* Alright, another very good episode, intriguing in both timelines, lots of juicy mythology, fun performances, action, hieroglyphics, dead people, the whole nine. So far the only false note for me this season has been the Great Kate Escape episode. Three out of four ain’t bad.
* During one of the initial segments of Jack’s flashsideways, he seemed as taken aback by his appendectomy scar as he seemed to be on the plane by the cut on his neck and just the general way he looked in the mirror. They made a nice big deal of this this time, complete with a call to Mom asking when he had the operation, so methinks there’s something fishy going on with this whole alternate timeline, that it’s not as simple as “what would have happened if the Island had been nuked in the ’70s.”
* And I’m glad of that, because it’s only now occurring to me why some part of me never quite believed that was where they were headed in the first place: I never consciously made this connection, but the idea that we’re seeing what life would be like if something bad had never happened to them and they lived happy lives instead is straight-up The Last Temptation of Christ and/or “For the Man Who Has Everything.” Obviously the Lost writers aren’t above riffing on or referencing other big genre works–The Dark Tower, The Stand, Watchmen, we can all rattle off another half-dozen major touchstones easy. But never do they simply lift storylines wholesale. This ain’t Heroes, and Jeph Loeb hasn’t worked on the show since Season One. So while I had speculated that maybe this would all lead to Jack or Sawyer or whoever seeing how much better their life would be without the Island but somehow sacrificing it all for the greater good, I don’t think that’s where we’re headed anymore, at least not in the “Christ still chooses to die on the cross/Superman decides to rip off the psychic plant and kick Mongul’s ass” way I was kicking around.
* So, in each flashsideways, our protagonist character will bump into an Other? Kate and Claire met Ethan, Locke met Ben, and Jack met Dogen. Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, three times is a pattern. Or to use Ian Fleming’s formulation, three times is enemy action. Dun dun DUNNNNNN! Anyway, I like this because it means we’ll probably see big Tom again. Speaking of which, did you notice the last name “Friendly” on Jacob’s lighthouse wheel? He really was “Mr. Friendly”! Oh, Lindelof & Cuse, you kidders.
* We’ve learned, if it wasn’t clear already, that the Man in Black is an out-and-out liar. Obviously he was pretending to be Jack’s dad. Obviously as such he only pretended to be speaking on behalf of Jacob. Claire tells us “her dad” told her that the Others stole her baby, which isn’t true. Thus one can assume he was seriously fudging the truth for Sawyer too. My brother Ryan pointed out that a cave hollowed out of a sheer cliff wall over the ocean seemed like an odd place for Jacob to hang out, making him skeptical that that was ever Jacob’s place to begin with. The moment I saw those 360 names written out in an orderly fashion next to each degree on the wheel, I thought, “Well, I guess there was probably no need for Jacob to have scrawled them all over the roof of a cave someplace else on the Island.” Particularly if the wheel is a magic portal into all their lives, right?
* Who’s the momma? Juliet?
* I loved all the callbacks to Season One. Shannon’s asthma inhaler, the caves, going on a jungle quest, Jack recalling his vision of his dad…Thinking back, it really did seem like that was just a vision, for a long long time after that episode aired. Maybe an Island-inspired vision, but a vision nonetheless. I wonder how long it took for the writers to decide “You know what? That really was his dad!” Then again, the body was missing from the coffin all along, so who knows.
* I would say that Hurley’s speculation that the skeletons in the cave are two of their own, as a result of time travel, shoots down the possibility that that’s actually the case. But remember back in the day when they got “Moonlight Serenade” by Glenn Miller to play on the radio and Hurley said it could be coming from anywhere “or any time?” He added a quick “just kidding,” and at the time I thought that was the creators’ signal to us that we didn’t need to bother with spacetime continuum theorizing. Whoops!
* Jacob’s a manipulator too. Important to remember. What I really want to know is whether the Others’ rather barbaric conduct over the seasons are a result of a more-or-less faithful interpretation of his orders, or if things are way off base due to either a communication breakdown or deliberate malfeasance by Ben or Richard or Widmore or Dogen or whoever the relevant person is.
* With Jacob looking on approvingly, newly minted leadership-position Hurley opts to be cryptic and not answer Dogen’s question. So THAT’S how they learn it!
* The animal-corpse baby in Claire’s basinet was the most disturbing thing the show has served up in a long time. Like, it made me really uncomfortable for the brief few seconds we saw it. That is Texas Chain Saw Massacre shit right there. I’ve said this before, but as we’ve learned more about the Others, the Dharma Initiative, the Monster, and so on, a lot of the sense of fear and horror that these things presented in the earlier seasons, when the show was often one of the scariest on television, gradually dissipated. It’s nice to see them try to inject it back in.
* And hey, an axe murder! Alright.
* I don’t know if this was something they thought of, but of all the characters they could have left to the tender mercies of crazy Claire and evil Locke, Jin was an excellent choice because he spent years trying to stay one step ahead of the wishes of a vicious gangster. I believe that he’s someone capable of thinking on his feet and staying alive around the homicidally violent, longer probably than any other character except maybe inveterate conmen like Sawyer or Ben.
* Here’s the thing, though: Fake Locke knows that Jin knows that they’re both lying about who has Claire’s baby. Sawyer, who’s with Fake Locke, will know it too. How’s all that gonna work?
* Back to the Lighthouse for a second: I thought this was a fine scene, because it delivered something we haven’t seen…mmmmmmaybe since Locke refused to press the button at the end of Season Two? Which was someone getting so fed up with the way the Island’s phenomena have used and abused him that he snaps. There was an interesting new dynamic in play here as well: In the Hatch, Locke really had no evidence about whether what he was doing was extraordinary or bull, he just didn’t buy it anymore. Jack, on the other hand, just got a glimpse of his childhood house, and someplace in Japan, and maybe Oxford or something, in the mirrors of a magic lighthouse to which he’d been led by someone who got his directions from a dead man only he could see or talk to. Jack knows damn well that something really astonishing is happening on the Island, in reference to him specifically–and it’s precisely that knowledge that’s driving him crazy, not the lack of knowledge that so tormented Locke. Jack smashing the mirror (did he hear or fear or…?) was six seasons of not knowing what the hell is going on exploding into action. Good stuff. (I sort of wish the smashing hadn’t been spoiled by the stupid network’s next episode teaser last week, but oh well. It was at least nice of them to try to avoid making that mistake again this week.)
* I loved seeing all the hieroglyphics on the temple hallway wall, just ‘cuz you know they threw that in there so that the Lostpedia folks would translate it. And translate the Japanese dialogue, and freezeframe every glimpse of the wheel, and so on and so forth.
* Who’s coming to the Island? I’m pulling for Walt. I can barely fathom how satisfying that would be.
29 Responses to Lost thoughts