SPOILER ALERT
SPOILER ALERT
SPOILER ALERT
* How did Kate find Claire after ditching her? Why the hell would a woman 36 weeks pregnant decide to be besties with the woman who terrorized her with a gun to her head and stole all her shit? Why would two of Lost‘s most experienced writers throw a credibility-destroying development like that into one of the show’s final episodes?
* I’m pretty impressed that even after all these years, they’re still finding ways to have the Others do heinous shit but still leave open the possibility that it might almost kinda sorta be justified. I just wish people would remember that the fact that Destro fought Cobra Commander once doesn’t make him a good guy.
* So…the Others really are nominally servants of Jacob, but occasionally their Lazarus Pit turns people evil? Which most of them act like anyway? I guess we’ll get this ironed out eventually.
* Sawyer just saying “fuck it all” at this point makes a lot of sense. Josh Holloway’s handling it well. It’s funny, though: The Missus asked me toward the end of the episode “So why is Kate chasing after Sawyer now?” and I had no idea.
* Always fun to see Ethan. What great casting William Mapother was! The first of many, many compelling villains on this show. (Or the second, considering how Locke was initially handled.) It took me a minute to accept that hey, he’s not evil here, things worked out pretty good for ol’ Ethan Goodspeed in a world without the Island.
* And see, before anyone starts, I can accept synchronicity, as in Ethan being the doctor who delivers Claire’s baby. That’s how the world of the show works. I can accept smoke monsters and an immortal guy in eyeliner (I think that’s a Grant Morrison character, actually)–that’s how science fiction and fantasy work. If they’d worked a little harder to show that Kate finding Claire was a function of one of those things, fine. But they didn’t. Neither character seemed the least bit fazed by Kate pulling up to that bus stop, beyond a “Oh great, this lady again” look from Claire. It sure wasn’t a “What the fuck, how did this person find me again?” look. I’m pretty much stunned it got on the air. Oh well, maybe this means they got the rotten episode out of their system early on and it’s smooth sailing from here on out.
I thought the bleed between the worlds with that shot of Racer X and the baby’s name and the older characters re-appearing in different roles was enough to explain the comfort the two ladies felt with one another. They’re both kind of rotten actors, though.
Still, give me one hundred scenes with those two over any of that stuff in the Temple. That was like watching a really boring role-playing game being acted out. The two temple people that left with what’s her face and Jin were pretty horrible characters, too, like they escaped off the set of Stargate: Island Alpha.
I’ll stick it out if that Sawyer guy really does go all the way and starts laughing at inappropriate times and shooting random people and peeing in the temple water. That’s the way I’d go when the dead people started showing up.
Well the white dude they sent with Jin and Kate is a cast member on It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia who’d been on the show in this bit part once before, so that was fanservice. Maybe if I watched It’s Always Sunny I’d be as excited about it as I am about the constant stream of Deadwood refugees, but I doubt it.
I always look forward to this blog’s Lost thoughts, whether validation for what I’m thinking about a particular episode, or an opinion that runs completely contrary to my own. In this case, I have to thank you for verifying that yes, that moment (with Kate finding Claire) was stupefyingly terrible and sloppy and an example of the weakest writing on a season that has been full of it.
Like most Losties I was looking forward to this season with almost hyperbolic anticipation, and to have so much crap to deal with now that it’s here (more new people on the island?! another new place on the island?! terrible weak writing attempting to set up more mysteries and add new characters when we should be dealing with the ones we have?!) is demoralizing.
I almost bailed in Season 3, and then 4 & 5 made me glad I didn’t. 6 is killing me so far.
Well, Kate was chasing Sawyer because she wanted him to help her find Claire.
As far as the bus stop goes, Claire couldn’t have gotten very far pregnant and on foot, and Kate seemed to know the area, so it doesn’t seem all that implausible that she’d find her. And Claire is young and preggers and was abandoned by the people who were supposed to adopt her baby – with no options, in a strange country, it doesn’t seem like that far of a stretch. I’m not saying it was genius storytelling, but calling it credibility-destroying seems like a case of morning-after fan rage. I really didn’t even think twice about it during the show. Maybe I wasn’t paying close enough attention.
And are we really complaining about a “season full of weak writing” after two episodes? Ugh.
I was initially confused by Kate finding Claire again but passed it off to scenes that were editied for time. That Kate came back to give Claire her stuff back at all probably helped Claire in trusting her a little, and even that they played off with Claire hesitant to accept Kate’s offer. Like JeffK said, Claire had no other options.
ANd I’m also wtf with anyone complaining about the way the season is going after two episodes. Another new place on the island? Are you talking about the Temple that has been talked about for 3 seasons at least? ANd I don’t see any new mysteries except for the parallel universe thing. All the stuff with the sickness has been around since season 1 with Rousseau.
JeffK: It just seems to me that if you’re a pregnant person who just flew in from another country and a person holds you hostage at gunpoint, steals all your possessions, and ditches you in the street, you don’t wait for a bus, you find the police–particularly if that person is in a taxi cab she stole while fleeing from a federal marshal who got a good view of its license plate, which is a whole ‘nother ball of wax. So yeah, Claire’s other option besides going for a ride with the person who robbed her is contacting the police and saying “Help I’m a pregnant person and I’ve been robbed.”
JJosh: Thanks for the kind words, but here comes one of those opinions that runs completely contrary to your own: I enjoyed the hell out of the premiere, and really didn’t even hate this episode–I just thought the business getting Kate and Claire back together after the cab hijacking was poorly handled, that’s all. We’re only three hours into the season. A little early to write it all off, don’t you think? I’m with Charles on that score.
Dunno, man, I think that assumes a lot about her mental state–the girl is a mess at this point, and I can easily see her just kind of shutting down and grabbing a bus-stop bench. I’m not saying the whole thing doesn’t stretch believability, but this is Lost we’re talking about. On a list of potential series logic-defying dealbreakers, I can’t even see this making the first page. Or three.
* How did Kate find Claire after ditching her? Why the hell would a woman 36 weeks pregnant decide to be besties with the woman who terrorized her with a gun to her head and stole all her shit? Why would two of Lost’s most experienced writers throw a credibility-destroying development like that into one of the show’s final episodes?
This made no sense. Good point, but I am inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt for now.
* So…the Others really are nominally servants of Jacob, but occasionally their Lazarus Pit turns people evil? Which most of them act like anyway? I guess we’ll get this ironed out eventually.
Unless Sayid was “claimed” before the Pit. Or something. We were told that the closest translation to what happened to Sayid was “claimed.” My first thought was, “Not possessed?” I’m not sure what the difference is, but therein might lie the answer.
Whatever happened to Sayid obviously draws a comparison to Fake Locke. Fake Locke knew what Real Locke was thinking when he was dying (or so he told Richard). If Fake Locke “claimed” Real Locke, then it stands to reason whomever “claimed” Sayid did so before the moment of death, right?
The torture scene was an obvious attempt to ‘exorcize’ whomever claimed Sayid.
* Sawyer just saying “fuck it all” at this point makes a lot of sense. Josh Holloway’s handling it well. It’s funny, though: The Missus asked me toward the end of the episode “So why is Kate chasing after Sawyer now?” and I had no idea.
To be fair, she said it was because she thought he’d help her find Claire.
P.S. Regarding Kate saying she followed Sawyer because she thought he’d help her find Claire, I should add that I thought this was a sweetly believable way to subvert the obvious answer, which was “Because I want to fuck your grieving brains out.”
P.P.S. Re: Sayid, maybe the simplest way to put it is that the Pit didn’t resurrect Sayid, it resurrected Fake Sayid.
Hmmm, too early to write the whole season off? Possibly. I guess it’s just from reading that massive 3 part interview with Cuse and Lind, waiting such a damn long time between seasons, being assured again and again that “we’ve always known exactly what we’re doing,” and so on, I’m expecting good (at the very least, solid) stuff from the get-go. And it hasn’t felt like that.
I think what I’m reacting to is something that I remember a film professor of mine talking about, the idea that a storyteller of any kind needs tomake you feel like “you’re in good hands,” and that if you feel that, they can do anything. More often than not in the past (alterna-past?), Lost has given me this feeling, but not in the last 3 hours and that makes me nervous.
I’m doing my best not to fall into the “and at the end it will all make sense” trap, but I still want solid storytelling here. I’ll back off on issues with the introduction of the temple (I guess I got confused and thought that the temple that was referred to in the past was the weird place where Ben had his smoke monster vision thing, so this felt like a gratuitously new place). I have a hard time with the Kate/Claire bus bench bit, but sure maybe we write that off to timeline bleed synergy symmetry that will be explained later. But introducing a whole host of new characters in the first ep? That just forces us to go through these questions that we’ve done to death on this show:
who are these guys?
what do they want?
are they good or bad?
who do they work for?
how long have they been here?
what’s their deal?
repeat, etc.
I’m amazed when someone said they were Others, the writers didn’t have Hurley at least acknowledge this nonsense and say “No dude, these are OTHER others.” It feels like weak writing at a critical juncture when I want the writing to be stronger than ever.
I’ll stick around to the end, I guess I’m just hoping by then I’ll feel, “well, they started off pretty feebly, but wow did they pull it together by the end.”
Man, the Claire and Kate stuff really was pretty awful, wasn’t it? We can justify Claire getting in the cab as destiny, or timeline-bleed. But without a plausible character reason for doing it, it should FEEL intentionally strange. And the way the scene was shot and assembled, it didn’t.
Kate actually got offended when Claire checked her purse and initially rebuffed her offer. As though that was the odd behavior. And the show did nothing to make us feel as though getting in the cab with the woman who kidnapped you at gunpoint is unusual.
I’m not getting the sense that these Temple dudes are other Others. My undestanding (which might be flawed b/c they haven’t really spelled it out, but then, until I read the internets it wasn’t even a question in my mind), is that the Temple is Others headquarters, and the Others on the beach at the moment is just a group sent out from headquarters on a mission, with Richard in charge of that mission.
Cindy the stewardess, the kids, and the guy who almost shot Jin have been shown in the past to be part of the same group as Richard. And Richard knew immediatley what the fireworks was a warning for. That the fireworks were set off at all means the Others in the temple where trying to warn someon what was up, my guess being Richard’s group outside the Temple walls on their mission.
For me, the real other Others are Illana and Bram’s group, with their whole “what lies in the shadow of the statue” thing. If you’re upset about the introduction of those guys, fine, but I will point out that they were setup and a thread from last season.
JeffK: Like I said in the post, I understand that it looks a little silly to complain about Kate’s Claire-tracking abilities in her magic undetectable-by-police taxi, given that this is a series that features (for example) a giant smoke monster that can read people’s thoughts and transform into dead people as it prowls around an Island that travels through time. But the latter business is science fiction, something we’re prepared to suspend disbelief about; the former is the basic nature of human interaction, which we’re not. Granted, Lost has played with the basic nature of human interaction over and over again with all its coincidences/fate/syncrhonicity/destiny stuff, but when it has done so, it’s used the tools of filmmaking and acting to make it clear that that’s what’s going on. They didn’t do that here.
Simon has it exactly right:
We can justify Claire getting in the cab as destiny, or timeline-bleed. But without a plausible character reason for doing it, it should FEEL intentionally strange. And the way the scene was shot and assembled, it didn’t.
That’s dead on. None of the destiny cues were there–no funny looks, no portentous camerawork, no music cues. That’s why those things exist. That’s what I meant when I said “If they’d worked a little harder to show that Kate finding Claire was a function of one of [the sci-fi/fantasy/synchronicity aspects], fine. But they didn’t.” We got a little of it toward the end, when both Kate and Claire seemed taken aback by Claire having named her baby Aaron, but we could have used a lot more up front.
I want to be clear that I’m not tossing out the whole series, or even the whole season, because of this sequence, which may be the impression I gave with the phrase “credibility-destroying.” All I meant was that it undermined the credibility of this episode. Ultimately, it’s small potatoes. But it was frustratingly sloppy, and not the kind of thing you wanna see from a show in the homestretch. Like Eric, I’m giving them the benefit of the doubt, but I don’t think I can be begrudged a disappointed initial reaction.
Eric: Thanks for the clarification re: Kate’s explicit and unspoken motives for chasing down Sawyer. Both make sense. I think I missed the former because I was eating something crunchy, no kidding.
Also: Regarding how people are claimed or infected: Your theory that people are claimed before they die, otherwise how could Fake Locke know what Real Locke was thinking as he died, is interesting because it raises the question of how Locke got claimed in the first place. Perhaps the infection was passed to him by Ben? Keep in mind that Richard warned…I think it was Sawyer and Kate, when they gave wounded young Ben to him for healing, that if they did this, Ben would never be the same. This would imply that Ben is infected/claimed, and perhaps he transmitted the infection to Locke as he killed him?
Ha, trying to unravel this at this point is an exercise in futility, no doubt, given just how many unknowns there are in terms of all the divisions among the crazy Island types, and all the different kinds of dead people we’ve seen, not to mention Walt and Miles, but it’s a fun futility!
Finally: I too think the torture scene was an exorcism attempt. It’s also a lot like what anti-infection zealot Rousseau did to Sayid when she first captured him in Season One, which is probably not a coincidence.
JJosh: I think Charles is right–it’s been made clear that these are plain-vanilla Others. Seasons’ worth of Others being sent to the temple, including Cindy the Stewardess, back that up. If you accept this, are your concerns about Dogen, Lennon, and the rest of the Temple gang lessened?
Quick thought: Was oddly helpful and bribeable auto mechanic one of the timecops, i.e. folks like Faraday’s mom or Matthew Abbadon (or, I presume, Libby) who exist to get people where they need to be? Seemed like an strangely weighty bit part to me, sorta like the sudden introduction of Jack’s grandpa last season. I’m also told the mechanic was on Buffy, and Lost is about nothing if not fanservice.
I hate to sound like I’m stuck on this one note , but the Kate episodes always suck because the writers, by their own admission, aren’t very good at writing female characters. It doesnt’t help that the acting is sometimes weak, to be sure — Elizabeth Michell’s chops definitely helped make Juliet stand out.
I didn’t find ANYTHING not-Smokey Claire did remotely believable — damn straight she would have gone for help not sat at a bus stop. Kate’s behavior I can understand as she’s been shown as a total meddler — not a runner. There’s not a situation that Kate doesn’t think she can make more messed up, wither it’s raising Aaron, going after Sawyer and Juliet on the sub, saving young Ben, going after Sawyer in this episode, or becoming Claire’s birthing partner. I’ve always liked Kate but in this episode I totally began to see why everyone hates her — she’s an annoying troublemaker! This whole season seems to be her playing Jack and Sawyer against each other, and no credible reason for her behavior has ever been shown — and that’s bad writing, sorry. ON the plus side, her hair looked INCREDIBLE.
I can get that Claire and Kate share a secret bond in the alternate future, but the way it played out was completely unbelievable.
But just to show it wasn’t just the girls who were erratically written, there was Jack’s sudden interest in asking questions, something no one on the show has ever been much interested in.
So, I considered this episode a necessary evil — a analog to “What Kate Did” and getting the neccessary Kate story out of the way early on. Plus Rousseau Claire and Empire Straikes Back Sayid torture scene…finally!
Heidi: “There’s not a situation that Kate doesn’t think she can make more messed up.” Haha, so true! I don’t really find any Lost characters annoying the way some do, but she’d be my number-one candidate, not fan-unfavorite Jack. Jack I see as an experiment in making your hero difficult to like through constant failure, which is ballsy. Kate’s always been just kind of frustrating. Still, as you say, she’s always been that way. It’s a consistent character trait, with consequences.
And you’re right about the female characters of course. One of the VanDerWerff pieces I linked to recently talks about that at length if you’re interested.
Just thought I’d point out that the Temple Others were surprised to find the Lazarus Pit all clouded and dark when they came in to throw Sayid in there. Theoretically, that’s the reason why he’s infected- the pool was contaminated, implying to me that with the loss of Jacob/ascendence of the MIB the status quo of the wishing well had changed.
It would also follow that when Ben was dunked in the pool as a kid, it was Jacob’s pool and so he was infused/infected with the Jacob disease, and so now Sayid is infected with the MIB disease?
I think that might be pretty much what’s up, but.. If it is allegedly the same infection/insanity that Claire has, and we all seem to believe then that maybe it’s the same kind of crazy that Rousseau had, I don’t know if that works with what we saw of Rousseau’s crew getting dragged away by the smog monster and then being creepy douches.
Or maybe the Claire/Rousseau thing is not as binary as “she had the same infection”, just that Rousseau was understandably crazy after all those years (heh) and Claire has taken a crazy mountain lady course on her own terms.
Also, I hadn’t seen it pointed out anywhere, but I thought it was cute that Jack wanted to do a tracheotomy with a pen on Charlie in the season premiere when he mocked Boone for having that idea in the Season 1 opener..
I just read Todd VanDerWerff’s round up post that you linked to and it gave me lots of ideas about the sickness and the pools.
Maybe dipping someone in the pool’s when they’re clear gets you infected with a different kind of sickness, the Jacob sickness making you into an Other, replete with constant affirmations of you being a good guy while you murder, kidnap, and torture anyone not on your side. Like what Richard warned Kate would happen to Ben back in 1977.
So that if you are dipped into the pool while it’s cloudy, you become a MiB acolyte, like apparently Sayid and maybe Rousseau’s team? And the two factions are at war, except the Jacob’s Others have been winning all this time so there aren’t many (or any) MiB acolytes.
When did the pool’s change color? When MiB tricked one of Jacob’s guys into murdering him.
This would follow the growing theory that neither Jacob or MiB is all evil or good. Just two opposing sides, with the Oceanic survivors in the middle.
Sometimes when you’re playing an RPG, you’ll get a situation where you get half-way through a really awesome scene and someone remembers some kind of accounting detail that invalidates/undermines the scene. Like: “So, I’m smashing away at the orcs with the Sword of Cimmeria and they’re running scared and -” “Wait – you left the Sword of Cimmeria with your horse remember?” “Oh yeah-”
I imagine something similar happened with the Kate & Claire scene. “Wouldn’t it be awesome if Claire went into labor after Kate steals the taxi and then Kate has to take her to the emergency room and they totally bond?” “Yeah – that would be great.” “We could even have Ethan show up as the doctor.” “Yeah – but, oh wait, Kate still has her handcuffs on.” “Well, maybe she can find Claire again after she gets them off somehow.” “Um – ok – I guess.” – thus undermining the originally imagined awesomeness.
Charles R:
That’s more or less what I was thinking, Ben et al are “infected w/ Jacob” and Sayid & co. are “infected with Esau”.