SPOILER WARNING

* Before I begin, a plea: We’re heading into season finale time, which means I’ll be speculating a bit about what will happen. If you know what’s going to happen–or at least have some educated guesses–based on in-real-life, behind-the-scenes stuff that you’ve read in interviews or the press, actors getting cast in other pilots or whatever, I ask that you please do not bring it up in the comment thread. I try as hard as I can to restrict myself to whatever ends up on the television, meaning the episode and the next-week teaser, and really really hate finding out about future developments because so-and-so is in some article from Variety or Jeff Jensen said something a little bird told him, so I’d like to keep the comment section free of that too.

* This episode of Lost got my heart racing like the show hasn’t done in a long time, perhaps not since last year’s season finale (Keamy and the freighter), or maybe even the previous year’s (“NOT PENNY’S BOAT”). I think it’s because it’s really starting to feel like we’re moving toward some major showdowns–Locke confronting Jacob, whatever “The Incident” is, Jack trying to set off the bomb, maybe some revelations about Richard and/or that Annie girl that Li’l Ben was friends with in portentous fashion a few seasons ago who we haven’t seen or heard from since–with the end in sight, and suddenly I realize that anyone’s probably fair game to go.

This has been a harder trick for the show to pull off now that it’s pared down the original cast so much. Boone and Shannon were relatively easy marks, Charlie started as a core character when the show was depending on Lord of the Rings fandom to boost ratings but by the time he was killed he was the definition of a supporting character, the Tailies (even Eko) didn’t get to stick around long enough for their deaths to be real hard work for the writers, Michael got the shit end from the start of his heel turn so sending him out like a punk wasn’t a huge risk, Walt’s aging gives fans agita every time he shows up so people don’t seem to mind that he’s gone, Vincent seems to have undergone Charlie’s basic trajectory from foreground to background, the redshirts are the redshirts (despite the occasional for-fun elevation of the likes of Arzt, Nikki & Paulo, and Frogurt), and I don’t hear too many people clamoring for the return of Claire, Rose, and Bernard from parts unknown. (I love me some Rose & Bernard, but I know I’m in the minority.) Heck, even most of the major Others like Tom and Mikhail are dunzo. Obviously the show has kept up the mortality rate by offing freighter characters (and newbies like Cesar), but while the freighter gang is fun, I don’t feel as attached to them as I am to Desmond, Penny, Ben, and Juliet, let alone the remaining original castaways.

So along comes this episode, and all of a sudden we’re getting tons and tons of foreshadowing that There Will Be Blood between Sawyer and Juliet, while Jack and Locke are involved in high-stakes Island brinksmanship with forces beyond their control and characters with demonstrably few scruples. And since this is the show’s penultimate season finale, when it sends the message that anything could happen to characters we’ve cared about for a long time, I believe it. Which makes for exciting television!

* My friend the great Ben Morse brought my attention to this pretty thoughtful review of last week’s episode at Primetime Pulse, which contains the following provocative paragraph:

A lot of people have brought up how these characters may not want to change the future, as landing safely to LA (strangely enough) is a worse fate than crashing on the island. Sure, that’s true. Kate was on her way to prison, Sawyer had nothing to live for, Locke was paralyzed and working at a dead-end job, Hurley was cursed, Rose had cancer, Jin and Sun were in an emotionally abusive relationship. Things weren’t that great. But, then again, think about all the people who have died: Boone, Shannon, Ana Lucia, Libby, Eko, Charlie, Michael, and all those nameless red shirts. Is it acceptable for our heroes to say, “You know what? I didn’t really like the apartment I was living in before the crash. It was too small and in a bad neighborhood. I don’t want to go back there. To hell with all those good, innocent people who had to die”? I suppose Locke’s view of “I wouldn’t change the past because those events made me who I am today” is a bit more acceptable, but still.

I’ve already talked about this sort of thing in terms of the Oceanic Six’s disregard for the lives of the other people on the Ajira flight; iirc I was ready to book them for criminally negligent homicide over the death of the plane’s pilot. So my response when Ben pointed this out to me was this:

Nutshell reaction: Sadly, I think the morality of the main characters’ actions vis a vis the redshirts is something that the show can never address without making Jack into Tony Soprano, so we just have to ignore it, more or less.

Imagine my surprise and delight, then, when saving the lives of all the people who died during their Island experience and its aftermath was one of Jack’s first offered rationales for trying to go through with Daniel’s plan. I kept waiting for the show to send us a big signal that we’re meant to think that Jack is wrong to want to do this and Kate is right, but beyond the preexisting warped calculus of screentime-based emphasis, privileging Kate’s actually rather miserable romantic relationships with Sawyer and Jack over the lives of untold dozens, we really didn’t get one. In fact I think we’re supposed to be irked with Kate for winding up on the sub and potentially fucking things up between Sawyer and Juliet one last time. Yes, the show tried to make Kate seem less like the most selfish person on the planet by couching her objection to the H-bomb plan in “if you’re wrong you’ll kill everyone on the Island” terms, but that was clearly an afterthought. Now, I suppose you could say the same thing about Jack, i.e. his main rationale for wanting to change the future isn’t to save Boone, but so that he doesn’t spend those few years of his life constantly fucking up and feeling guilty about it. But so far the show seems to be leaning toward the (correct) point of view that the Main Characters’ thrilling adventures taking their stand down in Jungleland aren’t worth sacrificing the lives of everyone else on the plane. (Meanwhile I don’t think Faraday would be trying to set off the H-bomb if it was going to kill anyone except perhaps the people setting it off–seems to me like the idea is the energies of the bomb and the Island will cancel each other out relatively harmlessly–so that’s why I’m not giving much credence to Kate’s idea that Jack is risking the lives of the Dharma people or whoever else.)

This show is never going to be about morality the way The Sopranos, Deadwood, The Wire, or Battlestar Galactica were about morality–it’s more about the emotional consequences of decisions you make or are prevented from making than the moral ones–but I’m happy to see this addressed even a little bit. It could just end up being a one-line nod in the general direction of the idea before ignoring it entirely, a la Ben saying “who cares” about whatever happens to the other Ajira passengers, but I’ll take what we can get.

* I got a good chuckle out of how Ben sheepishly tilted his head down and averted his eyes after Locke mentioned that he did, in fact, die.

* I’m kind of disappointed in the “next week on Lost” teaser for revealing that Sawyer, Juliet, and Kate all end up back on the Island somehow. I feel like the teasers have done a lot of that sort of thing this season–prematurely revealing the temporal/spacial proximity of characters who we didn’t know were in the same point in the spacetime continuum, showing that people who were in a bad spot got out of that bad spot, etc.

* Hopes for the season finale: seeing Jacob, seeing the DeGroots or Alvar Hanso or whoever really runs the Dharma Initiative, seeing Annie, a flashback to Statue Time or Black Rock Time, finding out what lies in the shadow of the statue and who the people who are dropping that catchphrase are, a happy ending for Sawyer and Juliet, explosions, The Incident, Richard info…

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