SPOILER ALERT, SPOILER ALERT
* When it emerged in the course of Sawyer’s conversation with Jack that he was going to detonate a nuclear bomb and change the course of time because Kate broke up with him, I can’t be the only person who shook his head in utter dismay. My first recourse was to the old “nobody cares about the love quadrangle anymore” saw, but you know what? I doubt that that’s true. Nobody on the Internet may care about it anymore, but I’m sure Lindelof is right and that his mom and people like her are totally tuning in week after week to see who Kate chooses and suchlike. (Granted there are a lot fewer people like Lindelof’s mom in the audience for Season Five than there were for Season One, but still.)
* So no, that’s not ultimately what bothered me about it. What really irked me is something I’ve been talking about for weeks now, which is how utterly selfish and irresponsible the main characters’ behavior has become with regards to anyone who isn’t a main character. It’s fine to care about the love quadrangle, but doesn’t the whole “some people are more equal than others” aspect of how much more important who Kate chooses is than whether or not the other 30 or so non-main-character castaways live or die kind of creepy? In this episode it was particularly pointed. Even Sawyer, who momentarily looked good when in the midst of beating the bejesus out of Jack he pointed out that Jack was out to steal the best three years of his and Juliet’s life from them, is really just looking out for him and his when you give it more than two seconds of mid-fight thought.
* This chronic case of mefirstandthegimmegimme-itis was the case not just in Jack risking the lives of everyone on Island ’77 and using the lives of everyone on Island ’04 as a maguffin for his real motive, i.e. to hopefully Pound That Pussy once more someday, but also in Jack becoming a relentless killing machine, gunning down countless Dharma guards. These guys aren’t cultlike Others or Widmore thugs but salarymen trying to protect the lives of an island full of scientists and janitors and schoolkids and so on. Dudes straight out of Dante and Randall’s Death Star debate in Clerks, more or less. Genre pieces occasionally have such lapses–Neo and Trinity’s electronica-soundtracked massacre of innocent security guards and police in the first Matrix movie is a good example–and they always bug the shit out of me.
* But ultimately, I think we have to abandon the notion that Lost is about anyone but the main characters. This isn’t Battlestar Galactica, where personal needs and the greater good were constantly weighed against one another during life-and-death choices. It’s a show about a bunch of people with horribly fucked-up personal lives who come to a place that violently forces them to confront the personal failures that got them where they are, and to attempt to fix them in the future. The personal lives are what matters here.
* So how did things look through that lens? Well, they weren’t perfect. My ears are still ringing from the pounding of the plothammer that made Juliet launch “The Great Sub Escape” to stop Jack only to end up leading the sub crew in their Wild Bunch shootout as Jack’s backup. It was particularly weird and random given that we were certainly to believe by the end of that climax that Sawyer really did love Juliet and vice versa, and that he was telling the truth when he said “it doesn’t matter who I looked at–I’m with you.” Kate’s turnaround was just as unpersuasive–she was more dead-set against blowing up the bomb than anyone, and I can’t even recall what Jack said that made her change her mind.
* Another lapse: The shockingly hamfisted Juliet flashback. The writers raced through it in order to make their pat point, and there wasn’t even the mitigating circumstance of Jacob’s presence to justify showing it any way other than “we just want to make Juliet’s bizarre behavior seem even slightly plausible.”
* But!
* The climax was really something! First of all, kudos to a setpiece that references the Sarlaac Pit fight from Return of the Jedi and the climaxes of Jedi, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, The Return of the King, and of course Lost Season Two all at once.
* More importantly to the show, it was really something emotionally. Smart, smart filmmaking to track the reaction to Jack’s release of the nuke solely with tight closeups of the four main characters’ emotionally wracked faces. And while it seems a shame to jettison the love story with the most believable chemistry the show’s seen so far by killing off Juliet, that same chemistry is what gave it all such an impact–that and Josh Holloway and Elizabeth Mitchell’s really gutwrenching performances. Once you saw where it was going, it actually became difficult to watch. It’s easily the show’s most powerful death scene this side of the execution of Alex.
* The point is, Lost is like opera, or superhero comics, or art-house kung-fu movies. In opera, the singing (at least the arias) is a spectacular representation of the emotional states of the characters. In superhero stories and wuxia flicks, that’s what the fighting is for. In Lost, that’s what the daring, desperate, dangerous, deadly last-ditch plans are for. Whatever its flaws, this episode made that work as well as it ever has on the show.
* And then there’s the whole Locke story. Am I a little disappointed that the Locke we saw hilariously lording it over Ben, the Locke who finally gave that compulsive liar his comeuppance, isn’t Locke at all? Hell yeah. Is it gonna keep me up at night, given that we’re now watching some kind of skin-changer waltz around settling centuries-old grudges? Hell no! That’s awesome!
* Also awesome: Casting Titus Welliver as your sinister ur-antagonist. God bless Lost and its Deadwood Cast Relocation Program. Paula Malcomson, Robin Wiegert, and William Sanderson pass the torch to you, sir!
* So that leaves us with the question of Jacob. I take it the cabin housed this other guy back when the creepy rocking-chair silhouette said “help me” to Locke? Are Christian and Claire working for him, or for Jacob? How does he get off the Island? Does Ben and Widmore’s battle have any relation to the fight between Jacob and the other guy? Did everyone notice their black and white color schemes during the opening scene? Shouldn’t Hurley have tried to throw himself out of the cab when a stranger knew who he was given that he was convinced people were out to get him? Just how many Island factions have shadowy global networks, anyway?
* The statue is nice and creepy. Well done, designers. Also? “It was like that when I got here.” LOL!
* I wonder how long Terry O’Quinn knew he wasn’t Locke anymore.
* Thinking about it now, whatever or whoever Locke is, he’s not omniscient. Otherwise why go through the whole farce of browbeating Richard into showing him where Jacob lives? That makes me feel like New Locke/Titus Welliver Character and the Smoke Monster are two separate things, given the Monster’s apparent role as a security and surveillance mechanism–if this guy had transmogrified into Smokey, surely he could have tracked Jacob down?
* A nice reversal: Ben spent the back half of season three trying to convince John to kill someone; Locke pulled the same trick with Ben in the space of one episode.
* It’s just occurring to me now how much having the Island be riddled with tunnels and secret passages is 100% pure kids playing around in the basement. Love it.
* The whole “obliviously standing in the middle of the street facing the camera when all of a sudden a vehicle comes out of nowhere and plows into you” shot is getting a little cliched at this point. Sorry, Nadia, you deserved better.
* So that’s probably the last we’ll see of Rose and Bernard. I’m fine with that. I loved those characters and this is pretty much the ending for them that both they and I wanted. I just hope they end up being the Adam & Eve skeletons.
* I’m less okay with this being the end of Vincent. Which I doubt it is, if only because Lindelof said he’s the one character you can count on being safe till the end of the show. Still, “safe” and “on the show” are not necessarily synonymous–just ask Walt!
* Walt better come back, man. He was a HUGE DEAL, you can’t pretend he wasn’t!
* Man, there are still a lot of unanswered questions, aren’t there? I figured we’d get more traction on the Christian & Claire question, just for starters.
* Desmond, Penny, and Widmore also had no role in the finale.
* Meanwhile, Sun dragon-lady’d her way to the forefront earlier in the season only to recede to the background in the back half. Weird.
* I love that Frank Lapidus is a big deal. The way he reacts to everything like “[sigh] Now what?” is so hilarious to me. It reminds me of the headshaking dismay and resignation with which Mike asks Michelle what’s goin’ on in Utah.
* I always hope that big episodes will bring back dead characters for a cameo, but no joy this time around. Cynthia Watros, call your agent, that Gossip Girl prequel was not hot!
* The fade to white with a black logo instead of cut to black with a white logo was pretty clever. It’s the opposite sketches, motherlovers! Anything can happen!
* I got a kick out of seeing the promo for the season finale of Grey’s Anatomy, which seems like it will be the second time a character has been written out of the show because the actor playing him or her is an insufferable asshole. It’s a different ballgame over there!
* Here’s the thing about the cliffhanger: If the bomb’s detonation really does change everything, then the whole scene with New Locke and Ben killing Jacob while Richard and Lapidus and Ilyana gape at Dead Locke outside would never have happened. And since I assume that that was meant to be a cliffhanger too, rather than a collection of characters we’ll never see in the same place together again, I’m guessing the bomb’s detonation didn’t change everything.
Here’s where I’ve come on Jack’s choice and the ignoring of the innocent castaways:
I was as pissed as anyone that the writers seemed to assume that we as an audience (not even subdividing us but just looking at the whole viewership in general) would just shrug and ignore the idea that those people died for nothing. And you know what? They may be right that the audience doesn’t care, but that doesn’t mean it’s a good story choice or something that does their lead characters any favors.
Still, I’m willing to give the creators the benefit of the doubt and watch to see if they really address this. For a while last week, I thought Jack had turned towards his humanity, but now we know that was bull. But with the idea that the main cast at least was marked by Jacob years before flight 815 was boarding gives credence to the idea that the general big moves that have fucked them over are to some extent out of their control. They didn’t chose to come to the island. They didn’t chose to get caught up in the war between Ben and Widmore. They didn’t chose to make the island time jump causing so many to (we assume) die horribly.
If the burden is on Jack and company only to go back and try and save their faceless friends, then that’s a lesser crime to behold, especially if it’s Jacob and Silas Adams who are really pulling the strings. However, all of that needs some more addressing and development in the final season to make this angry itch in the back of my brain go away.
Mystery I’d never have thought would seem really important to me going into the final season but is all of the sudden: why did the flight attendant and the kids from the plane get spared and absorbed into the Others?
Woo boy.
Re: the characters making selfish choices at the cost of the greater good:
I think we’ll see that’s a major point of the show. It seemed to me that this is a game that Jacob and Black-Shirt-Guy play whenever anybody falls into their web of an island. Like the idea that the Christian God gives humans the free will to choose to follow either good or evil, Jacob leads people to the island and then supplies those who arrive on the island with the resources to do right. It’s up to them to do that right. Ben even asks “What about ME?!” and Jacob’s like, “What about YOU?” So does that mean Jack and the gang are doing what’s right? I think that’s the point of the show.
That said, I was confused/upset by Jack/Kate/Sawyer/Juliet’s behavior/decisions.
Re: Dropping the bomb:
That scene had us literally on the edges of our seats. And on their faces, you could read Sawyer, Kate, Jack and Juliet’s goodbyes to each other.
Re: The Cabin:
I think it housed Black-Shirt-Guy and when Locke and Ben went to go see him back in the day, they disturbed that ash and it freed him. But not before he put on that haunting show by throwing things around the room. And this would explain why Fake Locke didn’t know where Jacob was – as B-S-G, he was in the cabin for forever and wouldn’t know. Or, shit, maybe he had to be led in by Richard, like a vampire in a stranger’s house.
Even still, Black-Shirt-Guy’s connection to Christian and the smoke monster are still fuzzy to me. If he WAS the smoke monster, maybe B-S-G killed who he killed as the smoke monster because those he killed or attempted to kill would all support his ultimate goal of corrupting someone, anyone, on the island to then off Jacob. The smoke monster/B-S-G’s posing as Christian could’ve been to entice Jack, Claire, and Locke to help kill Jacob. Posing as Eko’s brother could’ve been a test to see if Eko would. And the creature did kill the pilot, one of the main guys who could have helped figure things out early on. And, then, there was the scene later this season when Ben fell down the hole in the temple and Fake Locke was like, “Let me get some rope” and then ran off and then the smoke monster came and posed as Alex and told Ben to follow whatever “Locke” said before Alex disappeared and Fake Locke showed back up. But in this theory, how do you explain the smoke monster allowing Ben to command it during the fight with those commandos? Hmm…I wonder how long after the ash was disturbed that the smoke monster started acting weird/dead people started showing up more.
Re: The cliffhanger set “30 years later”:
I’m not so worried about whether that scene happened, so much as I’m saddened that Locke DID die.
Y’know what I was thinking of before I lay my head down to the pillow last night? How this show, which constantly has us wanting to know answers to more and more mysteries and questions is also amazing about shattering our expectations of just who has those answers.
Let me elaborate (and forgive me if I’m getting some of the timeline wrong)…
Season one, the survivors are clueless but there are these mysterious Others out there who we’re pretty sure know everything we want to know.
Season two, we meet Ben, who seemingly has all the answers.
Season three (?), Richard is introduced, and he’s clearly higher up the pecking order than Ben, who we see does NOT know everything. We also get our first hints of Jacob and Widmore.
Season four, more stuff is laid down about Widmore and Eloise, as it seems they know as much if not more than Ben. Richard and Jacob’s importance is also played up.
Season five, by the end Jacob and a new force are revealed to pretty much be the end all of the food chain (for now) and every character we thought had the answers up until now (Ben, Richard, Widmore, Eloise…to say nothing of the run of the mill Others) seems as clueless as the survivors. The point is really driven home by Ben, once the seemingly omnipotent and enigmatic master manipulator with all the answers, reduced to a confused and clueless pawn.
Fantastic stuff. And again just a wild indication of how the show now barely resembles the show of season one like no other show ever. I think next season we’re gonna see a lot of callbacks to characters/concepts we haven’t seen since the early days and it’s gonna be way trippy in an awesome way.
The black/white thing in the opener definitely did not escape my notice. I also was thinking how the “I’d like to kill you but there are rules keeping me from doing so” is very similar to Ben and Widmore.
I’m sure I’m not the first to speculate the Jacob is or is represented by the god the statue depicts (he lives there, after all) and that his buddy either is the smoke monster or is very closely associated with it, mostly because of the illustration we saw in Smokey’s cave of the two of them doing battle. I’m starting to wonder now how many of the characters who think they’ve been doing Jacob’s bidding have really been taken in by this other guy – we saw Jacob appear to Ilana, so he’s presuumably cool with her tribe of cultists. But we’ve never seen him interact directly with any of the Others. (Lostpedia points out that in the off-island Jacob flashbacks, he touches each of the castaways. Interesting, that. Also, Kate was totally a New Kids fan, of course).
This is a show that’s always grappled with questions of fate and free will, and seems to have come down squarely on the side of these people (so far at least) almost play-acting out a destiny that had already been chosen for them. Now it seems like it’s one or both of these two guys who’s been pulling all the strings. It’ll be interesting to see how everyone reacts.
Also, I’ve gotta assume Fake Locke knew where Jacob lived (he visited him there in the intro), although maybe he didn’t know the way IN to the statue. My guess, though, is that he wanted the Others to witness what Ben had done. Why else bring the whole tribe?
nce again, I agree with Ben!
I always think about this show along similar lines but using a slightly different chain of plot points:
When they first landed on the island, there was no way to predict there’d be a giant monster or a cult of Others or a hatch.
When they first found the hatch, there was no way to predict that inside the hatch there’d be a Scotsman involuntarily recruited into some kind of utopian research project.
When they first discovered the inside of the hatch and the utopian research project, there was no way to predict that the creepy Others had nothing to do with it.
When they first discovered that the creepy Others had nothing to do with it, there was no way to predict that they basically lived like suburbanites.
When they first discovered that the creepy Others basically lived like suburbanites, there was no way to predict that there was ANOTHER group of seemingly even more well-connected crazy people out there trying to kill them as part of some long-running war.
When they first discovered the even more well-connected crazy people out there trying to kill them as part of some long-running war, there was no way to predict that the temporary solution for this was to fucking time travel.
And on and on and on!
Sean, I like your opera comparison.
Certainly in TURANDOT no one in the audience cares about the dozens of suitors that have died thanks to the title character’s capriciousness.
Same deal with the LOST “redshirts.”
Justin: Good catch on the picture of the statue-thing fighting the smoke monster.
It’s interesting to compare the tapestry that Jacob was weaving with the carving in the Temple. There are pictures of both up at Lostpedia. Jacob’s tapestry has a winged eye seemingly giving things to people in an apparently benevolent manner. The Temple carving has the lightning smoke monster looking creepy and hanging out with Anubis, Egyptian god of the dead. I’m sure the contrast was intentional, since we were shown both in the same season within a few episodes of each other.
I’m guessing that Jacob represents choice, based on his comments to Hurley and Ben and his optimism in the first scene, while Anti-Jacob (Esau?) is fate and fatalism, given his pessimistic attitude toward the ship. I really hope that Locke gets a better send-off than being murdered by Ben. I wonder how Terry O’Quinn feels about all this.
When Farraday first mentioned detonating the bomb and effectively erasing everything that’s happened, I got kinda freaked out and worried that we’d have a Dallas-Bobby-in-the-shower-It-was-all-a-dream thing. But after the way everything played out, and thinking about how, as Ben and Sean mentioned, nothing ever really goes the way we expect it to. And things really don’t go the way the characters expect them to (like how the Oceanic 6 came back to the Island in an effort to rescue their friends and save the day, but instead got stuck in Dharmaville).
So if they thought they could just wipe everything clean and start over, and we thought that too, then what will actually happen is impossible to know. So I’m not even going to try and guess what happens post-bomb.
And I love this whole Jacob/Anti-Jacob thing. Whether they are God and the Devil, or just manifestations of good and evil or fate and choice, I’m super psyched. Why the hell do I have to wait so long? Bah.
My friend Mykel, whom I’ve never discussed Lost with beofre, just e-mailed this whole long theory, which is pretty much everything that I’ve thought about and contemplated. But he mentioned one thing I had totally forgotten about.
Backgammon.
From the very first episode–Locke taught Michael how to play, stating that it’s the oldest game in the world, from before Jesus Christ and it’s game between a white piece and a black piece. The entire point of the game is for each player to get their pieces off the board.
I hate to read too far into it, but it could totally be true. The game dates back to ancient Egypt (like that damn statue) and the whole thing with the numbers could be explained by a game.
If done correctly, I would be totally satisfied if everything that has happened is all due to some cosmic game of backgammon these two dudes have been playing with each other…But who knows…
But what about Annie????
Are the security guards in The Matrix innocent?
At worst, they’re guarding a torture chamber.
At best they’re part of the dubiously alive power source for the baddies.
Furthermore, they are innocent only in the sense that they’re incapable of exercising free will because they live in a world were cause and effect are so constructed as to manipulate them to do the will of their robotic masters. They live in a world were doing the right thing is always already a cover for doing evil.
(Besides, honestly, when is it ever the right thing to do to let Laurence Fishburne die?)
No matter how you slice it, it seems like they’re legit military targets.
As for the contractors on the Death Star – you shouldn’t punch clock on a giant space-based weapon called the Death Star during a violent civil war unless you’re cool with the fact that you are working on a weapon that is a legit military target. After all, it’s already racked up an entire planet’s worth of bodycount. So the death and destruction the device, and by extension its builders, have caused is not hypothetical.
Assuming even 90% of the people on the Death Star were not soldiers, but merely “innocents” who were happily turning a quick buck on the construction of weapon of global destruction
“Also, I’ve gotta assume Fake Locke knew where Jacob lived (he visited him there in the intro), although maybe he didn’t know the way IN to the statue. My guess, though, is that he wanted the Others to witness what Ben had done. Why else bring the whole tribe?”
A bit from Matt Basilo’s review over on Primetime Pulse that addresses the above question in part and that I also find interesting besides:
“Oh, the irony. After all of his lying and manipulating, Ben was played like a fiddle. So here
CRwM: As far as the security guards know, they’re just guarding an office building. There’s nothing to indicate that the Agents would have any reason to let them know that they’re torturing a guy on the top floor, particularly given that they have the ability to program the poor saps to believe anything they want them to believe about the Agents and these crazy trenchcoat-wearing machine-gun-toting people shooting at them. So yeah, they’re innocent, or at the very least it’s weird to consider people “legit military targets” when they simultaneously have no idea they’re in a war and no choice but to fight it.
The Death Star contractors thing I’ve always thought was silly. He’d have had a better point if he talked about all the prisoners that Luke, Han, and Chewie left behind when they sprung Princess Leia in the first movie.
Carnival of souls
* Todd Van Der Werff tackles the Lost season finale. He notes something I picked up on as well–resonance with Battlestar Galactica. * My pal TJ Dietsch weighs in as well, and there’s a pretty lively discussion going on in…
I don’t know that it makes sense to assume the guards are not aware of the fact that they are guarding a high-priority prisoner. Although the fight starts when a bunch of garden-variety rent a cops go down, the second wave of guards that arrives in just a few second is all tricked out in combat-armor and M-16s.
Then there’s the fact that a few of the fully-loaded guards are right outside the torture chamber door. (When the Agents get gunned down, they pop over into the door guards’ bodies.)
Even assuming that the guards were ignorant – I don’t know to what degree you can claim that somebody without willpower, awareness, or really any sort of mental life to speak of could be considered innocent. The guards are innocent in the way zombies are innocent: They can’t help but be an existential threat and don’t really have any control over what they’re doing, but does that make killing them the same as murdering an innocent human?
Doesn’t a human being in possession of their own mind , capable of development and growth, and able to make moral judgments and have a stronger claim on our ethical responsibilities than humans with no mental lives of their own, no potential for real growth or development, and no ability to make moral decisions?
I should put my cards on the table here and say that I don’t have anything to say about Lost because I’ve never seen the show.
Sean wrote:
in Jack becoming a relentless killing machine, gunning down countless Dharma guards. These guys aren’t cultlike Others or Widmore thugs but salarymen trying to protect the lives of an island full of scientists and janitors and schoolkids and so on. Dudes straight out of Dante and Randall’s Death Star debate in Clerks, more or less.
I was thinking about this myself, but I believe that Jack believes “Undoing” all of this with the bomb will mean this never happens, and therefore, “unkills” them and so it’s okay. Just like he says it will save Sayid.
Also… what a fucking cliffhanger! I’m thrilled and pissed all at once… in other words: PERFECT!
Picky Wrote:
I think it housed Black-Shirt-Guy and when Locke and Ben went to go see him back in the day, they disturbed that ash and it freed him. But not before he put on that haunting show by throwing things around the room. And this would explain why Fake Locke didn’t know where Jacob was – as B-S-G, he was in the cabin for forever and wouldn’t know. Or, shit, maybe he had to be led in by Richard, like a vampire in a stranger’s house.
I like that!