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

Notice the title change? That’s because there’s no need to post theories or think about how things will play out because it’s over. Well, what did you think? Me? I loved the finale. I thought it was a beautiful tale of moving on and letting go. I got choked up more in those two and a half hours then I had the entire series. As far as Series Finales go that was one of the best. The only problem is that I have no idea what series it wrapped up.

I have so many thoughts in my head and I don’t want to sound pedantic but the episode did nothing for me in terms of wrapping anything up on the island. It was like watching the opening five minutes of Evil Dead II, which asked me to completely forget about what happened in the first movie since they rewrote it all in that span of time. Again, do not jump on the pitchfork and torch bandwagon yet. Let me reiterate, I LOVED WHAT I SAW, but I just don’t get why I saw it.

You know I am going to bore you to death with my ramblings.  I attempted to swallow the pregnant Metis, also known as my ability to go to Erie to tell a story, but couldn’t.   If I don't, the Athena-like rant shall spring forth from my head. So, I will break it all up into a couple of posts because, quite frankly, I’ve been mailing it in lately with reposting CarTalk puzzlers and I really don’t have the time to get all pop culture geeky on you with new stuff. So, let’s start off with this past Saturday’s repeat of the pilot episode, OK?

SHOW OF SCIENCE, SHOW OF FAITH

When LOST was first announced on the fall schedule I thought it was going to be utter crap. Why? Because I didn’t think a show about people shipwrecked on a island was going to be able to hold my attention. I made an attempt to watch Alias and after I missed two episodes I was completely… LOST.   My wife was also not interested in watching the show, which kind of made it easier for me to just let it slip into the pile of missed shows. Still, I was willing to give the show a chance with the pilot. Why? Because I hate to miss things.

That opening scene was quite simply one of the best things I had ever seen. And remember, this was a season that boasted Rescue Me, Desperate Housewives, Grey’s Anatomy, albeit in March, CSI: NY, Deadwood, Veronica Mars, Boston Legal, and House. Unfortunately it also had Joey and The Apprentice. So for me to put LOST’s premiere ahead of these other really decent shows gives me a newfound appreciation for appointment television. Until now, I had only done that with Buffy, Angel, West Wing, and The Oscars.

Here was a show that defied convention. It was a piece about characters and people and it just so happened that they were stuck on a tropical island. Had that been it, it may have lasted two seasons and I probably would have been happy with it. Then that pesky noise in the jungle came about and things took a turn. Still, even with that noise, that mechanical roar accompanied by the swaying and cracking of trees, the show stayed rooted in the focus of the people who survived. We had little snippets of back story concerning each castaway. There was a doctor, a con man, a rocker, a fugitive, a sad sack, a couple isolated by social mores and language, a father and son, a broken man, the pretty young over privileged rich girl and her infatuated step brother, and a torturer. Talk about The Real World. This was almost a slap in the face of reality shows that pit opposing personalities and backgrounds against each other to see if they can coexist in a confined space. Then Greg Grunberg got sucked out of the cockpit. After a bit, we saw how the passengers were flawed. We saw the post 9/11 fears play out as Sawyer attacks Sayid. We saw Jin tell Sun to stay covered and keep a low profile. We saw one of the most terrifyingly real depictions of a plane crash I’ve seen since Alive. We saw a spoiled brat refuse to help out and face the facts that no one is coming. We saw the first steps of a group of strangers working together towards becoming a community by looking for help. Then Sawyer shot a polar bear. “Guys, where are we?”

THE REST OF SEASON ONE

Those two hours held the world on edge for something different. It strayed into the bleeding edge of drama and hovered around science fiction but it stayed firmly rooted in its storytelling about people and their problems. How they were lost in life and how their time on the island might help them. From then on it became a finely tuned instrument that delved into the nature of what happened, happened. But I am referring to what happened off the island. Here it didn’t matter. Daddy issues, mental issues, abandonment issues, and Spanish Graphic Novel issues aside, everyone on the island was given a blank slate with the chance to redeem themselves. It only took four seasons to change all that.

It started with that damn hatch. That pill bottle lid that just stuck out like a piece of the alien ship in Tommyknockers. Once the characters began digging in the dirt looking for answers the show became more about science than faith. With the end of the first season we had found that somehow people and things on the island were connected off the island. Soon, the show became more about spotting the connections, the numbers, the crossed paths, and less about people’s atonement and relationships. Sure that was still there, but the questions and mysteries took over. Some of the highlights of that first season include some of the best music I’ve heard in a series. I can’t help but love Michael Giacchino as a composer. For me, he ranks up there with Christophe Beck and Snuffy Walden. I still get weepy when I think of that church scene from the finale with the “LOST theme” playing over it just like I used to when Beck’s theme for Season 2 of Buffy played as Angel got skewered into oblivion.

In fact there were so many great scenes from Season One that were punctuated with that damn heartstring tugging tune. Boone’s death while Aaron is born was one. The launching of the raft was another. I was immediately struck with the imagery of Tom Hanks leaving his island captivity on a raft outfitted with a port a john. The same kind of weepy music accompanied Hanks as he looked back on four years of his life as a different man, island man. As the rafties made their way out to sea to look for rescue I felt that same twinge of longing for a place that had become home for several months, even though it had been like two weeks for them.

But nothing could have prepared an audience, so willing to accept the small quirks of the island like evil others and a faceless monster, for what was about to happen. The other pillar of black smoke came and they hid, the raft encountered salvation only to find it was taking something away, and a cork was pulled out of the bottle that unleashed the island’s mysteries upon the castaways when that damn hatch lid blew. Season One was full of everything that made LOST so engaging and intriguing. It beguiled us and bugged as for the next five seasons until it had to come to an end.

Next up, Did Season 6 answer all those pesky questions?

LOST Theories for S6E14 The Candidate May 4th, 2010

Letting go. For me that was the theme of last night’s total “kitten drowning / puppy mangling” of an episode. Hey Cuse and Lindelof, why don’t you just have Santa Claus shoot the Easter Bunny, execution style, while snorting a line of coke off the Tooth Fairy’s cleavage? That would be fun wouldn’t it? Ok, childhood memory killing rant over. Letting go and continuing on…

JACK
Everything that we built up on either side of the island in Season 2 about science vs. faith is now finally coming down on the side of faith. Jack, who constantly raged against the machine in terms of being at the will of the island is letting go his anger and his doubts and is making that transition towards just being a part of things. Sayid said, just before he became an ironic joke about Middle Eastern suicide bombers, “Because it’s you, Jack.” You, who? The Candidate? For a moment I was thinking that the title was a misnomer because it was more about Locke’s candidacy for surgery than it was about any of the Losties being a candidate for Jacob’s replacement. Yet, in an almost inaudible and possibly thrown away delivery, Sayid gave us perhaps the answer to everything this season has been about. Case in point, let that timer go to zero, Sawyer. We’ll be fine. He didn’t get it at first but after “Lighthouse” he understood it. He understood it with Alpert in the Black Rock when he nearly soiled himself to test his theory about dying. Here, he gave full control over to fate and destiny versus the science of what C4 will do to the human body when detonated. If Sawyer would have not pulled the wires, would it have blown? Don’t know. But, I think that fate would have ended up causing the sub to sink, anyway, because that was the will of the island.

SAYID
Should we be shocked at Sayid’s death? We’ve seen characters die when they’ve fulfilled their purpose. Charlie finally let go and found peace in dying, fulfilling his part of the island’s plan, or will. Arzt and Illana… maybe not so much but their deaths were still shocking. Sayid, however, went full circle on his path. Perhaps he was fated to become what he was in order to save Desmond from MiB. With Sayid being Puff the Magic Bastard’s assassin, perhaps that was better because Desmond could get through to Sayid. And with the information he was given, he was able to pass that along and save the others, fulfilling his purpose. With Desmond’s consoling of Sayid’s soul, Sayid let go of his anger and became the “Redemption of Anakin Skywalker” on Lost.

JIN AND SUN
Were there ever two more tragic lovers, save for Romeo and Juliet? To be separated by time and space, land and sea, and life and death only to be reunited in death is pretty much a case of “Your karma ran over my dogma.” It was hard enough to watch, given the circumstances surrounding my family these past few weeks, but it would have been even harder had I invested more emotion into their reunion two weeks ago instead of wondering if one of them was going to be a small part of smoky. But it was also beautiful. Even though it was highly annoying being a parent and all. What of Ji Yeon? She’s now an orphan, like Walt. Never once did Sun say, “Go, be a father to your daughter.” Nope, she just wanted him to live because it was a dire situation. But they both let go and chose to be together in death or not at all. But why? What was their purpose on the island as candidates.. either one or both of them? How was the island finished with them. It rails against the established rules laid out by previous episodes.

THE AUDIENCE
We need to let go. There are only four more episodes left in the history of this incarnation of LOST. We got handed a nice big crap sandwich last night but that is what I’ve come to expect from the show. LOST is in a league of shows that I love because of their ability to screw the audience’s upbeat mood. Supernatual and anything from The Whedonverse are the others. Main characters. Beloved characters. Important characters. Dead characters. There is no safe haven in these shows. In fact there is a lot of cross pollination of creative people involved with all of these shows and it is apparent when watching. I can say, “Oh that was Buffyesque” when someone dies. Look at the proof.

Buffy kills off Joyce Summers and Anya in the series along with Xander becoming another ironic joke as a cyclops mimicking his pirate costume from an earlier Halloween episode.  Angel kills off Cordy, Fred and Wesley as well as putting Gunn near death by the end of the series.  Supernatural has killed the two leads more times than I can count but also blew up Ellen and Jo as well as let professional dying guy Jeffrey Dean Morgan go a few seasons back. As faithful followers of LOST we need to let go of our attachment to any of these characters and just let the story tell itself over the last four episodes.

THEORY DEBUNK TIME
Well, it looks like we can kill a number of theories with this last episode.

Sundown

Sayid is definitely bad and Claire is headed there. Kate will do what she can to save her.

½ credit on this one. Sayid redeemed himself but Kate did save Claire.

Recon

Locke Monster and Widmore hate each other.

Yeah that one works while Locke and Widmore being on the same side is null and void at this point.

Everybody Loves Hugo

1. 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

Guess we know which one came true, there.

NEW THEORIES
The next Jacob will be:

1. Jack (Sayid said it and he keeps saying he is not leaving the island.)


1. Locke (No not the Locke from the OT, Locke from The Alterverse. Somehow the two timelines will converge and Locke in the ALT will do battle with his doppelganger.)
2. Desmond (Jack must shepherd him from the well to a spot of concentrated electromagnetic energy in order to accept Jacob into his being.

Does anyone else get the feeling that the everyone on the list is not actually a list of candidates but a list of people who will be used to get the candidate into position? Once they fulfill their role, they are killed and removed like fallen pieces on a chessboard.

2. 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!?!?!?!?

The only person I think may really still be alive is Frank. We saw him have the stereotypical “Shit” moment when he knew the door was going to fly at him but we never saw him during the obligatory “LOST Death Theme” If he were truly dead then they should have showed his body floating around among the bits of Sayid and Sun and Jin. Frank will still need to fly Ajira 316.

3. Sideways James Ford will get his revenge by:


1. Taking out a vegetative Anthony Cooper at Helen and Locke's wedding
2. Taking out a vegetative Anthony Cooper at the nursing home
3. Taking out the Sideways Sawyer who will end up being a totally different character than Anthony Cooper.

Because the Alterverse established that James Ford is still hunting for the Sawyer that conned his parents it's safe to say that there should be some sort of resolution to that story.  Of course, who knows with only four episodes left.   We could say that Anthony Cooper was Sawyer but that seems rather anti-climatic to have a catatonic con be given the Inigo Montoya speech by Jim once he finds him.  My bet is going to be that a different Sawyer played the role of home wrecker for little Jimmy.   Once again, with only four episodes left it seems highly unlikely they will resolve this at all.

4. 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.

I made this statement in a previous post. I reiterate it because of Jack’s new frontrunner status as the new Jacob and add the second theory that Locke from the Alterverse will be Jacob and Locke from the OT will MiB.

Four more left. LET IT GO ALREADY

LOST Theories for S6E13 The Last Recruit April 20th, 2010

Since last night's episode was a repeat I will post last week's analysis... if you can call it that... today.  For some reason this never published last Thursday though it was scheduled to do so.   Technology is great when it works.  Ask the Dharma Initiative about that one.

Reunions. Yes, I tend to boil each episode down into one word but that’s how I viewed this episode. The biggest of all was the reunion of Jin and Sun but more on that later.

The other reunions of note in this episode are as follows. We have a reunion, of sorts, between the original Losties. Jack and Claire reunite as brother and sister in the original timeline and the alterverse. Jack and Locke reunite as opposing sides of the same coin in the original timeline and in the alterverse Jack is reunited with the man he spoke of miracles with while waiting for lost luggage to come up with some knives and a dead father at LAX. Kate and Jack reunite as two points of the exhausted love triangle of them plus Sawyer, even though it’s pretty apparent that Sawyer has moved on from Kate as a love interest. We also have a reuniting of Sayid and his soul…again more on that later.

Jack and Locke. At first I couldn’t figure out what the big deal was between their exchanged, Telemundo like, glances. The James Bond Horn riffs were in full effect as Jack trotted out of the flora into the sightline of his old nemesis, John Locke. Because we as an audience member see everything on the table whereas individual characters only get some of the given circumstances and that tends to get buried after three or four episodes that encompass maybe a day or two. I totally forgot that Jack wasn’t at the temple when MiB smoked the joint. He was at the lighthouse with Hurley earning infinite years of bad luck. In fact, Jack hadn’t seen Locke since he was in the funeral home back in the states, not to mention he had only seen him once in passing since they left the island from “The Life and Death of Jeremy Bentham.” But he already knew that something was wrong with Locke. Maybe someone filled him in on what happened, “previously on LOST.” Still, the old gang being back together meant the reunion of tension between Jack and Sawyer and Jack and Locke, not to mention the reunion with Sawyer and his Sawyerisms, the best aimed at Frank Lapidus claiming he just walked off the set of a Burt Reynolds movie and by calling him Chesty later on.

SAYID’S SOUL
Anyone who really thinks that Sayid killed Desmond in the well needs to be… well… shot. It makes you wonder though if Desmond has the same power as the MiB did with potential assassins. “Don’t let him speak to you or it’s already too late,” seems to be the mantra with missions to kill the other guy. MiB told Alpert that and Dogen told Sayid that. In both cases they failed. Maybe Sayid did shoot Desmond, but since Desmond spoke to him before hand he negated the ability for Sayid to be able to kill him. Instead he reached out to Sayid as a human being needing redemption from sin for the sake of his loved Nadia. It seems as if both Claire and Sayid are now back on Team Jacob, for now.

JIN AND SUN
I try not to be influenced by other writers when it comes to my opinion on the nature of things like LOST but Doc Jensen over at EW really ruined this episode for me, after I had watched the last episode and then read his recap. He suggested that perhaps MiB is not in fact impersonating John Locke. It seemed odd that Desmond chose to call MiB as John Locke while everyone can sense that he’s not. He suggested that maybe MiB is hiding like John Carpenter’s The Thing in someone else and pointed towards Frank “Chesty” Lapidus. That unnerved me because I really didn’t enjoy the payoff of Sun being reunited with Jin… and her voice because I kept thinking, “Wait a minute. Doc Jensen said that he thinks MiB is inside Frank Lapidus and Frank asked everyone to come down to the galley on the Elizabeth for some Frank and beans (get it) while Jack and Sawyer played King of the Boat and Jack jumped off. What if Frank infected everyone else and now Sun is part MiB. And now she’s running towards that sonic fence and is liable to go poof. Now, that would be a great twist…. Aw their kissing and I really missed that moment.” That was long winded, I admit, but I tend to think at 45 rpms while the show is moving at 33 1/3.

It was great to see them back together after all that time but the moment was short lived as Widmore turned the tables on Sawyer and now he’s back to being prisoner of the Others… one of the originals, mind you.

THEORY DEBUNK TIME
I don’t really have a lot to debunk other than I’m pretty sure that Widmore is not exactly on the side of good. Maybe he’s Chaotic neutral. Perhaps he’s simply trying to get Desmond to interact with a source of electromagnetic energy in order to turn back the hands of time to save Daniel, who knows. Ben once said Charles only wanted to exploit the power of the island. He broke the rules by making several trips off the island and having Penny. I don’t know what that has to do with anything, really in the larger scheme of MiB and Jacob’s bargument. The only theory I will pat myself on the back about is why Desmond ram rodded Locke. (20 points if you knock him out of the chair, brutha) He did it to put him in direct contact with Jack to spark a memory. And did you notice that he looked at Locke in a mirror?

NEW THEORIES
I don’t even want to get into a lot of theories because it’s too hard to even fathom what could be going on with Jack and Locke, but I will pose this new theory about Jack.

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.

2. More than one Lostie is MiB

The biggest gamble of a theory I have is that at the end there will be a reveal that one or more of the remaining Losties aside from Locke will be MiB. Wouldn’t that be a trip if it all came down to Team MiB and Team Jacob standing on opposing sides only to have select members of Team Jacob turn and point their guns at Jack and Desmond. It’s a long shot theory because that would mean that Frank infected Hurley who was voted least likely to become a host for the smoke monster in his senior year.

That’s all I got. See you at the reunion here next week.