Lost may be set on an Island isolated from time, space and the laws of common physics, but there is no single piece within this puzzle-story that exists in isolation. Everything, everyone, is connected to something, someone, else. By now we’re familiar with these connections. We’re old hands now at the Where’s Waldo game of looking for them in episodes, but back in Season One we were just starting to deke them out. Sometimes it’s a name, or a book title, or an object in the background that cues our attention. It’s anyone’s guess whether or not these hidden trinkets, these Easter Eggs, are anything more than bonus prizes for the super obsessed, but either way, we wouldn’t be half as LOST without them.

This was also the first time we put an ‘Easter egg’ into the show – Hurley on the tv in Korea – and we thought maybe two or three people would catch it. But our audience is so dialed into detail, it didn’t get past them. – Damon Lindelof, TV Guide, May 29, 2005

If Damon ever doubted the OCD level of apophenia in this fandom, he shouldn’t have.

We didn’t just notice the connection between Hurley’s lottery win and the Korean Secretary for Environmental Safety’s living room, where Jin had come to deliver a beat-o-gram courtesy of Mr. Paik.

Some of us even noticed that Locke’s long lost mom had once been a patient in Hurley’s institutional home sweet home.

Some of us may have caught the throwaway connection made when Hurley’s financial advisor informed him that he had just bought a box factory in Tustin, CA, the same town where the box factory regional manager Locke had been sentenced to his cubicle gulag.

But there was no way for us to connect the body that flew by during their conversation in the California high rise …

… with the Californian named John Locke, whose paralyzing eight-story fall we wouldn’t even learn about until two years later.

Now that we have the luxury of hindsight, the connections run as deep as a viewer has the energy to pursue them. We might have expected that we’d someday see the corpse of the drug smuggling Nigerian priests made flesh,

and we did

but we could never have imagined the half of it.

We had no way of knowing back then that when Boone made joyous radio contact with another human voice,

the man on the other end of the line, identifying himself as a “survivor of Oceanic Flight 815″, was none other than Bernard Nadler, DDS.

Why was Locke temporarily lame during Boone’s climb up the terrifying tree-root cliff?

We may have thought it was because he’d been wounded by the metal shard from the trebuchet, but now we have to wonder if he wasn’t sort of existentially lamed by Ethan’s gunshot during his future journey to the past, in order to prevent him from being the one to climb the tree roots and die.

He wasn’t the sacrifice the Island was demanding just yet. It’s like Ethan was there to make sure Locke didn’t jump ahead in line and steal Boone’s ticket to the death lottery.

We’ve gotten so hyper-connected within this convolvulating story that the connections no longer help us find our way. They only leave us more lost than ever, on shakier and shakier ground.

They were already leaving us clues back then, even if we hadn’t yet learned to read them. Like this one telling us that Time would soon start Wrinkling on us.

We can’t have been expected to notice that Sawyer was a Madeleine L’Engle fan. We were all still Easter Egg neophytes at this point. Season One was before anyone thought of things like that, before we ever conceived of time travel and course corrections , before the Dharma Initiative and the Others and Widmore Corporation and Benjamin Linus, before we ever imagined there was a godlike Egyptologist weaving a magical tapestry inside a hollow four toed foot who was destined to be killed through a loophole deviously engineered by his ancient metaphorical nemesis who had long conned John Locke into donating him his body.

In Season One we were still making Connections 101. The connections were mostly simple, even primitive. We learned how all the characters ended up in Australia and why they were all collected inside the fragile hull of the doomed Oceanic Flight 815 on that fateful day. We were learning their backstories. One basic connection fast became obvious:

All of them were hopelessly, helplessly LOST.

Jin had lost his marriage and his moral compass.

Hurley was losing his mind under the incessant attack of the cursed Numbers.

Locke had lost his kidney, his dignity and his last shred of self respect.

Sawyer, conned into committing his first horrifying murder, had lost his soul.

in Season One LOST was a show that was accessible to everyone. It was still keeping its sci fi colors under deep cover. We all knew there was something askew with this story-verse, but we were hypnotized by the carousel of humanity spinning around us. The connections that we noticed in Season One, the connections that most fascinated us, were the ones being made between the characters.

The survivors were becoming a community. When Sawyer needed glasses to heal his splitting headache, it took a village to make him well. The whole gang pitched in.

You can almost hear the Smurf tune in the background, can’t ya?

Or was that just the redshirts starting up their own Blue Man troupe?

Jin wanted to connect to the community, even after they treated him like a terrorist and beat the living crap out of him. He even learned the word for the thing he wanted to do: Boat.

Walt felt so connected to the Island that he burned the raft that was going to disconnect him from it.

Jack, a/k/a The Keymaster, was starting to feel mighty connected to his new job as Boss of Everyone.

After all, nobody got a gun unless Jack let them have a gun. Suck on that, keyless losers.

Sayid decided to cut the Nadia connection that meant so much to him mere days before,

and connect up with the hot, hot blonde who was ready, willing and right there.

Carpe diem, Sayid.

As we approached the back end of Season One, the quality of the storytelling was picking up. Two of the episodes in this group were cited as the favorites of the original creators – J. J. Abrams and Damon Lindelof – in the May 2005 TV Guide wrap up.

(click to enlarge)

I concur with their choices. It’s an all stellar lineup: The Pilot (J.J.), Exodus (Damon), White Rabbit (Damon), Do No Harm (J.J.). Both Sawyer-centrics made the list: Damon chose Confidence Man, J.J. picked Outlaws. Unsurprisingly, both loved the transcendent episode Walkabout. Surprisingly, they both also chose …In Translation.

One episode that I’m guessing just missed the list was the well titled Deus Ex Machina. Episode titles in Season One were so beautifully chosen, I find myself drawn to interpreting each one. In literature, “deus ex machina” – the god out of the machine – refers to a literary device that is not generally much respected. It derives from the custom in Greek theater to have a god literally lowered down onto the stage. By a machine.

It was the ancient Greek equivalent of a WTF! ending. Aristotle considered it to be a cheat, because nothing the audience had already seen prepared them for it.

“It is obvious that the solutions of plots too should come about as a result of the plot itself, and not from a contrivance.” – Aristotle, Poetics

But despite its bad rep, WTF! is not an unusual method of turning around a story that has gotten itself lost. It’s not always a bad thing. I mean, without gods coming out of machines, where exactly would LOST be?

And we all ended up liking that twist, didn’t we? Even Aristotle had to admit it was often unavoidable.

“it is probable that improbable things will happen. – Aristotle, Poetics

The sepulchral light that lit up the hatch window felt like a sign to the bereft and desperate Locke. But that wasn’t a god down there. It was only Desmond Hume, buried under the earth with his button to push, shining up a light to see what was causing all that racket.

Locke was connected to Desmond before any of us even knew that Desmond existed. At times it almost seemed like Locke had become the hub in the connective wheel.

In just the few short weeks since the crash, Locke had turned Guru. We’d watched Walt seeking him out, admiring him. In these episodes, Locke deepened his connection with the young grasshopper.

To Walt’s amazement, Locke knew that he’d burned his father’s raft, and to Walt’s relief, the secret was safe between soulmates.

Locke knew it was Claire’s birthday. He even gave her a present! A cradle for the baby who would soon be born, another kindred spirit to Locke – the son of a child mother who hadn’t wanted to keep him.

Locke was so tapped into the Island grapevine by this point, he was even giving advice to Shannon on her love life.

But the person Locke had become most closely connected to was his devoted acolyte, Boone, whose faith in Locke was about to become a waking nightmare.

They were a kind of Master and Apprentice … except that it wasn’t clear what exactly Locke might be a master of.

Every day Boone went out into the jungle with Locke and dug holes and pounded fruitlessly on the sealed up hatch. He helped him build a trebuchet.

Boone gave a lot more than just blood, sweat and tears to Locke. He put up with a constant stream of crazy shit.

But more than anything, Boone listened to the old coot. And Locke had a lot to say. He filled their working days with long dissertations on The Meaning of Lost Island.

The Island had made him whole. They were supposed to be on The Island. The Island would tell them what it wanted them to do. The Island had given everyone a new life. The Island would test their commitment but if only they kept faith, the Island would show them how to open the hatch. Everything breaks if you apply enough force.

Boone knew Locke was pretty much batshit insane. Still he couldn’t help but absorb some of his rabid intensity. It was all SO clear to Locke. Maybe it was that certainty alone that convinced Boone to follow his leader.

Straight over a cliff.

Before that tragedy, Locke and Boone, for their brief wrinkle in time together, had become a kind of father and son.

And father and son, as we have seen time and again on LOST, is a connection that matters. A lot. Daddy issues were equal opportunity in this story. As Locke told Walt, everybody’s got a dad. It’s a universal connection. Everybody’s got a mom too, of course, but on LOST mothers don’t seem to be quite as important. Unless they’re filled with heroin.

Or have a funny accent.

Mostly on LOST, it’s the Y chromosome that counts.

Locke had been so hungry to have a real, live dad all these years that he was a sitting duck for the slimy conman who claimed to have donated a sperm on his behalf 40 years before. All it took was some drinkin’ and some shootin’ and Locke was ready to hand over his internal organs. Anything for dear old Dad.

Jin had a sweet, wise father, loving and forgiving – a true anomaly on LOST.

But to make up for it, he had the father in law from hell, a mean sturgeon faced psychopath who had Jin by the balls and didn’t plan on ever letting go.

Sawyer’s father was a pair of pointy toed, high heeled cowboy boots.

That’s all we ever saw of him, making it all the more sadly ironic to hear Sawyer referred to so often as a cowboy, or to hear him tell someone to “cowboy up”. The cowboy who killed himself on his little boy’s bed was an animal.

And Sawyer had been chasing the wrong man rather than deal with the fact that the enemy he should have been hating on all these years was his own daddy.

Since this is a story of connections, it stands to reason that the connection between Locke and Sawyer would be made through a Dad.

The same coldblooded con man who had snatched Locke’s kidney was the same ruthless creep who had conned this little boy’s family into oblivion.

We knew nothing about any of that then. But all the seeds had been planted for the story that was yet to unfold.

Perhaps the most memorable connection made in these episodes was the one forged between Sawyer and Kate in one of Lost’s signature scenes from Season One – the great “I Never” fireside chat from Outlaws, about which J. J. Abrams had this to say:

“I loved the dynamic between Sawyer and Kate. It proved to me that two people talking in the jungle could be as compelling as running from a monster.” – J. J. Abrams

“I Never” is a drinking game that lets you tell the things you’ve done by only admitting to what you have not. It started light and teasing. The tomboy had never worn pink. The redneck had never kissed a man.

It was just a game, a way to catch a much needed buzz after weeks of staggering hardship.

Quickly, the revelations turned personal. Kate had never had a one night stand. Sawyer had never been in love. Kate had been married, for at least a New York minute.

What made them slip into such sudden, unexpected intimacy? Why were they telling each other these things? They began to needle one another.

She teased him about chasing a boar. He challenged her for wanting to take off into the night and be alone with him.

She lashed out about his letter. She was teasing, but it cut deeper than she’d thought.

He asked her flat out if she had ever killed a man. She looked him in the eye and told him yes.

Darkly, brokenly, he confessed that he had too.

There was silence, maybe shock, that they’d exposed themselves so utterly to one another. In the morning they were back to snarking and bitching at each other,

but the encounter had left its mark. For reasons we have yet to discover, the writers had decided to give this love story the slow burn.

Kate was there to witness the moment when Sawyer let escape the boar he’d gone into the jungle to hunt. She didn’t know exactly what she was seeing when it happened, had no idea yet of the thing that was haunting Sawyer, but she could not look away. She was connecting to him. And we would see this connection continue to build, in ways big and small, past and present, on Island and off it.

In the Season Five finale, we saw another connection. Of all those he touched, Jacob chose only two children. He helped one child to see that, for her, crime might just pay.

And he encouraged the other child to hold tight to his anger and pain.

Why did Jacob choose only two children and why did he make a point of teaching them exactly the wrong life lessons? It was almost like he wanted to be sure they both ended up getting lost in the lives that were ahead of them, like he wanted to make sure they grew up to be a couple of Outlaws.

The “I Never” scene was notable, not only for Season One but for LOST in general, because it contained something very rare for this show – actual communication.

Connection after all takes language. And asking questions, giving answers – that’s something that doesn’t happen too often on LOST.

Jin let himself be beat almost into brain damage rather than signal to Michael that he had not burned the raft. Miscommunication leads to assumptions.

Watching Sun and Jin wrestle over her bathing suit on the beach, everyone assumed that Jin was a brutal abuser. No one suspected that he was instead the gentlest and most trustworthy of men.

Sun could have helped connect him to the larger group if she’d only revealed she spoke English, but Sun, for reasons known only to her, was hoarding the power of language to herself.

Sun and Jin parted bitterly in this episode, a reminder of just how fragile our connections to one another really are.

At the end of this episode, Hurley also loses his connection to the word. When the batteries on his CD player run down, he takes off the headphones with calm resignation. It was a poignant moment, not least because it had been inevitable for some time. It was a powerful reminder of just how alone and disconnected the survivors really were.

… In Translation, another great title, might be taken to mean “(LOST) … In Translation”. Or perhaps it’s a reference to “In Translation” by James Merrill, a poem about (I think) a child putting together a jigsaw puzzle that doesn’t seem to know what picture it wants to be.

There is a scene in … In Translation where for a minute we are inside Jin’s head, listening to the quarrels of the people around him, not a word of which he can understand. We get a chance to experience briefly what it has been like to be Jin. The voices are actually the soundtrack being played backward in that scene. It’s very short, and it’s the only time Jin’s language problems ever gets that much consideration, but it brings home the point. Without language, Jin is disconnected, as any of us would be.

The Island has its own language, and not just the one Locke is trying to hear. When Sawyer chases the boar into the jungle, he is suddenly engulfed in a swirl of hissing, whispering voices.

Like Sayid in Solitary, Sawyer can’t hear most of what the whispers are saying. However if only he had the the proper decoding audio software, he could have heard them saying a lot of creepy things, like “I knew he was American” or “He’s been in a plane crash” or “Hide against the bushes” or “I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry”. The voices seem to be talking about Sawyer as he stumbles around mesmerized and confused:

Sawyer’s whispers differed from Sayid’s in that there was one clear phrase repeated in the middle of the otherwise indecipherable murmurs. There were the dying words of the innocent man Sawyer wrongfully murdered in cold blood, to his own immeasurable horror.

Karma. The ring of birth and death that never ends, that none escape.

The incessant, inexorable wheel of causation and consequence.

After watching Sawyer’s tragic tale in Outlaws it felt like Sawyer’s soul was doomed to damnation. But no moral quandary on LOST is ever that clear, especially not when Sawyer is involved.

On his first pass, we saw that Sawyer hadn’t been able to bring himself to shoot the shambly old Yank, the nice enough dude who only wanted to cook him up some hot shrimp, half price. He ran. His soul would have been saved, he could have gone home with his conscience clean.

Except that he had the misfortune to run into a certain sozzled Boston doctor, in a bar bathed in an almost beatific light, who convinced him to get on with his business, and put that bullet into the man he thought deserved it, and finally get to read the letter that Jacob had helped him write. What was it with Jacob and his emissaries giving Sawyer very, very bad advice just when he was at his most vulnerable?

Sawyer’s story, in Outlaws as in Confidence Man, is a black diamond of exquisite moral contradictions.

No child in the Lost-verse has ever been more grievously harmed than Sawyer. But the murder he committed was the act of a grown man.

He had been conned into committing the murder, a karmic justice right there. We saw the horror and regret break instantly across his face when he realized what he’d done. But he couldn’t have ever been conned if he hadn’t been nursing evil in his heart.

He remains haunted, by the evil he has done and the evil done unto him.

In the years since, we have come to see that there is a world of good inside Sawyer, so what does his story mean? How are we to take it?

After freeing the boar Sawyer seemed to feel lighter, happy again, back to needling Lord Jack. Did that mean his guilt had been exorcised? Is it ever possible to be free of that kind of guilt?

Or is Sawyer trapped forever in a perpetual loop, both victimizer and victim, a creature inspiring equal parts of pity and fear? For Sawyer, will it always and inexorably come back around?

Karma is not an easy concept to understand, and it’s no easier when we’re all speaking the same language. Sometimes it’s a relief to just dispense with language entirely.

That brings us to the subject that is near and dear to the hearts of all original flavor LOST fans. When you really want to get lost on LOST, the thing to concentrate on is the Numbers. Mathematics is a unversal language, and Numbers are the indispensible building blocks of mathematical connection.

Hurley’s first great centric was a classic. Actually I think this one could have gone on Damon and J.J.’s list as well. The famous Numbers first showed up on Hurley’s lottery ticket. After that, they’d be popping up all over the place. At the end of the episode, we got an eerie glimpse of them stamped into the lid of the unopened hatch.

But that was just the beginning. In later months and years, we’d see them on the medicine vials.

On a girls soccer team.

On the odometer of Hurley’s Camaro.

On Eko’s magic stick.

The Numbers are the subject of endless fascination and speculation. LOST attracts a special breed of intellectually gifted interpreters, as any online fan knows. The things they have discovered about the numbers is truly awe inspiring. You might be interested to know that the numbers hold a valid Diophantine relation, that they appear in a mathematical relationship to the Flavius-Josephus sieve … and, what’s more, if you hold the ALT key in notepad/wordpad (font type must be “System”) and type the numbers 4 8 15 16 23 42, and then release ALT, you will get the Greek symbol µ (Mu) which is the name of the lost continent Lemuria, which is similar to Atlantis! Don’t try and tell me that’s an accident!

But what do they mean to we of little brain? Anything? In a May 2008 interview with Kristin of E!, Damon Lindelof seemed to hint that the infamous Numbers didn’t actually mean a dang thing.

“There are some questions that are very engaging and interesting, and then there are other questions that we have no interest whatsoever in answering. We call it the midi-chlorian debate, because at a certain point, explaining something mystical demystifies it. To try and have a character come and say, “Here is what the numbers mean,” actually makes every usage of the numbers up to that point less interesting….You can actually watch Star Wars now, and when Obi-Wan talks about the Force to Luke for the first time, it loses its luster because the Force has been explained as, sort of, little biological agents that are in your blood stream. So you go, “Oh, I liked Obi-Wan’s version a lot better.” Which in the case of our show is, “The numbers are bad luck, they keep popping up in Hurley’s life, they appear on the island.” … But if you’re watching the show for a detailed explanation of what the numbers mean—and I’m not saying you won’t see more of them—then you will be disappointed by the end of season six.”

You know I just don’t think that explanation could ever be acceptable to the kind of obsessives who managed to connect the Numbers to the lost island of Atlantis via their keyboards. So in 2009, again with E!, Damon took another crack at it and this time he did better:

“Here’s the story with the numbers. The Hanso Foundation that started the Dharma Initiative hired this guy Valenzetti to basically work on this equation to determine what was the probability of the world ending in the wake of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Valenzetti basically deduced that it was 100 percent within the next 27 years, so the Hanso Foundation started the Dharma Initiative in an effort to try to change the variables in the equation so that mankind wouldn’t wipe it itself out.”

Muuuuuuch better. It’s important to give the literal minded among us something to connect with. Personally, I’m fine with swimming around in a sea of vague multicultural free associations. I enjoy it. When Michael started rhapsodizing about the architectural genius of the Flatiron Building in Manhattan, it didn’t just strike me that the Flatiron was a triangle – LOST’s favorite shape – but I also recognized right away the location: 23rd Street!

It doesn’t mean anything, but gee, it’s kinda cool. Once you know the Numbers you can dig out Easter Eggs all over the place.

The numbers add up to 108 – the number of Penelope’s suitors when Odysseus was away, the number of names for each Hindu god, the number of beads in a Buddhist prayer mala, the number of times the bell is rung for Japanese New Year and in China, the most fortunate of lucky numbers.

Hurley wore a medallion on his neck with the Chinese symbol known as LU, which means Luck, specifically the luckiness of Prosperity.

There was cruel irony in that choice of symbol of course because Hurley never had a lucky day after the Numbers had made him prosperous. He became obsessed with discovering the source behind the curse. He was connected to the numbers via his pal Leonard from Santa Rosa,

who was connected to the numbers via his old Navy buddy, Sam Toomey.

Sam Toomey had built himself a house in the middle of nowhere, so as to be in a place where his numerical curse couldn’t hurt anyone but himself. Except for his wife, Martha, who had already lost her leg – in a car crash, the night after Sam had guessed there were exactly 4,815,162,342 beans in the jar at the Kalgoorlie fair.

Despite her loss and despite Sam being driven to madness and suicide by the Numbers, Martha refused to submit to the concept of a curse. She was emphatic in declaring to Hurley that bad things happen all the time, and everyone is still responsible for making their own luck. It was a classic Fate vs. Free Will dichotomy.

It was also in stark contrast to the philosophy expressed by Christian Shephard in the bar with Sawyer.

Christian’s core belief was fatalistic. Where Martha represented Free Will, Chris was a true believer in Fate. And in Curses. His slogan was “That’s why the Sox will never win the Series”, a reference to the once hapless Boston Red Sox who, as of September 2004, hadn’t won a world series since they’d sold Babe Ruth to the Yankees in 1920 and brought down the Curse of the Bambino on themselves.

It’s an interesting reference, and maybe a clue as to where the writers true affiliation lies in this perpetual debate between Fate and Free Will. The episode was set in September, 2004, about a month before the Bambino’s Curse was finally broken. On October 28, 2004, with a lunar eclipse adding a final surreal touch, the Red Sox won the World Series for the first time in 86 years.

After defeating the hated Yankees in the ALCS championship no less! After being down 3-0 and winning the last 4 straight. How’s that for Fate?

What to make of it? By the time Outlaws aired on Feb. 16, 2005, we all knew that Christian’s life philosophy had become permanently irrelevant. Was that a clue that fatalism was the false path? That Fate can sometimes bring good things? Or does it mean Free Will controls the outcome? Even if it takes 86 years to come back around.

Hurley’s quest to solve the secret of the Numbers had been in vain, until he finally met up with the crazy French chick.

He was driven to find her after he’d found her scribblings of the Numbers on one of her maps. Like Sam Toomey, Rousseau had heard the Numbers beaming through the atmosphere, repeated on an endless loop over a radio transmission. Her crew had followed the Numbers to the Island, as if they were magnetized by them, and been ruined there. Meeting Rousseau was a great relief for Hurley. Finally someone who understood what the Numbers had meant for him, how it felt to have your whole life stolen from you by a string of inanimate digits.

Rousseau listened to Hurley and then she agreed. They had both been cursed by the Numbers, the mysterious integers whose power had drawn them both to this same cursed place. That was all he needed, someone to understand him. They connected with a kingsize hug.

Rousseau’s belief that the Numbers were responsible for them landing on the Island sounds like an argument for Fate again. It’s a question that keeps spinning around and around. We all know by now we’re not getting the answer to that question until the bitter end, if then. In this game, we just have to accept we don’t know when or where they’re finally going to spring the trap.

In the Bible, the Book of Numbers tells the story of the Jews as they wandered in the desert, after they had left Egypt but before they entered the Promised Land. It’s also known as the Book of Aaron, because Moses’s big brother gets to play quite a prominent role in this part of the Exodus. As always, we are never far from Biblical allusions on LOST.

“When a prophet of the LORD is among you, I reveal myself to him in visions, I speak to him in dreams. “ – Numbers 12:6

Locke, the visionary, the dreamer, ended his episode in a state of despair, reduced from mystical wise man to a traumatized, unhinged child.

But the behavior we’d seen from him didn’t lend itself to literal understanding. None of it made sense. How did he know why Sawyer had been out in the jungle?

How did he know it was Claire’s birthday?

What spirit told him about Boone’s childhood nanny, Theresa, who had fallen up and down the stairs and broke her neck doing the bidding of a tyrannical six year old Boone?

How did he know that Walt had burned the raft?

Why did he try to convince the rest of the group that unseen Others had burned the raft when he knew all along it was his little backgammon playing buddy?

What was Locke’s agenda, right from the beginning? Rewatching Season One, I often feel like I’m missing something, some connection between the Locke we saw then and the Locke we saw at the end of Season Five.

There is more to Season One Locke than just a quirky old nut who likes the scenery on Craphole Island. But what?

There is a moment while Locke is building Aaron’s crib. Hearing that he has made his own glue out of rendered animal fat, Claire is fascinated, as are we all, by Locke’s incredible array of exotic abilities. Without tools or measuring sticks or levels or squares he has put together quite a quaint little manger for the Island’s chosen one.

He explains to Claire that he is good at “putting bits and pieces together”. Connecting things. Now that is the same thing all of us are trying to do whenever we watch an episode of LOST. That’s the whole technique of the whole big puzzle-game. But for some reason that comment reminded me of this recent Easter Egg, one of the more in-your-face book titles we’ve been given during the history of LOST.

Everything that rises must converge. As we approach final landing, I don’t get the feeling that all this confusion is yet coalescing into anything. Is all this dizzying complexity going to connect in the end to form one unified, transcendent reality? We are still waiting to find out. But it won’t be long now.

It only ends once. Anything that happens before that is just progress.

We dance around in a ring and suppose.

But the secret sits in the middle and knows.
- Robert Frost

As we moved on in to the midsection of Lost’s great Season One, the secrets were beginning to pile up. There were the secrets the survivors had brought to the Island.

The secrets they found there.

Secrets kept.

Secrets stolen.

And secrets finally shared.

There were the secrets that others had left behind

And the secrets the Island wasn’t planning to give up.

Recently Damon Lindelof revealed his own secret in an interview with USA Today. It seems all episodes on Lost are not created equal, and this batch contains the episode Damon considers “my least favorite episode of the show ever …” Homecoming, I think, was flawed on almost every single level that an episode of Lost could be.” It’s true the quality flagged here and there in the first season. But maybe that’s an occupational hazard of trying to put together a puzzle when it has to be kept a secret where all the pieces are being kept. It’s easy to get a little lost.

I think Damon’s being too hard on himself about Homecoming. Even a subpar Season One episode was pretty damn fun. Things jump out at you that you never noticed the first time, things there was no reason to notice. Like this scene from Hearts and Minds. Jack approaches Locke, who is sitting on the beach, looking out to sea.

There’s more to it, a conversation where Locke bullshits Jack about there being no boar, because he’s keeping his secret about the hatch from Jack. It’s only a little scene. It’s probably just a happy accident that now, five years later, it seems almost like a bookend to this scene:

Now, it’s not exactly the same. Jack and Locke don’t achieve the same level of metaphorical color coded fashion in Hearts and Minds. Instead of black and white we get a beige and checkered theme … which means – like, nothing. But later, when the two alphas are out in the jungle digging up guns, they do put on their bicolored duds, just for the occasion. I’d like to draw your attention to whose wearing which color shirt. Not that I have any theory on it. Just sayin’.

I do realize this is most likely just a fortunate glitch, but when a story is clicking, those connections have a way of making themselves. I’m still giving even money that the final scene of Lost resembles something along these lines:

And of course I’m completely prepared to be completely wrong. How could I watch this show if I wasn’t?

There were other foreshadowy moments, though none quite as glamorous. There was a tiny moment when Sun and Jin were discussing Claire’s baby, just after Claire had returned from the jungle, and they gave each other a look that told us – even though we didn’t see it then – that this was a couple where babies were a big issue.

We had NO idea watching that scene that we were being given our first signal that infertility and infidelity would one day define the story of Jin and Sun. But it was there, and it was fun to spot it. That’s a big part of the fun of rewatching Season One as a visitor from the future. You get to see all the stuff that was always right there that you never saw before.

Another pleasure of a rewatch is just getting to watch – again – things you really enjoy rewatching. Like Kate and Sawyer jumping into the waterfall and frolicking and larking around like two kids. It is one of the most purely joyous moments of Season One.

It’s sexy, but it’s innocent.

It feels so natural. It looks so fun.

Until they bump up against those everpresent dead people that turn up everywhere on Craphole Island.

The discovery of The Case begins the quest for the shiniest secret of the batch.

What was in Kate’s Case? And by extension what was the deal with Kate? She had been traveling under heavy guard with a U.S. Marshall. Aside from that, we knew that she climbed trees better than Tarzan.

She could track. She seemed to feel pretty comfy living in the wild. And that’s about all we knew about her. Then as now, she’s a very hard character to get a bead on. Finding out that she had this case, and that it meant so much to her, became a not so subtle metaphor for how much Jack and Sawyer both wanted to find a way to get inside her … head.

This episode, coming on the heels of the epic sex-ay kiss in Confidence Man, was the next chapter in the LOST Love Triangle series of stories. It starts out light and bubbly with the waterfall romp.

Then it shifts into a hotter, more sexual vibe as Kate and Sawyer wrestle for The Case

and bargain for it and come to an impasse.

Kate enjoys the cat and mouse with Sawyer and almost gets the upper hand.

But then inexplicably, prematurely, she just gives up and goes begging to Jack.

That’s when it all starts disintegrating into a long, miserable slog towards Jack finally letting Kate have her lost Cracker Jack prize. And in the end, it’s still a total secret what it all means to her.

As a matter of fact, according to this 2006 interview with ABC, Damon Lindelof regarded Kate’s toy airplane as “probably the single biggest regret that we have as storytellers. ”

Our intention was always that there be a second flashback story that revealed that that plane was part of a time capsule that she shared with a childhood sweetheart. She was responsible for the childhood sweetheart’s death when she was on the run and, therefore, the plane had great emotional investment. And we would hear “What’s up with the plane? What’s going on with the plane? When are you going to pay off on the plane?” Then we paid it off and people still are asking us. So in the finale that year the marshal gives this big sort of monologue about, “You want to know about this f–ing plane? I’ll tell you, God damn it!”

It goes to show you how much forethought those guys were putting into Kate’s storyline. Like … none. The plane meant nothing. It just showed that Kate was clinging beyond all rational measure to a childhood trinket. But let’s let bygones be bygones, shall we? This episode, the cleverly named Whatever the Case May Be was a fun one, at least for the first half. It could almost be considered a kind of litmus test for shippers. For example, if you like your romance flirty and hot and where the girl gets to be on top sometimes,

then you just might be a Skater.

If, on the other hand, you’re more of a navel gazing no fun mopey type,

then don’t look now but you just might be a Jater.

Seriously, it’s wrong to generalize. There’s more nuance than that to both these stories. The differences between them, however, are striking. Sawyer bargains with Kate over The Case, and only wants her to tell him what’s inside. He’s not even asking to see it. He’s curious, not about what’s actually in The Case, but only why it means so much to Kate to have it.

Jack on the other hand not only has to see what’s in the case, he’s going to oversee any and all openings of said case, and then whatever they find, he’s going to take it.

Except that stupid plane, of course.

When Sawyer and Kate have their close encounter with corpses, they’re as weightless and playful and graceful as a pair of dolphins.

When Jack and Kate go grave robbing, they’re gagging and tearing up and trying not to retch all over each other.

Was this stuff deliberate or did the writers not see what they were doing? Even when it came to month old dead people, Sawyer and Kate managed to make it look sexy. Jack and Kate had peaked too early with all that hot and heavy verbal copulation. By this episode they had already moved on to the numbingly miserable bad marriage phase of the relationship.

Maybe it all boiled down to respect. When Kate couldn’t go along on the jungle trek to trap Ethan, Sawyer simply handed her his extra gun. No problem, baby.

Jack didn’t think a grubby little alley cat like Kate deserved his trust.

After he dragged THE TRUTH out of her and wrenched the key out of her hand, after he’d humbled her and made her watch while he opened her damn case and confiscated the key and put it around his own fucking neck!,

he left her to have a good girly cry. When it comes to these two ships the biggest secret for me still remains: Why did anybody like watching Jack and Kate? And more than that, what were these writers thinking when they dreamed up this shite? One possible answer? It’s an aspect of season one that makes fanboys a little uncomfortable, I’ve noticed, but I’ll say it anyway. The explanation for Season One Jack & Kate, as far as I’m concerned, was the not so pretty thread of misogyny that ran deeply through much of the early characterizations.

Jack, despite being as highstrung as a tripwire, was portrayed as the reasonable man, the decent guy, the great doctor who had every right to control and discipline the white trash brat, Kate. Kate was the liar and the criminal who deserved to be treated with suspicion and resentment. We had seen her use her feminine wiles to rook the bank manager,

and we knew she’d been pulling plenty of tricks on the fool she got to help her rob the bank.

Kate used sex, heavily watered down with tears when necessary, to get whatever she wanted from life. I’m not sure if we were supposed to be distracted by the way she handled a gun into thinking she was kickass,

because in the story we saw on the Island, Kate was playing the naughty child begging for the good graces of her mad daddy Jack, as traditional and demeaning a female role as there is. If Kate were a singular case, maybe I wouldn’t have noticed it so much. But Sun was also a liar. In fact, she was such a liar that she asked Kate, right after she stopped lying about not speaking English, “Have you never lied to a man you’ve loved”? As if to say that lying and loving went automatically hand in hand for women.

And on Season One LOST, unfortunately, they did.

Shannon lied to Boone to take his money, and then she duped him into quasi-incest sex, and then she dumped him with about as much warmth as an ice shower.

And to top off the array of women behaving badly, Walt’s mom Susan lied to Michael so that she could steal Walt away for herself and then she lied to Walt his whole life by never letting him know his dad had sent him letters.

In the twisted world of fanboy-written romance, the undeniable undercurrent is that girls, basically, suck. You can’t trust them. They lie and they’ll screw you over first chance they get. It’s a throwback to the mother of all misogynist archetypes – Eve, the devious manipulator who tricked poor Adam into losing innocence, immortality and the most prime piece of real estate in mythological history.

As in the Bible, there are exceptions made, but basically only for women that weren’t considered sexually desirable. Or available. The innocent madonna Claire was sacrosanct. Never more so than when she was playing damsel in distress, which is a female role fanboys can all get behind.

And no one could ever say a bad word about Holy Mother Rose, comforting her boy Charlie in this jungle Pieta.

So while it was being well established that hot girls are all sneaky ass bitches, what story were we being told about the boys?

Most of their stories revolved around a secret as well, the kind of secret LOST really likes to get its teeth into – the secret of what it takes to turn a boy into a real live man. Manhood, baby.

The first thing it takes is the one thing most of these poor schmucks on LOST ain’t got: a real live Dad.

What they had instead was John Locke, their resident fatherless mystic crackpot – boar expert, dreamweaver and most likely a hardcore devotee of the Iron John School of Mythopoeic Manhood. Iron John is an interesting fairy tale to read if you have a minute, with echoes of LOST that are quite striking and lyrical.

“I am Iron John, and was by enchantment a wild man, but thou hast set me free; all the treasures which I possess, shall be thy property.”

Walt met with Locke secretly, every chance he could get, trying to glean the secrets of manhood that Michael seemed so uniquely inept at teaching.

Locke had been mentor to Charlie as well, imparting to him the wisdom of bees and boars and the fine art of kicking a monkey off of one’s back. But the young man Locke was most invested in was his partner in hatch finding, that dreamy boy Boone.

Since time was of the essence, and Boone was a pretty limp subject to start with, Locke was forced to resort to his homemade Instant Manhood Recipe. He bashed him over the head and then slathered his open head wound with hillbilly LSD that he mixed up himself, right on the spot.

You won’t find this method in any of the parenting handbooks, but as always Locke knew how to think outside the box. Locke told Boone he had given him “an experience that is vital to your survival on this Island”, and despite the fact that Boone ended up not surviving on this Island, it seemed to be a very useful experience.

Manhood means freeing yourself from the effeminazation of modern civilization and grabbing hold of that big ass knife.



It means rescuing damsels in distress.

And then it means, when you lose the thing you love the most, you must suck it up and “let it go”.

There’s no crying in manhood. Because really, what girl is worth getting so messed up over, dude?

Especially your not-sister who is a self absorbed airhead who’ll flirt shamelessly with any old charming Iraqi torturer that wanders into her life.

Shannon’s first death scene, even though it was just hallucinogenic wish fulfillment, was pretty gruesome, and I’m sure it felt shocking the first time around. I don’t remember how I felt the first time I watched it, if I even realized it was a dream at first. But what I noticed this time around was that Boone’s dream accuratetly depicted the way that the Smoke Monster kills.

Shannon was lifted up in the air exactly as Eko was and thrashed around until she looked like chewed up hamburger.

Boone may not have lived very long in this tale, but he was very talented in the dreamosphere. We would see him again in Locke’s dreams, a bond between father and son that would not be broken by death.

Charlie, like Boone, struggled to find his way as a man.

He had his own flashback secrets. Instead of incestual longings, Charlie’s secret was his addiction to heroin. His sad attempt at fitting in as a normal workaday man type ended with him ralphing straight into the state of the art C815 photocopier he was trying to sell.

It was one of the most pathetic flashback stories ever told on LOST, small and weak, but it revealed a central secret. For Charlie, manhood was going to be about “taking care of someone”.

It didn’t work out with the daughter of the guy who bought the paper company in Slough (shoutout to the British The Office ), especially after he was caught stealing Winston Churchill’s cigarette case,

but he was determined to make it work out with sweet little Claire. He mourned her loss and tortured himself over his failure to save her.

Then he read her diary and got real happy because he found out she liked him,

which felt like a wildly inappropriate reaction considering at the time she was still missing and in the clutches of the dreaded Ethan Rom. (Come to think of it, maybe I can see why this is Damon Lindelof’s least favorite episode.)

He gently coaxed her back to reality after she survived her trauma.

And then he did the most manliest thing of all and picked up a gun and shot another man dead.

Killing Ethan left many secrets hidden, at least for another year or so. We wouldn’t know how Ethan got all those scratches on his face.

We wouldn’t know what happened to Claire or why Ethan took her or who he took her to. All that would have to wait because Charlie had decided to be judge and jury, to give Ethan what he “deserved”. Charlie’s story, as always, circled back to Catholicism and judgment, and to the biggest secret of all – the secret of Faith and why it means so much to some people and seems so totally irrelevant to others.

Let’s take a break here and collect some of the other secrets that were raining down in these episodes. Like, who knew, when we watched Sayid’s long passionate tale about his devotion to his beloved Nadia, that he secretly just had a thing for leggy blondes.

Turns out Sayid was down with that “love the one you’re with” mentality all the way.

Yes, that was a direct contradicton of what they had been telling us about Sayid just a few weeks before, but what the hell. Romance on LOST is the soul of inconsistency.

That’s one thing I think we all can agree on.

Here’s a secret I’ve always wondered about: Why are bathroom jokes always considered funnier when they’re about a fat guy ?

Hurley had to put up with Jack snickering because he had the shits, and then they had him grabbing at Jin’s crotch to beg him to pee on his foot! It was double the hilarity. Number one and number two in the same episode!

And why is it even funny when Hurley just looks at a dead fish? Like I don’t see any joke here, but this picture still makes me smile.

Another secret: How do assless men keep their pants on?

And speaking of Sawyer, how did he rebuild his shelter up beach when all he carried with him on the great migration was a backpack?

It was still a secret, a cool one, why 815 passengers kept showing up in each others flashbacks, like Sawyer during Boone’s visit to the Sydney police station. Come to think of it, it’s still a total secret what those pre-crash connections are going to mean in the end.

And we are able to wonder now, with all our wonderful hindsight, whether it was coincidence or fate that Kate was robbing a lockbox 815

in a bank in the same city where Sawyer later told the warden to deposit Clementine’s inheritance.

When Michael was hit by the car just before he was set to go and get his baby Walt back

was that the Island reaching out to shape his fate the same way the gun he bought refused to kill him?

Was the cartoon about the Penguin with a Sunburn a secret nod to the mystery of a Polar Bear on a South Pacific Island? Is there some meaningful secret behind the cognitive dissonance of Antarctic creatures existing in tropical climates?

Why was the unluckiest boy in town the one wearing the shirt with the four aces?

Here’s a secret I don’t expect any answer for, but what was up with those slimy greenish greyish guava seeds that Jack gave to Kate?

Was it some kind of squicky method of asexual seed transfer, sort of like second base for verbal copulators?

Why were there so many antibiotics on the plane? Jack was able to blackmail Sawyer into giving up the case by playing peekaboo with his Hippocratic Oath and threatening to withhold the cure. But where did all those drugs come from? Was this plane full of hospital patients being flown to a quarantine ward?

When Scott was killed, they reminded us again that nobody remembered if he was Steve or Scott and thus the ongoing secret of the redshirts continued. How many of them were there? And why were they always lugging heavy things in the background and never allowed to talk to any of the A-team?

The A-team meanwhile was beginning to put together its own cabal of secret keeping. Jack and Locke had a discussion about whether to tell the group what was threatening them, a question that would be troubling throughout the story. As late as Season Three, Jack still felt it was his private prerogative whether to tell the nameless redshirts that they were about to be murdered in their beds. In this episode it was decided, as would become a habit, that the ever so brilliant elites would henceforth make all life and death decisions for the blissfully ignorant masses.

By far the most intriguing secrets of course were the secrets of the Island. And there were juicy ones throughout these episodes. The Black Rock that Claire told her diary she had seen in her dream was a potent source of mystery. There was of course the Black Rock ship, which had only been vaguely referenced by Rousseau, but that we now know is an ancient slave ship that is inexplicably moored in the middle of the jungle.

The same Black Rock whose ledger Charles Widmore would one day be seen buying at auction.

The same auction where a painting of the Black Rock was also sold, later to hang on the wall of Widmore’s posh apartment. But there’s more to the term “black rock” than just a ship. Volcanic islands in the South Pacific have large concentrations of black basalt, an igneous rock with weak, but measurable, magnetic properties due to the metallic elements they contain. And we saw that magnetic anomalies were beginning to be a real problem.

First the tide shifted suddenly and unexpectedly, which is something tides simply don’t do. Tides commune with the moon, and like the phases of the moon, tides repeat on a metronome of mathematical regularity. So it was a very frightening phenomenon when this happened, although, again, I think most of us hardly noticed on the first pass around.

The compass that Locke gave to Sayid deviated from true North as well, and it was plain that Sayid didn’t think it was just because Locke had given him a crappy compass.

This wasn’t quite as intriguing a story point as Locke’s magical perpetual loop compass would be years later, but it was Locke being associated early on with compasses. Without some kind of compass to trust, a traveler will be forever lost. Did Locke really give Sayid a faulty compass? Did he know it was faulty? Was the broken compass hinting about an anomaly in the Island’s magnetic field or was it pointing us instead to an anomaly in Locke’s secret hidden agenda?

Nothing much was made of the magnetic anomaly, except to show us that Sayid was on the case of trying to grok out the Island’s secrets, but it was something that would come back again and again.

Most spectacularly when Desmond had to pass through the magnetic moat on his way to the freighter and it mindwarped his consciousness and sent it skittering all over the timespace continuum.

But I still don’t think we’ve scratched the surface of how magnetism is going to figure into the final solution. Magnetism is a geek subject, and a surprisingly complex one to understand, but I do hope it all means something that average dummies like me will be able to comprehend in the end.

Some of it can maybe be attributed to the legend of the Rupes Nigra, described in the Inventio Fortunata (a/k/a “The Lost Book”) as a phantom island located at the Earth’s North Pole.

But the Black Rock has other mythological connotations, especially in Hawaii, where there is an enormous black rock cliff called the Puu Kekaa. It is believed that this is the place where Lost Souls would take the great final leap into the afterlife. This ritual is still played out for tourists today.

Could this non-stuntman’s dive by the athletic Josh Holloway have been intended as a nod to Puu Kekaa?

As lovely a view as it was, it’s also true that he was quite literally diving into the final resting place of lost souls. The Black Rock is one of those deep, multilayered symbols on Lost that means so many things it may almost be a moot point if it’s ever pinpointed as meaning any one thing in particular.

In any case, Sayid, with the help of the less useless than usual Shannon, managed to piece together Rousseau’s map into a diagram of the location of the signal tower, or so he hoped.

He was distracted, not just by Shannon’s sexaliciousness, but also by the seeming nonsense the crazy lady had scribbled all over the map. In the end, the gibberish turned out to be derived from a song lyric.

Somewhere beyond the sea, / Somewhere, waiting for me,

My lover stands on golden sands / And watches the ships that go sailing;

The lyrics weren’t particularly helpful as clues, except perhaps in confirming once and for all that this place they were lost in was not someplace that really existed anywhere in the known physical world.

It’s far beyond a star, / It’s near beyond the moon
I know beyond a doubt / My heart will lead me there soon.

Rousseau’s maps would continue to turn up when convenient for the plot twist du jour, and I know a lot of fans like to analyze them, but it has never struck me that knowing the exact specific geography of anything on this show is vital to understanding whatever the hell is going on.

“No one ever keeps a secret so well as a child.“-Victor Hugo

Most fascinating – and frustrating – is the secret of the Special child, the manboy Walt. That great enigmatic character who disappeared so abruptly from the story after this first season. Walt had the power of parapsychology. Or telekineses. Or something like that, some conglomeration of mind control tricks and talents that even he didn’t seem to understand he possessed.

We had seen in Tabula Rasa that he appeared to make the rain stop when Michael said he’d be looking for the dog if only it wasn’t raining. But we saw much more of Walt’s special powers in Michael’s flashback episode “Special”.

Back in Australia, when Walt was still living with his mom, he complained about having to study the birds of Australia. This was a special scene for two reasons. First, Walt wondered why he couldn’t be studying the Birds of Egypt instead, and this marked the first mention on LOST of the great kingdom of Egypt that would figure ever more prominently in the mythology as time went on.

Second, the scene was remarkable because we saw that when Walt got irritated, he had the power to take it out on the literal world around him.

An Australian Bronze Cuckoo bird, the exact same bird Walt was not wanting to study anymore, crashed into the apartment window and died.

This had to be one of those reasons his unDad Bryan Porter wanted to hand him off to Michael the first chance he got. The kid was creepy.

And though we lost Walt too soon to puberty and never got to follow up on his mindmelding powers, we did get to see him do more birdkilling in the future, when he killed flockfuls of birds in the pre-Season Four mobisode named Room 23.

Walt also seemed to be able to dream himself into his own nightmares.

Michael threw his comic book into the fire and Walt ran off. When next seen he was being attacked by his very own dreamed up polar bear,

prompting another lesson in manliness from the great Iron John Locke,

and a heartfelt reunion for a father and son who at long last began to feel like family.

How was Walt able to conjure up the polar bear, if in fact he did? And why did the producers hinge such a pivotal plot point on a child actor who was so close to morphing into an unrecognizable man? One theory is that this plotline was the fail safe in case LOST was never renewed for a second season. They could have just had the whole thing be a fiction concocted in the mind of an imaginative child. It could have worked – in a pinch.

The imagery of children and childhood has always been prominent on LOST. From Kate and Sawyer’s wonderment at discovering their secret waterfall,

to Michael’s childish glee about the baby on the way,

and the cartoons he drew to try and share his life with his lost son,

to Claire being left as helpless bait in the enchanted forest,

and Boone and Shannon’s protecting one another from unseen demons like an hallucinogenic Hansel and Gretel,

there were many moments when the characters reminded me of children. Especially the children in fairy tales, where innocence meets evil as a matter of course. And pinning the whole plot on a child like Walt tied it all together.

Or maybe the clue was in Locke’s command to Walt to just “see it”. Seeing is serious business on LOST, as the constant parade of eye closeups reminds us.

Maybe Walt’s ability to conjure up what he sees in his mind’s eye is akin to the “wishing box” that Ben used to bring Anthony Cooper to the Island. Unless that whole thing was just an elaborate ruse to mess with Locke’s mind, which come to think of it, it probably was.

All in all, Walt’s comic book was a treasure trove of easter eggery. He was reading the Spanish version of the Green Lantern, the comic book Hurley was reading on the plane.

It was a Green Lantern/Flash: Faster Friends #1 (1997), for all you trivia buffs out there.

Not being a comic book geek myself, I can’t make any guesses on the relevance of that particular issue, if any, but I like that it has this kind of dialogue in it: “What we did half a century ago was bad, and what we did since then was further away from any type of forgiveness.”

That seems to fit this show. Somehow.

One of the prettiest pages in the comic, the one the camera lingers on long enough for us to notice, is this one:

It shows a castle atop a snowglobe atop a magical city, sort of a “Cities in Flight” image. It also reminded me of this image from Season Five.

If this were the only image of a snowglobe we’d ever seen on LOST, it would make no impact on the repeat viewer. But the writers have made a point of scattering snowglobes throughout the landscape, albeit scantily. They’re like rare bird sightings. They take a sharp eye and a lot of patience. There is one on the counter when Michael buys the fateful gun that refuses to kill him.

I think even then we could dismiss them as meaningless teases, except for the fact that Desmond, after failing to sail his boat away from the Island, described a ring around the horizon that couldn’t be passed beyond. Like the walls of a dome, or a snowglobe.

So maybe it’s something we should think about. Is it like a Rosebud kind of snowglobe, like Citizen Kane dropped on his deathbed, symbolizing …

… I don’t know. Something about the lost innocence of childhood, maybe, or the fragile vessel of our physical lifespan. Maybe it’s like the snowglobe at the end of the tv show St. Elsewhere, where at the end they sprung on the audience, for no conceivable reason, the random notion that the whole series had existed inside the mind of an autistic child.

Or maybe it’s about a controlled environment experiment, a metaphorical universe where human beings are forced to play out the wishes of a puppetmaster god.

I guess we’ll have to see about that one. Most likely the snowglobe is a fairly innocuous clue, one of the many subtle shoutouts the LOST writers like to give to both their classical and pop inspirations. But it’s fun to speculate, especially as this is, most incredibly, the last time this audience will ever get to speculate on anything LOST. Has the last-ness of this hiatus begun to sink in for everyone?

What will we all do without the speculating? LOST has created an entire subculture of speculating nomads doomed to wander the cyberverse without another show that will ever be this fun to speculate on again.

Word is out that the Premiere Date for the Big Finale Season will be January 20 2010 – or alternately, 01.20.2010. It looks so much more significant in that format, doesn’t it? Before you know it it will be countdown time. In the meantime, here’s the FIRST PROMO of the Season. It’s real short, so don’t blink after you press Play or you’ll miss it. But it gives me just enough of the chills.

It’s coming baaaaaaaaaack.

By the ninth episode of Lost we had all begun to learn the rhythms and the irrationale of the story. We knew the major players. We understood they had been consumed against their will into a world of menace and magic. Their frail humanity was no defense against the terrors that surrounded them. Naturally, they were frightened.

Bewildered.

And really stressed out.

Except for Locke, who continued to enjoy his dream vacation.

For the first time we heard The Whispers.

We met our first Other.

The words “Flight 815″ were uttered for the first time.

And we heard the first clank of metal against the door of the mother of all hatches, the Swan.

All the building blocks of the mythology were being lifted into position. As with so many mythologies, the core truth could be revealed only in a dream.

Claire’s Dream is one of those first season moments that absolutely must be explained before this whole thing ends. I’m not one who needs to have every loose end untangled. I can live with it, for instance, if we never learn why the painting by Thomas the Deadbeat Dad was in Charles Widmore’s office in 1994

when he didn’t paint it until sometime in the early 2000s.

I’m not asking for perfection. I can let that one go. But if the mysteries unleashed in Claire’s Dream aren’t tied up with a neat, tight bow at the end of this show, then I don’t see how any of the rest of it can ever make sense.

Claire’s Dream was more than every pregnant woman’s favorite fantasy that she’s going to wake up and the whole dreadful waddling fat bellied experience will be instantly over. It was more than just the natural fears of a new mom. Her dream was framed as an omen. The baby’s crib was in the monster infested jungle. The baby himself was a cuddly bundle of thick, red blood.

It’s typical for mythic heroes to have their births announced with dreams and prophecies.

In ancient myth, the hero’s mother was, if not a virgin, at least a very young, pure maiden. Little more than a child herself.

Sometimes the father figure was sinister, like Luke Skywalker’s fatha,

and sometimes he was awesome, like Kal El’s,

but sometimes Dad is just somebody everyone would rather forget.

The child Claire was carrying was not ordinary. If they made nothing else clear to us in Season One, that was it. Claire had been to a psychic, a man named Malkin, who nearly had a stroke the first time he held Claire’s open palms. He was so shattered by his vision of the unborn child that his eyes glassed over, kind of like how Locke’s did when he looked into the Eye of the Island.

The problem with watching an episode like this while looking back is that we know what happened to Aaron. We’ve seen him, in all his ordinary suburban kid normality. And, while he’s cute as a bug and everything, he just doesn’t seem to be all that…special.

It really feels at this point in the story that Aaron could go on living the rest of his life in Australia with his coma-proof granny, and nothing in the entire universe would ever be the worse for it. So what was up with all the portents and omens in Claire’s Dream? Was it, as Jack so condescendingly suggested, just a pregnant woman having a hormone attack?

It’s kind of hard to accept that Claire’s Dream was made of oxytocin when you think about the fact that the person she ran into, in the middle of the jungle in the middle of the night,

sitting at her psychic’s table, under her psychic’s lampshade,

… was the great dreamer, Locke. This time with added extra-metaphorical binary colored eyes.

It’s even harder to dismiss Claire’s Dream as an aberration when you consider that the psychic whose table Locke was sitting at was the same psychic who was ultimately responsible for getting Claire onto Flight 815, even paying for and handing her the ticket. He claimed to have found a home for Aaron. He just left out the important detail that his home was Craphole Island.

There was a reason Richard Malkin worked so hard to make sure Claire would be part of the Flight 815 Plane Crash.He was desperate to keep mother and child together, and this was the one sure way to do it. According to him, it was absolutely essential that Aaron never be Raised by Another.

“Raised by another” is not a random prophetic phrase. Being raised by another is maybe the most common trait that all heroes share, whether they’re mythic or comic or somewhere in between. From Oedipus to Moses,

from Skywalker

to Superman

from Peter Parker to Harry Potter

it’s almost de rigeur that a True Hero be Raised. By. Another. So why did Malkin want to make sure Aaron escaped that fate? Did he want to prevent Aaron from having a properly heroic childhood? If that was his goal, it didn’t work. Despite all his best efforts, Aaron ended up being raised by another anyway. Specifically, this Another.

In their years apart, dreams continued to be a connection between Claire and her lost son,

but thus far, the danger surrounding him has failed to materialize. As things stand, he’s still being raised by another. And so far, no horsemen of the Apocalypse have appeared on the horizon. The state of this story really does force us to look at Malkin’s prophecy with a skeptical eye. Where’s the Big Bad that Aaron’s separation from Claire was supposed to unleash? Aaron being raised by another doesn’t seem to have created so much as a wrinkle in the fabric of infinity. Unless it’s all about to start now that Jack has dropped the big bomb, of course.

There have been other Special Boys on Lost. Certainly John Locke meets all the checkpoints: Teenage mama. Absentee dad. Raised by lots of different Anothers. By any metric, Locke is pretty goddamn Special. And yet, so far, all that specialness seems to have ended with a great big pffffffffffffffffffft.

Walt certainly seemed a candidate for specialness at one time, but his star has also dimmed considerably. I have to admit that worries me just a little.

I mean, if they were planning this thing out meticulously from the first moment to the last, you would think the one thing they could have foreseen was the tendency of twelve year old boys to get big.

Maybe we’ve been horribly deceived by this idea of a prophesized child being raised by another. Maybe it’s the other meaning of the double meaning title we should be thinking about. On Lost, we should never ignore the wordplay. It’s not Another who shouldn’t raise Aaron. It’s An Other who shouldn’t raise him. Specifically this Other – the great and powerful Ethan Rom.

What a fun name. It makes me nostalgic for the old days when Lost was still limited to Anagramz 4 Dummiez. Ethan Rom: Other Man. So easy.

Sling Blade Ethan was the perfect introduction to the world of Others. With his square Frankenstein head and his dead, hooded eyes, it’s a wonder we didn’t notice him right away. But initially he blended right in with all the other not-hot no-names that were milling around in Season One. Like Dude With The Rash.

Ethan didn’t stand out any more than RashMan at first.

He was lurking behind Kate at the golf course when she was taking Sawyer’s action.

But why would anybody be looking at Ethan in that shot? It was a classic distraction technique. Watching Ethan go from large anonymous dork to terrifying ogre in the space of two short episodes was another example of how gracefully Season One was written. And of course the hits kept on coming in the following years. Ethan wasn’t just a brute. He was a doctor, of all things, a doctor who had prepared an immaculate subterranean manger for the hero-baby it seemed the Others had been dreaming about for some time.

(The above is the single skeeviest image of Ethan Rom for me personally, but I’m sure you all have your favorites.)

Ethan’s story would be woven throughout the years, warped and wefted into all the assorted timespaces we’d be visiting. From the creepy looking guy who wasn’t on the manifest, Ethan has evolved into a critical fixture within the ever sprawling plot of Lost.

Other-ness was a concept that felt profound in Season One. If there’s anything worse than being on a deserted island all alone, it’s being on a deserted island with unseen “Others” whispering and hovering just outside your reach. The fear of Others is universal. When Sayid stumbled home from his lost weekend with Madame Rousseau, he uttered the phrase that strikes fear in the hearts of all Earth Men: We are not alone.

Sayid had exiled himself to atone for the evil he’d done. Lost on a deserted island, he sentenced himself to solitary confinement.

His penance was rudely interrupted by that noble savage, Danielle Rousseau – the infamous radio talking Frenchwoman who had been living in her own eerie isolation for sixteen long years.

Somehow after all this time, Rousseau still had charged batteries! Which she had used to create her very own shop of horrors. (Because an electrocution rack is just what you need when you’re living completely alone in the polar bear infested tropics. Natch.) What Rousseau offered Sayid was Instant Karma.

Having just tortured a man days before, for information he didn’t have, Sayid himself was immediately tortured by the crazy French lady – for information he didn’t have. It was, to put it mildly, a bizarre duet between two very solo souls. I half expected it to break down into some kind of kinky sex thing. Danielle had been alone for so long, she couldn’t decide if she wanted to feel Sayid up or stab him with her rusty needles.

Too bad she couldn’t pull herself together a little bit. No romance ever developed between the sexy Iraqi torture meister and the hallucinating French hermit. Consider it an opportunity missed.

Rousseau interrogated Sayid in five languages, asking him “Where is Alex?” in English, German, Spanish, Italian and French. It added to the disorientation as Sayid’s mind spun backwards in time, to another woman whose loneliness had once penetrated his isolation.

Sayid’s great romance with Nadia is another one of those Season One events I found on rewatch that I had misremembered. I had forgotten that, except for some childhood teasing, Sayid hardly ever knew Nadia at all. They had bonded quickly, intimately – in a dirty prison cage. Then, just as they realized they were falling in love, they were separated again.

Impulsively, Sayid sacrificed everything so that Nadia could go free. It’s a kind of love story we’ve seen elsewhere on Lost – a sudden romance and an heroic sacrifice followed only by endless separation. Despite the fact that Sayid soon fell ever so deeply in love with the nearest available blonde cutie,

we in the audience have always accepted that Nadia was his one true love.

The last thing Sayid and Nadia shared, before being parted for most of the rest of their lives, was a quickly scrawled promise on the back of a photo. Nadia wrote to Sayid, “I will meet you in the next life if not in this one.” And although we know they did meet again, very briefly, it is still the next life where their best chances of happiness will lie.

Sayid’s story, like Rousseau’s, like Nadia’s, is one of human isolation, of loneliness endured stoically and heroically. But that is not to say there weren’t windows of happiness in the dark cells of those lives.

Despite being tasered, beaten, hamstrung and drugged, Sayid turned out to be a very courteous houseguest for Rousseau.

He reattached her to her lost humanity by fixing her little Intermezzo music box, the gift from her lover Robert. In Season Five, we finally met young Robert, and we watched Rousseau kill him.

She used the same trick on him that she later used on Sayid – the old remove the firing pin trick.

Except for some reason, she decided to spare Sayid’s life. Why? Rousseau’s memories of what had happened to her crew did not jive exactly with what we later saw in Season Five. The way she described it – that she had to kill her crew because they had become “carriers” – it sounded like they all turned into zombies that had to be destroyed before they destroyed the world.

But what really happened to Danielle’s crew? We saw that they were all sucked, or that they jumped, into the lair of the Monster. And we know that they later re-emerged and tried to explain to Danielle what they had witnessed.

In what way had the Monster “infected” them? Was it like the way the Man in Black “infected” Locke’s empty corpse? What evidence did Rousseau see in her crew that they had been changed into alien beings? Although we’ve seen their fate, we still don’t know what it was that made Rousseau so sure her friends and her lover had to be put to death.

Rousseau was the second character we’d so far met who had been named after a philosopher from the Age of Enlightenment. It was those kind of details that made people start digging around into the minutiae of Lost. In hindsight there really aren’t much about Rousseau, aside from her backwoods camping skills, that bore much resemblance to the philosophy of old Jean Jacques.

There is an interesting interview available with David Fury, where he reveals that the purpose of Rousseau’s scientific expedition was …

“… in an early draft of “Solitary” when Rousseau tells Sayid she had been part of a research team. Sayid asks her what they were researching. She replies: “Time.” “

… but the reference to “Time” had to be deleted for fear of scaring off the sci-fi-phobics in Season One’s mega-sized audience. If this is true, then it’s more evidence, if any is still needed, that time travel discombobulation was what this story was always intended to be about. They just didn’t want us to know that right away.

Keeping us in the dark is Lost’s trademark, but sometimes it strains credibility. Knowing all we know now, it’s hard to see how Rousseau managed to stay so alone for so long. In our years watching this show, there have been jeeps, vans, bulldozers, construction rigs, freighters, sailboats, brigantines, submarines, Beechcraft, Boeing 777s, helicopters, hot air balloons and for all we know flying saucers with little green men in them, traveling on, over, under and around the Island. How did Rousseau miss it all? Sixteen years and she never bumped up against Othertown’s sonic fence until Sayid, Kate and Locke brought her there?

The real reason Danielle was so alone was because the last piece of her, her baby Alex, had been taken away – by Ben, as we now know. And that’s a bleak little substory that has come to a permanently unhappy end. Her child grew up without her mother ever knowing her.

Miraculously, they were one day reunited.

Then Rousseau got shot in the heart.

And her baby was murdered execution style.

With that, the entire crew of the Besixdouze was finally extinct.

It’s a story that won’t be coming with us into Season Six, at least not as anything more than an echo. It was a poignant reminder of the human toll taken by the Island, and of the damage done to the human soul by being too much alone. But it was also an interrupted melody, like so many of the meandering hitchhiking trips this story has taken. It joins the great long list of unanswered, half answered and maybe-never-asked questions of Lost.

Like: Why does a soldier’s conscience torture him when he has done something shameful

but a doctor’s conscience remains clear?

How do we know when our apophenia is getting the better of us? Were we meant to notice the little kid’s shoe

and the little kid’s glasses in these episodes?

Were these subtle hints reminding us of the children that had gone missing?

When the census was being taken in Mr. Reyes’ Neighborhood, how come he didn’t notice there wasn’t anybody named Sawyer on the manifest either?

What exactly did Charlie use to brew the tea? Was it palm frond chai?

Were we meant to notice that Christian Shephard’s children

both had life altering experiences happen in big conference rooms?

Were we meant to notice that sister Claire’s pen refused to embrace her destiny when she was asked to sign away Aaron to the “nice couple” in Sydney?

Were we meant to notice that brother Jack’s pen worked just fine when he was asked to sign on the dotted line swearing to his father’s integrity?

Since Ethan’s family name was Goodspeed, why come he calls himself Rom? Is he ashamed of his pops?

Was it a joke or a clue when Rousseau told Sayid that “there’s no such thing as monsters”?

Wasn’t it strange that Locke didn’t know the Star Trek origins of the term “redshirts”,

when he’d been a Starfleet Commander in a previous life?

These early episodes were filled with foreshadows. The cable that Sayid found on the beach

would one day lead Charlie to his watery grave in the Looking Glass hatch.

There was a sad foreshadow feeling when Kate told Shannon that the safest place her brother could possibly be was with Locke.

Except, you know …. not.

Years later Desmond would remind us that he’d been inside that hatch the day Locke and Boone were topside thumping on his geodesic ceiling.

And we didn’t realize they were punking us with a big inside joke when Hurley promised Walt that he was good for twenty thousand buckaroos.

There was no secret about the way the anti-Hero was starting to steal the show in Season One, even in episodes where he only got a few moments of facetime. He gave Hurley the manifest with nothing more than the price of one cute Ghostbusters insult. He flirted with Kate using a righteously witty punchline.

He began his pattern of speaking the simple clarifying truths for the audience when he gave a spot on summary of the plot in case we weren’t following: “So a tribe of evil natives planted a ringer in the camp to kidnap a pregnant girl and a reject from VH-1 has-beens.”

And when he came upon his torturer Sayid, flat and helpless on his back, he held no grudge. He forgave the man who tried to separate his cuticles from his fingertips and he even offered his own atonement. He knew he’d been a jerk.

He let Sayid know he’d been keeping the signal fires burning and showed us that for some people, this whole redemption process maybe wasn’t going to be all that complicated after all.

A Season One mystery that we still don’t much understand is The Whispers. It seems some geniuses, owners of high quality sound equipment, have analyzed and transcripted The Whispers for the edification of us low tech types. I’ll have to take it on faith that this is what the whispers are saying around Sayid:

Male Voice- “Just let him get out of here.”
Male Voice- “He’s seen too much already.”
Male Voice- “What if he tells?”
Female Voice – “Could just speak to him?”
Male Voice- “No.”

Who is the suspicious man and his lady friend who wants to speak to Sayid? Are they people we know? Are they, maybe, another manifestation of the Island’s Adam and Eve?

It wouldn’t be Lost if there weren’t Games being played. Walt and Hurley play backgammon.

Ethan drops Charlie’s finger letters to throw his trackers off his trail. It was like Ethan was a fan of Hangman Spoiler games, only with extra added sadism mixed in.

And of course there is The Golf Game: the prototype for all the daffy, inconsequential sideplots that Lost would use throughout the years to chew up extra screentime.

This was an opportunity for Jack to look cool,

for Charlie to be silly,

and for Noble King Kameha-Hurley to hold court.

Michael lost track of Walt during the golf tournament, giving Walt the chance he’d been looking for to finally bond with his spiritual soul daddy.

There was a kind of father-son-father triangle going on between Locke and Walt and Michael. Michael was clueless as a pater familia, but despite never having a father of his own, Locke knew exactly what a boy needed to learn to become a man,

and he was willing to teach it.

That brings us to the final theme of these episodes, the mythic element that was missing from Claire’s prophetic, heroic dream. The one thing missing from Aaron’s story is the thing that overwhelms the story of his Uncle Jack: the overshadowing spectre of dear old dreadful, drunken Dad.

There are few myths that could get past the first paragraph without some kind of dreadful daddy issue. Daddy Issues are the meat and potatoes of the stories on Lost, but we were just working our way around to all that in Season One.

When Jack gets all suspicious of Kate because she’s a good tracker and he wants to know WHY SHE’S SUCH A GOOD FUCKING TRACKER!!!! (you all remember how adorable these two were in Season One, doncha?), it gives her an opening to tell him the whole “truth” about how her “dad” taught her how to track crazy monsters through the forest,

except for the part where the Army tracker dude wasn’t really her dad and the part where she barbequed the guy who was.

The first time we heard Claire’s baby-daddy bitch about her “daddy abandonment crap”, I’m sure none of us took any special notice. But on a rewatch, that comment sticks out like a very sore thumb.

And in Jack’s episode, the over-titled All the Best Cowboys Have Daddy Issues (subtitled The One Where Jack Kills His Father and Brings Charlie Back from the Dead), center stage went, as it so often did in Jackbacks through the years, to Lost’s Number One Dad:

the illustrious Dr. Christian Shephard, Chief of Surgery at St. Sebastian Hospital, King Ghost of Craphole Island and lifetime member of the Pickled Liver Club.

In most myths, the father of the hero shapes his story. Sometimes he’s good, sometimes he’s bad, and we won’t run through another whole list of them again, because this image is as good an archetype as any for our purposes here.

The Drs. Shephard had come to a crossroad.

Christian had been drunk, had operated sloppily, and a young woman had died. But before her inevitable death, Jack had been forced to intervene, and had been the doctor on the scene who had to let her go. It was a well chosen moment of conflict between Hero and Father. It embodied two of Jack’s biggest psycho-issues, namely the thing where he can’t stand to fail and the thing where he wants to rip his father’s heart out for being such a heartless, unethical waste case.

It became clear as Jack chased Ethan through the forest, that the whole quest was another metaphor, as most of Jack’s story has tended to be, for the son who wants to hunt down the father and finally make him pay.

Everyone Jack encountered in this episode was a stand-in for Christian. He was getting pissed at Locke for trying to be a know it all about tracking Ethan through the jungle.

His suspicions of Kate were framed as another sub-issue of his preoccupation with not being lied to. He was angry at himself for guessing wrong about Claire’s dream, for being imperfect again. And when he finally found Ethan, he couldn’t stop fighting even when it was a lost cause, because he wasn’t going to let “him” get away with “it” this time. Obviously, he was having transference issues.

Ever since Zeus stopped his father Chronus from cannibalizing his own children, the age old competition of father and son has shaped the story of men.

It’s not uncommon in these myths of manhood for the son to end the madness by finally putting an end to daddy, by killing him. In this Jackback, the second, we watch Jack commit the act of metaphorical murder on his desperate, frightened father.

It’s an interesting ethical dilemma to trace.

At first Jack has agreed to cover up his father’s latest misstep. He surrenders to his father’s frantic pleading. Blood is thicker than whiskey, after all. It’s true that Jack owes all he has and all he is to this man, no matter how decrepit his Hippocratic oath has become. So Jack agrees, reluctantly but of his own free will, to swear to testimony he knows is a lie.

And nothing changes between the moment Jack agrees to protect Christian and the moment he decides to expose him. Jack discovers only that his father kept a piece of information from him, something not medically all that relevant, but just something that Jack didn’t know. The dead woman had been pregnant. And that word – pregnant – always a loaded word on Lost, is the cut that lets Jack drop the guillotine on his father.

You can see Christian’s shock. It really is as if he’s already dead, even though we know he’ll take a long roundabout walkabout before he finally hits the Kings Cross morgue. But for all practical purposes, this is the moment when Jack kills him.

The resolution of father and son doesn’t happen before death for Christian and Jack, the way such myths require.

If they’d resolved things, then there really would never have been any need for this whole big story. That’s the part that’s coming up around this final bend. If we know nothing else, I think we all can feel safe in predicting that the final showdown between Christian and Jack will be a moment to remember in the final moments of Lost.

Jack having the biggest bestest daddy issue marked him once again as the central hero of the tale. But just to make it a little clearer, in case any of us hadn’t yet noticed that the uber-jackiness of Lost was going to be a permanent feature, the hero performed his first miracle.

Ethan had had it with being tracked, and he had no use for the dirty blonde hobbit, so he dispensed with the metaphorical killing and just strung him up by the neck. When Jack and Kate found Charlie hanging from the tree, there was great suspense while they cut him down and Jack tried desperately to revive him. Would this be the first important death on Lost? It certainly seemed like it. Jack’s efforts seemed to be in vain, but he pounded and pounded and pounded and pounded (and somehow didn’t splinter every rib in Charlie’s tiny chest)….

until just when all hope seemed lost, one massive punch finally hit the sweet spot and Lazarus came back to the land of the living!

Resurrection would become a theme of Lost. In fact, Richard Malkin, the same mystic who steered Claire on to Flight 815, showed up in a later episode, in one of those fascinating pre-crash connections between otherwise unrelated characters.

Eko came to visit Malkin in Australia after hearing that his daughter had been resurrected from a day she had spent being dead. To keep us on our toes, the writers had Malkin claim to be a fraud in this encounter. But later, the daughter would pull Eko aside and not only confirm that she had been returned from the dead, but that she had brought him a message from his dead brother, Yemi. We don’t know yet what it means that life and death ride such a fine line together on Lost , but I have a very good feeling that we’re about to find out.

For now, Charlie’s return was just a joyful moment, almost like a Nativity scene for the little trio. And Jack got to cry some happy tears for once, which was a pleasant change for him.

The fun of this mid portion of Season One is watching them build and craft the mythological maze that we all find ourselves still trapped in. We can see some of the dead ends in the labyrinthe now. We have eliminated some of the wild goose chases and are starting to hone in on the goal. Watching these early episodes, seeing how densely they had populated their mythology, it begins to feel even more exciting to think that we are finally about to have this whole mystery revealed to us.

In the very early days of Lost, romance promised to be its most unsurprising element. Not since the glory days of Dawson’s Creek had a central couple been shoved in the audience’s face with less finesse. After a mere week Island time, Jack and Kate’s schmoopfest was well underway. Already there were scenes like this where Jack and Kate giggle over his manly tattoos

… while Kate appears to be doing something entirely unnecessary, if not wildly inappropriate, down below Jack’s waistband. (What is she doing down there, btw?) The writers really beat us over the head with the obvious stick here. Never mind the smoking carnage or the terrifying noises in the mysterious jungle. These two were flirting like a couple of college kids on a camping trip. And just in case anyone didn’t get it, they had Charlie helpfully announce, like subtitles, that what we were watching was … uh, “verbal copulation”.

I ask you, in the history of romance writing, has there ever been a clunkier line than that? Does too much verbal copulation lead to a whole bunch of little baby verbs?

Why the rush job with Jack and Kate? That question was irking me the whole time I was rewatching House of the Rising Sun and The Moth. Didn’t these talented writers realize that there is no such thing as a prefab love story, that romance has to be a slow brew, that they had to tease and charm and woo the audience before we’d slowly start to crave some consummation?

Duh. Of course they did.

The minute Kate strolled down the beach in Confidence Man hauling a load of bulging bananas towards a naked, dripping wet Sawyer, the reason for the earlier rush job was clear.

Lost was not going to force feed us just one predictable love story. They were going to give us a Choice!

And that has made all the difference.

Choice is the idea that hooks these three episodes together.

In House of the Rising Sun, Sun must choose between fleeing or staying with Jin, the husband she has fallen out of love with.

At the same time, the survivors must choose between the wet, buggy womb of the shadowy caves or the macabre ruins on the sunlit beach.

Charlie must choose between making the rest of his life’s choices stoned or straight.

Jack must choose between just beating the shit out of Sawyer

or torturing him to within an inch of his life.

Meanwhile Kate, who must have done something good at some time in her godforsaken life, has to choose between just kissing sweaty, bloody Sawyer

… or kissing him like this.

…uh, excuse me if I go off on a few tangents this time around … but did Kate really have a choice here? When Kate chose to hold the kiss, to open her mouth and melt into it completely, was that Free Will at work there? Can we be sure?

We had been introduced in the very first episode, in bold block letters, to the idea of Fate. But Fate and Free Will don’t make a fair fight. Fate is absolute. Either it exists or it doesn’t. If it exists, it is unstoppable, irreversible, inescapable. Free Will, at best, is hit or miss. There are definitely limits to what Free Will can do for us. We don’t get to choose our parents, for example.

Or where we are born.

We don’t get to choose to be born man or woman, rich or poor, big brother or small.

And even when we do make a choice in life, it’s not as if we get to choose which consequences we’d prefer.

Just ask all the people who chose to get on Flight 815.

Fate – or Destiny, John Locke’s guiding star – is a concept where the future is as fixed and immutable as the past. Because the future can not be changed, it is the future, in essence, that creates the past, forcing the past to be whatever the future needs it to be in order to make Destiny happen as it must. This is a concept that works with what we’ve seen on Lost, where past, present and future are not fixed points in time, but are always interacting and intersecting. Watching these episodes with the full foreknowledge that we lacked then, we can see Destiny’s fingerprints everywhere in the story now, with the unchangeable future switching back to shape and inform the past.

The House of the Rising Sun is the episode that marks the one and only appearance of Lost’s famous cave couple, nicknamed (by Locke) Adam and Eve. Darlton hinted in a March 2008 interview that the discovery of Adam and Eve was the first sign that time travel would one day flash into our story.

“And it was sort of those conversations which obviously happened way back in season one when Locke and Boone found the hatch that were the early precursors of time travel. I will say, though, that the first significant event in the show where we were thinking in the back of our minds that this is going to require a story telling element that isn’t traditional narrative, is the discovery of Adam and Eve in the caves.”

“I don’t want to be Eve.” – Kate Austen

…over a timepiece.

The first time I watched this episode, to be honest, I had NO idea what Jin was freaking out about. But on a rewatch it all makes complete sense. The fight was all over THE watch, the one that would knit together the stories of Michael and Jin. The watch that Jin had been transporting to L.A. for Mr. Paik, the watch that Michael had found on the beach and started to wear….that was the same watch that Jin later returned to Michael as a tribute for building the raft, the same watch that Michael later pawned for the gun that wouldn’t let him kill himself

… until he came back to the Island and helped Sun escape so that Jin’s spermtacular miracle baby could be born safe and sound back at home. The watch connects the future to the present. And all this despite the fact that, as Michael said, “Time don’t mean nothing on a damn island!”

Of course, time means everything on this damn Island. Charlie and Liam were seen horsing around in a churchyard that reminded me…

… of the place where Daniel and Desmond first tried to bend the time space continuum.

And if you think that wasn’t meant to be a clue, then how do you explain the scarves?

Come on. Tell me that’s just a coincidence!

It’s hard to know which clues were planted in the first season because they would become important later, and which ones became important later just because they were introduced in the first season. For example, was Liam’s T shirt a clue that animal headed Egyptian gods were going to show up at some pivotal future moment,

or did the writers decide to go with the Egyptian god motif because they remembered when Liam wore that cool shirt?

At the end of Confidence Man, there is a poignant song about reaching for Mother Mary, as the camera watches Sawyer,

who we later learned was the son of a murdered mother…named Mary.

Did they mean us to make that connection? Maybe not, since it was kind of an easy one to fudge. But maybe this was the connection they were going for?

Charlie steps out of confession (after being lectured by the priest within about the value of choice) and walks past a statue of the Virgin Mary, which wouldn’t exactly be unusual, except that a Virgin Mary is never just a Virgin Mary on Lost, especially for Charlie.

We didn’t have any reason to notice the Virgin Mary when we watched this episode in 2004. It’s only on the rewatch that we even realize Mary was there all along. She is not, however, the only religious icon in the game. Adam and Eve, the cave skeletons, became one of the favorite guessing games of truly fanatical Lost fans. It has to be the fanatics who argue about Adam and Eve’s identity, because I’m thinking 99% of the normal people who watch Lost have no memory of them at all. But they could be important! In January 2007, Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse gave an interview where they said

“When all is said and done, people are going to point to the skeletons and say, ”That is proof that from the very beginning, they always knew that they were going to do this.”

After reading something like that, it’s impossible not to try and guess who they might be. The most common guess on Adam and Eve’s identity is the obvious one. Jack and Kate, naturally.

They found the skeletons, and Kate was the only one who saw that Jack swiped Adam’s nifty black and white stones.

So the quickie answer on this one is that the bones belong to Jack and Kate. Someday those two crazy kids will crawl up on shelves on opposite sides of this cave, die and then rot for half a century until the whole loop spins around again and Jack rediscovers the black and white stones he once put into his own pocket. For fans of time loops, not to mention all the fans of necro-romance, this conclusion is a no-brainer. The stones are the giveaway. It all comes down to who has the right kind of stones.

The thing is we haven’t seen Jack’s stones ever again since that one scene. We don’t know where he put them, or if he even kept them. We know that Locke was a big fan of black and white stones. And Juliet had a couple in her Zen rock garden.

But I’m not seeing either one of those as likely suspects. In the Jan. ‘07 EW interview, Darlton promised that an anagram in the upcoming Feb. 7, 2007 episode would give a clue to the identity of Adam and Eve. That episode, Not in Portland, had a scene where a woman’s voice is heard repeating “only fools are enslaved by time and space.” And believe it or not, there are people out there who have managed to de-anagram this phrase to uncover this gem: “Bones of Nadlers may lay deep in lost cave.”

By George, I think they’ve got it! It’s become a popular guess recently, especially since we last saw Bernard and Rose living in 1977 about to have an atom bomb go off in their vicinity. Did they crawl into the cave with their skin melting off from the bomb’s after effects and were never able to crawl out again? Maybe Bernard had those stones because they’d been playing Locke’s left behind backgammon game during all those long days in paradise. Or maybe the stones are just a metaphor. The stones are black and white, which fits nicely with Bernard and Rose,

who are … well, pink and brown.

But, you know, that’s close.

Now Adam and Eve are not famous just for being the first man and woman in the Biblical world. They were also the makers of the First Choice. Because they chose to eat the apple from the tree of knowledge, they were driven from eternal paradise into this shitty world we all live in, where we have to work and suffer and bear children in pain. God may have given Free Will to Adam and Eve but the moral of their story is that no one in their right mind should ever try to actually use it.

It’s very hard to figure out what the message is exactly regarding Fate and Free Will on Lost. I get the feeling fans don’t want this to be a story about Fate, like the only acceptable message should be that spunky little Free Will turns out to be the underdog that triumphs Rocky-style over the big bad fickle finger of Fate. But I’m not convinced that fans will get their wish on this. Of course, it would help if the writers weren’t so muted and misleading about the message.

In Season Five’s “The Incident”, Jacob definitely wants Hurley to get on that plane. But he makes it seem like it all makes him no nevermind. He says “All you have to do is get on that plane. It’s your choice, Hugo. You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to.”

And then he leaves Hurley with a magical Charlie Guitar. What kind of choice is that? Of course, Hurley is going to jump on the plane with the Charlie Guitar, so he can fall out of the sky and land on the Island of Mystery,

just like Charlie’s magical guitar did the first time.

Once the guitar was presented to Hurley he really didn’t have any choice because, being Hurley, an all-knowing stranger leaving him a Charlie Guitar in a taxi pretty much sealed the deal. He behaved the only way Hurley possibly could.

Let’s concede, for sake of argument, that our choices are what determines our destiny. Free will at work, right? But what determines how we will choose? Our personal identity. And our circumstances. But we don’t get to choose either one of those, do we? What does determine our circumstances and our identity? Could that be something we can call Fate?

In these three episodes, the identities of three characters were revealed to us – Sawyer, Charlie and Sun.

Sun appears as a bird in a gilded prison. We are given a glancing overview of her story with Jin, their sweet, furtive romance that blooms into wedded bliss but then quickly dissolves into angry suspicion and resentment. In the years since, layers and layers have been added on to the spare bones of the Kwon story. Now we see the puppy.

Later we’ll see how Jin takes the puppy as a bribe from his terrified shakedown victim. We see the telltale signs of Jin’s bloody brutality.

Later we’ll see that Jin only has to do that job because Sun sold his soul to her father to save him from the shame of knowing his mother was a whore. We see Sun longing to run away from her marriage. Later we’ll learn about all the things she so badly needs to flee. But all we really learn about Sun in this first look at her is that she is not who she pretends to be. The circumstances of her life have made her a graceful mistress of deception.

There are revelations about Sun. She speaks English but pretends not to. She knows the science of herbs and healing.

These are all nice decorative brushstrokes to her characterization, but the years have shown that they mean little to her story. Despite the ornamentation added to her character, in the end Sun remains merely the woman who chose to marry Jin and then chose to stay with him and then chose to return to the Island so she could be with him again. In these early episodes, the reason behind her choice is clear. She is the purebred product of a strict culture where honor is everything, and no matter how frustrated she is with who Jin has become, she doesn’t hate him enough to expose him to the loss of honor he’d suffer if she left him. Honor binds Sun to Jin, and choice is almost an irrelevance.

*

Sun and Jin remind me of the dancers in Rousseau’s broken down music box, forever joined, twirling towards their Destiny together.

Jacob’s visit only confirmed this for us – that their value to the Island is as a couple. Their individual identities matter very little, and the Destiny we are concerned with is the one they create through their choices to be together . Sun’s destiny is Jin, and Jin’s destiny is Sun, and if that ends up meaning something bigger to the story, I have to admit, I can’t figure out what it will ever be.

But I would like to see it.

Charlie’s Identity starts with being born the younger, shorter, far less doable brother. He is a religious boy,

a fact that amuses his brother, who christens him The Rock God. That’s the right button to push for Charlie. That’s the identity he wishes he could choose, that he would choose, if he had any choice in the matter.

But he doesn’t. Charlie’s an addict, a lifestyle choice where Free Will can only be described as a cruel joke. Trying to grab a fix, he’s punished with a plague of bees.

And it’s all downhill from there.

He makes excellent boar bait. And he becomes a rock god alright…when he orders the rocks to cave in and bury Jack alive inside the cave.

On top of all that, Locke decides the time is right for Charlie to be given a teachable moment.

Rather than just let his scag run out, as it inevitably will, Locke encourages Charlie to escape it of his own free choice. Because choosing will make him strong, like the moth who has to fight his way out of his cocoon. It was an odd turn for Locke to take, from being the high priest of Destiny to suddenly preaching about the glories of Free Will. Did he really believe in what he was saying, or did he just want Charlie to believe it? Would it make things easier for Charlie if he thought he chose his Fate, rather than thinking he got steamrolled by the Destiny Express?

Either way, Locke’s lesson takes hold. The dutiful Catholic remembers that all he ever wanted to be was useful, a humble servant to a higher power. He plays the hero, and watches others get covered in glory instead.

And that will happen to him again, when his greatest sacrifice barely merits a tear from his “friends” in Season Four.

That is Charlie’s Destiny, to be a permanent second fiddle, never the flashy butterfly, always the utilitarian moth. All his choices have only brought him back around to the place he’s been ever since he was born as Liam’s uncool baby brother.

Sawyer, on the other hand, is all flash.

At least on the glittering surface. Which is all we had seen of him before his fantastic coming out episode, Confidence Man. If the revelation of Locke’s cured paralysis was the moment that hooked my brain on Lost, this episode, with its revelation of the shattered child inside the redneck asshole, was the one that stole my heart.

Like everyone else, I had totally bought into the mask of Sawyer.

It made perfect sense that this arrogant, sexist douchebag would have seduced a woman and ruined a family just so he could make off with a few bucks. When he made Kate read the letter aloud, describing the pain that evil Sawyer had inflicted on the innocent child letter writer, I think most of the audience just took it at face value. It sounded exactly like the kind of thing this worthless slimeball probably would have done.

But there was a hitch to it all. Sawyer wasn’t just a bad guy, he was apparently a total masochist.

He wanted to be punished. He let Jack beat him without fighting back, and when he thought he was going to stop, he pretty much begged Jack to hit him again.

He was a tortured soul long before the actual torture started.

Rather than just tell Jack he didn’t have the medicine, Sawyer submitted to bloodcurdling torture. How sick was Sawyer to let this happen to himself? We may have been lulled into thinking Sawyer was just the pretty boy sideshow, but halfway through this episode, I think everyone had to sit up and take a second look at this dude. He was one seriously disturbed individual. The torture scene in Confidence Man was primal, unforgettable. And it marked the entrance of Josh Holloway as a player in this cast, someone who was going to bring a hell of a lot more to this story than just another pretty face.

There is no character on Lost that is more human than Sawyer. This year it seemed a lot of the audience took a shine to Sawyer, parts of the audience that had never felt the power of Teh Soya before. I think it took fanboys so long to “get” Sawyer because they missed all the cues. He wasn’t a mysterious vessel of the Island’s power, like Locke, or the obvious alpha dude with the white rabbit daddy, like Jack. He’s us. He speaks for the audience and he makes us feel for him. As many have only noticed for the first time this year, Sawyer is the heart of Lost. But it’s not like this should be considered news.

We watched the defenses and disguises of the slick con man stripped away. We saw a man deeply shamed and corrosive with self loathing, someone who appeared to be longing, as his crime partner described it, for the blissful relief of sweet death.

But we didn’t learn right away the reason for his shame. The evil bad thing we thought he had done was instead an evil bad thing that had been done to him. In one of Lost’s greatest shock endings, we realized we’d been the pigeon in a most cleverly constructed con job. We were going to have to care about this guy whether we wanted to or not, because we had seen his heart and his soul laid bare in front of us, in scene after scene in this great episode.

He started as a walking metaphor, part of that black and white distraction the writers were waving in front of us at the beginning of the series. He was the bad one. It looked like Jack was All That Is Good. Jack ran the hero’s gamut in these episodes. He directed his own shoulder relocation.

He got hugged by the worshipful young girl.

He healed Sayid’s head bump.

He tenderly cradled Boone’s face and dressed his pretty wounds.

He talked Shannon off of an air deficit ledge and bought her some breathing room.

He smacked Sawyer around like a peanut bag. With the dislocated shoulder, obviously.

He was pretty much a god by this point in the story.

Sawyer was just there as a foil, the fulfillment of a fanboy’s fantasy, where the sexy bad boy gets put in his place every episode, to keep shining up the gleam on the hero’s halo. In this episode, that fantasy got popped. Damon Lindelof’s commentary on the Season One dvd set shows how deeply he’d worked these characters out.


The lines of Calvinist morality began to blur really fast. I mean, if the bad guy isn’t so bad, and the good guy isn’t so good, then what was the point of those friggin black and white stones? Those stones they kept waving in our face were the first sleight of hand in this magic show.

Maybe they had a different trick up their sleeve: Adam and Eve had two sons, Cain and Abel.

Abel was All That Is Good. But he got killed. By Cain. Who went on to have lots of kids, who multiplied and begat through the eons to become….the human race. I almost wonder if Adam and Eve weren’t another mislead, pointing us not to some tricky dicky puzzle answer, but to this drama of brothers instead.

This ancient fable has been nuanced into something totally different in modern interpretations of it. In the movie version of John Steinbeck’s East of Eden, All-Good Abel is portrayed as a self righteous tightass, while Cain is

….James Dean. Le Bad Boy Originale. (I hope you’re seeing where this is headed.)

Now, aside from being a Commie hater who wouldn’t share, Sawyer really hadn’t been such a bad boy in the days leading up to the torture. He gave up the laptop battery when asked, for just the price of a “Please”. He climbed the tree and set off the signal rocket, even after Kate ditched him. Truth is he was always a pretty civic minded citizen. Sure, he’d taken a page from Ayn Rand’s guidebooks and done the hard work of stealing all the natural resources for his own personal profit, but it don’t seem right to judge a guy for something as all American as that.

Especially if we’re not going to judge a guy for enabling something as reprehensible as this.

When this episode aired, stories of the torture at Abu Ghraib Prison were still surfacing in the American media. The US had opened its own tropical torture chamber at Guantanamo Bay, but the American public had conditioned itself, almost overnight, to accept that torture in the hands of the righteous was somehow magically transformed from something evil to something good. On the TV show 24, torture was almost a feel good thing for audiences. It was entertaining and everybody enjoyed it!

So maybe it’s not a surprise that fans greeted Lost’s big torture scene as apathetically as they have, even though it was a perfect miniature of the whole moral quandary. We watched as unfounded suspicions were allowed to breed

and violence was encouraged.

Extraordinary rendition of the subject.

The abdication of all moral authority.

And finally the act of inflicting unbearable pain on another human being in order to get them to tell you what you want to hear,

whether they can give you the answers you want or not.

Personally I think that the ethical issues of having a doctor assist in torture, of an innocent man no less, are rather profound. Certainly they were topical at the time Confidence Man aired. However, it’s rarely discussed. It’s accepted that both Jack and Sayid tortured Sawyer, yet somehow only Sayid had anything to repent. Apparently the Sayid part of the torture was spiritually devastating, but the Jack part was just a stress reaction from the overworked doc.

Not even human torture could dent Jack’s halo. At least not in Season One.

By now we’re years removed from the facile interpretations of Season One. We know that this isn’t a story about the great White Jack and the nasty Black Sawyer. We accept that Lost’s moral universe is permanently gray. But what is the importance of the rivalry between Sawyer and Jack? How meaningful was Sawyer’s line in The Moth that “we ain’t that different”?

By now we’ve seen Sawyer become a hero a couple of times over, and we’ve seen Jack hit a couple of bottoms on the rocky road to his destiny. They’re not exactly changing places on the moral seesaw.

They’re hanging in a kind of balance.

I tried to see what other symbolic clues might have been buried in these episodes about Free Will and the value of making choices. As always, eyes were important.

Sun got the one eye opener of The House of the Rising Sun and Charlie got the slightly less typical two eye opener. When Charlie visited clean and sober Liam in Australia, the brothers were seeing the world through opposite colored glasses.

Drug addicted Charlie was still in the dark, but Liam’s vision had been made clear.

There was a minor Bug theme in the first two episodes, but I don’t think we can make anything of it.

Bees did appear in Egyptian tombs, and were known as the “tears of Ra”, but I think that’s a stretch. In Christian allegory a queen bee sometimes represents our old friend the Virgin Mary. And, at the risk of drifting into apophenia, it could be suggested that the bees were a reminder that when Adam and Eve did the bad deed, one of their many, many punishments was to have to inhabit a world where among their many afflictions, obnoxious itchy, stinging bugs would eat them alive for the rest of their lives.

But one of the cleverest, and subtlest, clues in this series of episodes was the number Three.

Charlie confesses to three sins of the flesh.

Locke gives Charlie three chances to quit his drugs.

Each of the three episodes features a major song: Willie Nelson’s “Are You Sure” plays over the separation scene at the end of House of the Rising Sun, The Blind Boys of Alabama’s “I Shall Not Walk Alone” plays over the closing montage of Confidence Man and of course in The Moth, we heard the Rock God’s one hit wonder, that immortal, unsingable classic “You All Everybody”.

You all, everybody

Acting like you’re stupid people

Wearing your ’spensive clothes

You all, everybody – Drive Shaft

(Just in case you needed a memory refresh.)

There are three Star Wars shoutouts:

In The House of the Rising Sun, Han Sawyer repeats Han Solo’s line from the cantina scene, “well, that’s the real trick, isn’t it?”

In The Moth, Charlie Not-Quite-Skywalker repeats the line from A New Hope when he comes to save Princess Jack, “I’m here to rescue you.”.

And in Confidence Man, Hurley fluffs up one of Jack’s many heroic mini-feats by calling it a “Jedi moment”.

And then there’s the whole business that starts in House of the Rising Sun and runs all the way through the reason Sayid wants to torture Sawyer in Confidence Man – the failure to triangulate the signal.

This was the kind of Sayid McGyver moment that abounded in the first season. I certainly never analyzed what the hell he was doing. I just figured it made sense to whoever understands that kind of thing. But it turns out it doesn’t actually take three signal points to do what Sayid was trying to do here. It takes two.

Angles are measured from points A and B, to determine the distance d to the target. There’s no third measuring point. But, hey, come on. It’s not as if this show is being written by rocket scientists.

Seriously, I’m pretty sure someone on the writing staff realized they were using the wrong terminology for what Sayid was trying to do, but they chose to write it like that anyway. There was a reason Sayid’s project needed to have Three signal points. Three is a common literary device in Western literature – three wishes, three witches, three Gods in the Trinity. But why was Three so important in this story, at this time?

Duh. It’s because Triangulation is how you make a Triangle!

And no matter how much the romance hating nerds in the audience may grumble in the nerd corners of the Lost fandom, the Triangle is a story point as big and as baffling and as much a fixture in this story as is the Smoke Monster or the Temple or the big broken foot. You don’t go to all the trouble these writers did just to set up an irrelevant diversion. The problem is that we still don’t have any idea what importance the triangle could be serving. Even now, after we’ve watched the triangle become the basis for the most contrived finale plot twist in Lost’s illustrious history, the question begs an answer. Why did they do this to us?

Maybe the clues were there back then and we missed them, along with all that Three stuff. Maybe we have to go take another look at Adam and Eve’s tale of woe.

In Genesis when Adam and Eve were driven out of paradise, they realized for the first time that they were naked, and it was not a pretty sight.

Genesis 3: 7 And the eyes of them both were opened, and they knew that they were naked;

But the thing is, you see, before The Fall, when Adam and Eve were still in the Garden of Eden, before they’d screwed the whole thing up, they weren’t ashamed to be naked at all. Until Eve ate the forbidden fruit, sex was a good thing!

Genesis 2:25 And they were both naked, the man and his wife, and were not ashamed.

From the beginning, Sawyer and Kate’s story had an entirely different tone from Jack and Kate’s. Where Jack and Kate’s story was more like a tv dinner than a tv romance, Sawyer and Kate was a recipe that started from scratch. Theirs was the classic romantic setup – they couldn’t stand each other. He was a crude, lewd redneck and she wouldn’t give him the time of day.

(Pay no attention to all those penis shaped bananas.)

Jack and Kate were portrayed as longing for one another, when they’d known each other a few days.

We saw him mooning over her mugshot.

We watched Kate dig for Jack like her husband of 20 years was buried beneath the rocks.

We watched them sit shyly at the fireside like an overgrown Kevin and Winnie.

But the one thing we never watched was them getting to know one another. We were just told to accept that they met a few days ago and they just love each other now, mkay?

With Sawyer and Kate all the exploration and discovery happened right in front of us. Kate wanted to know more about Sawyer. What book was he reading? She finds out Sawyer’s reading a book …

… About Bunnies! And not the white rabbit kind either. We all know what bunnies like to do!

Sex was always a part of Sawyer and Kate’s story. Jack and Kate were so chaste that Jack couldn’t admit to checking out Kate’s ass even when she was practically begging him to.

And even though he totally was.

But Sawyer was direct with Kate. He told her flat out what he wanted. He wanted a kiss.

And he wasn’t kidding. He wanted it so bad he’d damn near die to get it.

Kate’s discoveries about Sawyer are paced throughout the episode.

First she encounters him naked. Completely exposed to her. And she doesn’t look away.

Later, she tries to get him to confess to stealing the inhalers. She’s convinced herself she understands him. But she insults him when he asks for the kiss, thinking it’s a joke, and finds out more about him than she had ever bargained for.

There is intimacy in the angry way Sawyer forces his life story into her hand.

Intimacy in the way she reads his own childish scrawl out loud to him.

And there is intimacy in their kiss some hours later.

No one on the Island is more lost than Sawyer is at the moment Kate finally kneels to kiss him. It’s a beautifully shot scene – Lost’s first, and still greatest, kiss. The jungle sounds add to the bizarre sultriness of the circumstances. Just as they are about to kiss, a jungle bird calls out, and it’s almost like the way a saxophone wails at sexy moments in movies. It’s shocking when Sawyer pushes his tongue into her mouth, so carnal.

But it’s even more shocking when instead of pulling back horrified and wiping her mouth off, Kate pauses and then dives in for as much as she can get.

Why does she do that? It’s not like they’re drunk in the backseat of a car. She’s soul kissing the creep who won’t give up the asthma medicine, even though he is tied to a tree in the jungle of mystery getting tortured by a gen-u-wine Eye-raqi. It’s not what you’d call ideal circumstances for a make out session. So why does Kate kiss Sawyer like that?

Will this most-rewound-scene in-Lost-history mean anything in the future of the story? We don’t know, but we do know that this is the kiss that woke the sleeping frog, or whatever the fairy tale metaphor would be – the kiss that woke Sawyer out of his spiralling spell and put him back on the road to being human again. And it was Kate who woke him.

She got the truth out of him, in more ways than she’d ever expected.

When the kiss is over, and Sawyer survives the stabbing he takes next (this episode also marked the beginning of one of Lost’s most hallowed traditions – Sawyer getting the shit beat out of him), Kate doesn’t hate him. In fact, after realizing that he is so fucked up that he just let himself get tortured over something he didn’t have, Kate spent time working out more clues about him, discovering all by herself his deepest, darkest secret.

At first Sawyer confesses to Kate, opens up. He’s honest and vulnerable.

You can almost see the little boy in him, the one who saw his parents’ brains blown out right before his eyes. Then something terrible happens. He sees that Kate feels sorry for him.

Her pity enrages him. He shuts her out again, as quickly as he let her in.

As much as Kate has learned about Sawyer, and it seems like quite a lot at this point, she has barely touched the surface.

The bond they feel as an instinct in this episode won’t be processed by either of them for a long time. It’s a slow brew we’ll get to enjoy throughout the first and second season, because the pacing of Sawyer and Kate’s story is done magnificently in these first years.

Sawyer and Kate shared another connection at this point in the story. We saw how John Locke was later inhabited by an alien persona. But Sawyer and Kate had him beat. Long before the story started, they were both old pros at being someone else. Interchangeable identities were nothing new to them.

And talking about interchangeable identities, remember Scott and Steve? They’re essential Lost trivia for the true fanatic. This was it – their moment of glory!

Which was Scott and which was Steve? I know some of you out there probably know the answer to that question, but really, does it matter? We can choose whichever we want and it makes no difference at all. Nonetheless, as the survivors adapted, choices continued to be made. Some chose to make the best of a bad situation.

Sun chose to stand up to Jin and finally wear some comfortable clothes.

Sayid chose to take responsibility for his heinous acts, because unlike Jack, he understood that the torture hadn’t been Sawyer’s choice. It had been theirs.

This was the moment that won over the audience to Sayid, I think. Long before we knew anything much about him, we respected him. He was a little bit evil, but at least he had integrity.

Sawyer chose not to burn his letter.

It might have made a difference if he’d burned it, but then again, probably not. The letter that Jacob made him write couldn’t be destroyed with a cigarette lighter. Just the fact that Sawyer was considering burning it was a sign of hope. But the letter still had work to do. The 2009 finale returned to this letter, and its significance has since soared much.

This letter wasn’t just the device being used to work out Sawyer’s redemptive arc; it was the source of Sawyer’s whole vicious circle, the Fateful unchosen act that had landed him, like all the others, on this Island of ever deepening Mystery. The Island where his nemesis would suddenly appear before him, brought there by … a wishing box. Sawyer made a lot of bad choices to twist his life into the mess he was in, but knowing all that we do now, it’s hard to see how Free Will was anything more than a peripheral player in his story.

So that battle continues, and in my opinion it’s a toss up where the writers plan to come out on it. Are our characters all puppets being driven uncontrollably, uncomprehendingly, down a path that’s been fated and determined for them from the start? Or will this be a quixotic victory for that scrappy and unpredictable little underdog, Free Will, to tumble Fate on its ass and create its own freely chosen outcome?

I’m not putting up any bets on this one.

“I can’t go back to yesterday – because I was a different person then.” - Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

After the Pilot episodes, we in the audience had to land on our feet trying to chase down this story that immediately began to race ahead of us. It got real weird real fast.

“If you don’t know where you are going, any road will get you there.”

These three episodes introduced the most profound and lasting themes of Lost. The first threads of the basic Lost themes – themes of Manhood and Destiny, of Magic, Mystery, Illusion, themes of Life and Death and Life beyond Death – all began to weave into the fabric that has become the great tapestry of Lost.

Not the least of these threads was the relationship that in Season One seemed destined to be THE central relationship in the story. Time has dulled that impression, at least for me, because Jack and John have only rarely shared screen time lately, divorced as they’ve been across the time space continuum. But Reset-Rewatching the early days of Lost, it’s hard to tell which guy we were supposed to be watching, which one was supposed to be dominant, which one – if either one – was meant to be our hero.

In the aftermath of the crash, Jack was in a state of shock,

but for John, it was more like a state of grace.

In the next three episodes after The Crash, all the survivors learned to accept the heavy reality that no rescue was coming. They were truly Lost. Abandoned.

They had to try and survive, however ill-equipped they might be for the task.

They looked for food.

They even began to commit small kindnesses to their enemies.

They burned the dead.

They tried to do right by those the Island had not chosen to save. In another touching nod to the then-recent 9/11 tragedy (or at least it felt like that to me) there was The Reading of The Names.

It was a good moment for Claire. While Jack griped about trying to “sort through everyone’s God”, his sister Claire simply remembered that each individual soul was special in his or her own way, even if it was just because she wore corrective lenses or he would have been an organ donor. Each of them had been special enough to love someone, and to be loved.

These early episodes were a time of discovery, a time of constant Firsts. There was the first Great WTF Shock Ending (which was also, incidentally, THE moment that hooked me on Lost for good).

The first of those fantastic Perpetual Tiki Torches.

First time Jack bitched out Kate!

First time Kate and Sawyer rolled around on top of each other in the jungle!

First Jears!

First Bunny!

But not everything we thought we saw in Season One turned out to be lastingly important.

Walt made the rain stop, but I have a feeling we’ll never find out what was supposed to be so bloody special about him.

We never found out why everyone was running around after Jack begging him to please Please PLEEZ! be TEH LEADER,

when Sayid already was one.

Not every budding theme we thought we saw in S1 was intended to bear fruit. There are boars in this story, but it’s not really like Lord of the Flies.

Sawyer used his wiles to harvest raw materials like an Ayn Randian hero of gloriously selfish capitalism. Meanwhile Jack was exhorting the proletariat to cooperate selflessly for the common good, with a line lifted straight from the great socialist anthem, “The Internationale”.

“Come greet the dawn and stand beside us
We’ll live together or we’ll die alone. “- Internationale.

Unfortunately, Lost never went anywhere as a sociopolitical allegory. I know, I know, the whole point was just that Jack was Good and Sawyer was Baaaaad.

At first, when Lost was new, they pretended this stuff would be easy. They gave us a false sense of security that this would be a simplistic morality tale of black hats and white hats, good guys and bad. Sawyer and Kate connived the dubious mercy killing of the Marshall, but naturally, the worthless Sawyer fucked it up. On the surface, it only proved that if you want something done right on this damn Island, then there was no point in sending anyone other than Hero! Jack! to do it. But Sawyer’s anguish was one of those fleeting windows that opened in those early weeks where we glimpsed just for a passing second the human being inside the animal’s shell.

Plus Sawyer, of course, was right! He did see “the big picture” that Jack couldn’t. What was Jack’s plan? To pour all the antibiotics down the drain into the doomed man, stealing them from the living who were sure to need them later. It was a battle of earthy pragmatism vs. airy idealism, a classic dichotomy. But the audience mostly missed it, because we were being lulled into dismissing Sawyer as just a big handsome asshole.

Kind of like how we were misled into thinking that Jin was nothing more than an abusive control freak of his innocent, terrified wife.

Or that Hurley was only there for us to laugh at, as our fat, cuddly clown.

(Well, that one was kinda true.)

The misleads were there to distract us from just how plain and simple some of the themes really were. Kate’s episode was titled Tabula Rasa, a belief much favored by the 17th century philosopher that our hero John Locke was destined to be named after.

“Tabula Rasa” means literally “scraped table”. (Tabula is also the Roman name for the game of Backgammon, but we probably don’t have time to get into that one now.) In the writings of 17th century John Locke, “tabula rasa” was a term used to describe the mind of the newborn babe – empty, blank, an open space within which any possible spirit can build its castle.

If we all start out blank, then the thing we call personality, or identity, is just the random picture that happens to get drawn on each person’s generic slate. So who are these people, these spirits inhabiting these shells? For starters, who is Kate?

The historical figure Kate reminds me most of is Richard Kimble.

There’s even a One-Armed Man mixed up in the middle of the story.

Like poor old Doctor Kimble, Kate just seems too nice to be a most wanted criminal tracked across the globe by a relentless nemesis.

She saves the life of Farmer Ray, the guy who ratted her out for a couple of mortgage payments. She even saves the life of the Marshall when the plane is starting to crash. The group trusts her so instinctively that they give her their only gun. Of course, there is the inconvenient complication that, unlike Richard Kimble, Kate is basically….guilty.

Throughout the first season, we never found out What Kate Did.

We were left to try and helplessly imagine what this angel faced girl scout could possibly have done to earn the obsession of the hardbitten G-Man. What could she have done that was so bad? Was she a child molester, an axe murderer, a spy? Was her evil on an epic scale? Was she the Catwoman?

None of the possibilities seemed possible. Maybe Edward Mars was one of Kate’s jilted lovers?

Did he just really, really hate Patsy Cline music?

It was always hard to know what to think about Kate. It never seemed to me that they put much care into the writing of her. She said she was a vegetarian, but we all saw her chowing down on pork like she was Ponyo.

So was she lying? I mean the food supply on the Island consisted of fish, boar

…and toothpaste. Hard to see how a vegetarian could get enough calories to climb out of bed, let alone climb trees like Tarzan.

Probably, since it was Kate, just a girl in a story that’s all about men, it didn’t matter that much. It’s a small example, but it illustrates how the writers never seemed to try all that hard with Kate. The great intrigue about What Kate Did eventually went pffffft. Sure she killed her Dad in cold blood, but he wasn’t very nice, and besides – isn’t she purty? As we enter Season Six, Kate remains a sketch of a character that the writers seem never to have fully invested in. Sadly, the side effect has been that the audience, over time, has come to feel about Kate pretty much the same way the Marshall did.

In stark contrast, the characterizations of Locke and Jack were masterfully done. From the beginning you could see how much care and thought went into how the writers introduced these two,

their yin and yang,

fire and water,

light and dark.

Of course, which one was the light one and which the dark is never made entirely clear. We’re supposed to keep guessing. Are these guys the Good Twin and the Bad Twin?

Do they represent a dichotomy or a unity? Or is that question just another one of the many misleads we’re always getting lost on?

The eye is the window to the soul, and we enter each man’s soul just that way. We see his eye opening.

He’s flat on his back.

This splat position is one we’ll see both Locke and Jack in many times over the years, especially Locke.

In fact, in White Rabbit, we actually get a rare sighting of the difficult double back splat.

The two men are complementary. Together they instinctively provide for and sustain their fellow survivors. Locke finds food. Jack finds water. Psychologically, there is also some kind of desolate symmetry. Jack’s always been told he doesn’t have what it takes.

And everyone’s always telling Locke what it is he can’t do.

Although it seems they’re working together, there’s a sense early on that they’re not on the same side. In a story that just left us with a very foreboding sense of impending war,

we remember that we first met Locke as a “Colonel” playing Army board games in the lunchroom at the box factory.

Knives have always been important in Locke’s story. They are a symbol of manhood.

Of potency.

The opposite of the disabling wheelchair. Knives make people sit up and pay attention. A man who knows how to throw a knife is automatically Special.

The Knife is the symbol of John Locke’s DESTINY.

Locke may have been a sad, sad cubicle nerd stuck doing Totally Pointless Shit reports

for a Lumbergian little douche named Randy Nations.

(Speaking of which I wonder if we’ll see Lost’s low rent Zelig again in Season Six?)

Locke may have been reduced to paying a sex phone worker to pretend to be his girlfriend. And he may have been humiliated when he was rejected for the Australian walkabout tour because he couldn’t…uh, walk. But Locke was more than a whackaloon survivalist with delusions of grandeur, even if that’s exactly what he often looked like.

Locke carries the weight of the story’s most central theme on the shoulders of his bright white T-shirt. Locke believes in DESTINY, a theme even the ABC promo department can understand.

Destiny is the thing you can’t escape, the thing you can have absolute faith in. The things you are destined to do are the same as the things you have already done. With destiny, the future is irrefutable, irreversible, undeniable, just like the past. Locke had learned that the hard way.

The Island had come for John.

As he told Jack at the fireside, everything that had happened to them had happened for a reason. Everything. But in the early days, John Locke was the only one who understood that.

If the audience had been as tuned in as Locke, we might have noticed the signs all around us.

The toys and dolls in the wreckage were the first sign we received that Lost would also be a story about lost children. And lost childhoods.

And what about this?

When Kate tackled Sawyer, he was delighted to have his birthday wish fulfilled – the one he’d made four years before. That was a throwaway line at the time, but it reverberates a little bit now, when we’ve seen how capriciously these characters have scampered around the timespace continuum.

There’s also this. Does Charlie think FATE is LATE?

I don’t get it. Unless we’re supposed to read it backwards – in a mirror, through the looking glass – where it becomes ET AL, which translates from Latin (the language of The Others) as … And Others. Get it? OTHERS!

It was always Charlie’s Fate to be done in by Et Al. He didn’t know it then, but there was no way he’d ever escape it.

By the end of this group of episodes, even Jack had bowed to his Destiny and embraced his fated role as Boss of Everyone and all around Mary Sue.

Locke describes a Walkabout as “a journey of spiritual renewal, where one derives strength from the earth. And becomes inseparable from it. ” That’s an incomplete description. A Walkabout is the rite of passage, the ritual of manhood for adolescent Aboriginal males.

A Walkabout traces the Songlines and follows the Dreamtracks of ancestors who have died, but who still dwell within the ancestral landscape of the earth. We know that Locke is a great dreamer.

And we’ve also seen him embrace the soul of his ancestors in ways we could never have imagined back then.

But just when did this conversion take place? There’s a moment in Tabula Rasa that is striking and scary. Locke uses the whistle to finally bring Vincent, the invincible dog, back to his mystical young master Walt. He generously allows Michael to be the hero, knowing that he desperately needs to build some cred in the eyes of his boy.

But, as Locke watches over what was a deliriously happy moment for the little family, his expression is not happy at all. In fact, it is downright sinister.

It’s almost as if he is – suddenly – someone different.

We can’t yet read what Locke might be thinking as he scowls over this happy scene. But it’s one of those scenes that means a lot more on the Rewatch, because of all the things we know now, or things we don’t know. To tell you the truth, I’m so openminded on this story right now, I even wondered if there wasn’t something going on there between Man and Dog.

“But I don’t want to go among mad people,” said Alice.
“Oh, you can’t help that,” said the cat. “We’re all mad here.”

Locke ends up on the Island because he desperately needs to take a Walkabout, but it’s Jack who hears the Dreamsongs while he’s seeking his manhood in the wilderness.

“And if you go chasing rabbits
And you know you’re going to fall” – Jefferson Airplane, White Rabbit

The White Rabbit that Jack chases is the ghost of his father. The dear old dad he was bringing home to bury. Christian is someone we’ve come to know almost as well as we know Jack, but we still don’t know why he won’t leave Jack alone.

The clue may be hidden somewhere in the symbol the writers have chosen to represent him. Lost is about lots of things, but throughout the years, it’s always been About Bunnies.

Rabbits represent fertility. Rabbit’s feet bring good luck. Rabbits are used in magic tricks. And in a Game like Lost, images of rabbits have turned up in all kinds of tricky places.

Can you find it? You have to really keep your eyes peeled when you watch this show. It’s not that hard to find this bunny:

But this one’s a toughie:

But by far the main way Lost has used rabbits is as part of its ongoing Through the Looking Glass metaphor.

Like Alice, Jack chases his white rabbit down a hole into a world where logic and proportion have fallen sloppy dead.

Jack’s Dad has been bringing the crazy into Jack’s life for a long time. We saw Jack laying on the ground as a boy

his head turned exactly as it was when we first saw him on his back in the jungle.

We see that Jack’s dad decided to write on his son’s blank slate with a poison pen.

“Don’t choose, Jack, don’t decide. You don’t want to be a hero, you don’t try and save everyone because when you fail … you just don’t have what it takes.”

See? The way Christian talked to his kid in his Scotch soaked study wasn’t all that different from the way the hookah smoking caterpillar talked to Alice from his mushroom. He didn’t say Jack would fail because he didn’t have what it takes. He said that he couldn’t fail because he didn’t have what it takes to fail successfully. Like Jack was destined to fail even at failing.

You can see why Jack didn’t have the warm and fuzzies for his dad, even if it turns out that Christian had it exactly right about his super successful overachieving failure of a son.

Jack had been chasing his father figure for a long time before he ran into him in the Jungle of Mystery.

“I fled Him down the nights and down the days;
I fled Him down the arches of the years;
I fled Him down the labyrinthine ways
Of my own mind “ – Francis Thompson, The Hounds of Hell

He thought he had finally put an end to it when he ID’d his pop’s sodden corpse in the King’s Cross morgue. King’s Cross. What a wonderful place for Christian to die. It’s a name that reminds us of another King who died on a Cross to redeem mankind from sin.

And while King’s Cross – Sydney’s red light district – is an appropriate place for a sinner like Christian to die, it’s also a nice shoutout to the same place Harry Potter goes when he needs to transition away from the world of Muggles to the world of Magic.

Now that Jack has made that transition through the looking glass of the Island, he’s going to have to go back and forth a couple of times before he gets it. What happens when he does catch up to Christian? That’s a part of the story that’s still ahead of us. We’ve gotten so jaded with all the Daddy Issues on Lost that it’s hard to remember how profound and mythic this first encounter with the Big Dad really was. Jack puts out his hand to try and touch the illusion of The Father

but he only ends up tumbling off the edge of a cliff, hanging at the end of his rope. And at the very last second, just when he’s about to fall to his death, what does he see? A hand reaching out to bring him back to life, a hand belonging to the unseen …

…Locke.

Locke has a long heart to heart with Jack, then leaves him alone in the middle of the night, in the middle of the jungle, with the monster growling out there in the darkness. After all, it’s not a proper Walkabout unless you’re by yourself. There’s a sound…of clinking ice cubes in a Scotch glass…and a whitish figure passes through the trees behind Jack. He leaps up to chase it. He doesn’t catch Dad this time either, but he does find the thing he’s been looking for, the thing they all need, the source of life itself. Finally. Water.

Early in the episode, when Jack is failing to save the drowning swimmer, the shot pulls back as if to show us the viewpoint of an unseen figure who observes very closely…

…as Jack fails.

Now the hand of the unseen Father has once again,

through the barely heard whisper of a mysterious songline,

led Jack to the water that will keep them all alive.

At first he thinks it has also led him to the thing he was really looking for – his father’s body. But the grave of the Father is empty.

“And he saith unto them, Be not affrighted: Ye seek Jesus of Nazareth, which was crucified: he is risen; he is not here: behold the place where they laid him.” – Mark 16:6

Of course Jack is never really alone during any of this. When Jack first spies Christian on the edges of the jungle, he chases him inside only to see him disappear behind a bush…

…a bush that seconds later, Locke stumbles out of, wrestling the meat he has just killed to feed the people.

Considering Christian didn’t appear to lead Jack to water until after Locke left him alone by the fire, it’s fair to ask…did Christian lead Jack to the water, or did Locke? After all, Locke did say very clearly, earlier in the episode, that he knew where the water was. Just what is the connection between Christian Shephard and John Locke? We have seen Jack escort two corpses to the Island, that of his father, and that of Locke.

A Father is a Protector, and we have recently learned that What Lies in The Shadow of The Statue

is He Who Protects Us All.

We’ve got a pretty good sense that the Island houses at least one free floating spirit that can impersonate whoever it chooses, can inhabit any physical shell that Death has turned into a Tabula Rasa. What we don’t know, however, is whether this spirit is a good twin or a bad twin, whether it’s a God

or a Monster.

When Jack is chasing his White Rabbit, he calls out to him, “Who are you?”

The same thing Eko called as he chased the mirage of his brother Yemi.

Who are you?

That’s the million dollar question. At one point, Jack tells Kate very matter of factly, “Three days ago, we all died”. I didn’t take that literally when I first heard it. Probably no one did. It seemed like another one of those drippy motivational lines in one of those many, many lame JackandKateSitandTalk scenes that are littered throughout the early episodes. But what if that’s exactly what it meant?

When Locke wakes up, his shoe is off. He struggles to grab it and put it on. I’m not sure of this one, but don’t dead men wear no shoes?

There’s a Twilight zone episode where a bum puts on the shoes of a murdered man and is inhabited by the dead man’s vengeful spirit. “Who are you?” is a question maybe we should have been asking all along.

“For should the soul of a prince enter and inform the body of a cobbler, as soon as deserted by his own soul, everyone sees he would be the same person with the prince, accountable only for the prince’s actions; but who would say it was the same man?” – John Locke, On Identity

Is it possible, just maybe, that the Locke we’ve known has always been dead? Since the fall from the window. Or since the plane crash. Or since his mama got hit by a car and then gave birth when she was only a few months pregnant. There’s always been something magical about Locke. How many times has he died and come back to life, really? A commenter at my blog (thanks J. Hall, great pickup!) mentioned the possibility that Locke’s eye scars mark him as the Norse god, Odin.

It’s definitely an interesting concept. I realize the writers seem to have settled on the Egyptian motif for their ancient, pre-Abrahamic deities, but the Norsemen’s Odin is a god that makes a very neat fit with our man Locke. He’s the god of Poetry but also the god of the Hunt.

And the Spear.

And of War.

He hung himself for nine days from Yggdrasil (literal translation “Odin’s horse”), the sacred Tree of the World, the Tree of Life.

But Odin, like our good John Locke, was alive again after that long death.

So Odin, like many of mankind’s most popular gods, from Bacchus to Christ, is a god of resurrection, a god that dies and lives again. He’s also a shapeshifter, who takes on the appearance of both people and animals.

What’s more, Odin is a one-eyed God, having sacrificed his eye to the Well of Wisdom, in return for…wisdom, I guess.

And eyes, single eyes, eyes being opened, are maybe the single most identifiable motif in the whole grand tapestry of Lost images.

What does it mean when an eye opens?

Well, it means that you have to see reality, for one thing. You can’t be lost in illusions, trying to take the easy way out. And yet we’re in the middle of a story that feels most of the time like one big grand illusion. One that gets curiouser and curiouser by the year. When Locke is waylaid by the Smoke Monster on his Walkabout, he escapes unharmed.

He looks terrified.

But he says later that he has looked into the Eye of the Island and he saw that it was beautiful. It’s a fascinating idea, that the fearsome, terrifying Monster is described by Locke as an Eye. A beautiful one. It adds another layer of potential to the eyes that we are so used to seeing on Lost. On Jacob’s tapestry, the Eye of Horus, the symbol of Ra’s protection and power, watches over the blank human slates who seem to be lined up against one another on opposite sides. What Game is being played with the human playing pieces? We don’t know yet. We just have to wait and see it all play out. Like most games, the rules are probably very simple.

“Begin at the beginning,”, the King said, very gravely, “and go on till you come to the end: then stop.”

We can do that.

“All he knew was that the years flow by like water, and that one day men come home again.”
-Thomas Wolfe

Trying to reset yourself to rewatch Lost as for the first time is like trying to unring a bell. It’s impossible. As Sawyer repeatedly reminded us last season, what’s done is done. We know who the man in the black suit laying on the floor of the bamboo forest is. We know how he got there and what will happen to him next …..Or do we? When last we saw our long Lost friend, he had this great big plan where he was going to blast time off its axis and reset it all back to the beginning.

Or at least, back before the place that has always felt like the beginning to us.

The first thing that occurred to me, as I Reset-Rewatched the iconic opening scene of Lost, was this: How did Jack land so far from the beach, virtually unharmed, except for one conveniently placed rib wound? For that matter, how did so many of the plane crash surivivors come through their ordeal looking so healthy? Not to mention, so pretty? On the first go round there was no time to analyze these things. We were too caught up in trying to figure out what was up with the skinhead dude in the suit.

With the eye.

And the dog.

And the running.

The magnificent opening sequence flows with eery smoothness into the even more extraordinary crash scene. There is a beautiful dichotomy in the way Jack first surveys the peaceful side of the beautiful beach,

then turns to confront the smoking, shrieking carnage.

This one incredible scene surrounds us like a symphony, an overture during which we are swept into an hypnotic new world. We learn that the anonymous Man in Black is the victim of a plane crash.

We see death and suffering and chaos all over the Guernican montage, set against a soundtrack of pounding, insistent percussion.

We learn that the nameless one is a born HERO!, who leaps into the abyss to save as many lives as he can lay his healing hands on.

Before the haunting, shattering sequence is over, we learn his name, a name we know not yet how sick we will become of. JAAACK! And so, we are handed the first fixed and immutable fact of Lost: It is a story about Jaaack.

We will not be permitted to ever forget this thing, no matter how much we may one day wish we could.

What makes the opening sequence most powerful, however, is not watching Jack leap from one heroic workstation to another. It is what happens while we are watching Jack, still curious as to who he is, and the other characters appear one by one, like instruments sounding their entrance within the orchestra.

Jin.

Michael.

Charlie.

Claire.

Hurley.

Boone. Rose.

Shannon!!!

These characters come to us in a group, like a box marked “Seconds.” Other characters, the ones marked “Firsts”, make a different kind of entrance. Locke is never introduced to us. He runs into the frame without any focus, no shot of his face. He’s there to help Jack.

He’s a nobody, as ordinary as any ordinary middle aged passenger on any ordinary plane would be. But there is this one quick shot of him running past Jack, something that struck my Reset-Rewatcher’s eye.

The two men cross midframe. A whiteshirt and a blackshirt.

Hmmm.

Our first sight of Kate is no such passing glance. Kate wafts in from … someplace… all blowdried and airbrushed, rubbing her wrists. We know now (but didn’t back then) that Kate is rubbing her wrists because she just hanked off her government issued bracelets.

So Kate, we can guess, reacted to the plane crash by running as hard as she could up into the hills to get herself dolled up to make a good, innocent first impression. Which she does.

In the third famous scene from this famous episode, Kate famously sews up Jack’s side while he famously teaches her about counting to five. I think I’ll get into all that a bit more later, but for now, I draw your attention to this little factoid: She lets Jack choose from every color of the sewing kit rainbow, and what color does he pick? Standard BLACK.

OK? Just sayin’.

Sawyer is introduced wordlessly, simply, but not as anonymously as Locke. We get to see his face. He looks like the Marlboro Man.

Then he hops off the wing of the plane and merges into the disaster scene that is now calming into a tableau of human stamina.

When we meet Sayid, he is building a fire. From the start, he makes himself useful.

Later we meet, almost as an afterthought, Sun. Looking whipped.

And finally, Walt.

Having brought all the characters onstage, the story begins to be told. No time is wasted in laying out the central theme.

Just block letters written on a junky’s dirty fingers, but a word we’ll learn to respect. We will be diverted in the midseasons into the story of Desmond Hume, namesake to the great philosopher of free will, who concluded free will was an illusion, but one we had no choice but to believe in. The word FATE – and more often,Destiny! – will be thrown in our faces throughout the story. As difficult as the writers have made this puzzle, they’ve also hidden certain plum answers right out in plain sight. When the story resumes in 2010, whatever it is we see, it will be an ending that has been predetermined by forces beyond any of the characters’ control.

And here is a clue that, in Season One at least, seemed to be extremely critical.

The gameboard. The playing pieces. BLACK and WHITE.

They wanted to drum this into our heads, the opposites, the duality that is the basis of all Western philosophy. We tend to think, mechanically, that black is evil and white is good. The storytellers rely on us making that assumption. But we have learned from Lost, in a story where almost no one has ever been totally good or totally bad, totally wrong or totally right, that such an assumption may have been our first misread. Or who knows? Maybe that’s exactly how it will turn out. A stark story of good and evil, with everyone falling on one side or the other. I doubt it, but we’ll find out eventually, since it seems this black/white duality was deliberately reemphasized in the final episode of Season Five.

It has to mean something, otherwise, it’s an annoying frakking fakeout.

Just as important as the bicoloration, though, is the concept of GAMES. Lost is a game, after all, and we will be seeing many more games played over the years, both on boards and off them. But the first game we see played is Backgammon. Locke, inhabiting his first deceptive shell as an avuncular old schlub, teaches Walt that Backgammon is the oldest game known to man. It is 5000 years old and was played in Mesopotamia, where civilization was first cradled. It is, in other words, a game as old as mankind.

What Locke doesn’t tell Walt is that the game of Backgammon, in its original form when it was known as Senet, was found in archaeological ruins in Egypt. And what we don’t know yet is that Egypt is going to be a place we are going to learn a lot more about.

Watching Season One for the first time, we didn’t yet know how completely this story would become unchained from time and space. We didn’t realize yet that the characters we were watching might be part of a story that is older than we could possibly imagine.

I was struck on my Reset-Rewatch with how mysteriously Locke is introduced. Unlike Jack, who is thrust into our faces as almost a cartoon version of TEH HERO!, Locke at first appears to be a Nowhere Man. We see him sitting on the beach, looking out to sea,

as we will see him do in the future.

We see him enjoying the rain,

as we know he likes to do.

He bears silent witness as Kate robs shoes from the feet of the dead.

Locke doesn’t speak until late in the second hour of the Pilot, and when he finally speaks, he speaks to Walt, another character of mystical mien. He says “It’s a much better game than checkers.”

I have wondered before if the final scenes of Lost will be something like this,

but watching and remembering how much games meant to Locke, I’m beginning to wonder if we might not someday see some twist on this classic scene instead.

LIFE and DEATH are in the balance throughout the Pilot episodes. The Pilot himself is alive one minute

and becomes The Original Redshirt the next.

Jack performs his first resurrection, wrenching Rose back from the dead to the living.

When Jack is running through the jungle, he passes a spectral white shoe,

a shoe whose ghost we will come to know so very, very well in years to come.

Death is everywhere in these first episodes, but it’s not just because it’s about a plane crash. Death will always be a major player in this story.

From the beginning, it is a story that proves it’s not enslaved by time or space. Stories and people from the past, and even those from the future, exist as much in present time as in memory. We learn, for instance, in the very first scene, that Jack has a friend in vodka,

and we see that he especially likes to guzzle his poison on airplanes,

but we don’t realize yet that we’ll eventually come to know Jack as a Friend of Bill’s as well.

We may have thought at the time that the vodka bottle was merely a prop to give Jack something to use to disinfect his side. We didn’t realize that we had been introduced to one of the primary characteristics of the character, or of his elaborate, jackbacked life story.

How many other clues like that were there in these Pilot episodes? Much of the foreshadowing has already been fulfilled. Kate’s description of the plane crash has since been graphically illustrated for us.

We see Sawyer’s letter very early on, and our attention is drawn to it,

but none of us could have suspected what it would ultimately mean,

or how well we would come to know the frightened boy inside the heart of the badass.

The first human being that Jack makes physical contact with is Claire.

Who we now know is his half sister, related through their dead white shoe wearing father.

When we first meet poor junky Charlie, he is pulling his drugs out of his black and white checkerboard shoe. We will see that shoe again someday, a long time later, on the day Charlie dies.

It may not have made much of an impression when Sawyer held up the five pointed star he stole from the Marshall,

but we have since come to learn that very little in this story has been left up to chance.

Though I still want an explanation for that “LaFleur” shit, because…Gah!

We hear the Frenchwoman’s message in the second hour of the Pilot.

Her crudely translated recording, on its endless loop, is chock full of fleeting phrases that will later mean much more to us. She was trying to get back to the Black Rock.

“It killed them all”, and she has been all alone….

for sixteen years.

Who killed the Frenchwoman’s crew? In the first episode, we are introduced to one of the great questions of Lost to which we still have no sign of an answer. The Monster.

We hear his mechanical growling subway sounds and witness his fearsome treecrushing power on the very first night the survivors spend on the beach. We have since learned a little bit more about The Monster,

but not much.

Truth be told, we don’t even know for sure that the Monster and the Smoke are one and the same. There are many awesome theories about the Monster, including my favorite – that it’s the equivalent of a video game obstacle that can be changed at will in order to keep the game challenging. Lost is a game, after all, and not just a board game.

But clearly, this is one of the BIG ANSWERS that they are saving for the bitter end.

Walt is seen reading a comic book,

which we’ll find out later belongs to Hurley,

who really likes reading comic books on planes.

Hurley’s love of comic books has provided an opening for an orgy of apophenia, but in the end it probably means nothing more than that the writers of Lost really, really like comic books…..Although, that preference of the writers may be a clue in itself, as to how this all will eventually come down. You never know.

We will later find out that the comic book Walt is reading has a city under a snowglobe, which is exactly how Desmond will someday describe the Island, when he tries and fails to escape from it by boat.

It will also have a polar bear in it.

And polar bears will matter in this story.

We learn about polar bears in the second hour of the Pilot episode, when Sawyer guns down the bear that comes charging at him out of the jungle. How the frak they figure into this story is still completely unexplained. Yes, I have read the theories but none of them satisfy me. This is another BIG ANSWER that will have to be done right, because it’s going to take a whole lotta ’splainin’ to justify big ole polar bears roaming around a tropical Pacific island.

The first episodes were densely packed with almost all of the powerful images and mysteries that this story would come to be about. Just as importantly, and as deftly, the first episode limned the characters and their relationships with simple, bold brushstrokes. In Season One, characters were the story.

We learned that Michael was an insecure father of an unusual son.

That Jin was not just a paranoid isolationist, but also a kind, skillful provider.

And that his wife hated his guts.

We met the monkey on Charlie’s back

and, even though we didn’t realize it, we met Bernard.

We found out that Hurley’s job in the story was to be fat.

And funny.

(This is my favorite Jack scene from the Pilot, by the way, as he tries to operate on the dying Marshall as Hurley faints dead away right onto his patient’s face.)

We entered the bizarre, and slightly sick, world of helpful Boone

and selfish Shannon,

who didn’t let a little thing like a massive catastrophe get in the way of her regularly scheduled pedicure.

The Redneck’s racially charged fight with the Revolutionary Guardsman

reminded us that the passions of 9/11 were still on the writers’ minds in September of 2004.

Sawyer was initially camoflauged as a shallow, self absorbed prick,

but we later learned he was anything but.

*

Unexpectedly, and without fanfare, Sawyer was exposed as an undercover hero early on. Without the histrionics of Jack’s klieg-lit heroics, Sawyer calmly faced down the polar bear in another of the Pilot’s most famous scenes.

And that scene segued effortlessly into the first physical encounter between Lost’s sexiest lovers.

Kate and Sawyer are positioned as antagonists with the hots for each other, immediately. The moment is quick. And sizzling. It has an almost Rhett and Scarlett feel to it.

He knows girls like her?

Is that because in fact, he already does know her?

Jack and Kate’s first meeting is considerably less crisp. The endless rib sewing scene takes up two damp, limp segments and feels almost like a parody of a badly written scene in a cloying chick flick.

They talk endlessly about fear and angel hair pasta and Jack’s awesome resume.

Maybe it only feels endless because, y’know, I don’t care. Later they talk some more. About something.

And later, I think, there’s more.

It just goes on and on. It’s a prelude to the way this relationship will devour countless hours of moist, awkward screentime for years to come. Can’t say they didn’t give us fair warning.

There remains however the issue of the rib. Jack’s one wound is on his side, above his ribs. Could this mean that Kate is the Eve that was made from Adam’s rib?

Given that even in the Pilot episodes, a big part of Kate’s job was to provide the sexalicious sideshow,

maybe the writers only ever intended for her to represent Eve’s permanently subservient status. I hope not, because we did see that Kate was capable of more.

Just as long as she was nowhere near Jack.

Sadly, this does not seem like a lesson that the writers have managed to learn.

I can think of an alternate interpretation for Jack’s side wound. Maybe it’s like the wound that the Centurian put in the side of Jesus before they took him down off the cross,

the one that Doubting Thomas insisted on feeling with his own finger.

They don’t call him Jacksus for nothing you know.

What did it mean that Jack had taken a “few flying lessons”? That’s a pretty random factoid. Will it ever mean anything more?

Do these cool face markings on Jack and Locke mean anything?

I don’t know. I’ve looked up the I Ching, warrior face painting and Cub Scout initiation rites and so far, I’ve come up with nada.

But you can’t keep a good apophenic down. I’m still looking.

Where did Kate come from anyway? Why did it seem like she knew exactly what to do the second she realized she was about to be in a plane crash? Was she walking around the Island while Jack was still out cold? We know from the final Mobisode before Season Four, “So it Begins”, that Christian himself sent Vincent to go wake Jack.

Specifically because Jack “had work to do.” What I wonder now is: Was this the first time Jack had been to the Island? It’s hard to think how he managed to fall down through that bamboo grove and end up with only one bite out of his side.

What was Jack doing at the cockpit when he left Charlie and Kate alone? Was that just an opportunity to have the little woman scream for TEH HERO to come save her?

Or did Jack have work to do there also?

Who actually killed The Pilot anyway? Conventional wisdom has always held that it was The Monster, but we have not often seen The Monster be so bloody minded. Mostly he just growls and slinks away back into his hiding place. Could this be another obvious, but wrong, assumption we’ve failed to question all these years? And no, I’m not suggesting that Jack himself killed the Pilot, just realizing that there may well be implications we haven’t thought of, if Jack does indeed succeed in resetting time and returning them all to that fateful day.

I was impressed and inspired by Reset-Rewatching the Pilot episodes. An incredible amount of exposition, foreshadowing and Easter Egg hiding was packed into two hours of drama that unfolded for the most part effortlessly, magically. As we consider the possible return to this set of circumstances next season, I can imagine that many of these famous moments may take on a different cast if we happen to revisit them again.

Most intriguing for me, in light of what we now know of him, is the way Locke is introduced in this episode. He appears to be a dazed and slightly loopy old man, preternaturally calm. We think it is because he was reacting to the miracle of having his spine restored to him. But there is something more to this creature called Locke, even back then. WHY was he restored? It’s not as if those blessings were given to all the others. Shannon still has asthma. Charlie is still hooked on heroin. Sawyer still has murder on his conscience. None off their burdens are lifted. With all we know about Locke now, or whoever Locke has since become, the question is more intriguing than ever:

Why is Locke so special? And what is really on his mind as he drifts into the story, from the edges, giving no clue as to why he finds this whole process so amusing?

” I have never been lost, but I will admit to being confused for several weeks.”
- Daniel Boone

There are many weeks of confusion left for us, but one way or another, we’re finally going to stop being Lost this year. I am more curious than ever to see how much of these two Pilot episodes play into the story when it picks back up. With all the time-play we have witnessed in recent years, I am almost wondering if we even have the sequence of events right, if this plane crash indeed happened in the beginning the way we always thought it did. All bets are off and I’m looking forward to the rest of a season that I almost feel like I’m watching now for the very first time.

I’ve been too busy this too short summer to hop on board any of the great rewatches happening around Lostwebbia. By now the hunting parties are deep into the jacktastic jungle of Season Two, so that’s a road untaken for me. But I think it’s for the best. Slogging through five long seasons would be too, too much work for this Fishbiscuit. And besides, I’m not sure it’s necessary. I was struck by some of the quotes issuing forth from our dear leaders when they were doing the press rounds during Comic Con.

Things like:

“Season six will feel a lot like season one,” says Lindelof. “The focus comes back to the characters with whom we began. We’ve been winnowing away everyone else who came along. “

And like:

“That was a conversation that started back between seasons one and two of the show,” says Lindelof. “We are following the plan pretty much to the letter, although there is room for improvisation.” Lindelof says next season – which will be the Emmy- and Peabody Award-winning series’ last – will bring things full circle.

Let me connect the dots from these quotes to the last sight we had of Jacob’s chosen few being bombed back to the beginning, and here’s how it all reads for me: Is it possible that everything we needed to know about Lost was contained in Season One? At the end of Season One, the creators of Lost decided on exactly the ending to their story that we are about to have revealed to us in Season Six. All the intermediate seasons were a case of slowboating it to a port that wasn’t all that far away at all. They were elaborate distractions, if you will, designed to deliciously prolong the agony (and keep the ad revenue pouring in) while the writers waited to unleash the story they really wanted to tell. And now it’s time!

Season Six is almost upon us. But I’ve realized, if it’s going to be a reprise of Season One, then I for one am woefully unprepared. I haven’t seen the magical first season since the first time I watched it. I’ve forgotten everything!

I need a refresher course. I’ve forgotten what it felt like back when shock endings were worth their weight in WTF.

I’ve forgotten when characters drove the plot and they intrigued me more with every new thing I learned about them.

I’ve forgotten when the themes seemed simple

even if the questions were not.

I’ve forgotten when the mysteries made the hair stand up on the back of my neck.

“In the first season, the characters were running around the jungle, things felt intense and surprising,” said executive producer Carlton Cuse. “We have a way that we’re going to be able to do that in the final season too.”

Carlton says they can do that again. They can recapture the magic. Is that even possible? I don’t know, but I know that if it is, then I want to be prepared. I want to look back at Season One to see which clues were laid out for us early on, which ones have come to fruition and which ones have died on the vine. I want to look at the ways the writers have developed their characters and their relationships and try and figure out what that might mean for our final (sob!) trip to Lostylvania. I want to try and winnow out the themes that have lasted, the ideas that were always meant to be important, to try and understand – using all the knowledge we now have from Seasons Two through Five – where this great big magical mystery tour might be headed now that it’s circling in for the landing.

As always, I’m not afraid to guess wrong. I’m not even afraid to guess stupid. I’ll try to guard against the Lostmaniac’s affliction of apophenia. (Look it up, we all do it.) And of course, I’ll do my best to keep it fun. Over the next weeks and months, I’m going to review all the Season One episodes in various groups of 2 or 4 or 6, depending on what feels right. I won’t be on any timetable, and updates are likely to be erratic, so if you’re interested, keep checking back in.

And so, with no further ado….Avast! Ahoy! All aboard for Fishbiscuit’s Reset Rewatch!

Let’s see if there’s anything new to discover before all our discovering is through.

Ok, ok, I’m a little bit late with this finale review. Just a little. OK, like six or seven weeks late. But who’s counting? By now the dust has cleared, the new and improved theories have been stitched into the warps and wefts of the interwebs, and the last ever Lost finale cliffhanger is a memory. There’s just one thing left to add. And so, with no further ado, I present, at long last, Fishbiscuit’s Review of “The Incident”.

“We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience.”
- Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

Expectations are always sky high for a Lost finale. We expect them to enlighten and clarify, even though we know by now that all they ever do is discombobulate and confuzzle. Like many Lost fans, I’ve come to the rueful conclusion that the puzzle will never fit exactly right, will never look the way I imagined it would. But I still want to try and figure out what it will look like! I’ve decided that, like any other existentialist-ish dilemma, the best way to approach it is from the side. Peripherally, not directly. And my operating theory is this: The answer will never make ANY sense.

After all these years of wandering in the forest of fantasy, it’s a foregone conclusion that Faith is going to win out over Science in the end. Which means, right off the bat, there’s no way this will ever make sense. So that takes a lot of the pressure off, doesn’t it?

Lost dropped a few of its finale traditions this year. The story actually ended ON the Island, something it hasn’t done since Season One.

But overall, tradition was upheld. Including recent traditions, like Hurley running a VW Rescue Bus service.

Or Ben going Psycho with Mr. Pointy.

For the third straight finale, Locke was in the box.

Kate was still mopping up Jack’s blood.

Juliet received the dubious honor of not only speaking the Official Lost Finale Slogan, but illustrating it as well. It seems like no matter how hard people try to Live Together, everyone still pretty much ends up Dying Alone.

Of course the most hallowed of Finale Traditions was observed.

Important stuff blew up!

This year they went atomic, and really the outcome is very much up in the air. Thermonuclear weapons of the Jughead variety were quite capable of decimating small islands.

That’s probably not what happened here, since Jack only dropped in a piddly thermonuclear trigger warhead, but there was still a lot of nostalgia, a lot of looking back. From the reappearance of Charlie’s Driveshaft ring,

to Ben and Locke reminiscing over mementos from their first date,

to the return of the unsinkable Vincent,

from Kate’s New Kids on the Block time capsule lunchbox,

to yet another reminder that Jack knows how to count to five,

there were shout outs and callbacks and handshakes with past seasons riddled throughout the episode. Just like Alice returned from her adventures Through the Looking Glass to the same sitting room she started out in, it feels like Lost has begun to circle around an ending that is going to take us right back where we started.

“If you want to know the end, look at the beginning”
- African Proverb

That seemed like the working premise to me, a theme split between the two halves of the episode.

Wherein the faith based mad scientist was on the move again, this time racing as hard as he could to get back to the future he could have had if he’d never gotten on that goddamn plane in the first place. And…

Which sucked us back through the vortex of time to Island antiquity, back to when the inscrutable Saint Jacob was weaving the cloth of history down deep in the Shadow of the Statue.

This was Jacob’s Coming Out party. All these years, watching men tremble at the mere mention of his name, we’ve wondered about him. Who is this omnipotent potentate?

Well, first off, he looks exactly like, but clearly isn’t, Paul, Rita’s creepy ex-husband who Dexter beaned with the frying pan.

(I hate when I get distracted like that.)

Turns out Jacob is a blond. An excellent fisherman.

A patient craftsman. A world traveler. And a linguist.

In the Bible, Jacob was a famous Twin. His elder twin brother, Esau, struggled and wrestled with him even while they were still trapped in their mother’s womb. They’re the ancient poster boys for the kind of brotherly strife we’re very familiar with on Lost.

Esau was a “cunning hunter, a man of the field”,

while Jacob was a “plain man, dwelling among the tents.” They were never friends, though they eventually made a wary truce, and it’s easy to see why they never got along. God had already played favorites.

“Was not Esau Jacob’s brother?” the LORD says. “Yet I have loved Jacob, but Esau I have hated, and I have turned his mountains into a wasteland and left his inheritance to the desert jackals.”
– (Malachi 1:2-3)

We have yet to learn what event created the murderous stalemate between Blackshirt and Whiteshirt, but the bitterness between the Biblical Jacob and Esau was due to an ugly shared scar. When they were fifteen, Jacob had tricked Esau, who was hungrier than he was smart, to trade away his birthright for a bowl of stew. Then, years later, when their father Isaac was dying, Jacob tricked Isaac into blessing him as his firstborn, by wearing an animal skin and pretending to be his hairy brother. In the Bible, Jacob was known as a great and successful conniver. A deceiver.

But in this story, it doesn’t feel like Jacob has been the one pretending. There were many hints and clues that the No Name Man in Black, who we can call Esau for convenience sake, was the one who has been shifting shapes all this time. Was it Esau who appeared to Eko as Yemi before destroying him? Was Alex really Esau when she ordered Ben to obey Locke? Was it Esau that had been in the cabin, the one that Ilana burned in a kind of exorcism when she realized Jacob had not been there for a very long time?

Has Esau been appearing as Christian? The way he now appears as Locke?

What were we to make of the black and white tunics?

Is this like a private grudge match or are they planning to take this global?

With all the transmogrification going on lately, is it possible we’re headed for an ending that looks something like this?

Is it a black and white morality play, like it once seemed Locke was hinting at?

If so, is Jacob the Good Guy? He did have a saintly glow and he went willingly to his slaughter, almost like Aslan, like Christ.

With Locke as his mouthpiece, Blackshirt Brother was ominous when he spoke to Richard about “taking care” of the rest of the Ajira 315 gang, and brutal in the way he shoved gentle Jacob into the firepit. If he’s been appearing as the Smoke Monster, as it now seems likely he was, is it safe to say then that No Name Guy is:

This is not a blood sport; it’s more like an existentialist chess match. There are Rules.

As Ben could not kill Widmore, neither can Esau kill Jacob…unless he finds The Loophole, in this case a Proxy Killer to do the dirty deed. As he said, he had to go through a lot to get there. First he had to grow little Ben Linus up into a skeevy little goblin. Then he had to get crazy John Locke involved in all kinds of head games with him. When Ben left the Island, Esau had to scheme a way for Locke to get himself murdered – by Ben, of course – and then carted back, all so Esau could impersonate Locke before anyone found out Locke’s corpse was still in the box! Jacob did have a clever defense mechanism in place. By only agreeing to see one person at a time, he knew that Esau, as a single person, would never be able to kill him. But he hadn’t counted on the diabolical cleverness or the eternal patience of his Bad Twin brother.

In this picture from Jacob’s Tapestry, we see nine figures (like the nine people Jacob visited in the episode flashbacks) arrayed as if in battle, controlled by the outstretched hands of the Sun God, while at either end two figures sit, on thrones, like kings. A war is coming, as we’ve been told and told. But how can there be a war if one of the kings is already dead?

Is it even possible for Ben to kill one such as Jacob? It’s remarkable how much the above picture resembles the famous Rembrandt, of Jacob fighting with the Angel. Is it possible that Jacob is not dead at all, but merely transformed, just passaging another stage of some eternal struggle?

What happens if Jacob is dead? What happens to the Tapestry he was weaving? Jacob not only weaves the cloth but he spins the thread. Jacob keeps bringing people to the Island, where as we learn they do nothing but destroy and corrupt. But Jacob does more than just lure people to the Island, he goes straight out and spins them into the kind of thread he’s looking for to complete his great masterpiece.

In his dying moment, Jacob pleads with Ben to use his Free Will. But is Jacob really the best spokesman for that cause? After all, for almost his whole life, poor Ben had sublimated his own Free Will to Jacob and his incessant decrees and commands and his lists.

You can see why Jacob advocating for Free Will enraged Ben. Like Jacob in the Bible, this Jacob is very expert at manipulating people into doing his will. Biblical Jacob was known for his Covenants, which is another word for contract or promise. We saw Jacob make contracts with little Kate

and little Sawyer,

getting both of them to make promises they’ll never be able to keep. He uses Death to force his will into the life of Sayid

and he uses the touch of Life to capture Locke.

Jacob, who robbed his brother of his Blessing, blesses Jin and Sun’s marriage, another promise, contract, covenant.

He tells Hurley that he is also blessed. And just to prove it, he gives him a free guitar.

Last but not least, he reminds Jack that if you really want a candy bar,

you could at least try to jiggle the machine before you storm off to do something rash.

What does it mean to receive the touch of Jacob? Is it a blessing or a curse? And, for all the lip service he gives to Free Will, how much is that part of Jacob’s shell game? The clue here, as to Jacob’s true agenda, might just be in his chosen symbolic icon: the spinning wheel. Historically, the spinning wheel is symbolic of the famous man of peace, Mahatma Gandhi.

“I am like God wanted me and I do as he advises me to do. Let him do with me as he pleases. If he wants to he may kill me. I believe that I do as he orders.”
-Ghandhi

Mythologically, it was Penelope who spun and wove, unmaking each night the weaving of the day before, to keep her 108 suitors at bay while her Desmond-ysseus was at sea.

But that symbolism seems all wrong for Jacob. First of all, he’s a dude, and secondly, he’s not unbuilding anything. He’s moving in the direction of Progress. He’s got a plan and he’s carrying it out. Jacob’s spinning wheel is more like that of the godly Greek sisterhood known as The Fates.

Specifically, Jacob is analogous to Clotho, the one on the left, the one who spun the thread of human life and, as such, was responsible for the magical mystery of Birth. So here we have Jacob, spinning like Clotho, creating the fates of human lives, all in the shadow of the statue of Tawaret, another ancient goddess of…you guessed it… Birth!

It seems to me that most Lost reviewers can’t resist playing symbolic tic tac toe. In Jeff Jensen’s finale review alone, he managed to compare Juliet to not only Tawaret, but Isis, Nausicaa, Oedipus’s mommy, the Holy Mother of God … oh, and Stephen King’s Carrie, too! Basically there’s almost no god, goddess or fictional archetype that can’t be swapped into this story to suit almost any interpretation. It’s childsplay.

But I have a harder time making these connections. I mean, this is how Tawaret was portrayed by Egyptian artists:

You may be wondering, like I am, what happened to the stumpy legs, the big belly and the saggy boobs. Hippo head aside, many thought, with no small justification, that the statue more closely resembled Sobek, the god of Chaos.

TPTB have apparently confirmed for all the world that the statue is indeed meant to represent Tawaret, so all we can do is go with that. Think of it as a kind of Hollywood version of a fertility goddess. Hollywood, where even a pregnant hippo can be tall and tan and lean and lovely. As a matter of fact, this fertility goddess was built kind of like a certain fertility doctor we know, the one whose heartrending death transcended the silliness of the quadrangle storyline that she was so unfortunately trapped in this year.

The character machinations of the quadrangle were so downright dumb in this episode, it’s embarrassing to even try and remember them.

Juliet jumps off the sub to save “all those people” but then they run into Jack who needs to bleach Kate out of his memory bank so he’s going to blow up the Island and hope that puts him back to never knowing her, which prompts Juliet to change her motivation completely and jump on Jack’s bandwagon because she also agrees she wishes she could go back to never having known Sawyer! Seriously!

I mean, words fail me, but… Seriously??? This is the best they could come up with for character motivations for four grown adults?

Maybe that’s why the players in this year’s triangle were all featured in flashback as immature children. We saw that Kate was getting into trouble with Tom long before she managed to help him get dead.

We saw that Sawyer never would have written his vendetta letter without Jacob’s helpful assistance.

Both Sawyer and Kate were touched by Jacob. Very tellingly, Juliet was not. Juliet learned a different lesson. When her parents gave her and her sister the divorce “talk” they managed to frame the whole thing in very fated tones. Some loves aren’t meant to be. Just because Juliet didn’t want to accept it, doesn’t mean it isn’t true.

Pinkshirt Juliet’s worst nightmare had come true and Redshirt Juliet was cutting Sawyer loose. Why? Well, it seems the whole plot hinged on Sawyer accidentally choosing a most inopportune time to give Kate this one sad, longing Look.

Faced with the all-too-revealing question of who he’d most wish to spend Forever with, Sawyer looked at Kate when he shoulda looked at Juliet. And that, as they say, was that.

Juliet was all charged up and ready to help Jack drop some Go Away Bombs. Looks on Lost are important, especially between lovers and ex lovers and would be lovers, and as we all know, finale Looks are the best kind, the kind that can send message board ship wars into hyperdrive. Even if they’re almost always misinterpreted.

As Jack dropped the bomb, our Season Five Quad Kids had their very own Finale Look.

What did this Look mean? Was it Goodbye?

With Sawyer and Juliet now separated by a death scene that had about a thousand times more feeling than their entire unbelievable relationship ever had, it’s hard to see how the Look meant anything other than farewell for this pair that was never meant to be.

But what about Kate and Jack?

Who the frack knows? Or cares? Sure, Jack wanted to destroy Kate’s memory forever and sure, he was fine with sending her ass back to jail and sure, he couldn’t be bothered to walk even a few steps to jiggle the candy machine before he blew up the Island. All of that is true. So, yes, Jack and Kate remain one of the most unappealing and uninspired couples in the history of tv romance, but that doesn’t mean they’re gone for good. All we can do is offer fervent blessings to Jacob and hope that the Quad Looks were a casting off of that entire knitting row, that we’re done, finally, with all such relationships that are not “meant to be”.

I know, I know, who am I kidding? There’s really nothing much else to be said about the silly Quad plot that mucked up the Jackisode half of the finale, except to note that there is a very loud and determined internet contingent that is unwilling to accept any possibility that Juliet, despite falling to the center of the earth and detonating a nuclear warhead, might in fact be dead. It’s true that Desmond survived a similar (?) kind of explosion in Season Three, landing naked in the middle of the jungle, none the worse for wear.

So I guess that might be a nice fantasy for Juliet’s horndog fanboys. I sympathize with those fans who’ve lost their favorite character, and Lord knows we could ill afford to lose another female from this Boys Only Club, but the clues for a living Juliet just don’t seem to be there.

It was Juliet, and only Juliet, who wasn’t touched by Jacob. Am I putting too much faith in one clue? Should I be thinking more like the geniuses who put together Bernard’s offer of tea (the fetus loves the folic acid!) and Juliet’s hand touching her stomach (or adjusting the gun sticking into her crotch), and concluded…

Yep! It’s a baby for Sawyer and Juliet in Season Six! She’s not dead. She’s going to be a mama!

Yo. There’s a limit to how far parsing clues will get you on Lost. You can use them to justify any wishful theory your heart desires, and at least for as long as the hiatus lasts, you can convince yourself that you’re the only one who truly gets it. And why not? It’s not as if actually reading the clues we’re given is all that helpful. It’s easy to get confused. For instance, did it mean anything that when Jack got clocked, it was a big red Toolbox that hit him?

I like to think so.

But then I thought the big car sized box Ilana’s boys were carrying was akin to the Ark of the Covenant. Who would have thought that guys carrying a dead body around a tropical island would want to make it ten times heavier, just for the hell of it?

Was that an icebox they had Locke in?

Clues can be tricky. Some of them may be inside jokes, but others, which might at first glance seem goofy, turn out to be quite meaningful. When Hurley painted a Sphinx as a Rehabilitative Art project, it wasn’t anything to scoff at.

Because here we are now, smothered in Egyptian imagery, unriddling the mystery of what lies in the shadow of the Four Toed Foot.

Candy bars named after Greek gods might have seemed frivolous,

but this passage on Jacob’s Tapestry forces us to speak Greek. Under a picture of tall masted sailing ships are these words:

Richard was seen building a ship in a bottle in the episode before the finale, “Follow the Leader”.

Jacob was seen awaiting the arrival of a very similar 19th century sailing vessel, another one of the many he has brought to the Island. There is a big beached boat marooned improbably on the interior of the Island, the slave ship Black Rock, out of Portsmouth, England.

Can we put two and two together here and conclude that Richard was the Captain of the Black Rock and that Jacob, after bringing him there, favored him and bestowed on him immortal life?

It sure seems possible.

What are we to make of all the Eyes we see on Lost? Jacob’s Tapestry is topped by the Eye of Horus, a symbol of godly protection being woven into history by He Who Protects Us All.

Although Ilana is a new character I seriously wish I didn’t have to care about, I couldn’t help noticing that the only thing left uncovered by her mummy makeup was her one Cyclopean eye.

What did Ilana look like before she was mummified? Is it significant that she maybe sees out of only one eye? Or is it a different eye analogy they were going for? Maybe a Third Eye kind of thing?

It’s so hard to say. In any case, it seems inevitable from what we have that Ilana has come to fight in The War on Jacob’s side. Is she a Good Guy, like Bram said, or the kind of Bad Guy who keeps saying she’s a Good Guy, like Frank hipped to?

Who will fight on the other side of The War? Not Bernard and Rose, I’m thinking.

These two were looking chill, and their Zenlike tranquility was so deep even death could not frighten them. Does this mean they are the carcasses found by Jack and Kate in the cave, the ones with the symbolic black and white rocks in their pockets, the mysterious Adam and Eve, the favorite message board guessing game for true Lost fanatics?

There’s no such thing as a straightforward clue on Lost, which is why so many of us are paranoid. It seems many fans jumped to the conclusion that the fish Jacob was seen cooking in the opening sequence was in fact an honest to God Red Herring, a trick clue designed to throw us off the trail.

But I don’t think so. First off, it’s not a Herring, which is a coldwater fish. It’s more like a Rockfish, or tropical perch, but it is a RED fish. Or yellowish anyway. Maybe it is another joke they’re playing on us, but wouldn’t that negate the entire mystical, enigmatic drama of Black and White Beachboys exchanging cryptic dialogue? That would be underhanded even for Lost. I think the fish is meant to represent instead the Ichthus, the symbol of Christ.

“Once again, the kingdom of heaven is like a net that was let down into the lake and caught all kinds of fish…The angels will come and separate the wicked from the righteous and throw them into the fiery furnace, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.”
-Matthew 13:47-50

In its most primitive form, the Jesus Fish was portrayed by ancient Christians, as an eight spoked wheel, here marked with the Greek word for Ichthus.

It’s a symbol we’ve seen so very often on Lost, the recurring theme of the Dharmachakra, the great Wheel of Life and Death. It’s another one of those instances on Lost where unrelated cultures clash and find common ground, where things that have no relationship to one another – like say, Egyptian gods and Christian saints and Buddhist imagery – are synthesized into one great big unified theme. I think the Clue of all Clues in the episode was this one:

I don’t think it was Flannery O’Connor’s story that was being referenced. Or the inside joke that “Everything Rises” just as Locke is taking a dive. Or the dove with the arrow through its heart, though certainly that soon became Jacob’s fate.

I think the important point was just the title itself: “Everything That Rises Must Converge” The title is a reference to the philosophy of the fascinating Jesuit paleontologist, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin.

No one has ever tried harder to synthesize both Science and Faith than this man, who attempted to reconcile the scientific study of evolution with the orthodox teachings of Catholicism. It wasn’t easy and he risked condemnation from his Church by doing it, but he perservered. He believed in his philosophy that all evolution, by increasing the complexity of organisms, from cell to organism to planet to solar system and whole-universe, was resulting in a Unification of Consciousness that spiralled inevitably towards an irresistible point of perfect harmony, a condition he named the Omega Point.

“”Evolution is nothing but matter become conscious of itself.”
- Julian Huxley

We have seen many times on Lost this perpetual intermingling of cultures and faiths and languages and themes.

“‘Be not afraid, open, open wide to Christ the doors of the immense domains of culture, civilization, and progress.”
-John Paul II

Instead of splitting the world into Black and White halves that can never be joined,

perhaps Jacob represents the Omega Point, the force that is drawing humanity together towards a Supreme Consciousness. If so, then Bernard and Rose were probably right. It won’t matter whether anyone lives or dies, only that they find a way to finally attain the harmony and peace that Destiny has designed for them. Jacob draws people to the Island, where time and again they are destroyed and corrupted, but all this is just the upward converging progress of human consciousness, being drawn to the one and only endpoint, towards Omega.

There are many questions left hanging for next season. Was Jack’s great race after Destiny nothing more than him creating the very same Incident that had always happend, as Miles theorized, when nobody was paying attention to him?

Did whatever happened just happen all over again?

Will Sawyer be able to overcome his grief?

Will sexy Sayid survive?

Will Sun ever get a plot?

One thing that seems inevitable is that all clues are progressing towards WAR next season. But maybe that’s the ultimate red herring. Maybe we’re being thrown off by the idea that this is a story of blacks and whites, that must inevitably clash and create chaos.

Maybe that’s not it at all. Maybe the story isn’t circling around its own beginning. Maybe instead it’s circling around Omega. And everything that happens along the way is just … Progress.

“I postpone death by living, by suffering, by error, by risking, by giving, by losing.”
-Anais Nin

In my new series, “Examining the Scene,” I will pick two to three unique, important scenes that stick out to me as special in terms of the way they are shot, cut, and directed.

With my Season 1 & 2 Blu-rays in hand, I’ve finally begun the LOST rewatch. In my first examination of a scene from the Pilot, I look at the first flashback to to before the crash. 21 minutes into the show, we get a glimpse of what the characters were like pre-crash. This is somewhat pivotal to the series, establishing the flashback for what will become the show’s major staple.

We start of with an establishing shot quickly letting the audience know where and when we are. This episode (and the next) don’t utilize the flashback sfx so they’re strictly relying on visuals to indicate when we are. The shot dollys back to reveal our main character: Jack.

Notice how Cindy is in a medium shot (MS)(waist and above) while Jack is in a medium close-up (MCU)(chest-and-above).

Life is a tragedy when seen in close-up, but a comedy in long-shot
- Charlie Chaplin

This scene is a little funny and cute. Compared to the first 20 minutes of the Pilot, this scene is down right hilarious. It’s the first departure form the dark and dreary plane crash. However, we don’t cut the medium shot of Jack right away. Staying closer on him and farther away on Cindy keeps us connected the main character. Until Jack laughs and we cut to a further away shot (indicating to us it’s funny):

As the scene dies down we’re back in the close-ups:

Then something interesting happens…

We stay on Jack for a long… long… time. Staying this close, not cutting to anything, it makes the audience nervous. Horror films do this constantly. It’s not about the big BOO, it’s about the anticipation, taking the audience to the edge. A common horror technique goes something like this: see girl walk around suburban house looking for the noise she just heard, stay on her, silent, all we hear is her footsteps; then we hear something off screen; she goes to investigate as we yell at the screen, “don’t open that door!” When she opens the door, it’s actually just her puppy that was making the noise. How cute. Relieved that there’s not a murderer in her house, she turns around and BAM there’s the guy in the mask with a giant knife!

Sound familiar? Well, here, we stay on Jack and his drink. We know the plane crashes. We know it’s coming. We know where they all end up… BUMP. “This is it!” we shout. But it’s not. It’s just turbulence. Then Jack sees that his neighbor is getting nervous.

They have an interesting moment where she tells a story of how her husband lets her know that everything is OK.

Look at this close up of Jack:

Don’t you just trust this guy? The shot is almost dead-on, as if he’s looking right at us to tell us everything is OK.

Too bad it’s not…

Cut to…

For the Season 5 finale, the LOST cast rallied and decided to act out the Bible in roughly 84 minutes. Technically, they did it in about 72 minutes, when accounting for the artificially added, twelve-minute gunfight, which I totally don’t remember being in the standard-issue Catholic go-to, King James edition.
Still, it was all very impressive.
My only gripe was not getting to see Ben and John’s rendition of “Jesus Christ Superstar,” which I understand had to be cut for time.
And while that duet would’ve been killer, I’d be grossly remiss if I didn’t state, right here and now, that I am effing thrilled with “The Incident.” I think it was brilliantly executed.
Also, I am totally 100 percent crushing on Jacob.
Wait…was that a blasphemous statement?
Forgive me Father, for I have sinned…

Dear Micro-Me…

Dear Micro-Lyndsey (circa 1987),
I know you hate it. I know you cannot comprehend why your mother inflicts this gnarly-ass extra hour of ‘school’ upon you every Sunday, especially AFTER you’ve been made to sit through that interminable Roman Catholic mass.
Still, I heartily encourage you to pay attention to those seemingly ‘meaningless’ parables that bore you so…
While I am trying to keep your life as ‘spoiler-free’ as possible, I will tell you that one day you’ll have a favorite show in the whole wide world (no, not “Who’s the Boss?”,) and all of this preachy nonsense will suddenly thread itself together and become the genesis of a most awe-inspiringly intricate web of characters and events, which you will come to know as, “LOST…”
This is precisely why you will not regret devoting some time to the tale of Esau and his kid brother Jacob.
Their pals Thomas, Moses and Judas are wicked fun too…
I swear to God (even though we aren’t supposed to,) that it’ll be worth your time.
Trust me on this one; I’m from the future.
Love,
Macro-Lyndsey (circa 2009)

“One of these days, sooner or later, I’m going to find a loophole, my friend.”

Jacob weaves his divine threads of creation, and then catches a super-symbolic salmon to satiate the Original Hunger.
Jacob is joined by Esau a conspicuously unnamed, diametrically-opposed-older-brother-type, on the beach. They converse as The Black Rock approaches from the sea, and it quickly becomes obvious that Jacob and The Other Boleyn Girl the guy who really wants to kill him, seem to have majorly disparate opinions on the whole ‘You-can’t-change-the-future’/‘Oh-yes-I-can!’ debate.

“If I could chhaaaannngggeee the world…” Eric Clapton

Radzinsky thinks consequences are for pussies.
And in spite of his Eric Clapton-inspired eyewear, Stuey is not a pussy.
Far from it, actually.
He’s really a lot like the O.G. badass, Thomas Edison.
And thank Jacob God!
Because, just think of where we would be sans electricity and you know, The Swan Station…

“Yes, I lied. That’s what I do.” Ben Linus

The jig is up.
Ben admits that he’s a total phony and that he’s never seen Jacob. He feels blue.
I’m sure it doesn’t help that just 20 paces to the left, Richard and John swap ‘Super-Special-Island-Guy’ beauty secrets.
Ben feels way left out, as he is neither age-less nor un-dead.
He suddenly wishes he hadn’t been so cavalier with Ethan’s life, because hey, at least Ethan was loyal. Sigh.
But now Ben is loyal.
To his leader… John Locke.
And John Locke decrees that Ben must kill Jacob.
Because he said so. And actually, he’s doing Ben a favor.
Just as Ben did for Locke when he delivered Anthony Cooper to John for retribution…
Though, thinking back, that didn’t really go so well, did it?

Even God Changed His Mind on Occasion…

Richard attempts to enroll Jack in some ‘John-Locke-Ain’t-All-That’ trash talk, for which Jack is traditionally totally game.
However, recently, Jack’s had a change of heart re: Crazy-Leg-John.
He’s developed a soft spot for the guy and his ‘Destiny’ mumbo-jumbo.
He encourages Richard not to ‘count John out’ just yet.
Because John is his disciple or apostle or whatever.
Awesome.
*The preceding ‘awesome’ was a retrospective, sarcastic ‘awesome,’ brought to you from the future. This ‘awesome’ is a Variable and was derived from the end of the episode. If things had gone differently, I’d not have added that bit of sarcasm, as it would not exist. Or would it? *
Juliet also changes her mind.
And hey, even though Juliet is not God or even Jack, it’s still her prerogative and she’ll do what she wants to do.
So she stages a flashy ‘Coup d’Sub’ and heads back to the Island to live together , die alone save the Others.
And also to escape Sawyer’s moony-eyed ‘Kate-looks.’
Which was sad, because I for one totally got sucked into all the “Blondie” and “I love you, back,” Suliet stuff. Which I’d resisted. For a long while.
As the French say, “Que Sera, Sera…”

“I’m sorry that this happened to you…” Jacob

Jacob bops around spreading his divinity and touching his ‘chosen ones.’
Please note that Juliet was not ‘touched.’
Except for by Sawyer, who is pretty effing divine himself, so I would’ve called it a wash, except for the fact that Sawyer is not actually God, Jesus, Jacob or any other savior. Turns out that sheer physical beauty and hella quick wit, do not a deity make.
Also, the presence of Jules’ red t-shirt (never a good color choice in a finale sitch) just didn’t bode well…

“We hide in plain sight” Sayid

So Ellie is ‘in charge’…
Even though Richard claimed (in “Whatever Happened, Happened”) that he does not answer to Ellie or Charles. Still, upon performing the now-famous “LOST-gun-to-the-back-of-the-head-knockout,” he declares that he did it to protect his leader, Ellie. He sends Jack and Sayid into the wild (a.k.a.- alarms blazing, almost-Incident-ridden Camp o’ The Others.)
Sayid, feeling fortified by his discovery of Horace’s ‘mathematician’ jumpsuit, does some quick calculations and remembers that the quickest way to get from point A to point B is via straight line, and suggests that he and Jack make their way directly through the fracas. Sadly, Uncle Rico is still all angsty toward ‘the Hostile who shot his kid,’ and he promptly shoots Sayid in the stomach.
Hey, an ‘eye for an eye’ or a ‘stomach for a stomach,’ you know?
Once again, Hurls and his mystery ship Dharma van, arrive just in time to scoop Jack and Co. up, and expediently transport them far away from “The Battle at Dharma-ville.”

“It’s always something with you people” Rose

Post-‘Great Sub Escape,’ Sawyer, Kate and Juliet paddle furiously toward the Island.
Kate and Sawyer share a moment. Juliet cries on the inside.
Once they arrive on the beach, Juliet and Kate share a moment and have a laugh about all those times they bitch-slapped one another.
That was their internal dialogue anyway…
Suddenly, Demon Dog Vincent makes an appearance, which prompts the much-anticipated re-appearance of Earth Mother Rose and Scraggly Beard Bernard.
Bernard has clearly spent the last 3 years enjoying the herbal offerings of the mysterious Jungle and dancing naked in the moonlight with his beloved.
Island ‘retirement’ has been good for the Phil Collins (a.k.a.- Genesis) fans, and they care not at all to shoot people and save lives and stress out over shit like, saving the universe, man…
They point ‘Team Stop-Jack’ toward the barracks and bid them adeiu.
But not before Bernie asks Jules to stay for the weekend, and invites her to enjoy a spot of the delicious magic mushroom tea he’s concocted.
She seems momentarily tempted, but instead opts to forge on with her love and his love.

“In my experience, the people who go out of their way to tell you they are the good guys are the bad guys.” Frank J. Lapidus

Massively good call, Frank.
Call me a cynic, but I’ve gotta agree that the truly good, authentic people in life, tend not to harp on said ‘goodness.’.
Still, Frank (the ‘Candidate’) joins Team Ilana (against his will) and immediately wishes that he hadn’t been given access to ‘Locke-in-a-box.’
Especially after his new ‘friends’ start burning and looting…
Frank may be a helluva pilot, but has no experience with extinguishing forest fires.
He’s also not down with the whole ***“And the enemies set fire to the house of God, and broke down the wall of Jerusalem, burnt all the towers, and whatsoever was precious they destroyed,” nonsense. ***(2 Chronicles 36:19)

“I don’t speak Destiny” Sawyer

Team Destiny runs into an issue, in the form of Team Free-Will.
It’s all so ‘Hatfield’s vs. McCoy’s’…
Just as Jack and John had once done, Sawyer and Jack settle in for  ‘5-Minutes-Tops’ leader talk.
Sawyer channels Churchill and requests that Jack pull up a tree stump, so they might speak like gentlemen. Jack refuses. Sawyer insists. Jack obliges.
This is already going better than ‘Locke-Talk ‘05’

Sawyer spills his tragic tale to Jack and concludes that even though he knew that he’d have been able to prevent his tragedy, he’d decided not to. Because what’s done is done (read: ‘Whatever Happened, Happened’.)
He asks Jack what he wants…because “a man always does what he does because he wants something for himself.”
Jack admits that he’d wanted Kate. And he’d had what he’d wanted.
But now it was too late to get her back, so he’d rather change the course of the entire Universe, in hopes that he might ‘Eternal Sunshine-ize’ his mind and heart.
This is clearly the logical thing to do, as Jack is obviously not a fan of the ol’ “get over it and move on,” school of thought.
Sawyer sees that Jack is pretty solid in his decision to nuke the Island, so he takes the opportunity to kick Jack’s ass. And groin. Which I can imagine was no picnic for Jack.
Juliet saunters in, just in time to save Jack from Sawyer’s years of pent-up aggression.
Jack slips away during Jules announcement that she’s defecting from Team Stop-Jack.
Though Sawyer was the heavy favorite in his scuffle with Jack, Juliet turns the tables and easily decimates Sawyer when she spits the reason behind her sudden ‘change of mind.’
It seems she and Jack are now on a common mission… to avoid losing the ones they loved and skip the heartbreak altogether, by never encountering them in the first place.

Same Line…Different Time

*Radzinsky learns that the ‘Hostiles’ will soon descend upon the site of the future Swan Station. He commands Phil to fortify the perimeter so that “when they get here, we’ll be ready for them,” which is exactly what Jack said when Karl informed the 815-ers that the Others were coming “NOW!” back in S3’s “Greatest Hits.”

* Kate wipes the blood from Jack’s head wound and they discuss how it ‘feels like a million years ago’ that she first stitched Jack up in the Jungle.

A similar line was uttered in S3’s “There’s No Place Like Home,” as the two waited for the ‘rescue’ helicopter. That time it was Jack who commented, “It feels like a hundred years ago that we first came out here.”

Shortly thereafter Jack repeats his favorite convince-Kate line, “Are you with me?”

And just like that, Kate is magically re-enrolled on Team Destiny.

Back at the van, Sayid gets weaker and Jack promises him that ‘this will work’ and Sayid will be saved. Sayid disagrees, claiming, “Nothing can save me.”
Jack stomps off to prove him wrong, and throws some metaphorical salt in Sawyer’s gaping wound as they pass in the Jungle, by promising to “See him in Los Angeles.”

“So maybe the best thing to do is nothing? I’m glad you all thought this through.” Miles

Miles suggests that maybe “The Incident” was always Jack setting off the nuke, and that perhaps everyone needs to just, like, let everything run its course. Clearly Miles has NEVER MET EVEN ONE OF THESE PEOPLE.
Jules vetoes the ‘sitting still’ plan and Team Help-Jack, head for The Swan.

“This Don’t Look like LAX” Sawyer

Phil spies Jack and another madcap shoot-out begins. The ‘Van that Dharma Built’ once again squeals into town, in just the knick of time. Sawyer saves Jack by taking Phil hostage… which  seemed like a way ill-conceived plan, right from the start.
I mean, seriously?
PHIL?
I’m a loyalist and all, but were I as hell bent on ‘changing the world’ as Radzinsky seemed, the sacrifice of that woman-beater Phil, would be the least of my concerns…

Still, Sawyer’s gun-to-head-of-Unibrow tactic seems to have worked, and after his trademark “5 second pause for fear,” Jack drops the bomb.
And we wait. And wait. And wait…
And then we collectively realize that perhaps in his weakened condition, Sayid’s
‘re-jiggering’ of the bomb, so that it detonates on impact, may have gone awry.
But before any brilliant new plans can be hatched, that crazy magnetic force that Alvarez got caught up in, unleashes itself times a bazillion, causing major issues. And while it was gratifying to see un-Radzinsky and his entire Jeep of cronies get sucked into the vortex, as well as watch Phil become the victim of “flaming-arrows-2.0” better known as “metal rods through the chest,” what happened next broke my wretched heart.
And I cried.
And so did you.
Deny it if you must, but Sawyer fighting for Juliet’s doomed life was phenomenal.
And gut-wrenchingly poetic. And, in my mind, maybe the saddest goodbye on LOST…ever (don’t maul me Charlie-lovers…it’s an opinion.)

“I’m the same man I’ve always been” John Locke

I am totally not a gloater, but I would now like to gently point out how totally ‘un-Locke’ S5 John Locke really is. Was. Whatever.
John and Co. arrive at the statue and he promptly gets snippy with Richard regarding why they’ve stopped. Rich-y totally faces John when he tells him that they’ve stopped because they’ve arrived.
John proceeds to get all lippy with Richard and accuse him of “making up rules,” after he suggests that Jacob would prefer to speak ONLY to the leader…
And that only one leader is allowed on the Island at a time.
This causes John to play his “But-I’m-the-leader-and-what-I-say-goes” card for the 90th time in the past three episodes.
Ben and John proceed into Jacob’s lair…

“I’m a Pisces” Ben Linus

Benjamin Linus is a Pisces. Jacob Jesus was also said to be a Pisces.
The symbol of Pisces? Why, a fish of course.
Just like the symbol of Jesus, which somehow reminds me of the fish Jacob filleted on that rock, all those years ago. Fun.
Other notable Pisces?

Bobby Fischer- Chess Genius. Ben also likes chess…
Maurice Ravel- Composer and Famed Concert Pianist. Ben enjoys the piano…
Albert Einstein- Scientist- concocted some theory about time being relative. Tres’ Ben…

And last but totally un-least:
Linus Pauling- Scientist and peace activist
Pauling was born in Portland, Oregon. Just like Ben…

According to Wikipedia:

*During the Second World War, Pauling worked on military research and development. However, when the war ended he became particularly concerned about the further development and possible use of atomic weapons and with the destruction inflicted on the world by war in general.”
* In 1946, he joined the Emergency Committee of Atomic Scientists, chaired by Albert Einstein.
*In 1962, Pauling was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his campaign against above ground nuclear testing. His beliefs were not without controversy at the time and he was criticized by some for his actions.
* Linus Pauling died of cancer.
* Benjamin Linus had cancer as well, but our Linus also had Jack…

I wouldn’t dare to attempt to connect all of the above with the Benjamin Linus we saw last night, but I like the connections that might be drawn in terms of Ben actually being a ‘good guy’. I’ve clung to this hope that Ben really has a genuine love for something other than Ben, and that he was simply protecting that thing, by any means necessary.
The Ben we saw last night was the pretty much the anti-Ben.
We saw a complete character 180 and it was wholly powerful.
Pre-finale-Ben totally hinged on the idea that he was special.
That he was chosen.
That he was a leader.
And now he thinks that he was merely a pawn…

And he is spinning.

“NO EFFING WAY!” Collective viewer outcry post ‘Locke-in-the-box’ reveal

Ilana and crew arrive at the statue for a quick show-and-tell with Richard starring the corpse of ‘John Locke 1.0.’
Sun was already craving a stiff drink and this revelation only serves to stoke that desire.

“What about me?” Benjamin Linus

Jacob and Not-Exactly-John exchange not-so-pleasantries.
Jacob acknowledges that Non-John has found his ‘loophole,’ and then he addresses Ben.
Ben is fired up, vengeful, and ready to scrap.
He makes a stirring speech about ‘always doing what he was told and continually being ignored.’
He is a man spurned and he is done with doing as he’s been instructed…
He asks what was wrong with him.
“What about me?” he yells
Jacob calmly sneers, “What about you?”
Ben replies by stabbing Jacob…exactly as he’d been instructed to.
Ahhh Bartleby. Ahhh Humanity.

With his last, dying breath, Jacob warns Non-John that “they are coming.”
Non-John tosses Jacob into the hell-fire and watches him burn.

But here’s the kicker…Jacob totally goads Ben into killing him.

He was dealing with an emotional madman and instead of giving him the ‘choice,’ as he’d always done (even if it was a manipulative, faux-choice) he made sure that Ben would snap. He needed Ben to kill him.
Exactly as he always had. Exactly as he was meant to. So that everything would be ‘Constant.’
But then Juliet got her hands on the bomb…

The Last and Final Sacrifice

Juliet finds herself up close and personal with that dang faulty bomb.
She makes her final sacrifice. Her final choice. And she chooses ‘faith.’
She detonates the bomb. And she changes everything.
White screen… blank slate…Tabula Rasa.
The ‘black’ had been written. The ‘black’ had been the Constant.
The white is still un-written…it’s the Variable in the truest sense.
Juliet was the Variable.
She was never ‘touched’ by Jacob.
No one knows anything from here forth.
And though, according to Jacob, there is but ‘one ending,’ we are left to wonder if this particular brand of ‘progress’ is big enough to change all of that?

A New Thought for a New Day

We are all familiar with the story of Jesus and his Judas.
The widely accepted version of the tale dictates that Judas betrayed Jesus by delivering him to the Romans.
But what if that weren’t exactly the case?
According to the ‘Gospel of Judas’, Judas and Jesus struck a deal whereby Judas would deliver Jesus to the Romans so that Jesus could carry out his duty to God.
This ancient scroll was written in the 2nd century AD,  and described the story of Jesus’ death from the viewpoint of Judas.
“Where was this thing discovered?” you ask…
Beni Masah, Egypt.
During the 1970’s.
In a leather-bound Coptic papyrus (probably just like the journal that Daniel carried…)

I am not necessarily saying that Ben IS Judas.
In fact, in addition to his Judas-y characteristics, Ben is a fun Moses, Thomas, Andrew hybrid.
Along with a slew of others, I’m sure.
In the end, I think that drawing direct parallels to the Bible is a bit of a cop-out, but I do think there is merit in some of the conclusions that might be drawn through consideration of these possibilities.

I’m also liking the idea that Jacob may actually be Aaron.
Yes, I know that I have previously shunned this notion, but what if he were?
And what if (as Miles pointed out) the future has already happened and essentially becomes the past, thus the actual ‘timeline’ (1954, 1977, 2007,) would matter not at all?
Because its all ‘past’…
What if the ‘Esau’ figure isn’t actually a brother at all?
Might he be anOther?
Might he be a version of Ben or Jack or Christian or someone else entirely?
Food for thought…

Just Asking/ Saying…

* Simon was the father of Judas. ‘Simon’s Butcher Shop’ served as Benny’s ‘dead-Locke storage,’ as he attempted to gather the O6.
* Ben could not kill Widmore, just as ‘Esau’ could not kill Jacob.
Do the players change, but the rules remain constant?

* Both John and Ben have Mother’s named Emily. Neither John nor Ben appears to be as ‘special’ as they’d hoped. Might John and Ben represent ‘twins?’ Warring brothers? Duality? Cain and Abel?
* The still-intact statue holds an ankh.
* Jacob physically touches each 815 survivor that he ‘chooses.’
* What’s Frank’s story? Why him?
* Nadia is killed in the same over-the-top, way-fake looking manner that Juliet’s ex-husband was.
* John Locke ‘never should have survived’ his eight-story window tumble.
Seems as though he may not have. Good thing Jacob was hanging around…
* Jin wrote out his wedding vows (as did Jack’s ex, Sarah). Sun wings it (a la Jack)
* Christian always believed in Jack. But, it seems Jack may not have always believed in Jack.
* Hurley is discharged from jail. Against his will.
* Ever the easy mark, Hurls believes it was really his ‘choice’ to get on Flight 316.
* The knife Ben uses to kill Jacob is the knife that John ‘chose’ as the thing that was ‘already his,’ when Richard visited him as a child.
* The music playing behind Ben’s maniacal stabbing of Jacob is a total ode to “Psycho”
* Jacob ‘makes the thread’ (of life) by hand. He spins his own silk.
This totally brings me back to S1’s “The Moth.”
In that episode, Locke attempts to save Charlie from relapse by explaining the mysterious nature of struggle.

Locke: Come here. Let me show you something. What do you suppose is in that cocoon, Charlie?
Charlie: I don’t know. A butterfly, I guess.
Locke: No, it’s much more beautiful than that. That’s a moth cocoon. It’s ironic. Butterflies get all the attention. But moths, they spin silk. They’re stronger, faster…
Charlie: That’s wonderful, but…
Locke: You see this little hole? This moth’s just about to emerge. It’s in there right now, struggling. It’s digging its way through the thick hide of the cocoon. Now, I could help it. Take my knife, gently widen the opening, and the moth would be free. But it would be too weak to survive. The struggle is nature’s way of strengthening it.

Could John be the real ‘Judas’?
Could he be supporting the ‘true’ leader’s strength by forcing his (or her) struggle?

“Whoever undertakes to set himself up as a judge of Truth and Knowledge is shipwrecked by the laughter of the gods.” Albert Einstein

Technorati Tags: LOST With Lyndsey

As we all prepare for the finale, let’s look at the visual and editorial clues in “Follow The Leader”. It was an excellently directed episode in terms of preparing us for the finale. All pre-finale Lost episodes have tons of moving shots when going into a new scene. A lot of Dolly-Ins that really feel like the story is moving somewhere and heading in a specific direction.

However, I’d like to start of by apologizing that I did not end up writing an article for “The Variable” nor did I finish the rest of “Some Like it Hoth”. Much like Juliet reminiscing about the ‘real world’, the real world caught up with me and I got swamped with films that required my attention. After the finale, I plan to go back to the beginning and analyze the Pilot. I want to work out a schedule where I make it through the entire series leading up to the premiere of Season 6. Since there’s roughly 102 episodes prior to Season 6, I hope to do two episodes per week.

Now, on to “Follow The Leader”.

The first scene is the normal Lost handheld style for Island happenings.

A high-angle POV from our character’s perspective.

High-angle on Widmore showing that he has power. A lens flare is peaking through (usually a cinematographer’s worst nightmare but sometimes used for empahsis).

The shot where Widmore enters is a moving shot, in tone with all Pre-Season Finale episode styles. Moving shots indicate change, indicate that there’s something going on.

Super-Duper Brief Recap

Season 5 Episode 16 “Follow the Leader”- Ellie kills her future son and then invites Jack and Kate back to her tent for tea explanations.
Jack wants to play with Jughead; an activity that Kate wants no part of. They fight.
John, Richard and Ben re-unite. They make an odd trio.
Sawyer protects Kate and is brutally beaten by Radzinsky.
Phil proves that he really is the son of a motherless goat, when he hits Juliet.
It’s disgusting.
Miles gets closure on his Daddy issues.
Team Jack and Team Ellie merge to create Team Destiny, forcing Kate to strike out on her own and form Team Free-Will.

The Island Really IS in a Time Loop

Author’s Note: I’m in Hawaii. I will be here for a long time to come. I was unreasonably stoked to watch “Follow the Leader” and next week’s “The Incident,” in the land where the show is shot (okay, I’m on Maui, but the idea is there…)
I waited all day, forcing myself to avoid the Internet during the interminable six hours between the East coast airing and the Hawaiian airing…
Finally, at 8:56pm, I turn on the television, flip to ABC and see… Juliet and Sawyer.
On a submarine. And she is asking him ‘what they will do when they get to Ann Arbor.’

And my heart breaks. Apparently, one must never take for granted that LOST airs at 9pm everywhere on Earth. It does not.
My record totally skipped and my only consolation is that at least this nonsense didn’t happen during the finale.

As an aside, my Sirius Satellite Radio does not work here due to ‘poor signal quality,’ so I am currently seeking volunteers to help triangulate a signal and get that beast transmitting. Just saying….
Alas, here is my belated take on “Follow the Leader…”

“Take Me to Your Leader…Whoever the Hell He or She May Be…”

Post-tragic-Daniel-death, Kate and Jack hide like ‘rats’ in the Jungle and argue.
Jack wants to charge the camp and save Daniel; Kate thinks this is a really bad plan.
Jack preaches the merits of blank slate.
Otherwise known as ‘Tabula Rasa.’
Kate preaches the virtue of the experience.
Otherwise known as ‘Kate-is-sad-that-Jack-wishes-they’d-never-met.’
Jack doesn’t give a hoot.
The argument is unceremoniously ended when Widmore clocks Jack in the head with his gun resulting in the capture of K&J.
Ellie and Charles have a lover’s quarrel, which Richard wisely attributes to the fact that love is ‘complicated.’
Thank God we have Richard on board as the resident Island consigliore, because that ‘love is complicated’ stuff was a total gem and not at all obvious.
Anyway, Ellie wins the argument and Jack and Kate are untied.
They retire to Ellie’s tent for bourbon and cigars and re-join their Jungle disagreement, already in progress.

“And the Beat Goes On…” Sonny and Cher

Radzinsky beats Sawyer in vain attempt to acquire intel re: Kate’s whereabouts.
Sawyer ain’t playin’; which seems more than a mite vexing to Juliet.
Horace proves to be a super shitty leader and also a massive wuss, when he bitches out in the face of Radzinsky and Phil’s collective fists of fury.

Once an 815-er…

Jack done taught Hurley well.
Miles and Jin send Hurls to the Barracks to collect rations to sustain them at the beach.
Hurley believes that they are about to embark on ‘Operation Save Suliet,’ and is quick to remind his cohorts that Sawyer would never leave them behind.
This turns out to be a false statement.
Still, Hurley was clearly trained in the ‘No man left behind,’ ‘live together, die alone’ school of Island survival, and he cannot help but return to his roots when the going gets tough.

Dr. Chang: So you fought in the Korean War? Hurley: There’s no such thing.

Best. Hurley. Dialogue.
Maybe ever…
The interrogation scene, between Dr. Chang (trying to get Hurls to admit that they are from the future) and Hurley (denying this balderdash,) was brilliant.
It was classic, loveable Hurls.
After admitting that they are indeed from the future (which finally seems to be the ‘get out of jail free’ card it was always meant to be,) Miles and Pierre share a completely unremarkable moment of  ‘Oh, so yeah… we are related…’
In their defense, I guess the imminent cataclysmic event on the cusp of occurrence, could be regarded as something of a buzz-kill.
Miles vouches for Danny’s pristine ‘time-related-event’ accuracy record, and P.F. Chang orders the evacuation of the Island.
Right on schedule.

Speaking of ‘Right on Schedule…’

Three years after his hasty departure, John waltzes back to the Others camp toting a massive boar and a brand new attitude.
Richard acknowledges the latter and John credits the change to ‘having a purpose.’
Ben appears not to be so lucky.
He is battered, bruised, and (thanks to Smokey) forced to follow Locke around like, well…like Locke is the leader.
Witty repartee between John and Ben ensues but ends quickly due to time constraints.
John Locke is on a mission. And Ben and Richard live but to serve him.
Praise ye fearless leader…
The incongruous trio head toward the Beech craft so that John can walk Richard through saving him, which he does… exactly as he should. Or did. Or will. Or always has.

“In this journey, you’re the journal, I’m the journalist. Am I eternal or an eternalist?” Eric B & Rakim

This episode focuses on leaders and such, and in following that theme, I must state my open concern for the current condition of the D.I. hierarchy.
First, Radzinsky wrests control from Horace as he and his bitch-boy Phil, commence training for a future in the UFC all over Sawyer and Juliet’s faces.
Then Chang, whom I’d assumed was an upper-echelon Dharma-guy, also allows his authority to be wholly mitigated by the Swan-architect-turned-terrorist, Radzinsky.
This entire thing is way disturbing and though the D.I. is in an understandable state of turmoil, why is Radzinsky suddenly the go-to guy?
I blame this egregious leadership failure on the Republicans.
I’m not sure why precisely, but blaming the GOP seems super-effective these days; thus I shall take the cue from my leaders and follow suit…

“Then away he’ll schlep on his elephant Shep while Fella and Ursula stay in step” George of the Jungle

Kate’s totally over the merger of Team Jack with Team Ellie.
She decides she’d rather leave on her own, than swim into bomb-laden tunnels with ‘Team Destiny.’
Sadly, this is simply not in the cards, as Ellie feels she’s already said too much in front of her new ‘friends.’ Just as some heathen named Erik, cocks his rifle in Kate’s direction, two shots ring out and Erik keels over. Sayid, doing his best George of the Jungle impression, emerges from the foliage.
Ahhhhhhhh! Watch out for that tree!

“Oh, you can’t help that,” said the Cat: “we’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad.”

Kate remains steadfast in her belief that while arson is sometimes excusable, detonating bombs and shooting children is never okay.
Jack pleads ‘innocent by reason of destiny.’
Kate equates him with that other crazy F.O.D. (Friend of Destiny), John Locke.
She vows to stop him and runs off to gather the rest of ‘their people.’
She hopes they’ll have her back…

Speaking of Having Someone’s Back…

Sawyer has Juliet’s. And he tells her so.
Juliet loves Sawyer. She tells him so.
He loves her back… which he openly states.
There is so much communication happening here that I almost forgot that I was watching LOST.
Until Kate falls down the rabbit hole steps through the submarine hatch.
Then I remembered…
And so did Sawyer.
And so did Juliet.

Ben Sawyer Always Has a Plan…

In this case, the plan is to run far, far away from Ann Arbor and use his future-knowledge to pick stocks and bet big on sporting events.
That sounds just like what Widmore did to make his fortune…
Still, something tells me Suliet may never make it Ann Arbor, let alone their local O.T.B. facility.

“You’ll find he is a whiz of a Wiz! If ever a Wiz! there was…”

John gathers his people and makes a Jack-style speech about not blindly believing in that which we cannot see (read: Jacob).
He tells them that he intends to unmask the wizard (read: Jacob).
He also intends to kill the wizard (read: Jacob), but he (wisely) doesn’t mention that fact to his people…
And on his ‘people…’
I couldn’t help but notice that Richard seemed just a smidge condescending towards John and his ‘new leader-whims,’ throughout this episode.
He seemed to be placating John the Baptist.
It’s almost as though Richard is allowing John to believe he is the actual leader while in reality, he is merely paving the way for Jack , the true prodigal son.
Just thinking aloud…

“The best executive is the one who has sense enough to pick good men to do what he wants done, and self-restraint to keep from meddling with them while they do it.” Theodore Roosevelt

Technorati Tags: LOST With Lyndsey

That said, WOW! Wowee wowee wow wow. Didja see when the smoke monster…? And he shot Desmond…? And Locke looking all…? And Miles & Hurley going all Han & Chewy on us…? And Dan! Poor Dan. Poor Ellie. Poor everyone. It’s so not going to end well. At least Des is on the mend and looks like he’ll be OK. For now. (*insert ominous music here*)

Season 5 of Lost is now and forevermore to be known as the Greek Tragedy Season™. And it’ll be even more of a tragedy for me if I don’t start tearing through the last few episodes.

But don’t panic. Base eight is just like base ten really…if you’re missing two fingers. Shall we have a go at it? Hang on.

I know that the above quote from dear Mr. Lehrer doesn’t really apply so much except for the “Hang on” sentiment, except perhaps in that, throughout the present-day narrative in “Dead Is Dead,” Ben was starting to show us a side of himself that we’d rarely seen: the side that has a problem he’s not sure how to solve. In fact, harking back to “He’s Our You,” Post-Donkey-Wheel-Turn Ben has if anything been someone giving the appearance of fighting the future. Granted, he’s using a very advanced toolkit of skills and resources that allows him to improvise better than some people’s best-laid plans, and he’s fighting with the tenacity of an animal in a trap willing to gnaw off its own leg, but the fact remains.

In the grandest of Lost traditions, “Dead Is Dead” has re-contextualized previously-seen events, making us see them in a whole new way. From his reveal as the leader of the Others at the end of Season 2 to Ms. Hawking dressing him down in “The Lie,” Ben Linus looked like one of The Major Players in the grand game at the heart of the show. But the cracks in that façade started becoming more and more obvious as time went on…and around…and twisted back on itself…and, well, you get the idea.

But now…now we see it differently. We see Ben chastising Widmore for being too seduced by the perks of being The Other Lama™ only to become, if anything, even more seduced by them in the post-DHARMA era than Widmore likely ever was. Don’t get to literal in assessing the story of Alex as pertains to Ben’s life. When Smokey was showing him that montage (and, by the way, does Smokey moonlight as the background in inane political commercials for wingnut groups? Just askin’…), it wasn’t that Alex’s life was being held as more valuable to the Island than anyone else Ben ever killed, cheated, tricked, or lied to. It was that the story of Ben’s adoptive…OK, larcenous…fatherhood of Alex was indicative of lost humanity.

Ben went from sparing Rousseau’s life and adopting young Alex to being the doting father and faithful Island steward to being willing to sacrifice teenage Alex like a piece on a chessboard. He’d come to value his position and power more than the life of the person closest to him in the entire world. And even then he didn’t get it, choosing not to atone but to compound the wrong by storming down the path of vengeance, willing to take the life of someone who’s never done him a single wrong rather than admit his own complicity in Alex’s death.

It seems that the Island needs its leaders to be able to make hard decisions and do dirty work, but it also needs them to retain their sense of compassion for their fellow human. Why else would the knife be such a deeply wrong choice in the Other Lama Test™? The seed of that humanity remains, as witnessed by Ben’s hesitation to kill Penny Widmore when her golden-haired moppet showed up saying, “Mommy?” And I suspect that this is the only reason that Ben wasn’t killed outright by Smokey the way Eko was at the end of “The Cost of Living.”

And his penance of serving Locke faithfully with a great, big, bolded, italicized, all-caps OR ELSE? Priceless. The Island won’t have any of this self-preservation or -aggrandization. Oh, no, you have to give big, bad Papa Island everything—your pride, your faith, even your life.

You’re the largest liar that was ever created. You and Pinocchio are probably related!

Now, I don’t know if you’ve read your Dante, but the Ninth and lowest Circle of Hell was reserved for traitors and betrayers. And Ben’s betrayed everyone at every turn. He betrayed his father (who admittedly kind of deserved it) by killing him, he betrayed his extended DHARMA family by helping plot their slaughter, he betrayed his leader (Widmore) by mutinying, he betrayed the Island by going off course in so many ways, he betrayed Sayid by cutting loose after making an assassin of him, he betrayed both Locke and Juliet so many times it’s not even funny, and then he betrayed the Island again by coming back when he wasn’t supposed to.

Even despite the admonition…and threat…from Smokey-as-Alex, can anyone really think that he isn’t going to turn around and betray everyone (but especially Locke) again before all’s said and done?

What’s more, what always seems to lurk behind the betrayal is the raw, festering wound that was young, Roger-abused Ben. Think back to his tantrum to Juliet as Ben pettily showed her Goodwin’s decaying body, his petulance as he turned the Frozen Donkey Wheel, his “nyah-nyah” attitude anytime he’s one-upped someone.

The only conclusion I can draw is that Ben, for all his intelligence and endurance (I mean, the man spends most of his time in a state of recovery from being beaten to within an inch of his life, doesn’t he?), is like a child with a toy. Big, bad Charles has what I want. WAAA! Mean old John and Richard want to take my magic box away. WAAA! I’m being sent to my room (the outside world) for being bad. WAAA!

The ultimate tantrum/betrayal of wounded-child Ben can only be yet to come — probably as Ben tries to either a) ingratiate himself with the “Shadow of the Statue” people and/or b) destroy same from within — and you don’t want to be anywhere nearby when it happens.

Gimme head with hair…long beautiful hair. Shining, gleaming, streaming, flaxen, waxen!

OK, I have to ask. Are the hair & makeup people on Lost having an extended joke at our expense? I mean first, we get Jack’s chin-badger. Then we get the Michael Emerson in the ludicrous rug pictured to the right. And Alan Dale in a piece that looks to me eerily like a more “salty” version of my departed father’s kinky salt-n-pepper ‘do. The rest of the time, Lost’s actor image enhancers seem to do such a good job, too.

At least Dale got a stand-in to play his younger Widmore of Arabia self. And Fionnula Flanagan got no less than two stand-ins for various points along her personal history as Eloise “Don’t Call Me Ellie” Hawking.

But we’re actually supposed to buy Emerson as a twentysomething. I mean, the guy’s an amazing actor and all, but at this point I’m surprised they didn’t try to have him play tween Ben as well just to mess with us.

And the second we see Desmond in a novelty nose, glasses, and mustache, I’m taking a hostage.

Right before your eyes see the laughter from the skies and he laughs until he cries, then he dies, then he dies. Come inside, the show’s about to start, guaranteed to blow your head apart!

But the centerpiece (as opposed to the hairpiece) of the episode was the Ben & Locke Show, which has now taken a dramatic reversal. Suddenly, Ben’s mojo is completely gone with his former dupe, John Locke. He can still work a yokel like Caesar without difficulty (alas, poor Ceasar, did we hardly know ye?), even sow the seeds of doubt with no less a Ben-skeptic than Sun.

But rain-divining, Island-attuned, fully faithful Messiah Locke is having none of it, and is going to make a truth out of Ben’s probable lie that he came back to be judged for his misdeeds. And along the way from watching Ben’s waking eyes bug out over seeing him, the resurrected Locke played an oddly ascendant Virgil to Ben’s Dante, out to strip away all of Ben’s self-deception and ensure that the Island actually did get its chance to judge its former Anointed One.

From continued needling about Ben’s notion to engage in the New Otherton (née Dharmaville) “pharisee” life, to reminding Ben that all his manipulations have left him alone, to rubbing Ben’s nose in his previous treatment of Locke, to the repeated hints that Locke was “something [Ben] can’t control,” to ultimately driving home the point that it was no one’s fault but his own (well, and Keamy’s) that Alex was killed. The canary in the coal-mine of Ben’s soul was dead because the toxicity had gotten too high.

But it was Smokey in the guise of Alex who ultimately got through to Ben, laying bare his intent to kill Locke anew and assigning him that most humiliating of atonement: serving the very man he’s manipulated perhaps more grossly than anyone faithfully.

Let’s be completely clear about this. Somehow, Ben thought he could challenge destiny. And he got farther than anyone else…you don’t see Widmore back on the Island, after all. He still failed, just like everyone else has this season, and Locke finally gets to be the Other Lama™, even if it ends up being a comparatively short reign.

And speaking of John Locke, I’m going to part company with anyone theorizing that he’s now an Island manifestation a la Christian Shephard or Yemi. When he says he’s “the same man [he's] always been,” I believe him. He’s just unbound by all the things that prevented him from being the Island’s perfect instrument. His anger, his daddy issues, his need for a self-aggrandizing destiny. I think they’re all gone. I’ll grant that he took a bit of malicious pleasure at Ben’s discomfiture, but one can hardly blame him for that, especially when he’s doing what can only be described as the Island’s bidding. But this just points all the more strongly to the Island being Locke’s ultimate exploiter, which I’ve been banging on about for goodness only knows how long. Longer than I’ve been writing for this site, certainly.

Quick Hits From “Dead Is Dead”:

• I actually find I believe Ben both when he says he knew Locke would be resurrected and that it scares him to death because he’s never seen anything quite like it. The rest in both of those exchanges was typical Ben BS.

• The Temple’s outer perimeter is a half-mile in radius?!? With all the over “the line” galavanting that various Lostaways did, not a single one of ‘em saw a massive stone wall surrounding a circular mile?

• Locke should never tell Ben to “shoot.” Ever. Jus sayin’.

• Smokey gets summoned by unclogging an ancient drain? All I ever get in my bathtub is my discarded hair. Yeesh. The only way that could have been more underwhelming would have been if Ben had filled out a form in triplicate.

• Is it just me or did Anubis look supplicant to the image of Smokey in the Temple hieroglyph? I find this…disturbing.

• Ben looked genuinely surprised to see Jack, Hurley, and Kate in the DHARMA Class of ‘77 photo. Curious.

• Widmore got some of the best lines, what with constantly sneering, “Boy!” at Ben and getting in a sweet reference to The Prisoner.

• Locke got so very many great lines: “I was just hoping for an apology.” “You just make friends everywhere you go, don’tcha.” “No sense in me dying twice, eh?” And even his little smile and wave to Frank & Sun. Priceless!

• “What lies in the shadow of the statue?” doesn’t sound like the Snowman Joke so much as some kind of Illuminati secret signal. At last, we have our other party in the “war” that Widmore’s always going on about. I’m coming around to the notion that Ben, Widmore, Hawking, Alpert, and now Locke, are all on the same side here even if there’s internecine struggle.

And now, “Some Like It Hoth!”

That is why evil will always triumph, because good is dumb.

From a Ben-tastic mythology-fest to a Miles & Hurley, pop-culture-laden, authentic Lost throwback to the days of pure flashback storytelling…and another one of those “breather” episodes before the roller-coaster that is Season 5 goes into a three-gee barrel-roll en route to the explosive finish.

Now, the discerning Lost fan had long since figured out that Miles was Dr. ChangCandleWickmundHalliwax’s son. So, that revelation was a distinct non-event to anyone reading this blog. But we still got some good insight into Miles’ character…enough to know that he’s a walking, talking example of the Hedgehog’s Dilemma, more comfortable with the leftover impressions of the dead than with anyone living.

Me, I’d be surprised if someone being brought up under those circumstances and losing his mother so young didn’t develop intimacy issues and a larger-than-healthy dollop of bitter cynicism. And can you honestly imagine being privy to all the mundane, nasty detritus of a dead mind effectively trapped in amber? There’s a reason Douglas Adams construed telepathy as a punishment in The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. (And I thought working tech support could give you a dire opinion of your fellow human!)

Good thing that Miles was playing Han to Hurley’s Chewbacca with the DHARMA van standing in for the Millennium Falcon on their little smuggling run around the Island. Hurley, as always, laid on the wisdom. If people just communicated more, they’d be a lot less miserable. And Ewoks suck, dude. Yes, his spelling may be atrocious and he may be ignorant about the time-scale on global warming and he may not be too swift on the uptake about the nature of time-travel in the Lost universe, but when it comes to matters interpersonal, Hurley seems to have more on the ball than any other character on the show.

You’d also think that Miles would be able to take his own advice as given to Mr. Gray (played by Dean Norris, a regular on the truly amazing Breaking Bad. If you’re not watching this unbelievable show, then start. Now!) not to miss his chance to tell a loved one he is loved. But noooooo…or at least, not yet.

Running on a treadmill after you and I’m running on a treadmill now

But it wasnt going to just be easy-breezy Lucas references from opening to closing credits. No, it wouldn’t be a Season 5 episode if there weren’t a few more inexorable time-loops constricting our characters in their coils.

Yes, the one involving Miles is patently obvious. It’s going to be thanks to him and the rest of the time-travelers that Dr. Chang turns his back on his wife and baby to save their lives, thus making him much less of a “douche” than Miles had been led to believe during his upbringing. (Note the way Miles kind of “fell in” behind Chang at various points in the episode, as if indulging his desire to be a boy following his father’s commands?)

But did you see the look on Hurley’s face as he watched the Numbers be stamped into the Swan Hatch-to-be? It was as if the number chisels were being hammered directly into his tormented heart. That was more painful than watching Jack & Kate, the troublesome twosome, trying and failing miserably at allaying the suspicions of Roger Linus about his dying son’s sudden disappearance. Those two really can’t do a damned thing right, can they. *sigh*

Paternal relations aside, I can’t help but think that the reading of Alvarez of the lethal orthodonture was not Miles’ purpose in being back on the Island. After the events of “The Variable,” I can’t help but wonder if Miles won’t be reading poor, dead Daniel to get at the crucial information in his cranium. I also can’t help but think that Miles is also headed to a bad end along with the rest of the freighter people.

Charlotte seems to have been brought back just to realize she’d been there before and to motivate Faraday to work himself up to thinking he can change the past. Faraday had to fail at that and get killed at the hands of his own mother. And Miles? I have a bad feeing about this…I don’t think he’s going to survive The Incident while Chang does, thus forcing another parent to see the ultimate fate of their child who was unnaturally transported to the past. But I hope I’m wrong. Miles has kind of grown on me.

Things that make you go, “HAH!”

• “Circle of trust.”

• “Why don’t we carpool? It’ll help with global warming, which hasn’t happened yet, so maybe we can prevent it.”

• “You’re just jealous my powers are better than yours.”

• “Polar bear feces.”

• “That douche is my dad.”

• “Third day we were here, I was on line at the cafeteria, and my mother got in line behind me. That was my first clue.”

• “We should all… get together for a beer sometime. How awesome would that be?”

• Miles’ deadpan reading of Hurley’s alternate script for The Empire Strikes Back.

• Phil getting beat up and tied up.

Hurm

• Is it even possible that the DI was managing to build the Swan without the knowledge and at least tacit approval of the Others?

• Emotional scenes with the dead always seem to cost extra with Miles, then end up getting refunded.

• Did anyone not know that it was Widmore who staged the fake 815 wreckage?

• OK, it was nice to know how Miles settled on exactly $3.2 million, even if it was a little underwhelming.

• Wow, but Bram came off like a recruiter for Jonestown in his attempt to persuade Miles. Kind of creepy. Also, their “team” clearly has nothing to do with Widmore, Hawking, Ben, or Alpert. Makes me happy Miles was so snarky with them.

• I so need to make myself one of those stylin’ black jumpsuits Dan was wearing when he got off the sub.

Stay tuned for the thrilling conclusion of me working through my backlog after “Follow the Leader!”

Technorati Tags: Ben Linus, Charles Widmore, Daniel Faraday, Desmond Hume, Eloise Hawking, Greek Tragedy, Hurley, Jack Shephard, John Locke, Kate Austen, Looking at the Little Things, Miles Straume, Pierre Chang, Richard Alpert, Sawyer

Turn off your mind, relax
and float down stream
It is not dying” – The Beatles

Whatever Happened, Happened. It’s been our Constant this season, our guide through the jungle of time travel absurdity and confusion. Remember how Daniel schooled us all in this one simple basic rule in the first episode of the season? You do remember that, right?

OK, now forget it.

Daniel took the yellow submarine back to Ann Arbor circa 1974, and whatever happened to him there convinced him that maybe something else could happen than whatever happened the first time. He had it all written down in his trusty notebook.

He came twitching into town with this revised theory, hoping to recruit some of his old friends to test it out. He told them that even though whatever happened, happened in the past, now that the past was their present, he had brilliantly surmised that whatever happened didn’t happen yet so maybe he could make something different happen.

Wow. And it only took a lifetime of studying relativistic physics for him to come up with this. He had carefully considered the pseudo-Reimemannian metrics and Lorentz invariants, worked through all the ramifications of teleparallelism and energy-momentum tensors, rejected the Schwarzschild solution, the Reissner-Nordström solution and the Kerr metric, and come up with his own brilliant discovery: Hey, guys, we can do whatever we want!

So this is great, right? Whatever happened doesn’t have to happen! Except not so fast. Because in this episode, whatever had ever happened did manage to happen again. First we got a literal repeat of the opening scene of the season. It happened. Again.

Then we saw Daniel kneel down like an icky child molester man in front of baby Charlotte and repeat exactly the same lines she remembered him telling her, about never ever coming back to the Island.

Which she will take with her into adulthood and repeat to Daniel as she dies, because she will still only remember that a scary weirdo said them to her and she won’t remember that she died because of it. Until she’s actually dying of course.

Whatever happened, happened.

And Daniel’s lovely mother, who killed him in the past, will raise him up just so she can kill him again, endlessly, ad infinitum, in the same twisted Oedipal loop, over and over and over. Whatever happened, happened.

Now there was a little glitch in this predestined family Oresteia. Mama Eloise, knowing she’d killed her adult son, apparently, from what we can guess, took her child off the Island, and raised him in America. Now, one would think, if it’s Sophocles we’re copying here, that Mom would have tried very hard to outrun Fate, tried to cheat cruel Fate out of making her sacrifice her only begotten son. But no, if you thought that, you’d be wrong.

When she heard his gift for the piano she could have sent him to Conservatory and kept him as far from a Physics textbook as was humanly possible.

When she found out he could count metronome beats in his head like an Idiot Savante she could have marketed him as a sideshow freak and made enough money to keep him set for life.

Or she could have gone even further, and tried to have him raised by another, set him adrift in a basket like Moses and tried to protect him that way. Instead it seemed like she wanted her only child to fry his beautiful mind with Relativistic Physics until he couldn’t see straight. And then she wanted him to go back to Craphole Island so he could walk straight into the barrel of her gun.

Twice.

Eloise was convinced that whatever happened had to happen so she warped and twisted and forced her only child’s life into a living hell, just so she could be sure to make whatever happened, happen. I think these writers need to go re-read their Sophocles, because the whole idea of Greek tragedy was that no matter how hard one tried to escape an inevitable Fate, they got caught in its claws anyway. That’s the whole basis of catharsis. In this story, Mama wasn’t just accepting Fate, she was boosting it along and feeding it steroids. She even managed to hop inside Desmond’s head when his consciousness time travelled back to her ring shop, to make sure he went back to the Island to not push the button that would crash Flight 815 so her son would have to travel to the Island so she could kill him.

Maybe she figured if she was going to have to take out her only kid, at least she could see him go out in a blaze of academic glory.

I wonder if that’s why she gave him the name of a famous historic physicist rather than her own, or that of his mystery Dad. Poor Daniel, his whole life was an exercise in futility.

She wouldn’t let him have a girlfriend. She thought that her love inscriptions in a fancy notebook would be an acceptable substitute and might somehow make up for the fact that she spent his whole life fattening him up like a pig for the slaughter.

But Daniel showed her, didn’t he? He fried his brains, blew out his memory, and then he made his forbidden girlfriend into his forbidden test subject and sent her broken memory careening through whatever had ever happened, while she lay paralyzed, a vegetable unstuck in time for all eternity.

But none of this stopped Mom from marching along her predestined path. After all, she had warned him to stay away from girls.

When Daniel’s brain got smoked, she let him go live in the family home, where he was sitting, sobbing in front of the tv set at the sight of a sunken faux-Flight815, probably suffering from the pangs of precognition of his coming death. Or something.

There he was visited by two spirits – his father, the graverobber,

and his mother, the assasin.

Together these two true believing missionaries worked to convince their darling boy to take a trip to the Island they knew would become his tomb. Did they want to be sure he prevented whatever happened from happening or that he made sure whatever happened happened, which by the way, would have happened without them being such noodges, but …uh, whatever. It happened.

Somewhere along the way, we know not where, Daniel discovered that Desmond Hume was his Constant. Maybe that happened when Future Desmond came to his Oxford lab and gave him the proper variables to make his equation work so that he could send his beloved mouse Eloise on the time trip that would sizzle her brains and kill her.

We don’t really know how that led to Daniel realizing Desmond was his Constant. Heck, we don’t even know what it means that Desmond was Daniel’s Constant. And, uh, looks like we’re not going to find out now.

In any case, at some point, Daniel’s memory returned. When he first got to the Island, it wasn’t working too well.

But by the time Ben pushed the Dharma Wheel, it seemed to have returned and he was giving seminars to the left behind group about all the intricacies of time travel. Which all boiled down to one hard and fast rule – Whatever Happened, Happened. Now we do remember that, as soon as Daniel delivered this message, he knocked on the hatch door, met Hazmat Desmond and proceeded to try to make something different happen.

But my understanding was that, once he did that, then that chain of events became the Whatever that always had Happened, and the rule remained true. But that would be wrong. Maybe.

When Daniel met Pierre Chang, he messed with his mind a little and sent him off fuming. Miles scolded him and Daniel responded that he was only trying to make sure that Chang did what he had to do. Which sounded a lot like what Mommy Dearest had been trying to do with him. So at that point Daniel was still trying to make whatever happened happen. Then he went to see his old friends – who seemed astonishingly not surprised to see him – and tried to get them to help him make whatever happened NOT happen.

That brought us to our stupid High School Musical moment of the week. Jack jumped on board with Daniel’s plan because he’s still looking for that pony under his bed…er, I mean that Destiny! they promised him he could have if he came back here.

Sawyer wanted his Freckles to come with him.

Which prompted Juliet to get her bitch on and give out the code to the fence,

probably hoping that Kate and her cute little freckles would fall into a wormhole someplace out there and disappear forever.

Kate took the hint and ran off with Jack Daniels, but first they stopped at one of the many convenient gun cabinets that this peaceful Dharma community keeps fully stocked and loaded at all times. Jack had the keys because you know, he’s been there three days, and Dharma security is so airtight that they hand out keys to their gun stash to all the janitors.

Guns were handed out like party hats, even to Daniel, whose brain was becoming refried by the minute. The only thing he was missing was a big KILL ME NOW sign on his jumpsuit.

There followed a hilarious cartoon gunfight that looked like a bunch of 8 year old boys playing in the backyard.

They should have just had them point their fingers and go POW! BANG!

You are so dead!

Then Jack and Kate and Daniel walked through the jungle towards the Others, swinging their guns, looking for whatever happened to happen. Daniel explained to Jack that he had a truly brilliant idea. Instead of letting a leak of electromagnetic energy to force the Swan hatch to be built as a containment unit that would need to have a button pushed every 108 minutes, he was going to find the hydrogen bomb he’d seen in 1954 and blow that up instead! Jack listened and nodded and thought that sounded good. This way Flight 815 would never crash. Of course, Jack, Kate, Sawyer, Hurley, Jin and everyone else on the freaking Island would probably be blown to kingdom come in a great big beautiful mushroom cloud. But, hey! Look at the bright side. At least their flight would never crash!

Jack should have stopped and consulted his Paradox manual because a doctor as brilliant as himself would have easily understood that what Daniel was proposing was impossible. If Flight 815 never crashed then Daniel would never have been sent to the Island on the freighter and would never be in any position to blow up the H-bomb to stop the Incident that eventually led to the plane crashing. We are talking Elementary Paradox Theory here. Daniel’s plan was doomed from the get go, because even if whatever happened never happened, what he wanted to make happen would have prevented him from ever being in a position to make it not happen. Come on!

Halfway through this episode, the 100th episode ever in a mostly glorious series, I came to the sad conclusion that this might just have been one of the dumbest episodes they ever wrote. It wasn’t just the writers who were dumb. It was also the characters. Did Juliet stop to think that sending Jack and Kate into Others territory might have some ramifications aside from keeping Freckles away from her Snookums?

Did the brilliant Dr. Burke not think of maybe giving crazy ass Phil a little sedative to keep him from thumping around in that closet like a big telltale heart?

How about this packing job they were doing on their way to go live in the wild? I get that Sawyer has become as soft and squishy as a bowl of tapioca, but how was he planning on getting all that crap down to the beach?

Was he planning on driving his Winnebago down there and hooking up to the utilities at the campsite? And Juliet was clearly planning on needing an elaborate wardrobe on this adventure.

I hope she remembered to pack her heels and a little black evening dress.

Back in the jungle, Jack and Kate were also showing a great deal of savvy.

First they let Daniel wander down into the camp waving a gun around like a big red flag – because that worked out so well during the gunfight at the truckshop corral.

Then, once he was down there, they watched from their vantage point as Eloise apparently crept up behind him and shot him in the back.

Way to be good lookouts! I guess the farce won’t be complete until next week, when I’m guessing they sit on their butts and wait to get captured. I mean, I know whatever happened has to happen, but can it happen only if all our characters get mind sucked?



With that in mind, it seems the 100th episode of Lost really did mark a milestone in our experience of this show. I do believe this was the moment when every last holdout, every fan who still bravely pretended to know what was going on, finally gave up the ghost and admitted defeat. And there’s probably no point right now in overthinking it. Let’s just all give up. We surrender!

Let’s not think of any of the consequences, for example, if Daniel is right about Flight 815 never crashing. Just kicking the Paradox Monster out the door for a minute, what would that mean? Well, it would mean that Desmond and Penny never reunited, which would mean that this touching moment never happened.

And this little boy would never exist.

Michael could go on to raise his video game playing son.

Sun could have divorced Jin and his 98 pound weakling sperm. Sorry about that, Ji Yeon.

Aaron could be raised by that nice couple in L.A. and Claire could go back to … whatever Claire did.

Hurley could continue on his merry way as an overstuffed, exuberant gajillionaire.

Boone and Shannon could have played their incestuous psychodrama out to its natural sordid conclusion.

Locke could stay in his chair, unmanned and unspecial.

Sawyer would never have to wear those hideous coveralls.

Kate could go to jail until all her freckles faded into wrinkles.

Jack’s hair could go back to never growing.

None of their triangular sex games would ever happen. Juliet would still be holding book club, Alex would be alive and Ben would die of a spinal tumor. In essence, the whole story we’ve seen would not have happened. And Jack was down with that. He was hopping right on board that Do-Over Wagon.

I’m curious though. If Daniel’s plan succeeds and Flight 815 never crashes, would Sawyer, Kate, Jack, Hurley, et. al. just disappear from 1977 Dharmalala or would they disappear off of Flight 815? When whatever happened doesn’t happen, which whatever doesn’t happen first? What’s the priority sequence here?

I tell you what. I’m not going to even bother thinking about it, until I see what they have up their sleeve. Even if we concede that it’s possible for human beings to be variables in the great equation of cause and effect, we don’t know which people are the independent variables and which the dependent variables. Once you change one value, a whole different cascade of results will ensue, changing the values of all the other variables in the equation, which in turn will cause a new chain of events in all the other related equations. Bu it’s not like this is science we’re dealing with here. Or mathematics. Or common sense. We’re in comic book territory, good and proper.

The consequences, however, could still be very serious and tragic. In any case they’re sure to be unpredictable.

“Or play the game
existence to the end
Of the beginning
Of the beginning….” – The Beatles