at this point to suddenly gift him with additional information would seem false. the man has had all the pride beaten out of him, and i think the parallel story probably will show us that had he not been shot and dipped in the spring, he truly would have been a good person. still manipulative, but good.

tossup:

richard - he seems to know more than anyone just what the stakes are, so it's unlikely he'd suddenly join up with nemesis, but nemesis also seems to have answers that jacob was never honest about.. episode 9 is richard's..
lapidus - seems to be a good guy. we know nothing of his past other than that he was originally supposed to be piloting flight 815. bram and ilana took a liking to him, and he seems firmly entrenched in their camp.
jin - if jin doesn't die, he's going to have to play along as a nemesis recruit in order to stay alive. i think his attempt to switch sides is what will ultimately kill him. is there any way to get him back on a boat? seems like jin really needs to die on a boat.

4. some questions.

what exactly is dogen's power to protect the temple? we saw the shot of claire and nemesis standing at the edge of the ash before claire went into the temple - it seems that somehow dogen's life 'powers' the ash. did the ash around the temple have to be broken before smokey could enter, or did dogen's death totally nullify it? it seems like smokey was waiting for the exact instant of dogen's death before entering. odd..

what exactly is nemesis' plan? how is he planning to use the small army of people who've chosen to follow him? is there truly a way for all of them to get off the island together, or is it just a ruse to gain their allegiance? is everyone who left the temple to join nemesis now 'infected' or can they still venture to jacob's side? is there any hope for claire?

where did ilana, lapidus, sun, ben, and miles disappear to? are they heading to the lighthouse?

hey! remember the person juliet shot from the outrigger boat during the timeflash in season 5's 'the little prince?' we know that timeflash occured in 2007, after ajira landed, but the events of that flash have not yet crossed over with what we've seen in 2007 so far.. this crossover is something the writers have been holding onto for awhile, so next time any of our cast gets into one of the outrigger boats.. look out.

5. some moments.

so far, i've been impressed with this season's episodes. 'the substitute' remains my favorite of the season for its strength in both the island and sideways stories. jack's episode is the only one so far that's made me cry, though it's too bad the island story in jack's ep wasn't quite as strong as the parallel. 'sundown' featured the strongest island storyline since locke's episode, thanks to some killer moments:

sayid vs. dogen - it would not be a complete tribute episode to sayid if it didn't include a kick-ass fight scene. the choreography was great, especially when sayid started flinging pots. my only disappointment is that he didn't get to use one of his trademark leg moves.
sayid plunges the knife into nemesis - i actually felt relief that sayid had so easily chosen to prove himself good.. of course, he was instructed to do it before nemesis spoke a word. in the end i don't think sayid's delay matters - the end result would have been the same; a bloodless stabbing, and recruitment of sayid. dogen was expecting nemesis to protect himself. bad play, dogen.
miles says of claire 'still hot though.'

kate's meeting with claire. the music during this scene is fantastic - it starts out from kate's perspective; hopeful and sweet. it's been three years since kate saw claire! then, as soon as kate says, with her hand to her heart, 'i took him!' the music goes slightly sour, shifting to claire's perspective. what i want: a serious kick-ass fight between kate and claire.
ben's discovery of sayid at the spring. the look in ben's eyes. the look in sayid's eyes. terror and terrified.
cindy is flaky - well, so are a lot of the others. they seem to know quite a bit about what's actually going on, because a bunch of them switched sides pretty quick. rob predicted that we might see a metaphor similar to the game of 'othello,' where the playing of one piece can quickly turn the entire board black or white.
smokey rushes over kate - an amazing shot. for that matter..
smokey's takedown of the temple - for some reason this was much more exciting than smokey's tantrum at the foot statue. i think the camera was more kinetic, and the size of the temple allowed for more variety.
the calvalry comes in - i totally loved miles' astonished 'lapidus!?' the last time miles saw lapidus was the beginning of season 5, when the chopper took off to take desmond and sayid to the freighter.

'catch a falling star.' woah. i think this was the first episode of season 6 to end with a slow-motion/music montage, and this is unlike anything else the show has ever done before.. claire, kate, sayid walk through the carnage of the temple, kate collects a rifle from a body, and through it all is a haunting version of claire's signature song, accompanied by (oscar winner!) michael giacchino's score.

6. preboomer

nemesis nods to sayid and claire. they nod back with demented pride. kate steps into the light with an astonished look on her face. nemesis gives her an indifferent look, turns, and walks up the hill, his new followers behind him.

(boom)

the timing of the music, the energy of the scene, the momentousness of it - best preboomer of the season if you ask me.

7. next episode

it's ben! he's only only had one genuine flashback episode: 'the man behind the curtain,' though he's had a total of three centric episodes, and good chunks of the 1977 story could count as ben backstory as well. 'the shape of things to come' was a flashforward episode, showing how he recruited sayid, and 'dead is dead' flashed between ben in 1977 and island ben being 'judged' (or so he thought) by the smoke monster.

regardless of whether or not the character dies at the end of the episode, this is almost certainly going to be our last ben episode, and it must function flawlessly as his tribute. ben's entire story seems to stem from the death of his mother during his birth. the details of ben's backstory wil answer a lot of questions about just when this alternate timeline originates. did ben's mother still die? did horace and olivia goodspeed still pick them up by the side of the road, outside of portland? was this ben ever on the island? is alex rousseau 'teacher's pet?'

the sideways story is a wonderful way to return to ben the things that have been stolen from him in the original timeline: secrets and power. no idea how they'll give all that to a european history teacher, but i have a feeling this is the parallel story that will provide the most answers yet about just how the two timelines are related. i'm expecting classic ben moments.

lost 6.5 'lighthouse'

2010-03-01T14:48:00.000-08:00

lost 6.5 'lighthouse'

written by: damon lindelof and carlton cuse. the big guns.

directed by: jack bender. the big gun.

cinematography by: stephen st. james. my friends noticed weird reflections, but to me these looked like light through foliage. the color palette in this episode looked much more saturated than usual: hugo's red red shirt, jack's blue blue shirt, the trees greener than green. this was contrasted by the muted palette in claire's scenes, where everything was washed out and earthy. it looked good, but still doesn't have the visual scale and feel of season one.

basically: a beautiful counterpart to jack's first episode in season 1, cycling back themes, locations, and ideas that the show had left by the wayside for many years. on the larger scale, the episode repeated revelations uncovered last week, and so functioned less as jaw-dropping game-changer than as grand-finale set up.

the son becomes the father
who is david's mother?
what is dogen doing in the parallel timeline?
the caves, or, who are adam and eve?
that lighthouse
squirrel baby
preboomer
next episode..

1. the son becomes the father

the opening shot of 'white rabbit:' jack as a teenage boy

i've been wondering for years how the show might finally reconcile all of jack's issues with his father. would he finally confront the ghost that's been walking around the island? would nemesis take his father's form and manipulate him in the same way that he manipulated claire, ben and locke? how can jack finally let go of all the pain associated with that central relationship?

the day after the flight, jack changes out of his work clothes and seems to notice the scar from his appendix removal for the first time.. his mother tells him that he had it out when he was 7 or 8, which means little boy jack collapsed in school the same year that jughead was detonated on the island.

david? no, it's little jack shepard, being told by his father he doesn't 'have what it takes.'

what's interesting is that jack not only seems to have lost his memory of having his appendix out, he also seems to have almost completely forgotten that he has a teenage son. there is definitely a kind of cross-consciousness happening in the parallel story: claire 'knows' the baby's name is aaron, jack, locke, and kate all have moments in their episodes where they stare at their own reflections - they know that something is odd, but can't place it. it's along the same lines as the time travel rules employed in 'frequency,' where the present is changed multiple times, and each time, the people who create the changes retain the memory of the original timeline, but also instantly aquire an entire lifetime of new memories on top of it.

of course we know the original source of jack's scar is from season 4's 'something nice back home,' when jack was hit with a mysterious illness, on the eve of securing passage off the island on the freighter. juliet performed the operation, while jack watched in a mirror. that episode also showed us how jack played father to aaron by reading 'alice in wonderland' to him.

jack says that david was always asking about kitten and snowdrop, alice's black and white cats. ah, the recurring black and white theme.. this is kind of interesting, here's the first line from lewis carroll's 'through the looking glass:'

'one thing was certain, that the white kitten had had nothing to do with it: -- it was the black kitten's fault entirely. for the white kitten had been having its face washed by the old cat for the last quarter of an hour (and bearing it pretty well, considering); so you see that it couldn't have had any hand in the mischief.'

jack's identical appendix scar is potential sign that things in the parallel story are course correcting, possibly towards the same ultimate end as the island story. given the limited information we have about how the two timelines connect, we're just gonna have to be patient. not every episode can pack the same impact. we're entering act 2 of the final season's story arc, which means lots of setup for things that aren't immediately satisfying, but should have big payoffs later. they'd better!

david? no, it's young daniel faraday, practicing the same piece of music david had in his room. if a pregnant eloise died on the island, then is jack's child a course-corrected 'reincarnation' of daniel? is allowing david the chance to pursue his art the way in which faraday achieves a kind of redemption?

by mysteriously and miraculously adding a son into jack's parallel story, we got the beautiful scene in which jack pays off 6 years of torment by telling his son 'in my eyes, you can never fail.' i cried. jack is able to redeem his daddy issues by preventing them from reoccurring with his son? who would ever see that coming? this aspect of the episode was a full on win.

it's almost as though the parallel world exists precisely to give all of our characters exactly what they need in order to exorcize the demons that haunted them in the original timeline. the estranged father/son theme echoed michael and walt's season 1 relationship, and even extended the parallel by making david gifted, and having dogen point out that david is 'special.'

another interesting parallel with 'white rabbit:' while hunting for christian's will, jack sits in the same chair his father sat in when he was told he 'didn't have what it takes,' literally putting jack into his father's position. this is when jack's mother makes the comparison between jack and his dad. in 'white rabbit,' margo and jack were in this same room, with margo convincing jack to go to sydney to find out what happened to his father. this time around, margo emplores jack to discover the source of his tension with david.

2. who is david's mother?

though everything we've known form the original timeline seems up for grabs, sarah is likely out of the picture in this universe. if sarah is jack's ex-wife and mother of david, then they would have to have met many years earlier than in the original timeline, which had them meeting in 2001, after the car crash that injured sarah and killed shannon's father. in the original timeline, jack was obsessed with jealousy over sarah, stalked her, and was suspicious that she might even be cheating on him with his father.

the general consensus among lost fans is that david's mother must be a course-corrected juliet. while it radically changes her path (without the island, she could end up anywhere) - it's somewhat feasible. remember that weird kiss juliet and jack shared during season 4?

what's interesting about the juliet possiblity is my memory of her first moment on screen. in the opening scene of the season 3 premiere, my first thought was 'omg it's penny!' my second thought was 'omg it's sarah!' my third thought was 'oh wait, we've actually never seen this person before.' later, in 'the cost of living,' ben tells jack:

ben: we had such a wonderful plan to break you, jack.
jack: break me?ben: wear you down till you were convinced we weren't your enemies. get you to trust us. and then of course we'd lead you to believe that you were choosing to do... whatever we asked you to do. all of this of course assumed that you would get... invested.
jack: invested in what?
ben: has it not occurred to you that juliet bears a striking resemblance to your ex-wife?

so there's already some interesting metaphysical basis for juliet replacing sarah in the parallel timeline - also, it would make sense for jack and juliet's marriage to play out similarly to their brief, but fruitless flirtation on the island. if the energies are the same, both jack and juliet would be drawn to each other, but each would ultimately be pulled in different directions. probably with a lot less drama and anguish than jack's marriage to sarah.

what's tricky though is that the hard-edged juliet we know and love was created as a result of her time on the island. before alpert kiled her ex-husband with a bus, juliet was weak, subservient, and utterly trapped in her job. though it became her prison, the island actually saved her in many ways. while it's too much to hope for an entire episode explaining juliet's parallel story, i'm hoping that the few scenes we get can give us proper context - perhaps she hasn't changed, is still meek, and 'finds herself' when she meets sawyer?

3. what is dogen doing in the parallel timeline?

i found this crossover a bit.. over the top. only because dogen is a new character, and we're still waiting to learn his true purpose in the original timeline - it's simply not that interesting to see characters without much established backstory show up in a world where the backstories are altered. this might change as we learn more about dogen's character. dogen's line 'it is hard to watch and be unable to help' seemed like a heavy-handed way to emphasize that dogen is powerless to interfere with the actions of the candidates. the theme is further emphasized with the poster advertising the music conservatory auditions reading 'all candidates welcome'

4. the caves, or, who are adam and eve?

the caves! 'white rabbit' was the episode in which jack discovered the caves, after chasing the ghost of his father around the island. jack nearly falls off a cliff, but is saved by locke. the two men sit and have a chat, where locke compares jack's quest to chasing the white rabbit in 'alice in wonderland.' locke also encourages jack to accept the leadership role that the survivors have cast him in. when jack discovers the caves, he finds pieces of wreckage, and his father's coffin is among it. but when jack opens the coffin, it's empty. the person who's been haunting him, who he expected to find, is not there. in a rage, jack picks up a pipe and smashes the thing to smithereens. sound familiar?

jack not understand! jack smash! after jack's little catharsis at the cave, he returned to the beach camp and gave his iconic 'live together, die alone' speech. i have a feeling we're about to see him reclaim his position as leader on the show.

after the hatch was opened, the caves were completely abandoned by both the survivors, and the show - mostly because it was a giant indoor set that had to be dismantled to make room for the hatch set. the caves were never mentioned again until 'lighthouse,' which served to remind us of jack's original mindset on the island (mourning the death of his father, believing himself to be going crazy by seeing an impossible vision), and to remind us of the presence of 'adam and eve,' the two shriveled bodies that jack estimated had been dead for 40-50 years.

hurley basically threw out the most popular fan theory by stating it outright: 'what if we time traveled back to dinosaur times and we died.. what if these skeletons are us?' man! adam and eve must be two of the main characters on the show. but now that hurley's laid it out so openly, i'm not sure. damon and carlton have pointed to adam and eve for years as proof if the larger story plan for the show. here's a quote from damon lindelof in 2007:

there were certain things we knew from the very beginning. independent of ever knowing when the end was going to be, we knew what it was going to be, and we wanted to start setting it up as early as season 1, or else people would think that we were making it up as we were going along. so the skeletons are the living -- or, i guess, slowly decomposing -- proof of that. when all is said and done, people are going to point to the skeletons and say, 'that is proof that from the very beginning, they always knew that they were going to do this.'

other clues to the identities of adam and eve - they had shiny black and white stones in their pockets - so are adam and eve jacob and his nemesis' successors? are they the final two candidates? is there one more push of the wheel in store for the show?

here's is jack's original speech about adam and eve:

jack: these caves make too good a shelter just to be used for burial. adam and Eve, they must have lived here. their plane crashed, or maybe they were ship-wrecked. they probably found this place and knew they could survive here. unlimited supply of fresh water, tree canopy keeps the temperature down, shields out the sun, [kate is looking down, unconvinced], the openings are narrow, easier for protection against predators. we don't need to bring the water to the people. we need to bring the people to the water. [kate still looking unconvinced]. i think we could live here.

later, at the beach, kate says:

kate: i don't want to be eve.
jack: no one's asking you to.
kate: i just can't -- dig in.
jack: why not? someone else can stay here, keep a look out, wait for rescue. why does it have to be you?
kate: that's not it.
jack: then what is it? kate, how did you get to be this way? just what is it that you did?
kate: you had your chance to know.

will we look back on this conversation as ironic, or prescient? i think we can at least prepare for the adam and eve question to be answered definitively this season.

5. that lighthouse

jacob gave hurley a bunch of instructions that, in retrospect seemed only to serve the purpose of getting hurley and jack away from the temple before locke, claire, and jin show up looking for 'aaron.' the thing is at least as tall as the statue, and seems to have the exact same birds flying around it, always on hand to establish scale. at least jack said 'how did we not see this before,' because by this point, it's hard to swallow that no one's seen it, or mentioned it. it's possibly on the opposite shore from the foot statue, but this is asking us to believe that none of our main characters has circumnavigated the island yet, or if they did, it wasn't important enough to show us.. also, the time it takes to traverse distances has been seriously compressed now that the seasons are shorter, and plot points need to unravel faster. hmm. alright alright, i forgive it, though i do find it a bit irritating.

let's talk about the specifics of the lighthouse itself, which seems right out of myst - the lostpedia candidates page has been updated to cross reference all of the visible names from the cave with those in the lighthouse, and there are a few small discrepancies. are jacob and nemesis keeping their own lists? did nemesis have to make his own copy of jacob's list from the lighthouse?

we can see from stills that #108 is someone named 'wallace.' is this person actually important? we've yet to meet anyone on the show named wallace. did someone we know take a new name, like walt? walt must have taken a new name after returning to the mainland to avoid press scrutiny after the oceanic six debacle, right? walt still believes his father is alive, so it could be walt, right? or did jacob just ask hurley to turn the wheel to 108 (fun fact, this was the 108th hour of 'lost'), knowing that it would be a great enough distance for jack to notice the implications of the mechanism?

i think someone is definitely still coming to the island - desmond still has an open story arc, so my bet is that he's the person jacob is expecting. charles widmore is also a possibility..

a weird detail about the lighthouse dial is that the handwriting in which the remaining candidates names are written is considerably different from the rest of the names. it's not just darker, it's all caps, and looks over-written. on the lighthouse dial, kate is given the number 51, and her name is not crossed out. why wasn't kate's name copied into the cave?

i felt that the lighthouse scene was missing a numbers discovery moment for hurley - to have the names and numbers laid out for him on the dial and then artificially deny him the discovery felt false. undoubtedly, they are saving something big for hurley's centric episode coming later, but it just made no sense to keep the character that functions as the primary audience proxy in the dark. i also think that the absence of that discovery moment is what ultimately kept this episode from feeling as satisfying as 'the substitute,' even though it had just as many revelations and comparably excellent performances. which brings me to..

6. squirrel baby

i just hope claire chose formula over breast feeding.

it's fascinating how difficult it is to appreciate when an attractive person is a good actor until their looks are stripped. claire's role for 4 seasons on the show was pretty much to be either a pregnant victim, or a baby-holding victim, reacting to outside forces, and never really taking much action for herself. when a character's backstory is exhausted, the writer's only real option is to have the character disappear for awhile, so that a new backstory can be created to fill their centric episode (michael in season 2). emilie de ravin's performance here is great because it's reminiscent of our first encounter with rousseau in season 1's 'solitary,' but it also stands in such amazing contrast to the person who wandered into the jungle three years ago (and more recently, the pregnant girl who got off of flight 815). it's also a great payoff to having her absent for so long, to have her return to the show in such a big way. it's also just way way more fun to play crazy.

it's upsetting, though that claire seems to truly be 'infected,' and probably beyond hope of cure - apparently she was shot by the others in the leg at one point, taken to the temple, and given the same 'test' dogen gave to sayid. i think we can pretty much expect that sayid is going to go the same way.

the whole encounter has me wondering though if we're supposed to question whether or not rousseau was also infected. infected claire's behavior and actions are incredibly similar to rousseau's, though rousseau probably would never have let sayid live if she was infected. jin's timeflash adventure with rousseau seemed pretty clear that it was robert who was infected, and not rousseau. if that's the case, it's pretty amazing that rousseau avoided infection for 16 years when smokey had access to the bodies of her entire crew and could presumably take their form and attempt to manipulate her. i think we're meant to take away that rousseau-like behavior isn't the basis by which 'infection' should be determined - the litmus test is random, viscious murdering behavior.

7. preboomer

locke: am i interrupting?
jin: (another wtf face from jin - i think he has more preboomer wtf-faces than anyone) john?
claire: that's not john. this is my friend.'
(boom)

this is a setup preboomer, launching us directly into next week. but it also made me race back through my head to figure out in this fractured timeline exactly when jin last saw locke - and does jin know that locke is supposed to be dead?

jin last saw locke shimmie down the well to push the wheel and stop the island from timeflashing. it was locke's final push that trapped jin in 1977, where he learned english during the three years of working for dharma. before locke went down the well, jin gave him his wedding ring to present to sun as proof that he had died in the freighter explosion. the ring was later used by ben to prove the exact opposite, that jin is still alive, and convinced sun to board ajira 316.

though we haven't seen it on the show, we can assume based on jin's knowledge of the ajira flight, that all the survivors had a pow-wow after sawyer brought them into dharma. so jin's wtf at seeing locke is a combination of 'wow, i haven't seen you for three years,' and 'holy crap, aren't you supposed to be dead?' it could also be 'where is my wedding ring?' but i expect we'll get to that later.

8. next episode..

according to darlton, the next episode, 'sundown,' is breaking from the centricity pattern of season 1 and giving us a sayid episode instead of a sun and jin episode, though the title still seems to reference the corresponding 6th episode of season 1, 'house of the rising sun.' why the reversal of ordering? what should we watch to prepare?

i'm going to rewatch 'house of the rising sun,' primarily for the island story, 'solitary,' for a refresher on the sayid/nadia history, and 'the greater good' to be fully reminded of sayid's immediate pre-815 backstory in sydney. i have a bad feeling sayid is going to die for real in the island timeline. i have incredibly high expectations for sayid's parallel timeline story. sayid's history with nadia is not simple. he tortured her repeatedly, and she endured it because she, uh, liked him. then he killed a guard and shot himself so she could escape. not exactly a jennifer aniston movie. nadia, after being such a central character in sayid's story, was treated only as an object in the flashforwards. their reunion was heartfelt, but a huge chunk of sayid's story with nadia was told only in rough sketches. nadia functioned as a plot point but not as a character. we know that they were reunited, it was bliss for three months, she died in the car crash, and sayid spent the next three years as ben's hitman.

sayid's parallel story has the potential to redeem all of the hell sayid endured because of the island. it also has the obligation of reintroducing nadia to us as a fully developed character - as a victim of torture, a war escapee, and a woman wrapped up in an incredibly complicated web of culture, violence, and attraction. i want the parallel reunion to be satisfying, and not simple.

'solitary' was one of my favorite episodes of season 1 because it really felt like a movie-scale story. i remember thinking, as i was still discovering the format of the show, 'holy shit, we're going to iraq now..' the scale of the production, the performances, photography, writing, were all feature film quality work. if the final season is truly going to continue echoing season 1, it has to look bigger visually, but feel more intimate emotionally. it's on the right track. they just better not mess up sayid's closing act.

lost 6.4 'the substitute'

2010-02-22T10:02:00.000-08:00

written by: elizabeth sarnoff and melinda hsu taylor. far and away the best episode written by either of them. the dialogue is intelligent, the stakes are clear, it's filled with nothing but forward momentum, and it's a beautiful counterpart to the companion episode, 'walkabout.'

directed by: tucker gates, who has only directed a handful of episodes: the ho hum kate wedding episode, 'i do,' kate's 'born to run,' the wonderful '..in translation,' and sawyer's great 'confidence man.'

director of photography: john bartley, career dp for 'lost,' shooting over 40 episodes beginning with 'special' in season 1. this ep has great shots in both the parallel and island worlds, and is also filled with subtle visual references to 'walkabout.' the cliff sequence was beautifully executed, not to mention the inherent awesomeness of smokeycam.

nutshell: we're back! this epsode is unbelievably good, and represents all the best qualities of the show. it had mythological density, emotional sensitivity - this episode succeeded in all areas 'what kate does' failed: highlighting character growth and major themes through the sideways world, while hurtling the island plot forward towards the endgame. it was heartfelt, sinister, thrilling, and will likely go down as one of the best episodes of 'lost.' this is the driving episode of the season i've been waiting for (like 'confirmed dead,' and 'jughead'), pointing the way toward the grand finale. it is a joy to be inspired to write this blog again.

major points:

parallels in the parallel
connections in the parallel
scrawls on the walls
jacob ghosts and monster ghosts
the hatch all over again
preboomer
best moments

1. parallels in the parallel

in order to fully appreciate what's happening in the sideways world, it's important to look back and see just how altered the parallel locke's life is. yes, he was still denied a chance to go on his walkabout, but the details are different. in the original timeline, locke didn't keep the walkabout secret, and was teased by his boss randy about using vacation days to do it. here, locke needs those vacation days for his october wedding to helen (!) and so uses the conference to go on the walkabout, which he hides not only from his boss, but also from helen.

helen! i remember last year, watching 'the life and death of jeremy bentham,' how disappointed i was to learn that helen had died before locke returned to the mainland. it felt so unsatisfying and clipped-off that i suspected a larger conspiracy. i thought perhaps she was killed by widmore, or ben, to ensure that locke has nothing left on the mainland. but i see now what they had planned for locke all along: by denying him closure in the original timeline, by denying him everything in the original timeline, we now get to see his redemption in the parallel. what changed here? not only is locke still with helen (who in the original timeline, left him after he was unable to stop stalking his father). in 'walkabout' we see an incredibly sad, lonely and broken man who's deepest connection is with a phone sex operator he's named 'helen' out of desperation.

locke on the phone with 'helen,' the phone sex operator, in his crappy original timeline apartment

in the parallel world, somehow the sinking of the island has dramatically shifted locke's relationship with his father. helen says to him, in the midst of wedding planning, that they should go to vegas and ask his father to meet them there! in the original timeline, helen slapped anthony cooper across the face and never saw locke again. also, locke's father's unsuccessful murder attempt is what put locke in the wheelchair in the first place. in this timeline, locke has a photo of him and his father in his cubicle.

wha wha what!??

what happened? why did helen decide to stay with locke? did his father still push him out of the window? does this version of locke still have both kidneys? is anthony cooper still a bad person? or has locke just not discovered that he's bad yet? how will the show a) answer these questions and b) close out locke's story with so few episodes left?

i love the counterpoints that occurred in the sideways story: locke, upon returning home, falls off his wheelchair ramp, does a faceplant, and the sprinklers immediately turn on, soaking him. it's not just an example of the world shitting on locke, but it's a direct parallel to what happened to him on the island at that exact moment - a rainstorm came, and locke, now able to walk, soaked in the rain as a symbol of joyus cleansing and rebirth.

this time the 'rain' isn't cleansing at all, just an ironic underscoring of his disability. another cool detail is that locke's office is identical in nearly every way (even the sweater on the next chair is the same), except the subtly oppressive green color timing has been removed from the footage, indicating that while locke is still trapped in this office job, it's no longer quite the hell it once was in the original timeline.

here's locke's office in the original timeline:

and here's the parallel timeline, now with proper white-balance!

some other cool parallels i noticed between 'walkabout' and 'the substitute:'

in 'walkabout,' locke's desk calculator makes the same tika-tika noise as the smoke monster. in 'the substitute,' locke's alarm clock makes the same noise as the button's three minute warning sound.

in 'walkabout,' locke encounters the smoke monster for the first time, and we see the confrontation from the monster's perspective. this camera technique is never used to depict the monster again until 'the substitute.' i can't get over the genius of that - in 'walkabout,' it shows locke looking into the face of the thing that will eventually destroy him. then, the next time we see through the smoke monster's eyes, five years later, it's because the monster has taken over locke's form. who knows if they had the story planned to this level by 'walkabout,' which was episode 4 of the show (i'm certain they didn't), but their ability to find this depth of perfect circularity in the initial steps of the path is thrilling.

another great parallel is how the introduction and opening of locke's suitcase of knives figures heavily in both episodes. in 'walkabout,' locke opens the case with his foot, proudly displaying his hardware, and sending the survivors into a frenzy of speculation about just who this military-esque tough guy must be. in 'walkabout' the suitcase reinforces locke's new persona, but in 'the substitute,' the opening of the suitcase is a sad revelation - the knives inside represent an unfollowable dream, an adventure that can never take place, a person locke can never be. i hope the show can keep up this kind of intelligent, character-based counterpoint throughout the parallel timeline.

the real beauty of this episode is that it reminds us how deeply locke's philosophy was transformed by the island's gift of mobility. on the island, locke has every reason to believe in destiny, fate, and the unknown. after 5 years, it's so easy to forget the power of what happened to him - but watching 'walkabout' again, it's so clear: locke is moved to a point of religious conviction by what occurred in those moments after the crash - really, who wouldn't be? but with that crucial moment removed from his life, locke has no reason to believe in miracles. even that fortuitous meeting with jack isn't enough to convince locke. his outlook is diametrically opposed to the person the island allowed him to become. for locke's story to have closure, i'm not sure that he needs to walk again (though it's pointing in that direction), but parallel locke will need to find fulfillment in his life - he must get his walkabout, whether or not it means he actually gets to walk. the most beautiful finish for locke would be for jack to attempt the surgery and fail. with their leadership struggle removed, these two characters possess the power to redeem each other. jack can open locke to the possibility of miracles, and locke could give jack the gift of finally learning to accept failure. whether or not jack's inevitable surgery on locke works, i expect i'll be crying my eyes out.

2. connections in the parallel

'lost' spent three years of flashbacks tying our character's lives together in subtle ways. a huge network of crossovers was established, and if you blinked, you would miss the reference in the season 1 episode, 'numbers' revealing that hurley actually owns the box company locke worked for, and that randy nations, locke's boss, was also hurley's boss at one point. with the parallel timeline, the show now has the opportunity to re-intersect the characters through trajectories initially established in those early flashbacks. genius! since hurley's fortunes are reversed, is tricia tanaka still alive? did the meteor hit something else?

lynn karnoff was the terrible psychic hired by hurley's dad in 'tricia tanaka is dead' to convince hurley that he isn't cursed. in the parallel world, she is equally inept as hurley's temp agency employee. fortunately, her boss is..

rose! rose and locke shared a connection in the island story - rose was the only person on the flight who knew that locke was in a wheelchair before boarding flight 815, and shared his knowledge of the island as a place of healing. even though it's a little bit shoehorned to place her as manager of hurley's temp agency (why were they both on the same australia flight? company retreat?), the scene was beautiful. now instead of rose and locke bonding over their mutual healing, their bond is about mutual misfortune, and accepting the realities of life. and i love that rose places locke as a junior high substitute teacher - given the way we saw locke interacting and teaching walt, this probably is the best job for him.

ben! best. reveal. evar. oh the poetic justice that someone as cunning and manipulating as ben would become a history teacher, and use his limited power to lord over an empire, however small, within the teacher's lounge break room. i cannot wait to find out ben's bigger story, and to see how his new friendship with locke plays out. (i never realized it before, but ben linus was actually my high school choir teacher: the most manipulative, emotionally damaging bastard to hold tenure.) will ben and locke become best friends? will locke forget to change the coffee filter, sending ben into a murderous rage? will ben kill locke a third time? i'm wondering if this ben was still shot by sayid, and still dipped into the temple - because if the timeline diverged at the incident, then these things could still be part of ben's life. did richard still visit locke as a child? i'm sure we won't know those timeline details until late in the season. looking forward to his full episode.

3. scrawls on the walls

and now the island story. wowzers was it packed full of info. i found myself riveted by every scene with nemesis-as-locke, because every eye twitch, every look and glance is now a clue to the truth of his character, the purpose of the island, and the patten of monster behavior we've witnessed for 5 seasons.

let's break down the major revelations in the island story:

jacob has 'a thing for numbers' and wrote the names of hundreds of people inside the candidate-cave, and gave each person an accompanying number.
at some point, jacob touched each person whose name appears in the cave, manipulating their free will, pushing them toward the island.
eventually, one of the remaining candidates will take over as jacob's replacement as protector of the island.
nemesis says that there is actually 'nothing to protect' on the island. it's just an island.

this reintroduction of the numbers as a mystical force was brilliant. it doesn't 'explain' the numbers, but it gives them deeper significance. the numbers started on the show as lottery numbers, and now we've learned that, really, that's all they are, on a cosmic level. hurley, jack, sawyer, jin (or sun), locke, and sayid became winners of the cosmic lottery when jacob assigned them those fateful values, who knows how long ago. were these the 4th, 8th, 15th etc.. names jacob wrote on the wall?

check out the lostpedia page on the candidates. it lists all of the visible names in the cave tracing back through all seasons and time periods of the show. brilliant.

i have some questions, though. when nemesis freed richard from the tree, he told richard 'i want what i've always wanted, for you to come with me.' then he tells richard that he looks like john locke 'because he was a candidate.' and richard says 'what do you mean, a candidate?' this means that richard knows nothing of jacob's candidacy mission to find a replacement. pretty odd, considering that the two minor others from last week both knew that jin was 'possibly a candidate.' how can richard possibly be so disconnected from jacob's primary goal? since richard is considered a series regular this year, i'm looking forward to those answers in his centric episode.

the other huge question about the candidates is where is kate's name? why doesn't she have a number? does this mean that she's going to die? i have full confidence that the show will kill a core character (sawyer, kate, jack) before the finale. the narrative device of the parallel timeline allows them to kill anyone while still giving the character a complete resolution. i just hope the show has the guts to surprise us by what they're willing to do. they've never played safe, but they've also never killed a central core character (save for locke, who they've retained through a resurrection device). sayid's death is imminent, like charlie's in season 3. i think we can expect his exit soon (probably in the same episode in which his parallel self is reunited with nadia, who will find her sunglasses ten seconds earlier and not die). but kate.. c'mon darlton.. do it.. do it.. kill kate! kill kate!!!

4. jacob ghosts and monster ghosts

this episode dropped another significant piece of information: the creepy bloody blonde boy. cbbb made two appearances, each with significant differences. the first time cbbb appears with special lighting, is bloody, is holding a pose, and isn't seen by richard. in this appearance, cbbb is only seen by nemesis.

the second time cbbb appears, he's no longer bloody, so he's just cbb. he also doesn't have any special lighting on him, and sawyer is able to see him. these are some important distinctions because since the beginning of the show, we have seen two different types of ghosts. jacob ghosts and monster ghosts.

monster ghosts:

yemi
alex
christian
locke

in order to be a monster ghost, the body must be on the island, and not properly buried.

jacob ghosts:

jack's dad when wearing a suit and sneakers
kate's black horse
walt's appearances to locke and shannon
jin speaking english to hurley in the hatch food pantry
claire appearing in aaron's room, telling kate not to bring him back
ben's mother, urging him to join the others

jacob ghosts are distinguished by skirting the line between being physical manifestations and merely visions. they are similar to nemesis ghosts in that they seem to originate from strong memories, and sources of guilt. kate definitely saw that horse running through the jungle, just as jack was nearly able to reach out and touch his father in 'white rabbit.' nemesis seems to know that sometimes it's just a visual, subconscious reach into your mind, and sometimes it's a physical thing you can chase, catch, and get something from.

there's also a third category of ghost, and i think those are the 'actual ghosts' hurley can see and interact with.

i don't think we're seeing any new phenomenon with cbbb. to add a new phenomenon to the show at this point would muddle the mythology. cbbb is the product of reaching into nemesis' subconscious, and pulling the image of what is probably jacob as a child. did they murder someone together? is the blood the boy's, or someone else's? as a physical form, cbb reminds nemesis that he must 'follow the rules' and that he 'can't kill him' because 'he's a candidate.' presumably he's referring to nemesis' plan to kill sawyer. in a direct echo from 'walkabout,' nemesis screams back at the boy 'don't tell me what i can't do!'

5. the hatch all over again

here's how i'm seeing the bigger picture..

the monster is evil. pure evil. and the island exists purely as a containment system for it. jacob's job is the same as desmond's - he is 'manning the station,' ensuring the safety and protection of the rest of the world, and like desmond in the hatch, jacob is waiting for his replacement to come.

i'm guessing that it was the egyptians who discovered the island's powers, built the donkey wheel, tricked the monster into coming, then pushed the wheel, trapping him there forever. the monster says there's nothing to protect on the island, because he is the purpose of the island. it's only true function is to be his prison, all of its time and space manipulation properties exist to keep the world safe from the dangers contained within - and the only person who can release him is jacob's successor.

i have a sneaking feeling that in the parallel timeline, desmond is jacob's sucessor, echoing his 'savior of the world' position in the hatch, and that his appearance on the plane, reading (just like jacob before meeting locke), he touches jack just like jacob during their handshake, and then his mysterious disappearance, were all jacob-style 'pushes' to bring about his replacement. somehow, in the parallel timeline, is desmond is back 'manning the hatch' on a cosmic level? though, seeing as how the island is underwater in this timeline, there are still a million questions to answer before any of that will fully make sense.

6. preboomer.

nemesis: so what do you say james? are you ready to go home?
sawyer: hell yes
(boom)

this preboomer is more of a punchline than a jawdropper, which occurred (for me) during the cave revelation.

the final scene between nemesis and sawyer is eerily reminiscent of the scene between inman and desmond during the season 2 finale. desmond discovers that inman had been repairing his boat, and planning to abandon him, leaving him to push the button by himself. in their final fight, inman asks desmond to leave the island with him.

inman: want to come with me?
desmond: come where? what about the button?
inman: screw the button, man. who knows if it's even real?
desmond: that's not what you said when you were going on and on about dams and electromagnetics and failsafes!
inman: well, i was drunk.
desmond: why did you lie to me?
inman: i lied to you because i needed a sucker to save the world after i left.
desmond: you crazy old bastard! you stole my life!!
inman: oh, come on.
desmond: what else did you lie to me about?! what else? tell me?!

the same situation is echoed in the nemesis' struggle to leave the island. he needs those on the list to either die, join him (possibly the same as dying), or take over for jacob (and subsequently release him). in all circumstances, he must wait until the game is fully played out. it means that in order for the endgame to take place, both jacob and nemesis (and all parties affiliated with either side) are simply waiting for those final names to be crossed out. let me tell you, my excitement over this revelation nearly caused me to use allcaps here (though rob talked me out of it) -- finally, we finally have the true payoff to the 'you need to come back' storyline!!! all of it, all of it originates from jacob's search for a successor, and nemesis needing to place his man in that position. finally that huge gaping hole in the narrative drive of seasons 4 and 5 is filled!

(however, we still don't fully understand what ben's knowledge of the situation is/was. ben was a driving force in the 'we have to go back' storyline, and it seems now that he's totally unaware of the island's big picture mechanisms. ben's actions during that period are still kind of sketchy - why exactly did he need to kill locke? was it simply because they needed a christian shepard proxy onboard ajira 815? if the show answers those questions, i'll be really really happy.)

if nemesis can place sawyer as jacob's replacement, sawyer will release him - but since sawyer chose not to accept the mantle, perhaps nemesis now plans to 'infect' sawyer and use him as a disciple to facilitate a global pandemic. should be interesting.

7. best moments

i have absolutely no gripes about this episode. it was beautifully shot, an intelligent, subtle reflection of season 1, and it was filled with great moments. my favs:

ben's lie to ilanna about whether the black smoke also killed jacob. '..yes.'
ben's eulogy at locke's funeral - i loved this both for the honest performance by michael emerson, as well as the momentousness of burying this body that's been dead only two weeks, but took two years of storytelling to put into the ground.
'weirdest damn funeral i've ever been to.'
the shot of the cliffs sawyer and nemesis climb down to get to the cave
helen asking locke 'what are the chances of meeting a spinal surgeon?'
locke telling helen that 'miracles don't happen.'

this week's episode, 'lighthouse,' is jack's, and it will likely be counterpoint to 'white rabbit,' in which jack first saw the ghost of his father on the island. in the flashback, jack learned of his father's death, and identified the body in australia. i expect the theme of 'lighthouse' will be reunification - in the parallel story, jack will have to reclaim his father's missing body, and on the island, will jack finally confront that pesky christian shepard ghost? apparently nemesis can no longer change form, so perhaps jack will instead see the jacob version of this ghost..

the success of this episode deepens my disappointment in 'what kate does:' what a lost opportunity to explore her character. hopefully the rest of this season can maintain this level of intelligence and sensitivity. once again this was inspiring, top notch television. while the show hasn't quite won back the full, implicit trust i once gave it, i have absolute faith that it can. i'm expecting to see everyone's best work, and i'm hoping we haven't seen anything yet.

lost 6.3 'what kate does'

2010-02-16T12:00:00.000-08:00

written by: eddie kitsis and adam horowitz, who have a snarky writing style that suits 'exposé' and hurley's episodes, but not here, and not at this point in the narrative. too many jokes in the wrong places, as well as an apparent disconnect with the audience's investment and frustrations. now, if they'd had the guts to just run over dr. arzt, i'd forgive them.

directed by: paul edwards, who's first episode of 'lost' was 'what kate did.' here was his chance to close out his career with 'lost' on a high note, and come full circle. i felt like there was some mismatch here between director and writers - eddie and adam were writing an episode unlike the ones they usually do, and edwards perhaps didn't know how to properly handle their comic style.

director of photography: stephen st. john, who i think is new to the show. this week didn't give us any new locations, mostly taking place at the temple and the hospital, with a pit stop at the docks and the ruined dharma barracks. if the show is going to live up to season 1 on a cinematic level, it will need to find more moments to luxuriate in the locations, and it will have to be more visually brave than is has been. every time i rewatch the pilot, i'm surprised by how scaled down the show has become over the years.

nutshell: this episode made me realize the narrative potential of the parallel story, but it's unfortunate that the writing didn't live up to it. while i don't think it was a terrible episode, i understand why so many people were frustrated, especially after such a great start. sadly, perhaps the cleverest thing about it was the title.

issues:

• parallel timeline:

kate
claire
ethan

• original timeline:

sayid
dogen
jack
claire

• primary gripe
• preboomer

• parallel timeline:

lets hope this is the 'end' of arzt. har har..

the challenge with the parallel timeline structure is that we were all asking 'why should we care about the sideways story?' but done well, the sideways story reminds us who these people were at their core, without the island. it shows us how they've grown and changed over the years by directly juxtaposing who they were with who they are now. it's doing the same thing that the flashbacks once did. but it also demands that the writing be rock-solid because the parallel stories must be driven almost entirely by character choices, rather than outside plot elements.. at least until our patience pays off and darlton finally unload the mysterious connection between the parallel and original timelines.

the best episodes this season will be the ones that deal honestly with the characters, pointing them on trajectories that are logical and in line with who we discovered them to be during the first three seasons of flashbacks.

i think this is an episode that probably worked much better on paper. eddie kitsis and adam horowitz, promoted to executive producers last year, are mythlogical drivers of the writing staff. they love to bring minor background characters to the forefront, expecially dr. arzt, frogurt, and little known others (hence the ludicrous expansion of aldo from season 3). they also have a specific writing voice that works great for hurley's episodes and more tongue in cheek episodes like the excellent 'expose.'

unfortunately their sarcastic humor was deeply misplaced in this episode, dropping too much self referential humor, the stuff with aldo (remember him?), the arzt stuff, the zombie joke (hurley asks sayid if he's a zombie) was a fun shoutout to fans of the podcast (damon and carlton have been promising for years that season 7 of 'lost' would be the 'zombie season'), but didn't quite work in the context of the episode.

1. kate

well, what does kate do? i suppose the parallel story is meant to hinge around her decision to return to where she kicked claire out of the cab and help her out in some way. in concept, it's a cool juxtaposition - with the plane crash, it takes kate more than three years to go back for claire, and here she sees a photo and does it on the very same day.

what i don't know is where they plan to go with kate's story from here on out - she has claire's credit card, so she's somewhat trackable. how will her story be woven in with the other characters after this point? has she served her parallel universe purpose with claire by suggesting that she keep her child, thereby uniting claire and aaron in at least one universe?

i like this interview with evangeline lily because she talks about the differences between the parallel kate, and the island kate so clearly. unfortunately the actual writing and directing of the episode don't demonstrate that at all. critics of her acting would say that you can't actually tell she's doing anything different as an actress, but i happen to be of the camp that thinks she is great. i want the show to give her the same narrative drive that she expresses here: island kate is completely over jack, she's gone to trial for her crimes, has spent three years raising a child, mostly by herself, and cares only about reuniting that child with his mother. by contrast, lily describes parallel kate as an overgrown childish thrillseeker who gets off on the danger of being on the run and courting risky situations.

where is the parallel story going to take this kate? to jail? to trial? death? will it reunite her with jack somehow? the seeds are there - kate has his sister's credit card..

2. claire

here was a fantastic opportunity to reintroduce us to claire, who we haven't seen in over a year - it was also a missed opportunity to refresh our memories about her bigger story; the boyfriend who walked out on her, the psychic, richard malkin, who freaked out and then insisted that she raise the child herself, then mysteriously decided that it would be ok for her to give the kid up for adoption if she gave the child up to a couple in los angeles.. claire's assessment of the situation was that malkin knew the plane would crash and deliberately placed her on the plane to ensure that she would raise the child herself.

so the question is - how does the absence of the island affect malkin's intentions? what is malkin's relationship to the island? was he once an other? did malkin just deliberately set claire up with a flaky couple? was this simply an adoption-gone-wrong? in this universe, is it still important that claire raise the child herself? they wasted a great opportunity to satisfactorily handle these questions.

one way they could have done this would be to have ethan behind the door of the mysterious couple wanting to adopt aaron. this would have been a much creepier and interesting choice than the hospital setting. instead give ethan a monologue about how his wife died, and he just can't take on the responsibility of raising a child.. which would echo his story from the missing pieces about how his wife died in childbirth.. but introducing this lindsey baskum character (an anagram for 'used by malkins' hrm), and then giving her an irritating, teary monologue is not a satisfying way to close out the biggest mystery of claire's original story. also: making characters cry a lot is not a good way to recall our memories of season one.

the mysterious relationship between the timelines is hinted at when claire mysteriously 'knows' that the child's name is aaron. and there's also a brief reaction shot of kate that seems to register some recognition in her face upon hearing the name as well.

3. ethan

while i think he would have been better placed as the adoptive parent, the most interesting revelation of the episode was ethan's presence at claire's hospital (amazingly, it's a different hospital from jack's!), and that his name is now ethan goodspeed, rather than ethan rom. remember ethan was born on the island, delivered by juliet, and was the child of horace and amy goodspeed. it seems that in this timeline, after ethan was evacuated from the island, it sunk, and he had no place to go back to. he was never recruited by the hostiles (who changed his last name, though they didn't see any need to change ben's last name), yet still continued a career in prenatal care.

there was some interesting misdirection during the ethan scene:oh no! is ethan still bad? oh no! is he going to do something bad to claire? oh no! was aaron meant to be born on the island and nowhere else? now that would have been interesting.. imagine if this had turned into a grisly death scene for claire, the one we feared would happen to sun if she didn't get off-island in time. ethan could redeem himself by heroically attempting to save her. the scene raised all of those possibilities and paid none of them off. is this going to be the happy fun time timeline?

there's a fun juxtaposition where ethan says 'i don't what to stick you with any needles if i don't have to.' of course, the irony is that he spent a good deal of season 1 sticking needles into claire (see photo above).

what else remains to be said about the parallel timeline? i think we're just going to have to be patient. it looks like this season is unraveling the episodes in roughly the same character order as season 1 - which means it goes kate, locke, jack, sun, charlie, sawyer, sayid, claire.. so tonight's episode is locke, which should mean a generous unloading of mythological data as well as a fairly intriguing parallel storyline.

oh yes, much has been made of this screenshot showing the date on claire's sonogram as october 22, 2004, pushing the date of flight 815 up by a month. well, gregg nations, script coordinator for the show has essentially confirmed that the date was yet another prop error, making two for two this season after sayid's botched passport in the premiere (the fine print says iran instead of iraq. oops). i'm really astonished because it takes a considerable amount of effort to create these props, and to shoot the closeups. plus, anyone on the crew knows that the show is designed to be freeze-framed and analyzed. i mean, to mess up sept 22, 2004 is, like, messing up one of the numbers. someone on props should be fired.

original timeline:

this portion of the story was equally frustrating. the high point was a good performance by josh holloway, though the logistics of that wedding ring have me puzzled. he buried the ring in the floorboards of their house? when was he planning on digging that up and proposing? he never felt like mentioning the whole marriage thing during events leading up to the incident? if they knew last year that the ring was in there, it would have been a great teaser to show his desire to get back to their house one last time before leaving on the sub. instead this felt like a plot element shoehorned into the narrative to give the character a physical trinket to cry over. if i wasn't hung up on these details, if it felt like the proposal was something organic that he'd genuinely been planning (or that the writers had genuinely been planning), i could have taken the emotional journey. but instead i felt somewhat manipulated. it's that 'this is a crying scene' kind of manipulation that makes me worry about what we're in for the rest of the season. especially when the showrunners talk about it being 'like season 1.' i pray that this isn't what they think season 1 was about. it was about characters, not crying. hopefully this is just an early misstep.

usually the second episode (or, hour 3) unloads the big exposition for the course of the season. in season 4 we got the excellent 'confirmed dead' that introduced us to the freighter science team. last year at this time was 'jughead,' both definitive episodes for the arcs of the seasons. so it was disappointing that at this point in the show for season 6, it doesn't feel like we've seen 'the thing' that's going to define the ending of the show/season. that may be because they're following the first season character order, and it just didn't make sense to shoehorn 'the thing' into kate's episode - we didn't see any of the beach/statue story, so tonight's episode will likely not contain any temple, typewriters, baseballs, or pills. whew.

1. sayid

another missed opportunity: torturing sayid. having dogen begin by blowing ash over sayid was a dramatic mistake. this action made it obvious that the intent was to diagnose, and that the diagnosis would have something to do with smokey. rather than identifying with sayid's horror at being tortured, i found myself on dogen's side, studying sayid's reactions to see if he betrays any signs of smokey or jacob's nemesis. i also found myself making whimsical note of the irony of seeing sayid tortured.. not the best way to structure that scene. it should have been shot from sayid's perspective, not dogen's, and it should have felt like truly random torture of the exact style he once administered himself. we should have wondered if these temple people are actually in the business of enforcing poetic justice, and then surprised to discover the true purpose.

we still don't know what sayid is now. or rather, what he's going to become when 'it reaches his heart.' all that we've previously seen on the show of the infection is rousseau's team, who seemed to appear totally normal and then would suddenly try to kill her. if sayid starts doing that it could get interesting.

2. dogen

there are so many 'leaders' of the others now that it's confusing. remember the 'sherrif' isabel, who branded juliet on her back for killing pickett? when she came into the show, ben said she outranked him. was she visiting from the temple to administer justice? where does alpert fall into this hierarchy? it seems like every season these people have another level of management to conquer. i would like an office-style organizational chart drawn up detailing who answers to whom, please.

the questions we're supposed to be asking about dogen: what was he typing before he found out sayid was still alive? why the f does he have a baseball on his desk? what is his relaitonship to jacob and his nemesis? does anyone at the temple have any idea what's happened at the statue? did the others run out of batteries for their walkie talkies? what are those plants growing in his office? why is it important that all the people on jacob's list remain at the temple? if sayid failed the test, why couldn't they just kill him and be done with it? what is in the pill? why does it have to be taken willingly? what would happen to sayid if he did take it? what kind of poison listens to your 'intent' before activating? i'm spiralling here people, help me.

3. jack

argh so many reasons to be frustrated by this episode, not least of all because the characters are also frustrated. the introduction of that damned pill just made my heart sink. not an interesting thing to make our beloved characters debate over for an hour. were they trying to do something like 'the button?' i can only hope that like 'the button,' patience will pay off and there will be interesting answers to what the pill is about.

it seems like jack is now just being argumentative for the sake of it. he's got a long way to climb this season if he's going to be a legitimate leader again.

one thing i've realized during this episode is that for the people who landed in 1977, only kate and jin have clear objectives. sawyer has nothing. sayid has nothing. jack has nothing. hurley has nothing. one of the inherent strengths of season 1 was that everyone was working toward the same goal, even if they were incapable of working together. the show needs to state its season goal quickly, or it's going to get tiring fast. fingers crossed for tonight.

4. claire

so claire is now setting traps similiar to rousseau's, and has apparently been 'taken' by the infection that rousseau's team fell to in 1988. well this raises all kinds of questions. was rousseau actually the sick one? how exactly does this sickness manifest itself, and how is it related to smokey/nemesis and his ability to take the form of dead bodies on the island? is this going to answer what desmond's injections were about?

the sickness was relatively low on my list of mysteries demanding answers, but if it ties into the bigger picture, i'm happy to see it addressed.. (you hear me, show? tie into something larger.) even if it's eventually going to tie in, if we don't have that assurance, this is when it feels like the audience is being fed filler. enough fans complained of this to prompt damon to address it in his twitter: "For those of you complaining of "filler." Seriously. PLEASE WATCH NCIS: LOS ANGELES. I promise not to hold it against you."

it looks like claire has been living in the jungle for three years - and after being 'infected,' probably was not flashing through time with the rest of the survivors. i'm looking forward to finding out what happened to her.. it's another cool throwback to season 1, where claire disappeared from the show for several weeks after being abducted by the others. here is the same story arc, only played out on a larger scale. looking forward to seeing exactly what happened.

• primary gripe

oh so many gripes. my major gripe though is the scenes with aldo that just did not fit. i'm not sure if the problem lies in the writing, the directing, or possibly a mismatch between writers and director. rob mcelhenny's cameo in season 3 was fine because he had almost no lines and was knocked out quickly, but here he was not only given lines, but seemed to be encouraged to reprise his character from 'it's always sunny in philadelphia.' i love that show, but that show does not belong in 'lost.' what should have been funny was groaningly bad, and took me out of the show completely. the scenes would have been much much better served by a mysterious badass other like ms klugh, friendly, mikhail.. anyone!!

• preboomer

rousseau'd claire steps out from behind the trees. nice wtf face from jin (essentially his same wtf face from meeting rousseau in 1988), as well as a corresponding wtf face from claire. but the real shocker about this preboomer isn't that claire has returned to the island story, it's that jin's leg is in a bear trap. oww, that totally sucks for jin. dip him in the temple pool, i guess, if it still works. please episode 4, reward our patience!

lost 6.1 'la x'

2010-02-07T22:01:00.000-08:00

written by: damon lindelof and carlton cuse, of course.

cinematography by: michael bonvillain, who, between seasons of 'lost,' shot the very enjoyable 'zombieland.' some great shooting challenges here handled really well - duplication of LAX in hawaii, the amazing reveal of the temple (did they build that giant set??), and its inner chamber, and the (much larger than before, but i'll forgive it) hatch implosion site. also, excellent lighting reference to 'apocalypse now' in the way locke/nemesis is lit while speaking from the shadows. this ep looked great.

nutshell: this is what we've been building toward for three years: landing the plane, and seeing the paths of our beloved characters had the island never interefered. and after all the bellyaching about 'why should i care what happens if they're just going to undo it,' no one was more surprised to be totally enraptured by the alt story than i.. the subtle juxtapositions to events in season 1 are elegant and exquisite. what will make season 6 fly is absolute respect for the characters - show us what really would have gone down had the plane landed. for me the bar for the final season was whether the show could win back fans of season 1.. this device just may do it. i can't wait to see how it plays out. in short: my mind was blown, i laughed, i got teary, and i was in suspense. excluding the pilot, this was the best of all the season premieres.

new storytelling device, new blog format:

the sideways timeline

desmond
charlie
boone
kate
claire
sun and jin
hurley
the tailies?
jack and locke

the island story

jacob
jacob's nemesis
ben
juliet
cindy!

minor gripe
another detail
preboomer

• the sideways timeline

cindy in the pilot episode on the left, and in 'la x' on the right. excellent hair reproduction, i must say.

many people are confused! first point of confusion: if the bomb reset the timeline, why is the island story still happening? second point of confusion: why is the island underwater in the sideways timeline? third point of confusion: are these flashbacks? when it whooshes, what exactly are we seeing?

here's what's happening:

there are two stories happening now. at some point, possibly when juliet ignited jughead, the timeline split into two branches. the show is simultaneously showing us a) what happens to our characters if jughead 'worked,' and b) what happens if jughead doesn't work. this is why we see her hit the bomb twice during the episode. it sounds confusing, but this will actually be much easier to keep track of than last year when we would essentially have 3 stories (1977, 2007, + flashbacks). this year is about showing us the consequences of choice - what is the larger price of setting off the bomb? did it remove jacob's touches from the everyone's lives? will rose die from cancer? will locke find his true redemption? what if they set off the bomb and nothing happened? what if they set off the bomb and it changed everything? is the entire parallel story a grand scale course correction, eventually leading to the exact same ending as the island story? the time time travel and paradox stories on this show are over. season 6 is about exploring the long and short-term consequences of character's choices by juxtaposing events in the sideways timeline with the original.

the sound effect that transitions between the parallel timelines is slightly different - it how has a higher pitched sound incorporated into the whoosh, that is reminiscent of the time flashes experienced by the survivors in season 5. in future episodes we'll be able to differentiate between traditional flashbacks and flashsideways by listening closely to the transitioning sound effect.

the shaving injury that transcends space and time.

damon and carlton are insistent on calling these flashes 'sideways' and not 'alternate.' they want us to understand that this is not a 'dream' outcome, or a 'possible' outcome. the events in the sideways timeline are real and have consequences. what we don't know yet is how these two timelines are related to each other. and to that damon and carlton have said: 'be patient.' we don't know what it is yet, but that cut on jack's neck is going to be a major link between the two timelines.

2007 (linear story): as expected, jack, kate, jin, sawyer, miles, hurley, sayid, and even juliet were timeflashed back to 2007, probably the exact moment jacob was killed, and the spring went dark. jacob knew this, which is why he just stood there when ben stabbed him. these are also the people he meant were 'coming,' not ilana's people on the ajira flight. i criticized the show last season for inserting a 3 year break into the linear island story (in addition to throwing time travel into the mix). we'll get a better picture of the season as a whole coming up, but it looks like we are going to have two linear timelines happening in separate universes, possibly making this the easiest season to follow, ever.

2004 (parallel timeline): we are entering into this sideways story from the same moment that the original pilot episode gave us our very first flashback: jack looking out the window of the plane. the differences are both subtle and obvious. jack is sitting in a different section of the plane - we no longer see the plane's wing out his window. his conversation with cindy is slightly different. she only gives him one bottle of liquor instead of two.. the turbulence passes and (gasp!), bernard returns from the bathroom! every moment of this sideways story was exquisitely crafted. this final season has so much potential - because it's really getting back to the core of who our beloved characters were in their flashback stories, before the crash. let's look at each person's similarities and differences in this new trajectory:

1. desmond

well, first of all, he's on the plane! what!? why!? how!? well, let's consider - if the island is underwater, desmond is totally free of his responsibility to push the button. he is also wearing a wedding ring. is desmond married to penny in the sideways story? penny must have been born before 1977 off-island, so she's out there somewhere, but did charles widmore make it off the island before it sunk? do desmond and penny still have a child? did they name their child charlie after her deceased father? also, jack seems to recognize him. did jack and desmond have the same meeting that once occurred at the stadium?

i'm going to say not likely. in the original timeline, when jack entered the hatch and first saw des on the island, he recognized him immediately. so, is jack having a deja vu from the sideways universe? did they still train together at the stadium, but not have the conversation? did desmond still need to race around the world in order to win the approval of charles widmore?

when jack returns from having saved charlie's life, desmond is gone. jack looks around and doesn't see him anywhere. rose and bernard were asleep. is desmond time flashing again? or, perhaps, universe hopping? is this what ms. hawking meant when she said the island wasn't done with him yet? this is a good sign that desmond's arc on the show is not yet over.

2. charlie

if his story is the same, charlie is returning from australia having just visited his brother who refused to reivive drive shaft. his suicide attempt makes sense in this context - and the introduction of jack into this storyline is also logical. and - jack needed a pen to save charlie! oh the irony.. in the pilot, jack sends boone on a false mission for a pen just to get him away. what remains to be seen is if charlie has any future in the parallel story, or if this is his only appearance. it would be a mistake to contrive the parallel story into every possible happy ending - it wouldn't be fair to the story or characters, but it's possible that by season's end, the writers will find a way to bring charlie and claire back together.

3. boone

his scene was wonderful. also, notice frogurt asleep between them. the scene encapsulated the season 1 relationship and dynamic between these two men perfectly. another change here is that shannon is not on the plane - having decided to stay in the abusive relationship she summoned boone to rescue her from. of course the real reason shannon wasn't in the scene is because the producers were unable to sign maggie grace, but it's possible we may see her by season's end. i would love to see the show address the sayid/shannon relationship again in some way, any way. so much focus has been put back on nadia, that it's easy to forget sayid had this relationship. i'd love to know if the original script included an encounter between the two in the parallel story.

4. kate

damon has confirmed in the podcast that the 'america's most wanted' video screened at comiccon is canon, meaning the kate's trajectory is different, but mostly the same. will she run into jack again? considering that she's now hijacked a taxi holding his half-sister, this could be the path through which they meet. it made perfect sense that kate would try to run at the first opportunity. edward mars is probably the most inefficient us marshall in history, losing kate again and again. an interesting difference between our original kate and the parallel kate is that in the original timeline, kate went searching the island for mars' halliburton case. she wasn't interested in the guns it contained, but rather the toy airplane her childhood friend tommy had given her.

in the parallel story, kate abandons the hallibuton case in the bathroom without a second thought. is tommy still alive? is parallel kate not obsessed with trinkets? the next episode will be kate-centric and is titled 'what kate does,' a lovely inversion of the season 2 episode 'what kate did.' so, what does kate do? folks, this is probably going to be the last kate episode. as the final season progresses, we will move closer to the final piece of the endgame, but with each episode we're also saying goodbye to each character, as it's the last time that they will have a full hour devoted to them. i'm excited, anxious, and a little sad to see each person's big goodbye.

5. claire

we got one shot of claire! because the next episode is kate-centric, i have a feeling we will finally also see claire in the island story - since claire is the entire reason kate returned there. here's what i'm hoping to find out this season in regards to claire: who was the couple in la that wanted to adopt aaron? what is her psychic's relationship to the island? was he an other? how will jack and claire discover their relationship to each other in the parallel story? where will aaron ultimately end up?

6. sun and jin

oh this one is interesting. first off, they are not married. they do not have wedding rings, and the guard calls her 'ms paik,' instead of 'ms. kwon.' also, was sun lying about not knowing english, or in the parallel timeline did she not have a reason to run from jin? my theory: sun's father, being a business associate of charles widmore, was subtly course-corrected when widmore was killed in the jughead explosion. while sun's father is still a tyrant, events reveal to sun her father's true nature. jin is still working for him, but the wedding hasn't happened yet. they are on the plane to elope. it's possible sun never took english lessons (and thus never had the affair), or it could be that both of them learned english in order to prepare for their new life together in the states. we still need to find out what the wad of cash was for - it seemed to be a surprise to sun. some people have pointed out that jin is back to being his original assholish self - yes, but after rewatching the pilot, i think he's marginally nicer than he was originally. when he tells her to button up in the parallel story, it's not with the open hostility of the original. one of the unfortunate consequences of sinking the island is that jin is now sterile again, and without some kind of intervention, sun will never give birth to ji yeon.

7. hurley

hurley is the most obvious example of how the timeline has been altered - he's now the luckiest guy in the world! here are the big questions i have: did he use the same numbers? did the sinking of the island interrupt the numbers transmission that leonard simms heard out at sea? did the sinking of the island somehow change the properties of the numbers? this was such a great reversal though - hurley's stories are always borderline slapstick, and i can't wait to see his final episode later this season, titled, of course, 'everyone loves hugo.'

8. the tailies

cindy!!!! wow. this episode was all about cindy! it was great to see her again, both in the parallel and island stories. conspicuously missing however are libby and mr. eko. were they on the plane and we just didn't see them (the way we didn't see claire until later?), or were they not on the plane at all?

i'm really excited to hear that libby will be returning this year, because there is a good chance to finally get some real closure on her character through the parallel story. will she and hurley end up happily ever after? does she still give desmond her boat? does she still have her kathy griffin wig?

what is mr. eko's path in los angeles? assuming he was on the plane - he would have been travelling to la to be a priest at a local church. if he's going to be written into the show later, it would be completely awesome to have him be the priest at ms. hawking's lamp post station church.

9. jack and locke

best scene of the episode. both have lost luggage (well, a little more than 'luggage' for jack), and so are stuck in the waiting area together. unlike the locke/boone scene, which paralleled the two character's relationship, this scene between jack and locke revealed how these two men might be destined to save each other in the real world. i slap my forehead now, but the obvious connection between jack, a spinal surgeon, and locke, a paraplegic, never occurred to me - because on the island locke told almost no one of his original state. rose knew. walt knew, and ben knew. that was it. the possibilities for the paralel story are thrilling - will jack be locke's savior and cause him to walk again? will locke become a surrogate father figure to jack? which ever way this story goes, i have a feeling i'll be crying my eyes out about it.

• the island story

everyone on the island is in the same time period! two different places, but the same time period! at the swan station, the entire first hour of the island story consisted of our heroes orienting themselves (and us) and digging juliet out of the imploded hatch. the second hour of their story was the attempt to save sayid by dipping him in magic water.

at the foot statue, jacob's nemesis reveals himself, finally! he throws people around, tells richard he looks better than he did when he was in chains, hits him in the throat and walks off with his body.

1. jacob

jacob's plan is starting to reveal itself. he went to hurley precisely because hurley would be able to see him after he'd been stabbed by ben.. which means jacob must have known that hurley et. all would flash back to 2007 at that exact moment. jacob sure knows a lot about what's going to happen. jacob orders that sayid be brought to the temple, and provides instruction to the dwellers there that if sayid dies, they are in big trouble. why did jacob touch sayid in los angeles the day nadia was killed? part of the reason had to be that ben be shot and dipped in the pool, but was it also so that sayid could be dipped in the pool himself? wtf happens when you dip in the pool? did jacob inhabit sayid's body, or was the healing effect of the water just delayed?

so it turns out that jacob's guitar case was in fact a message intended for the inhabitants of the temple. we still don't know exactly what the message says, but we can presume that it at least has the names of those who would arrive along with the giant ankh. how did dogen know the message would be inside? is this an established delivery system for jacob's messages? did jacob take advantage of ajira's proxying of flight 815 in order to assure his message 'whooshed' off the plane into the proper place? again, jacob sure seems to know a hell of a lot about what's going to happen. quiz: how many days have passed for hurley since he saw jacob in the cab? (answer below)

2. jacob's nemesis

see last week's entry for more info on jacob's nemesis, the smoke monster, and how this person operates. this episode has confirmed a lot of my theories. the mystery surrounding this guy now is: what next? where is 'home' for someone who has been fighting a metaphysical war for 150 years? what is he going to do with richard? what exactly is the ash that repels him when in smoke monster form?

here is the corresponding shot from 'apocalypse now:'

3. ben

michael emerson does the wtf face better than anyone. his intake upon seeing locke's true dead body.. amazing. his effortless lie to richard after he exits the statue 'everything's fine!,' hilarious. his slow turn after smokey's rampage to find locke standing behind him, fantastic. it will be interesting to see what they do with ben from here on out. he's no longer leader, and he's been used by jacob's nemesis. his feud with widmore seems fleeting by now. does ben exist in the parallel story? was he killed on the island as a boy, or will we run into him in the parallel world, perhaps as an insurance salesman, or child psychologist?

4. juliet

juliet and her ex-husband, right before alpert throws a bus at him.

how did juliet know that 'it worked' before she died? her last words to sawyer were 'we should get coffee sometime. we can go dutch.' i'll bet money she says this to him when she eventually runs into him in the parallel story. without the island, though, juliet is a very different person. she's meek, indecisive, even clumsy. she gets walked on by her ex-husband. will sawyer awaken the tough girl within? some people wondered why juliet needed to die twice - i think it's because she's setting up two very important things: sawyer's trajectory for the final season, and the relationship between the parallel and island timelines. everything sawyer does from here on out will be partially motivated by juliet's death, and by season's end, we can look to her death scene as the first clue about how the timelines relate.

5. cindy!

we know now that cindy, zac and emma were not jumping through time during season 5 along with all the other crash survivors. they have clearly been living at the temple for the last three years, which means that they have somehow become indoctrinated as 'true' others. did they each go for a swim in the temple spring? some people were confused by these others living at the temple, but their presence has been established earlier in the show. in season 3, ben tells alex, rousseau, and carl to head for the temple - he tells them that there is a group of others living there, and that it's the only place where they will be safe. unfortunately they never made it. we still don't know what's been happening on the island during the three years that the oceanic six were self destructing on the mainland. were they just making beads and ships in bottles, waiting for ajira 316?

• minor gripe

the final shot of the opening scene, while a thrilling mythological puzzle-piece, was too overtly cgi. it's a tall order for an effects company - it unloads lots of information at once, and by being an unbroken shot, eliminates any confusion about it being a flashforward or flashback - it clearly states that in the parallel timeline, the island with its sonic fence, dharma barracks, and swingset, is underwater with ezra j. sharkington. i just wish it looked a bit more realistic.

• another detail

when sawyer wakes up in the temple, being tended to by kate, the scene is almost identical to when sawyer woke up in the hatch, being tended to by kate. it's a nice visual and verbal callback to s2.9, 'what kate did.'

• preboomer

sayid, after being well and truly dead, awakens with a wtf face and says 'what happened?' boom.

what happened indeed.. does jacob have the power to possess a body? we've never seen this type of power on the show before. it's not jacob's nemesis in sayid because nemesis doesn't possess that power. jacob's nemesis duplicates the body when taking its form. this is something different. did jacob bring sayid to the island knowing he'd die in the pool? did dying in the pool give jacob the right circumstances to enter sayid's body? is this show suddenly becoming 'dollhouse' now? why was the water murky? why didn't it heal mystic asian guy's hand? what is the history of the temple and the pool? what does kate do? any more questions? i could seriously write another 22 pages on this episode, but i don't have the luxury of 8 months to procrastinate again, so ask any questions below..

answer: 5 days