[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.]

Raw Fucking Awesome:

Ben: Okay, listen to me very carefully. I need you all to do exactly what I say. In a minute we have to run from this house as fast as we can At that moment, when I give the order, I want you to head straight for the tree line.

Hurley: You mean towards the guys with the guns?

Ben: No, we want to be as far away from them as possible.

I spent fifteen minutes rewinding Netflix to try and get this conversation as accurate as possible. Find an inaccuracy? Kiss my ass.

Summon thy smoke monster, summon thy goosebumps! One of my favorite moments on LOST is when Ben summoned the Smoke Monster in The Shape of Things to Come. My huggies were absolutely overflowing with brown excitement. One minute Linus is disappearing into some secret closet, and the next moment there is a bellow of death and the crackling of electricity. There is the vague sensation that something epic is about to occur, but I couldn’t believe what my brain was telling me.

Brain: Dude, he just summoned the Smoke Monster.

Me: No way, he couldn’t do that.

Brain: It’s coming dude, prepare for it.

Me: WHAT. WHAT. WHAT. WHAT.

Brain: Told you.

Me: Quiet!

Unfettered, jaw-dropping destruction is the only way I can describe the scene. Smokey had tore some ass up in his day, for sure. He laid waste to Boone, he gave a respectable ass-whupping to Eko, and he tried to drag Locke to his obliteration. But this was a different side of Smokey than we had ever seen. Smokey had been drinking green tea all damn day. He was hopped up and rocking out to Cowboys from Hell when Linus went into that secret closet and cried in his nasally voice:

Come hither,   Black Cloud of Annihilation, I Humbly Request You Rain Death!

And Smoke Monster was like:

Hell yeah! BRT, d00d!

Mercenaries were ganked and crushed and smashed into gorgeous gooey little bits. Lightning crackled and Linus and Sawyer and Claire and Hurley stared at a rather impressive manifestation of death. The cries of death and Smokey slowly gave way to an eerie quiet, and then there was silence.

I sat there completely rocked, trying to wrap my feeble brain around what I had just seen. When Ben summoned the Smoke Monster, it didn’t just give me one of my favorite moments in the entire show. It took the preconceptions about Smokey and threw them out the door. They landed in the same pile that all my preconceived notions about LOST land in, which is rather voluminous and reaches an impressive height.

Smokey can be summoned? What the fuck?

PREVIOUSLY ON LOST, they gave the impression that Smoke was this runaway formless demon thingamajig of doom. It seemed to deal out fatalities to anyone within its perimeter, displaying no particularities about who was felled or where. The whole idea was backed up by the fact that the Others still needed Dharma’s Sonic Fence to protect them when they inhabited their barracks. You want to argue they were just using it to keep out boars and mercenaries? C’mon dudes.

C’mon!

So the idea that Smokey could be tamed by some sort of summation was a significant paradigm shift. Just what the fuck was this Ball of Black? Who was controlling it? Ben showed that he had the means to summon Smokey, but could he control it? I don’t think the two are mutually exclusive.

What if Smokey is something of an independent spirit, but still answers to a higher calling? As an analogy – say there is a droid who operates under its own volition, and can do whatever it pleases. However, upon flipping a switch, it immediately has to do whatever its master demands.

If I’m going to begin flinging spaghetti at the wall, I’d argue that Smokey is a servant of the Island, and desperately hates its status as such. It has been corralled by the Others, via Jacob, and while it must do what they demand, it spends the rest of its days being pissed off and hating its situation. Which sounds like someone else.

In case you’ve missed it, I think that Smokey is Jacob’s Nemesis. Consider: Jacob’s Nemesis seems clearly subservient to Jacob, as though he is somehow bound to Jacob. He wants nothing more than to kill him, but he cannot carry out this wish. Instead he has to stare out into the sea and wish he could just go catch the plague in England or some shit. Whatever was going on in the Civilized World at the time.

But he can’t. He’s bound.

Just like? Just like Smokey! Smokey clearly serves the Island, whether or not it wants to. And since it spends a good amount of time beating whoever gets close to it into paste, I’m going to say that it resents its situation. We also know that Smokey can take the form of people – having appeared as Eko’s brother, Ben’s daughter, and I’m going to postulate, Locke. God only knows how/why Jacob’s Nemesis was reduce to Smokey’s form, but if Smokey can take human forms, and somehow Jacob’s Nemesis is appearing as Locke, it doesn’t seem impossible that they are one and the same.

All of this crazy conjecture and mind-warping started when Ben summoned Smokey. He went from some sort of rampaging immateriality into something that can be caged and controlled. And oh yeah, seeing the Smoke Monster lay waste to an entire mercenary group was pretty boss as well.

[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.]

When we first met Dicky Alpert, he was just a smarmy dude representing the false biosciencetechthing firm, Mittelos Bioscience. He was trying to get Juliet to come to the Island and unbreak all the uterus-areas of the women on the Island. No one could get their baby makers working, and it was an understandable source of consternation for the Others. So they sent their right-hand man out to recruit the beautiful, intelligent woman, who unlike The Woman Who Steals Aaron, doesn’t seem to spread for anything with a pulse.

(Though to be fair, both Sawyer, Jack, and Malcolm from Firefly are all fine specimens.)

I fell in love with the dude from the beginning, since he seemed to have the ability to ram buses into meddling ex-husbands, and had a prominent, strong set of eyes. There was a mystery to him, and I dug that. Obviously. If I didn’t dig mysteries, I probably would have thrown my pair of LOST underwear into the local creak a long time ago.

And I thought that was that. A bit player in the overall mythos of the show.

Wrong.

Double wrong.

My boy Dicky Alpert shows up again in the same season, looking like the Prince of Persia. And that’s when I realized there was more to this dude than meets the eye. For starters, the dude was on the Island in 1973. And aside from having shitty hair and dressing like someone from a Phish concert, the dude hasn’t aged.

This is the part where you say, alright, what the fuck is going on.

Alpert is the oldest member of the Others, from all my studies. My studies generally consist of whatever my caffeine-rotted brain can recall, as well as any minimal reading I have done over at Lostpedia. And that makes him intriguing as fuck. What the hell is a timeless, gorgeous man, doing on the Island? Eventually, we find out the answer. He’s working for Jacob.

Say it with me, what   the fuck?

HYPERTEXTUAL BRIEF ASIDE:

Here’s another tidbit you may or may not know. Like a lot of characters on the show, Richard Alpert is named after a real dude, though he has changed his name to Ram Dass. He was a Harvard professor who experimented heavily with LSD. Dude seems like the man:

Via Wikipedia:

Alpert accepted a permanent position at Harvard, where he worked with the Social Relations Department, the Psychology Department, the Graduate School of Education, and the Health Service, where he was a therapist. He was also awarded research contracts with Yale and Stanford. However, perhaps most notable was the work he was doing with his close friend and associate, Dr. Timothy Leary.

Having only recently obtained his pilot’s license, Alpert flew his private plane to Cuernavaca, Mexico, where Leary first introduced him to teonanácatl, the Magic Mushrooms of Mexico. By the time Alpert made it back to America, Leary had already consulted with Aldous Huxley, who was visiting at M.I.T., and through Huxley and a number of graduate students they were able to get in touch with Sandoz, which had produced a synthetic component of ergot wheat fungus called LSD. Alpert and Leary brought a test batch of both substances back to Harvard, where they conducted the Harvard Psilocybin Project and experimented with LSD relatively privately.

Moving on.

Alpert comes off to me like Jacob’s right-hand man. While there’s always a leader of the Others, who Richard then assists, I can’t help but feel that he ultimately answers only to Jacob. He’s like the guy who makes sure the one “in charge” doesn’t fuck up, because if he does, he’s going to stab him and roll him into the mud.

He’s done quite a variety of things in his days, from trying to recruit Locke as a child, to assisting Eloise Hawking while she ran the show. He’s always been timeless, accrediting that shit to some effect that Jacob has had on him. He answers to Ricardus, and speaks Latin. Ladies, he’s also disease-free, like dogs, and will bring your Mom flowers.

Where does Richard come from though?

I have my guess, probably the same as yours:

The fucking Black Rock!

It’s a blind stab, but at the end of Season Five, we see a ship coming ashore while Jacob and his Nemesis sit along the beach. The natural inclination is to say that shit is the Black Rock, but the idea that Alpert is on the boat is just a guess. It seems that there weren’t any “Others” at the team of the boat’s arrival, since Jacob   presents himself out in the open, which he hasn’t done at any other point on the show. Who the fuck knows.

Whatever the case, Alpert is one of my favorite mysteries of the show. It isn’t just that he’s timeless, or where he comes from, but rather his role in the entire play. If he was Jacob’s assistant, why does he stand idly as Jacob is murdered? Does he embrace fate, has he seen the future?

Or perhaps he is Jacob’s second assistant, to replace Jacob’s Nemesis/Smokey when he revolted. There’s a lot of theories bandied about that suggest that Jacob’s Nemesis can’t kill Jacob himself because he is bound in some way to him. Who knows, maybe it is that bond that makes one ageless, and when Smokey was like, fuck this, I quit, Jacob asked Dicky if he wanted in on the whole immortality thing.

Either way, it’s interesting to see what shall become of our boy, now that his BFF has been slain in his Temple of Doom or whatever. Does he answer to Locke/Facob? Or will he side with Ilana, seeing as that she seems to work for Jacob, and he was the only one to provide the correct answer to “What lies in the shadow of the Statue?”

I don’t fucking know! And I love it.

To the two or three people who actually frequent this site/blog/source of banality and vulgarity, it may be apparent that we’ve been more quiet than usual here. With the daily LOST ramblings taking up a vast majority of my mental capacity, I’ve been shying away from my usual comic book and video game ramblings.

This is all compounded by my sorry ass starting graduate school this week. And it isn’t to say I won’t have time for OL, but rather I’ve been thrown off my schedule and I’m trying to cobble together something that approximates functionality. I’m like a tard, yes a tard. If you alter the time that I’m supposed to eat my bologna sandwich I start to freak the fuck out.

I’d like to provide some programming notes, if you will.

• Monday Morning Commute comes out every Monday. It’s where I tell you what I’m digging. theoretically, you join in the fun. It’s slop, and vapid, but what is the internet for, if for not slop and vapidity?
• Remember That Time On LOST will be ending on the first day of the new season. However, I’m going to kick off This Week on LOST, so we can all gather around after the episode and speculate and masturbate. This will be posted every Wednesday.
• Variant Covers, the weekly round-up of superhero vomit dropping onto comic book shelves will be returning next week. This will be posted every Tuesday.
• Images & Words, Pepsibones’ comic book pick of the week, is a Thursday operation. I think he didn’t post this week because he was busy sculpting animals out of body hair and paste, screaming at the sky that there is no escape, only lateral movement. This will be posted every Thursday. [Update – Pepsibones managed to stop shaking his fist & screaming at the “Bearded Sky-Man” long enough to post this week’s Images &Words]
• This Week On 24 will start today, and continue to be posted every Tuesday. This show sucks.
• Friday Brew Review still comes every Friday, because Pepsibones is an alcoholic.

Other than that, party on. I’ll still be posting general impressions and reviews of video games I’m rocking out to, references to latex tentacle porn, and immaturity. Strap-in.

[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.]

[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.]

There was a time when I thought that Aaron was some sort of super Satan baby or something. It came early in the series, when they had that flashback episode where Claire was thinking of giving him up for adoption. But then some psychic dude went insane and was like, “You must raise him!” And the Others were hunting him, and everyone thought he was totally important! And now he just seems like a typical booger-eating kid who gets LOST in supermarkets. What the fuck happened? I know I’m not making this up. Either it’s been discarded away with Super Telepath Walt and Smoke Monster Is A Giant Monster and the rest of the shit they were flinging at the wall, or we’re in for some sort of mindfuck in the final season.

The first time you think that Aaron may be more than your typical nipple-suckling, booger-eating shitbag is when Claire goes to a psychic when she’s been knocked up. The dude geeks out, tells her to get the fuck out.

I’m sorry, uh, I can’t, I can’t…I”m not doing this for you. You’ll have to leave. Now.

Oh shit! Something is up! Then Bob the Psychic reads Claire’s future or whatever again, and he delivers an even more dark and foreboding speech.

I can tell you. This is important. It is crucial that you, yourself, raise this child. This child parented by anyone else, anyone other than you, danger surrounds this baby. Your spirit must be an influence to the development of the child.

What the fuck is up now! Don’t tell me something isn’t going on here! they were definitely writing Aaron to be some sort of antichrist, or something…I don’t know. It was going to be cool though! A lot cooler than hanging around and being parented by The Strumpet Who Seduced Jack and Sawyer! What happened here? I mean, if this wasn’t LOST, and there wasn’t some sort of supernatural element running through everything, I’d just drop the case. But I remember being distinctly impressed that this cute Australian chick was carrying the devil in her uterus.

It takes skill!

I’m going to assume that there’s probably something still special about Aaron. Why? Yeah, I have no idea. I’m leaning on the idea that there’s something special about Christian Shephard and the seed he has disseminated throughout his family. Christian, his son, his daughter, and his grandson end up on the Island at the same time? Maybe it is an enormous coincidence, or maybe there’s something up with it. The entire thing could be said about the entire show though: are these characters here by chance, or are they here by fate? Were they brought to the Island by Jacob because they were special, or were they special because they were chosen by Jacob?

Claire ran off with her spectral dad at the end of Season Four. And while I’ve always taken Christian to be Smokey the Bandit/Jacob’s Nemesis, maybe it really was his reanimated corpse? Or! How about this! What if the Shephards are related to Jacob’s Nemesis? Yeah, I’m just flinging mud against the wall here, I got nothing.

All I do know is that Claire seemed eerily comfortable sitting in the cabin of Jacob’s Nemesis with the ghost of her father. Who she also allowed to cradle Aaron. Weird.

So the question is, is Aaron special? Was he being hunted by the Others because he was a child born on the Island, or because he had sweet ass telekinesis and could throw down with Smokey and jump the Island through time with his soggy diapers? I wouldn’t be surprised either way. There’s so many things that were brought up throughout the show that it seems impossible to answer them all, but I mean, they’ve done pretty well so far.

I got no idea. Maybe the Shephard Family team-up and somehow form a Voltron-type thing to fight Taweret in an epic clash? That’s what I’m pulling for. Bank on it.

[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.]

Yeah, I said it. Mr. Eko was fucking dumb. I ain’t got no love for the guy. Every day, I try and think of something to write, and everyday Pepsibones goes “Write about Mr. Eko! Write about Mr. Eko!” Well, let me tell you something. Fuck Mr. Eko.

Fuck.

Mr.

Eko.

The entire tail section of the plane is pretty fucking boring and forgettable. And even if they were all fired from the show for fornicating with barnyard animals and drinking while driving and the whatnot, I’m glad they’re gone. As my friend Crackbaby used to say, “Good riddance to bad rubbish.”

Why does Mr. Eko suck so much? Well, for starters, the dude’s character is a smorgsborg of other tropes that are already working throughout the show. He comes off uninspired to me, and all of his themes were already being done better through other characters. It’s as if the writers realized during some brainstorming session, holy shit, we already have all of this guy’s storylines covered! What the fuck is this guy doing on the Island? Yeah, he’s got a huge stick or something! But I mean, come on!

It was only in death that Mr. Eko served any sort of awesomeness, because his unrepentant ass let us see the Smoke Monster gobble someone up. Or whatever the hell it did to him.

Derivative #1 – Man of Faith

So get this, there’s a guy on his Island who isn’t proud of his past. And he’s also a man of faith. Yeah, doesn’t that pretty much sum up everyone on the fucking Island? And while Mr. Eko turns towards blind silly faith towards building a church, he has the same sort of blind passion towards the immaterial that really just makes me say “He’s like Locke except different and not cool.”

Eko’s righteous derivativeness is compounded when he replaces Locke as the guy who sits all day and slaps numbers onto a keyboard down in the Hatch. So while Locke has better things to do like channel the Island and kill himself so deities can betray one another, Eko picks up where he left off.

And I mean, how many faith versus faith storylines do we need going on here? Jack versus Locke, faith versus science. And then Eko comes flying into the ring like Mick Foley with a steel chair of blind faith and then Locke and him throw down? Science versus faith versus faith versus Cactus Jack!

Yeah, it’s no wonder that they killed this guy off.

It’s like he’s getting from the garbage pail of other characters.

Derivative #2 – Foreign Guy With Military / Mercenary Past

Oh wait! Stop me if you’ve heard this one! There’s this foreign guy, and he used to kill people as part of a questionable company. Wait, you’re thinking of Sayid, right! Wrong! It’s fucking Mr. Eko, who used to be a warlord. Sorry guys, this doesn’t impress me. You already played out the Foreign Guy Who Shot People card for me when you introduced Sayid as a member of the Iraqi army. And now we have this other guy running around, and you’re like, oh hey, he used to shoot people!

And push drugs or indoctrinate kids into child militaries.

Derivative #3 – Dumb Ass Who Gets Eaten by Smokey

This is my favorite role that Eko performs. After running around as a Man of Faith like Locke, and after being a member of a foreign military organization like Sayid, he gets to be another dumb ass that gets owned by Smokey. And to be fair, Eko even had his chance to save his own life. But instead of dealing with the fact that he was a drug-pushing piece of shit that got his brother killed, Eko then gets munched upon by Smokey. Listen dude, you’re going to be judged by the Island, and like all the other douchebags who refuse to face their sins, you failed the test.

Au revoir!

Derivative #4 – Specter of Dead Oceanic 815 Member Who Visits Hurley

Even in death, Eko’s unoriginal, boring ass is derivative as fuck. Like Ana Lucia and Charlie, Hurley sees Mr. Eko. And apparently they place chess. I don’t know why they didn’t play wiffle ball with an ethereal form of his dumb Jesus Stick, but whatever. The dude sucks, why would they do anything cool.

Mr. Eko was a dumb thug who carried around a Jesus Stick, got eaten by the Smoke Monster, and got little kids and his brother killed. I don’t miss him one god damn bit, and if you do, I’m hoping this Ode to his Craptastic Character has sated your desire to see him memorialized in internet file.

[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.]

You the only thing that’s cooler than accompanying the Fellowship to the fires of Mount Doom to destroy the One Ring? Being a junkie. Wait, that sounded way cooler in my head. In the early days of LOST before madness, they could afford to spend episodes talking about junkie hobbits that desperately needed to get their latest hit of heroin. They were simpler days. And I’m sure I miss them for about fourteen seconds before I remember how much I want to bang Daniel Faraday, and spin crazy wheels of time.

Charlie’s initial storyline where he totally went head to head with his drug addiction is something I would interpret as one of those obvious stranded-on-an-island tropes. You have the pregnant lady, the fat guy, and the druggie. It seems a bit paint by numbers, but I found it interesting nonetheless. The writers wanted to have a character wrestle with an addiction that was going to have to come to an end, because he was stuck on an Island in the middle of nowhere. And while I don’t even know what heroin is, or how you make it, I assume that it isn’t made on forbidden Islands.

I could be completely wrong.

It’s such an obvious storyline, but it was appealing back at the beginning of the show. At some point, the show was very interested in examining the effects of being stranded on an Island through a variety of archetypes. And the druggie who is being plunged into recovery through sheer lack of choice was something I found engaging. It was the spiral into the desperation that was great; to see the mind of an addict swirling with anxiety at the incessant need.

As a caffeine addict, I can tell you that if I crash landed on an Island, and there were no twelve packs of something caffeinated around, I would begin to lose my fucking mind. I would be hacking down trees as I ran through the dense vegetation searching for a hatch, Dharma cave or something. Watching LOST has me convinced that should I ever find myself plummeting to my death on an airplane, I’m probably just being summoned by Jacob anyways, and it’s all good.

Charlie’s a respectable, if not implausible character to me, because he gives up the heroin on his own. Locke, who not only has super hunting skills, also appears to have a sonar for crashed planes herding massive amounts of heroin. And when Charlie asks him a third time to hook him up with the smack or whatever, Locke obliges. At that moment, Charlie the junkie hobbit is at a crossroads, and somehow manages to convince himself to toss the heroin into the flames.

Are you kidding me?

If I ever was given the choice between throwing a can of delicious Diet Mountain Dew into the flames, or drinking it, I’d be burping Dewy goodness before you even had time to deliberate over whether I was going to take it or not. The fact that Meriadoc wasn’t pushing through the flames for one last hit is pretty damn impressive.

But again, it’s like, fiction and stuff.

What is particularly impressive is that the hobbit passes this crucible twice. When Charlie comes across the Jesus Heroin towards the end of Season Two, he once again flings that shit into the seas and out of his yearning veins and gums. It’s pretty impressive, especially for a character on this show.

Most of the assholes on LOST are perpetually perpetuating their own misery. They continue to flail and bring the shitstorm that is their lives onto themselves. But Charlie, the heroin addicted hobbit, somehow defeats the urge to rock out junkie style twice. It’s a remarkable feat, and the fact that he dies anyways makes me wonder what is being said.

I always operate under the idea, perhaps incorrectly, that the Island punishes those who fail to correct their ways. But if a character like Charlie can surmount something like this, and he dies anyways, the question becomes, why?

Perhaps Charlie’s death isn’t a punishment, but rather he casts himself in sacrifice. We know that he died after Desmond told him that he saw him dying over and over. So there is a sense that he had finally accepted his fate. But maybe Charlie is a token that shows that while death is a certainty, how you carry yourself up until and at your death, may define how you are as a person.

I mean, the guy was going to die. But he was never had to sacrifice himself. Sure, maybe it seems easier because he knew he was going to be sneezing worms sooner or later, but aren’t we all? Let me tell you what, Imma be sitting on my futon playing video games until my heart stops, ain’t no nobility in me. So a character that is willing to lose their live in an effort to save his peeps? Sort of commendable. For a junkie hobbit.

[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.]

When we first met the Others, they came off like a pack of child-stealing pederasts. Their beards were fruitful, and filled with childrens’ screams and the echoes of a dungeon’s walls. At least, that’s what I imagined. I mean, all they seemed to want was Claire’s kid, and Walt. How the hell else am I supposed to interpret that? I made sense with the sort of preconcieved notions the viewer holds about the Island. It appears to be largely uninhabited, or scourged by the advancements of modern man. Anyone who would be on the Island would have to be a pack of savages.

I mean, what is man without a twenty-gallon drum of pretzel sticks, and a thirty-nine liter bottle of Diet Mountain Dew? A fucking savage!

So when Tom Friendly rolls up crackin’ about needing Walt, and the dude looks filthy and has a giant beard, it made sense to me. Typical, non-colonized world. Over time though, I began to realize that the Others were something scarier than a pack of homeless child molesters, and that’s saying something. They were a well-organized, modernized peoples whose agenda was even more murky and unfathomable than kidnapping little kids.

Things started getting really bananas at the end of Season Two. The bearded guy who seemed like he just wanted to snag kids to diddle rips off his beard after The Chick Who Breaks Up Every Good Relationship tells him that she knows it’s fake. The Slut Who Probably Made Out With the Smoke Monster calls the guy out after realizing that the shitty beard she found in some Dharma birthing-baby-stealing center belonged to the same creepy guy. For some reason the dude instantly complies, and tears it off. I imagine in the real world of Secret Island Cults and Gangs, this breaks all sorts of protocol. I mean, if someone admitted to lies every time someone hurled a blind guess their way, nothing would stand up for very long.

Then a newly freed Ben rolls up to our boy Mr. Friendly and is all “Where is your beard?”, making it pretty clear that they only wore the shitty ragged clothes and fake beards in an effort to confound the already ridiculously confused survivors of Oceanic 815. I mean, weren’t they already confused enough? They’re on an Island with Smoke Monsters, Mysterious Distress Calls, and glowing Hatches. If you guys couldn’t divide and conquer them amidst all that, you’re riding the fail boat.

And this is when things begin to get complicated. At the time, you begin to wonder, wait, are Dharma and the Others really the same entity? Or are they separate peoples, on the same Island? Huh? What the fuck?

And then comes the intro to Season Three. The opening starts off mundane enough. It’s a bunch of people palling around in some typical suburban neighborhood. You know, typical happy bullshit. Everything is modern, comfy, gorgeous. A bunch of douchebags sit around and debate the merits of a Carrie by Stephen King. Some asshole named Adam rails against the book, saying it lacks metaphor and whatever. And then you get to meet this big breasted, intelligent chick who is pissed off at his dissin’ some Mr. King flavor. And as she’s spouting off “Here I am thinking that free will still exists on…” there’s a rumbling.

Props to them for both working in Stephen King, and the obviousness theme of free will from the show into the first two minutes of the season.

I don’t remember if I realized that they were on the Island at the time. I probably should have, since the writers used the same gimmick at the beginning of Season Two. They show you something that absolutely, positively, cannot be happening on the Island. And then, oh shit! They’re on the fucking Island!

The merry band of suburbanites run outside and look up at the sky, and holy shit, there she is. The exploding, rupturing steel eagle that dragged everyone into the heart of the Island in the first place. There’s madness, and then Ben comes out, and he starts addressing everyone. Ben, whose name we still don’t know, tells Ethan and Goodwin to each address one of the crash sites. And at that moment, I began to barf with excitement.

What the fuck is a neighborhood doing in the middle of an Island, in the middle of nowhere? The Others weren’t a bunch of monkeymen running around demanding children! They were a bunch of suburban pedophiles! Or something! Who the fuck knows.

It’s amazing, since we still don’t know who the others are. I mean, they work for the Island. Maybe. Or something. And they’ve been here for a long time. Maybe. And they are Jacob’s pals. Supposedly.

What we do know is that they’ve managed to defeat the initial idea of people inhabiting the Island. Instead of savages, or ruffians, they’re living out a quiet, mundane lifestyle. They’re comfortable in the same way that we’re all comfortable. Vomiting up nonsense at book clubs, repairing cars, populating our lives with the white noise of existence.

That is, until Oceanic 815 plummets to a thud, seemingly at Jacob’s behest. A boat, a plane, dude brings people here it seems. And it shatters the lives of the Others, who seem content to engage in the same sort of life you’d expect from any middle class neighborhood.

Who are the Others? Who fucking knows! But we do know they like themselves books, and modern appliances, just like the rest of us.

[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.]

For awhile there was a mystery (go figure!) surrounding the funeral of one of the Oceanic 815 who managed to make it back to shore. For some reason, everyone referred to said corpse as “That guy” or “Him“, playing the pronoun game. Clever. And though the writers toyed around with the dead dude’s identity for awhile, when they dropped the name Jeremy Bentham, it became apparent to me who it was that was currently sucking non-wind. It was our pal, He Who Can Walk Again, the monster or the Island, tamer of Smokey The Monster Bandit, champion of faith, John Locke.

John Locke unto himself is a reference to the famous empiricist of the name name from way back in the day when dinosaurs roamed England and witches used magic to conjure rifles and other chicanery. That a man of faith was named after an omega lad of reason and empirical evidence is totally, like, ironic. But then they gave him the name of another real philosopher, that ofJeremy Bentham, and all of a sudden, dudebro had a named that fit him like a glove.

This is the real philosopher Jeremy Bentham. Dead and stuffed, and on display. I know I’m full of shit usually, but I’m not fucking with you:

Via Wikipedia:

As requested in his will, Bentham’s body was dissected as part of a public anatomy lecture. Afterward, the skeleton and head were preserved and stored in a wooden cabinet called the “Auto-icon”, with the skeleton stuffed out with hay and dressed in Bentham’s clothes. Originally kept by his disciple Thomas Southwood Smith,^[13] it was acquired by University College London in 1850. It is normally kept on public display at the end of the South Cloisters in the main building of the college, but for the 100th and 150th anniversaries of the college, it was brought to the meeting of the College Council, where it was listed as “present but not voting”.

The Auto-icon has a wax head, as Bentham’s head was badly damaged in the preservation process. The real head was displayed in the same case for many years, but became the target of repeated student pranks, including being stolen on more than one occasion. It is now locked away securely.

Can I get “Stranger Than Fiction” for $500, Alex?

I know of Jeremy Bentham because I’m a philosophy nerd who spent way too much time in college taking classes that had absolutely nothing to do with my degree. As I waltzed around campus for thirty-five years I ran across Bentham in Social Ethics, Modern Philosophy, and Medical Ethics.

Like I said, I’m a nerd.

Bentham was a utilitarian, a group of intellectual swaggernauts who operated under the belief that mortality was defined but whatever benefited the greater good the most. This is a super watered down, super base, utterly awful description of the philosophy. I promise. But it gets the point across. It’s the same idea that empowered Jack Bauer to shoot a dude in the face if it will stop a nuclear blast from wiping out the Eastern Seaboard. Again, super stripped down. Cut me some slack. I’m writing pop-culture slop, not teaching you philosophy. You unlearned fucks.

John Locke has always operated under some version of utilitarianism that places everything at the mercy of whether or not it benefits the Island. The Island is his equivalent of ‘the people’, and the dude will slice you, cut you, betray you, smash your shit, if he thinks it’ll help prevent the Island from being besieged by some sort of serious shit.

In a Season One episode called The Greater Good (GET IT?!), Locke thrashes the shit out of Sayid’s head in order to protect the group. Later on, the dude throws a knife through Naomi because he believed she and the rest of her posse from the freighter posed a threat to his little patch of paradise on the Island. And then? Then the dude, knowing he must die to save the Island, undertakes the quest of trying to bring Oceanic 815 back to the Island. The dude is totally in love with the Island. If the Island were a chick – and who knows, maybe it is – he would ask her to go steady.

The dude is straight up Jeremy Bentham rockin’ out on the Island stylee. He’ll do whatever it takes to save her, even if it means hanging his own ass. ‘Course, he never gets to pull off that wicked feat, because Ben chokes him out and all, but seriously, he would have.

Dude is ballin’.

Still though, the reveal was pretty awesome at the end of Season Four. I had the idea that it was going to be him, rocking the moniker Jeremy Bentham, but it didn’t do anything to reveal why he was dead, or if someone had killed him, or the what not. You have to appreciate someone as dedicated to preserving the greater good, even if it means sacrificing yourself. If Jack’s Dead Dad told me that I had to save the Island, I would have told him to kiss my ass, and that he could find me eating cheetos in the Hatch with Hurley.

[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.]

LOST didn’t jump the shark. Lost jumped the fucking Island.

Do you remember where you were when Ben jumped the Island? Do you remember when you were? I sure do. I was sitting in a pile of my own disbelieving fluids on my futon. It was the moment where LOST went from sort-of-crazy, to absolutely insane. It went from the guy who used to come into the Shell station I worked at who always ordered forty-two cents of gas, to the other guy at Shell who used to pick cigarettes out of the outdoor ashtrays and mumble to himself while drooling. Both crazy, but different shades for sure.

LOST had always hinted at time-travel. You know, played with the penis tip of insanity. A little flick here, a little rub there. But it was just toying with the concept. And I mean, can you really blame them? The unwashed masses who vomit up onto themselves while watching Everybody Likes Three And a Half Pedophiles Named Raymond aren’t much for time traveling, are they? They like jokes where the unfunny guy makes a comment that casts him as a buffoon to his wife, who just happens to be way too good looking for such an inept douche.

Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse, who shall be known as The Geeks With Balls of Enormity introduced time travel into a big budget show on a major network. Maybe my generation aren’t just a bunch of people spray-tanned orange and strung out on pills! Maybe they’re a people spray-tanned orange, strung out on pills, and down with some serious mind-intercoursing!

The moment itself is epic. It is so wonderfully apparent that the writers of LOST can’t do anything simple. There’s no magic lever that Ben pulls to jump the Island. There’s no single red button. No, Ben descends into an ancient cavern, cast in frost, and yanks on a wheel. It’s all so absurd and wonderful and it makes me gleeful that they’ve been able to tell this story, despite the fact that I have absolutely no idea what the Island is, why a donkey wheel can shift bodies of land, or why this wheel is in the heart of the Island, which just so happens to be bound in ice and snow.

And so Ben shifts the Island, and in doing so unbounds the show from yet another set of rules. Forwards, backwards, even perhaps laterally, the show can move in time. The show wipes its ass with past conventions of narrative and has sort of just made it up as it goes along. They take hypertextuality to a new level.

At first the show moved backwards from the present to the character’s past lives. Then it moves from the present, to the past, and also to the future. And when Ben moves the Island, dislodging the weird wheel that looks likes its from a Zelda game, the show moves in well, any direction. The present is an illusion, cast upon our lives by our mortal brains! In the next season, the present becomes a variety of moments, differing from character to character. And even then, the ‘present’ for someone can be all totally like 2004, then 1952, then 1976! Or something! Holy shit! Free your mind from common ideas of linearity!

Or be like me, and get nosebleeds and dance in the blood of your confusion! MUWHAHAHAHAHA.

The Island jumps and takes with it the remnants of narrative structure holding it in. Or maybe. I don’t know. As a literature major, I sort of want to argue with myself about this. I mean, clearly there is a structure, it is just not a linear one. Or maybe it’s a linear one, but perhaps that straight line appears non-linear, because of the times it weaves through. Or is non-linearity just an illusion, and…Alright, I just had the hugest moment of deja vu typing this, and I’m wondering if the donkey wheel is off its fucking axis.

But poof! The Island disappears! And it suffers a fate onto the writing of the show other than really taking away any constraints for what the writers can do. It also allows the Island to jump around in time, showing characters as we have never seen them, as well as giving us glimpses into what the Island looked like before. We get to see Taweret in her entirety, we get to see Alpert looking all gorgeous and brooding in the past. Never aging. Eternally smoldering with immortal importance and knowledge.

Anyways.

And so the Island moves in time-space-something, I don’t know I’m not a physicist, but Ben also jumps onto the Tunisia desert. And apparently, that jump gifts him with powers of kicking ass. I mean, I love Ben, but all of a sudden he’s in the desert and now he’s not a fucking dweeb anymore? Ben go karate-chop-chop! Who the hell knows, maybe they’re in the fucking Matrix. It was awesome.

Ben jumps the Island, plunges the story into more righteous absurdity, and explodes the expectations and conventions the show seemed to be working under. One of those pants-filling moments, of which this show is filled with many.

Ten days.