Listening to Celtic Thunder's new album, Take Me Home, gave me all sorts of fodder for filking. Here's a reflection by the speaking members of the Oceanic Six as they return to civilization, to the tune of the title track.
We Are Home
Jack: At my dad's urgin',
I became a surgeon.
Now I can focus on perfecting my skill.
Kate: I should find a lawyer,
And thanks to Sawyer,
I have a request to fulfill.
Hurley: My mom is waiting,
And I've been debating.
I might be ready to let Dad try again.
Sun: I'll have this baby,
Then I think that maybe
I'll go and track down Ben.
All: Home.
Yes, we are home,
The place we never thought we would see.
Sun: I wish that Jin was here with me.
All: But we are home!
Sayid: Nadia, where are you?
I've come too far to
Disregard the romance that I have dreamed of for years.
All: Faced with this ending,
No use pretending
Our eyes have been free of tears.
All: Home.
Yes, we are home,
The place we never thought we would see.
Kate: I wish that Sawyer was with me.
All: But we are home!
Jack: We are home after months away.
Hurley: Now I wonder if we'll stay.
Jack: Home.
(Sun and Kate: Jin and Sawyer.)
Sayid: Yes, we are home.
(Jack and Hurley: Claire and Charlie.)
Kate: The press is making a mighty fuss
(Sayid: Who knew that only six of us would return?)
Hurley: We wish our friends
(Sun: I'm so lonely)
Hurley: Were here with us.
(Sun: And I'm yearning to be with him again.)
Jack: But we are home!
Jack: Home.
(Sun and Kate: Jin and Sawyer.)
Sayid: Yes, we are home.
(Jack and Hurley: Claire and Charlie.)
Kate: The press is making a mighty fuss
(Sayid: Who knew that only six of us would return?)
Hurley: We wish our friends
(Sun: I'm so lonely)
Hurley: Were here with us.
(Sun: And I'm yearning...)
Jack: But we are home!
All: We are home!
Thursday, July 30, 2009
Monday, July 27, 2009
Penny Hume (Penny Lane, Paul McCartney)
Over the weekend, thousands of geeks converged in San Diego for the 2009 Comic-Con. Though I wasn't one of them, through the magic of eBay, I did manage to snag an official Ben Linus bobblehead, which captures the after-effects of his confrontation with Penny and Desmond in the fifth season. Here, then, to the tune of the Beatles' Penny Lane, is an ode to Penny, who's had to put up with an awful lot as Desmond's One True Love.
Penny Hume
Poor Penny Hume was separated from the one she loves.
He disappeared for years before the two were wed.
Though many others would have thought him dead,
She had faith instead.
In The Searcher she endeavored to discover him.
A chat with Charlie proved her hope was not in vain.
When she found him, nothing could restrain
Desmond's utter bliss.
What a kiss!
Penny Hume is Desmond's long-awaited wife.
She'd become the constant in his life,
The one who rescued him.
When Penny Hume and Desmond left the Oceanic Six,
They knew they'd have to have their wedding on the run.
In circumstances that were far from fun,
Penny bore a son.
Penny Hume has got a complicated life.
Ben is sowing seeds of strife.
He plots a mean attack
While Desmond steers his little family to Los Angeles
To meet the spooky mom of Daniel Faraday.
He doesn't mean to put her in harm's way,
But Ben plans to slay
Poor Penny Hume, whose father Widmore is a scallywag.
She doesn't want a jot to do with his affairs.
But avenging Benji doesn't care
That she's unaware.
So unfair!
Penny Hume is begging Ben to show some grace.
Then the boy named after Charlie Pace
Turns up and Ben relents.
Penny Hume is both a daughter and a wife,
But the role of mother saved her life.
Penny Hume.
Penny Hume
Poor Penny Hume was separated from the one she loves.
He disappeared for years before the two were wed.
Though many others would have thought him dead,
She had faith instead.
In The Searcher she endeavored to discover him.
A chat with Charlie proved her hope was not in vain.
When she found him, nothing could restrain
Desmond's utter bliss.
What a kiss!
Penny Hume is Desmond's long-awaited wife.
She'd become the constant in his life,
The one who rescued him.
When Penny Hume and Desmond left the Oceanic Six,
They knew they'd have to have their wedding on the run.
In circumstances that were far from fun,
Penny bore a son.
Penny Hume has got a complicated life.
Ben is sowing seeds of strife.
He plots a mean attack
While Desmond steers his little family to Los Angeles
To meet the spooky mom of Daniel Faraday.
He doesn't mean to put her in harm's way,
But Ben plans to slay
Poor Penny Hume, whose father Widmore is a scallywag.
She doesn't want a jot to do with his affairs.
But avenging Benji doesn't care
That she's unaware.
So unfair!
Penny Hume is begging Ben to show some grace.
Then the boy named after Charlie Pace
Turns up and Ben relents.
Penny Hume is both a daughter and a wife,
But the role of mother saved her life.
Penny Hume.
Brother Desmond (Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da, Paul McCartney)
Since I snatched Penny up from the Beatles' catalog, I figured Desmond deserved the same treatment. Here's a LOST ditty to the tune of Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da, mostly inspired by the episode Catch-22.
Brother Desmond
Desmond, you're a coward and you just can't face
Marriage to your Scottish sweetheart Ruth.
Fear and not devotion brought you to this place.
It's time that you let Brother Campbell know the truth.
You're a drunk, not a monk, Brother Desmond!
God has other plans for you.
You're a drunk, not a monk, Brother Desmond!
God has other plans for you.
Desmond, you will have to make a sacrifice
In your quest to prove you're not too scared.
You won't find the years of isolation nice,
But with this month of silence, now you're more prepared.
You're a drunk, not a monk, Brother Desmond!
God has other plans for you.
You're a drunk, not a monk, Brother Desmond!
God has other plans for you.
In a decade or so, you will make a dashing groom.
You will cheekily smile as the priest declares you
Desmond and Penny Hume.
Happ'ly ever after won't come easy, Des.
Though you'll sometimes wish your life would end,
Put your trust in Penny when she plainly says
She loves you in her note in Our Mutual Friend.
You're a drunk, not a monk, Brother Desmond!
God has other plans for you.
You're a drunk, not a monk, Brother Desmond!
God has other plans for you.
In a decade or so, you will make a dashing groom.
You will cheekily smile as the priest declares you
Desmond and Penny Hume.
Happ'ly ever after won't come easy, Des.
Many troubles wait around the bend.
Someday, though, she'll help you banish emptiness,
And you will sail away on Our Mutual Friend.
You're a drunk, not a monk, Brother Desmond!
God has other plans for you.
You're a drunk, not a monk, Brother Desmond!
God has other plans for you.
What are you running to?
Get ready to find out.
Brother Desmond
Desmond, you're a coward and you just can't face
Marriage to your Scottish sweetheart Ruth.
Fear and not devotion brought you to this place.
It's time that you let Brother Campbell know the truth.
You're a drunk, not a monk, Brother Desmond!
God has other plans for you.
You're a drunk, not a monk, Brother Desmond!
God has other plans for you.
Desmond, you will have to make a sacrifice
In your quest to prove you're not too scared.
You won't find the years of isolation nice,
But with this month of silence, now you're more prepared.
You're a drunk, not a monk, Brother Desmond!
God has other plans for you.
You're a drunk, not a monk, Brother Desmond!
God has other plans for you.
In a decade or so, you will make a dashing groom.
You will cheekily smile as the priest declares you
Desmond and Penny Hume.
Happ'ly ever after won't come easy, Des.
Though you'll sometimes wish your life would end,
Put your trust in Penny when she plainly says
She loves you in her note in Our Mutual Friend.
You're a drunk, not a monk, Brother Desmond!
God has other plans for you.
You're a drunk, not a monk, Brother Desmond!
God has other plans for you.
In a decade or so, you will make a dashing groom.
You will cheekily smile as the priest declares you
Desmond and Penny Hume.
Happ'ly ever after won't come easy, Des.
Many troubles wait around the bend.
Someday, though, she'll help you banish emptiness,
And you will sail away on Our Mutual Friend.
You're a drunk, not a monk, Brother Desmond!
God has other plans for you.
You're a drunk, not a monk, Brother Desmond!
God has other plans for you.
What are you running to?
Get ready to find out.
Thursday, July 23, 2009
The Ring From My Hand (The Black Velvet Band, Traditional)
For a couple of seasons, one of the most enduring mysteries on LOST for me has been, "What will happen to Charlie's DS ring?" Ever since I found out that it was a precious family heirloom, I've been hoping that Liam would somehow end up with it, or at least someone would. The season finale opened a door, so here's hopin'! Here's a parody to the tune of the Irish Rovers' version of The Black Velvet Band.
The Ring From My Hand
His skills, they always surpassed mine.
He was clearly the king of the band.
But I wish the ring that I gave him
Was still sitting safe on my hand.
In a neat little town called Manchester,
We worked out our signature sound,
And many a musical masterpiece
We wrote in that neat little town
Till drug addiction oppressed me
And messed up the life I had planned.
I was sure he'd resist that temptation, so
I slipped him the ring from my hand.
His skills, they always surpassed mine.
He was clearly the king of the band.
But I wish the ring that I gave him
Was still sitting safe on my hand.
Well, we were in Finland one Christmas,
And Charlie was havin' a blast.
He had picked up a couple of groupies,
But I figured those flings wouldn't last.
Yeah, I knew he wanted a family;
Through him, the Pace line would expand.
It seemed fitting to give him the heirloom
That once sat on Great-granddad's hand.
His skills, they always surpassed mine.
He was clearly the king of the band.
But I wish the ring that I gave him
Was still sitting safe on my hand.
One morning, I woke up a father.
I hadn't seen Megan arrive.
It was just the reason I needed
To clean up my act and survive.
I felt I had run out of options;
I hoped Charlie might understand.
When I sold off his precious piano,
I left him the ring on his hand.
His skills, they always surpassed mine.
He was clearly the king of the band.
But I wish the ring that I gave him
Was still sitting safe on my hand.
Since Charlie was always my refuge,
A prince of a brother to me,
It appeared that the ring that provided our name
Was where it was destined to be.
But when Charlie crashed into the ocean,
Mum's legacy sank to the sand,
So I feel like I lost her again that day
And cringe at my unadorned hand.
His skills, they always surpassed mine.
He was clearly the king of the band.
But I wish the ring that I gave him
Was still sitting safe on my hand.
His skills, they always surpassed mine.
He was clearly the king of the band.
Yes, I wish the ring that I gave him
Was still sitting safe on my hand.
The Ring From My Hand
His skills, they always surpassed mine.
He was clearly the king of the band.
But I wish the ring that I gave him
Was still sitting safe on my hand.
In a neat little town called Manchester,
We worked out our signature sound,
And many a musical masterpiece
We wrote in that neat little town
Till drug addiction oppressed me
And messed up the life I had planned.
I was sure he'd resist that temptation, so
I slipped him the ring from my hand.
His skills, they always surpassed mine.
He was clearly the king of the band.
But I wish the ring that I gave him
Was still sitting safe on my hand.
Well, we were in Finland one Christmas,
And Charlie was havin' a blast.
He had picked up a couple of groupies,
But I figured those flings wouldn't last.
Yeah, I knew he wanted a family;
Through him, the Pace line would expand.
It seemed fitting to give him the heirloom
That once sat on Great-granddad's hand.
His skills, they always surpassed mine.
He was clearly the king of the band.
But I wish the ring that I gave him
Was still sitting safe on my hand.
One morning, I woke up a father.
I hadn't seen Megan arrive.
It was just the reason I needed
To clean up my act and survive.
I felt I had run out of options;
I hoped Charlie might understand.
When I sold off his precious piano,
I left him the ring on his hand.
His skills, they always surpassed mine.
He was clearly the king of the band.
But I wish the ring that I gave him
Was still sitting safe on my hand.
Since Charlie was always my refuge,
A prince of a brother to me,
It appeared that the ring that provided our name
Was where it was destined to be.
But when Charlie crashed into the ocean,
Mum's legacy sank to the sand,
So I feel like I lost her again that day
And cringe at my unadorned hand.
His skills, they always surpassed mine.
He was clearly the king of the band.
But I wish the ring that I gave him
Was still sitting safe on my hand.
His skills, they always surpassed mine.
He was clearly the king of the band.
Yes, I wish the ring that I gave him
Was still sitting safe on my hand.
Thursday, July 9, 2009
Tuesday, July 7, 2009
I'm His Mother (Flowers Never Bend With the Rainfall, Paul Simon)
Time for a little LOST again! Here's an Oceanic Six-era reflection by Kate to the tune of Simon and Garfunkel's Flowers Never Bend With the Rainfall.
I'm His Mother
There's a secret that I keep
That's robbed me of my sleep
Since James kissed me and leaped from the chopper.
I won't need an appeal,
But I can't help but feel
I've been sentenced to conceal this mighty whopper.
So, I'll continue to continue to declare
We left nobody there
And Aaron isn't Claire's.
I'm his mother.
He seems so still and small,
Like a perfect china doll,
But soon he'll start to scrawl his name on paper.
As he learns to read and write,
Will questions come to light?
I may find myself contrite about my caper.
Still, I'll continue to continue to declare
We left nobody there
And Aaron isn't Claire's.
I'm his mother.
I don't deserve Jack's scorn.
We thought that Claire was gone.
I was there when he was born and must protect him.
I can guarantee
That it would shatter me
Should someone crack the mystery and come collect him!
So, I'll continue to continue to declare
We left nobody there
And Aaron isn't Claire's.
I'm his mother.
I'm His Mother
There's a secret that I keep
That's robbed me of my sleep
Since James kissed me and leaped from the chopper.
I won't need an appeal,
But I can't help but feel
I've been sentenced to conceal this mighty whopper.
So, I'll continue to continue to declare
We left nobody there
And Aaron isn't Claire's.
I'm his mother.
He seems so still and small,
Like a perfect china doll,
But soon he'll start to scrawl his name on paper.
As he learns to read and write,
Will questions come to light?
I may find myself contrite about my caper.
Still, I'll continue to continue to declare
We left nobody there
And Aaron isn't Claire's.
I'm his mother.
I don't deserve Jack's scorn.
We thought that Claire was gone.
I was there when he was born and must protect him.
I can guarantee
That it would shatter me
Should someone crack the mystery and come collect him!
So, I'll continue to continue to declare
We left nobody there
And Aaron isn't Claire's.
I'm his mother.
Monday, June 8, 2009
"Don't Ever Tell Me What I Can't Do! Ever!"
From the beginning, John Locke has been one of the most intriguing characters on LOST, particularly since Walkabout. This single episode establishes so much essential information about the Island's Man of (apparently Misplaced) Faith: he knows his way around the jungle, he's handy with a knife, he and the Island have some sort of understanding, he used to be a belittled cubicle dweller, he was paralyzed when he boarded Flight 815. This last is, of course, the most tantalizing bit of all; for three seasons LOST kept us wondering exactly how he got into the wheelchair, and it's still something of a mystery how he got out of it. The Incident suggests Jacob, but given that Esau has been indirectly manipulating him since he was a baby, I wonder exactly at what point he started to get to John on the Island. Whatever the explanation for his returned mobility, in a show full of massive twists and turns, few moments can beat the wow factor of seeing John Locke wheeling through that office, yammering about "destiny" and bellowing, "Don't tell me what I can't do!"
There are hints, now that I watch it knowing what's to come. There's his "secret" admission to Walt that a miracle happened to him. There's the shot of him gazing incredulously at his wriggling toes, which is repeated twice in this episode, but then I just figured he was glad to be alive. Like Michael said, that anyone survived was a miracle. There's the fact that we never see him standing in his flashbacks, but then there was no reason for him to stand in those situations. Randy's obnoxious comments are more fitting now - and more insensitive. When John was flat on his back after the boar charged, it's now apparent that he was afraid the paralysis had returned, was afraid even to test and see whether that was the case. And of course, there was the wheelchair on the beach, the one John stares at as the episode concludes, willing it to burst into flames like the fuselage in front of which it sits. But John, sadly, is not done with wheelchairs yet...
John with a knife in hand is a formidable thing. A canteen was the only thing standing between a fatal blade and Hurley back in season three. Later that season, he knifed Naomi, and he came charging in again in season five to rescue Sawyer and Juliet from the '50s-era Others. In this episode, Sawyer is the one in uncomfortable proximity as the knife plunges into the other side of the two-person seat in which he's sitting; Jack's wry comment about John's aim - either really good or really bad - cracks me up. No wonder Sawyer doesn't think much of John's plan! Interesting, though, that Michael joins in, perhaps to atone for his surliness with John earlier. This allows Sun to be drawn more into the family's confidences as she agrees to babysit Walt, and her asthma remedy and decision to plant a garden are foreshadowed by her invention of toothpaste.
It's a shame that the warm glow of finding Vincent doesn't last very long. The episode basically begins with him barking his head off and annoying everyone - though it turns out he's just being a good guard dog, and all his racket alerts the castaways to two important pieces of information. There are boars on the island (which is blatantly Lord of the Flies), and they could be a source of food. And the rotting bodies in the fuselage are attracting dangerous animals, so it's time to do something about that. I find it interesting that throughout the series, Sayid is extremely concerned with the proper treatment of dead bodies. He objects heartily to the burning of the fuselage, with no regard for the religious beliefs of the victims; Jack, in exasperation, says, "We don't have time to sort out everybody's god," while Charlie quips, "Really? Because the last time I heard we were positively made of time." I think I have to side with Jack on this one, but it seems to reveal a certain lack of regard for religion in general, while Charlie's response, while flippant, may hint that he's more in line with Sayid, who later insists on bringing Naomi's body back to the freighter, who is on the Island in the first place because he needed to ensure that his friend received a proper burial, and who is seen praying on more than one occasion.
Jack also says, "Any bodies we bury are not gonna stay buried long." Oh, how true that seems to be! And it's not long after this that he starts seeing his father... That is, after his nearly episode-long conversation, or lack thereof, with Rose. They mostly just sit there together, quietly gazing out at the ocean, and though Boone sent Jack there to help Rose, I think it's Jack who actually gets the most out of the encounter. He really needs this opportunity for healing after his chaotic few days, really needs to spend some quiet time with someone who isn't looking to him to solve all her problems. I love her wryly letting Jack off the hook, telling him he doesn't have to keep his promise and stay with her until Bernard comes back from the bathroom! Her comment about Bernard's fingers swelling and her "always" wearing his wedding ring around her neck seems to suggest a slight inconsistency with S. O. S., which reveals that they're on their honeymoon; wouldn't this be the first time they've flown together, at least with a wedding ring? But I'd much rather have a minor inconsistency than no Rose and Bernard flashback.
Though in the beginning of season two, Hurley will tell Jack he has a crummy bedside manner, Rose compliments him now, but their reverie ends, once again, with Jack asserting his stubborn unwillingness to believe that anything unlikely could possibly be true. Rose is convinced that her husband is still alive; Jack says it's impossible. "They're probably thinking the same thing about us," is Rose's serene response, and that's our first strong hint that there may be other survivors we haven't encountered yet. Though Jack's take was more practical, I was inclined to believe Rose. Besides, this is immediately followed by Christian turning up in the jungle. Is Jack just cracking up? I'd say not, given that his appearance heralds John's arrival. But is it really Christian? Well, that's a very different matter...
Hurley plowing into Sawyer in Dave seemed so out of character that I completely forgot he and Sawyer had scuffled before, this time over the latter hoarding airplane peanuts. Hurley objects to Sawyer's selfishness, especially now that it's the last of the food. His annoyance with Sawyer continues, as he confides to Charlie on their fishing expedition that he's just glad to get away from that redneck. Oh, yeah, and the fuselage full of bodies. I love this scene because it allows Hurley and Charlie a chance to have a great time together as well as brush up on their survival skills. Their friendship is beginning to blossom. Meanwhile, there's just enough ill will between Hurley and Sawyer now to make the depth of their later friendship all the more powerful.
Shannon is pretty irritating in this episode once again, and I can't blame Boone for being frustrated with her. She sweet-talks Charlie into catching a fish for her, and he in turn gets Hurley to help, because he really doesn't know what he's doing. He devotes his day to catching that fish, and then once he presents it to her he comes to the realization that he has been used. I think this is the point at which he starts to lose romantic interest in Shannon - who showed no more interest in DriveShaft than anybody else has. It's a little pathetic the way he keeps bringing it up, but since that's the one thing in life he feels like he can be proud of, I guess it's pretty understandable. I do like the fact that he mentioned his grandfather to Shannon, and that he said, "God rest his soul," another indication of Charlie's Catholicism.
Although we don't see Claire for that much of the episode, in terms of defining her character, it's one of my favorites. She's the one who heads up the effort to glean as much information as possible about the deceased so she can give them a proper send-off; Jack doesn't want anything to do with it. As he will later state, he hates funerals. Claire is especially taken with Steve and Kristen, the couple who were planning their wedding. This convergence of a wedding and a funeral is significant for a show whose main musical theme is Life and Death, a show where bliss and tragedy always seem to accompany each other. In the midst of her recovery efforts, she finds Sayid's photos of Nadia and gives them to him, setting us up for his grand, tragic love story, and more immediately for Solitary.
While we don't see Hurley saying anything at the memorial service, my guess is that he does; I love that he is standing up there with her, apparently having planned the ceremony right alongside her, which makes perfect sense since he speaks at almost every funeral among the castaways that follows. Claire and Hurley have such a nice rapport, especially in these early episodes; I could almost see them getting together in the final season (assuming Charlie isn't zapped back into existence). I also love Sawyer showing his softer side by very awkwardly giving Claire some wallets he found while raiding the fuselage, much like he will later, on the advice of Hurley, give her a blanket, even more awkwardly.
Walkabout is one of the most significant episodes in all of LOST, mostly because of what it tells us about John, and in turn, the Island. And as much as I was disappointed to learn that John has been manipulated into thinking he is special for most of his life, the fact remains that when he landed on the Island, he could walk again. That's pretty special. How did it happen? Is Jacob responsible, or is it his nemesis? And do we really have to go through the last season without John Locke (and Terry O'Quinn as pseudo-Locke doesn't quite count) or is there any chance of seeing this incredibly intriguing character again?
There are hints, now that I watch it knowing what's to come. There's his "secret" admission to Walt that a miracle happened to him. There's the shot of him gazing incredulously at his wriggling toes, which is repeated twice in this episode, but then I just figured he was glad to be alive. Like Michael said, that anyone survived was a miracle. There's the fact that we never see him standing in his flashbacks, but then there was no reason for him to stand in those situations. Randy's obnoxious comments are more fitting now - and more insensitive. When John was flat on his back after the boar charged, it's now apparent that he was afraid the paralysis had returned, was afraid even to test and see whether that was the case. And of course, there was the wheelchair on the beach, the one John stares at as the episode concludes, willing it to burst into flames like the fuselage in front of which it sits. But John, sadly, is not done with wheelchairs yet...
John with a knife in hand is a formidable thing. A canteen was the only thing standing between a fatal blade and Hurley back in season three. Later that season, he knifed Naomi, and he came charging in again in season five to rescue Sawyer and Juliet from the '50s-era Others. In this episode, Sawyer is the one in uncomfortable proximity as the knife plunges into the other side of the two-person seat in which he's sitting; Jack's wry comment about John's aim - either really good or really bad - cracks me up. No wonder Sawyer doesn't think much of John's plan! Interesting, though, that Michael joins in, perhaps to atone for his surliness with John earlier. This allows Sun to be drawn more into the family's confidences as she agrees to babysit Walt, and her asthma remedy and decision to plant a garden are foreshadowed by her invention of toothpaste.
It's a shame that the warm glow of finding Vincent doesn't last very long. The episode basically begins with him barking his head off and annoying everyone - though it turns out he's just being a good guard dog, and all his racket alerts the castaways to two important pieces of information. There are boars on the island (which is blatantly Lord of the Flies), and they could be a source of food. And the rotting bodies in the fuselage are attracting dangerous animals, so it's time to do something about that. I find it interesting that throughout the series, Sayid is extremely concerned with the proper treatment of dead bodies. He objects heartily to the burning of the fuselage, with no regard for the religious beliefs of the victims; Jack, in exasperation, says, "We don't have time to sort out everybody's god," while Charlie quips, "Really? Because the last time I heard we were positively made of time." I think I have to side with Jack on this one, but it seems to reveal a certain lack of regard for religion in general, while Charlie's response, while flippant, may hint that he's more in line with Sayid, who later insists on bringing Naomi's body back to the freighter, who is on the Island in the first place because he needed to ensure that his friend received a proper burial, and who is seen praying on more than one occasion.
Jack also says, "Any bodies we bury are not gonna stay buried long." Oh, how true that seems to be! And it's not long after this that he starts seeing his father... That is, after his nearly episode-long conversation, or lack thereof, with Rose. They mostly just sit there together, quietly gazing out at the ocean, and though Boone sent Jack there to help Rose, I think it's Jack who actually gets the most out of the encounter. He really needs this opportunity for healing after his chaotic few days, really needs to spend some quiet time with someone who isn't looking to him to solve all her problems. I love her wryly letting Jack off the hook, telling him he doesn't have to keep his promise and stay with her until Bernard comes back from the bathroom! Her comment about Bernard's fingers swelling and her "always" wearing his wedding ring around her neck seems to suggest a slight inconsistency with S. O. S., which reveals that they're on their honeymoon; wouldn't this be the first time they've flown together, at least with a wedding ring? But I'd much rather have a minor inconsistency than no Rose and Bernard flashback.
Though in the beginning of season two, Hurley will tell Jack he has a crummy bedside manner, Rose compliments him now, but their reverie ends, once again, with Jack asserting his stubborn unwillingness to believe that anything unlikely could possibly be true. Rose is convinced that her husband is still alive; Jack says it's impossible. "They're probably thinking the same thing about us," is Rose's serene response, and that's our first strong hint that there may be other survivors we haven't encountered yet. Though Jack's take was more practical, I was inclined to believe Rose. Besides, this is immediately followed by Christian turning up in the jungle. Is Jack just cracking up? I'd say not, given that his appearance heralds John's arrival. But is it really Christian? Well, that's a very different matter...
Hurley plowing into Sawyer in Dave seemed so out of character that I completely forgot he and Sawyer had scuffled before, this time over the latter hoarding airplane peanuts. Hurley objects to Sawyer's selfishness, especially now that it's the last of the food. His annoyance with Sawyer continues, as he confides to Charlie on their fishing expedition that he's just glad to get away from that redneck. Oh, yeah, and the fuselage full of bodies. I love this scene because it allows Hurley and Charlie a chance to have a great time together as well as brush up on their survival skills. Their friendship is beginning to blossom. Meanwhile, there's just enough ill will between Hurley and Sawyer now to make the depth of their later friendship all the more powerful.
Shannon is pretty irritating in this episode once again, and I can't blame Boone for being frustrated with her. She sweet-talks Charlie into catching a fish for her, and he in turn gets Hurley to help, because he really doesn't know what he's doing. He devotes his day to catching that fish, and then once he presents it to her he comes to the realization that he has been used. I think this is the point at which he starts to lose romantic interest in Shannon - who showed no more interest in DriveShaft than anybody else has. It's a little pathetic the way he keeps bringing it up, but since that's the one thing in life he feels like he can be proud of, I guess it's pretty understandable. I do like the fact that he mentioned his grandfather to Shannon, and that he said, "God rest his soul," another indication of Charlie's Catholicism.
Although we don't see Claire for that much of the episode, in terms of defining her character, it's one of my favorites. She's the one who heads up the effort to glean as much information as possible about the deceased so she can give them a proper send-off; Jack doesn't want anything to do with it. As he will later state, he hates funerals. Claire is especially taken with Steve and Kristen, the couple who were planning their wedding. This convergence of a wedding and a funeral is significant for a show whose main musical theme is Life and Death, a show where bliss and tragedy always seem to accompany each other. In the midst of her recovery efforts, she finds Sayid's photos of Nadia and gives them to him, setting us up for his grand, tragic love story, and more immediately for Solitary.
While we don't see Hurley saying anything at the memorial service, my guess is that he does; I love that he is standing up there with her, apparently having planned the ceremony right alongside her, which makes perfect sense since he speaks at almost every funeral among the castaways that follows. Claire and Hurley have such a nice rapport, especially in these early episodes; I could almost see them getting together in the final season (assuming Charlie isn't zapped back into existence). I also love Sawyer showing his softer side by very awkwardly giving Claire some wallets he found while raiding the fuselage, much like he will later, on the advice of Hurley, give her a blanket, even more awkwardly.
Walkabout is one of the most significant episodes in all of LOST, mostly because of what it tells us about John, and in turn, the Island. And as much as I was disappointed to learn that John has been manipulated into thinking he is special for most of his life, the fact remains that when he landed on the Island, he could walk again. That's pretty special. How did it happen? Is Jacob responsible, or is it his nemesis? And do we really have to go through the last season without John Locke (and Terry O'Quinn as pseudo-Locke doesn't quite count) or is there any chance of seeing this incredibly intriguing character again?
Wednesday, June 3, 2009
Kate "I've Got Trust Issues" Austen Gets a Clean Slate
Tabula Rasa is about a lot of things, but it's mostly about Kate. This is when we get the mug shot and we find out she was the one in handcuffs - about the same time as, some distance away from Jack and the marshal, Team Sayid opts to give sweet, innocent Kate the gun. Hurley, the second castaway to find out about her outlaw status, is especially jumpy around Kate, though he still shakes hands with her. He's polite enough, but it ought to be pretty obvious to her that something is up from his jittery eagerness to get away from her.
Interestingly, both of the names that come up in the flashback resurface later in the series. Do I think that's significant? Probably not. But Kate takes on the name Annie, which of course is the name of Ben's childhood sweetheart, and she works for a guy named Ray, which is also the name of Jack's grandpa. The significance is probably more that they were running out of names... I like Ray, despite the fact that he turns Kate in; maybe we should see his phony arm as foreshadowing of his deception. I guess she likes him, too; she's hurt by the betrayal, but that doesn't stop her from ensuring his safety and trying to make certain he gets the reward money (the numerically significant $23,000). I think he's a good guy for the most part. It's just a shame that Kate's trust issues had to be confirmed as valid in such a dramatic way.
No wonder she doesn't trust Jack with her secret, though once he finds out half the story, I'm not too surprised she wants to tell him exactly what happened. It might make her come off as more sympathetic. I was annoyed with him for insisting he didn't need to know; maybe he doesn't, but we do! But that's a story for another season... And his point about being able to start over is a good one - though I wonder how many "Island as Purgatory" rumors were fueled by Jack's "Three days ago we all died"! I like how we get a hint about Evangeline Lilly's nationality when Annie claims she's from Canada, and how in the flashback, Kate wears stripes, whereas in the present, she wears orange, both prisoner duds. The marshal tells her, "You don't look free to me"; the Island is a prison too. Also, this is the first time we hear Patsy Cline in a Kate flashback. Few of the characters have a musician so associated with them.
Sawyer and Kate are thrown into one another's company quite a bit here. Sawyer calls her Freckles for the first time, and there's lots of snarky interplay between them. The scene back at the beach is especially good, and you think that Sawyer is talking Kate into putting the marshal out of his misery, but she delegates the job to him. There's an interesting blend here of Sawyer's hostility and compassion, and foreshadowing of his own first flashback as we see that killing is not something that comes easy to him. He talks a big talk, but when it comes down to it he does it wrong, probably in part because he's conflicted to begin with, though he's horrified when he realizes that he's just made this poor guy suffer even more.
The marshal becomes the first character to have some degree of resolution of past issues and then die, and ironically, Jack the savior is responsible for the first death that occurs among the castaways after the immediacy of the crash. At least, I read it as Jack doing something to end the marshal's life, though it isn't clear what, and of course he was a goner by then. Still, back on the mainland, I doubt Jack would have agreed to assisted suicide; he certainly was reluctant here, and only did it because Sawyer inadvertently made the situation so much worse. That conversation between them in the fuselage revealed so much about their personalities, and Sawyer encouraging Jack to forget the rules of civilization oddly comes into play at the end of the episode. Also, that suitcase blow to the head that knocked the marshal out reminds me of the toolbox that Jack took to the head in The Incident; I hope the doc comes out of it a little better!
Hurley spends this episode hovering around Jack, trying his best to be helpful, though uncomfortable with the marshal's condition and the revelation about Kate. I think my favorite Hurley scene in this episode is his conversation with Jack in which he postulates that the Smoke Monster is a dinosaur. Jack says it couldn't be a dinosaur because they're extinct; turns out it isn't, but it just goes to show how closed-minded Jack is. At this point, Jack has no inkling that this Island has been inhabited by humans before; what makes him so sure dinosaurs couldn't have survived here, and nobody knew about it? And anyway, that bird that calls Hurley's name looks like it could be prehistoric. Their chat reminds me of Xeno Lovegood calling Hermione "limited," and it comes up again and again, as early as the next episode when Jack insists that Rose's husband is dead because he simply can't imagine how anyone from the tail section could have survived.
Jack's furious "What did you do?" to Sawyer after he shoots the marshal reminds me of his reaction to John blowing up the submarine. John gets the last shot of the episode, an indication that the next episode will focus on him. Here, he's nothing but helpful, making a whistle to find Vincent and then showing Michael where to find the dog so he can take credit for returning him to Walt. I saw that scene at the very end of the episode when it actually aired, and it made me quite inclined to like John. All this after Michael has demonstrated such instant dislike for him. It seems he's simply jealous because Walt would rather spend time with "Mr. Locke" than him. I love the revelation that a miracle happened to John - another hint at what's to come in the next episode - and Michael's response that a miracle happened to everyone who survived the plane crash. And apparently the Island wants Michael to keep his promises; I always get a big chuckle out of him pledging to look for Vincent when it stops raining, only to see the deluge suddenly stop seconds later.
Of course, this leads to Michael's encounter with the shirtless Sun. She's too startled to say anything, while he yammers on, making a fool of himself before finally stumbling away. This moment sets up hints of a potential romance between Michael and Sun that are very nearly acted upon in the mobisode Buried Secrets. In both cases, Michael is looking for Vincent and stumbles upon something he shouldn't see, but in the second, he and Sun are moving in for a kiss when Vincent suddenly shows up. Awfully good timing! Sun and Michael could have made a good couple, but not at the expense of the Kwons' marriage. Sun's indulged in more than enough adultery already, methinks. Jin doesn't come off great in this episode either, at least in the beginning; Sun is busy looking through luggage trying to find their bags, and Jin tells her she's filthy and to go clean up. It seems really rude, but in part, he's probably feeling bad that she's exhausted and overworked and wants her to take it easy. The cleaning up isn't just about modesty or pride, it's about feeling refreshed. And when we see them together at the end of the episode, with Sun asleep, Jin is undeniably tender as he brushes her hair across her face.
The ending of the episode is wonderfully tranquil, with Hurley's song about washing one's troubles away playing on his Walkman as castaways make amends with one another. There's the Jin and Sun moment; the reconciliation between Michael and Walt as the boy joyfully runs to greet his father and Vincent; Boone handing Shannon her sunglasses and her gratefully accepting them; Sayid cheerfully tossing Sawyer a piece of fruit, prompting confusion from the latter; Charlie smiling as he sits near Claire and changes "FATE" to "LATE". Does this mean he thought the plane was fated to crash, and they were stuck, but now he's hopeful that rescue is merely late in arriving but will come soon? This was the first episode in which we see Charlie and Claire interact; maybe that blossoming friendship has cheered him up. For all concerned, it's a wonderfully uplifting way to end the episode. Sayid - who is really proactive in this episode, dividing the beach folks into groups and generally taking charge, showing he's as much a leader as Jack - says at the beginning that hope is a dangerous thing to lose. As the episode ends, it's clear that hope has not been lost.
Interestingly, both of the names that come up in the flashback resurface later in the series. Do I think that's significant? Probably not. But Kate takes on the name Annie, which of course is the name of Ben's childhood sweetheart, and she works for a guy named Ray, which is also the name of Jack's grandpa. The significance is probably more that they were running out of names... I like Ray, despite the fact that he turns Kate in; maybe we should see his phony arm as foreshadowing of his deception. I guess she likes him, too; she's hurt by the betrayal, but that doesn't stop her from ensuring his safety and trying to make certain he gets the reward money (the numerically significant $23,000). I think he's a good guy for the most part. It's just a shame that Kate's trust issues had to be confirmed as valid in such a dramatic way.
No wonder she doesn't trust Jack with her secret, though once he finds out half the story, I'm not too surprised she wants to tell him exactly what happened. It might make her come off as more sympathetic. I was annoyed with him for insisting he didn't need to know; maybe he doesn't, but we do! But that's a story for another season... And his point about being able to start over is a good one - though I wonder how many "Island as Purgatory" rumors were fueled by Jack's "Three days ago we all died"! I like how we get a hint about Evangeline Lilly's nationality when Annie claims she's from Canada, and how in the flashback, Kate wears stripes, whereas in the present, she wears orange, both prisoner duds. The marshal tells her, "You don't look free to me"; the Island is a prison too. Also, this is the first time we hear Patsy Cline in a Kate flashback. Few of the characters have a musician so associated with them.
Sawyer and Kate are thrown into one another's company quite a bit here. Sawyer calls her Freckles for the first time, and there's lots of snarky interplay between them. The scene back at the beach is especially good, and you think that Sawyer is talking Kate into putting the marshal out of his misery, but she delegates the job to him. There's an interesting blend here of Sawyer's hostility and compassion, and foreshadowing of his own first flashback as we see that killing is not something that comes easy to him. He talks a big talk, but when it comes down to it he does it wrong, probably in part because he's conflicted to begin with, though he's horrified when he realizes that he's just made this poor guy suffer even more.
The marshal becomes the first character to have some degree of resolution of past issues and then die, and ironically, Jack the savior is responsible for the first death that occurs among the castaways after the immediacy of the crash. At least, I read it as Jack doing something to end the marshal's life, though it isn't clear what, and of course he was a goner by then. Still, back on the mainland, I doubt Jack would have agreed to assisted suicide; he certainly was reluctant here, and only did it because Sawyer inadvertently made the situation so much worse. That conversation between them in the fuselage revealed so much about their personalities, and Sawyer encouraging Jack to forget the rules of civilization oddly comes into play at the end of the episode. Also, that suitcase blow to the head that knocked the marshal out reminds me of the toolbox that Jack took to the head in The Incident; I hope the doc comes out of it a little better!
Hurley spends this episode hovering around Jack, trying his best to be helpful, though uncomfortable with the marshal's condition and the revelation about Kate. I think my favorite Hurley scene in this episode is his conversation with Jack in which he postulates that the Smoke Monster is a dinosaur. Jack says it couldn't be a dinosaur because they're extinct; turns out it isn't, but it just goes to show how closed-minded Jack is. At this point, Jack has no inkling that this Island has been inhabited by humans before; what makes him so sure dinosaurs couldn't have survived here, and nobody knew about it? And anyway, that bird that calls Hurley's name looks like it could be prehistoric. Their chat reminds me of Xeno Lovegood calling Hermione "limited," and it comes up again and again, as early as the next episode when Jack insists that Rose's husband is dead because he simply can't imagine how anyone from the tail section could have survived.
Jack's furious "What did you do?" to Sawyer after he shoots the marshal reminds me of his reaction to John blowing up the submarine. John gets the last shot of the episode, an indication that the next episode will focus on him. Here, he's nothing but helpful, making a whistle to find Vincent and then showing Michael where to find the dog so he can take credit for returning him to Walt. I saw that scene at the very end of the episode when it actually aired, and it made me quite inclined to like John. All this after Michael has demonstrated such instant dislike for him. It seems he's simply jealous because Walt would rather spend time with "Mr. Locke" than him. I love the revelation that a miracle happened to John - another hint at what's to come in the next episode - and Michael's response that a miracle happened to everyone who survived the plane crash. And apparently the Island wants Michael to keep his promises; I always get a big chuckle out of him pledging to look for Vincent when it stops raining, only to see the deluge suddenly stop seconds later.
Of course, this leads to Michael's encounter with the shirtless Sun. She's too startled to say anything, while he yammers on, making a fool of himself before finally stumbling away. This moment sets up hints of a potential romance between Michael and Sun that are very nearly acted upon in the mobisode Buried Secrets. In both cases, Michael is looking for Vincent and stumbles upon something he shouldn't see, but in the second, he and Sun are moving in for a kiss when Vincent suddenly shows up. Awfully good timing! Sun and Michael could have made a good couple, but not at the expense of the Kwons' marriage. Sun's indulged in more than enough adultery already, methinks. Jin doesn't come off great in this episode either, at least in the beginning; Sun is busy looking through luggage trying to find their bags, and Jin tells her she's filthy and to go clean up. It seems really rude, but in part, he's probably feeling bad that she's exhausted and overworked and wants her to take it easy. The cleaning up isn't just about modesty or pride, it's about feeling refreshed. And when we see them together at the end of the episode, with Sun asleep, Jin is undeniably tender as he brushes her hair across her face.
The ending of the episode is wonderfully tranquil, with Hurley's song about washing one's troubles away playing on his Walkman as castaways make amends with one another. There's the Jin and Sun moment; the reconciliation between Michael and Walt as the boy joyfully runs to greet his father and Vincent; Boone handing Shannon her sunglasses and her gratefully accepting them; Sayid cheerfully tossing Sawyer a piece of fruit, prompting confusion from the latter; Charlie smiling as he sits near Claire and changes "FATE" to "LATE". Does this mean he thought the plane was fated to crash, and they were stuck, but now he's hopeful that rescue is merely late in arriving but will come soon? This was the first episode in which we see Charlie and Claire interact; maybe that blossoming friendship has cheered him up. For all concerned, it's a wonderfully uplifting way to end the episode. Sayid - who is really proactive in this episode, dividing the beach folks into groups and generally taking charge, showing he's as much a leader as Jack - says at the beginning that hope is a dangerous thing to lose. As the episode ends, it's clear that hope has not been lost.
Friday, May 29, 2009
Resurrected Man (Ordinary Man, Peter Hames)
Richard is one of the most fascinating characters on LOST, and season five gave us a lot to contemplate about him, particularly in the last couple of episodes. He strikes me as very wise and probably fairly benevolent, though not above resorting to violence in threatening situations. On the other hand, I was surprised to find how seldom he seemed in the know this season. So clearly he doesn't possess some kind of Island omniscience. I'm hoping for a full-blown Richard flashback episode or two next season, but until then I have to do a bit of guessing. Here I try to get into his head as he starts to grow suspicious of his supposed new leader, to the tune of Peter Hames' Ordinary Man.
Resurrected Man
"I'm a resurrected man, and I'm claiming my command.
I trust that's not a problem," murmured John.
Well, I reassured him but the misgivings within my gut
Were grumbling to me grimly, "It's a con."
Though he's told me that he's blessed, that he's different from the rest
And destined for a quest that Jacob planned,
My intuition knows beneath his princely clothes,
A serpent slithers softly through the sand.
Yes, I understand.
I've served my master well, and oh, the stories I could tell,
The miracles and intrigues I have known!
Yes, I have seen amazing things, but not the mightiest of kings
Cheated death to reclaim his flesh and bone.
Countless years have made me wise, and I have come to realize
That I've fallen a victim to John's trickery.
He dropped Jacob's name the first time he came,
And that's how he manipulated me
For half a century.
Crossing Earth seemed worth it to glimpse him at birth;
I'd saved the date he gave me in '54.
Infant, child and youth brought me closer to the truth;
I thought the boy was nothing but a bore.
How long could I wait to find the proof he was great?
I weathered Eloise and Charles and Ben
And I tried to hide my doubt this John had any clout.
I feared I would just be let down again.
When, Jacob, when?
I wish that I could banish this resurrected man;
He isn't the John I thought I knew.
We soon will pay the price for my heeding Jack's advice:
"I'd not give up on him if I were you."
It may be too late now to change our fate.
My duty to follow him is clear.
But I'm sure, as I grope for feeble strands of hope,
That Jacob's not the one who brought him here.
The end draws near.
The end draws near.
The end draws near.
Resurrected Man
"I'm a resurrected man, and I'm claiming my command.
I trust that's not a problem," murmured John.
Well, I reassured him but the misgivings within my gut
Were grumbling to me grimly, "It's a con."
Though he's told me that he's blessed, that he's different from the rest
And destined for a quest that Jacob planned,
My intuition knows beneath his princely clothes,
A serpent slithers softly through the sand.
Yes, I understand.
I've served my master well, and oh, the stories I could tell,
The miracles and intrigues I have known!
Yes, I have seen amazing things, but not the mightiest of kings
Cheated death to reclaim his flesh and bone.
Countless years have made me wise, and I have come to realize
That I've fallen a victim to John's trickery.
He dropped Jacob's name the first time he came,
And that's how he manipulated me
For half a century.
Crossing Earth seemed worth it to glimpse him at birth;
I'd saved the date he gave me in '54.
Infant, child and youth brought me closer to the truth;
I thought the boy was nothing but a bore.
How long could I wait to find the proof he was great?
I weathered Eloise and Charles and Ben
And I tried to hide my doubt this John had any clout.
I feared I would just be let down again.
When, Jacob, when?
I wish that I could banish this resurrected man;
He isn't the John I thought I knew.
We soon will pay the price for my heeding Jack's advice:
"I'd not give up on him if I were you."
It may be too late now to change our fate.
My duty to follow him is clear.
But I'm sure, as I grope for feeble strands of hope,
That Jacob's not the one who brought him here.
The end draws near.
The end draws near.
The end draws near.
Tuesday, May 26, 2009
Thinking About Annie...
For me, one of the absolute most pressing mysteries in LOST for the past few seasons has been Annie, Ben's best friend in Dharmaville for an unspecified amount of time in his past. She was the second person to welcome Ben to the Island, the first being Horace. After the Purge, Ben walked among his fallen comrades and respectfully closed Horace's eyes. He seemed to be the only person in the Dharma Initiative for whom he had any real depth of feeling. We also saw him tuck the doll Annie had given him into his jumpsuit before he went off to kill his dad. That would seem to me an indication that Annie is gone - and I simply can't believe that Ben would have allowed her to be killed in the Purge, unless he really had no idea what was about to happen.
I've long insisted that Annie is an incredibly important character, but thus far, she has only been mentioned in The Man Behind the Curtain. If Ben is still treasuring her doll as late as 2004, it seems to me that she is still of great significance to him. But are we ever going to learn what happened to her? Where she went, and why? Whether she and Ben were still firm friends when she departed? I think she will have a major role to play in the sixth season, though I don't know if we will actually see her. I hope so.
But I was thinking the other day about Apollo bars, which stand among my favorite props in LOST, and how Annie welcomed him to the Island by handing him an Apollo bar, and it made me wonder if there might be a connection among the significant candy-bar-sharing moments the show has given us. There seem to be three: Annie gives Ben an Apollo bar, Hurley shares an Apollo bar with Ben and Jacob gives Jack an Apollo bar. And I suddenly got a wild and crazy idea. What if Annie is Jacob?
I think the chances of this being right are pretty slim, but I like to think about it anyway. After all, we know absolutely nothing of Annie's parentage. What if she is an independent entity, and she's in place in Dharma in the 70s specifically for the sake of guiding Ben along a righteous path? So far, Jacob has only ever appeared in the same form, whereas I get the impression that Esau is a shapeshifter who may not even have a true form that he can revert to at this point. But if Jacob could change his appearance too, this would show that he'd had a big hand in Ben's life at an important stage of his development but had kept his identity secret for reasons known only to him. At some point, Annie simply disappears, and no one knows why, but Ben retains the doll and keeps it close to him all of his life. As he remembers the dearest friend of his life, he unknowingly is demonstrating his loyalty to Jacob.
Which begs the question... Is there a flash of recognition when Ben looks into Jacob's eyes? Could "What about you?" have some kind of significance going back to a childhood conversation? My guess, if this totally off-the-wall theory has any credence to it, is that Ben, like Ellie, gets a slightly unsettled feeling just after doing the deed, but it isn't until after Jacob's death that the full reality of what he's done hits home - when he discovers, tucked into a corner of Jacob's cave, the doll in the likeness of himself.
This is probably completely ridiculous, but I'm getting so frustrated by a lack of answers on this front that I'm starting to entertain all sorts of wild ideas. And I like the thought of Jacob having this intimate relationship with Ben that Ben doesn't recognize as such. It seems more satisfying, anyway, than his having completely ignored him all his life, as he seems to have done.
This is all assuming, too, that Jacob is a Good Guy, which is not at all set in stone at this point. If he is as good as he seems, then I see a sixth season with many Lewis parallels, with Ben as Edmund/Puzzle, Esau as the White Witch/Shift, Jacob as Aslan, Jack as Peter, perhaps Juliet as Susan... Anyway, in this scenario, Jacob is Very Good, and he allowed himself to be killed, knowing of a Deeper Magic that will make everything right again, and counting on Jack and his friends to fight the good fight on his behalf.
There's also the Jacob is Bad scenario, which strikes me as smacking more of Pullman, with Esau winding up the hero for overthrowing this powerful figure and freeing everyone to live purely as they please with no interference from Jacob. In this scenario, we are meant to see Jacob as cold and manipulative at worst, ineffective and weak at best. Evidence for a Jacob is Bad reading: He brings people to the Island knowing that there's a good chance they will destroy each other. He lets Kate off the hook for her crime, so while he tells her not to do it again, his actions help ensure she will. He helps Sawyer become a vigilante by helping him finish his letter. Rather than saving Sayid, he actually causes Nadia to die in the car crash, since she is walking more slowly as she waits for her husband to join her. A negative interpretation is possible in every Jacob scene, I think, which is very frustrating, and the reversal of the colors at the end of the episode could be an indication that in the case of Jacob and Esau, who were wearing opposite-colored shirts in the opening scene, White is bad and Black is good.
I sincerely hope that is not the case, because I think it's setting us up for a really depressing ending espousing a distressing world view. Of course, there are many other conjectures we could make about Jacob that don't fit neatly into either camp. For instance, "God loves you as he loved Jacob" seems to suggest that Jacob is some sort of fallen angel a la Lucifer; clearly Jacob is still alive, so why the past tense? In which case, Jacob being evil doesn't necessarily carry with it any kind of anti-Christian sentiment. It would seem that this makes the castaways the good guys, and I prefer this scenario a bit, but it still leaves a bad taste.
So I'm sticking with Jacob is the Good Guy, and the sharing of an Apollo bar is an act that is almost holy. I think of Harry Potter here and the use of chocolate as a tool in counteracting the effects of Dementors. The Apollo bars are powerful symbols of friendship and faith in the face of despair. And the fact that Hurley shares one is so fitting, as I suspect that of everyone on Flight 815, his connection to Jacob is the strongest.
Of course, there's also the very big question of where Jack and the gang will end up and how that relates to the Jacob saga. Do they get zapped to 2007 and join right in the battle that will be shaping up between Esau and those still loyal to Jacob? Do they end up in 2004 and crash on the Island again, or in 2004 and land safely but still end up on the Island via Ajira 316? Do they get zapped back to the points at which Jacob touched them? Do they retain their memories of everything that has happened since 815 crashed? Do they stay in 1977 and bring about the rest of the events in the Island's backstory that have yet to happen? This is a really important issue, and I have no idea what will happen, though I hope that in any case, they do not lose their memories. I hope they can keep the progress they've made and the knowledge of the friendships they've forged, and this will be instrumental in helping them to ultimately win this war that Charles was talking about, the war in which he may very well be on the wrong side.
I hope that Jacob is a good guy, and I hope the good guys win.
I've long insisted that Annie is an incredibly important character, but thus far, she has only been mentioned in The Man Behind the Curtain. If Ben is still treasuring her doll as late as 2004, it seems to me that she is still of great significance to him. But are we ever going to learn what happened to her? Where she went, and why? Whether she and Ben were still firm friends when she departed? I think she will have a major role to play in the sixth season, though I don't know if we will actually see her. I hope so.
But I was thinking the other day about Apollo bars, which stand among my favorite props in LOST, and how Annie welcomed him to the Island by handing him an Apollo bar, and it made me wonder if there might be a connection among the significant candy-bar-sharing moments the show has given us. There seem to be three: Annie gives Ben an Apollo bar, Hurley shares an Apollo bar with Ben and Jacob gives Jack an Apollo bar. And I suddenly got a wild and crazy idea. What if Annie is Jacob?
I think the chances of this being right are pretty slim, but I like to think about it anyway. After all, we know absolutely nothing of Annie's parentage. What if she is an independent entity, and she's in place in Dharma in the 70s specifically for the sake of guiding Ben along a righteous path? So far, Jacob has only ever appeared in the same form, whereas I get the impression that Esau is a shapeshifter who may not even have a true form that he can revert to at this point. But if Jacob could change his appearance too, this would show that he'd had a big hand in Ben's life at an important stage of his development but had kept his identity secret for reasons known only to him. At some point, Annie simply disappears, and no one knows why, but Ben retains the doll and keeps it close to him all of his life. As he remembers the dearest friend of his life, he unknowingly is demonstrating his loyalty to Jacob.
Which begs the question... Is there a flash of recognition when Ben looks into Jacob's eyes? Could "What about you?" have some kind of significance going back to a childhood conversation? My guess, if this totally off-the-wall theory has any credence to it, is that Ben, like Ellie, gets a slightly unsettled feeling just after doing the deed, but it isn't until after Jacob's death that the full reality of what he's done hits home - when he discovers, tucked into a corner of Jacob's cave, the doll in the likeness of himself.
This is probably completely ridiculous, but I'm getting so frustrated by a lack of answers on this front that I'm starting to entertain all sorts of wild ideas. And I like the thought of Jacob having this intimate relationship with Ben that Ben doesn't recognize as such. It seems more satisfying, anyway, than his having completely ignored him all his life, as he seems to have done.
This is all assuming, too, that Jacob is a Good Guy, which is not at all set in stone at this point. If he is as good as he seems, then I see a sixth season with many Lewis parallels, with Ben as Edmund/Puzzle, Esau as the White Witch/Shift, Jacob as Aslan, Jack as Peter, perhaps Juliet as Susan... Anyway, in this scenario, Jacob is Very Good, and he allowed himself to be killed, knowing of a Deeper Magic that will make everything right again, and counting on Jack and his friends to fight the good fight on his behalf.
There's also the Jacob is Bad scenario, which strikes me as smacking more of Pullman, with Esau winding up the hero for overthrowing this powerful figure and freeing everyone to live purely as they please with no interference from Jacob. In this scenario, we are meant to see Jacob as cold and manipulative at worst, ineffective and weak at best. Evidence for a Jacob is Bad reading: He brings people to the Island knowing that there's a good chance they will destroy each other. He lets Kate off the hook for her crime, so while he tells her not to do it again, his actions help ensure she will. He helps Sawyer become a vigilante by helping him finish his letter. Rather than saving Sayid, he actually causes Nadia to die in the car crash, since she is walking more slowly as she waits for her husband to join her. A negative interpretation is possible in every Jacob scene, I think, which is very frustrating, and the reversal of the colors at the end of the episode could be an indication that in the case of Jacob and Esau, who were wearing opposite-colored shirts in the opening scene, White is bad and Black is good.
I sincerely hope that is not the case, because I think it's setting us up for a really depressing ending espousing a distressing world view. Of course, there are many other conjectures we could make about Jacob that don't fit neatly into either camp. For instance, "God loves you as he loved Jacob" seems to suggest that Jacob is some sort of fallen angel a la Lucifer; clearly Jacob is still alive, so why the past tense? In which case, Jacob being evil doesn't necessarily carry with it any kind of anti-Christian sentiment. It would seem that this makes the castaways the good guys, and I prefer this scenario a bit, but it still leaves a bad taste.
So I'm sticking with Jacob is the Good Guy, and the sharing of an Apollo bar is an act that is almost holy. I think of Harry Potter here and the use of chocolate as a tool in counteracting the effects of Dementors. The Apollo bars are powerful symbols of friendship and faith in the face of despair. And the fact that Hurley shares one is so fitting, as I suspect that of everyone on Flight 815, his connection to Jacob is the strongest.
Of course, there's also the very big question of where Jack and the gang will end up and how that relates to the Jacob saga. Do they get zapped to 2007 and join right in the battle that will be shaping up between Esau and those still loyal to Jacob? Do they end up in 2004 and crash on the Island again, or in 2004 and land safely but still end up on the Island via Ajira 316? Do they get zapped back to the points at which Jacob touched them? Do they retain their memories of everything that has happened since 815 crashed? Do they stay in 1977 and bring about the rest of the events in the Island's backstory that have yet to happen? This is a really important issue, and I have no idea what will happen, though I hope that in any case, they do not lose their memories. I hope they can keep the progress they've made and the knowledge of the friendships they've forged, and this will be instrumental in helping them to ultimately win this war that Charles was talking about, the war in which he may very well be on the wrong side.
I hope that Jacob is a good guy, and I hope the good guys win.
Saturday, May 23, 2009
"Guys... Where Are We?"
Ah, that's the question, isn't it? Not only where in location - aside from hopelessly lost anywhere within a thousand-mile radius of where search parties are looking - but what kind of place is this? Part 1 introduced the Smoke Monster. Now, with Pilot: Part 2, we can add to that polar bears and creepy messages from a French woman playing on a loop for 16 years. Yeah, there's definitely something a little off about this place.
The weather Charlie so cheerfully described as apocalyptic has desisted, and Jack and Kate return to the beach while the rocker yammers his complaints and tells Kate he was "getting sick" when she found him in the bathroom minutes earlier. It's a cover-up, but his malaise is genuine, and when Kate assures him he's not a coward, he, like Desmond, recalls a miserable moment, and certainly not one to be proud of. He looks an agitated mess as he taps his fingers. (I notice he's wearing headphones; what happened to his walkman, I wonder? Or are those official plane headphones?) Oh, and Charlie nearly gets creamed by a heavy rolling object. The universe starts bashing him before the plane is even on the ground!
Shannon lies uselessly on the beach in the pose captured in plastic for posterity. Lucky everyone. Boone scolds her for being a spoiled brat and walks away. Claire tries to make nice with Shannon, and Her Majesty deigns to talk to her, briefly. Claire is worried about the baby. Meanwhile, Sun is trying to convince a Walt-seeking Michael that she doesn't understand a word he's saying and Jin is looking up from his fishing to demand that she keep her blouse fully buttoned, especially in the presence of another man. This is when he really starts coming off as a controlling jerk.
Walt wanders around the jungle on his own looking for Vincent, leash in hand. Bad idea. Michael definitely thinks so, and the handcuffs Walt found make him nervous. Walt should've left them in the jungle; they immediately start causing problems. Sayid already has our sympathies somewhat, while Sawyer is a wild card who looks like a renegade. This scene serves as our first real introduction to Sawyer, and he's really making a nuisance of himself. I thought Lord of the Flies: Jack is Ralph (good guy), Sawyer is Jack (bad guy). Or at least they want us to think so. But I suspected that Sawyer would turn out to be decent underneath all the bluster.
He seemed too obvious an antagonist, a prejudiced redneck who pounces upon Sayid as soon as he learns there were handcuffs on the plane. Racial profiling, or submerging a guilty conscience? Sawyer deserved to be in handcuffs as much as Kate did. (Oh, and I wonder what untranslated vitriolic insult Sayid spit at him?) Sawyer continues to launch unfounded accusations at Sayid until Hurley intervenes: "Hey, we're all in this together, man. Let's treat each other with a little respect." My love for him is forever assured, and Sawyer tells him to shut up and spits out his first nickname, the ever-so-clever "Lardo". But before the year is out, Sawyer will come to take the advice of the first victim of his name-calling tendencies. (And then "Whatever you say, Doc; you're the hero" to an objecting Jack. You will be too, James! You will be too!)
Boone, rather late to the party as usual, asks, "You guys found the cockpit?" I guess there wasn't time to discuss it before Jack broke up the fistfight, but the question now feels very out of place. Hurley vents against Sawyer and bonds with Sayid. Slightly unsettled by the revelation that he's consorting with "the enemy", but that war's over and Sayid has done nothing but treat him decently thus far. So they're friends, and this was my first great moment of hope for building bridges with those perceived as "others". If everybody had Hurley's disposition, methinks there would be a lot more people standing as of season five.
Kate stares out at the ocean while stripping off her outer garments; Sun attempts to convey a message with only gestures and inflection going for her. Sayid and Kate make a good team and ought to buddy up more often. Oh, and "how high" to the tallest point on the Island? Pretty darn high. Up... Up... Up. Kate, I'm afraid you've got a bit of a journey ahead of you. But first she has to check on Jack, stuck watching over a hopeless case in unsanitary conditions. Again she doesn't take no for an answer, insisting on her hike with Sayid, but Jack does offer advice much like Jenny's in Forrest Gump. At the first hint of danger... run.
Jin slaps Sun on the wrist. Sun looks so submissive and miserable, though we see her defiant streak for the first time as she unbuttons her top button. Meanwhile, Jin offers Hurley food, which means he's not all bad after all, and not entirely following his own advice about the Kwons sticking to themselves. Hurley is cordial to Jin but won't go so far as to honor him by accepting his gift of strange, unappetizing food. Oh, well. He tried. And tastes will become considerably less refined as time goes on. Hey, Jin, suddenly being raised by a fisherman doesn't seem so bad, does it?
Walt has Hurley's comic book, and Michael wonders if it's because his son is some kind of bilingual super-genius. Conversation attempt one fails. And then he utters the line no kid ever wants to hear when his pet goes missing: "Oh, I'll buy you another one." Yeesh, Michael. I know you're out of the parenting loop, but come on. Charlie's still unattractively focused on drugs. Hurley, too, is thinking about drugs, but of a very different kind, as he's been recruited by Jack to find some prescription medicine to set up a little Island pharmacy. Boone's exhausted from his efforts, and it's finally starting to sink in for Shannon that this is for real. And she shows remorse for her past bratty actions. But instantly, she and Boone are bickering again. Watching it now, Boone is reminding me of Paolo physically restraining Nikki as she tries to join an expedition. I like Sayid's little "I'm not getting involved in this" half-smile behind his hand as he listens to them verbally claw each other. It's a shame there couldn't be more moments of genuine tranquility between them.
Sawyer sits in a chunk of wreckage and reads his note, brow wrinkled in dismay as he watches Team Sayid shove off. Knowing what the letter is about, the hurt in his eyes is searing. Cue first Sawyer-Kate dialogue, with that great Han Solo-like "I'm a complex guy, sweetheart!" And cue the epic "walking" music, which is used so heavily, and enjoyably, in The Incident. We're really getting a sense of the Island's scope. Are these guys really properly equipped for such dangerous climbing? Slight whiff of Cliffs of Insanity here. And they're slightly insane for attempting it.
Backgammon! Games, and black and white (or, as John says, "one is light, one is dark.") So important to John's character. And Walt is the first character he really connects with. "You're havin' a bad month," John says. We could certainly say the same about John. He takes that commonality and Walt's curiosity and uses it as a bonding and mentoring moment. Walt is the first of many he tries to guide, and the most receptive. (John also is the first character to make a Biblical reference, saying the game is "older than Jesus Christ," coupled with the first reference to an ancient civilization. John cites Mesopotamia, not Egypt, as the birthplace of backgammon, but it's in the ballpark. The Christian references have been sprinkled through the show all along, while hieroglyphics first turned up in season two, with Egypt finally coming to the forefront in parts of season five.) Walt is a captive audience and kindred spirit, so in addition to a little history lesson, he also gets to learn John's secret two episodes before we do.
Claire writes in her diary, which feels extra significant now that we see Daniel, like her, had to rely on his own journal to recall past events. Claire doesn't hold out against Jin's offer as long as Hurley does. She's too sweet to refuse him, and I like Jin's gentle concern for her, and that he gets to feel the baby kick, even if the intimacy of that moment freaks him out. I think part of his discomfort has to do with cultural norms and part may have to do with it triggering his disappointment that he and Sun can't have a family. But I think there's also a sense of wonder there, and it seems very fitting that Jin then gets to help with Aaron's delivery. Little does he know that Sun will be in Claire's position in mere months - or that he won't be there to see it. This experience, then, feels like a gift.
Sayid and Sawyer scuffle again, Shannon freaks out again and Sawyer makes his first contribution the his fellow casataways' wellbeing... by shooting something. And the killings begin! But seriously, that polar bear was on the attack. So well done, Sawyer! Even if it doesn't exactly endear you to anyone... Still, I wish he would've run out of ammunition post-bear and never found the other guns. Blech. Speaking of which, Hurley is "not so good around blood." I knew he was gonna pass out. It had to happen. And it was soooo inconvenient. How is it that the members of the I Pass Out Around Blood Club keep winding up as Jack's surgical assistants?
It's odd to see Charlie flirting with Kate, then switching to Shannon, in these early episodes. According to Greatest Hits, he and Claire have met by now, but obviously he doesn't only have eyes for her. His attempts to win over Shannon throughout this trek are amusing and rather pathetic. (Shannon: Polar bears don't live in the jungle. Charlie: Spot on!) We see Sawyer's frustration in being miscategorized; people have already made judgments about him, and while they're not wholly undeserved, there's a lot more to this guy than meets the eye. Kate's gun con is cunning, and one she's used before, though we don't see it until late in the season. "I don't know how to use a gun!" Ah, Kate. We thought you were so sweet and innocent... Flashback again, and all of our illusions about Freckles are shattered. Who would've guessed her story would be so Catch Me If You Can?
Shannon helps out in a big way by translating Danielle's message, effectively killing the euphoria that preceded the translation. Already starting to get tired of the Shannon-Boone and Sawyer-Sayid sniping. The gravity of this new information shuts them all up, once they take a minute to stop and think about what math whiz Sayid is saying. IMDb says this aired on a different night; I thought it was a two-hour premiere. Certainly the episodes go together. Part one establishes the basic problem, part two clues us in that this might not be quite standard stranded-on-an-island fare. The polar bear is even a Dharma nod, though we won't know that for a long time. Did they have a backstory for this poor creature? A reason he was here? Or did that come later? Just one of many questions. But again, the big question the episode left us with was the most prominent line from the previews, Charlie's simple but haunting, "Guys... Where are we?"
The weather Charlie so cheerfully described as apocalyptic has desisted, and Jack and Kate return to the beach while the rocker yammers his complaints and tells Kate he was "getting sick" when she found him in the bathroom minutes earlier. It's a cover-up, but his malaise is genuine, and when Kate assures him he's not a coward, he, like Desmond, recalls a miserable moment, and certainly not one to be proud of. He looks an agitated mess as he taps his fingers. (I notice he's wearing headphones; what happened to his walkman, I wonder? Or are those official plane headphones?) Oh, and Charlie nearly gets creamed by a heavy rolling object. The universe starts bashing him before the plane is even on the ground!
Shannon lies uselessly on the beach in the pose captured in plastic for posterity. Lucky everyone. Boone scolds her for being a spoiled brat and walks away. Claire tries to make nice with Shannon, and Her Majesty deigns to talk to her, briefly. Claire is worried about the baby. Meanwhile, Sun is trying to convince a Walt-seeking Michael that she doesn't understand a word he's saying and Jin is looking up from his fishing to demand that she keep her blouse fully buttoned, especially in the presence of another man. This is when he really starts coming off as a controlling jerk.
Walt wanders around the jungle on his own looking for Vincent, leash in hand. Bad idea. Michael definitely thinks so, and the handcuffs Walt found make him nervous. Walt should've left them in the jungle; they immediately start causing problems. Sayid already has our sympathies somewhat, while Sawyer is a wild card who looks like a renegade. This scene serves as our first real introduction to Sawyer, and he's really making a nuisance of himself. I thought Lord of the Flies: Jack is Ralph (good guy), Sawyer is Jack (bad guy). Or at least they want us to think so. But I suspected that Sawyer would turn out to be decent underneath all the bluster.
He seemed too obvious an antagonist, a prejudiced redneck who pounces upon Sayid as soon as he learns there were handcuffs on the plane. Racial profiling, or submerging a guilty conscience? Sawyer deserved to be in handcuffs as much as Kate did. (Oh, and I wonder what untranslated vitriolic insult Sayid spit at him?) Sawyer continues to launch unfounded accusations at Sayid until Hurley intervenes: "Hey, we're all in this together, man. Let's treat each other with a little respect." My love for him is forever assured, and Sawyer tells him to shut up and spits out his first nickname, the ever-so-clever "Lardo". But before the year is out, Sawyer will come to take the advice of the first victim of his name-calling tendencies. (And then "Whatever you say, Doc; you're the hero" to an objecting Jack. You will be too, James! You will be too!)
Boone, rather late to the party as usual, asks, "You guys found the cockpit?" I guess there wasn't time to discuss it before Jack broke up the fistfight, but the question now feels very out of place. Hurley vents against Sawyer and bonds with Sayid. Slightly unsettled by the revelation that he's consorting with "the enemy", but that war's over and Sayid has done nothing but treat him decently thus far. So they're friends, and this was my first great moment of hope for building bridges with those perceived as "others". If everybody had Hurley's disposition, methinks there would be a lot more people standing as of season five.
Kate stares out at the ocean while stripping off her outer garments; Sun attempts to convey a message with only gestures and inflection going for her. Sayid and Kate make a good team and ought to buddy up more often. Oh, and "how high" to the tallest point on the Island? Pretty darn high. Up... Up... Up. Kate, I'm afraid you've got a bit of a journey ahead of you. But first she has to check on Jack, stuck watching over a hopeless case in unsanitary conditions. Again she doesn't take no for an answer, insisting on her hike with Sayid, but Jack does offer advice much like Jenny's in Forrest Gump. At the first hint of danger... run.
Jin slaps Sun on the wrist. Sun looks so submissive and miserable, though we see her defiant streak for the first time as she unbuttons her top button. Meanwhile, Jin offers Hurley food, which means he's not all bad after all, and not entirely following his own advice about the Kwons sticking to themselves. Hurley is cordial to Jin but won't go so far as to honor him by accepting his gift of strange, unappetizing food. Oh, well. He tried. And tastes will become considerably less refined as time goes on. Hey, Jin, suddenly being raised by a fisherman doesn't seem so bad, does it?
Walt has Hurley's comic book, and Michael wonders if it's because his son is some kind of bilingual super-genius. Conversation attempt one fails. And then he utters the line no kid ever wants to hear when his pet goes missing: "Oh, I'll buy you another one." Yeesh, Michael. I know you're out of the parenting loop, but come on. Charlie's still unattractively focused on drugs. Hurley, too, is thinking about drugs, but of a very different kind, as he's been recruited by Jack to find some prescription medicine to set up a little Island pharmacy. Boone's exhausted from his efforts, and it's finally starting to sink in for Shannon that this is for real. And she shows remorse for her past bratty actions. But instantly, she and Boone are bickering again. Watching it now, Boone is reminding me of Paolo physically restraining Nikki as she tries to join an expedition. I like Sayid's little "I'm not getting involved in this" half-smile behind his hand as he listens to them verbally claw each other. It's a shame there couldn't be more moments of genuine tranquility between them.
Sawyer sits in a chunk of wreckage and reads his note, brow wrinkled in dismay as he watches Team Sayid shove off. Knowing what the letter is about, the hurt in his eyes is searing. Cue first Sawyer-Kate dialogue, with that great Han Solo-like "I'm a complex guy, sweetheart!" And cue the epic "walking" music, which is used so heavily, and enjoyably, in The Incident. We're really getting a sense of the Island's scope. Are these guys really properly equipped for such dangerous climbing? Slight whiff of Cliffs of Insanity here. And they're slightly insane for attempting it.
Backgammon! Games, and black and white (or, as John says, "one is light, one is dark.") So important to John's character. And Walt is the first character he really connects with. "You're havin' a bad month," John says. We could certainly say the same about John. He takes that commonality and Walt's curiosity and uses it as a bonding and mentoring moment. Walt is the first of many he tries to guide, and the most receptive. (John also is the first character to make a Biblical reference, saying the game is "older than Jesus Christ," coupled with the first reference to an ancient civilization. John cites Mesopotamia, not Egypt, as the birthplace of backgammon, but it's in the ballpark. The Christian references have been sprinkled through the show all along, while hieroglyphics first turned up in season two, with Egypt finally coming to the forefront in parts of season five.) Walt is a captive audience and kindred spirit, so in addition to a little history lesson, he also gets to learn John's secret two episodes before we do.
Claire writes in her diary, which feels extra significant now that we see Daniel, like her, had to rely on his own journal to recall past events. Claire doesn't hold out against Jin's offer as long as Hurley does. She's too sweet to refuse him, and I like Jin's gentle concern for her, and that he gets to feel the baby kick, even if the intimacy of that moment freaks him out. I think part of his discomfort has to do with cultural norms and part may have to do with it triggering his disappointment that he and Sun can't have a family. But I think there's also a sense of wonder there, and it seems very fitting that Jin then gets to help with Aaron's delivery. Little does he know that Sun will be in Claire's position in mere months - or that he won't be there to see it. This experience, then, feels like a gift.
Sayid and Sawyer scuffle again, Shannon freaks out again and Sawyer makes his first contribution the his fellow casataways' wellbeing... by shooting something. And the killings begin! But seriously, that polar bear was on the attack. So well done, Sawyer! Even if it doesn't exactly endear you to anyone... Still, I wish he would've run out of ammunition post-bear and never found the other guns. Blech. Speaking of which, Hurley is "not so good around blood." I knew he was gonna pass out. It had to happen. And it was soooo inconvenient. How is it that the members of the I Pass Out Around Blood Club keep winding up as Jack's surgical assistants?
It's odd to see Charlie flirting with Kate, then switching to Shannon, in these early episodes. According to Greatest Hits, he and Claire have met by now, but obviously he doesn't only have eyes for her. His attempts to win over Shannon throughout this trek are amusing and rather pathetic. (Shannon: Polar bears don't live in the jungle. Charlie: Spot on!) We see Sawyer's frustration in being miscategorized; people have already made judgments about him, and while they're not wholly undeserved, there's a lot more to this guy than meets the eye. Kate's gun con is cunning, and one she's used before, though we don't see it until late in the season. "I don't know how to use a gun!" Ah, Kate. We thought you were so sweet and innocent... Flashback again, and all of our illusions about Freckles are shattered. Who would've guessed her story would be so Catch Me If You Can?
Shannon helps out in a big way by translating Danielle's message, effectively killing the euphoria that preceded the translation. Already starting to get tired of the Shannon-Boone and Sawyer-Sayid sniping. The gravity of this new information shuts them all up, once they take a minute to stop and think about what math whiz Sayid is saying. IMDb says this aired on a different night; I thought it was a two-hour premiere. Certainly the episodes go together. Part one establishes the basic problem, part two clues us in that this might not be quite standard stranded-on-an-island fare. The polar bear is even a Dharma nod, though we won't know that for a long time. Did they have a backstory for this poor creature? A reason he was here? Or did that come later? Just one of many questions. But again, the big question the episode left us with was the most prominent line from the previews, Charlie's simple but haunting, "Guys... Where are we?"
Friday, May 22, 2009
A Look Back.... Meet the Castaways!
So I decided to go ahead and have a re-watching spree, starting with the cinematic Pilot: Part 1 (a generic title that is unusually fitting). It's odd to watch it so soon after listening to the season one soundtrack and to realize how integral that score is to the first episode. In the first ten minutes, it's overpowering, particularly up until the seventh minute or so, when Claire nearly gets taken out by the airplane wing. Those first six minutes are profoundly disorienting. First Jack wakes in the jungle, and then we see Vincent. Second character of the series. Yay, Vincent! All that music, very little talking, hard to tell who's who or what's going on...
I remember exactly when I watched this for the first time. It was February 4, 2006; it was the day before the Superbowl, which makes the date easy to recall. It was a total couch potato kind of day. Mom and I started it off by watching Corpse Bride, which we'd rented, then going to see Rent at the dollar theater with Libbie. We proceeded to Wendy's for lunch, called home and ascertained that Nathan was in a bad mood, but for whatever reason decided to continue our fun at my house. On the menu: LOST. "I got it from the library," Libbie told me. "Do you want to give a shot?" Did I! I'd only been waiting a year and a half to watch the show; goodness knows what took me so long, or how much longer still it would have taken if Libbie hadn't given me that Jacob-like "little push". It helped, of course, that Dan had spent the past year assuring both of us that it was the best thing on television. "Nathan, don't you want to watch this with us?" I prodded as he sulked in the corner. "You know you do..." He harrumphed and turned away. But by the end of the episode he was hooked, bad mood forgotten, and by the end of the disc Mom and Dad returned from a grocery shopping excursion, flung into the show full throttle. They would have to be filled in on the Pilot later.
I went into it with higher expectations that I can ever recall having for a show, which made me nervous. I figured I would most likely wind up disappointed, that it could never turn out to be as fantastic as I thought it would be. That, I suspect, was part of the reason for my delay. In the meantime, I'd been stalwartly avoiding almost any information about the show, though I caught a few things here and there, which were enough to give me a general idea about who a few of the characters were. I was most interested in Charlie, though I realized - largely from the seemingly endless barrage of promos for The Moth - that he was a darker character than Merry, and I wondered if I would even like him. I found sage wilderness man John Locke fascinating, particularly from the the aforementioned preview and the one actual moment of the show that I accidentally watched, when he finishes whittling a whistle and hands it to Michael as a Vincent-finding tool. By this scene, then, I also knew there was a boy and his dad and a dog. Dan filled me in on sweet, pregnant Claire, an early favorite of his, back when she had more to do. Oh, and I knew there was a fat guy, and I wasn't sure exactly what his role was on the show, but I was hoping he would be benevolent. I watched him especially carefully during the first episode.
So Jack comes crashing out of the jungle in a half-run after pulling out his little bottle of alcohol. On the beach, all is pristine and silent... and then a scream. We are introduced to Shannon, the third character, though we hear her long before we see her. And suddenly that little bottle seems like Lucy Pevensie's healing potion, with Jack, like her, trying to attend to all of the wounded at once. In all the panic, we manage to meet most of our core 15. Charlie is next, stumbling about in a daze; he narrowly misses Gary's fate, and moments later almost gets hit with a massive piece of falling plane. The Island, it seems, was always out to get him. Then there's Jin, bellowing in Korean, looking for his wife, who we don't meet until later. Of all the characters, they were the only two who I couldn't connect with at first; they just seemed too separate from everything that was happening, and the language barrier cemented the difference. For long stretches of time, I forgot they even existed. Seconds later, we get the first name on the show, and it's one we're not likely to forget. Essentially the first articulate line of the season is "WAAAAALLLLTTTT!"; it's also the last.
Jack starts ordering people around, and the first to leap to the ready is John. What a joy to be able to lug away a heavy piece of equipment, when moments before he couldn't walk! We don't know that now, of course; that revelation at the end of the fourth episode serves as the first massive "Oh my gosh!" moment of the show. If you weren't hooked before then, that had to do it. But no sooner is Redshirt With the Mangled Leg liberated from the wreckage than we hear Claire's piercing screams and see that she is Very Pregnant, and Jack's got somebody else to run off and rescue. While he converses with Claire, we watch John try to save Gary with a shouted warning, to no avail, and Boone attempt to perform CPR on a prone Rose. Jack's not the only hero here. But he's certainly the dominant one, and he now pulls a dazed Hurley aside and puts Claire in his care. Hurley looks sick to his stomach at the prospect of being responsible for a woman who could go into labor at any moment, but he complies - and it's thanks to him and his stellar interpersonal skills that Our Hero finally, about six minutes in, becomes Jack. "Hey, what's your name?" Hurley calls. Thanks, dude, for clearing that up.
Poor Boone. Jack shoves him aside, and then he runs off to get a pen for a tracheotomy, returning only two minutes later, but it feels like about two hours, especially after Jack's cross-beach sprint to stop Claire from getting pulverized. When Boone shows up midway into Jack's post-panic solitude - after not just Jack but a "spry" and protective Hurley have saved Claire's life - with a fistful of pens, it's so pathetic there's nothing to do but laugh. Which Jack does, but he also gently expresses gratitude for the effort. And ten minutes in, we meet Kate, and her brilliant first line is "What?" This is Jack's first intimate introduction, away from all of the madness of the beach. So Jack and Kate have a special connection from the get-go. (If I'd watched this when it first aired, I think I would have recognized Kate at once from the LiveLinks commercials that played about a hundred times a night in the fall of 2004. That might have worried me...)
And the next thing we see is Sawyer. Which also seems very appropriate. Jack. Kate. Sawyer. And he's sitting there, all stubbly and brooding, with his shockingly short hair and his bad-boy 'tude. "Yeah, I'm gonna sit here and light up a cigarette even though I'm a few feet away from an exploding plane. Who wants to try stopping me?" Just wait until Part 2; Charlie will! Fat chance, buddy. And already, Hurley is making himself useful by gathering food, while John and Claire gaze out at the ocean in wonder. And nearly 13 minutes in, we meet Sayid. In front of a massive fire. He, too, is being helpful; it's a signal fire, and he delegates Charlie to help. (And now the names have started flying fast and furious; we know Sayid , too, and will soon know many others. It helps a lot that nearly everyone has to make introductions to each other.) Anyway, while Sayid's initiative shows his leadership potential, this first shot of him against a blazing backdrop could also be seen as foreshadowing at this late date. Did the writers know how thoroughly Sayid was going to crash and burn?
Poignant shot of Rose kissing Bernard's wedding ring, and then we're back to Jack and Kate and the charming "I might throw up on you." (I feel like somebody else said that, much later in the series, but I can't remember who... Hurley maybe?) And now it's the counting to five story - without any reference to his father. In light of that new knowledge, I see Jack indulging in some denial here, making believe he's a bit stronger than he is on his own. But then he's also convincing Kate to be the best she can be. For now, he's here to help others; the being willing to accept unsolicited help part can come a little later.
Fifteen minutes in, and we've switched to night under a dazzling star-spangled sky. Charlie writes FATE on the cloths on his fingers. More foreshadowing? Sayid wonders why no one's come yet; throughout most of the first season, he is the primary force in the Let's Get Off the Island plans. He's highly motivated - impending reunion with his long-lost love, and wanting to make his best buddy's death worth something - and highly qualified. Next shot - Shannon. Painting her toenails. Is this foreshadowing of their relationship? I never liked that much; why couldn't they just be friends? How could Sayid forget Nadia so quickly? Or give up on getting back to her so quickly? It didn't gel for me. And Shannon is hardly endearing here. She's obnoxious; Boone is at least trying to help, albeit generally failing.
Hurley offers Claire food, asks how she's feeling and even gives her an extra portion; he's really her first friend on the Island, so it's sweet to see him returning to that role in Charlie's absence, starting with Greatest Hits. Not that he and Claire stopped being friends, of course (and I love how he advises Sawyer to endear himself to her by offering her blankets in Left Behind), but he took more of a backseat. Seventeen minutes in, we finally meet Walt - looking so young! - and he rejects nearly-beardless Michael's conversation attempts. He mopes. These two have as many issues as Shannon and Boone. As do Sun, seen here at last, and Jin who, understandably, says, "You must not leave my sight." The kind of separation they endured on the beach would be terrifying. But not knowing Jin yet, he soon comes across as demanding and cold, and it takes most of the first season to get an inkling of what a good guy he actually is.
Meet the Marshall, loaded with shrapnel, and the first indication that Kate knows him, though she spares us the details. "I was sitting next to him." I love Jack's leaf-plane. I'd forgotten he took flying lessons. "Wasn't for me," he said. Could Jack have been a Frank? Might we learn that Frank dabbled in med school? Nah... probably not. But who knows? Oh, and Kate sees smoke. And suddenly, the jungle starts going bonkers, and everyone sits up and takes notice. The best assessment? "That was weird, right?" Yes, indeed, Charlie. The silliest? "Is that Vincent?" Yeah, kid. That's your dog flattening the trees like a herd of elephants. Several people stand up and band together. Our core group, for the most part. "Terrific," says Charlie. (Just what Frank says when he sees John in the box...) Twenty-one minutes in. BOMP. Black. First flashback!
Hiya, Cindy Chandler! Way to flirt with Jack, and Jack, way to tip us off as to your problems with alcohol. Charlie running down the aisle, Jack and Rose bonding. I'm with Rose; I've "never been a very good flier." First mention of Bernard, though her moment on the beach with the ring was a clue that she had a husband, and he was probably on the plane from the reverent, distressed way she was treating the symbol of their bond. John, behind her, looks mildly startled but mostly unbothered. Shaking plane! Flying luggage! Oxygen masks!
And 24 minutes in, we're back to the beach, another day, everyone clustered around talking about the jungle weirdness. Rose recognizes the noise (because it sounds like a grocery scanner?). Kate insists on joining Jack on his quest; first indication that this gal isn't going to simply take no for an answer. She wants to get her hands dirty. She's not even deterred by having to take shoes off of a dead body, though she looks about ready to cry the whole time. And right around minute 25, here comes John in his white shirt with the blue checkered pattern, sporting an enormous scar above and below his right eye and slowly flashing the Fruit Smile. Charming or demonic? Kate seems to vote deranged, and John, abashed, retracts his gesture.
Charlie wants sunblock, which makes me laugh because Diane Sawyer was just harping about how a third of the people in the US don't use sunblock, and I was thinking that the folks on LOST must all be getting skin cancer from prolonged exposure to the sun with nothing to combat it. After the first few days, anyway; Shannon has some at the moment, and in her first helpful gesture, she agrees to share some with Charlie. And Hurley hilariously tries to shield young Walt from grim reality by spelling out "bodies". Incorrectly. (Judging by Some Like It Hoth, he didn't put his three years off the Island to good use by brushing up on his spelling skills.)
Jack puts Boone in charge of the wounded; nice of him, again, to prop others up. Of course, he does need to have somebody playing doctor in his absence, and with his lifeguard experience, Boone is the likeliest candidate. Sayid seems to perk up at the word "transceiver". Jittery Charlie just wants to get back to the cockpit. There are drugs to be had! And 27 minutes in, he's flirting with Kate and trying to impress her with the fact that he's in Drive Shaft. It works, somewhat; Kate's friend Beth (never mentioned again, I don't think?) is a huge fan, and Kate's at least heard the song. But Jack is not impressed, and rather like Desmond in Catch-22 and Daniel in Because You Left, he's all about cutting the chit-chat and getting on the with journey.
While Charlie tries to convince Kate that Drive Shaft is, not was, Vincent stares after them. Knowing he was recently given orders by Christian (Esau?), it sort of makes me wonder what he's up to... Which makes it seem especially fitting to see John next, sitting on the beach, still trying to comprehend his situation. Certainly with no inkling of the long, strange road that will follow. And right after that, sudden rainstorm! Everyone else panics and runs for cover, but he sits, simply calmly at first, then in sheer exuberance, grinning and raising his arms to the sky in gratitude right around minute 29 in the second Iconic John Locke Expression of the series. Sun and Jin are conspicuously together, as are Michael and Walt, though Sun doesn't look thrilled and neither does Walt. And Hurley's still worrying about dead bodies. He's very uncomfortable with corpses, just as he will be freaked out about the whole "I See Dead People" thing later.
Jack says, "Well, let's do this" as they prepare to enter the cockpit; didn't Eloise say that, too, when she welcomed the castaways to her creepy abode? It's time for answers. The plane's a mess, but it's in better shape than the pilot, who like Eko manages to survive a horrific situation only to be killed by Smokey. Getting to the pilot is treacherous, an upward climb in an unstable structure. Charlie's scared out of his wits but still worrying about his drugs. And feeling insignificant. Much like the poor pilot, who at least manages to relay some very important information before he gets splattered across the treetops: They're way off course. A thousand miles. Help is not coming anytime soon; they have no idea where to look.
"Where's Charlie?" Makes me chuckle because I saw a musical by that name in London. The guy spent half the play doing the Mrs. Doubtfire thing; Charlie certainly isn't cross-dressing, but he is engaged in deception. Then again, who isn't? Aaaand note to pilot: Why are you sticking your head out the window when there's a man-mangling monster outside??? Scary running-from-monster music. Muddy and slippery; why must it be raining during this pursuit? Charlie falls and gets tangled in the bracken, Jack goes back to free him. Third time Charlie almost kicks it in the Pilot alone. Kate, isolated and terrified, doesn't seem to care what happened to Charlie but screams for Jack, then tries his counting-to-five trick. And then Charlie shows up out of nowhere, and instead of being relieved, she assaults him with "Where's Jack?" Poor Charlie. Oh, and Kate tells an incredulous Charlie, "We have to go back (for him)."
Can you imagine how this would have played out if they'd stuck to their original plan and killed Jack off here? If Smokey had gotten him like he got the pilot? Grotesque! (I so didn't need to see what precisely befell Seth Norris.) Smokey, for the most part, has left the castaways alone. Why? And why did he pick on the poor pilot and chase Jack, Kate and Charlie through the jungle What did they in particular do to offend him? Or is it just that they're the first intruders he sees? Still not too clear on this. Also, is he somehow unable to visit the beach? We've never seen him there, have we? He seems restricted to a certain area... Charlie gets the last line of Part 1, and it's a question, just like in the second part. "Guys... Where are we?" is much more iconic. "Guys... How does something like that happen?" is certainly pertinent, however - though the more pressing question now is why. Black screen! BOMP! And in white lettering... LOST. What a beginning!
I remember exactly when I watched this for the first time. It was February 4, 2006; it was the day before the Superbowl, which makes the date easy to recall. It was a total couch potato kind of day. Mom and I started it off by watching Corpse Bride, which we'd rented, then going to see Rent at the dollar theater with Libbie. We proceeded to Wendy's for lunch, called home and ascertained that Nathan was in a bad mood, but for whatever reason decided to continue our fun at my house. On the menu: LOST. "I got it from the library," Libbie told me. "Do you want to give a shot?" Did I! I'd only been waiting a year and a half to watch the show; goodness knows what took me so long, or how much longer still it would have taken if Libbie hadn't given me that Jacob-like "little push". It helped, of course, that Dan had spent the past year assuring both of us that it was the best thing on television. "Nathan, don't you want to watch this with us?" I prodded as he sulked in the corner. "You know you do..." He harrumphed and turned away. But by the end of the episode he was hooked, bad mood forgotten, and by the end of the disc Mom and Dad returned from a grocery shopping excursion, flung into the show full throttle. They would have to be filled in on the Pilot later.
I went into it with higher expectations that I can ever recall having for a show, which made me nervous. I figured I would most likely wind up disappointed, that it could never turn out to be as fantastic as I thought it would be. That, I suspect, was part of the reason for my delay. In the meantime, I'd been stalwartly avoiding almost any information about the show, though I caught a few things here and there, which were enough to give me a general idea about who a few of the characters were. I was most interested in Charlie, though I realized - largely from the seemingly endless barrage of promos for The Moth - that he was a darker character than Merry, and I wondered if I would even like him. I found sage wilderness man John Locke fascinating, particularly from the the aforementioned preview and the one actual moment of the show that I accidentally watched, when he finishes whittling a whistle and hands it to Michael as a Vincent-finding tool. By this scene, then, I also knew there was a boy and his dad and a dog. Dan filled me in on sweet, pregnant Claire, an early favorite of his, back when she had more to do. Oh, and I knew there was a fat guy, and I wasn't sure exactly what his role was on the show, but I was hoping he would be benevolent. I watched him especially carefully during the first episode.
So Jack comes crashing out of the jungle in a half-run after pulling out his little bottle of alcohol. On the beach, all is pristine and silent... and then a scream. We are introduced to Shannon, the third character, though we hear her long before we see her. And suddenly that little bottle seems like Lucy Pevensie's healing potion, with Jack, like her, trying to attend to all of the wounded at once. In all the panic, we manage to meet most of our core 15. Charlie is next, stumbling about in a daze; he narrowly misses Gary's fate, and moments later almost gets hit with a massive piece of falling plane. The Island, it seems, was always out to get him. Then there's Jin, bellowing in Korean, looking for his wife, who we don't meet until later. Of all the characters, they were the only two who I couldn't connect with at first; they just seemed too separate from everything that was happening, and the language barrier cemented the difference. For long stretches of time, I forgot they even existed. Seconds later, we get the first name on the show, and it's one we're not likely to forget. Essentially the first articulate line of the season is "WAAAAALLLLTTTT!"; it's also the last.
Jack starts ordering people around, and the first to leap to the ready is John. What a joy to be able to lug away a heavy piece of equipment, when moments before he couldn't walk! We don't know that now, of course; that revelation at the end of the fourth episode serves as the first massive "Oh my gosh!" moment of the show. If you weren't hooked before then, that had to do it. But no sooner is Redshirt With the Mangled Leg liberated from the wreckage than we hear Claire's piercing screams and see that she is Very Pregnant, and Jack's got somebody else to run off and rescue. While he converses with Claire, we watch John try to save Gary with a shouted warning, to no avail, and Boone attempt to perform CPR on a prone Rose. Jack's not the only hero here. But he's certainly the dominant one, and he now pulls a dazed Hurley aside and puts Claire in his care. Hurley looks sick to his stomach at the prospect of being responsible for a woman who could go into labor at any moment, but he complies - and it's thanks to him and his stellar interpersonal skills that Our Hero finally, about six minutes in, becomes Jack. "Hey, what's your name?" Hurley calls. Thanks, dude, for clearing that up.
Poor Boone. Jack shoves him aside, and then he runs off to get a pen for a tracheotomy, returning only two minutes later, but it feels like about two hours, especially after Jack's cross-beach sprint to stop Claire from getting pulverized. When Boone shows up midway into Jack's post-panic solitude - after not just Jack but a "spry" and protective Hurley have saved Claire's life - with a fistful of pens, it's so pathetic there's nothing to do but laugh. Which Jack does, but he also gently expresses gratitude for the effort. And ten minutes in, we meet Kate, and her brilliant first line is "What?" This is Jack's first intimate introduction, away from all of the madness of the beach. So Jack and Kate have a special connection from the get-go. (If I'd watched this when it first aired, I think I would have recognized Kate at once from the LiveLinks commercials that played about a hundred times a night in the fall of 2004. That might have worried me...)
And the next thing we see is Sawyer. Which also seems very appropriate. Jack. Kate. Sawyer. And he's sitting there, all stubbly and brooding, with his shockingly short hair and his bad-boy 'tude. "Yeah, I'm gonna sit here and light up a cigarette even though I'm a few feet away from an exploding plane. Who wants to try stopping me?" Just wait until Part 2; Charlie will! Fat chance, buddy. And already, Hurley is making himself useful by gathering food, while John and Claire gaze out at the ocean in wonder. And nearly 13 minutes in, we meet Sayid. In front of a massive fire. He, too, is being helpful; it's a signal fire, and he delegates Charlie to help. (And now the names have started flying fast and furious; we know Sayid , too, and will soon know many others. It helps a lot that nearly everyone has to make introductions to each other.) Anyway, while Sayid's initiative shows his leadership potential, this first shot of him against a blazing backdrop could also be seen as foreshadowing at this late date. Did the writers know how thoroughly Sayid was going to crash and burn?
Poignant shot of Rose kissing Bernard's wedding ring, and then we're back to Jack and Kate and the charming "I might throw up on you." (I feel like somebody else said that, much later in the series, but I can't remember who... Hurley maybe?) And now it's the counting to five story - without any reference to his father. In light of that new knowledge, I see Jack indulging in some denial here, making believe he's a bit stronger than he is on his own. But then he's also convincing Kate to be the best she can be. For now, he's here to help others; the being willing to accept unsolicited help part can come a little later.
Fifteen minutes in, and we've switched to night under a dazzling star-spangled sky. Charlie writes FATE on the cloths on his fingers. More foreshadowing? Sayid wonders why no one's come yet; throughout most of the first season, he is the primary force in the Let's Get Off the Island plans. He's highly motivated - impending reunion with his long-lost love, and wanting to make his best buddy's death worth something - and highly qualified. Next shot - Shannon. Painting her toenails. Is this foreshadowing of their relationship? I never liked that much; why couldn't they just be friends? How could Sayid forget Nadia so quickly? Or give up on getting back to her so quickly? It didn't gel for me. And Shannon is hardly endearing here. She's obnoxious; Boone is at least trying to help, albeit generally failing.
Hurley offers Claire food, asks how she's feeling and even gives her an extra portion; he's really her first friend on the Island, so it's sweet to see him returning to that role in Charlie's absence, starting with Greatest Hits. Not that he and Claire stopped being friends, of course (and I love how he advises Sawyer to endear himself to her by offering her blankets in Left Behind), but he took more of a backseat. Seventeen minutes in, we finally meet Walt - looking so young! - and he rejects nearly-beardless Michael's conversation attempts. He mopes. These two have as many issues as Shannon and Boone. As do Sun, seen here at last, and Jin who, understandably, says, "You must not leave my sight." The kind of separation they endured on the beach would be terrifying. But not knowing Jin yet, he soon comes across as demanding and cold, and it takes most of the first season to get an inkling of what a good guy he actually is.
Meet the Marshall, loaded with shrapnel, and the first indication that Kate knows him, though she spares us the details. "I was sitting next to him." I love Jack's leaf-plane. I'd forgotten he took flying lessons. "Wasn't for me," he said. Could Jack have been a Frank? Might we learn that Frank dabbled in med school? Nah... probably not. But who knows? Oh, and Kate sees smoke. And suddenly, the jungle starts going bonkers, and everyone sits up and takes notice. The best assessment? "That was weird, right?" Yes, indeed, Charlie. The silliest? "Is that Vincent?" Yeah, kid. That's your dog flattening the trees like a herd of elephants. Several people stand up and band together. Our core group, for the most part. "Terrific," says Charlie. (Just what Frank says when he sees John in the box...) Twenty-one minutes in. BOMP. Black. First flashback!
Hiya, Cindy Chandler! Way to flirt with Jack, and Jack, way to tip us off as to your problems with alcohol. Charlie running down the aisle, Jack and Rose bonding. I'm with Rose; I've "never been a very good flier." First mention of Bernard, though her moment on the beach with the ring was a clue that she had a husband, and he was probably on the plane from the reverent, distressed way she was treating the symbol of their bond. John, behind her, looks mildly startled but mostly unbothered. Shaking plane! Flying luggage! Oxygen masks!
And 24 minutes in, we're back to the beach, another day, everyone clustered around talking about the jungle weirdness. Rose recognizes the noise (because it sounds like a grocery scanner?). Kate insists on joining Jack on his quest; first indication that this gal isn't going to simply take no for an answer. She wants to get her hands dirty. She's not even deterred by having to take shoes off of a dead body, though she looks about ready to cry the whole time. And right around minute 25, here comes John in his white shirt with the blue checkered pattern, sporting an enormous scar above and below his right eye and slowly flashing the Fruit Smile. Charming or demonic? Kate seems to vote deranged, and John, abashed, retracts his gesture.
Charlie wants sunblock, which makes me laugh because Diane Sawyer was just harping about how a third of the people in the US don't use sunblock, and I was thinking that the folks on LOST must all be getting skin cancer from prolonged exposure to the sun with nothing to combat it. After the first few days, anyway; Shannon has some at the moment, and in her first helpful gesture, she agrees to share some with Charlie. And Hurley hilariously tries to shield young Walt from grim reality by spelling out "bodies". Incorrectly. (Judging by Some Like It Hoth, he didn't put his three years off the Island to good use by brushing up on his spelling skills.)
Jack puts Boone in charge of the wounded; nice of him, again, to prop others up. Of course, he does need to have somebody playing doctor in his absence, and with his lifeguard experience, Boone is the likeliest candidate. Sayid seems to perk up at the word "transceiver". Jittery Charlie just wants to get back to the cockpit. There are drugs to be had! And 27 minutes in, he's flirting with Kate and trying to impress her with the fact that he's in Drive Shaft. It works, somewhat; Kate's friend Beth (never mentioned again, I don't think?) is a huge fan, and Kate's at least heard the song. But Jack is not impressed, and rather like Desmond in Catch-22 and Daniel in Because You Left, he's all about cutting the chit-chat and getting on the with journey.
While Charlie tries to convince Kate that Drive Shaft is, not was, Vincent stares after them. Knowing he was recently given orders by Christian (Esau?), it sort of makes me wonder what he's up to... Which makes it seem especially fitting to see John next, sitting on the beach, still trying to comprehend his situation. Certainly with no inkling of the long, strange road that will follow. And right after that, sudden rainstorm! Everyone else panics and runs for cover, but he sits, simply calmly at first, then in sheer exuberance, grinning and raising his arms to the sky in gratitude right around minute 29 in the second Iconic John Locke Expression of the series. Sun and Jin are conspicuously together, as are Michael and Walt, though Sun doesn't look thrilled and neither does Walt. And Hurley's still worrying about dead bodies. He's very uncomfortable with corpses, just as he will be freaked out about the whole "I See Dead People" thing later.
Jack says, "Well, let's do this" as they prepare to enter the cockpit; didn't Eloise say that, too, when she welcomed the castaways to her creepy abode? It's time for answers. The plane's a mess, but it's in better shape than the pilot, who like Eko manages to survive a horrific situation only to be killed by Smokey. Getting to the pilot is treacherous, an upward climb in an unstable structure. Charlie's scared out of his wits but still worrying about his drugs. And feeling insignificant. Much like the poor pilot, who at least manages to relay some very important information before he gets splattered across the treetops: They're way off course. A thousand miles. Help is not coming anytime soon; they have no idea where to look.
"Where's Charlie?" Makes me chuckle because I saw a musical by that name in London. The guy spent half the play doing the Mrs. Doubtfire thing; Charlie certainly isn't cross-dressing, but he is engaged in deception. Then again, who isn't? Aaaand note to pilot: Why are you sticking your head out the window when there's a man-mangling monster outside??? Scary running-from-monster music. Muddy and slippery; why must it be raining during this pursuit? Charlie falls and gets tangled in the bracken, Jack goes back to free him. Third time Charlie almost kicks it in the Pilot alone. Kate, isolated and terrified, doesn't seem to care what happened to Charlie but screams for Jack, then tries his counting-to-five trick. And then Charlie shows up out of nowhere, and instead of being relieved, she assaults him with "Where's Jack?" Poor Charlie. Oh, and Kate tells an incredulous Charlie, "We have to go back (for him)."
Can you imagine how this would have played out if they'd stuck to their original plan and killed Jack off here? If Smokey had gotten him like he got the pilot? Grotesque! (I so didn't need to see what precisely befell Seth Norris.) Smokey, for the most part, has left the castaways alone. Why? And why did he pick on the poor pilot and chase Jack, Kate and Charlie through the jungle What did they in particular do to offend him? Or is it just that they're the first intruders he sees? Still not too clear on this. Also, is he somehow unable to visit the beach? We've never seen him there, have we? He seems restricted to a certain area... Charlie gets the last line of Part 1, and it's a question, just like in the second part. "Guys... Where are we?" is much more iconic. "Guys... How does something like that happen?" is certainly pertinent, however - though the more pressing question now is why. Black screen! BOMP! And in white lettering... LOST. What a beginning!
Wednesday, May 20, 2009
Bad Twin (Tie-In Novel) Review
Gary Troup, the first character whose demise we saw on LOST, wrote Bad Twin. Darlton said getting sucked into a turbine was just punishment. It wasn't that bad, but I doubt Sawyer would have been as riveted if he hadn't been so hard up for reading material.
Saturday, May 16, 2009
Friday, May 15, 2009
And the Wait Begins...
Only one more time of being between seasons of LOST. I heard that they planned to do an Alternate Reality Game last year, other than Dharma Wants You, in the fall, but they had to axe it because of the economic meltdown. I'm hoping they can manage something this year. Meanwhile, I think I'm going to go through and write about all the episodes I watched before I started watching live, and recapping. Which is totally silly, especially now that most of the questions posed by those episodes have been answered, but we'll see how it goes. It'll give me something to do and satisfy my obsessive sensibilities. I also got Bad Twin out of the library; my hopes aren't too high for that one, but Sawyer seemed to find it moderately entertaining...
Thursday, May 14, 2009
"It Only Ends Once. Anything That Happens Before That Is Just Progress."
Wow. "Cataclysmic conclusions," indeed! This was some episode. If not for that one horribly disheartening scene, I might be prepared to call it my favorite finale. On the whole, The Incident delivered for me in a big way. In preparing for the finale, this time I decided to make bingo cards, with each square listing something that could happen in the finale. As I was watching, I kept thinking, "Oh, I should've put that!" - "fish," "fistfight," "familiar character played by new actor," etc. Out of 120 predictions that were on my cards (several of them contradictory), about 30 were correct, by some interpretation anyway. Big stuff like Sawyer saving Jack's life; small stuff like the appearance of an Apollo bar. Several of the items were things that couldn't be conclusively determined by the end of the episode; silly me to think we might actually get an answer or two as to where we were headed next! And several - "Jacob does not exist," "Hurley meets Liam" - were wildly off the mark.
I made 5 cards, and each had a different prediction regarding Jacob. Technically, none of them was correct - and, oddly enough, none of them was "Jacob dies." I mean, the most startling assertion from the last episode, aside from Richard saying he saw everyone die - a statement that didn't gain any clarity in this episode - was John admitting he planned to kill Jacob. But for one, while I thought that Jacob probably did exist, I found it hard to think of him as an entity who could be killed - and if he could, I convinced myself that Richard or Ben would put a stop to it. Probably the closest I came to a right answer on that one was the grossly inaccurate "Jacob is John" - by which I mean anti-Jacob (henceforth to be called, for convenience's sake, Esau), who was apparently posing as Jacob in The Man Behind the Curtain, is New John. Old John, alas, really is dead, and a season later, I guess it's time I mourned him properly. Unless he and everybody else who's died is zapped back into life by the hydrogen bomb...
But let's talk about Jacob, because I've been itching to find out about this guy ever since Ben mentioned "Him" in season two, back when he was still posing as Henry. The more hints were dropped, the more anxious I was to get some answers. But I was also afraid that if we saw Jacob as a flesh and blood person, it would detract from his mystique. Somehow... It didn't. And any doubts I had as to Jacob's benevolence were wiped from my mind almost immediately. I never thought that tonight would be a Jacob flashback. I never thought that we'd see him off the Island (unless he and John or Christian were the same person). And I can't say I expected to fall so utterly in love with him. Doc Jensen has maintained for much of this season that five is analogous to two, and to some extent Jacob's flashbacks are a reflection of that. They completely immerse us in an important character only briefly touched on before. I didn't fall in love with Desmond until Live Together, Die Alone; it's probably still my favorite finale.
If anything bugs me about Jacob - aside from his interaction with Ben, which I'll get to later - it's the way he talks. Jacob and Esau are sitting on the beach in the 1800s, watching the Black Rock head their way. They've obviously been on the Island for a very long time even before that. Yet they both talk like modern Americans. There is nothing in their accent or lexicon to suggest antiquity. I can maybe buy him adapting with the times. But why is he talking that way two hundred years ago? Oh, and I bopped over to Lostpedia last night trying to find out the name of the actor who played Jacob, as IMDb doesn't list him at all, even under a character pseudonym, and discovered that what Jacob was filleting in the first scene was a red herring. What does this mean? It would seem that the show is leading us astray about something, but what? Could it mean Esau's physical appearance, perhaps? Though I don't know that I really expected to see him again in that form. Jacob looks the same year after year, but as soon as I realized he had a nemesis, I figured we might have met him before and not realized it. (The red herring could also be our impression of Jacob as Ultimate Good Guy. After all, Esau accuses Jacob of just causing strife in trying again and again to prove... that people are good, or redeemable, or something of that nature. You could argue... But no. I won't make that leap. I'm sufficiently convinced Jacob truly is good and will be very annoyed if the show turns that on its head. Or maybe the fact that it's a red herring being cooked on a black rock is significant. Like we've been thinking the Black Rock is a lot more important than it is? Or that's not really the Black Rock sailing toward the beach? Or maybe it's just a fish that happens to be red.)
Throughout the series, I've tended to think of Jacob, the Smoke Monster and the Island apparitions as different aspects of the same being. But now it appears that the apparitions are a manifestation of Esau. I'm not sure if Smokey is too, or if he's a separate being, a "security system" as they say. But I don't think he's Jacob, and I'm not at all sure he's a "good guy," if he can be called a guy. If Smokey is Esau, what were the reasons for his past actions? Did he appear as "beautiful" to John because he recognized that he was the key to his grand "loophole"? Was the killing of Eko less about the refusal to repent and more about him realizing that he couldn't manipulate Eko as he did John? Did he spare Ben just so Ben would do his dirty work? It seems that, like Ben and Charles, Jacob and Esau are incapable of killing each other. So a willing murderer was needed. And all of this episode leads me to the conclusion that John really was not very "special" at all, that his delusions of grandeur - fed by Richard, informed by John, who was in turn informed by Richard who was manipulated by Esau - simply made him the ideal candidate to set up as a ruler. By the time that touching conversation between Jack and Richard occurred, in which Jack rather surprisingly told Richard, who was expressing his doubts about John's "special"-ness, "I wouldn't give up on him," I was thinking, "Well... Maybe you should." Real John wouldn't want to kill Jacob. And that exchange in which pseudo-John implied to Richard that he intended to kill the survivors of Ajira 316? Terrifying. That's not the John I know and love. Baldie may be a little unhinged, but he's certainly not genocidal.
It did occur to me back when John came back to life that he could be like Christian, Yemi, Boone and all of the other dead people who have popped up on the Island, memories intact. But John seemed so much more substantial than any of them, who we have only seen for moments at a time, and usually in strange, shadowy circumstances. We saw him eating fruit, for one, and savoring it with intense sensual satisfaction - rather, come to think of it, like Nicholas Cage's character in City of Angels. Did something happen to allow Esau to take a more permanent form this time? Then again, Esau must also have been Alex, so if he could change forms so quickly, maybe John's form wasn't any different. And Alex did beat Ben up. What, I wonder, made Jacob abandon the cabin, and when was the line of ash around it broken? It would seem that Jacob himself was never trapped; he's been coming and going freely for years. Was Esau imprisoned in there like the witch in the tree in The Magician's Nephew? How, then, was he released? Anyway, I was troubled but not entirely shocked when John's body tumbled out of the crate that Ilana and her cronies had been carrying around like the Ark of the Covenant. My first, mundane thought upon contemplating the crate at the beginning of the episode was that it contained weaponry of some kind. My second was that it was a body - though what happened to John's coffin? When I saw it again at the end, I pretty much figured that it was either Jacob's body or it was John's. The one consolation here is that we're probably still going to have Terry O'Quinn on the show for the bulk of next season. Except he's evil now, and our dear John is gone for good.
Charles wanted John to go back to the Island, but he said that John wouldn't have to die. So did he intend for John to be back on the Island, fighting the good fight, or was Charles an agent of Esau? What about Eloise? Did she have any inkling of what she was unleashing by sending John's body back? It really does seem now that the warnings that seemed to be about Aaron - "You're not supposed to raise him," "Don't you dare bring him back" - applied to John. But heads-up, PB&J; if you've got a crucial message to get across, it's best not to be so cryptic.
So I said I was going to talk about Jacob, and so far I've done little but discuss his nemesis. Jacob... Yeah, he had me hook, line and sinker. I was mostly there at the end of the first scene, which was so gloriously picturesque and mythic and had that epic score, my second-favorite music of the episode, which hinted at the time period much better than the dialogue did. But once he turned up again in Kate's flashback, I was completely sold. And how great was Kate's flashback? The most ineffective encounter, perhaps, but sweet and playful and just thoroughly enjoyable. My first comment was, "This looks like Iowa," so I got a kick out of the confirmation in the license plate. My second, upon seeing the toy plane, was "This is Kate and Tom." We'd never seen kid Kate before, aside from that photo in Sam Austen's wallet, and I thought she was terrific, though it was the adorable, frail-looking Tom I was especially taken with. I loved Kate's doleful glances after she was caught red-handed - and how hilarious is it that she stole a New Kids on the Block lunchbox? I feel like I was the only girl in my elementary school not to be obsessed with them during their heyday - and her grateful reaction to Jacob, whose nose tap was so wonderfully tender. Didn't exactly sway her from a life of crime, though, did it? As the episode emphasized by immediately cutting to her in handcuffs on the sub... Anyway, this was when I knew the episode would be Jacob-centric, and in a way reminiscent of the hundredth episode of Desperate Housewives, a show I don't watch much but boy, did they nail that one. The similarity was coincidental, though, I'm sure. And in this case, nobody knew just who it was they were interacting with except Ilana - but several of the others had a feeling it was someone pretty special.
Perhaps the most puzzling of Jacob's flashbacks was Sawyer's. He offered comfort to Sawyer... and he gave him the pen with which to write his note. The note that served as a constant reminder of his thirst for vengeance. It was Sawyer's uncle, not Jacob, who warned him not to spend his life obsessing over the past - but maybe Jacob facilitated that conversation. Sawyer would have finished the letter later, anyway; giving him the pen drew his uncle's attention to what he was doing and prompted a conversation that would have great resonance years later. Realizing that Sawyer could have undone his parents' death, or at least tried, I found myself surprised he didn't attempt it. But Sawyer didn't want to reboot. If he'd succeeded, what a different life he would have led! And he almost certainly wouldn't have been on that plane.
Ever since Ilana abducted Frank, I've been mighty suspicious of her. She was pretty scary in Sayid's flashback too. I pretty much figured she was one of the bad guys and was building an army against our friends. And Frank's point about the good guys not generally identifying themselves as such seemed a fair one. But once I saw that Jacob had specifically enlisted her help, I trusted her. One might say this was the most illuminating flashback - aside from the opening scene, of course. (Oh, and I think I owe Caesar an apology. I liked him at first, then he went rummaging for guns and I became suspicious. But it's looking like he really did die from that gunshot wound, and he really was just trying to help. Poor guy.) Questions: What happened to Ilana that she was all wrapped up in bandages? How did she know about Peter Avelino? By the way, he is listed in the IMDb credits, so are we supposed to figure that he was the one driving the car that ran over Nadia? That would be odd since it was someone Ben told Sayid to kill, but not the one he claimed was responsible for her death. I've been kinda figuring Ben had no idea who killed Nadia. But it can't be just coincidence that one of the guys on his hit list actually did kill her. Anyway, perhaps the most compelling question is, How do Ilana and Jacob know each other? And if she's so much in Jacob's inner circle, why don't she and Richard know one another? We don't know the exact timing of this flashback, but it must have been fairly recent. Jacob knew trouble was coming. I wonder if that means he wanted Sayid back on the Island; it would seem that perhaps she apprehended him on Jacob's command. The Sayid flashback was the most depressing; Jacob saved his life, but he had to watch his wife get mowed down. Who would want to kill Nadia, and why? And was Jacob really doing Sayid a favor when he's been completely miserable ever since, save a brief stint in Build Our World? I found myself wishing he'd stopped Nadia instead, but if the driver really was after Nadia, I don't suppose that would have done any good. But how sad... And I found myself thinking of Forrest Gump and Bubba's last words as she begged Sayid to take her home.
After the wedding tip-off, I did a lot of contemplating as to whose wedding we might see in this episode. I considered Sun and Jin, but I didn't find it likely, since we've already seen the events immediately surrounding their wedding. Still, the scene didn't feel stale. I loved the vows, and Jin's seemed especially appropriate given what would befall them later. And I loved Jacob's gentle and astute blessing, and Jin's being so impressed with his command of Korean. Jacob, it appears, it a polyglot extraordinaire. Of course, he's apparently had centuries (millennia?) to pursue the study of languages. This was the most romantic flashback. The shortest was John's; Jacob barely said anything at all. But there were a couple of very interesting things about it. First, John looked dead; I don't know if Jacob resurrected him or if he merely brought him out of unconsciousness, but either way, it seems likely that John wouldn't have survived without Jacob's intervention. Was Jacob also responsible for the healing of his legs once 815 crashed? In healing / resurrecting John, did Jacob know he was paving the way for Esau's re-emergence? Was he setting the ultimate showdown into motion? A glance at the cover of the Flannery O'Connor book he was reading tells me yes. A dove being pierced by an arrow... That's pretty powerful imagery there. I think Jacob expected to be killed.
Jack's was the first flashback of the second hour. When I saw him in surgery, I said, "Oh, I bet we're going to see the counting to five thing!" So I was glad when we did. When he told Kate the story, he didn't acknowledge anyone calming him down; he implied that he collected himself on his own. I figured at first that Jacob would be the one advising Jack to count to five, but when it was Christian, and when we saw nothing but Christian throughout the scene and its continuation, I started to think that maybe Christian really was Esau, and all of the flashbacks for the second hour would involve him. Thankfully, that wasn't the case; I'm pretty sure that Christian really was just Christian when he was alive, and, for all his faults, wasn't such a bad guy. How do we explain Jack seeing Christian off-Island last season, though? Hurley, via Charlie, told him someone was coming; does that mean Christian wasn't Esau? It seems likely that he can't go off the Island, for one thing. But then does that mean Jack was really seeing his father? Or was Christian a hallucination, and Charlie referring to someone else? Of all the encounters, the Jack-Jacob encounter seemed the least significant. All he did was give him a candy bar (I was excited to see Apollo, and now I want to try a Humdinger) and say, "Maybe all it needed was a little push." But I guess that was his way of telling Jack that his dad was trying to help. And maybe a bit of foreshadowing about the "little push" needed for the bomb? Though of course that involved Juliet, not Jack. Juliet, whose flashback felt completely jarring. It's a shame, because it was a well-done scene and helped us understand her motivations in the present. But unless they really want to draw attention to the fact that Juliet wasn't visited by Jacob, it was completely out of place. Now, maybe they did. Maybe that will play heavily somehow into season six. Maybe it has to do with Juliet making a conscious, grand self-sacrificial gesture without having been touched by Jacob. Or something. But if there's no special significance there, then it should have been left out or altered because it just seemed really strange as it was.
Once I realized that this was, essentially, a Jacob-centric episode, my hopes for a Hurley-Liam meet-up dimmed considerably, though I still held out a bit of hope. Alas, no Liam. Nonetheless, I loved the Hurley scene. For one, it ran incredibly parallel to the Desmond prison release scene in the season two finale, with Hurley getting his personal effects back from a guard who seemed rather annoyed with him and getting into a car, in which sat a man with a gift and some life-changing advice. Hurley was surprised in his meeting with Jacob, but he didn't freak out like he did with John and Abaddon. Instead, Jacob seemed to have a calming effect upon him. Indeed, Jacob came bearing news that Hurley, far from being cursed and crazy, had been blessed with a very special gift and was needed back on the Island. Hurley wasn't nuts, he just convinced himself he was, and his state of being took a downward spiral. Jacob snapped him out of it. There was such warmth and affection flowing from Jacob to Hurley in that scene, no wonder he decided to take that flight after all. Hurley's connection with the Island has always seemed very strong indeed, and it seems very fitting that Jacob would specifically recruit him like that. Also... Maybe that really is the guitar that Charlie had on the Island. Did he leave it with Hurley just because of the thing about recreating the conditions of the original flight, or was there another reason? Or maybe there's no guitar in there at all. Could there be something else inside of mysterious significance?
We got a lot of Jacob flashbacks. There were notable omissions, however. Richard. I've maintained for quite some time that he probably came from the Black Rock, and when the ship showed up on the horizon in the beginning, I was thinking, "Oooh, here comes Richard!" But now that we know that Jacob and Esau had been on the Island for ages, it makes me wonder if Richard has been around even longer than the Black Rock. Still, that scene seemed to suggest that they were the only two on the Island. Maybe among everyone on that ship, Richard displayed an unusual wisdom, fortitude and grace, prompting Jacob to appoint him his deputy. Surely we'll delve more into Richard's past later. I'm over my initial bus accident-inspired suspicions and can't help but feel I really like the guy. The other major omission was Ben. I felt sure that just before Ben had to decide once and for all if he was going to kill Jacob, we would see a flashback indicating that Jacob had made some sort of extraordinary impact upon Ben without his knowing it. It could be, of course, that Jacob healed Ben after he was shot - though I have an uneasy feeling that isn't the case. Ben had already encountered Esau, I presume, in the form of his mother. And I'm guessing it was Esau who healed him, and that's why the consequences were so unfortunate. Richard says you don't go to Jacob, and anyway Jacob resides near the statue, not in the temple. Smokey's in the temple. But why would Jacob's right-hand man consort with the enemy? And is this why Jacob has been ignoring Ben all these years? Is Ben somehow off-limits, Esau having staked his claim on him?
I loved most of this episode, but I hated the Ben-Jacob confrontation. Oh, it was powerful, and Michael Emerson was particularly compelling, but I was so frustrated with Jacob for evidently having refused to acknowledge Ben all his life, or, if the impression was false, for not showing Ben he was mistaken. I wanted an explanation for Jacob's distance or evidence of his involvement. I got neither. There was something very Job-like about all this talk of patience, and the sense of Ben being a devoted (albeit sadly substandard) servant with misery heaped on him for no known reason. I can't blame Ben for being frustrated. But I was furious with him. As Jacob said, he had a choice. And I so wanted it to be the right one. I'd managed to convince myself that we were building toward Ben's great redemption by way of refusing to kill Jacob. It was clear from his staggered response at the end of the last episode and his misery in this one that he didn't want to do it, but that he also had all of these bitter emotions swirling around inside of him. There, too, it took just a little push - Esau's wheedling (and I think things might have gone quite differently if Ben had realized this wasn't John) and Jacob's lack of response - for something major to happen. Majorly bad in this case, and which Ben completely brought upon himself by killing John. I am sorely unversed in Latin, but Lostpedia informs me that the translation for Richard's response to Ilana's riddle was “He who will protect/save us all.” And now Ben went and killed him. Nice. Going. Ugh. I don't think it's going to take him very long to realize he's made a massive mistake. But now that he's made his irrevocably awful decision, has he lost any shot at redemption? Did he ever have one? If Jacob's death was necessary for a final season apocalyptic battle between the forces of good and evil, was this heinous crime actually ultimately a good thing? Ugh. I don't know. I just know that I spent the whole episode longing to give Jacob a bear hug, and this scene made me feel like Lucy witnessing Aslan's execution. Ben, you have let me down. (Unless, in my desperation to make Ben Snape, I entertain the possibility that Ben has been acting completely ingenuine; that he knew John was Esau; that he has been in communion with Jacob all along and has been using his supreme lying skills to play us all for fools; that Jacob asked him to kill him, knowing the ultimate battle for Good could be won through the efforts of Jack and company. And the one lie we know he told in this episode, that he was a Pisces, was his subtle tip-off that he was a disciple of fish-filleting Jacob, a fish in the sand for Jacob-loving viewers. Oh, yeah. I think I like that far-out theory better. And after all, it isn't as though Jacob offered any kind of significant resistance...)
So let's move from my least favorite scene of the finale to my favorite. Rose. And. Bernard. (!!!) So... yeah, I was really excited to see them again. I was fairly convinced they'd died out in the jungle (or in the caves); I figured surely they would've turned up by now otherwise. I wasn't terribly optimistic. But there was still that shred of hope... I loved Sawyer's exuberance as he embraced Vincent and ruffled his fur, and then that familiar voice... Well, it wasn't the warmest of welcomes, was it? But once they took Sawyer, Kate and Juliet back to their humble abode (which they, apparently, built themselves), it was all pretty cordial, and I'm not sure I could imagine a better way for them to have been integrated into the episode. It was a stunning oasis in the midst of mass chaos. The score throughout this scene was gorgeous - and had definitely better be on the soundtrack. One of my favorite pieces of LOST music ever. (I was surprised at the total lack of diegetic music in this episode. And yeah, I totally just learned that word from consulting Lostpedia as I wrote my review of the first soundtrack. But if this is our last week in the seventies, it might have been nice to give the ol' record player one more spin. Oh, well. Speaking of the score, I found myself really digging the recurring walking music with Team 2007.) I loved the quiet retirement Rose and Bernard built for each other, their calm contentment with their lot in life, their gentle words of advice with Bernard's hint of "live together, die alone," their willingness to offer the needed information despite their Bombadilian detachment. I loved that they shared this life with Vincent. I loved Rose's derisive comment about everyone always finding new ways to kill each other. I loved the fact that Sawyer and Jin had searched for them diligently. I loved Bernard asking them in for tea, which felt especially wistful because this may well be the last time they meet. I even loved Bernard's scraggly beard. It was just a perfect scene. And while I very much hope to see them again, I could possibly be all right with us leaving them here, with this being our last impression of them. For this, Damon and Carlton, thank you, thank you, thank you. And hopefully Whoopi is satisfied as well...
And my second-favorite scene: Sun discovering Charlie's ring. Almost made up for the lack of Liam. I've been waiting and waiting for someone to find that thing, but Sun was the last person I would have expected. Of course, it made a convenient segue into her wedding flashback, but more than that, I think it was powerful that it was her because it symbolizes a move from vengeance to forgiveness. I really wasn't a fan of Black Widow Sun and was glad to see that aspect of her dissipate once she learned Jin was alive. Charlie wronged Sun pretty badly, so finding that ring and gazing on it with fondness signals that she has forgiven Charlie, and if she's moved on from that then she can move on from other things too. (Although I'm really worried about Sawyer. I've loved his character arc through the last couple of seasons, and if Juliet is indeed dead, I feel like he could be in for a massive regression yet again, which I would really hate to see. As far as revenge goes, though, who would he go after? I don't see who he could legitimately blame, except maybe Jack, and Sawyer made the decision to go after him.) Anyway, I'm thrilled that Sun has the ring now, and I'm guessing next season she will have an opportunity to present it to Claire. And maybe Hurley will give her the guitar as well. The Hurley-Jacob scene is probably my third-favorite. And that opening scene was really cool.
I wasn't all that surprised to see Sayid get injured, but the shooter was a bit of a shock. Of course, it made perfect sense; Sayid shoots Ben, so Roger shoots Sayid. And all Sayid really accomplished by attempting to kill Ben was potentially getting himself killed. It's nice that he still managed to be helpful after that, but he seems to be on his last legs. Unless time resets and his injuries are rendered moot. It really was important to have him on board at this stage of the game, though; I don't think Jack could have made much sense of Daniel's instructions. That is, if it turns out to be a good thing that they detonated the bomb. Which it might well not be. Phil definitively kicked the bucket, in one of the single grossest moment LOST has given us. The guy was a pain, but yecch. Radzinsky, it seems, lives to terrorize another day - and if this has set history into motion instead of changing it, no wonder he offed himself, realizing what his mad scientist ambitions wrought upon the world. I don't think he's exactly a bad guy, just a powder keg, and a real inconvenience right at the moment. We saw how Dr. Chang mangled his arm - and Miles' heroic efforts to save him. And wasn't that the first time he called him "Dad"? Anyway, it was a terrific moment for a character who really got the short end of the stick last season but has been building toward greatness this season. And oh, how I loved Richard taking action, knocking Eloise out to save her from herself in the biggest show of aggression we've seen from him, mirrored later by his extreme agitation but frustrating inaction in response to pseudo-John's plan to take Ben with him to see Jacob.
This was a rough episode for Sawyer. There he was, on his way to domestic bliss with Juliet, when Kate had to come along and mess everything up by insisting they go stop John - though of course, they ultimately ended up helping him instead, even after Sawyer and Jack had that whopping fistfight in which each seemed equally likely to kill the other, except I was sure they wouldn't let it come to that. If Sawyer had a problem with Old Jack, he's got an even bigger issue with New Jack, and I thought his baring his soul to Jack about his parents, in a bit of a reversal of telling him about his encounter with Christian back in season one, was a cathartic moment. But despite his reservations, he still went to the trouble of busting in on the Swan site and saving Jack's life. I'm glad he took it pretty easy on the sub captain, and that the captain was pretty compliant. Shooting the radio was a decent way to cut off communications without hurting anybody. He seemed stunned and mystified to see Rose and Bernard. Thrilled, but pretty bewildered that they'd chosen to evade him for years. And not long later, absolutely gutted that Juliet has decided that it's best they never meet at all. (And really, even after Sawyer explicitly reminded him that Kate would wind up in prison if his plan worked, shame on Jack for his sulky "I can't have Kate so let's erase the last three years" stance.) Then, of course, trying so valiantly to save Juliet (who I really think he does love as much as he insists, even to the exclusion of Kate) in a scene that reminded me a lot of Sam and Frodo in the Cracks of Doom in Return of the King, but ended much differently. Talk about anguish, much like Sun watching Jin apparently die in season four... Though for Juliet, it was a moment that very much mirrored Desmond's heroic season two decision to "blow the dam", especially when she manually detonated the bomb, causing the entire screen to go white, with the black LOST in a striking inversion of the norm. Which makes me wonder how much of the next season is going to show things being the opposite of what we're used to... And whether Juliet, like Desmond, will emerge miraculously unscathed early in season six.
Other season finale parallels... Electromagnetic catastrophe a la season two, with metallic objects flying everywhere (and poor Jack getting knocked flat by a toolbox - ouch!). Hurley saving the day in his Dharma van a la season three. This time, he was taking instructions from Jack in a panic as he tried to make a clean getaway. Hurley driving the VW and Hurley post-prison release were practically all we got of him here; not nearly as much as I'd hoped, but what was there was fantastic. Frank freed from bondage a la season four (though he hasn't managed to do much with his freedom so far). Not much Frank here, but I loved his caustic "Terrific!" in reaction to seeing John's body (I was starting to think we were going to have to wait until season six to look inside that box ourselves) and objecting to the torching of the cabin (which was a good point, and made me wish we'd seen them extinguish the flames before they left). Also, what is he a candidate for? Leadership of an anti-Esau faction? As in the other finales, some crucial element of the season blew up. Third season finale to make some reference to Moses. First not to include Walt; first since one not to include Penny or Desmond. First one not to include somebody drinking alcohol - though Sun asked Richard if he had alcohol, and he replied, "I wish!" Four-toed statue a la season two was back with a vengeance. Ben says it's been just a foot for as long as he's been on the Island. If that's true (and Ben sort of seems too exhausted to lie in this episode, though I liked his dry assertion of "I lied. It's what I do."), I wonder what happened to it? Since Jughead, I've been kinda thinking the hydrogen bomb blew it apart. Maybe it wasn't the first or last bomb tested on the Island...
What didn't we see? The Humes. Not at all. But I'm worried that if the future changed, their idyllic life together may evaporate. No Charles, which surprised me a bit. Again no reference whatsoever to Annie, and she's now replaced Rose and Bernard at the top of the Characters-You-Better-Not-Have-Forgotten list. A reference to Horace, but he didn't turn up, nor did Amy and Ethan. Presumably they remained on the Island with him, though you'd think he would want to evacuate them. I suppose they could have left and come back. Or, of course, the future changed and they left, never to return, and Ethan never grew up to torment innocent Islanders. No Liam, Kelvin, Brother Campbell, Henry Gale or other minor character I postulated might pop up in some enlightening capacity. We did see Kate's Tom, Nadia and Rachel, and those were great scenes, but they didn't reveal any deeper connections. And, of course, no definitive idea of what's coming next season. Did Jack and his gang negate history or create it? Or something in between? Eight months is a long time to wait for this basic answer. If I have to venture a guess, I suppose I'll say that the '77 group ends up in 2007 just because it sure would be nice to have everybody in the same time period again, and in the same place.
So where does this leave us? At the conclusion of The Incident, Phil is dead, as, presumably, are several redshirts thanks to the O.K. Corral-style shootouts, while Sayid and Juliet seem on the verge of death, though that could be negated if Daniel's plan works properly. Rose, Bernard and Vincent are alive. Jacob exists and is benevolent but is dying. In flames. (But could that be a phoenix reference?) John is dead. Sigh. Pseudo-John is evil Esau, who seems likely to be responsible for the Island apparitions, and possibly Smokey. Ilana and Bram are on Jacob's side, and even though they knocked him out, they seem to like Frank. Richard will likely be a force to contend with (and presumably he and his group are the "they" Jacob refers to). Maybe he and Sun will team up. He's gotta be kicking himself that he let Esau pull the wool over his eyes. Ben is a villain and a victim, and I have no idea what he's going to do with himself now. Will Esau still want him for his stooge? Will self-preserving Ben accept the job? If time-zapping occurs, I imagine Sawyer, Jack, Kate, Miles, Jin and Hurley will all wind up in the future. But we really have no clue which of Daniel's assertions is true. Can you change history or not? Confusing. Maddening. Chilling. But on the whole, I'd say The Incident was exceptional.
I made 5 cards, and each had a different prediction regarding Jacob. Technically, none of them was correct - and, oddly enough, none of them was "Jacob dies." I mean, the most startling assertion from the last episode, aside from Richard saying he saw everyone die - a statement that didn't gain any clarity in this episode - was John admitting he planned to kill Jacob. But for one, while I thought that Jacob probably did exist, I found it hard to think of him as an entity who could be killed - and if he could, I convinced myself that Richard or Ben would put a stop to it. Probably the closest I came to a right answer on that one was the grossly inaccurate "Jacob is John" - by which I mean anti-Jacob (henceforth to be called, for convenience's sake, Esau), who was apparently posing as Jacob in The Man Behind the Curtain, is New John. Old John, alas, really is dead, and a season later, I guess it's time I mourned him properly. Unless he and everybody else who's died is zapped back into life by the hydrogen bomb...
But let's talk about Jacob, because I've been itching to find out about this guy ever since Ben mentioned "Him" in season two, back when he was still posing as Henry. The more hints were dropped, the more anxious I was to get some answers. But I was also afraid that if we saw Jacob as a flesh and blood person, it would detract from his mystique. Somehow... It didn't. And any doubts I had as to Jacob's benevolence were wiped from my mind almost immediately. I never thought that tonight would be a Jacob flashback. I never thought that we'd see him off the Island (unless he and John or Christian were the same person). And I can't say I expected to fall so utterly in love with him. Doc Jensen has maintained for much of this season that five is analogous to two, and to some extent Jacob's flashbacks are a reflection of that. They completely immerse us in an important character only briefly touched on before. I didn't fall in love with Desmond until Live Together, Die Alone; it's probably still my favorite finale.
If anything bugs me about Jacob - aside from his interaction with Ben, which I'll get to later - it's the way he talks. Jacob and Esau are sitting on the beach in the 1800s, watching the Black Rock head their way. They've obviously been on the Island for a very long time even before that. Yet they both talk like modern Americans. There is nothing in their accent or lexicon to suggest antiquity. I can maybe buy him adapting with the times. But why is he talking that way two hundred years ago? Oh, and I bopped over to Lostpedia last night trying to find out the name of the actor who played Jacob, as IMDb doesn't list him at all, even under a character pseudonym, and discovered that what Jacob was filleting in the first scene was a red herring. What does this mean? It would seem that the show is leading us astray about something, but what? Could it mean Esau's physical appearance, perhaps? Though I don't know that I really expected to see him again in that form. Jacob looks the same year after year, but as soon as I realized he had a nemesis, I figured we might have met him before and not realized it. (The red herring could also be our impression of Jacob as Ultimate Good Guy. After all, Esau accuses Jacob of just causing strife in trying again and again to prove... that people are good, or redeemable, or something of that nature. You could argue... But no. I won't make that leap. I'm sufficiently convinced Jacob truly is good and will be very annoyed if the show turns that on its head. Or maybe the fact that it's a red herring being cooked on a black rock is significant. Like we've been thinking the Black Rock is a lot more important than it is? Or that's not really the Black Rock sailing toward the beach? Or maybe it's just a fish that happens to be red.)
Throughout the series, I've tended to think of Jacob, the Smoke Monster and the Island apparitions as different aspects of the same being. But now it appears that the apparitions are a manifestation of Esau. I'm not sure if Smokey is too, or if he's a separate being, a "security system" as they say. But I don't think he's Jacob, and I'm not at all sure he's a "good guy," if he can be called a guy. If Smokey is Esau, what were the reasons for his past actions? Did he appear as "beautiful" to John because he recognized that he was the key to his grand "loophole"? Was the killing of Eko less about the refusal to repent and more about him realizing that he couldn't manipulate Eko as he did John? Did he spare Ben just so Ben would do his dirty work? It seems that, like Ben and Charles, Jacob and Esau are incapable of killing each other. So a willing murderer was needed. And all of this episode leads me to the conclusion that John really was not very "special" at all, that his delusions of grandeur - fed by Richard, informed by John, who was in turn informed by Richard who was manipulated by Esau - simply made him the ideal candidate to set up as a ruler. By the time that touching conversation between Jack and Richard occurred, in which Jack rather surprisingly told Richard, who was expressing his doubts about John's "special"-ness, "I wouldn't give up on him," I was thinking, "Well... Maybe you should." Real John wouldn't want to kill Jacob. And that exchange in which pseudo-John implied to Richard that he intended to kill the survivors of Ajira 316? Terrifying. That's not the John I know and love. Baldie may be a little unhinged, but he's certainly not genocidal.
It did occur to me back when John came back to life that he could be like Christian, Yemi, Boone and all of the other dead people who have popped up on the Island, memories intact. But John seemed so much more substantial than any of them, who we have only seen for moments at a time, and usually in strange, shadowy circumstances. We saw him eating fruit, for one, and savoring it with intense sensual satisfaction - rather, come to think of it, like Nicholas Cage's character in City of Angels. Did something happen to allow Esau to take a more permanent form this time? Then again, Esau must also have been Alex, so if he could change forms so quickly, maybe John's form wasn't any different. And Alex did beat Ben up. What, I wonder, made Jacob abandon the cabin, and when was the line of ash around it broken? It would seem that Jacob himself was never trapped; he's been coming and going freely for years. Was Esau imprisoned in there like the witch in the tree in The Magician's Nephew? How, then, was he released? Anyway, I was troubled but not entirely shocked when John's body tumbled out of the crate that Ilana and her cronies had been carrying around like the Ark of the Covenant. My first, mundane thought upon contemplating the crate at the beginning of the episode was that it contained weaponry of some kind. My second was that it was a body - though what happened to John's coffin? When I saw it again at the end, I pretty much figured that it was either Jacob's body or it was John's. The one consolation here is that we're probably still going to have Terry O'Quinn on the show for the bulk of next season. Except he's evil now, and our dear John is gone for good.
Charles wanted John to go back to the Island, but he said that John wouldn't have to die. So did he intend for John to be back on the Island, fighting the good fight, or was Charles an agent of Esau? What about Eloise? Did she have any inkling of what she was unleashing by sending John's body back? It really does seem now that the warnings that seemed to be about Aaron - "You're not supposed to raise him," "Don't you dare bring him back" - applied to John. But heads-up, PB&J; if you've got a crucial message to get across, it's best not to be so cryptic.
So I said I was going to talk about Jacob, and so far I've done little but discuss his nemesis. Jacob... Yeah, he had me hook, line and sinker. I was mostly there at the end of the first scene, which was so gloriously picturesque and mythic and had that epic score, my second-favorite music of the episode, which hinted at the time period much better than the dialogue did. But once he turned up again in Kate's flashback, I was completely sold. And how great was Kate's flashback? The most ineffective encounter, perhaps, but sweet and playful and just thoroughly enjoyable. My first comment was, "This looks like Iowa," so I got a kick out of the confirmation in the license plate. My second, upon seeing the toy plane, was "This is Kate and Tom." We'd never seen kid Kate before, aside from that photo in Sam Austen's wallet, and I thought she was terrific, though it was the adorable, frail-looking Tom I was especially taken with. I loved Kate's doleful glances after she was caught red-handed - and how hilarious is it that she stole a New Kids on the Block lunchbox? I feel like I was the only girl in my elementary school not to be obsessed with them during their heyday - and her grateful reaction to Jacob, whose nose tap was so wonderfully tender. Didn't exactly sway her from a life of crime, though, did it? As the episode emphasized by immediately cutting to her in handcuffs on the sub... Anyway, this was when I knew the episode would be Jacob-centric, and in a way reminiscent of the hundredth episode of Desperate Housewives, a show I don't watch much but boy, did they nail that one. The similarity was coincidental, though, I'm sure. And in this case, nobody knew just who it was they were interacting with except Ilana - but several of the others had a feeling it was someone pretty special.
Perhaps the most puzzling of Jacob's flashbacks was Sawyer's. He offered comfort to Sawyer... and he gave him the pen with which to write his note. The note that served as a constant reminder of his thirst for vengeance. It was Sawyer's uncle, not Jacob, who warned him not to spend his life obsessing over the past - but maybe Jacob facilitated that conversation. Sawyer would have finished the letter later, anyway; giving him the pen drew his uncle's attention to what he was doing and prompted a conversation that would have great resonance years later. Realizing that Sawyer could have undone his parents' death, or at least tried, I found myself surprised he didn't attempt it. But Sawyer didn't want to reboot. If he'd succeeded, what a different life he would have led! And he almost certainly wouldn't have been on that plane.
Ever since Ilana abducted Frank, I've been mighty suspicious of her. She was pretty scary in Sayid's flashback too. I pretty much figured she was one of the bad guys and was building an army against our friends. And Frank's point about the good guys not generally identifying themselves as such seemed a fair one. But once I saw that Jacob had specifically enlisted her help, I trusted her. One might say this was the most illuminating flashback - aside from the opening scene, of course. (Oh, and I think I owe Caesar an apology. I liked him at first, then he went rummaging for guns and I became suspicious. But it's looking like he really did die from that gunshot wound, and he really was just trying to help. Poor guy.) Questions: What happened to Ilana that she was all wrapped up in bandages? How did she know about Peter Avelino? By the way, he is listed in the IMDb credits, so are we supposed to figure that he was the one driving the car that ran over Nadia? That would be odd since it was someone Ben told Sayid to kill, but not the one he claimed was responsible for her death. I've been kinda figuring Ben had no idea who killed Nadia. But it can't be just coincidence that one of the guys on his hit list actually did kill her. Anyway, perhaps the most compelling question is, How do Ilana and Jacob know each other? And if she's so much in Jacob's inner circle, why don't she and Richard know one another? We don't know the exact timing of this flashback, but it must have been fairly recent. Jacob knew trouble was coming. I wonder if that means he wanted Sayid back on the Island; it would seem that perhaps she apprehended him on Jacob's command. The Sayid flashback was the most depressing; Jacob saved his life, but he had to watch his wife get mowed down. Who would want to kill Nadia, and why? And was Jacob really doing Sayid a favor when he's been completely miserable ever since, save a brief stint in Build Our World? I found myself wishing he'd stopped Nadia instead, but if the driver really was after Nadia, I don't suppose that would have done any good. But how sad... And I found myself thinking of Forrest Gump and Bubba's last words as she begged Sayid to take her home.
After the wedding tip-off, I did a lot of contemplating as to whose wedding we might see in this episode. I considered Sun and Jin, but I didn't find it likely, since we've already seen the events immediately surrounding their wedding. Still, the scene didn't feel stale. I loved the vows, and Jin's seemed especially appropriate given what would befall them later. And I loved Jacob's gentle and astute blessing, and Jin's being so impressed with his command of Korean. Jacob, it appears, it a polyglot extraordinaire. Of course, he's apparently had centuries (millennia?) to pursue the study of languages. This was the most romantic flashback. The shortest was John's; Jacob barely said anything at all. But there were a couple of very interesting things about it. First, John looked dead; I don't know if Jacob resurrected him or if he merely brought him out of unconsciousness, but either way, it seems likely that John wouldn't have survived without Jacob's intervention. Was Jacob also responsible for the healing of his legs once 815 crashed? In healing / resurrecting John, did Jacob know he was paving the way for Esau's re-emergence? Was he setting the ultimate showdown into motion? A glance at the cover of the Flannery O'Connor book he was reading tells me yes. A dove being pierced by an arrow... That's pretty powerful imagery there. I think Jacob expected to be killed.
Jack's was the first flashback of the second hour. When I saw him in surgery, I said, "Oh, I bet we're going to see the counting to five thing!" So I was glad when we did. When he told Kate the story, he didn't acknowledge anyone calming him down; he implied that he collected himself on his own. I figured at first that Jacob would be the one advising Jack to count to five, but when it was Christian, and when we saw nothing but Christian throughout the scene and its continuation, I started to think that maybe Christian really was Esau, and all of the flashbacks for the second hour would involve him. Thankfully, that wasn't the case; I'm pretty sure that Christian really was just Christian when he was alive, and, for all his faults, wasn't such a bad guy. How do we explain Jack seeing Christian off-Island last season, though? Hurley, via Charlie, told him someone was coming; does that mean Christian wasn't Esau? It seems likely that he can't go off the Island, for one thing. But then does that mean Jack was really seeing his father? Or was Christian a hallucination, and Charlie referring to someone else? Of all the encounters, the Jack-Jacob encounter seemed the least significant. All he did was give him a candy bar (I was excited to see Apollo, and now I want to try a Humdinger) and say, "Maybe all it needed was a little push." But I guess that was his way of telling Jack that his dad was trying to help. And maybe a bit of foreshadowing about the "little push" needed for the bomb? Though of course that involved Juliet, not Jack. Juliet, whose flashback felt completely jarring. It's a shame, because it was a well-done scene and helped us understand her motivations in the present. But unless they really want to draw attention to the fact that Juliet wasn't visited by Jacob, it was completely out of place. Now, maybe they did. Maybe that will play heavily somehow into season six. Maybe it has to do with Juliet making a conscious, grand self-sacrificial gesture without having been touched by Jacob. Or something. But if there's no special significance there, then it should have been left out or altered because it just seemed really strange as it was.
Once I realized that this was, essentially, a Jacob-centric episode, my hopes for a Hurley-Liam meet-up dimmed considerably, though I still held out a bit of hope. Alas, no Liam. Nonetheless, I loved the Hurley scene. For one, it ran incredibly parallel to the Desmond prison release scene in the season two finale, with Hurley getting his personal effects back from a guard who seemed rather annoyed with him and getting into a car, in which sat a man with a gift and some life-changing advice. Hurley was surprised in his meeting with Jacob, but he didn't freak out like he did with John and Abaddon. Instead, Jacob seemed to have a calming effect upon him. Indeed, Jacob came bearing news that Hurley, far from being cursed and crazy, had been blessed with a very special gift and was needed back on the Island. Hurley wasn't nuts, he just convinced himself he was, and his state of being took a downward spiral. Jacob snapped him out of it. There was such warmth and affection flowing from Jacob to Hurley in that scene, no wonder he decided to take that flight after all. Hurley's connection with the Island has always seemed very strong indeed, and it seems very fitting that Jacob would specifically recruit him like that. Also... Maybe that really is the guitar that Charlie had on the Island. Did he leave it with Hurley just because of the thing about recreating the conditions of the original flight, or was there another reason? Or maybe there's no guitar in there at all. Could there be something else inside of mysterious significance?
We got a lot of Jacob flashbacks. There were notable omissions, however. Richard. I've maintained for quite some time that he probably came from the Black Rock, and when the ship showed up on the horizon in the beginning, I was thinking, "Oooh, here comes Richard!" But now that we know that Jacob and Esau had been on the Island for ages, it makes me wonder if Richard has been around even longer than the Black Rock. Still, that scene seemed to suggest that they were the only two on the Island. Maybe among everyone on that ship, Richard displayed an unusual wisdom, fortitude and grace, prompting Jacob to appoint him his deputy. Surely we'll delve more into Richard's past later. I'm over my initial bus accident-inspired suspicions and can't help but feel I really like the guy. The other major omission was Ben. I felt sure that just before Ben had to decide once and for all if he was going to kill Jacob, we would see a flashback indicating that Jacob had made some sort of extraordinary impact upon Ben without his knowing it. It could be, of course, that Jacob healed Ben after he was shot - though I have an uneasy feeling that isn't the case. Ben had already encountered Esau, I presume, in the form of his mother. And I'm guessing it was Esau who healed him, and that's why the consequences were so unfortunate. Richard says you don't go to Jacob, and anyway Jacob resides near the statue, not in the temple. Smokey's in the temple. But why would Jacob's right-hand man consort with the enemy? And is this why Jacob has been ignoring Ben all these years? Is Ben somehow off-limits, Esau having staked his claim on him?
I loved most of this episode, but I hated the Ben-Jacob confrontation. Oh, it was powerful, and Michael Emerson was particularly compelling, but I was so frustrated with Jacob for evidently having refused to acknowledge Ben all his life, or, if the impression was false, for not showing Ben he was mistaken. I wanted an explanation for Jacob's distance or evidence of his involvement. I got neither. There was something very Job-like about all this talk of patience, and the sense of Ben being a devoted (albeit sadly substandard) servant with misery heaped on him for no known reason. I can't blame Ben for being frustrated. But I was furious with him. As Jacob said, he had a choice. And I so wanted it to be the right one. I'd managed to convince myself that we were building toward Ben's great redemption by way of refusing to kill Jacob. It was clear from his staggered response at the end of the last episode and his misery in this one that he didn't want to do it, but that he also had all of these bitter emotions swirling around inside of him. There, too, it took just a little push - Esau's wheedling (and I think things might have gone quite differently if Ben had realized this wasn't John) and Jacob's lack of response - for something major to happen. Majorly bad in this case, and which Ben completely brought upon himself by killing John. I am sorely unversed in Latin, but Lostpedia informs me that the translation for Richard's response to Ilana's riddle was “He who will protect/save us all.” And now Ben went and killed him. Nice. Going. Ugh. I don't think it's going to take him very long to realize he's made a massive mistake. But now that he's made his irrevocably awful decision, has he lost any shot at redemption? Did he ever have one? If Jacob's death was necessary for a final season apocalyptic battle between the forces of good and evil, was this heinous crime actually ultimately a good thing? Ugh. I don't know. I just know that I spent the whole episode longing to give Jacob a bear hug, and this scene made me feel like Lucy witnessing Aslan's execution. Ben, you have let me down. (Unless, in my desperation to make Ben Snape, I entertain the possibility that Ben has been acting completely ingenuine; that he knew John was Esau; that he has been in communion with Jacob all along and has been using his supreme lying skills to play us all for fools; that Jacob asked him to kill him, knowing the ultimate battle for Good could be won through the efforts of Jack and company. And the one lie we know he told in this episode, that he was a Pisces, was his subtle tip-off that he was a disciple of fish-filleting Jacob, a fish in the sand for Jacob-loving viewers. Oh, yeah. I think I like that far-out theory better. And after all, it isn't as though Jacob offered any kind of significant resistance...)
So let's move from my least favorite scene of the finale to my favorite. Rose. And. Bernard. (!!!) So... yeah, I was really excited to see them again. I was fairly convinced they'd died out in the jungle (or in the caves); I figured surely they would've turned up by now otherwise. I wasn't terribly optimistic. But there was still that shred of hope... I loved Sawyer's exuberance as he embraced Vincent and ruffled his fur, and then that familiar voice... Well, it wasn't the warmest of welcomes, was it? But once they took Sawyer, Kate and Juliet back to their humble abode (which they, apparently, built themselves), it was all pretty cordial, and I'm not sure I could imagine a better way for them to have been integrated into the episode. It was a stunning oasis in the midst of mass chaos. The score throughout this scene was gorgeous - and had definitely better be on the soundtrack. One of my favorite pieces of LOST music ever. (I was surprised at the total lack of diegetic music in this episode. And yeah, I totally just learned that word from consulting Lostpedia as I wrote my review of the first soundtrack. But if this is our last week in the seventies, it might have been nice to give the ol' record player one more spin. Oh, well. Speaking of the score, I found myself really digging the recurring walking music with Team 2007.) I loved the quiet retirement Rose and Bernard built for each other, their calm contentment with their lot in life, their gentle words of advice with Bernard's hint of "live together, die alone," their willingness to offer the needed information despite their Bombadilian detachment. I loved that they shared this life with Vincent. I loved Rose's derisive comment about everyone always finding new ways to kill each other. I loved the fact that Sawyer and Jin had searched for them diligently. I loved Bernard asking them in for tea, which felt especially wistful because this may well be the last time they meet. I even loved Bernard's scraggly beard. It was just a perfect scene. And while I very much hope to see them again, I could possibly be all right with us leaving them here, with this being our last impression of them. For this, Damon and Carlton, thank you, thank you, thank you. And hopefully Whoopi is satisfied as well...
And my second-favorite scene: Sun discovering Charlie's ring. Almost made up for the lack of Liam. I've been waiting and waiting for someone to find that thing, but Sun was the last person I would have expected. Of course, it made a convenient segue into her wedding flashback, but more than that, I think it was powerful that it was her because it symbolizes a move from vengeance to forgiveness. I really wasn't a fan of Black Widow Sun and was glad to see that aspect of her dissipate once she learned Jin was alive. Charlie wronged Sun pretty badly, so finding that ring and gazing on it with fondness signals that she has forgiven Charlie, and if she's moved on from that then she can move on from other things too. (Although I'm really worried about Sawyer. I've loved his character arc through the last couple of seasons, and if Juliet is indeed dead, I feel like he could be in for a massive regression yet again, which I would really hate to see. As far as revenge goes, though, who would he go after? I don't see who he could legitimately blame, except maybe Jack, and Sawyer made the decision to go after him.) Anyway, I'm thrilled that Sun has the ring now, and I'm guessing next season she will have an opportunity to present it to Claire. And maybe Hurley will give her the guitar as well. The Hurley-Jacob scene is probably my third-favorite. And that opening scene was really cool.
I wasn't all that surprised to see Sayid get injured, but the shooter was a bit of a shock. Of course, it made perfect sense; Sayid shoots Ben, so Roger shoots Sayid. And all Sayid really accomplished by attempting to kill Ben was potentially getting himself killed. It's nice that he still managed to be helpful after that, but he seems to be on his last legs. Unless time resets and his injuries are rendered moot. It really was important to have him on board at this stage of the game, though; I don't think Jack could have made much sense of Daniel's instructions. That is, if it turns out to be a good thing that they detonated the bomb. Which it might well not be. Phil definitively kicked the bucket, in one of the single grossest moment LOST has given us. The guy was a pain, but yecch. Radzinsky, it seems, lives to terrorize another day - and if this has set history into motion instead of changing it, no wonder he offed himself, realizing what his mad scientist ambitions wrought upon the world. I don't think he's exactly a bad guy, just a powder keg, and a real inconvenience right at the moment. We saw how Dr. Chang mangled his arm - and Miles' heroic efforts to save him. And wasn't that the first time he called him "Dad"? Anyway, it was a terrific moment for a character who really got the short end of the stick last season but has been building toward greatness this season. And oh, how I loved Richard taking action, knocking Eloise out to save her from herself in the biggest show of aggression we've seen from him, mirrored later by his extreme agitation but frustrating inaction in response to pseudo-John's plan to take Ben with him to see Jacob.
This was a rough episode for Sawyer. There he was, on his way to domestic bliss with Juliet, when Kate had to come along and mess everything up by insisting they go stop John - though of course, they ultimately ended up helping him instead, even after Sawyer and Jack had that whopping fistfight in which each seemed equally likely to kill the other, except I was sure they wouldn't let it come to that. If Sawyer had a problem with Old Jack, he's got an even bigger issue with New Jack, and I thought his baring his soul to Jack about his parents, in a bit of a reversal of telling him about his encounter with Christian back in season one, was a cathartic moment. But despite his reservations, he still went to the trouble of busting in on the Swan site and saving Jack's life. I'm glad he took it pretty easy on the sub captain, and that the captain was pretty compliant. Shooting the radio was a decent way to cut off communications without hurting anybody. He seemed stunned and mystified to see Rose and Bernard. Thrilled, but pretty bewildered that they'd chosen to evade him for years. And not long later, absolutely gutted that Juliet has decided that it's best they never meet at all. (And really, even after Sawyer explicitly reminded him that Kate would wind up in prison if his plan worked, shame on Jack for his sulky "I can't have Kate so let's erase the last three years" stance.) Then, of course, trying so valiantly to save Juliet (who I really think he does love as much as he insists, even to the exclusion of Kate) in a scene that reminded me a lot of Sam and Frodo in the Cracks of Doom in Return of the King, but ended much differently. Talk about anguish, much like Sun watching Jin apparently die in season four... Though for Juliet, it was a moment that very much mirrored Desmond's heroic season two decision to "blow the dam", especially when she manually detonated the bomb, causing the entire screen to go white, with the black LOST in a striking inversion of the norm. Which makes me wonder how much of the next season is going to show things being the opposite of what we're used to... And whether Juliet, like Desmond, will emerge miraculously unscathed early in season six.
Other season finale parallels... Electromagnetic catastrophe a la season two, with metallic objects flying everywhere (and poor Jack getting knocked flat by a toolbox - ouch!). Hurley saving the day in his Dharma van a la season three. This time, he was taking instructions from Jack in a panic as he tried to make a clean getaway. Hurley driving the VW and Hurley post-prison release were practically all we got of him here; not nearly as much as I'd hoped, but what was there was fantastic. Frank freed from bondage a la season four (though he hasn't managed to do much with his freedom so far). Not much Frank here, but I loved his caustic "Terrific!" in reaction to seeing John's body (I was starting to think we were going to have to wait until season six to look inside that box ourselves) and objecting to the torching of the cabin (which was a good point, and made me wish we'd seen them extinguish the flames before they left). Also, what is he a candidate for? Leadership of an anti-Esau faction? As in the other finales, some crucial element of the season blew up. Third season finale to make some reference to Moses. First not to include Walt; first since one not to include Penny or Desmond. First one not to include somebody drinking alcohol - though Sun asked Richard if he had alcohol, and he replied, "I wish!" Four-toed statue a la season two was back with a vengeance. Ben says it's been just a foot for as long as he's been on the Island. If that's true (and Ben sort of seems too exhausted to lie in this episode, though I liked his dry assertion of "I lied. It's what I do."), I wonder what happened to it? Since Jughead, I've been kinda thinking the hydrogen bomb blew it apart. Maybe it wasn't the first or last bomb tested on the Island...
What didn't we see? The Humes. Not at all. But I'm worried that if the future changed, their idyllic life together may evaporate. No Charles, which surprised me a bit. Again no reference whatsoever to Annie, and she's now replaced Rose and Bernard at the top of the Characters-You-Better-Not-Have-Forgotten list. A reference to Horace, but he didn't turn up, nor did Amy and Ethan. Presumably they remained on the Island with him, though you'd think he would want to evacuate them. I suppose they could have left and come back. Or, of course, the future changed and they left, never to return, and Ethan never grew up to torment innocent Islanders. No Liam, Kelvin, Brother Campbell, Henry Gale or other minor character I postulated might pop up in some enlightening capacity. We did see Kate's Tom, Nadia and Rachel, and those were great scenes, but they didn't reveal any deeper connections. And, of course, no definitive idea of what's coming next season. Did Jack and his gang negate history or create it? Or something in between? Eight months is a long time to wait for this basic answer. If I have to venture a guess, I suppose I'll say that the '77 group ends up in 2007 just because it sure would be nice to have everybody in the same time period again, and in the same place.
So where does this leave us? At the conclusion of The Incident, Phil is dead, as, presumably, are several redshirts thanks to the O.K. Corral-style shootouts, while Sayid and Juliet seem on the verge of death, though that could be negated if Daniel's plan works properly. Rose, Bernard and Vincent are alive. Jacob exists and is benevolent but is dying. In flames. (But could that be a phoenix reference?) John is dead. Sigh. Pseudo-John is evil Esau, who seems likely to be responsible for the Island apparitions, and possibly Smokey. Ilana and Bram are on Jacob's side, and even though they knocked him out, they seem to like Frank. Richard will likely be a force to contend with (and presumably he and his group are the "they" Jacob refers to). Maybe he and Sun will team up. He's gotta be kicking himself that he let Esau pull the wool over his eyes. Ben is a villain and a victim, and I have no idea what he's going to do with himself now. Will Esau still want him for his stooge? Will self-preserving Ben accept the job? If time-zapping occurs, I imagine Sawyer, Jack, Kate, Miles, Jin and Hurley will all wind up in the future. But we really have no clue which of Daniel's assertions is true. Can you change history or not? Confusing. Maddening. Chilling. But on the whole, I'd say The Incident was exceptional.
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