LOST: There’s No Place Like Home (Season Finale)

LOST just gets better and better. Last night’s two-hour season finale was one of the best episodes they’ve ever done. Not only did we get answers to lots of the questions that have been plaguing viewers all season but we also learned it was John Locke who was in the casket.

The writers picked a perfect way to start the story by picking up where Season 3 left off by Jack’s calling after Kate that they need to go back. Kate slams on the brakes and lays into Jack and mentions Jeremy Bentham’s obituary, her “son” Aaron, and “all the horrible things that happened when they left.” The message for the viewer is clear: You’re going to get some answers to questions.

And what did we learn? We learned what happened to Jin and Michael (though I’m not convinced they’re dead), that Charlotte has indeed be on the island before, the Dharma Initiative was playing around with time travel, why the Oceanic Six are lying about what happened, that Walt is back on the show, Locke is dead, how the Island is moved (I guess it won’t be a character for awhile), Locke is dead, Claire doesn’t want her baby to come back to the island, what happened to Ben after he moved the island, and that Desmond and Penelope finally found each other again. For a show that’s been very hesitant to give its audience answers, this is a lot to digest. But it sure made the show fun to watch.

I thought the plot was great, the story moved at a fast but comfortable speed, and even though you knew the Oceanic Six were going to survive, there was still plenty of tension regarding their rescue and the fate of other characters throughout the episode that kept you on the edge of your seat for two full hours.

I only wish I had been more up on my philosophers. Had I know who the real Jeremy Bentham was, I would have realized it was Locke in the casket as soon as Kate mentioned his name. The writers dropped a big clue by using another philosophers name as Locke’s alias. Alas, I didn’t pay attention when Jon made this connection almost a year ago.

The writers have set the show up so next season we’ll see the Oceanic 6 try to make their way back to the island (after they’ve convinced everyone to come along) as well as what were the “bad” things that happened on the island after it disappeared. If the show keeps the same pace as the season four finale, we’re going to be in for a fun, wild ride.

Jon is a God

I need to give a shout out to my friend Jon who picked out the Jeremy Bentham reference in the season finale of LOST last year. In my comments of this entry Jon wrote:

yeah, i bet it’s ben’s funeral. there is a really awesome screengrab of the news clipping in jack’s hand on losteastereggs.blogspot.com. maybe i need to start watching lost in hd. it shows that the clipping is indeed real and details the death of someone with the first name starting with j and maybe the last name ending with antham. i guess there’s this philosopher from the 16th century named jeremy bantham. that may be another one of ben’s names or something and it would go well with john locke’s philosopher name.

Okay, he didn’t get the funeral right. But he picked up the Jeremy Bantham reference and tied it into Locke – the person in the casket.

Well done, Jon! You are a God! :-)

LOST: Cabin Fever

Last week, I wrote that that the Island was rearing its head again, supplanting Ben as the main character? And last night episode was about the mysterious Island trying to save itself.

Throughout LOST, most of the survivors have a history of seeing people or things from their past. This episode really confirmed that these dreams and visions the survivors are the Island’s way of communicating with people. Horace appears in Locke’s dream telling him how to find the cabin – although it was really Hurley that saw it first – and then Jack’s father is the one speaking for Jacob. If only future Jack could find a way to talk to his father. Maybe then he wouldn’t turn into a drunken mess and find the island.

One of the themes of LOST from the beginning is that fate or destiny brought many of the survivors to the Island. This episode reinforced that idea. I felt that it should have been Locke, not Ben, the Island really wants running things. Despite Locke’s best efforts – messing up (intentionally?) the test Richard Alpert gave him as a young boy or refusing to go to science camp in Portland as a teen – he can’t escape the Island’s call. (Maybe that explains Ben’s almost timid and mousy behavior. I was so disappointed. He’s so fun to watch when he’s on the warpath.)

And Michael has a destiny too. He just can’t die – no matter who wants to kill him. His mission isn’t over – yet. I’m not sure if he’ll be alive at the end of the series. I’m guessing the Island has some important work he wants Michael to accomplish before the island’s magical protection is gone.

As for Locke saying they had to “move” the island, maybe that’s why the despondent, drunk Jack of the future is so frustrated: The Island’s moved and Jack’s unable to find its new location.

LOST: Something Nice Back Home

Sometimes I wished I lived on the mysterious island of LOST. Sure, I’d have to put up with a smoke monster, Ben and the rest of the Others, a bunch of crazy plane crash survivors, and mercenaries hell-bent on killing everyone, but the one thing I wouldn’t have to put up with: Snow on the first of May. That’s right. Snowflakes fell yesterday and we had to turn the heat on because it was so darn cold. Where’s that global warming when you really need it? At least on the island I’d be running around in tropical weather. :-)

But on to last night’s episode…

It appears the Island will not go gently into that good night. Maybe it read my last post where I raved about Ben being such a great main character and decided it was time to come back into the picture. Whether it be taking Claire off into the jungle by her father(?!) or letting Miles know where Rousseau and Karl are buried, the Island wants to get back in the game. My gut tells me that despite everything Ben and Charles Widmore are doing to possess the Island, it will not have masters. It is really in control of things.

A little confused about when the Kate and Jack romance begins. I’m assuming it’s after he becomes drunkenly obsessive about getting back to the island. (One site dated the paper Jack was reading as August 31, 2007 but wasn’t sure.) Too bad. I liked the Jack who was totally focused on getting back to the island. I’m sure they’ll find a way back either next season or the final one.

The best part of the episode was the Sawyer/Claire/Miles trek back to the beach. Filled with tension. Now we know why Aaron isn’t with his mother anymore. Of course the question is what happened to her. (I think the island wanted to protect her. But why not Aaron?)

Everything comes back to the mysterious Island. One day it will reveal all of its secrets.

LOST: The Shape of Things to Come

Sometimes I wonder if LOST would have lost its way if it wasn’t for Benjamin Linus.

Before Ben became part of the series, we had a bunch of intriguing characters who survived a plane wreck but none of them could really be considered a main character of the show. (You could make a strong case that Jack or Locke fit this bill. I would say that the island itself was the main character through the first season and half.)

After Ben was introduced, we saw how everything revolves around him, his decisions, and his actions. All the other characters are responding and reacting to whatever he does. And last night’s episode illustrated this perfectly. We saw how Ben manipulated Sayid into becoming an assassin and how Hurly, Claire, Sawyer and others now rely in him for their lives, and how even the rich and powerful Charles Widmore is simply reacting to whatever Ben does.

But it isn’t the fact that the LOST universe revolves around Ben that makes him a great main character. The writers have shown us enough of his background and human side that we feel sorry for him. We’ve seen enough of his sad childhood and his unloving father that we can’t help but see that maybe part of the reason he’s evil is because, in part, some of his past experiences.

And even though we know he’s very evil and manipulative person, we couldn’t help but feel his shock and sadness when his disavowment of Alex backfired and she was executed. No one really blamed him for turning the smoke monster on the soldiers. And now his quest for revenge in flashforwards doesn’t seem pointless – even if we don’t agree with his actions we can last least see the motivation behind them.

Ben makes LOST tick. And I’m looking forward to (hopefully) two more seasons of this intriguing character.

LOST: Meet Kevin Johnson

My favorite part “Meet Kevin Johnson” was the episode’s irony. It was chalk full or irony. This is what I picked up on:

• In this episode Michael pawns Jin’s watch for a gun and bullets to kill himself. It was this same watch that Jin tried to kill Michael for on the island.

• Michael killed Ana Lucia and Libby (accidently) in order to get Walt back from the Others. In this episode we see that loses his son after he tells Walt what he did.

• Ben says that Charles Widmore doesn’t have a conscious, yet we’ve seen how Ben doesn’t have a problem killing others – including his own father.

• My personal favorite ironic moment was when Sayid turn Michael over to the boat’s captain because Michael is working for Ben. Yet we know in the future, Sayid will be working for Ben and carrying out assignations.

I also thought the song that was playing on the radio when Michael tried to kill himself the first time sounded kind of happy and cheerful but I didn’t recognize the song or pick up on the words. Anyone have any insight to that?

Since a mass slaughter appears to have begun on the island, it makes me wonder how many people actually survive. A few episodes back Hurley was visited by a mysterious man who wanted to know if there were other survivors. Maybe what he was really asking was not who survived the 815 plane crash but the mass killings that took place on the island. Maybe that’s why Kate ended up with Aaron.

And if Rousseau is dead, I’m going to be mighty upset. (Karl on the other hand, I really don’t care much about.) She’s one of my favorite characters even though we don’t know that much about her. And I was really hoping that before the series ended, we’d see a flashback on her to know how she came to the island, how she lost her daughter, etc. Okay we don’t know if she and Karl are really dead but I doubt they’ll be up and walking in the next episode. And thanks to the writer’s strike, we have to wait five weeks to get any sort of answer.

Interview with Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse

For all the LOST fans out there, UnderGroundOnline has a fairly in-depth interview with Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse. Lots of juicy tidbits about tonights episode, where the series is headed, and some insight into writing the show. Some tidbits:

UGO: Is the narrative structure going to change, yet again, from on island present with flash forwards to something else entirely?

CARLTON: Well this season is really about connecting the dots between what you saw in the finale last year, which was Jack and Kate's flash-forward, and the events on the island that were sort of catalyzed by the arrival of the helicopter. We're going to put some of those pieces together this season. We can't say much about what the format and structure of next season will be like because I think it would spoil the ending of this season. As this season gets closer to the end it is going to become more than apparent where the story wants to go next.

***

UGO: When was the decision to use time travel in the story made?

DAMON: It's been in the DNA of the show since the very beginning. Obviously, one thing the flash backs and the flash forwards provide you with is the idea of time travel. You're bouncing around in time and events from the past are seemingly influencing the present, but it's not a traditional time travel story until we started talking about what the hatch was there for, and what this electromagnetic energy that the hatch is trying to contain is and what would be the effect of that hatch going away, otherwise known as the purple sky event. And it was sort of those conversations which obviously happened way back in season one when Locke and Boone found the hatch that were the early precursors of time travel. I will say, though, that the first significant event in the show where we were thinking in the back of our minds that this is going to require a story telling element that isn't traditional narrative, is the discovery of Adam and Eve in the caves.

You can read the entire interview here.

LOST: Ji Yeon

Dear writers of LOST (especially Drew Goddard and Christina M. Kim):

You probably think you’re really clever by putting a flashforward and a flashback in the same episode. I know you were trying to make it seem that Jin was on his way to the hospital to be with Sun. I know you were trying to build tension in the show and make the surprise ending (Jin is dead!) even more of a bombshell. Well, it worked. However, it came with a price: It made the entire audience feel like a bunch of dupes.

Flashback and flashforwards are a great storytelling technique. However, they’re only effective when they help us understand the motivations, character, and personality of a character better or fill in some vital part of the story. For example, the flashbacks in the episode “The Other Woman” we learned a little more about Juliet’s connection to Godwin, their history, and that she doesn’t mind sleeping with married men. However, what made her flashback really interesting was what it revealed about Ben. We all knew he was narcissistic and evil but that flashback showed us just what a creep he is while setting the stage for a future showdown between Ben and Jack.

Jin’s flashback in “Ji Yeon” didn’t reveal anything about Jin that we didn’t already know. Instead, it served only one purpose: To confuse and misdirect the viewer. The entire flashback was completely unnecessary especially when there were better ways to hide Jin’s fate until the end of the episode. Since we knew Sun’s scenes took place off the island, you could have made her even more delusional and had her calling out for Jin more or asking where he was. Or, you could have focused more on making the doctors seem like they were going to steal her baby. Either way it would have made the same tension you were trying to achieve with the lame flashback.

Aside from that one mistake you crafted a powerful story. You introduced just enough of Michael to make us all wonder why he’s working for Ben. The interaction between Sun and Jin on the island after he learned about the affair was great and felt real. And the scene at Jin’s gravesite at the end was wonderful and touching end to the episode. (Of course we’re all wondering what happened!)

In the future, please refrain from making LOST fans feel like dupes. It’s not that we don’t mind being confused for most of an episode. Rather, at the end of the ride, we don’t want to feel like we were suckered into getting emotionally involved in something that really had nothing to do with the actual story.

Looking forward to future episodes.

Sincerely,

Abel

LOST: The Other Woman

I’m still a little stunned how much the latest episode of LOST revealed. We learned that Charles Whidmore is the owner of the boat looking for the island (not a big surprise), Ben loves Juliet and will find a way to eliminate any man that loves her (watch out, Jack!), the whispers are somehow related to the ability of the Others to appear and disappear (this has been hinted at but never fully shown until now), and that Ben was apparently trying to release the gas and kill everyone on the island (or so we’re told). Oh, and let’s not forget that Jack and Juliet finally decided to let each other know that they really liked each other with a kiss. How sweet.

The flashback of Juliet filled in some story elements rather nicely. I liked how Ben worked to eliminate Goodwin by sending him on a mission he knew he wouldn’t survive ala the King David story in the Bible. In some ways Juliet’s flashback revealed more about Ben than it did about Juliet. I think Locke’s in for a big surprise once he realizes that Ben once again has used him as a pawn.

I still think the new characters are the weak link in this season. I really want to learn more about them and their mission. Maybe next week’s episode will focus on that a little more. Remember, o ye writers of LOST, holding secrets back only works for so long. Sooner or later you have to start coughing up some information or the audience is going to flee.

And, as Marathon Girl pointed out last night, it’s no secret who Ben’s “man on the boat” is. Doesn’t anyone remember Michael? Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

LOST: The Constant

Since the last two episodes of LOST were below par, I worried that the show was headed in a downward spiral since it looked like the writers didn’t have a clue how to handle the new characters, flash forwards, and answer some of the questions that piling up.

Thankfully this show put everything back on track. Not only did we get to see more of Desmond and Penny (great characters and a beautiful, complex relationship), but we’re starting to understand what keeps the island hidden from the rest of the world. There’s obviously a time disconnect that makes it invisible to outsides unless they know exactly how to find it. And the show revealed that the island is about two days ahead of the freighter. The unanswered question, of course, is why.

Daniel Faraday, I think is going to become an increasingly important character and is probably the one most likely to help the crash survivors instead of completing their mysterious (and probably deadly) mission. It was nice that Desmond’s flashes included a little more background on this interesting individual. Let’s hope we get some flashbacks on him before too long.

The best part of the show, however, was the ton of clues that were dropped in about 15 seconds at auction where The Black Rock Diary was being auctioned. My ears perked up when the auctioneer said the contents of the diary were unknown except by its owner Alvar Hanso. Sound familiar? Alvar Hanso was the guy that founded The Hanso Foundation which financed the Dharma Initiative. The diary probably holds the secret of how to find the island. And now that Mr. Whitmore owns the diary, I’m willing to bet the freighter in the middle of the ocean is somehow connected to Penny’s father.