LOST Thoughts For S6E17 The End May 23rd, 2010 Part Three

So, how did I do in my predictions of what was going to happen this season? I’d give myself a C. I know that’s kind of vanilla but I was really way off on some of my theories. I could have never seen the big reveal with the Alterverse coming. That was a pretty nice touch.

Here’s the rundown of the remaining theories I had out there.

“Sundown”

1. The Flash Lefts are not reality and are just a metaphysical construct brought on by the MiB (Kind of like the Matrix) and Jack is becoming more aware of this in the Flash Lefts.

Result: DING! WRONG!
They were dead and the flash lefts, alterverse, etc. was a construct of their souls as a meeting place to find each other and make a spiritual connection in order to remember their lives so that they could move on to the afterlife. I don’t know if some accepted spiritual or religious doctrine speaks to this as a version of purgatory or the afterlife, but I connected with an 80s movie when I found out what the alternate timeline was. Made In Heaven was a movie with Timothy Hutton and Kelly McGillis as people who meet and fall in love each other after they are dead. McGillis’ character has not yet earned her wings and must do a tour of duty on Earth in order to do so. Hutton convinces the powers that be to send him to Earth, too but they will have no recollection of each other. They now have 30 years to find each other on Earth and fall in love or be fated to an unhappy life. Not quite the same thing but it came to my mind seeing how the characters didn’t remember one another.

“Dr. Linus”

1. The island sank after the Dharma Initiative left due to:
   
   1. The Incident minus the Jughead. Most DI non essential personal were off the island prior (Amy, Horace, Roger, Ben)
   2. The building of The Swan by the DI which hit the pocket of energy and with no way to contain it (i.e. Jughead, button) the island sank but not before Dharma Initiative were able to escape.

Result: WRONG! WRONG!
The sunken island was not real. And had it sunk for realsies it would have been because that stone carrot was removed.

2. Roger and Ben left the Dharma Initiative because:
   
   1. Roger did not want to be a Workman anymore and Horace couldn’t convince him to stay or was not there due to the birth of Ethan off island.
   2. He was fired.

Result: WRONG! WRONG!
They were dead.

“Happily Ever After”

1. Desmond is going to:
   
   1. Be the package.
   2. Deliver the package.
2. And his sacrifice will be:
   
   1. Die in the process.
   2. Become the new Jacob.
   3. Keep the alterverse the way it is.

Result: WRONG! on both parts.
Well, except if you count “being the package.”

3. Sayid is:
   
   1. Evil.
   2. Pulling a Sonny Crockett and playing evil
   3. Just plain crackers

Result: WRONG!
Redeemed.

4. The experiment was meant to:
   
   1. Show Desmond the alterverse and allow his doppelganger to realize the truth.
   2. Simply show that he can withstand a C.E.E. so that he can interact with the “Hot Pocket.”

Result: Indirectly DING! DING!
I was right on both counts but his doppleganger did not realize the truth because of this, it was just because of Charlie making the connection to his death on the island.

5. Widmore is able to find the island because:
   
   1. He is the friend Jacob was guiding towards the island and his name is actually Wallace.
   2. Desmond is on that sub and his name his family name is actually Wallace.
   3. Locke-Ness has killed Jacob leaving the island unveiled and seen by Widmore
   4. He went to the Lamp Post

Result: DING! DING!
Although I don’t know why, since we never found out what he planned to do with Desmond once he got to the island.  And I don't know that Wallace ever had anything to do with anything.  In fact, I don't really know what the purpose of the lighthouse really was or what is was showing since the Altervese was their purgatory after they all died.

“Everybody Loves Hugo”

1. Desmond plowed through Locke because:
   
   1. He loves Grand Theft Auto, brutha.
   2. He knows Locke is really MiB (The mirror to this is his response of “John Locke” when MiB asked if he knew who he was.)
   3. He wanted to show him something (Indirectly a nod to Charlie’s failed Lupe’s Escape move)

Result: DING! DING!

2. The pouch contains:
   
   1. Jacob’s ashes gathered by Ilana from the Foot.

Result: DING! DING!
That was an easy one.

3. MiB needs the others (no pun) because:
   
   1. He needs the conditions of the O6 leaving in order to be able to replicate it.
   2. He plans to just kill them in order to keep them from becoming the next Jacob.

Result: DING! DING!
He told the candidates that's why he needed them but it was really just to kill them.

The little boy is:

1. A rapidly growing Jacob getting ready to assume the persona of a candidate and that’s why his hair has changed color with every candidate that witnesses him in the presence of MiB. Blond for Sawyer, Brown for Desmond.

Result: DING! DING!
Although I was probably wrong about the hair color and that he was going to grow up to be the candidate. It was most likely a trick of the light or just casting.

“The Last Recruit”

1. Jack’s wife/ex-wife is Juliet. The age of David puts Jack’s age at the time of conception around 21. He could have conceivably met Juliet at medical school and fathered a child. Now that she is divorced or weary of men because of Jack she meets Sawyer and decides to get coffee but go Dutch. Perhaps Juliet will meet Sawyer at the hospital when he goes to talk with Sun about the shooting. Juliet will be the OB/GYN that helped save Sun’s baby.

Result: DING! DING! FULL OF WIN ON THAT ONE!
I made that prediction a month in advance.

“The Candidate”

1. The following are dead:
   
   1. Frank, Sayid, Jin and Sun
   2. Sayid, Jin and Sun (Frank is only mostly dead which means he’s slightly alive.)
   3. Sayid, Frank, and Sun (Jin is still a possible candidate and could not be killed, therefore he was able to swim away)
   4. THEY’RE ALL DEAD!?!?!?!?

Result: DING DING!
Yeah Frank!

2. The show will end with:
   
   1. Jack and Locke sitting on the beach having a conversation about killing each other.
   2. Locke and Locke sitting on the beach having the same conversation.

Result: WRONG!
Locke is lying in a broken bloodied mess over the cliff while Jack goes off to die in the bamboo where he woke up three years prior.

“What They Died For”

1. MiB will attempt to leave the island:
   
   1. Via the donkey wheel.
   2. Via Ajira 316 which will be disarmed.

Result: WRONG!
It was The Elizabeth.

2. The Alterverse Castaways are going to:
   
   1. Meet up on a boat to go to the spot where the island should be.
   2. Fly in another plane and somehow get back to the sunken island.

Result: WRONG!
They were dead.

3. MiB will attempt to destroy the island by:
   
   1. Throwing Desmond down the 100 watt cave.

Result: CLOSE! ½ credit.

4. MiB will be killed by:
   
   1. Blown up by the remainder of the C4 making Ben a suicide bomber who decides to kamikaze Smokey.
   2. Jack will go all Neo on him like he did Mr. Smith
   3. He won’t. Everything will simply go back to the way it was.

Result: ALMOST!
Jack, but Kate pulled a Schwarzenegger and one linered him after shooting him in the back.  But Jack did go kick ass on him.

5. The Survivors will leave the island by:


1. Ajira 316. Frank really isn’t dead and has been spending the last two episodes disarming the bomb. He’ll show up at the last minute like Bishop did in Aliens.
2. Penny will arrive on Penny’s Boat and rescue them but will lose Desmond
3. Each one will take a turn on the Donkey Wheel.

Result: DING DING!
Yeah Frank!

Ok, that was painful.   One mroe to go, I really promise this time.   Next I look at The End and after.

LOST Theories for S6E11 Happily Ever After April 6th, 2010

Relationships. Whether it’s the relationships between strangers on a plane, parents and their children, husbands and wives, and even those who are kept apart by time, space, and a weirdo island, relationships make up the core of LOST. We saw it in Season One in a father and son trying to repair a broken relationship. We saw it on the island and we saw it off the island as each of the survivors’ back stories intertwined with one another.

Now, when we are so near the endgame, we see that relationships still drive the story of LOST. We see a husband and wife trying to desperately get back to one another. We see a mother struggling with sanity after her son was taken from her three years before. And we see two forces, opposite sides of the same coin struggling in their relationship to good and evil. But the biggest relationships are those that were possibly not meant to be. And the producers have said to not read too much into the relationship between the Flash Lefts and the Original Timeline. I say, “Screw that.” If anything, last night made that relationship all the more clearer.

Critics of the Flash Lefts may be brought back into the fold after last night’s episode or will just give up their relationship to LOST altogether. There will be some that will hail that Happily Ever After was the BEE of LOST and they will do it in their best Simpson’s Comic Book Guy voice. I think it was good, but it doesn’t sit above "The Constant" on my ever evolving top ten list of best episodes ever. Because in that episode lies the destiny of Desmond Hume in the following phrase, "If anything goes wrong, Desmond Hume will be my constant."

The good of the episode is that we get to see Desmond, of course, but also Charlie, Eloise, Penny and Daniel. The bad is that we get more mysteries than answers. The highlights are Charlie getting to reprise his death scene with a different ending from "Through the Looking Glass" (although it would have been funny if Charlie would have put his hand up to the glass and been missing part of his pinky finger in a nod to FlashForward) and the low points include Sayid having the chance to put us out of our misery with killing Zoe, the most hated character since Nikki and Paulo, and not following through for once with his homicidal tendencies.

The biggest mystery solved is the connection between the Flash Left Verse and the Real World and that some people are self aware that their seemingly perfect lives are merely a lie. The newest mystery is how does Desmond plan on convincing Locke, Hurley, and Claire, among others who are better off in this fake life, that they are better off being dead, unlucky, and crazy sometime else. Not to mention, how do you reconcile the two timelines and bring everyone three years forward and to the right?

My general theories about what the island is and how everything functions keeps getting turned about like a giant Rubik’s Cube. I work for hours to solve one side thinking I’m making progress only to have five other sides still unsolved. In order to work on them I have to screw up the one thing I thought I had figured out. In the case of LOST it’s the nature of who is the key to everything.

But while fans overly analyze and try and pick apart every little thing about every episode, every sentence, every prop, and every pop culture connection between the show, science fiction literature and religion I tend to skew the connections by offering the oddball ones. Before I move onto individual aspects of the episode let me pepper my section on Desmond with this. Everyone is discussing and theorizing that Demsond’s experiment was used to cause the acknowledgement of the Flash Lefts. I don’t know that is the whole truth. We’ve seen over the course of almost six years that when someone has a flashback or in this case a flash left the connection… or relationship between the two is implied but the action that is taking place at the moment of the “whoosh.” I’m not so sure this wasn’t simply the same thing.

Maybe Desmond, being forced to withstand another Catastrophic Electromagnetic Event wasn’t designed to make him see the alternate reality but see something else that makes him compliant with Widmore’s plan. His Flash Left doppelganger may have the same inherent talent as his Original Timeline self and can see the connections as well, not just because he licked a giant 9 volt battery in the original timeline. What C.E.E. did Charlie and Daniel experience that caused them to realize the truth? Perhaps that C.E.E. is more commonly known as L.O.V.E. and when Sideways Sawyer meets Sideways Juliet and Sideways Hugo meets Sideways Libby, they’ll see the truth, too.

CHARLIE IN THE ALTERVERSE
Alterverse? I like that, I can’t keep typing Flash Left because it just doesn’t have that great flow to it. Alterverse feels more natural to say. Anyway, I liken Charlie to a type of dream I’ve often had in my life. You may or may not have had this dream. The setting or characters in this dream are inconsequential as they can be interchangeable with nearly any others. The focus is that at some point in your dream you suddenly become self aware that you are dreaming. For me it’s usually a scenario where I am supposed to take a very important test that I haven’t studied for. I don’t even remember going to any of the classes. As the test gets passed around and I find that I cannot read the questions. Suddenly, I realize that I am over 30 and no longer sitting in my 11th grade U.S. History class. (akin to a Batman The Animated Series episode plotline) So, then I proceed to just sit as an observer, put my head down, or run around the classroom yelling and screaming obscenities for the hell of it.

Now, I told you that story to tell you this one. Charlie has the same self realization that he doesn’t belong in this reality. It’s almost like Groundhog Day where Bill Murray starts goofing around because he realizes there are no consequences to his actions because he will wake up to the same day, every day. So, Charlie shows Desmond that something is wrong. Desmond then goes to the Widmore estate to inform Mrs. Widmore of Charlie not showing up to perform. After he begins to question reality, Eloise steps in and tells him to stop. Well, of course she does. She knows full well what’s going on and doesn’t want to see a reality where she kills her own son and then 30 years later sends him to his own death by her younger self. But what is important is that Desmond meets Daniel and Daniel also realizes that something is wrong. Perhaps the trick is that you have to have died in the original timeline to recognize that something is off in the alterverse. The exception would be John Locke, but there is no telling whether or not Locke is really Locke in the alterverse, just yet.

DESMOND IN THE ORIGINAL TIMELINE
“The island isn’t done with you yet!” Is the phrase we keep hearing from characters about Desmond’s destiny. But what does that mean? Is the island a stage five clinger? Or have the puppet masters of Jacob and MiB not finished their game of Dungeons & Dragons yet and still need Desmond to prove a point one way or the other. Desmond’s role may or may not be that important to the overall mythology. I tend to look at these last few seasons as a giant Rube Goldberg machine (The Game Mousetrap to all you unfamiliar with the concept.) Basically, the island and everything on it is one overly complex machine with many parts that when activated performs a simple task. Think of MiB’s loophole scheme to kill Jacob. All of that work just so he could leave the island. However, in keeping him on the island or stopping him for good, another equally complex and intricate device needs to be activated. In that device all the castaways and island visitors have a part to play. Perhaps Desmond is just one cog in a bigger wheel. Us old school text adventure gamers will recognize this as a sort of Chekhov’s Gun, where a seemingly unimportant item or character will suddenly become important later on and “Will Know What To Do When The Time Comes." For me, I’d rather see Desmond be Chekhov’s Gun that Zoe. At some point, because of Desmond’s ability to withstand Catastrophic Electromagnetic Events, he may be useful in performing some task relating to Jin’s knowledge of where these concentrated electromagnetic “Hot Pockets” are. We already know the Swan and the Orchid have one but where is the third one?

THE PACKAGE
A friend commented on my facebook import of last week’s post and said that perhaps Desmond is not the package. This could be a plot twist. I didn’t believe the probability seeing as how Desmond was introduced to Snoopy eyed Sayid in the water, but perhaps there could be something to this. What if Desmond is not the package but merely the mailman? Why would he need to be drugged if he was double padlocked on the sub? Maybe someone is still on the sub or being held somewhere else and they are the package. Maybe that person has a special talent that makes them somewhat akin to a hydrogen bomb that can interact with a “hot pocket.” Maybe that person is Walt?

SAYID’S ROLE
If ever there was a case for IS HE BAD OR ISN’T HE it’s Sayid. His pa-pa-pa-poker face, his pa poker face leaves me wondering if he isn’t in some way working both sides against the middle. Still, he killed Dogen and Lennon and red shirt number 23 for Team Widmore but he let Zoe live and took Desmond with him. If Desmond was had some kind of clarity or epiphany maybe he sees that he’s supposed to go with Sayid or it could be that he’s just a little bit high. Not sure. In any case, the truly evil Sayid would have killed Zoe instead of letting her run back to Charles to report the abduction.

THEORY DEBUNK TIME
I have no energy to scan old posts right now and pick theories I postulated however, the ones about Zoe and Desmond’s role in the story still stand because I think that the “sacrifice” Widmore says Desmond will have to make is to either to become the new Jacob, die to save everyone, or in a really wacked out scenario keep the alterverse the way it is because it’s the way things should be. However, I did check back to a previous post and decided to debunk my theory from Recon.

5. The Ajira survivors were killed by...


1. Widmore because he’s a sick bastard.
2. Locke Monster because they didn’t want to go with him OR he used them as leverage for Sawyer.
3. Something else happened to them entirely.

We know that the MiB/Locke Ness Monster cannot travel over water in smoke form but he was able to travel to the Hydra Island to chat with Charles about Jin’s abduction. In that case, he either killed the other Ajira survivors before he went to the temple OR Widmore did it for whatever reason. I think the fact that they were beginning to smell bad and attract flies might indicate it was still MiB’s handy work, although I am not a doctor or forensic scientist. Either way I’m debunking C. because it probably won’t ever get explained anyway and that means that C. is irrelevant.

NEW THEORIES

1. Desmond is going to...


1. Be the package
2. Deliver the package


2. And his sacrifice will be…


1. Die in the process
2. Become the new Jacob.
3. Keep the alterverse the way it is.

His sacrifice must involve his love for Penny somehow otherwise it wouldn’t have been so important to focus on their relationship in previous episodes.

3. Sayid is


1. Evil
2. Pulling a Sonny Crockett and playing evil
3. Just plain crackers

I still can’t come to grips with the whole idea of who is good and who is evil. If that is going to be a big twist then they are really going to lose the audience members who don’t slice and dice the series as much as those who do. I mean that in the case of people who look back on episodes and say, “Well that makes perfect sense now because so and so was really good/bad. But I find Sayid’s lack of character motivation disturbing in that I can’t read him….much like History tests in dreams.

4. The experiment was meant to…


1. Show Desmond the alterverse and allow his doppelganger to realize the truth.
2. Simply show that he can withstand a C.E.E. so that he can interact with the “Hot Pocket.”

I’m going with B. on this one as I previously stated. Charlie and Daniel are the exception to A. in that they merely caught a glimpse of love by seeing Claire and Charlotte which caused them to experience the notion that “this life is not our real life.” Now, you may say that unless Desmond is in love with Charlie, that theory doesn’t jive. I say, ”What was written on Charlie’s hand?” That’s right, it involved Penny and that is his relationship to the original timeline, he loved Penny and would cross time and space to be with her.

That’s all for now. Can’t wait for next week’s episode entitled “Everybody Loves Hugo.” Because why shouldn’t they.