EL LINUS struck this week, giving us an hour of the weasel and his nasal voice. I’ve always found Ben to be a tremendous douchebag, and I mean that in a loving way. There has never been anything he wasn’t willing to do in the name of himself, and you have to appreciate that in a guy. Be it letting his daughter get shot, or owning Locke in a seedy hotel room, the dude plays for keeps. He’s a a shitbag you respect because of how far he will go to maintain his tenuous grip on power.

The interesting wrinkle that this week’s episode addressed is what happens to Benjamin Linus when he realizes that he’s been duped, ain’t had no power, and has been a rube for the past twenty or so years? The immediate answer is simple: he stabbed the shit out of Jacob, before his dumb ass was rolled into a fire. But I suppose I’m talking more about the emotional effects.

On the Island, Ben is totally busted as the dude who jabbed Jacob in the belly-guts with a knife. Miles rats him out after doing the creepy twitching thing with Jacob’s ashes and this severely pisses off Ilana. And not in the good way, because I know you’re thinking it may be enjoyable to get spanked by such an authoritative and sultry woman. No sir, she has a gun. So then she’s like, hey, Linus, dig your own grave while we go and eat mangoes and shit. TTYL, d00d.

What a busch league move by Ilana. Hasn’t she been watching this show at all? You leave Ben Linus alone for anything more than nine seconds and he’s going to get out of the situation somehow. He has a remarkable ability to escape certain doom. So while she’s letting him dig his own grave, y himself, with some bamboo shoot or something, good ole Smokey rolls up and chats up Linus.

The biggest revelation this week on LOST was something that no one seems to want to talk about. Smokey is a fucking Jedi! Did you see that shit? He unshackled Benjamin with nothing more than a cute little wink and a hand gesture. Isn’t anyone else amazed by this? I am. I mean, I knew LOST was awesome, but I had no idea that we were dealing with wielders of The Force! Good god damn.

So Smokey and Ben have a heart to heart. It’s all very touching but all I could think about is how Ilana, while she was eating her mango, had no idea that Smokey had approached. I mean, for the past six seasons, every time he went anywhere, Smokey roared and you could hear him from three miles away. Well, if she’s dumb enough to let him be, she may be deaf enough to not hear a rampaging pillar of black smoke. Smokey frees Ben’s ass and once again Ben flees and Ilana is like, “Oh fuck, maybe I should be watching the sociopath and not eating a mango” and chases after him.

The two of them talk, and they get into one of the overriding themes of the show, which is a person’s sense of purpose. Ben has been feeling legitimately ass-crushed since he thought that Jacob had been playing him for a fool. And when he found out he had been betrayed and his entire sense of duty was but a charade, he freaked the fuck out. All of the power he assumed he had, all of his existence was tied up in what he thought was his position as the leader of the Others. When this was dismissed, he wile’d out. Like, woah.

Benjamin isn’t the only one being a self-pitying asshole ever since they learned they weren’t a Unique Snowflake. My boyfriend, the inestimably gorgeous and immortal Richard Alpert, is afflicted with the same sense of Emotitis.

Emotitis is a disease that is fatal to one’s dignity and leaves them without any sense of pride. Where your self-respect once was, you find a puddle of wallowing and lack of self-worth. Many of those suffering from this disease also still use MySpace-esque pictures in their Facebook profile, post status updates that read things like “Gee whiz I can’t ever catch a break :-/” or “UGH today is the WORST”, and they use self-hate as a way to attract members of the sex they wish to copulate with.

So yeah, Dicky Alps is seriously suffering from that.

Ricardo dupes Hurley and Jack the Sexpot to follow him to the Blackrock, where we’re given confirmation of what we already knew: the dude can’t die. Everyone who Jacob touches receives a “Gift”, which explains Dick’s predicament, but is vague enough to create another thousand questions. Like, is everyone immortal? Or what are their gifts? Can Jack shoot lasers out of his asshole? And since he can’t die, he wants Jack to light the fuse of the dynamite he wishes to go kabloom with. What a shitty way to die, right? I mean, couldn’t Richard have found like, a bottle of pills somewhere and had Jack dump them down his throat? Jesus, explosion?

Richard is seeking obliteration because he as well as Ben feels betrayed by Jacob. Much like Linus claims, Dicky was told by Jacob that he was part of some enormous plan, and now that Deity-Dude-Guy has been stabbed and rendered ashes, he assumes that it was all a lie.

What a fool! How can you possible begin to conceive of God’s…I mean Jacob’s plan! You self-absorbed fuck!

Jack’s drinking the Destiny Kool Aid though, and he agrees to light the stick of dynamite. After staring out at the ocean and humming that Kings of Leon song from the Grey’s Anatomy commercials, he’s come to accept his totally-specialness in the grand schemes of everything. It’s just like in the Matrix when Cipher is like IF HE IS SPECIAL CAN HE TOTALLY DIE TRINITY?!, Jack knows he’s all Neo shit and the fuse won’t go off. And look at that, he’s fucking right.

Jack’s got some grand role to play in everything, and it seems by displaying that, he cures Dicky of his Fall Out Boy-Blues, though I assume Alpert will continue to wear eyeliner. Can’t win all the battles.

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Here’s the thing about this season of LOST. A lot of people are worried that the writers don’t have enough time to wrap everything up. I disrespectfully disagree. I think that they have too much fucking time on their hands. And instead of a tightly-knit prolonged orgasm of a season, we’re getting a lot of tip-teasing. Yeah, tip-teasing. There’s a lot of foot-dragging and every episode is backloaded towards the last ten minutes or so. This episode was no different, though I dug the fuck out of it.

Let’s start with the big picture. MiB is clearly being used to some extent, as a doppleganger for the Devil. El Diablo! Repent, or the Smoke Monster will eat you! Or at least, he’ll drag you. He does a lot of dragging. How does he actually kill these people? Just gun them into air, and let gravity do the rest? I’m not hatin’, that’s an awful way to go.

More specifically, last night he reminded me a lot of Milton’s Lucifer from Paradise Lost. Last night, Sayid is given a sword by Dogen and told to go meet MiB in the forest and stab his ass, and he gives him the specific instruction to not let MiB speak to him.

The whole thing wafts of allusions to the snake in the Garden of Eden. Sayid marches through the forest to meet with MiB. He walks through this Eden, because let’s face it, the Island possesses some seriously fucking impressive attributes, and meets up with Smokey. And just like Lucifer, Smokey is a shape-shifter. Naw, not a snake, but an equally impressive black cloud. And just like Lucifer, Smokey’s most powerful quality is his velvet-tongue. Lucifer is all like, yo, dude, eat that fucking apple. But he doesn’t do it by force, he does it by pouring honey into the ears of those around them.

Promising them things.

Just like MiB.

The MiB is arranging some sort of super-squad of douchebags from Oceanic 815 and homeless-looking people. And for all the aspersions he casts on Jacob for being manipulative, he’s just as much. MiB has gone from Sawyer to Sayid to everyone on the Island, and told them of this grand deception that have played a part in – you don’t have to stay here!, your choices were cast for you!, let us all go, now that Jacob is gone!

Throughout the entire time on the Island, he has conspired to kill Jacob. And he has done it all through intermediaries and violence. The fact that he even wears the form of Locke is a testament to his guile and persuasion. His velvet-tongue, his temptations and promises, like the Devil, get people to do his bidding.

Sayid, you can have your babe back!

Claire, you can have your kid back!

Promises, promises, promises.

In LA X, Sayid still wants to bang the hell out of Nadia. Unfortunately, she’s married to his brother. She’s married to him because Sayid was all emo and pushed her away in LA X. And when she’s like, dude, you’re still sweating me, why didn’t you get with this? Our kids would have been way cuter, have you seen my daughter? Her fucking eyebrows look like caterpillars, Sayid has the most disgusting response ever.

Because I don’t…deserve you.

Holy fucking groan! Did he just really say that? Jesus Christ. I turned to my friend Dave, who then barfed onto my crotch. After wiping up the vomit, he asked me, who is writing this? And I told him the Wachowski Brothers. But that was a lie. This season is aggravating, because they’re swinging these mallets instead of making their points. You don’t have to have someone say the words destiny to make your point, nor do you have to make Sayid outright say he doesn’t deserve her?

On the Island, Sayid succumbs to the succor of MiB’s sayings. He sets about killing Dogen and Lennon, which somehow, and I have no idea how, allows for Smokey to infiltrate the Temple of Doom. Really, a random Japanese guy who was a business man was the only thing keeping them out of there? I have to tip my cap to the writers for their handling of Sayid, because I didn’t see it coming. I always assumed that Sayid would be a virtuous dude. Apparently he’s destined to cause misery. OMFG.

The other miserable moment in this episode came when Dogen was telling Sayid about his life. Listen, writers. It’s the final season. We’ve never met this guy before. All he’s been since he was introduced is some contrived mysterious guy, whose entire personality is centered around floating half-baked sentences around to conjure up mystic bullshit. We don’t care about his kid, his dumb baseball, or that he’s an alcoholic.

And furthermore, we’re not going to care when Dogen dies! We barely know the guy! And not only that, what we do know of him, sucks! Thank God he’s fucking dead.

And what exactly was the purpose of the Temple? Does anyone know? It was clumsily introduced at the beginning of the season, and then what? They just sat there for five episodes, everyone in it dies, and now they’re leaving it. Pointless. A waste of time.

On LA X, Sayid once again kills Keamy. Jesus Christ, how creepy is Keamy? And the question about Free Will versus Choice is again raised. It’s erroneous to think that the shit poppin’ off on LA X is destiny. Hurley, Jack, and Locke are all living much nicer livers; albeit quiet and boring and mundane and a waste of my time. But Sayid? Sayid is back to killing again. Keamy, again. Some lives have changed, some are the same.

A strong theory is that LA X is some sort of dreamworld or reality conjured up by Jacob or MiB that gives the people of the Island the life they deserved. Coming at the beginning of this season, the writers kept dropping the word consequence. Consequence. Consequence, consequence, consequence. So perhaps Sayid is being punished in LA X for the fact that he just laid the boom down on everyone in the main reality.

Who knows?

It’s interesting though.

The last ten minutes of the episode were insane, and had me screaming at the top of my lungs. If you watch the show with me, you know I’m not not kidding. MiB busts into the Temple, and starts droppin’ heads. But even more bad ass? Ilana, Ben, and Lapidus roll up! When they showed up, I was like, OH FUCK, THE JUSTICE LEAGUE IS HERE! Lapidus is obviously Superman, Ilana being the Amazonian beauty   she is stands in for Wonder Woman, and Ben is Batman. Just like our boy Wayne, he’s got a million ways out of everything. They were like a supergroup ready to lay the smack down on Smokey. Or at least save whoever wanted to come with them.

Some shit is up with Ilana, and I’m glad they’re not done with her character. When Jacob visited her in The Incident, he spoke to her as though she knew who he was, so she’s got some inside knowledge. Maybe she subscribes to Deities Weekly, and has been writing scholarly articles or some shit. I have no idea. She’s special.

At the end of the episode, the battle lines are drawn. MiB has conjured himself up a legitimate fucking posse. And they roll out in slow-motion, which every single posse should do at one point. I’m not certain where they’re going, but they are rocking out en masse, and they intend on leaving the Island. MiB has promised them all riches and excess freedom. Save for the fact that he’s done it down the barrel of a gun. Come with me and be free, or die. On the other side? There’s Jacob and his crew! Save for uh, the fact that Jacob is dead.

The obvious confrontation is between the philosophies of Jacob and MiB. Do either of them really offer Free Will? I’m not really sure. MiB has propelled people through Force, which fits nicely into people’s comparisons to him with Hobbes. And yeah, Smokey sure looks like a Leviathan, doesn’t he? And Jacob presents with them choices or opportunities. Like our philosopher Locke, not the crippled one, he believes in the human spirit. He doesn’t offer a direct hand, and it is his distanced approach that MiB has exploited as lack of caring, disregard, apathy, cruelness.

In the end, maybe they’re both just exploiting everyone on the Island in some deistic chess match. They are all pieces in a debate over the virtues of humanity. Is Jacob really offering free choice, if he goes to visit these people? Or, as MiB says, does that affect their entire lives, leading them there? And conversely, MiB isn’t offering anyone freedom or choice. In fact, he’s exploiting the very faults he enumerates in the Incident, their greed, their destruction, their consumption, to achieve his release. Who the fuck knows.

This was really long, I’m sorry. I’ll see you next week.

Yeah, you go ahead and grimace Jacob. You’re grimacing like I am, at the uneven quality of this week’s LOST. There were some totally radical moments, and then there were some really unsubtle and painful scenes, where the dialogue made me go, wtf, no seriously? I can’t tell if I totally like the mundane action of LA X, or if it is lulling me to sleep in the middle of epic Island adventuring.

Hurley is the stud of this show right now. Almost every scene he is in, I’m totally digging on. Our portly fellow continues to mix together hilarious metacommentary on the show itself with other witty comments:

You ever try to get Jack to do something? It’s like impossible. I can just go myself…Okay, it’s bad enough you already made me write down way too much, and I just lied to a samurai.

Awesome. I love how they continue to have Hurley act as the mouthpiece for almost everything the viewer is thinking. I mean, Jesus Christ, c’mon Jacob! Everyone knows that Jack, along with everyone else on the Island are bunch of obstinate assholes, who listen to no one and only do what they please. It’s amusing to hear it out loud.

Claire is romping through the jungle with Jin and drags him back to her hut of depravity. There is something really creepy going on with Jack’s half-sister. Be it her shitty hair, or the skeleton-baby in her crib, or the fact that she’s burying hatchets in dudes, yeah, something’s up.

What is up?

Don’t you remember!

She’s infected!

With what?

AN INFECTION, DUMMY.

The big reveal at the end of the episode is that her friend that she kept referencing throughout the episode was the Man in Black. The double-twist that really wrinkled the ole proverbial testicles was that she knew he wasn’t Locke. Oh. Snap. Claire walked off with the MiB back at the end of Season Four when he was rockin’ out as her Dad. And now it seems that she’s totally down with Smokey. Interesting.

I really want to know how Claire and Sayid became infected with the infection, since I assume that once they’ve become engulfed in it they’re under Smokey’s power, and do this a lot:

Damn.

So yeah, Claire is batshit crazy and working with the Man in Black. She’s hellbent on getting Aaron back, and I’m all like, uh, bitch, you fucking left him two seasons ago! Maybe if you hadn’t wandered off into the forest in the dead of night with the specter of your father, you wouldn’t be trying to desperately to find him. Just saying. I mean, I know that there are many philosophies regarding parenting, most of which involve leaving your kid in front of a TV or video game console and then complaining when they grow up to get drunk in the woods and spend all damn day on the Tweeterbook or whatever. But I’m just going to go out and condemn the “Abandon Your Baby And Vanish Into the Forest” approach.

I can already hear the groans of people expecting more from the LA X dimension. I know this because I had two friends groaning on my futon last night about how fucking boring the storylines set there are. I’m trying really hard to enjoy them,   because I figure there has to be some value to them. Right? I mean, please?

This week we get to see Jack the Shitty Dad. Over the course of the twenty minutes allocated to LA X, we watch Jack as he tries his hand at parenting, realizes he’s becoming OMFG, just like his own father, and makes solid with his kid. I can see where they’re going thematically. They want to show you what would have been different, et cetera, et cetera. Or rather, blah blah blah. Unfortunately, what works on paper as a neat concept – show the viewers the banal existence they would have suffered had they not landed on the Island!, is just sort of boring in execution.

This is the sort of stuff that interests me on LA X; shit like Jack not remembering when he had his appendix removed in that timeline, and myself quietly begging that it has something to do with an overlapping with the Oceanic 815-Crashed timeline. I hold my breath hoping that LA X plays out more than a sterile drama, and in my darkest moments, I begin to worry it won’t.

Yo, we get it. At first all the books they were dropping in the show that had allusions to the plot were cool. But it’s like they’re just smashing us in the face with their themes. I mean, last week Al Bundy’s wife tells Locke outright, “Maybe it’s destiny! Destiny! Do you get it? Destiny!” and this week we’re handling Alice in Wonderland. RABBIT HOLES OMFG I GET IT.

Ah, the Lighthouse. I mean, c’mon. If you didn’t think this part was rad, you’re a fucking asshole. Or maybe you’re just not a fanboy like me. But Jacob, much like God, has been watching over all of the candidates throughout their entire lives. Every candidate is assigned a number, and corresponds with a point on the wheel that rotates the mirror. Am I wrong in assuming there are 360 degrees, and consequently, 360 candidates on the wheel?

Of course Jack is impetuous as fuck, as ever, and after finding himself on the wheel, goes banana-shit crazy and demands they put the dial on his number. It reveals his old-ass house and he’s all butthurt because Jacob has been watching him take craps and suffer throughout his entire life. Then Jack decides to beat up a helpless mirror, and trash Jacob’s sweet voeyeur device.

Everyone on the fucking Island is so impulsive and hard-headed, and it is infuriating to watch their stupidity sometimes. You just know they’re going to fuck everything up. Of course Jack has to make with the breaking of the lighthouse mirror, of course. Because he’s an asshole, like everyone else on that plane.

That shit is rad though. C’mon. There’s a mysterious lighthouse with a mirror that allows Jacob to peer into the lives of those he had chosen as candidates. It’s creepy, and it continues to make me wonder how these people were dubbed worthy of being candidates.

I’m going to ignore the bad line about having to let Jack look out at the ocean to figure out his destiny and just fawn over Jacob’s interaction with Hurley towards the end of the episode. I really dig on Jacob’s nonchalance towards whatever happens on the Island. The guy has been stabbed and thrown into a firepit, and he still exudes a peacefulness that I can dig. It all carries over from his initial conversation, where he   makes it known that he believes the human spirit will persevere. Guy has faith in everything working out, and even if it doesn’t, I can respect his optimism.

He is a man with a plan, and it don’t matter if you smash his lighthouse “into a billion pieces”.

When Jacob tells Hurley that he needed to get Jack and him away from the Temple, I was like, here we go, fuck, they’re going to run off to the Temple like assholes. But Jacob drops the bomb that they’re too late already, and I was totally stoked. Man in Black is going to tear some shit up at the Temple, and for once, the assholes running around the Island aren’t going to be boneheaded and run towards danger.

Next week, hopefully MiB tears up Dogen’s samurai ass (paging Freud), and Jack stops being emo and finally realizes he has to kick some ass. Remember Shephard, brother, ain’t nothing irreversible. Just because you’ve totally blown as a leader and ruined lives, you still got a chance at redemption.

Or at least give me more Hurley.

With thunder and lightning LOST returned this week to the epicness that we had all come to expect from the show. After a throwaway episode last week that left me at a frothing level of indignancy, this week threw so much at me that I have no idea how to begin to wrestle with the episode. Questions were answered, but as always, fourteen more took their place. Right after watchin’ this shit, I was like, fuck me, I have to make something intelligent out of the awesomeness that I just absorbed into my skull-plate. Because honestly, this is really all I wanted to say:

Fucking awesome!
Huh?
Jesus Christ!
Woah.
Huh?
What?
Holy fucking shit.
Tuesday is so far away.

That’s it man, that’s really it. The episode left my brain a gooey melange of confused awesomeness. But let’s try and think about this shit.

It seems obvious to start with the brain-shattering revelation that was why all of the peeps we have come to know are on the Island. Jacob beckoned them to the Island because he’s been searching for a substitute. Get it? Get the title of the Island? Yeah, me too. And from the looks of the scrawlings on the inside of whatever sort of damp, creepy cave the Man in Black brought Sawyer to, he’s been going at it for a long, long fucking time. As well, we finally get to see what the numbers were for. Sort of. MiB tells Sawyer that “Jacob had a thing for numbers”, which sort of explains why they’ve been fucking everywhere, but uh, not really. That said, I’m completely fine with that being the explanation behind them even if they don’t elaborate any further.

Of all the mysteries of the Island, this is one of the ones I give the least shit about.

It’s also worth noting that The Freckled Hussy wasn’t one of the ones that MiB mentioned being summoned to the Island. I know this because I turned to my friend Tommy and said fourteen times, “You sure she wasn’t shown? You sure? You sure? Totally sure? I should shut the fuck up? Okay, yeah…You sure?” Does Jacob’s heir have to be male? That seemed to be what we dragged out of it.

More of MiB’s revelation in a moment, but let’s diverge off this path. LOST style, hypertextual trains of thought!

Was there anything more frightening and entertaining than Dicky Alpert running out of the jungle like a fucking crackhead and accosting Sawyer? Seriously. Dude was losing his fucking mind, and it was awesome. For years the dude has been the composed, sexy, strong dude of righteous immortality. This episode? Dude was tweaking out! He scampers out of the bushes and is like, “C’mon man! We got to go! We-got-to-go! C’mon bro! Seriously, let’s fucking go! MiB kicked my ass and smeared my mascara! He is fucking legit!”

Just what the fuck is Richard? If he came from the Blackrock as a dude to potentially replace Jacob, he clearly wasn’t chosen. Was Jacob all managerial and like “Well, see here Richard. We don’t think you have the stuff to protect the Island for thousands of years, given your experience, but we’d like to take you on as a steward!”

And just like that, Crackhead Richard ran back off into the jungle, fleeing from another ass-whupping from MiB. And speaking of the MiB, how about that first-person perspective of Smokey doin’ his thang? Fucking epic! Epic with a capital EPIC! Yeah, that doesn’t make sense.

Hurley is fucking awesome. That’s all. I really enjoy seeing the inversion of his character from the I’m Totally Fucked Guy to Yo Man, Don’t Sweat It. For that matter, Hurley’s inversion is also in line with Locke’s dismissal of faith and miracle, and Jack’s belief in it.

Locke’s life on LA X fucking sucks, a lot. And as I’ve mentioned, he seems a broken, pathetic man, just like MiB mentions in the season premiere. I’m really fingering my brain over what they’re doing with LA X. My bro Pepsibones thinks it may be nothing more than a mundane drama, showing us the unremarkable lives they all would have led if they weren’t brought there. I’m not sold on that shit, but it does seem eerie that Locke’s Fiance Whose Name I Forget shreds Jack’s card, perhaps dismissing any sense of miracle and the destiny we’re expecting.

I ain’t sold though. These people are meant to be together, and they will. I just ain’t got no idea how.

Also, Ben as the school teacher? Fucking huh? I don’t know, man. Ben being a teacher makes me wonder if his ass was ever on the Island, and if not, just how long ago did the Island itself sink? WHAT THE FUCK IS GOING ON?! Is it Destiny, or mundanity?

The interweaving of destiny comes up throughout the episode, but there is no greater point than when MiB tells Sawyer that Jacob has played them all for the fools and brought them to the Island. MiB is all “Blah, blah, Jacob effected the course of your life to bring you here, as you were meant to be.” And he’s right, maybe. There were a zillion choices they could have made that would have pushed them off the course they were on. However, what MiB fails to mention is how he has been manipulating everyone just as he claims Jacob has, and maybe in even more nefarious ways.

Everything that led up to Jacob’s death has been executed by MiB. From getting Locke to leave the Island, to having Benjamin kill Locke, all of this was in an effort to gain the trust of Ben so they could put the ole stabby-stab into Jacob. Is there any free will going on, on the Island? Or have they all been chess pieces for both MiB and Jacob? Who the fuck knows.

I’m going to guess that Jacob is neither as benevolent as we may have thought, nor as cunning and selfish as MiB makes him out to be.

Either way, there seems to be an inherent necessity for balance on the Island, which MiB has disrupted. From the tilting of the scales to the eerie little fucker in the woods telling MiB, “You know the rules, you can’t kill him”, everything points towards MiB and Jacob being symbolic of the balance of Good and Evil in the world. Both are needed for the other to exist. Jacob and MiB’s conversation at the end of season five contrast the two of them, and now makes much more sense in light of the fact that Jacob summons them to the Island to replace him.

MiB: They come, fight, they destroy, they corrupt. It always ends the same.

Jacob: It only ends us, anything that happens before that, is just progress.

Jacob’s search for a replacement is centered around his notion in the potential for humanity. Despite being disappointed for what seems like hundreds, if not thousands, of years, Jacob considers the idea of a replacement for him to be plausible, if not inevitable. How long Jacob has been searching, or what his criteria is, or even further, if there was someone before Jacob? Who the fuck knows.

Yo, cheer up Sawyer! I’m sorry, you let me down, but I still love you, okay?

I’ve had a week to stew about the steaming pile of shit that was last week’s episode of LOST. It may have not been the worst one ever; there were no golf courses made or anything of that banality. But I mean, a typical “Nothing Happens in LOST” episode in the middle of the final season? An episode centered around the Freckled Whore? Jesus. Forty-plus minutes of her trying to get into Sawyer’s pants after his would-be fiance died, and giving birthing tips to that Australian chick. Youch!

I’m over it though, I’m over it. I’m excited to see you again. I’m not going to lie, I thought about you all week. So, tell you what, let’s just put this shit down as Water Under the Bridge, and try and enjoy ourselves tomorrow night, okay?

Remember last week on LOST when the show returned to the events of the original season, albeit in what may be a different universe? Yeah, unfortunately this week it also returned to the narrative structure of the first season. It went nowhere, featured pointless and painful dialogue, and predominantly featured the Whorey Freckled Chick being whorey and freckled. Oh yeah, and waving a gun around on the run, again.

I knew this episode was in trouble when my friend Dave asked what the episode title was. I fumbled around with the remote and brought up the episode info, “What Kate Does”. I should have known we were fucked at that moment. For starters, even if they were trying to be cleverly simplistic, the title wasn’t nearly as intriguing as LA X, and secondly, no one in their right mind gives a fuck about what Kate does, even if it takes place in Dimension YYZ, where she shoots laser beams out of her nipples.

The main portion of the storyline in 2007 was dedicated to torturing the crap out of Sayid and drilling the viewer into misery with insipid dialogue. Sayid’s back from the dead, but because they needed some fluff to fill an episode with, they beat around the bush the entire time and don’t tell you what’s up. After Jack finds out that Sayid has been seared with a hot poker and had his nipples electrocuted, he storms into Dogen’s mystical and beautiful laboratory. Listen, I’m all for mysterious guys, but he’s always standing around playing with something just to get me to be like “Oooh, you’re so mysterious and clever! At first it was some potions for your LARPing, and now you’re spinning a basebal!”

Jack calls him out on his bullshit, and there’s actually a great scene coming about. Dogen brings up the various pains that Jack has been responsible for inflicting on others. Dogen just seems to want to guilt-trip Jack, but nevertheless it resonates with him, and compounds the guilt he’s been feeling about failing as a leader, letting people he cares about down, and getting Juliet and Sayid all dead and stuff.

But then? Then the scene’s dialogue turns into something out of one of the putrid Matrix sequels.

Dogen tells Jack that he must give Sayid a pill, and the expository conversation made me want to kill myself:

Jack: Why should I give him this pill?

Dogen: Your friend is sick.

Jack: Huh? Dude just came back from the dead.

Dogen: He is sick.

Jack: Uh, with that?

Dogen: He’s infected.

Jack: With what? Jesus fucking Christ, TELL ME.

Dogen: An infection.

Jack: Let me get this straight, we just wasted the viewer’s time drawing out the idea that Sayid is infected…with an infection? You’re fucking with me, right? This can’t really be the script.

Thematically, the scene doesn’t bother me. It calls on Jack’s concept of noble leadership, and asks him to once again entrust in faith to guide him to the right answer. As we find out though, all it was really guiding him towards was poisoning his friend. I can’t help but think that Dogen the Mystical Asshole is actually correct, but the manner in the plot device is structured is retarded. He has to have Jack take the pill, because the pill will only work if Sayid takes it from him willingly, and only Jack can get him to do that, and uh, and uh, and uh.

The whole “overwrought and painful mystery” device was overdone in 2005. It’s the last season, there’s no need for it.

Brief Aside: There’s no need for Mac to be on LOST. None. I couldn’t stop imagining him doing sweet karate moves and teaching them to the Others. Good thing I have a DVR, because everyone in my room was laughing.

The centerpiece of LA X saw Kate and Claire rocking out in Dimension X. Kate goes from being on the run to sitting in a hospital room with Claire while Ethan assures her that her baby is going to be alright. Again the theme of destiny is brought up, and we’re left to wonder why the two of them are even trusting one another. One moment Kate is holding a gun to Claire’s head, the next moment she’s walking up to the Adopting Family’s house with her. It seems far-fetched at first, until you begin to wonder if there is a residual trust bleeding over from the dimension where Oceanic 815 went down. It’s the only way I can fathom there being any semblance of trust between the Crazy Chick with the Gun and Claire. I may be reaching, but there seem to be distinct moments where Kate searches trying to figure out if she recognizes Claire, only to give up on the thorn in her skull.

Throughout the storyline, they also swing the Destiny Hammer. It strikes anyone with a pulse with an emphatic reverberation, and you’re like “Okay, I get it, it’s destiny.” After all, I mean, what are the chances that the adoptive family doesn’t want to take Aaron, because they broke up? Dur, it’s like Claire was supposed to take care of Aaron! OMFG.

Here’s my problem with them using Claire and Kate as a means to interweave the two realities: I don’t care about either of them. Kate is a whore who is trying to get into Sawyer’s pants moments after his girlfriend died. And Claire? Claire disappeared awhile ago, and I didn’t really care about her then. She was just sort of there. It’s neat to see that these characters have an interwoven destiny no matter if the plane crashes or not, and it’s neat to see that Aaron and Claire were meant to be together, but as far as characters go, it just wasn’t that exciting for me.

Which makes the idea of Claire returning on the Island not that spectacular to me. That said, I am intrigued by the idea of an infection being spread throughout the Island. You got me, writers. Claire looks oh-so very Rousseau wielding her gun and shooting the punks trying to take down Jin. And if you consider the similarities – they’re both women who birthed on the Island, then it gets even more intriguing. Was Rousseau infected as well?

I don’t assume the rest of the episodes are going to be as drawn out and as uneventful as this one, Christ I hope not. I rationalized the first few seasons as laying the groundwork for the fireworks for the rest of the show. Pepsibones brought up that this is one of “those episodes that wouldn’t be so bad if you were watching on DVD”, and I agree. But the problem is that we’re rushing towards a climax at this point, not setting the stage for the series. There’s only a handle of episodes left, and I hate seeing one being wasted without more to show for it.

Here’s to next week.

One of the things I find interesting about delving into LA X is that Jack and Locke both seem to posses a measure of the other’s Island-bound thematics. Locke waxes spiritual about the physical and ethereal location of Christian, before declaring with an empirical stamp that he is forever paralyzed. Jack comments on the physicality of his father, and then declares with an unusual amount of faith, “Nothing is irreversible.” This intersection of the two themes intrigues me, and no, I can’t stop thinking about LOST.

[ picture courtesy of slashfilm ]

And a thousand nerds creamed their pants at once, as the last season of LOST was underway. We had traveled through time ourselves, arriving in front of our televisions, our pants soggy, our lungs shuddering, our heart thundering. Sweet Jesus Christ, I had my mind fucked and left for dead last night. You know how sometimes a dog gets too excited, and it piddles on the floor? Well unfortunately, I’m a human, and I had the misfortune of running around my room screaming in-between commercials and peeing all over brother and friend alike.

Where to start? Where the fuck to start?

The episode starts and already I’m hyper-ventilating. I had a good suspicion that the episode was going to start with the plane crashing. Wrong, I’m already wrong. Jack’s sitting in the cabin and I’m vibrating back and forth and saying annoyingly out loud “Is this the actual footage from Season One? Is it? Pepsibones? Is it? Is it?” and he isn’t paying attention to me and I don’t blame him.

Turbulence starts! And I’m like, alright, they’re going back to the Island I knew it! Suck it, destiny prevails! And then I have the experience of being wrong twice in a row. So then they show the sunken Island, and I’m all like, we’re not on our Island anymore!

And then they come back from the commercial and they’re on the Island? What the fuck is going on? Oh, only one of the nerdiest things ever: alternate dimensions! As in Dimension X! LA X! Get it?! Is it only so amazing to me!? I’m shitting myself just thinking about it. Was anyone else hyper-paranoid and staring at all the passengers trying to see if they were conscious of some sort of shift? Because I think there may be one guy who knows all the different timelines.

Mr. Desmond Hume.

I mean, I’m not really basing that on anything, other than the fact that he fucking disappeared off of the plane. But if this is a guy who has been traveling through time and space for a long, long time, maybe he has been aware of the different possibilities? He’s seen Charlie die a zillion different ways, in what I assume are different dimensions.

So now it becomes apparent where the wrinkle in the narrative is coming for this season. When I was told that they were no longer doing flashforwards or flashbacks, I was like, well then, what does that leave us with? The producers are calling it “Flash Sideways”, but we can just call it following the alternate dimension that occurred when Juliet smashed a hydrogen bomb with a brick and “fixed” everything. It’s a neat twist. I had always assumed that if they had prevented the pocket of energy from being released, that reality would have rebooted. Instead, there’s another splinter reality that broke off from the one we already knew.

It’s going to be interesting watching where this LA X goes. Thematically, you can already see them suggesting that a reality in which they never crashed wasn’t the Utopia that they had perhaps deluded themselves into thinking it was. Charlie wants to die, Kate’s on the run, Locke is still a crippled mess.

During an intermission, Pepsibones began rambling about how the Island is the means through which perhaps these people were able to correct their flaws, and they needed the tragedy to improve themselves. There may be something to that.

Let’s take a break from LA X, shall we?

Meanwhile, on the Island, the grand reveal I had been prognosticating with a lot of others came true: Smokey is fucking Jacob’s Nemesis. The entire reveal was immeasurably fucking awesome, and centered around an action sequence that had me shitting my pants, and one of my favorite lines in a long, long time. After thrashing all of Jacob’s bodyguards as Smokey, Facob comes back and tells Ben:

I’m sorry you had to see me like that.

My brain actually exploded in an alternate dimension when I heard that line. In this reality I just moaned uncontrollably and pissed off my friends with fist-pumps and hand-claps. I’m slowly realizing I’m like a toddler when I get worked up. You’ve probably all known that way before me though.

And since I’m still bragging about being correct, Smokey wants exactly what I predicted: he wants to be free from the Island. The dude has been bound to the Island, and I assume Jacob, for god knows how many centuries. This entire time Smokey has been manipulating people to get exactly what he wanted: Jacob dead, himself freed. All of this was detailed in an epic speech given to Ben by Facob as they laid in the Shadow of the Statue. The speech also contained one of the most heart-breaking moments in the show for me.

Locke’s ultimate fate is heart-smashing, and the speech that Facob gives about it laid waste to my skin with goosebumps.

You should know, he was very confused when you killed him…Do you want to know what he was thinking while you choked the life out of him was, Benjamin? I don’t understand. Isn’t that the saddest thing you ever heard? But it’s fitting in a way. Because when John first came to the Island, he was a very sad   man. A victim. Shouting at the world for what he couldn’t do. Even though they were right. He was weak, and pathetic, and irrepairably broken. But despite all that, there was something admirable about him.

So what are they going for here? We have had the clash of the titans, Faith versus Reason since the show kicked off. Jack Shepherd versus John Locke. And both of them, both of them are miserable, sad bastards. My first inclination is to hold up Faith and say “See, this is what you get when you believe in something so blindly. You get choked to death in a hotel room for nothing.” But that isn’t entirely true, because as Facob said, there is something admirable about that dedication.

And I find that poor bastard’s fate to be entirely more heart-wrenching than the Sawyer and Juliet bullshit. Shit, she died. Oh well. And the Freckled Hussy still lives. But while Sawyer and Juliet hugging and making out covered in each other’s hemoglobin were one of the few times I was bored, hearing Facob describe Locke’s life nearly broke me. I got goosebumps, feeling for the guy. And I can’t help but hope that both Locke and Jack have happier lives in LA X, as suggested by the idea that Jack could cure Locke’s paralysis.

And I hope so for Jack’s sake, too. For reason has clearly failed Jack where faith has failed Locke. Jack wakes up, somehow being nuclearly-propelled back into the present day. Juliet’s dead, and they’re hanging out in the Temple of Doom with Jacob’s followers or some shit. It seems that the writers are trying to stem a bridge between the worlds of Faith and Reason, suggesting that the two of them are useless to an extent without the other, and suggest that staunch adherence to either of them gets you….Choked out in hotel rooms or fighting for you life on the set of an Indiana Jones movie.

As always, LOST follows the formula of giving us four mysteries for one answer. Alright, Smokey is Facob. But who the fuck are these people? What is this temple? What’s going on? Jesus Christ. The entire show has gotten entirely more epic in scope, for it appears that the fate of the world rests on Jack and his Buddies. They need to stop Smokey the Amorphous Cloud of Doom from leaving the Island, but how! And just who the fuck is he? Or Jacob?!

Facob is clearly heading for that Temple, where Jack and the rest are, and he does so after putting a serious stink onto Alpert’s face. Seriously, my heart seethed when I saw my boyfriend get laid out by Not-Locke. There was a serious ass-whupping dealt out. Facob comments that it’s good to see Richard out of “those chains”, which makes it clear the dude was summoned to Island by Jacob as part of the Blackrock. In addition, it would fit in with my idea that Richard was bound to Jacob just like Facob was bound to him. Not only would Facob have freed himself from serving some unaging-fish-eating master, but he would   have let Alpert off the leash as well.

And then, the episode ends with Sayid waking up, after being resurrected in some Fountain of Youth/Lazarus Pit. Two hours of mindfuck, doled out to all of our unsuspecting asses. The entire experience has blown me away, and I cannot, for the life of me, stop thinking about it. I couldn’t stop thinking about it prior to it airing, and now all I want to do is watch it again.

The questions are overwhelming: why are Jack and everyone else important? Who are the people in the Temple? The amount of awesomeness that occurred in two hours far too much for me to cover. I mean, I haven’t even mentioned Hurley, who is beyond hilarious, and scripted to say exactly what the viewing audience is thinking, “Why aren’t you answering any of my questions?!”

[Remember That Time On LOST is a daily post running the entire month up until the season premiere of LOST on February 2nd. I’m going to just pick something awesome, noteworthy, or ludicrous about LOST when I wake up that morning, and hopefully get you geeks talking about it with me.]

I was originally going to title this one “Remember That Time On LOST When: You Realized The Show sucked?” but I balked because I felt it was a bit unfair. If the show didn’t suck, at the very least, the show has changed how we watch television, and also our expectations for how narratives are structured on a weekly basis. It marked a change from the weekly serial to something that seems intended to be ingested at three or four episodes at a time for maximum enjoyment. I know people who refuse to watch the show save for on DVD, and while I’m a glutton for the weekly satisfaction, they may actually be correct.

The beginning of LOST was a slow boil that emphasized character driven episodes with very little occurring on the Island. My less intellectual side calls it “really fucking boring” and “the shit that we waded through to get to the awesomeness of later in the series.” And to an extent, I still feel that way. However, if you go back and watch the show on DVD, the drudgery is mitigated quite a bit. It isn’t nearly as boring, because as soon as one episode ends, you’re able to keep chugging along. Nothing happens? No big deal, next episode.

This is in contrast to the feeling of watching it while it was airing. I’d like to describe the feeling of watching the first few seasons as they aired as this:

WHAT THE FUCK, THEY JUST SPENT AN ENTIRE EPISODE WALKING ACROSS THE ISLAND?

WHAT THE FUCK, THEY JUST SPENT AN ENTIRE EPISODE MAKING A GOLF COURSE?! YOU HAVE GOT TO BE FUCKING SHITTING ME.

LOST is one of the first television shows I can remember thinking worked better on DVD, simply because of the pace of the narrative. In fact, it seems to the extent that the writers may even have been conscious of how their show was being watched. Maybe they realized that people were consuming it en masse through DVD, and they felt less of an onus to give instant gratification every week. This show has been the tantric sex of television; we’ve been in the Masquerading Goat or some shit for six years, and we’re just finally about to rocket our loads and squirt our squirty stuff. Whatever that fluid is called.

So with the advent of viewers watching television shows four or five episodes at a time, writers seem more comfortable crafting storylines out over a longer period of actual time, since for most, the next episode may be no further than a remote click away. It’s allowed the characters to be fleshed out, before they were rocketed off on the the temporal mind-fuck that the show has become.

Or conversely, maybe the show has actually changed how we watch television out of necessity, since we can’t stand to be given the minuscule amount of information every week. Either way, we’ve shifted towards watching things large chunks at a time, as opposed to the serial method.

Maybe.

I could be wrong.

As well, LOST is also a show that has lent to the viewers the desire to rewatch the show, again exploiting the use of DVD or DVR. LOST is a fucking shitload of mythos and mysteries for anyone to carry around in their head at any one time. And let’s be honest, it’s been six years since we watched Oceanic 815 explode above the Dharma barracks, and there’s so much that’s occurred across so long a period of time, that must of it has rotted in our cortexes and shit.

LOST is the first show that I’ve actively wanted to rewatch just to understand how everything is tying together. It is such a dense show that rewinding and reexamining certain scenes and flashes upon the screen has become usual, for many people.

How many times has something popped up on the screen for but an instant, and you screamed out, “Oh shit! Rewind that!”. Really, LOST is the first show that’s made the rewind button a necessary button on my grimy, food-encrusted controller.

The show has turned the viewer into voracious scavengers. We’re all trying to connect dots, most of them leading to nowhere but false ends. But because anything and everything seems to be of such tremendous significance, we want to see the writing on every chalkboard, understand the dialogue from any Dharma videotape.

We’ve become active participants in the show, and it is through DVR and DVD that we have rewatched countless scenes. I’m that asshole friend of yours going, “Dude, wait, go back!”

And along with that, it has allowed people to become purveyors of knowledge. References to philosophers, physicists, ancient goddesses and other crazy shit. It’s engaged us at so many levels, and allowed a level of scrutiny and hypothesis that you don’t usually get in a television show. It has literally transcended the medium of television and spilled into alternate reality games, enormous sprawling wiki pages, heated, profanity-filled rants on Ventrillo, and other shit.

The show has changed how I watched TV, and it has influenced other TV shows to follow suit with dense mythos and mysteries, and slower, character-build storylines that are more palatable spread across four-episodes when you get to watch them on the ‘ole digital video disc. It’s gotten people interested in philosophers, weird physics shit that I’m sure the writers butcher and I comprehend even less, and really interacting as a community. It’s gotten me flattening my rewind button from over-use, and paying attention to every conversation and setting as if I’m going to find the recipe for the elixir of life, whether that’s wrong or not.

It’s changed me, man.

Tomorrow.

[Remember That Time On LOST is a daily post running the entire month up until the season premiere of LOST on February 2nd. I’m going to just pick something awesome, noteworthy, or ludicrous about LOST when I wake up that morning, and hopefully get you geeks talking about it with me.]

At the end of Season Five, Jack Shephard decides that the best course of action in righting the misery of everyone on the Island is to detonate a nuclear bomb. It seems like an innovative, and creative way to advert suffering. How many people contemplate atomic vaporization as a salve to their ailments?

Jack Shephard, that’s who.

It seems a bit risky even pontificating at this point regarding what exactly happens at the end of Season Five, since the season premiere has inevitably leaked and people actually know. It seems like predicting the Red Coats to take the Rebels in the American Revolution after George Washington is already rocking out as the president.

But whatever, what can you do.

The idea is simple:

Dharma unleashes a pocket of eletctromagnetism-stuff sometime in 1977, and the result is the building of the Hatch, the failure of Desmond to push the buttons in the Hatch to disperse the energy, and Oceanic 815 crashing onto the Island. To prevent this, Jack decides he’s going to tell everyone to stop drilling, and that they’re treading on dangerous ground. Just like Faraday convinces Pierre Chang that he is from the future and has important shit in his head and should be listened to, Jack is like “Listen up, I have to tell you guys something serious, you’re all about to done fuck shit up.”

Oh wait, that would make sense.

So instead, Jack decides the only way to prevent all of this awful shit from happening is to detonate a hydrogen bomb near the pocket of energy, destroying it, and preventing them from ever unleashing the unstable energy source, and uh stuff. It’s a lot less subtle than the plan I proposed, but it’s epic as fuck and it excites us all a lot more.

The idea comes from a conversation that Jack has with Faraday. After blathering for an entire fucking season that the past is the past, and nothing can be changed, Faraday eventually comes across a brilliant realization: people are variables! I have to admit, that this is one of the few times during Season Five where I actively groaned internally. The entire speech came off like a an enormous diarrhea-barf of existential verbiage. As both a furious masturbator of existential philosophy, and fan of the erratic nature of human nature, it wasn’t the concept that bothered it.

It was how it was injected into the middle of a season where all we were told is whatever happened, happens.

Faraday: We’re like, people man. They’re the rogue elements, who like, do stuff, who are unpredictable. I read Dostoyevsky man, I know about shit!

I’m done complaining. I promise. I’m all for alternate realities, splitting from destined paths, and everything like that. I actually like the idea, which makes the last fourteen sentences irrelevant. Moving on.

What I want to happen:

So Jack has the idea that he can prevent the future from happening, acting as a variable in past events. What I’d like to happen is for this ideal to fail, and the show continues on the idea that the members of the Island are, in fact, the sources of their own misery. It would seem poetic that Jack is on the Island because his desire to detonate a nuclear bomb unleashed the pocket of energy which then had to be contained and dispersed every twenty-eight minutes or whatever.

However, that would result in half the cast dying, and we know that isn’t going to happen. Unless Jack has some sort of biotic barrier that prevent nuclear blasts from wiping him and the rest of the Island out, my theory isn’t going to happen.

What probably happened:

Reboot! Somehow, to some effect, Jack is correct. Their detonation of the bomb results in…something? Yeah, I guess I actually have no idea. There’s a lot of destiny being flung around like tits at Mardi Gras throughout the show. And I have to believe that all of these characters were called to the Island, by Jacob, for a reason. And even if they skirted being brought down on Oceanic 815, they’re going to be dragged their somehow. Eventually.

As well, I wouldn’t be surprised if the opening episode, titled LA X, starts with them at the crash of the plane. Maybe it isn’t Oceanic 815, but it’s them, crashed on the Island, again. They’re there for a reason, and they have to accomplish it. Jacob spits something like a circular notion at the end of Season 5, stating “It only ends once. Everything before that is progress.”

What if Oceanic 815 has been called to the Island over, and over, and over again? Groundhog’s Day type shit! Who the hell knows.

Jack’s bomb, did it solve anything, or did it just blow their crazy asses up?

Two days.