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.