Has the pain of the end of Lost faded yet?  (Click here for my thoughts on the finale.)  Wanna rub some salt in the wound?  Then be sure to check out this video compilation of all the questions Lost left unanswered.

Here’s another great video from collegehumor.com: a Star Wars google ad parody.  SO FUNNY!!  This is well worth two minutes of your time.

Movie adaptations of Philip K. Dick stories have a pretty terrible track record.  But I’m pretty excited about this one.  Click here for a trailer for The Adjustment Bureau, starring Matt Damon and Emily Blunt (who really should have been the Black Widow in Iron Man 2).

Has Rob Reiner finally made another good movie?  Check out this trailer:

I’m intrigued by that sweet trailer.  Rob Reiner had one of the great winning streaks of all time when he directed This is Spinal Tap, The Sure Thing, Stand By Me, The Princess Bride, When Harry Met Sally, Misery, and A Few Good Men.  But with the exception of The American President, it’s been a long, loooong dry spell since then.  Here’s hoping that Flipped represents the master’s return to form!

Whee, still more great trailers to see!  Here’s the second peek at Scott Pilgrim vs The World (about which I must admit I know very little, but these trailers have hooked me), as well as our first glimpse at Part One of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.

CHUD is running a fantastic list of the Worst CGI in History that is sad, funny, and well-worth your time.

See you all back here tomorrow!

So that’s it.  We’re done.  ”The End,” the epic-length two-and-a-half-hour finale of Lost that aired last night, was a magnificent episode.  It was pretty much everything that I could ask a series finale to be: both a thrilling, emotional episode on its own as well as a wonderful capstone to the series as a whole.

Too bad it comes at the end of one of the most disastrously terrible seasons of a previously-great show that I can remember.

Spoilers obviously lie ahead for the finale of Lost, gang, so be warned!

The Lost finale reminded me of everything about the show that I used to love.  From start to finish, “The End” exuded a narrative confidence that has been sorely missed.  A two-and-a-half-hour finale could very easily have been a bloated, indulgent exercise, but I found the episode to be exquisitely paced.  Yes, they took their time with the story, but I felt this was worth it in order to give all of the wonderful reunions in the sideways world their due.  The writers cashed in every single chip they had in terms of the audience’s investment in these characters, but I thought those moments paid off phenomenally well.  It was delightful to see so many of the familiar faces return, and each reunion felt like a powerful emotional payoff to six seasons of storytelling.  (But where were Michael and Walt???  More on this later.)  And those slow, emotional beats were well-balanced by some terrific, tense sequences on the island.  (I thought the take-off sequence aboard Ajira 316 was particularly compelling.)

Yes, the exact nature of the sideways world was left vague, but that is the kind of narrative vagueness that I have no problem with.  I don’t exactly understand whether that universe was intended to be a glimpse at what awaits us all after death, or whether it was (as Christian Shephard seemed to hint) something magical that was somehow created by the collective unconscious of all the castways.  Either way, I don’t really understand why the characters didn’t immediately remember who they were — why they each had to somehow be “woken up.”  But, you know, I don’t really care.  J.R.R. Tolkien didn’t precisely explain the nature of the Gray Havens in The Lord of the Rings, and it wasn’t necessary for him to do so.  What was important here at the end of Lost was the idea that, somehow, all of our characters got a taste of the happiness they’d all been chasing — and that we, the audience who had invested in those characters, also got to taste that happy ending.  That the ending was tinged with the bittersweet — since the show made clear that this alternate universe was NOT the “real world,” and that these characters were all dead — only made the ending more powerful to me.

But the vagueness that I DO have a problem with — and the reason why I was so crushingly disappointed by season six — is the show’s complete and total failure to answer so many of the questions that the writers had posed over the course of the first five years of the show.  Take a gander at my long list of unanswered questions that I put together before the start of this final season.  Here now at the end of the show, the vast majority of those questions remain unanswered.  That is a colossal failure of storytelling, and I’d go so far as to call it a betrayal of the show’s fans.  This isn’t one or two lost threads in the overall tapestry of the show.  These are MAJOR mysteries that the writers spent episode after episode building up, only to abandon.  What was so special about Walt?  What caused the infertility problems on the island?  Was there ever an infection on the island?  (And if not, what was up with the quarantine signs on the hatches, and the inoculations that Desmond & Kelvin gave themselves while pushing the button in the hatch, etc.?)  What is the meaning behind the numbers?  I could go on.

Even more frustratingly, there were so many times during season six when the writers actually brought up many of those old mysteries — only to rub our noses in their refusal to answer our questions!  The writers found a (clever!) way to bring the story back to the mysterious Room 23 — only to fail to tell us anything more than we’d already guessed about the origin and purpose of that weird Dharma room.  We see again Ben’s secret closet and the mysterious way he was able to summon the smoke monster — but aren’t given any answers as to who set up that system or why the smoke monster would ever want to do the Others’ bidding.  We see flight attendant Cindy again — but are given no information on why she was kidnapped by the Others, what she’s been doing for the past three years, why she seemed to be completely turned to the Others’ cause, etc.  We hear the word “infection” pointedly referred to over and over again (several times, in particular, in last week’s penultimate episode), only to get no further answers as to the true story behind the infection on the island that may or may not have existed.   Again, I could go on and on.

Twisting the knife further, season six introduced a number of new mysteries that went absolutely nowhere.  What was the story behind the Temple-dwelling Others?  Who were these people?  What was their connection to the Others we knew?  How did they have special knowledge about Jacob and the Man in Black?  What was the nature of the magic pool?  How did it change people?  Was Sayid really altered by his resurrection, or was that all in his head?  When/why/how did Claire wind up in the pool (as mentioned by the Dogan)?

But most damningly of all, season six failed to offer up any clear answers for us about the major underlying story-point of the entire season: the feud/contest between Jacob and the Man in Black.  Yes, we got the episode-long flashback “Across the Sea,” but that came WAY too late in the year, and completely failed to give us any of the key answers we needed in order to invest in this season’s stories.  Why couldn’t the Man in Black leave the island?  How is it that Jacob could, and why/when did he decide to do so?  When/why/how did Jacob’s “contest” with the Man in Black begin?  What was the nature of the oft-mentioned “rules” of that contest?  Why did Jacob allow himself to be killed by Ben?  What did his dying words “they’re coming” mean?  If the Man in Black could “possess” any dead body on the island, why did he have to go to so much trouble to engineer Locke’s death off the island?  What was the Man in Black’s plan to leave the island?  What did he really need the castaways for?  Without really understanding any of what was going on between Jacob and the Man in Black, I found it impossible as a viewer to invest in any of the season-long back-and-forth machinations of the smoke monster/Locke and those forces arrayed against him.  (And weeks later I am still seriously pissed by Allison Janney’s line in “Across the Sea”: “Every question you ask will just lead to another question.”  What an insulting slap-in-the-face comment to all the fans who have the unmitigated gall to actually expect the writers to resolve some of the mysteries they themselves created.)

The finale fell victim to this narrative weakness, in that even here in the final episode we got zero information as to: What caused the Man in Black to decide to use Desmond to destroy the island?  (If he knew/thought Desmond could do that, why did he throw him down a well a few weeks ago?)  Why did Desmond decide to pull that stone cap out of the pool of white light?  (Why didn’t Dez just sit and do nothing after being sent down that waterfall?)  Why was Jack so convinced that Desmond couldn’t destroy the island?  (Just what did Jack think would happen when Dez went down that hole?)  The idea that Desmond unplugs the island and so almost destroys things, and Jack saves the island by replugging the hole, is pretty stupid.  And that we don’t have any information about the cave or the light or really any other island or Jacob/M.I.B-related things totally undermines what drama MIGHT be able to be drawn from that macguffin.

But circling back to the finale itself — other than that silliness with the light and the hole and the plug, I really did enjoy the heck out of the episode.  To me, a series finale is all about how satisfied I am, as a viewer, by the places in which our beloved characters wind up.  I think the writers handled this really well.  I’ve already commented how much I enjoyed all of the alternate-world reunions, but I was particularly touched by the Claire-Charley scene.  (Though did anyone else laugh at how clean Kate’s hands were five seconds after delivering Claire’s baby???)  I also loved that Daniel and Charlotte got a small moment (those are two characters who I had no reason to expect would get any screen-time in the finale, and I LOVED that they too got to reunite).  On the island, I loved that Hurley wound up as the next Jacob.  I loved that he was the one character to finally show some kindness to Ben (and I loved Ben’s reaction to Hurley’s offer).  I liked that, after six seasons of who-will-she-wind-up-with soap opera, Kate chose Jack in the end.  I was very pleased that Lapidus and Richard hadn’t actually been killed off, and I loved that they made it off the island.  I liked Richard’s white hair.  I liked Miles’ faith in duct tape.  I liked seeing the Elizabeth again.  I loved the long-awaited return of Vincent.

And I absolutely adored the final scene — and in particular, the final shot — of the episode.  What a wonderful way to bring us full-circle to the opening scene (and the opening shot!) of the premiere episode.  So many little attentive details in those final moments combined to evoke the beginning of the show (such as the reappearance of the shoe on the bamboo stalk… and attentive Lost fans couldn’t forget that Jack had a pain in his right side when he first awoke in the premiere).  And that last shot — what a great payoff to all the eyeball openings that we’ve seen throughout the run of the show.  Just perfect.

Really, the only major piece of character resolution that bugs me has nothing to do with what we saw in the finale — it’s that I’m still sore over the deaths of Jin and Sun on the submarine.  Sayid’s self-sacrifice felt right to me, but killing off Jin and Sun right after they’d finally been reunited felt needlessly cruel of the writers — particularly when one considers that they have a now-orphaned child off the island.

Actually, as I think about it, the deaths of Jin & Sun aren’t the only major character story-lines whose resolutions (or lack thereof) irritate me.  Let’s all take a moment to lament the exclusion of Michael from the finale — as well as the complete and total pooch-screw that is the story of Walt.  Walt was a major character in season one, and even after his disappearance from the show, we heard over and over again about his special abilities and his special destiny.  And then we never heard from him again.  So disappointing.

There’s no question that the dismal season six has significantly impacted my over-all opinions about Lost.  It’s hard for me to recommend the show to anyone — or to consider ever re-watching it, myself — knowing at the lack of resolution of so many of the show’s key story-lines and mysteries.  Maybe my feelings will soften with some distance.  But for now, my disappointment still runs deep.  Still, I was thrilled by how much enjoyment I got from the actual finale episode itself.  I’m so pleased that, in its final two-and-a-half hours, the Lost that I had loved made a triumphant return.  I only wish a fraction of that quality could have been found in the other sixteen hours of this final season.

And with that, this epic saga — and my engagement with it — is over.

See you in another life.

I entered season six of Lost with enormous enthusiasm.  After re-watching the first five seasons on the show, I had gained a newfound respect for the wonderful, overall tapestry of the show, and I was beyond excited to see those myriad story-threads get pulled together over the course of the final season.

That didn’t quite work out the way I had hoped.

A few days late, last night I finally had a chance to watch the series’ antepenultimate episode “Across the Sea.”

I don’t, frankly, really even know where to begin.

But looking back, I’ll remember this as the moment when I gave up my last embers of hope that the show would reach anything resembling a satisfying conclusion.

Instead of dissecting the flaws of the episode, let me direct you to this interview with the two show-runners, Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse, conducted by the great Alan Sepinwall (who has just started a new blog over at Hitfix.com).

I have been reading and listening to interviews with Mr. Lindelof and Mr. Cuse for years now, and they’ve always struck me as funny, intelligent men who really knew what they were doing in charting this weird, complex show.  But now their comments just make me sad.

I received a lot of response to my post last week in which I discussed my disappointment so far with Lost’s sixth and final season.  Some people vehemently disagreed with my assessment, while others were pleased that I had come around to their way of thinking.

Here’s my more specific episode-by-episode run-down of the season so far:

6.1/2 — “LA X” – A strong start to the final season!  All the stuff on the plane was a lot of fun.  Here in this initial installment there was nothing but promise to the alternate-universe story, and I was intrigued to see where that half of the story is going.  (Sadly, after ten episodes, it seems to be going nowhere…)  Glad to see that Boone is still a numbskull in any universe, and I was pleased to see Jack again desperate for a pen to help with a medical procedure.  The dude should just start carrying a couple in his pocket at all times.

I was also pleased to see several mysteries get addressed right up front, such as the Locke/smokey revelation (which I called before the show aired, thank you very much, no applause, just throw money).  I was also intrigued by the Other Others inside the Temple, particularly the Dennis-Hopper-in-Apocalypse Now translater dude.  Is the asian Other Other related in some way to the enigmatic Alvar Hanso?  I would love to learn that Hanso had once spent time on the island, the way Charles Widmore did.  (Sadly, we have so far gotten little-to-none of the backstory of this Temple-dwelling group of Others.  One more unanswered mystery to add to my list…)

Why did all the time-jumping castaways on the island stay in the positions/locations they were in at the end of last season when Jack dropped the bomb, except for Kate who was suddenly up in a tree?

6.3 — “What Kate Does” — After a strong start with the premiere, season 6 took a big nose-dive in this, one of the worst episodes of the entire series.  Aside from the title, which was a clever play on the title of the season 2 episode “What Kate Did,” there was nothing of interest happening here.  The Claire/Kate stuff, which was supposed to be the dramatic centerpiece of the episode, was absolutely ridiculous.  I guess we’re supposed to understand that there’s some sort of connection between the two women, even in this alternate timeline, and that’s why Claire trusted Kate.  But it didn’t really work for me.  Plus, why weren’t there a thousand police cars following Kate out of the airport??  Why didn’t Claire call the police after getting out of the cab, rather than just waiting patiently at the bus stop?  Why didn’t the cops who had figured out that Kate was with Claire at the hospital put a guard or two by the door to Claire’s room, or by the hospital entrance?  Why did the mechanic dude cheerfully let Kate out of her cuffs even after she a) threatened him with a gun, and b) admitted that she was wanted for murder?  None of it adds up at all.

6.4 — “The Substitute” – A terrific episode, and the highlight of the season so far.  It was fast-paced and interesting, with LOTS of fun connections to Lost lore.  My favorite moments include:  The weirdest damn funeral ever.  Seeing Jacob’s list at last.  Hurley’s commiserating with Locke about Locke’s boss (since attentive Lost fans know that the douchey Randy was not only Locke’s boss back in season 1’s “Walkabout,” but also Hurley’s boss at Mr. Cluck’s in season 2’s “Everybody Hates Hugo”!!)  Rose.  Science-teacher Benjamin Linus.  Alternate-universe Locke’s alarm clock, which sounded quite a lot, to my ears, like the alarm in the hatch.  Sawyer again discussing his favorite book, Of Mice and Men (which, as I recall, he last discussed while trekking with Ben to be shown that he was being held prisoner on an entirely different island, back in season 3).  The return of Locke’s long-held “don’t tell me what I can’t do!!” mantra, along with the return of Helen.  That John Locke, Lost’s “man of faith” has, in the alternate universe, become a man of science (teaching biology, and denying the existence of miracles), the position long-held on the show by Jack.  The return of the numbers.  But my favorite moment in the episode, the one that made me giggle with glee, was the glimpse of the black & white rocks in Jacob’s cave.  Back in season 1, Jack found a black and white rock near the Adam & Eve skeletons, and I’ve been LONG WAITING for that particular plot point to be referenced again.

6.5 — “Lighthouse” —  While not as unwatchable as “What Kate Does,” with this episode the show sunk back into mediocrity.  The on-island stuff was OK (I enjoyed seeing more of Rousseau-Claire), but the Jack off-island story just didn’t grab me.  It was watchable, but not nearly as compelling as Locke’s yarn last week.  I also thought the “breakthrough” moment with his son was ridiculous.  No kid actually talks like that, explaining to their parent exactly what their deep internal issue is.

6.6 — “Sundown” —  How could an episode called “Sundown” not be about Jin and Sun??

I was totally bored by Sayid’s story here.  Why?  Because the writers have removed any dramatic stakes by not explaining to us whether this is really the Sayid that we’ve come to love over the course of the show, OR some sort of mind-controlled evil version of him.  Without knowing that key piece of information, I couldn’t invest in the story.  If this isn’t our Sayid at all, or if he’s somehow being controlled or otherwise influenced, then there is no impact to the decisions that we see him make.  The drama is totally undermined.

6.7 — “Dr. Linus” –  After a couple of poor episodes in a row, we finally get another engaging installment.  In this episode there was actually a compelling dramatic storyline both on the island and in the alternate world, as both Ben Linuses were confronted with tough choices.  I couldn’t care less about whether alternate Sayid was going to shoot Keamy in the kitchen, but I did invest in the story of whether or not the alternate Ben would value his own power over all else.  And it was great to see Alex again.  That’s another thing this episode had going for it (as did “The Substitute,”, which is pretty much the only other episode this season that I’ve really loved) — lots of little nods to past events and continuity (Arzt, the diamonds buried with Nikki and Paulo, etc.) and pay-offs to other story-lines (verification that Richard Alpert arrived on the Black Rock, Hurley admitting to having visions of Jacob, Ben owning up to his murder of Jacob, etc.)  This story felt to me like the culmination of three years worth of Ben’s story as we see, finally, that there may be some hope for him.  I also LOVED the scene with crazed Jack and suicidal Richard in the Black Rock.  It reminded me of the scene with Tom Friendly and Michael in the alley, when Tom gets Michael to realize that the island won’t let him die.

6.8 — “Recon” —  Aaand we’re back to lames-ville.  In season 5 Sawyer was the most interesting character on the show.  But I really didn’t care at all about mopey Sawyer on the island or mopey Sawyer off the island.  (Though it was fun to see him paired up with Miles again — that was the episode’s only saving grace.)

6.9 — “Ab Aeterno” –  Things are looking brighter, as this spotlight on Richard Alpert was pretty good, even though they glossed over some rather enormous issues (such as how the Black Rock wound up in the middle of the island, and how exactly a wooden ship could break a stone statue).  I loved the way the MIB set up Richard the same way that now-dead Temple dude did Sayid, and I enjoyed seeing the MIB tell Richard “nice to see you out of those chains” as he would again, over a hundred years later (in Locke’s body).  I liked seeing white/black stones again.  Nice to see that obscure first season plot point getting some play.

Frankly, the jury is still out on all of this backstory until we get more of an explanation about the natures of Jacob and the MIB (who I like to call Esav).  Just what sort of entities are they, really?  Can Jacob change shape the way the MIB can?  Why or why not?  What stopped the MIB from killing Richard?  (We’ve seen the MIB unable or unwilling to kill “candidates” — was Richard a candidate?  How does one become a candidate?  If the MIB can just kill everyone who Jacob brings to the island, then a) what’s the point, and b) why didn’t he/it kill all of our castaways the second they crashed on the island, as it did the poor pilot in the pilot episode?)  I also thought the explanation of Richard’s role of intermediary was WAY too easy.  Jacob doesn’t want to get involved… but in a flash he decides it’s OK as long as he gets involved through someone else?  I don’t buy it…

This really is an episode that we should have gotten much earlier in the run of the show, I think, maybe during season 4 or 5.  Putting it off until the final run of episodes put undue pressure on the episode to be the BEST EPISODE EVER to make it worth the long wait — and it definitely wasn’t.

6.10 — “The Package” — We’ve had two watchable episodes in a row, which in this mediocre season is cause for rejoicing.  With the exception of Sun’s ridiculous amnesia/ephasia/whatever (which sort of sums up the show’s stubborn insistance, since season 1, on having its characters unwilling/unable to communicate with one another) I thought this week’s episode was pretty solid.  It was nice to see Mikhael, and his ultimate fate was pretty poetic.  (Guess the alternate-universe Mikhail doesn’t have as many lives as his island counterpart…)  I liked Sayid’s Apocalypse Now moment at the very end.  It was also nice to see room 23 again, although the woman’s line about it being used for subliminal messaging experiments is the type of frustrating confirmation-of-things-we-already-knew-rather-than-addressing-the-larger-questions sort of answers that we’ve been getting so far in season 6.  Like the Richard Alpert episode (which confirmed a lot of the guesses that attentive fans of the show had made, but didn’t really tell us anything startlingly new), it was pretty obvious when we first saw room 23 in season 3 that it had been created for mind-control (or at least mind-altering) experiments.  But to what END?  WHAT were the Dharma folk trying to accomplish in that room?  How did that connect to the other work they were doing on the island??  THOSE are my questions, and they remain unanswered.

I’ve been a fan of Lost since the beginning, and I have always been confident that the writers had a plan for the show, and that much of what seemed bizarre or unexplained at the time in the early seasons would ultimately be explained.  Even in the somewhat uncertain 2nd & 3rd seasons, I remained a “man of faith” (to borrow a common phrase from the show).  With the absolutely spectacular 4th & 5th seasons, I felt that my faith had been rewarded, and I entered the sixth (and final) season of the show with enormous enthusiasm.

Well, my friends, my faith is now wavering, and wavering big-time.

It seems to me that, so far, season six has been by far the most mediocre season of the show so far.  The problems are myriad.  The alternate-universe storyline, which seemed so intriguing in the season premiere, has started to feel more and more like a time-waster to me.  This is exacerbated by my frustration that the storyline on the island has been moving so slowly.  Of my enormous list of the show’s unanswered questions, what have we learned so far this season?  We now know the nature of the undead Locke/smoke monster/MIB, and we know Richard Alpert’s story.  Is there anything else that has been definitively answered for us?

This is extraordinarily disappointing, and it has caused me to begin to resent the time spent, each week, on the alternate-universe stories.  It seems to me that that is valuable episode-time that could be better spent paying off some of the many story-lines that the show has built up over its first five years.

As episode after episode ticks by, my hope that my many questions will be answered begins to fade, and this is really starting to honk me off.  And as the burden of these unanswered questions grows from week to week, the same thing is happening to me that happened as I watched the final run of Battlestar Galactica episodes — my growing frustration is impacting my enjoyment of episodes that, in previous years, I would have quite enjoyed — such as last week’s Richard Alpert installment.  Yes, it was phenomenal to see Richard finally get the spotlight!  But did that episode really tell us anything that attentive viewers hadn’t already guessed?  Had that episode aired during the 4th season I would have called it brilliant.  At this point in the final season, though, I’m just left scratching my head about issues like Jacob’s motivations.  (Why does his long-held commitment to non-involvement suddenly switch to his being willing to guide, through Richard, all the people he brings to the island?)  And if the wine-in-a-bottle metaphor is all the information that we get as to the true natures of Jacob and the MIB, then I am going to be very upset.

Let’s go, Lost!  Pick it up!  Only eight episodes to go!!

(For more info on this issue of what resolution we can/should expect from the writers of Lost, I encourage you to check out this terrific article, to which I posted a link earlier this month, called The Real Problem with Midichlorians.  It hits the nail square on the head.)

Here we go — my final post giving you my thoughts on my Great Lost Rewatch Project!  Yesterday I began my analysis of season 5.  Let’s continue, shall we?

“What lies in the shadow of the statue?”

Favorite Episodes

5.2 “Jughead” — We open with Penny giving birth to her son with Desmond, who we learn at the end of the episode is named Charlie.  Nice.  Three years later, we follow Desmond’s efforts to find Daniel Faraday’s mother, Eloise, and we learn more about Daniel’s time-travel experiments that eventually got him thrown out of Oxford and that apparently left his former girlfriend in a vegetative state.  Back on the island, we see that our castaways have time-traveled back to the 1950’s.  There we meet a young Eloise Hawking and Charles Widmore, and discover that the U.S. Army had been using the island as a site for the testing of nuclear weapons.  Meanwhile, Locke meets Richard Alpert, and since this Alpert of the ’50s doesn’t know him yet, Locke tells Richard the exact date and place of his birth which will happen in 2 years.  Locke suggests that Richard come see him – thus explaining Richard’s interest in Locke throughout his youth that we learned of last season in “Cabin Fever.”  This is a dazzlingly dense episode, filled to the brim with dramatic revelations and fascinating connections.

5.6 “316″ —  This episode declares its awesomeness right from the opening seconds — a phenomenal re-creation of the opening scene in the pilot. Jack again wakes up alone in the jungle – but this time it’s after the crash of Ajira flight 316. He’s back.  In flashback, we see how this all went down. The episode is filled with amazing moments, from Hurley’s attempt to buy up all the empty seats on the plane to Lapidus’ perfectly-delivered comment of resignation (see the title of yesterday’s post) when he sees the Oceanic 6 on board.  You gotta feel for the guy!!

5.8 “LaFleur” – After Locke disappears down the well, Sawyer & co. see the enormous statue (of which we saw a four-toed fragment back in season 2’s finale and hadn’t been seen nor mentioned since). Guess they’re pretty far in the past. Then they flash again, more violently this time – and seem to settle in one time period. It seems Locke has succeeded in his efforts to stop the time-jumping.  For the rest of the episode, we cut back and forth between the next few days in 1974 and 3 years later, in 1977, at which point Sawyer and co. are completely ensconsced in the Dharma Initiative.  It’s a lot of fun to see how Sawyer, Juliet, and Miles have adapted to their new lives amongst the Dharma folk, and it’s great to see more of what life was like for the members of Dharma on the island.  We learn more about the tenuous truce that exists between Dharma and the Others (represented by Richard Alpert). We see Amy give birth (to Ethan!  But we’ll learn that later) — indicating that the issue on the island with women giving birth hasn’t started yet.  We also get to see Radzinsky (who we’d previously seen as a bloodstain on the ceiling of the hatch) and Horace (who we saw in “The Man Behind the Curtain”) — it’s really neat to see these Dharma folk brought to life in this episode, and throughout the rest of the season.  Ultimately, though, it’s just nice to see Sawyer so happy, though we know it’s all about to come crashing down when Jin radios in, at the end of the episode, that he’s found Jack, Hurley, and Kate…

5.12 “Dead is Dead” – This is a fantastic, mind-bending episode that gives us some major pieces of the Lost puzzle while, of course, also raising a lot of other interesting new questions!  We see the development of the Ben Linus/Charles Widmore feud, from Charles’ anger with Richard for saving young Ben, to their disagreement over Ben’s refusal to kill baby Alex, to the moment when Charles is exiled from the island, leaving Ben apparently in charge.  It’s chilling to hear Charles’ warning to Ben that if the island DOES want Alex dead, one day soon Ben will be forced to choose between the island and his adopted daughter.  On the island in 2007, Ben tells Locke that he came back to be judged by the monster (“we don’t even have a name for it”) for breaking the rules and leaving the island, though Locke says he thinks Ben really wants to be judged for allowing his daughter to die, and cheerfully agrees to help Ben find the monster to be judged.  When Ben tries to summon the monster from the Dharma barracks, as we’ve seen him do before, nothing happens.  So Locke leads Ben to the Temple, where we get our best look yet at the smoke monster as it surround Ben and displays for him moments of his life with Alex.  In the end, the monster takes Alex’s form and makes Ben swear to follow Locke’s orders no matter what.  This is a complex, fascinating episode, one that delves deep into the mythology of Lost.  It’s also an episode whose events must be seen in an entirely different light given the revelations about John Locke and the smoke monster in the season 5 finale, “The Incident,” and the season 6 premiere “LA X” (revelations that I’m proud to say I guessed, based on my careful study of this episode during my rewatch!).  Oh, and I haven’t even mentioned that the question of “What lies in the shadow of the statue?” is asked here for the very first time!

“Richard’s always been here.”

Least-Favorite Episodes

5.11 “Whatever Happened, Happened” — There really aren’t that many weak links in season 5!  But if I had to pick a least-favorite episode, it would be this one.  There’s some great stuff happening in the 1977 part of this episode, no question.  I love the drama of Jack and Kate’s arguments over saving young Ben’s life.  (When Kate angrily declares “I don’t like the new Jack,” it’s a little bit heartbreaking to hear Jack’s resigned reply, “You didn’t like the old one.”)  But what sinks this episode for me is all the stuff with Kate and Aaron.  I’m just not that invested in all of her indecision about what to do, and I found her supermarket freak-out to be pretty pathetic.  Then there’s the scene with Claire’s mom, in which Kate tearfully admits that Claire is still alive, the Oceanic Six lied about the crash, and, oh yeah, that Aaron is actually Claire’s son.  That scene is powerful emotionally but also absolutely ridiculous.  Kate tells Mrs. Littleton that her daughter is alive, and that the Oceanic Six left her (and others) on the island and then lied about it.  Wouldn’t any rational person ask: “WHY on Earth would you six have done that??”  That Claire’s mom doesn’t ask, and that Kate doesn’t provide any hint of an explanation is beyond weird.  OK, maybe Mrs. Littleton was just in shock by the revelations and not thinking clearly.  Well, then, next week when things have sunk in and Kate has gone never to return, wouldn’t she call the police and start trying to organize rescue missions for people to find her daughter and all these other survivors??  This is a key story point, and that it is handled so flimsily is very disappointing to me.

“You forgot your guitar!”  ”It’s not my guitar.”

Favorite moments from season 5:

5.1 “Because You Left” — The intriguing opening sequence, in which we see Pierre Chang on the island in the 1970’s, waking up and feeding his son (Miles!), recording a Dharma orientatiom video (for The Arrow, the station where the Tailies were living in season 2!), and then visiting the under-construction Orchid station where the workmen’s drills have come perilously close to puncturing a pocket of electromagnetic energy (where the frozen donkey-wheel is!).  Chang discusses the rules inherent to time-travel (rules which we’ll learn more about over the course of the season) and then, most intriguingly, bumps into Daniel Faraday!  At the time, viewers didn’t know whether Daniel had time-traveled from the 1970’s to the future (to come to the island on the freighter in seasons 3 & 4) or whether this scene indicated that at some point Daniel would time-travel from the present (2004) back to the past.  Either way, it was a hell of a way to kick off the season, and I love that we eventually circled back to this scene at the very end of the season.

5.2 “The Lie” — Hurley’s meeting with Ana Lucia.  The icing on the cake?  Ana Lucia’s parting comment: “Libby says hi.”

5.2 “The Lie” — Hurley’s frantic, stream-of consciousness attempt to summarize for his mother all the craziness that befell him during the first four seasons of the show.  Hilarious.

5.4 “The Little Prince” — Jin washes up on the beach (for the second time in the series!) and is rescued by a young French-woman: Danielle Rousseau!

5.9 “Namaste” – Amy reveals to Juliet that she and Horace have named their baby (that Juliet delivered in the last episode) Ethan. Nice.

5.11 “Whatever Happened, Happened”  – Hurley and Miles’ hilarious conversation in which Miles tries to explain to Hurley the rules of time travel.  I also love Hurley’s Back to the Future moment as he stares at his hand to see if it starts to disappear.

5.13 “Some Like it Hoth” — Hurley and Miles realize that they both have the ability to communicate with dead people.

5.15 “Follow the Leader” — The hysterically quick way that Pierre Chang is able to get Hurley to admit that he’s from the future.  (Chang: “What year were you born?”  Hurley: “Um…1931.”  Chang: “You’re 46?”  Hurley: “Yes I am.”  Chang: “That means you must have fought in the Korean War?”  Hurley: “There’s no such thing.”  Chang: “Who is the U.S. President?”  Hurley: “OK, we’re from the future.”)

“You asked what I remembered.  I remember dying.”

So that’s it, my friends!  Five seasons of Lost. It was GREAT fun rewatching the series from start to finish, and great fun sharing my thoughts with you all in these posts.  Needless to say, I’ve been attentively watching season 6.  Sadly, I’m a bit lukewarm on the season so far.  The show still has a LOT of questions that need answering before everything wraps up.  You can rest assured that I’ll be bringing you my thoughts on the conclusion of the series as things wrap up!

It’s time to begin wrapping up my post-game assessment of my Great Lost Rewatch Project by beginning my thoughts on season 5!  Click here for my thoughts on season 1, season 2, season 3, and season 4.  As always, folks, MAJOR SPOILERS lie ahead, so beware.

“OK, so what?  We’re gonna go back and kill Hitler?”  ”Don’t be absurd. There are rules. Rules that can’t be broken.”

Coming after the magnificent season 4, my favorite season of the show since the first year, I wasn’t sure if season 5 would be able to maintain that high level of quality and narrative momentum.  But I shouldn’t have doubted.  Season 5 is another home-run, one that deepens our understanding of the show’s characters and of the larger backstory of the island.

Here in season 5, Lost fully embraces the sci-fi aspects that have often been a peripheral element of the show, as the writers dove into a complex time-travel storyline to begin the season.  Lost has played tentatively with time-travel before, most notably in the two Desmond episodes “Flashes Before Your Eyes” (click here for my detailed thoughts on that critical episode) and “The Constant.”  Those episodes had allowed us to begin to get some sense of the “rules” of time-travel in the Lost universe.  This isn’t Back to the Future type time-travel, where one could alter the past and thus change the future.  Here in the world of Lost, it seems that “whatever happened, happened” — that making major changes to the timeline are impossible.  (Season 6 will tell us definitively, one hopes, whether that is indeed the case.)

After Ben moved the island in the season 4 finale, something goes wrong and our castaways find themselves unstuck in time, jumping around into the past and the future.  Over the course of these jumps, much of the secret history of the island and its inhabitants is peeled back for us to examine.  We travel back to the ’50s, meeting a young Eloise Hawking and Charles Widmore (I LOVE the revelation that he was once an Other!) and learning of the US Army’s use of the island as a test site for nuclear weapons.  We learn the reason for Richard Alpert’s interest in a young John Locke (see in last season’s “Cabin Fever”).  We see what befell Rousseau and her team.  We see how Ben came to raise Alex.  And we learn a LOT more about the Dharma Initiative.

The time-jumping storyline is great fun, but things get even more fascinating once Locke turns the frozen donkey wheel himself.  The castaways (Sawyer, Juliet, Miles, and Daniel) wind up back in 1977, and become members of the Dharma Initiative.  I did not see that plot twist coming.  It’s a brilliant way for us to have an opportunity to explore what things were like when the much-mentioned Dharma Initiative was on the island, conducting their experiments and building their hatches in the years before the Others’ Purge (which we saw in season 3’s “The Man Behind the Curtain”).  As always, though, the success of that storyline rests not just on our getting answers to some of our questions, but on the strong character arcs that center the stories.  The strong, stable relationship that Sawyer and Juliet are able to create for themselves, and Sawyer’s transformation from angry loner to the trusted, well-liked LaFleur, are wonderful.  It’s a credit to the writers and actors involved at how well they’re able to pull off those story-lines, and they bring great heart to the tale as it unfolds (and, upon rewatching, great tragedy, as well, since we know how this is all going to wind up in “The Incident”).

“Third day we were here I was on line in the cafeteria and my mother got in line behind me. That was my first clue.”

Things are every bit as fascinating off the island as well, as in the season’s early episodes we watch Jack and Ben’s efforts to reunite the Oceanic Six and find a way to return to the island.  As in season 4, what’s great is the intensity and energy these story-lines have (in contrast to some of the goings-on in seasons 2 & 3 that felt at times like we were treading water).  There’s a strong narrative thrust to these story-lines, as Jack and Ben have a clear goal (a return to the island), and we see them struggle with the many obstacles in their way.

On my initial viewing, I was quite shocked at just how quickly the Oceanic Six did manage to get back to the island (by the sixth episode, “316″), but pleasantly surprised, since this meant the show could focus on even more interesting story-lines — our characters’ lives amongst the Dharma Initiative in the 1970s.  This also upped the dramatic stakes even further, since while we could be pretty certain that the Oceanic Six would, eventually, find a way to return to the island, once they found themselves stranded in the ’70s viewers had no idea what was going to happen next.  Good stuff, and clever story-telling.

“They come. They fight. They destroy. They corrupt. It always ends the same.”

Then, of course, there’s the finale, “The Incident.”  The opening scene, in which we FINALLY meet Jacob, is a tour-de-force sequence that forces us to entirely reevaluate everything that we have seen so far in the show’s first five seasons.  For along with Jacob we also meet his mysterious enemy, the Man in Black.  We see that the Black Rock is about to arrive on the island, and the huge Egyptian statue is still standing.  The M.I.B. accuses Jacob of having brought the ship there, and says that he hates him and will one day find a loophole that will allow him to kill him.

Suddenly we are forced to completely reevaluate almost everything that has come before on the show.  For five seasons we’ve tried to puzzle out the meaning behind all the strange things that we’ve seen happen on the island, including the many visions our characters have seemingly been granted by the island (often in the form of dead friends or relatives).  Many of these visions have seemed to have been contradictory.  (An example that jumps to mind is the way, back in season 1, Locke’s visions of the drug-plane seemed to indicate that the island wanted him to find that plane — and yet when his legs mysteriously give out in the jungle it seems that the island DOESN’T in fact want him to find the plane.)  We’ve seen mysterious “apparitions” that may or may not have been real, such as the many appearances of Christian Shephard, and all the strangeness of the encounters with Jacob’s cabin.  We’ve tried to figure out what this all means, and what the island wants from our castaways.  But now we must consider the idea that there have been TWO forces attempting to influence the denizens of the island, and that these forces have been in OPPOSITION.  This puts a fascinating new spin on everything we have seen to this point (and perhaps helps explain some of the seeming contradictions).

Case in point: when I watched season 5 originally, I was bugged by the whole idea that the Oceanic Six had somehow damaged the island by leaving (causing the crazy time-jumping), and that somehow it was their destiny to return.  This was the position suggested by Locke.   Since he was able to stop the time-jumping when he left the island to bring the Oceanic Six back, it seemed to me that the show was suggesting that he was correct.  But I didn’t understand how the Oceanic Six’s leaving could have caused the island to go crazy, when we’d seen plenty of other people leave the island (Michael, Charles Widmore when he was exiled, Ben, Richard, Ethan, Tom Friendly, etc. etc.) before without causing similar problems.

But during my rewatch, it became clear to me that, in fact, Locke’s suggestion was entirely incorrect.  It was Ben turning the wheel that caused the island (and/or the castaways) to jump in time – the Oceanic 6 had nothing to do with it.  Once we learn in the finale that the M.I.B. has been inhabiting Locke’s body, it clarifies the scenes seen in the penultimate episode, “Follow the Leader,” and we can now understand that the whole idea that the Oceanic Six must return to the island was planted in Locke by the M.I.B. (when we see the M.I.B. in Locke’s body tell Richard Alpert exactly what he needs to say to the time-jumping Locke of the past, who Richard is about to help with his bullet wound).  The whole thing was a ruse to get dead Locke back to the island so the M.I.B. could take his place and get Ben to kill Jacob.

That is genius!!

It’s also fiendishly complicated, and we still have an extraordinary number of outstanding questions that I really hope season 6 will address.  But I applaud the Lost writers for their creativity and their cleverness.  It’s exciting that a show entering its final season still has so much creative energy and juice left in the proverbial tank.

Of all the seasons of the show, season 5 is the one that I most enjoyed during my rewatch.  It is so full of tiny little details and connections — many of which I missed when watching the show for the first time, week-to-week.  But it’s delightful to notice all of those little elements of the tapestry that the makers of Lost have cleverly woven into the fabric of the show, purely for the attentive fans.  (I’m going with a weaving metaphor here in honor of the scene that introduces us to Jacob in “The Incident.”)  This is bold, inventive television, and I sure hope that season 6 is able to stick the landing.

“When I was little, living here, there was this man, this crazy man. He really scared me. And he told me that I had to leave the island and never ever come back. He told me that if I came back to the island, I would die.”

See you back here tomorrow as my Great Lost Rewatch Project draws to a close, and I give you more in-depth comments on my favorite and least-favorite moments from season 5!

I have an extensive series of posts, that will be running over the course of the next month, in which I write about my revisitation of Arthur C. Clarke’s four-novel Odyssey series which began in 1968 with 2001: A Space Odyssey — as well as the two film adaptations (of 2001 and 2010).  On Wednesday of this past week, literally moments after I had typed the final words of my review of Mr. Clark’s fourth and final Odyssey novel, 3001: The Final Odyssey, I read the sad news that Mr. Clarke had passed away at the age of 90.  What sad news.  This detailed obituary from the New York Times is worth a look.  Mr. Clarke was a giant in the world of science fiction, and he will be sorely missed by all of his fans world-wide, including this one.

Some big trailers have hit the web recently.  Check out this terrific new trailer for Iron Man 2, as well as this intriguing glimpse at the I-can’t-believe-this-actually-got-made sequel to Tron.  How great is Bruce Boxleitner in that trailer?  How about that glimpse of (newly-minted Oscar winner) Jeff Bridges?  Both films look fantastic, and I fervently hope they both can deliver.

Speaking of Jeff Bridges, I wanted to direct your attention to this great recent piece from aintitcoolnews.com, in which Jeff Dowd, the inspiration for “the Dude” in The Big Lebowski, waxes poetic about Mr. Bridges.

And speaking of films I hope will deliver, here’s a sneak peek at Robert Rodriguez and Nimrod Antal’s upcoming movie Predators.  Is it possible that we might finally be getting a truly kick-ass Predator film that can hold its own with the Arnold Schwarzenegger original?  I am beginning to hope…  (At the very least, they have settled on a phenomenal title, one that echoes James Cameron’s Aliens, the sequel to Ridley Scott’s film Alien.)

Finally, all of the fans of Lost out there need to be sure to check out my favorite article of the month: The Real Problem with Midichlorians.  I COULDN’T AGREE MORE WITH THIS ARTICLE.

“She’s not my daughter. I stole her as a baby from an insane woman. She’s a pawn, nothing more. She means nothing to me.”

Yesterday I began analyzing Lost season 4.  Here are some of my favorite and least-favorite moments from that over-all terrific season!

“Is he talking about what I think he’s talking about?”  ”If you mean time-traveling bunnies, then yes.”

Favorite Episodes:

4.2 “Confirmed Dead” – A great episode that begins to introduce us to the “Freighter-Folk” and raises a whole heck of a lot of new mysteries.  We see Daniel Faraday watching the discovery of the Oceanic 815 wreckage and crying.  We see Charlotte investigating an archaeological dig in Tunisia, where the skeleton of a polar bear (with a Dharma collar!) has mysteriously been found in the middle of the desert.  We learn of Mile’s ability to communicate with the dead.  We see Laipdus, who was also watching footage of the Oceanic 815 recovery, at which point he becomes convinced that the bodies are not actually those of the survivors, and we learn that he was supposed to have been the pilot of 815 that day.  We see Naomi being recruited by the mysterious Abbadon.

4.5 “The Constant” – A phenomenal episode, without question one of the very best of the series. Leaving the island, Lapidus is forced by a storm to shift slightly off the precise bearing that Daniel gave him. As a result, Desmond’s mind is somehow thrown back in time and exchanged with that of his younger self, still serving as a soldier in the Scotts Royal Regiment. Over the course of this mind-bending hour, we are given an enormous amount of information about Daniel Faraday’s time-traveling experiments (information that will prove critical to our understanding of season 5).  We also see, in an intriguing scene, Charles Widmore at an auction, bidding on the first mate’s log from the Black Rock (the ship we know is beached on the island), which we learn had formerly been in the possession of Tovar Hanso (an apparent ancestor of the founder of the Dharma Initiative).  Suddenly we are forced to reconsider Mr. Widmore — he’s not just Desmond’s troublesome potential father-in-law, he’s a man with some sort of connection to the island.  But, of course, none of this fascinating back-story would matter at all if not for the episode’s emotional center: the star-crossed love story of Desmond and Penny.  Their tearful reunion, when Desmond calls her from the freighter’s radio room after having obtained her phone number in the past, is wonderfully powerful stuff, and a highlight of the season (and the series).

4.9 – The Shape of Things to Come – In one of my favorite flashforwards of the season, we see Ben appear (wearing a Dharma parka!) in the middle of Tunisia. (We’ll soon learn that this is where he went after turning the island’s wheel in the season 4 finale – and this explains how the Polar Bear skeleton that Charlotte found in Tunisia in “Confirmed Dead” wound up there.) Ben kicks the ass of some locals (using a weapon familiar to readers of Y The Last Man – a nice nod since this episode was written by Brian K. Vaughan), and then sets out to recruit Sayid’s help. It seems that poor Sayid finally found and married his love, Nadia, but that she was soon after killed when she was hit by a truck. Ben tells Sayid that Charles Widmore was responsible. Desperate for vengeance, Sayid agrees to work with Ben to kill all of Widmore’s men.  The story-line on the island is every bit as tragic and compelling.  The dead body of the freighter’s doctor washes up on the beach, an apparent result of more island-related time dilation, since when they radio in to the boat they learn that the doc hasn’t died yet!  Keamy and his men attack the barracks, killing most of the castaways hiding there,and blowing up Claire’s house. Keamy demands that Ben surrender or he’ll kill Alex. Ben refuses, and in a shocking moment Keamy shoots Alex in the head. A furious Ben enters a secret compartment in his house and summons the smoke monster, who decimates Keamy’s men.  At the episode’s end, we see Ben off the island, paying Widmore a visit in his bedroom and vowing to kill his daughter, Penny, in exchange for Widmore’s killing his.  Filled with I-can’t-believe-that-just-happened moments, this episode is a great example of season 4’s renewed narrative intensity.

“You’re more lost than you ever were.”

Least-Favorite Episodes

4.6 “The Other Woman” — In flashback, we meet Harper Stanhope, the Others’ psychiatrist, assigned soon after Juliet’s arrival on the island to meet with her regularly. The two women seem to take an instant dislike to one another, exacerbated when Juliet begins an affair with Goodwin, Harper’s husband.While the humanization of Goodwin is interesting, Juliet comes off looking pretty poor here (sleeping with a married man).  I also found this episode’s depiction of the cruel love-sick Ben (who declares to Juliet “you’re mine”) to venture too far into over-the-top moustache-twirling villainy, far less interesting than the more subtly manipulative Ben we have previously seen.

4.8 “Meet Kevin Johnson” – This is a fun episode, and it’s great to have Michael back on the show. But I have serious problems with the events portrayed in Michael’s flashbacks. It seems to me that the events depicted would have had to have taken place over MONTHS. When we first meet up with Michael in this episode, he is already suicidal over his guilt and his split from Walt – the implication is that Michael has already been home for a while. And it must have taken additional weeks for Michael to prepare for his task of infiltrating the freighter and then travel to the port in Fiji, and then we must consider the time it would have taken for the freighter to find the island. As I wrote, all of that seems like it would have taken MONTHS. But if you think about it, Michael left the island during the season 2 finale. The freighter has already found the island two-thirds of the way through season 3 (when Naomi parachutes onto the island). Since every episode of Lost pretty much takes place during a single day, that means that only 2-3 weeks, maximum, elapsed from the time that Michael left the island until the time that he returned, disguised as Kevin Johnson on the freighter. I don’t think that tome-line works at all, and it really undermines this episode. I also hate the ending, in which Rousseau and Karl are gunned down in the jungle (by Keamy’s men, which we’ll learn later) and Alex is taken prisoner. I can’t believe how easily the tough, cunning Rousseau – who survived all by herself on the island for 16 YEARS – walks right into the trap set by Keamy’s men. That’s pretty weak.

“Those things had to happen to me. That was my destiny. But you’ll understand soon that there are consequences to being chosen. Because destiny, John? Destiny is a fickle bitch.”

Favorite moments from the season:

4.3 “The Economist” — Daniel Faraday’s rocket experiment that clues us in on the mysterious bubble of time-dilation surrounding the island.

4.4 “Eggtown” — Hurley’s response when he realizes that Kate has tricked him into revealing where Miles is being kept: “You just totally Scooby Doo’ed me, didn’t you?”

4.8 “Meet Kevin Johnson” — Libby’s blink-and-you’ll-miss-her split-second appearance in Michael’s nightmare!

4.9 “The Shape of Things to Come” —  Keamy forces Alex to deactivate the sonic pylons, which causes a phone to ring in Ben’s house, something which really perplexes Locke & the gang! They ask Ben about it, and Ben immediately realizes what has happened – so, in another great moment, Ben quickly whips out the gun he’d apparently been keeping hidden in the seat at his piano!

4.11 “Cabin Fever” — Richard Alpert’s enigmatic visit to the home of a young John Locke.  (Eagle-eyed Lost viewers couldn’t have missed the young Locke’s drawing hanging on the wall, of what appears to be the smoke monster!)

4.12 “There’s No Place Like Home” Pt. 1 — At the memorial service for his father, Jack meets Claire’s mother and learns a staggering secret: that Claire was his half-sister.

“I’m here to tell you that the island won’t let you come alone. All of you have to go back.”

I’ll see you back here next week for my thoughts on Lost: Season 5!

My season-by-season analysis of Lost continues!  Click here for my thoughts on season 1, here for my thoughts on season 2, and here for my thoughts on season 3.  SPOILERS ARE AHEAD, gang, so beware!

“Rescuing you and your people… I can’t really say it’s our primary objective.”

There were times, watching seasons 2 and 3 of Lost when they originally aired, when I must admit that my faith in the show wavered.  There were so many mysteries raised but not answered, and after the terrific first season there seemed to be many times when the show was spinning in circles, narratively.  But season 4 firmly established Lost, in my mind, as one of the greatest TV series of our time, as opposed to a show that started off brilliantly but then slowly settled into mediocrity (cough 24 cough).

The writers brilliantly reinvigorated the show by abandoning their signature story-telling device, the use of flashbacks.  Instead they began presenting us with tantalizing flash-FORWARDS that hinted at what would befall to our castaways in the time between the on-island events of 2004 and what we glimpsed of 2007, when we met the desperate, suicidal off-island Jack in the season 3 finale.  That finale set up all sorts of questions: How did the castaways get off the island?  Why did only SOME of the castaways leave?  What happened to everyone else — were they dead, or did they decide to stay for some reason?  What happened to Jack (and the other Oceanic Six) in their three years off the island?  What drove Jack to become the destroyed, shell of a man that we saw in the season 3 finale?  Whose body was in that coffin??

One of the great strengths of season 4 is that way that, in decidedy un-Lost fashion, every one of those above questions were answered by the end of the season.  Season 4 feels like the most complete of all the seasons of Lost, with a distinct beginning, middle, and end, and in which all of the major questions raised at the beginning of the season (well, really by the finale of season 3) were answered by the end of the season.  That all this was accomplished despite the fact that the season was truncated due to the lengthy writers strike is quite astounding.  (Season 4 was scheduled to be 16 episodes long — much shorter than the 24 episodes-per-season that seasons 1-3 were — but it was shortened to only 13 episodes because of the strike.)  In many ways, I suspect the shortened length of the season turned into one of its greatest strengths.  There’s no flab in season 4 — with only 13 episodes to play with, the writers didn’t have a moment to waste.  As a result, every single episode of the season seems critical to the narrative, and the story rushes forward like a freight train from start-to-finish.

“I’m here, Charles, to tell you that I’m going to kill your daughter. Penelope, is it? And once she’s gone, once she’s dead, then you’ll understand how I feel, and you’ll wish you hadn’t changed the rules.”

I love that, in a surprising change of pace, the first episode of season 4 gives us a spotlight on Hurley!  I enjoyed meeting Matthew Abbadon (played by Lance Reddick, who played Cedric Daniels from The Wire!), though I wish we’d seen more of him during the year.

While season 2 introduced us to the Tailies, and season 3 spotlighted the Others, here in season 4 we meet the “Freighter-Folk.”  Looking back, it’s interesting to contemplate just how critical these characters (Daniel Faraday, Miles, Charlotte, Lapidus) have become to the show.  (This is in contrast to the Tailies, who were pretty much all dead — except for Bernard — by the time season 2 ended.)  Lost’s writers have repeatedly noted how the Freighter-Folk were the ones most impacted by the writers’ strike shortened season — we’d have to wait until season 5 to have many of our questions about them answered.  But this doesn’t weaken their story-lines in season 4 for me at all.  If anything, now having seen season 5, during my Lost rewatch project I found myself even more hooked by the intriguing glimpses we got into these enigmatic Freighter-Folk (such as the weird scene when Charlotte tests Daniel’s memory with playing cards in “Eggtown”).

“You people had therapists?”  ”It’s very stressful being an Other, Jack.”

As the season progresses, there is great fun to be had in watching all the pieces fall into place on the island for the events that we know, from the flashforwards, will be happening to our castaways.  Much of season 4 has a tragic inevitability, and watching Jack & co. struggle mightily to get off the island while we know of the misery that awaits them makes for powerful, compelling viewing.  In the two-part finale, “There’s No Place Like Home,” we see the moment we’ve been anticipating for 4 years – the castaways (some of ‘em, anyways), disembark from their rescue plane and are joyfully reunited with their families (some of ‘em, anyways).  We see the press conference in which they tell their (made-up) story.  (Note that in the cover story, the castaways left the uncharted island on which they had been stranded 108 days after the crash.  That’s a familiar number!!)  Then we get a fascinating series of glimpses into how the Oceanic Six spent their 3 years off the island, scenes that help put into context many of the flash-forwards we’d seen all season long.

Then, finally, we circle back to the Jack/Kate “we have to go back!” scene from the end of season 3. Kate angrily tells Jack that she’s spent the last 3 years trying to forget all the horrible things that happened to them the day they left the island. Jack returns to the funeral parlor, where he meets Ben and we see that the “Jeremy Bentham” in the casket is actually John Locke. Ben tells Jack that they ALL must go back to the island.  Bring on season 5!

“I’ve heard you tell that story so many times I’m starting to think you believe it.”

I’ll see you back here tomorrow, for more specific thoughts on my favorite & least-favorite moments from season 4.

Yesterday I began my look back at season 3 of Lost.  Click here to check out my thoughts on season 1, and here to read my thoughts on season 2.

“This is future crap, isn’t it?”

Favorite Episodes

3.7 “Not in Portland” – Juliet gets a terrifically juicy flashback as we see her performing secret (and somehow unethical?) research on her sister, who Juliet is able to help get pregnant despite her being stricken with cancer. Richard Alpert makes his first appearance as a well-dressed representative of Mittelos Bioscience who tries, repeatedly, to recruit Juliet to come work for him in Portland. We see a few glimpses of Ethan, who has apparently been hanging around Juliet’s place of work, and who is perhaps the one who brought her to Richard’s attention. We see Juliet frustratedly confess to Richard that she can’t work for him because her ex-husband (and boss) would never allow her to take her research elsewhere, and she hysterically wishes that he’d get hit by a bus. Which he does. At which point Alpert tries again to convince Juliet to come work for him, admitting that they don’t really have offices in Portland…

3.8 “Flashes Before Your Eyes” — Click here for my detailed thoughts on this bombshell episode!

3.10 “Tricia Tanaka is Dead” – Oh my goodness do I have great and powerful love for this episode.  Hurley finds an overturned, rusted old Dharma van.  Convinced that the gang needs a win, he sets out to repair it, with some help from Charlie, Jin, and Sawyer.  And repair it they do.  In flashback, we meet Hurley’s dad, played by Cheech Martin. He apparently left Hurley’s mom when the kid was about 10, but she doesn’t seem all that sore about it, as she welcomes him back into her life after Hurley wins the lottery. I guess he’s a jerk for ditching them all those years ago, but he seems like a good-hearted fellow who is genuinely concerned with the depressive spiral that Hurley has fallen into because of the curse he feels is upon him. We see good evidence for that curse early in the episode, when an unfortunate reporter, the titular Tricia Tanaka, perishes when an asteroid (or meteor?) smashes into the Mr. Cluck’s that Hurley purchased. D’oh!  There are so many great moments in this episode. All the silliness with the head of Roger, Workman (who, in a terrific turn, we later learn is none other than Ben’s dad, Roger Linus). Jin and Sawyer drunk on decades-old Dharma beer, and Sawyer teaching him the English phrases he’ll need to keep a woman happy. Hurley looking death in the face. Fantastic.

3.14 “Expose” – Oh boy, another FANTASTIC episode.  The wildly unpopular Nikki and Paulo get their own flashback, and we learn they’ve done some pretty terrible things in pursuit of diamonds.  In a terrifically clever series of sequences, we track back through the events of the first two-and-a-half seasons of the show and see how what Paulo & Nikki were doing weaves in and out of the events we’ve witnessed.  And , of course, we see them ultimately turn on one another and wind up being buried alive.  Rough!  The episode is filled with self-referential fun (Nikki’s line: “I’m only a guest star, and we all know what happens to guest stars”), and other silliness (Billy Dee Williams’ guest appearance!), but the highlight for me is the clever return, during the flashbacks, of many familiar faces (Shannon!  Boone!  Ethan!  Arzt!!).

3.20 “The Man Behind the Curtain” — Benjamin Linus gets a flashback episode.  In learning about Ben’s youth growing up on the island, we get our first real glimpse of the Dharma Initiative and what they were doing on the island in the ’70s.  We meet Horace Goodspeed for the first time (who will be a major player in season 5), as well as Ben’s father Roger (”workman”, who we already met as a corpse in the Dharma van in “Tricia Tanaka is Dead.”)  We see Ben’s first meeting with Richard Alpert (who we learn in this episode is apparently ageless).  And finally, we see at last “the Purge,” in which the Others eliminated the Dharma folk on the island.  This is a tremendous episode, and it fills in some big blanks of the story for us.  And I haven’t even mentioned all the goings-on in present day on the island, such as Ben & Locke’s enigmatic visit to Jacob’s Cabin!

3.21 “Greatest Hits” – This is one of my favorite episodes of the series.  Charlie makes peace with his impending death by listing the five greatest moments of his life, which we experience with him through flashbacks.  It is poignant and powerful, and a wonderful farewell to a beloved character (even though he’s still breathing by the end of the episode).  Attention TV writers: THIS is how you make the death of one if a show’s main characters have impact.

Least-Favorite Episodes

3.11 “Enter 77″ — There’s some intriguing stuff to be found in this episode, and it’s notable for introducing us (in person, at least, as opposed to on a screen in the Pearl) to one-eyed Mikhail.  But the episode is undone, for me, by Locke’s out-of-character behavior.  Locke acts like a total buffoon throughout the episode, becoming obsessed with the computer and allowing Mikhail to escape while his attention has wandered, and then entering 77 and destroying the Flame station.  In light of what we’ll learn in the next episode about Locke’s desire to destroy any methods of communicating with the outside world, I can sort of understand why he destroys the station – and that he did that on PURPOSE, as opposed to as a buffoonish accident.  But I cannot understand how/why he becomes so obsessed with the computer chess game in the first place, before he knew that beating the game would lead to his having an opportunity to destroy the station (something there’s no way he could have possibly known in advance).

3.12 “Par Avion” – 3.10 Claire gets pissed off at Charlie and Desmond for the weird way they’re acting, the result of Desmond again trying to keep Charlie from death.  Things worsen when Desmond messes up (he claims by accident, but clearly on purpose) Claire’s plan to capture a tagged bird that she sees, so she can fasten a message to the bird to be eventually found by the scientists tracking the birds’ movements.  This episode is undone because Desmond’s actions make no sense.  He says that he saw Charlie die on the rocks.  So why did Desmond STOP Claire and Jin from capturing a bird on the beach, when Charlie wasn’t around??  Desmond and Claire only had to go to the rocky area at the end of the episode BECAUSE Desmond had screwed up the first attempt.  This installment isn’t helped by the depressing flashback, in which we see that Claire apparently caused her mother to be terribly injured when they get into a car accident while in an argument.

Favorite Moments from the Season

3.1 “A Tale of Two Cities” — Tom Friendly tells Kate she’s not my type.  Such a bizarre little moment that must be seen in an entirely different light after the events of season 4’s “Meet Kevin Johnson”!

3.8 “Flashes Before Your Eyes” — Desmond sees Charlie singing on the streets of London during his flashback.  And what is Charlie singing when Desmond sees him?  ”Maybe… you’re gonna be the one who saves me…”  Brilliant.

3.13 “The Man From Tallahassee” — After being crippled by his father, we see Locke’s terror at going in the wheelchair.  He says he can’t do it, at which point the orderly replies with the phrase that will become Locke’s motto: “I don’t want to hear about what you can’t do.”

3.20 “The Man Behind the Curtain” — In an early scene in the episode, Ben tells Richard that it’s his birthday and says: “You do remember birthdays, don’t you, Richard?”  That the writers chose to place this scene in the show before we’d learned of Richard’s mysterious age-less nature is a mark of how well-made this show is, and how well-designed it was for repeat viewings.

“You know something about boxes, don’t you John? What if I told you that somewhere on this island there’s a very large box…and whatever you imagined…whatever you wanted to be in it…when you opened that box, there it would be. What would you say about that, John?”  ”I’d say I hope that box is big enough to imagine yourself up a new submarine.”

I’ll be back next week with my thoughts on Lost season 4!

Click here for my thoughts on Lost season 1, and here for my thoughts on Lost season 2!  Remember, there are LOTS OF SPOILERS ahead, so be warned.  OK, let’s dive into Lost season 3!

“The man from Tallahassee?  What is that, some kind of code?”   ”No, John, unfortunately we don’t have a code for ‘there’s a man in my closet with a gun to my daughter’s head’.  Although we obviously should.”

Whereas season 2 broadened the canvass of Lost to include the characters of the Tailies and their stories, season 3 expands the focus even further to begin shedding light on the heretofore enigmatic figures of the Others.

In many ways, season 3 represents a mid-series turning point for Lost.  Towards the end of the original airing of this season, it was announced that the show’s producers had come to an agreement with the network on an end-date for the show.  I don’t think I’m exaggerating to say that this announcement (quite unprecedented for a successful network TV series), literally saved the series.  There were points in season 2 that felt like treading water, and I got that same sensation more than once in the early going of season 3.  But the announcement that the series had a definite end date restored narrative thrust and energy to the show, and allowed the writers to begin parcelling out answers to long-held questions and moving forward on the storylines and plot-twists that they had intended for the end-game of the show.

“Pushing that button is the only truly great thing that you will ever do.”

Season 3 began with a “pod” of six episodes.  When watching these episodes originally I found them to be excruciating, as all sorts of weird things seemed to be happening with no explanation whatsoever.  At this point in the run of the show I was long-since ready for some answers, and I had hoped that this batch of episodes — in which Jack, Kate and Sawyer found themselves held captive by the Others and so we were at last taken inside the Others’ community — would give us some insight into just what the heck had been going on for the first two years of the show, but that was not to be.  To say that this was frustrating would be putting it mildly.  In addition, over the course of these 6 episodes we continued to have to suffer through watching our beloved characters treated incredibly cruelly (something that I mentioned that I found bothersome during season 2 as well), abused mentally and physically by the Others.  This is tough to watch, and as I commented in my write-up of season 2, the Others’ continued cruelty towards our castaways continues to perplex me, particularly if there is some nobility to be found in their attempts to protect the island.

On the rewatch, though, I enjoyed those early season 3 episodes a lot more.  Knowing where the story was going, I had a lot more patience now to watch things unfold, and I gained a lot more enjoyment from noticing all the intriguing little clues that the writers worked into those early episodes about the Others and the way their little society was run.  I’m also a lot more patient with the flashbacks now, and find myself able to enjoy the subtle textures these pieces of back-story add to our characters.  (When season 3 originally aired, I found myself often thinking of the flashbacks as wasted time that could have been better spent giving us some straight answers about the Others.)

What did bother me during the rewatch every bit as much as it did when these episodes originally aired was the ludicrous lack of follow-up to the momentous events of the season 2 finale by the characters on the show.  Why is Charlie so unconcerned about what went down at the hatch when he returns to the beach? Why is no one on the beach at all curious about what happened to Locke or Eko? Why aren’t there search parties out combing the jungle? Why does no one seem at all to care that the entire hatch has IMPLODED?? If the failsafe device was powerful enough to somehow “detonate” or seal the electromagnetic force unleashed by the incident, how did Locke, Eko, and Desmond survive unscathed? What the hell happened to Desmond’s clothes??? None of this makes a lick of sense, and it undermines the stories being told.

Then there is the sad story of Nikki & Paulo.  It’s funny, when season 3 first aired on TV I was every bit as annoyed by Nikki & Paulo as most fans were. I thought it was awkward how they were introduced out of nowhere, and I resented the time taken away from the other characters’ stories.  As a result I, like most fans, was THRILLED when the writers got rid of them in “Expose”.  But rewatching the show on DVD it’s stunning to me just how little screen time these two characters actually had before their demise in this episode.  As a result, watching this season again, I really didn’t mind Nikki & Paulo’s presence as much.  It feelt like they had barely been introduced before getting killed off.  It’s an interesting example of the difference between waiting painfully from week to week when the show aired on network TV versus experiencing Lost on DVD.

“You sure its an Island?”  ”Well what else is it?”  ”Little hot for heaven isn’t it?  They found your plane on the bottom of the ocean. One minute I’m in a car wreck and the next minute I’m in a pirate ship in the middle of the jungle.  If this isn’t hell, friend, then where are we?”

In the second half of the season (as was the case with season 2), things really pick up steam and we get a tremendously compelling run of episodes that lead us into season 4.  Naomi parachutes onto the island with a photograph of Desmond & Penny, and the possibility of rescue by the “freighter-folk” is tantalizingly raised.  Locke begins his journey towards becoming one of (and eventually, possibly the leader of) the Others.  Sawyer (and the audience) are struck by the astounding revelation that the original Sawyer who ruined his life is the same con-man who was Locke’s father, leading to an astoundingly powerful confrontation in the brig of the Black Rock that packs an enormous emotional punch.  We pay our first visit to Jacob’s cabin.

The season finale represents a total game-change for the show, and is probably my single favorite episode of the series.  There are all sorts of dramatic events on the island, as Jack and the gang set their trap for the Others, and then attempt to find the radio antennae on the island in order to deactivate Danielle’s repeating message so they can contact the freighter; Charlie heroically attempts to deactivate the jamming signal in the underwater Looking Glass station; Ben begs Jack not to leave the island and threatens to murder Sayid, Sun and Bernard if he won’t relent; and Locke and Jack have a showdown as rescue appears imminent.  But, of course, the center-piece of the episode is in what we think is a flashback (and the show is put together fiendishly well, so that on a first viewing one could never guess the switch-ending), as we see Jack at his lowest point.  He’s a drunken mess, and only happenstance stops him from committing suicide.  It’s only at the end, of course, that we learn that this isn’t a flashback but a flash-FORWARD.  Jack has been off of the island for THREE YEARS.  It is a devastating gut-punch to see how completely destroyed Jack’s life has become back home – this is far from the happy ending that he (and we!) had been hoping for.  But the real clincher is the final scene, in which Jack finally regains some of the passion that he used to have, declaring to Kate: “WE HAVE TO GO BACK!!”  Brilliant.

“I did not ask for the life that I was given. But it was given, nonetheless. And with it… I did my best.”

See you back here tomorrow for my favorite and least-favorite moments from Lost season 3!

Hope you enjoyed my thoughts about season 2 of Lost! Here are some of my favorite and least-favorite moments:

“Boy when you say beginning, you mean beginning.”

Favorite Episodes:

2.3 “Orientation” —  What a wonderfully bizarre and perplexing episode.  While the opening courts my annoyance by showing us (for the THIRD time!) the held-at-gunpoint scene between Jack, Locke, and Desmond, we finally get some tantalizing new pieces of the story of the hatch and the larger back-story of the show.  We get to watch our first Dharma video (the Swan Station Orientation video) which is a tour-de-force of hints and questions.  We learn that the Swan is only one of several Dharma stations on the island.  We learn that the Dharma Iniviative was funded by Danish Indistrialist Alvar Hanso.  We see the model of the swan station that we’ll see Radzinsky building in season 5.  We hear about “an incident” that lead to the button-pushing being necessary.  Awesome.

2.7 “The Other 48 Days” —  A genius episode, in which we follow the Tailies from the crash of the plane right up through Ana Lucia’s shooting of Shannon. We get lots of information on what happened to this group of survivors (who had it a lot tougher than our castaways), who they are and what makes them tick, and also some intriguing hints about the mysteries of the island and the Others.  (I love that they find an old-style army knife on the body of one of the two Others killed by Mr. Eko. A souvenir of the army team supervising Jughead, I presume?)  I also love that we learn that Bernard was on the other side of Boone’s radio call from the Nigerian plane.  Didn’t see that one coming!

2.10 “The 23rd Psalm” – I love this episode.  It blows my mind.  Eko gets a flashback and we discover how he used to be a violent mercenary, and it was his brother who was a priest.  Eko gets his brother killed and, when he’s then mistaken for a priest, steps into that role.  We learn that the plane carrying drugs in Virgin Mary statues that crashed on the island was actually sent by Eko (though his intention wasn’t for the plan to crash on any mysterious island, of course!!), and his brother’s dead body is aboard.  Crazy.  In this episode we also get our first full glimpse of the monster, and see it’s black-smoke-like nature.  Eko stares it down, and as he does the camera passes tantalizingly THROUGH the monster, thus giving a work-out to the pause button on DVDs world-wide.

“Don’t Mistake Coincidence for Fate.”

Least-Favorite Episodes:

2.11 “The Hunting Party” — I mentioned this episode yesterday.  It’s a particularly frustrating example of middle-season Lost storytelling, in which our characters’ (and our) desperate quests for answers are continually thwarted.  Making matters worse, in this episode Jack behaves in a completely unhinged manner (notice how his crazy-quotient is always dialed up to 11 in his flashback episodes??).  He pushes Kate away with his arrogant, dismissive attitude.  This is something that has really annoyed me during my re-watch.  Also, if the Others aren’t really “bad guys,” as later seasons seem to suggest, I am beyond confused as to why they are so brutally cruel to our castaways here (and in their kidnapping of Walt in season 1’s finale).

2.11 “Fire + Water” — Coming right on the heals of “The Hunting Party,” this is one of the low points of Lost in my opinion.  Charlie takes a walk off the deep end.  Desperate to repair his ralationship with Claire, he’s also haunted by dreams (visions?) that Aaron is in danger. His increasingly manic attempts to convey this to Claire only puts him further on the outs with her and the rest of the castaways. Eventually he becomes convinced that Aaron needs to be baptized, so he starts a fire to lure people away and then grabs Aaron and brings him down to the beach. Locke figures out what’s going on and beats up Charlie. The only thing I hate more than seeing Charlie reduced to such a sad, pathetic state here is the needless cruelty of Locke’s beat-down of him.  I can’t believe none of the other castaways speak up when that happens!!

“So what do you think’s the story with that Libby chick? She’s kind of cute, right? You know, in an I’ve-been-terrorized-by-the-Others-for-40-days kind of way…”

Favorite Moments from the season:

2.1 “Man of Science, Man of Faith” – Jack’s meeting with Desmond as they both jog up and down the stadium steps is one of my very favorite Lost scenes.  It’s fascinating, now, to hear Desmond speak of how he’s training for a race around the world, and the twinkle he gets in his eye when Jack talks about his issues with his female patient (since we now know that Desmond is doing it all for Penny).  Then there’s his parting line: “See you in another life, brother.”  Sure enough!

2.16 “The Whole Truth” — The episode ends with a terrific Ben moment that provides a powerhouse of a cliffhanger.  Having finally been allowed to leave the armory, which has been his prison cell in the hatch, and have breakfast with Jack and Locke, Ben has this to say: “Of course, if I was one of them — these people that you seem to think are your enemies — what would I do? Well, there’d be no balloon, so I’d draw a map to a real secluded place like a cave or some underbrush — good place for a trap — an ambush. And when your friends got there a bunch of my people would be waiting for them. Then they’d use them to trade for me. I guess it’s a good thing I’m not one of them, huh? You guys got any milk?”

2.23 “Live Together, Die Alone” — I will forever love the enigmatic moment, in Desmond’s flashback, in which we see that he met Libby in the past, and that she actually gave him the boat that he used to compete in Charles’ Widmore’s race (and eventually crashed on the island).  But what shoots this scene into the stratosphere is the revelation that Desmond’s boat was named for Libby, something none of our castaways will ever learn.

2.23 “Live Together, Die Alone” — Also from the series finale, I have to mention the final scene, in which we get our first ever present-day glimpse off the island — Penny Widmore’s arctic monitoring station.

“I’ve read everything Mr. Charles Dickens has ever written — every wonderful word. Every book except this one. I’m saving it so it will be the last thing I ever read before I die.”  ”Nice idea, as long as you know when you’re going to die.”

I’ll be back soon with my thoughts on season 3!

Last week I began my look back at Lost with my thoughts on Season 1.  Time now to move on to season 2!

“This is not your island.  This is OUR island.”

There’s a whole heck of a lot to enjoy in season 2 of Lost.  I had a great time revisiting this season during my rewatch project, but I strongly remember how tough this season was to watch, at times, when I first saw it week-to-week on TV.  There are a number of reasons for this, I think.

Season 2 of Lost goes to some dark places.  Many of the characters find themselves regressing and forced to continue struggling with the demons that we might have thought they’d conquered in season 1.  This is realistic storytelling, in which one’s issues can’t necessarily be put to bed so easily, but it also lent season 2 a feeling that we were treading water, narratively.

The same held true for the flashbacks.  This innovative storytelling device (that is so easy, looking back now, to take for granted), is a big part of what gave season 1 its narrative power.  But in many of the season 2 flashbacks, I didn’t feel that we learned much new about our castaways.  (For example, what did we learn in “Adrift” about Michael and his wife that we hadn’t already learned in “Special” from season 1?  What did we learn in “Everybody Hates Hugo” about Hurley that we hadn’t already learned in “Numbers” from season 1?)

Also, in this season the writers expanded on the fractured story-telling style they had played with at times during season 1, in which often they would only give us one piece of what was happening, making us wait to get the rest of the pieces until later episodes.  This is in evidence right from the start of the season, in which, for instance, in each of the first 3 episodes we get a different character’s perspective on what happened down in the hatch after Locke and the gang went down.  Re-watching the show now on DVD, this splitting up of the narrative makes a certain amount of sense, as it enables each episode to have a focus, as opposed to feeling the need to jam updates on every single character into every single episode.  However, I clearly remember watching these episodes when they aired weekly on TV, and this storytelling style was TORTUROUS.  I was desperate throughout the season premiere, “Man of Science, Man of Faith,” to learn what happened to the folks on the raft, and I was desperate throughout the second episode, “Adrift” (and, frankly, throughout the entire rest of the season) to learn more about just how the heck Desmond wound up pushing that button in the hatch!  In both cases, I was out of luck.

I must also comment, here, that I was disappointed that the misbegotten Sayid/Shannon pairing continued into season 2.  I just don’t buy that Sayid’s tough, pragmatic character would fall for vapid, selfish Shannon. (Yes, we learn in her final flashback that she has more depth than that, but nothing in her behavior on the island would have demonstrated that to Sayid.) Plus, Sayid’s two flashbacks to this point have been all about his devotion to his love Nadia. When he declares his love to Shannon in episode 2.6, “Abandoned,” and swears to her that “I’ll never leave you,” I just had to laugh.  Luckily this storyline came to a gruesome end pretty early in the season.  Bravo, brave (and bloodthirsty) writers for your fearlessness in continuing to off main characters, showing us that the death of Boone wasn’t a fluke.

Finally, what makes this season tough to watch in places is the way the castaways (who we have grown to know and love over the course of season 1) are continually stymied — in their efforts to get any concrete answers to anything that is happening on the island, in their efforts to rescue Walt, etc. etc.  Episode 2.11, “The Hunting Party,” is a particularly brutal example, when Tom Friendly refuses to release Walt and insists that there’s a line in the jungle that our people cannot cross.  It’s hard watching our characters continually running into proverbial brick walls — and of course we, the audience, are every bit as disappointed each time that the answers to our questions remain out of reach.

But enough about the negatives!  This is still a terrific season of television, ambitious and challenging, with so much to enjoy.

“Do you not hear me, brother?  I crashed your bloody plane!”

I loved the introduction of the “Tailies” in the beginning of the season, and the way that their stories were slowly integrated with those of the original castaways over the course of the season.  This was a great way in which the writers broadened the canvass of the show, and it allowed us to get to know some phenomenal new characters: Mr. Eko, Libby, Ana Lucia, and Bernard.  There was some dislike, amongst Lost’s fans, of Ana Lucia when she was first introduced (perhaps because of the way that she seemed to be positioned as a new love interest for Jack, in place of Kate), but I always enjoyed her character and did so even more upon the rewatch, when all of her appearances were colored by her tragic end.  (Same goes for Libby, times ten.)

When “Henry Gale” (Benjamin Linus) is introduced in 2.14, “One of Them,” things really kick into high gear, and the show has a great run of episodes leading up to the finale.  Benjamin Linus is one of the great television creations of all time, and he is creepily wonderful right from his first appearance, playing head games with Locke & co. while being locked inside the armory in the hatch.

As the season draws to a close, we get a lot of intriguing morsels of information about the island and what sorts of strangeness has apparently been going down there for decades.  In “Lockdown,” we see the invisible map.  In “?” we discover The Pearl, a Dharma station designed to monitor the goings-on in the Swan station.  In “Live Together, Die Alone,” we get a glimpse of the ruins of an enormous, four-toed statue.  I love that the season begins and ends with Desmond.  His flashback in the season finale, “Live Together, Die Alone,” is one of the most interesting and perplexing of the show’s run.  As we watch scenes of Desmond’s three years on the island, we are given an overload of hints and references to things we don’t yet understand — mentions of vaccines, infections, Radzinsky, etc, — many of which are a lot clearer upon rewatching, while some remain unexplained.

This is a complex season of television storytelling, and I must applaud the writers and craftspeople behind Lost for their towering ambitions, even if I feel that they occasionally missed the mark in this sophomore year.  It’s fascinating, while rewatching these episodes, to see how brave the writers were to pepper these episodes with story-points that wouldn’t become clear until well into the future of the show.  (If I have an overall complaint about Lost as a series, it’s how many of these questions remain unanswered.  Hopefully by the time we get to the end of season 6 we’ll have a lot more clarity on some of these issues.)

Case in point: I am still bothered, somewhat, by something I mentioned in my lengthy list of Lost’s unanswered questions: I feel like we never really got the true story behind the button in the Swan Station. I suspect the Lost writers think they have adequately explained this, but I’m still left scratching my head.  Was the button-pushing really necessary in order to stop the electromagnetic whatever, originally tapped/unleashed in “The Incident”, from getting out of control and destroying the world?  If so, why such a bizarre method of containment (with the weird numerical code and the Egyptian symbols)?  Or was it just a twisted psychological experiment?  The button was such a major part of this season, I’d really like to see some stronger resolution to these questions.  If we’d gotten those answers, I think I’d have more positive feelings overall about season 2.

C’mon back tomorrow for more of my favorite and least favorite moments from Lost season 2!

Yesterday I gave my over-all impressions on Season 1 of Lost.  Today I’m going to get a bit more specific about some of my favorite and least favorite episodes and moments of the season!

“There’s a fine line between faith and denial.  And it’s much better on my side.”

Standout Episodes:

1.3  ”Walkabout” — Our first spotlight on John Locke.  The ending, in which we learn the truth about his “condition,” still packs an emotional wallop even knowing what’s coming (and totally blew me away the first time I saw it).

1.14  ”Special” – Michael and Walt get their flashback and it is HEARTBREAKING. It’s one of the strongest, most poignant flashbacks the show ever did, in my mind. Poor Michael gets screwed over by the cold, cold Susan (Walt’s mom) who leaves him, taking Walt and moving out of the country and eventually shacking up with her boss. Contrary to what we had assumed so far, we learn that Michael desperately wanted to be a part of Walt’s life but that Susan shut him out, going to the point of not even giving young Walt all the letters that Michael wrote him over the years. Then there’s the scene in which Charlie wrestles with himself over whether or not to read Claire’s diary — this is comic gold, and a terrific example of what a brilliant performer Dominic Monaghan is.

1.18 — “Numbers” – At last, a Hurley flashback!!  And it rocks.  If the purpose of the flashbacks is for us to learn things about the castaways that we wouldn’t otherwise expect, and to set the stories on the island in a dramatically different light, then this episode succeeds in spades.  The whole scene in the insane asylum (when Hurley goes to visit the fellow, Lenny, who gave him the numbers) plays a whole lot differently now that we know that Hurley was an inmate there.  (That also explains Hurley’s angry reaction here when Charlie tells him that he’s acting like a lunatic.)  It’s great to see Hurley succeed in finding Rousseau (and getting her to give them a battery to use for a radio in Michael’s raft) despite everyone’s disbelief that he could do so.  Hurley can charm anyone!!

1.23 “Exodus” Part I – A terrific, terrific episode. Through a series of flashbacks we get intriguing glimpses of each of the castaways (including Boone, back for this episode!) in the hours before Oceanic flight 815 launched. We also meet Ana Lucia (who will be such a key character in season 2) for the first time! (It was very clever of the writers to introduce her here, at the end of season 1.)  There are a ton of great character moments in this episode, as Michael prepares to launch the raft. I was impressed by what a nice job the writers did, here at the end of season 1, of bringing a lot of their story arcs to a good end-of-the-year conclusion. Sawyer begins to soften, going into the woods on his own to chop down a bamboo stalk large enough to serve as a mast for the raft (to help repair the damage that happened when they tried to move the raft into the water). Sun and Jin reconcile, and we see Jin being more accepted by the other castaways. Michael and Walt seem to have found a comfortable understanding of one another. Meanwhile, Walt gives Vincent to Shannon, as he can see she is still struggling with Boone’s death, because he says Vincent was able to help him after his mother died. It’s all very nice stuff. Then there’s the dramatic reveal at the episode’s end, in which we learn that the Black Rock is no rock at all – but the name of an old galleon slave-ship that is somehow washed up in the middle of the island. Awesome. I remember being so delighted by that clever twist when first seeing this episode.

“We’re in Hell, huh?”  ”Don’t let the air conditioning fool you, son.  You are here, too.”

Episodes that could have used another rewrite:

1.6  ”The Moth” — Charlie’s flashback (dealing with the corruption that comes from fame and fortune) is overly-simplistic, and all the goings-on with Jack trapped by a cave-in interested me not at all.  The whole thing felt like a writerly device (we need something to keep Jack and the gang busy this week while Kate/Sayid/Sawyer work on triangulating the Frenchwoman’s signal) as opposed to the natural unfolding of the story.  I’m also not clear on why Jack, whose body was entirely pinned by the boulders that piled on top of him when the cave collapsed, wasn’t crippled, with his bones broken in ten million places…

1.11  ”All the Best Cowboys Have Daddy Issues” — This episode contains my least-favorite moment in season 1: the fake-out with the death of Charlie.  Kate and Jack find Charlie “dead” — complete with sad music and a long camera pull-back, which are clearly meant to convey to the viewers that he’s deceased — before learning that, hey guess what, he’s just mostly dead and Jack is able to revive him.  This is an annoying narrative trick that I hate when shows do.  (The Lost writers will do the very same thing to us a few episodes later, in “Hearts and Minds,” when Boone watches Shannon die in his arms before realizing it’s just a hallucination.)  Luckily by the end of this season the show will actually start killing off castaways, thus restoring important “you never know WHAT could happen” tension to the series.  In this episode, though, it’s just annoying.

1.15 — “Homecoming” — Charlie Pace has always been one of my very favorite characters on the show, but for some reason I rarely found myself at all interested in his flashbacks (with the exception being the superlative “Greatest Hits” in season 3).  Here we see Charlie being a total jerk to a woman he gets into a relationship with as a means of ripping off her rich father in order to get money for drugs. Sawyer he is not, and his con blows up in his face and everyone winds up feeling terrible. Yuck.  (Really the only thing I liked in the flashbacks was the joke in which Charlie’s girlfriend Lucy mentions that her dad is looking into purchasing a paper company in Slough. Hello, Ricky Gervais’ The Office!)  But what really lands this episode on this list is that Claire reappears and we discover that she has amnesia.  Ugh.  If there’s a lazier, more overused TV plot device out there, I don’t know of it.  OK, the writers aren’t yet ready to spill all the beans on what Ethan was up to with Claire, but using amnesia as a means of keeping the castaways (and the viewers) in the light is just dumb dumb dumb, and I have little patience for it.

1.21  ”The Greater Good” – In Sayid’s flashback, we learn how he allowed himself to betray a former friend (now a lost soul preparing to be a suicide bomber) in Sydney in order to get information from government agents about the location of his lost love, Nadia.  On the one-hand, it’s one more heartbreaking flashback as we continue to see just how screwed up all of the castaways were before landing on the island.  On the other hand, while I have sympathy for Sayid – who is emotionally lost at this point – it’s hard to muster up too much sympathy for his buddy Asam who, despite the tragedy of losing the woman he loved, is, after all, plotting to blow up innocent civilians.  I also find it a bit hard to square the Sayid we see in this flashback (which takes place RIGHT before his boarding the ill-fated Oceanic flight, as he gets his tickets at the very end of the episode) who is willing to do ANYTHING for even a hint at the location of the love of his life, Nadia, with the Sayid that we see on the island who is mooning over Shannon.  While I’m picking apart this storyline, let me say that my eyebrows raised at just how much the CIA seemed to know about Sayid.  How on Earth did they know that Nadia was the lost love that he’d been searching for??  I am dubious about this plot-point.

“Dude, you got some Arzt on you.”

Favorite Moments from the season:

1.16. “Outlaws” — The mind-bending scene in which we see that Sawyer met Christian Shephard at a bar in Australia.

1.17 “In Translation” — The scene at the end of Jin’s flashback, when he goes to see his father (who is NOT dead as Jin has been telling everyone, even Sun).  Without any boring exposition, the dynamic is clear: Jin has been ashamed of his poor fisherman father.  Yet this man has great dignity, and a heck of a lot of common sense.  His comment to his son: “It IS a good world” is such a simple, heart-felt declaration, that effected me powerfully (as it does Jin in the episode).  What a wonderful moment.

1.22 “Born to Run” — Kate’s reunion with her dying mother doesn’t quite go the way she’d planned when, instead of a tearful reconciliation, Kate’s mom calls the cops the moment she sees her daughter.  It’s a stunning, tragic moment that really surprised me (in the best possible way) when I first saw this episode.

1.22 “Born to Run” — In one of my favorite Lost moments, ever, we see that Charlie is working on a new album and that he has named track two “Monster eats the Pilot.”

1.23 — “Exodus” Part 1 – I also absolutely adore the “I guess this is goodbye” scene between Jack and Sawyer in the jungle. Jack gives Sawyer a gun to take on the raft, “just in case,” an extraordinary gesture of trust on the good doctor’s part. Sawyer responds by finally telling Jack that he met his father in Sydney before he died, and that Christian loved and respected his son. After Sawyer chose not to reveal that to Jack back in “Outlaws,” I had assumed that story point would never be referred to again, that it was another of the enigmatic connections that the castaways all had with one another prior to boarding Oceanic flight 815 that they’d never know about. So I was really, really happy to see this brought up again here, and the scene is a lovely burying-the-hatchet moment between Jack and Sawyer. The two actors have never been better.

1.24 - “Exodus” Part 2 — Arzt blows up.

I’ll see you back here soon with my thoughts on season 2!

As I’ve mentioned in my recent posts about Lost (my discussion of the implications of Desmond’s time-traveling in the season 3’s “Flashes Before Your Eyes” and my voluminous list of the burning unanswered questions still hanging at the end of season 5), my wife & I have been engaged for several months now in a massive (and massively entertaining) project of re-watching the entire series in preparation for the beginning of the show’s final year.  (I am pleased to say that we just made it in under the wire, finishing the season 5 finale mere hours before the airing of the season 6 premiere!!)  Over the coming weeks I’ll be sharing my thoughts on the series, in a season-by-season run-down.

As with all of my Lost posts, these articles will be replete with spoilers — there’s just no way to discuss the series without mentioning some of its plot twists — so anyone who hasn’t seen the show should read on at their own peril.

OK, here we go!

“Guys… Where are we?”

It’s extraordinarily impressive to me just how well the show’s pilot and early episodes fit with the show today.  Those early installments all “feel” like true Lost episodes, unlike many shows whose first season episodes bear little resemblance to what their shows ultimately became.  The biggest difference, of course, is the amount of time spent with characters who are no longer around: Michael, Walt, Charlie, Boone, Shannon, Claire (though hopefully she’ll be back in season 6!).  Also surprising is just how little screen time John Locke has in the pilot – though his “do you want to know a secret” line to Walt remains a powerful and mysterious introduction to that compelling fellow.  I am also impressed how nothing that we’ve learned about any of the characters in the subsequent seasons makes anything in the pilot not work (because the writers hadn’t figured out “x” aspect of any character’s back-story yet).  Rather, the iconic character traits of many of the castaways are established right from the beginning — Jack’s desire to always fix things, Kate’s instinct to run away, Locke’s mantra of “don’t tell me what I can’t do,” etc.

It is interesting, though to see how far John Locke has strayed from the person he was when he first crashed on the island.  I really like the Locke that we see in the first half of season 1 — I miss him!  This Locke has great moral certainty, he’s very helpful (keeping his cool when Charlie stumbles onto the hornets’ nest; trapping, killing, and cooking boar for everyone to eat) and I find myself agreeing with him a LOT in these early episodes.  (The castaways SHOULD focus on surviving as opposed to waiting around for a rescue.  Charlie SHOULD face up to his drug addiction.  Etc.)

But the character who has changed the most is without question Sawyer.  Whereas Jack, the purported “hero of the show,” has seemed unable to shake his core issues (still claiming desperately to Kate “I can fix this” even in season 5), Sawyer has really grown from the angry, closed-off person we see in the pilot.  But what’s also fascinating to me upon rewatching the show is how much my opinion of Sawyer has changed.  Like most people, I hated Sawyer when I first watched season 1 — I thought he was a big jerk, selfish and insensitive.  But when watching these episodes a second time I find myself thinking MUCH more favorably of his actions.  Yes he is selfish, and yes he can be mean (with his nicknames and his biting comments).  But Sawyer in many ways is also the most HONEST character on the show (except maybe for Hurley).  He’s one of the only castaways who doesn’t seem to play games, and who really says what he thinks.  (Could you really say the same about Jack, Kate, Locke, or Sayid?)  I also think that Jack and Kate really act like pricks towards him, constantly ransacking his stuff and always walking up to him to angrily demand that he do this or give them that.  (As an example, check out episode 12, “Whatever the Case May Be.”  Both Kate and Jack, at various points during this episode, DEMAND that Sawyer give them the case, without even bothering to ask nicely.)  I can’t really say I blame Sawyer for not usually wanting to help them out.

Meanwhile, I find Jack to be much less heroic upon this rewatch than I did the first time around.  Though he seems like a totally centered, altruistic guy in the pilot, it isn’t long before he slips into frantic, assholish behavior.  (See episode 11, “All The Best Cowboys Have Daddy Issues,” in which Jack frantically rushes headlong through the jungle trying to find Claire and Charlie and basically acts like a total jerk to Locke, Kate, and everyone else.)  He’s also extraordinarily condescending to Kate. His behavior is inconsistent – at first it seemed like he didn’t care about Kate’s past (in episode 2, “Tabula Rasa,” he told her not to tell him what she did), but by episode 12 (”Whatever the Case May Be”) he gets totally pissy with her for not spilling her guts to him about everything she’s ever done. It makes Jack surprisingly unlikable to me during the rewatch.

The other character who I really thought differently of during the rewatch was Boone.  When I first watched this show I remember thinking that Boone was a nice guy who tried his best, but upon re-watching these episodes I find his incompetence to be STAGGERING.  Take “Homecoming,” for example, in which Boone falls asleep on guard duty, which allows Ethan (or another Other) to sneak in and kill one of the castaways.  Nice going dude.  What a maroon.

“If you guys are finished verbally copulating, we should get a move on.”

Some of Lost’s central questions are introduced right away (like what the heck is the monster?).  But for a show renowned for its mysteries, it’s sort of amusing how quickly we got an answer to the question raised by the pilot of who on the plane was in the hand-cuffs.  (We get our answer in the very second episode, “Tabula Rasa.”)

We also begin to see many of the show’s central narrative themes.  One that comes to mind is the idea that the emotional baggage of most of the characters comes down to their struggling with having become the thing they most loathed.  The young boy whose life was ruined by a confidence man named “Sawyer” eventually becomes Sawyer.  Charlie becomes the drug addict he hated his brother from being.  Sayid is drawn to torture despite having sworn never to do so again.  Jack will eventually become an alcoholic like his father.  I love this about the show — I like that the writers clearly have something they want to say, and themes they want to explore, above and beyond just telling a story about island castaways and monsters.

These early episodes also quickly introduce Lost’s greatest narrative weakness: the consistent and annoying tendency of all the characters to withhold information from one another, for no clear reason.  In “Walkabout,” the third episode of the show, Sayid expresses frustration that he can’t tell anyone what he’s working on (his devices to triangulate the Frenchwoman’s signal).  Well, why the heck not?  Then there’s Locke, who in that same episode lies about having seen the monster.  Why exactly?  Usually these sorts of things happen because the writers aren’t yet ready to reveal certain key pieces of information — but I found this as annoying on the rewatch as I did when initially viewing these episodes.

I also find myself wondering, as I did upon my initial viewings, why the castaways don’t spend more time having to deal with the basic needs of surviving on a desert island.  We see Locke kill a couple of boars, and Jin do some fishing, but just what are they all eating all the time?  No one seems at all hungry, and we see Sayid walk off into the jungle seemingly never to return (in “Solitary”) without a mite of food on him.

“You’re a man of science. I’m a man of faith. Do you really think all this is an accident? That we, a group of strangers, survived, many of us with just superficial injuries? You think we crashed on this place by coincidence?  Especially this place? We were brought here for a purpose, for a reason — all of us. Each one of us was brought here for a reason.”

Overall, season 1 is a terrific season, one of the best of the show’s run.  One can clearly see, right from the beginning, why this show got such attention and acclaim when it first aired.  The extraordinarily level of craft on display (from the writing to the acting to the incredible sets, costumes, visual effects, etc.) is staggering.

I was really surprised and impressed by how great the first batch of episodes were.  Things get a bit wobbly towards the middle of the season, as the writers seemed to struggle a bit with how the keep the story moving forward while also keeping us in the dark about various mysteries and pieces of the characters’ back-stories until later seasons.  Sometimes there were episodes that seemed like time-wasters.  I had also forgotten just how much time was spent, in the second half of the season, on the forced Sayid/Shannon pairing.  Blech.  I found that just as ridiculous a storyline on the rewatch as I had originally.  Things really pick up, though, towards the end of the year, as Locke’s discovery of the hatch began opening up a whole new aspect of the “world” of the show.  The death of Boone was shocking, and seemed to free the writers to embrace an “anything can happen” mantra on the show in which even beloved characters weren’t safe (sniff, Charlie).  This brought a terrific intensity to the show, and created a sense of danger and dramatic heft which made the show so engaging to me.

C’mon back tomorrow for more specific thoughts on some of my favorite and least favorite moments from Lost season 1!

Lots of great Lost analysis out there.  Click here for EW’s Jeff Jensen’s in-depth write-up of the season 6 premiere.  I’m a big fan of “Doc” Jensen’s weekly Lost write-ups — they’re always insightful and ridiculously detailed.  Click here for Mr. Jensen’s interview with Lost masterminds Carlton Cuse & Damon Lindeloff, and click here for collider.com’s interview with Mr. Lindeloff.  Both contain some tasty morsels of hints about what awaits us in season 6.  (And here’s a great interview with Mr. Jensen himself in which he discusses Lost’s final season.)  On a less serious note, check out this very funny (and also super-detailed) review of the season 6 premiere from bestweekever.tv.  (The graphic of Jacob’s note to the Temple-Others is phenomenal.)  Lastly, this review of the premiere from chud.com is worth your time.  This dude has a Lost re-watch blog that I often checked out while conducting my own Lost re-watch project.  I hope you all enjoyed my extraordinarily lengthy list of the burning questions left hanging after Lost’s first five seasons.  Can’t wait for tonight’s episode!

Click here for a terrific interview with comedian Patton Oswalt.  Click here for the Onion A.V. Club’s interview with Aziz Ansari.  Both are great conversations with two very smart and funny individuals.

Speaking of interviews, for anyone out there who loved A Serious Man as much as I did (read my review here), you MUST read this phenomenal interview with Fred Melamed.  Mr. Melamed is the actor who portrayed Sy Ableman, one of the my favorite new characters that I saw created on screen in 2009.  The interview is a hoot, particularly when Mr. Melamed declares his effort to “bring the pompous, Jewish, overweight, rabbinic figure back to the center of American sexuality.”

Bill Waterson, the amazingly talented creator of Calvin & Hobbes, is well-known for having pretty much disappeared from planet Earth following the end of his beloved comic strip.  He hasn’t granted interviews, he hasn’t appeared at conventions or other gatherings of comic strip artists, and he hasn’t allowed any licensing of his characters.  So die-hard Calvin & Hobbes fans like myself took notice when he agreed to an e-mail conversation with a reporter for the Cleveland Plain Dealer.  Click here for the question-and-answer exchange!

This is very disturbing. Back to the Future Part III is officially ruined for me forever.

That’s all for today!

Yesterday I began listing a variety of burning questions that I’d really like to see answered in Lost’s sixth and final season (which begins tonight!).  Here are several more:

What is Walt’s special destiny and what are his special abilities? In “All the Best Cowboys Have Daddy Issues,” Walt tells Hurley: “My Dad said I was the luckiest person he ever knew.”  In “Special,” we see Walt apparently summoning or creating an obscure bird just by thinking about it, and then his stepfather Brian insists that Michael raise Walt after his mother’s death because “he’s different.”  (Brian almost seems frightened of Walt.)  We also see Walt demonstrating incredible skills with a knife, and then telling Locke “I actually saw it, like in my mind or something” (as if he were a Jedi Knight) to explain how he threw the blade so accurately.  In season 2’s “The Hunting Party,” Tom Friendly calls Walt “a very special boy.”  In season 5’s “The Life and Death of Jeremy Bentham,” Walt tells Locke that he’s not surprised to see him because he dreamed that Locke would come visit him.  So what is it about Walt that makes him special?  Does he really have supernatural abilities?  Why did the Others kidnap Walt (in the season 1 finale, “Exodus”)?  How did Walt communicate with Michael through the computer in the hatch (in “What Kate Did”)?  (Or was that Walt at all?  In season 3’s “Expose,” Paulo overhears Ben talking to Juliet about how he plans on using Michael to bring Jack to them.  Since we know that the computers in the Dharma stations are connected to one another, does this imply that it was Ben on the computer, pretending to be Walt??)  What of the other times that characters on the show have seen visions of Walt, such as Shannon before her death (in season 2’s “Abandoned”), and Locke after being shot by Ben (in season 4’s finale, “Through the Looking Glass”)?  Was Walt responsible for those visions, or were they sent by the island (or Jacob, or the M.I.B., or the smoke monster, etc…)?

What is Aaron’s special destiny? What is the danger surrounding Aaron that the psychic warned Claire about in “Raised by Another”?  What dangerous event would happen if Aaron were raised by someone other than Claire?  Is this why Jack is later warned (by Hurley, speaking on behalf of the ghost of Charlie in season 4’s “Something Nice Back Home”) that he is not supposed to raise Aaron?  How does this connect to Kate’s raising Aaron for the three years that she spent off the island in season 4?  Why isn’t that a problem?  Why does Claire warn Kate (in Kate’s dream in season 5’s “Because You Left”) that Kate must not bring Aaron back to the island?

Is the Dharma Initiative still active? It certainly seems as if they are.  Someone dropped that huge palette of Dharma food and supplies during the lockdown (seen in season 2’s “Lockdown”), and we learn in season 2’s “Live Together, Die Alone” that Kelvin joined the Dharma initiative some time after his service in the first Gulf War (which we saw in Sayid’s flashback in “One of Them”).  So what the heck has this group been up to ever since the Purge on the island??

Who are the Adam & Eve skeletons that Jack and Kate found in the caves in “House of the Rising Sun” back in season 1? Are these going to wind up being the skeletons of someone we know?  (My guess: Desmond & Penelope.)  What is the significance of the white & black rock that we see Jack swipe from the bodies?

What is up with the mysterious whispers in the jungle? Various characters have been hearing these enigmatic whispers in the jungle ever since season 1.  What do they mean??

What is the meaning behind the Numbers? I am OK if the writers leave the precise nature of their mysterious power vague.  But what is the explanation behind the transmission of the numbers over a radio signal 16 years ago that lured Rousseau’s ship to the island, and that Hurley’s friend Lenny from the insane asylum picked up?  (See season 1’s “Numbers.”)  Who was broadcasting the numbers, and for what purpose?  Why are they also inscribed into the hatch door?  Just what significance do these numbers have in the universe of Lost?

How did Libby wind up in the same mental hospital as Hurley did? (We saw her there in “Dave.”)  What’s the story behind her lending Desmond a boat to race around the world , that eventually got him stranded on the island (as we saw in “Live Together, Die Alone”)?

Who killed Nadia, and why? In “The Incident” we see the moment when Sayid’s true love was mowed down in a car accident.  Was this an accident, or was she murdered?  In “The Shape of Things to Come,” Ben tells Sayid that Charles Widmore had her killed.  Do we trust Ben on this one?  (I don’t!  Why would Widmore harm Nadia?)

What the heck has been going on in Room 23? We see that Alex’s boyfriend Karl was being kept there in season 3’s “Not in Portland,” forced to listen to weird loud noises while watching a parade of imagery and repeated phrases on a big screen.  Was this some kind of behavior modification room?  To what end?  Is this “the room” that Ms. Klugh threatens to send Walt to in “Three Minutes”?  Is this room responsible for Cindy the flight attendant’s apparent conversion to the Others (more on Cindy in just a moment)?  (And what sort of nastiness has been going on in rooms #1-22??)

What happened to Cindy the Flight Attendant? She vanished without a trace in season 2’s “Abandoned” while helping the Tailies carry a comatose Sawyer back to our castaways’ camp.  What happened to her?  Who took her, and why?  Why was she the only one kidnapped at that moment, as opposed to any of the other characters?  (For that matter, why did the Others kidnap so many members of the Tailies’ group, as seen in “The Other 48 Days,” while not doing the same for our castaways — except for their temporary kidnapping of Claire?)  I am also perplexed by Cindy’s brief reappearance in season 3’s “Stranger in a Strange Land,” in which she seems strangely unconcerned to see Jack kept in a cage, and claims that the Others aren’t really so bad.  What has been happening to her, and how/why did she come around to the Others’ point of view?  (Was she subjected to behavior modification in Room 23?)  She certainly seems to consider herself one of the Others when we get the final glimpse we saw of her in season 3’s “The Brig,” in which she tells Locke that “we’ve been waiting for you.”

What is up with the Others’ magic box? We saw that Locke’s dad (the original Sawyer) somehow appeared out of what Ben claimed was a “magic box,” as a test for Locke (in “The Man From Tallahassee”).  Is there really a supernatural element at work here, or had the Others just found daddy Sawyer, kidnapped him, and brought him to the island?  Later, when Locke demands an explanation from Ben (in “The Brig”), Ben responds, “the box is a metaphor, John.”  Um, okaaay…

What is up with the big green bird that shouted Hurley’s name? Betcha forgot about that, didn’t you?  I know I did, until recently re-watching “Live Together, Die Alone” (the season 2 finale).

When will we get to see the volcano on the island? This has only been mentioned once: when we see young Ben in the Dharma schoolhouse back in the ’70s (in season 3’s “The Man Behind the Curtain”), his class is doing an experiment about volcanoes and one of the students asks about the volcano on the island.  There must be a reason for this seemingly random mention of a volcano, right???  I really hope we see this volcano is season 6!!  Related question: will we ever learn what happened to the little girl, Annie, who we saw was friends with young Ben in that episode?

What is Eloise Hawking’s story? Why did she leave the island?  How was she able to locate the island (apparently using the Dharma Lamp Post station in season 5’s “The Lie” and “316″)?  Just why/how did she know of Desmond’s destiny to wind up pushing the button in the Swan Station (when she refused to sell him a wedding ring for Penny Widmore in season 3’s “Flashes Before Your Eyes” and declared that, unless he winds up on the island to push that button, “we’re all of us dead”)?  Who is she working for?  In season 5, she seems to be helping Ben get the Oceanic 6 back to the island (and return there himself).  But Charle Widmore (Ben’s bitter enemy) tells Locke (in “The Life and Death of Jeremy Bentham”) that he should find Eloise and she’ll help him.  How can Eloise be working with BOTH Widmore and Ben??

Eloise describes herself to her son Daniel (in season 5’s “The Variable”) as having the job of keeping him on “the path” (which she does in spades by ensuring that he returns to the island where she knows he will be killed), and which seems to explain her focus on getting Desmond and later the Oceanic 6 back to the island.  She’s the person who gets people where they “need” to be.  But who determines this need?  Is she aware of the future, and is therefore just making sure that the time-line stays on track and everyone does what she knows they’re supposed to do?  If so, how did she gain that knowledge of the future?  (Was it because she got her hands on Daniel’s journal, from the future, when she killed him back in 1977?)

Will we learn the identity of the “very smart man” who build the Lamp Post station? This comment by Eloise Hawking (in season 5’s “316″) has always intrigued me.

What happened to Daniel Faraday’s girlfriend, Theresa? In “Jughead,” we learn that she’s been turned into a vegetable, as a result of being exposed to the dangerous energies used in Daniel’s time-travel experiments.  (The same experiments that also scrambled Daniel’s brain before he arrived on the island and was healed.)  Theresa’s sister angrily tells Desmond that Daniel abandoned her — but that seems pretty out of character with the kind, gentle Faraday we’ve known.  In “The Variable,” we see Daniel tearfully claim to his sponsor (and father!), Charles Widmore, that he’d never hurt Theresa, and that he tested his machine on himself.  Does that imply that someone ELSE subjected Theresa to the tests that destroyed her mind?  Was it Widmore himself?  (Maybe after Daniel started losing his marbles?) Is that why Widmore was paying for her medical bills?

Did Penelope Widmore give birth to her own father? This is one of my crazier theories, but I stand by it.  It’s sweet that, in season 5’s “Jughead,” we learn that Desmond and Penny have named their son Charlie, after Charlie Pace.  But it’s striking to me that, of the three Widmores we’ve met over the course of the show, two of them have the same name.  Eloise warned Desmond that the island wasn’t through with him (in “316″) — does that mean that he will wind up back there before the show ends?  If he does, might Penny and Charlie wind up there with him?  With all the time-travel shenanigans of Lost, what if they wind up back on the island sometime in the PAST (I proposed yesterday that maybe the “Adam and Eve” skeletons will wind up being Desmond and Penelope), in which case young Charlie would grow up on the island…possibly becoming the Charles Widmore we know (who becomes an Other and fathers Penny and then gets exiled…)!!

What is the story with dead bodies on the island? Speaking of crazy theories, in re-watching Lost I’ve been wondering about what happens when people die on the island.  Consider the season 5 episode “LaFleur,” when, in the 1970’s, we see that Richard Alpert demands the body of the Dharma Initiative guy, Paul, who got killed.  When I first saw that episode it seemed like that request was borne out of some sort of desire by Richard to balance the scales for the two Others who were killed by Sawyer.  But when I think of all the times we have seen dead people on the island re-appear as visions or apparitions, I wonder if he demanded to take Paul’s body in order to ensure that certain steps were taken so that it was buried properly, to either PREVENT or FACILITATE the dead body’s being used as a manifestation of the smoke monster or the M.I.B…

What is the true story behind the button in the Swan Station? I suspect the Lost writers think they have adequately explained this, but I’m still left scratching my head.  Was the button-pushing really necessary in order to stop the electromagnetic whatever, originally tapped/unleashed in “The Incident”, from getting out of control and destroying the world?  If so, why such a bizarre method of containment (with the weird numerical code and the Egyptian symbols)?  Or was it just a twisted psychological experiment (a possibility raised in “?”, when we discover the Pearl station, from which the button-pushing in the Swam station could be monitored)?  Or was it the Dharma folk in the Pearl who were the subject of a psychological experiment (which seems to be suggested in “Live Together, Die Alone” when our gang finds that all of their journals, which they thought were being taken by pneumatic tube to the Dharma HQ, actually ended up, unread, in a big pile in the middle of the jungle)?  The button was such a major part of the show for so long, I’d really like to see some stronger resolution to these questions.

Why does Pierre Chang use different aliases in all of the Orientation videos? He calls himself Dr. Marvin Candle in the first video we see in season 2’s “Orientation” (as well as in the Arrow station’s orientation film that we see him begin to film in “Because You Left”), but he also refers to himself as Dr. Mark Wikmund (in “?”), and Dr. Edgar Halliwax (when he discusses time-traveling bunnies in “There’s No Place Like Home”).  For that matter, why was the Orientation video for the Swan Station cut up (with the part referring to the danger of using the computer to communicate with the outside world being hidden in a Bible in the Arrow station, as Mr. Eko would eventually discover)?  Kelvin Inman tells Desmond (in “Live Together, Die Alone”) that Radzinsky edited the film — but why?

Who is the mysterious Alvar Hanso, founder of the Dharma Initiative? He’s first referred to in “Orientation.”  Who is this enigmatic figure?  Was his founding of the Dharma Initiative connected to his desire to investigate or control the island, or did Dharma’s involvement with the island come later?  For that matter, how did the Dharma Initiative initially discover the island, and what were they really doing on the island in the ’70s?  Were they on the island BECAUSE of all of the weirdness we’ve seen associated with it over the course of five seasons of Lost, or did they just stumble upon the secrets of the island over the course of their work there?

OK, that’s quite a lengthy list!  Will some of these questions by answered in Lost’s final season??  I certainly hope so!!  Needless to say, I’ll be watching with great anticipation…

Since early October, my wife and I have been engaged in our Great Lost Re-Watch Project!  We started with the pilot episode, and have been slowly re-watching the entire run of Lost, all five seasons.  With the exception of the first handful of episodes, I had only seen most episodes of the show one time.  For a show as complex and inter-connected as Lost, that seemed crazy!  To prepare ourselves for the sixth and final season of the show, Steph and I thought it would be a fun idea to revisit the show from the very beginning.

Boy, has it been a blast!!  We have thoroughly enjoyed our trip back through Lost.  I’ll have lots more to say about the first five seasons of Lost in the coming weeks, but for now (in anticipation of tomorrow’s season 6 premiere) I thought I’d list the burning mysteries of Lost that are really weighing on me.  Lost is a show whose cup runneth over with mysteries.  In re-watching the show, it became clear that practically every episode of the series raised fascinating questions, an enormous number of which remain unanswered.  I certainly recognize that there is no way that the final season is going to answer each and every hanging question, nor would I expect it to.  However, there are a large number of burning questions that I feel really demand answers.  Here are the ones that come to mind:

(Obviously, SPOILERS ARE AHEAD for the first five seasons of the show!!)

What is the smoke monster? Described as the island’s security system, the creature referred to as Cerberus (on the map of the island found in the hatch, as seen in “Lockdown”) has been one of the most confounding mysteries of the show since the pilot episode.  We have seen the creature kill brutally (the fate which befell the pilot of Oceanic 815 in the pilot episode, the mercenaries in “The Shape of Things to Come,” as well as Mr. Eko in “The Cost of Living”), but we’ve also seen the monster confront certain characters and then let them live (Locke in “Walkabout,” Ben Linus in “Dead is Dead,” and Mr. Eko — at least at first — in “The 23rd Psalm”).  What is this creature?  Who created it?  Is it alive?  What is it protecting, exactly?  Is part of its role to somehow judge the people on the island?  If so, by what criteria does it evaluate people?  (I remain confused as to why Eko was able to stare down the monster in “The 23rd Psalm” only to later be brutally murdered by the creature in “The Cost of Living.”)

“The Cost of Living” also contains the fascinating exchange in which Locke describes his encounter with the smoke monster (in season 1’s “Walkabout”) to Eko: “I saw a bright light.  It was beautiful.”  To which Eko replies: “That is not what I saw.”  Nor is it the menacing smoke monster that we, the audience, have been seeing.  Well, with the exception of the weird, bright flashes we see when the monster encounters Juliet (who was handcuffed to Kate at the time) in season 3’s “Left Behind.”  What is the explanation for the vastly different experiences that these two men had with the monster?  In season 4’s “The Shape of Things to Come,” Ben is able to summon the smoke monster to brutally destroy Keamy’s mercenary after the death of Alex.  Just how is he able to do that?  In season 5’s “This Place is Death,” we saw how the monster seemed to take control of members of Rousseau’s team (16 years prior to the crash of flight 815).  It seems that the monster was the infection that Rousseau referred to so enigmatically in season 1.  What is that all about?  The monster can possess/control people?  How or why?

Is the monster connected to the many visions that our characters have seen of deceased people from their past?  In “Dead is Dead,” the monster seems to take the form of Alex.  And in “The Cost of Living,” we see Eko talking with his brother Yemi, only to have Yemi reply “You speak to me as if I were your brother” — at which point we see not Yemi but the smoke monster in front of Eko.   To me this implies that the smoke monster was taking the form of Yemi, which casts a whole host of other Lost episodes in a different light.  (I’m going to get back to this issue in a moment…)

Who is drawn to the island and why? Locke has certainly made clear, since the very beginning of the show, that he believes it was destiny that brought the castaways to the island.  That’s why they survived the plane crash unscathed, and that’s why they were tested by the island once they had arrived.  In the season 5 finale, “The Incident,” the Man in Black refers to an apparent cycle in which Jacob has continually brought people to the island.  (”They come, they fight, they destroy, they corrupt.  It always ends the same.”)  Yet, in “Live Together, Die Alone,” Desmond comes to believe that HE caused the crash of Oceanic flight 815, by failing to push the button (causing a burst of electromagnetism that fouled up the plane’s systems).  So which is it?  If indeed Jacob is the one who decides who gets brought to the island and why, then what was behind his special interest in the people on flight 815 (as seen by his involvement in their lives in “The Incident”), and why did he seem to only be interested in SOME of the people on that flight?  Furthermore, what was it about The Black Rock, and Rousseau’s boat, and the plane carrying drugs & Eko’s brother, and Desmond’s boat, that prompted Jacob to draw them to the island?

Connected question: What protects the island from being found by those who seek it? We know that Charles Widmore has been searching for the island ever since being banished from it (hence the team of freighter-folk he sends to the island in seasons 3-4).  But why is the island so hard to find?  In season 4’s “The Economist,” we see Daniel Faraday conduct an experiment which reveals a significant time dilation effect between the island and the outside world.  Is that “bubble” around the island part of what protects the island from discovery?  Is that why one must stay on certain specific bearings in order to safely travel to/from the island?  How does the island’s apparent ability to shift through space and time (evidently controlled or at least initiated by turning the big frozen wheel seen in the season 4 finale “There’s No Place Like Home”) fit in to all of this?  And why does turning that frozen wheel result in one getting beamed to Tunisia (the fate that befell the unfortunate polar bear whose skeleton was uncovered by Charlotte in season 4’s “Confirmed Dead,” and of course also by Ben in “There’s No Place Like Home” and season 5’s “The Shape of Things to Come”)??  What the heck is that donkey wheel, anyways???

Why does the island allow some to live and some to die? Connected to these first several questions is the outstanding question about how the island operates.  We have seen definitive evidence that the island can heal (Locke’s legs), as well as strong suggestions in support of that idea (Rose’s confidence that her cancer has been cured by the island in season 2’s “S.O.S.”, and all the times we’ve seen one-eyed Mikhail recover from being apparently killed) and we’ve seen it implied that it can also cause injury (the possibility that Benjamin Linus’ tumor was caused by the island; the many times when Locke’s legs have failed him, Jack’s sudden onset of appendicitis just as he’s about to leave the island in season 4).  We’ve also seen quite a large number of people get killed on the island.  Is there some rationale behind how and when the island sometimes protects its inhabitants, and sometimes does not?  Does this have to do with the way we have seen the smoke monster judge people on the island?  I’m also intrigued and somewhat confused by the implication in season 4 that the island won’t permit Michael to die (even after he’s left the island).  In “Meet Kevin Johnson” we see several suicide attempts by Michael thwarted, and Tom Friendly tells Michael that the island won’t let him kill himself.  How and why is the island able to protect Michael from death?

Who/what is Jacob? What is the nature of Jacob’s control/rule over the Others?  Does he really give direction to their leader, or has that just been a rumor that Ben has emphasized (or created) in order to keep control?  What is the deal with all the weirdness associated with Jacob’s Cabin, and was Jacob the shadowy figure who Locke saw there (in season 3’s “The Man Behind the Curtain”?)  Whose voice says “help me?” to Locke?  Why do we see Christian Shephard sitting in Jacob’s cabin in season 4’s “The Beginning of the End,” and whose eye do we see staring out the window at Hurley?  Speaking of Hurley, why was he able to find the cabin in that episode when Locke was unable to (in the following episode, “Confirmed Dead”)?  Can only certain “special” people find the cabin, the same way that only certain people can find their way to the island?  Does the cabin move around the island (a fact implied when Hurley encounters the cabin again while trying to run away from it, and when we see that the cabin isn’t where Locke expected it to be) in a similar fashion to how the island itself seems to be able to move through time & space?

What is the story behind Jacob’s lists? We’ve seen Ben and various Others refer to the names on Jacob’s list(s) several times over the course of the series.  Why does Jacob create these lists?  Is there one list, or many?  Whose names are on this list/these lists and why?  At first I’d thought that the reason that the Oceanic 6 had to return to the island had a connection to their being on Jacob’s list, but in season 3’s “I Do,” the Other named Danny says “Shephard wasn’t even on Jacob’s list.”

Why did Jacob visit certain people who wound up on the island earlier in their lives? The tantalizing glimpses we saw of this in season 5’s “The Incident” are intriguing.  Why did Jacob choose to visit these specific people, and for what purpose?  Did his touch bring Locke back to life after his fall?  Why didn’t he visit Sayid until AFTER Sayid had left the island?  (And was he involved in Nadia’s death, or did he just get involved in order to save Sayid?) Why did he give Hurley that guitar case?  Jacob gives Sun & Jin his blessing, and tells Hurley he thinks his ability to see dead people is a blessing.  Are Jacob’s visits to the castaways all about his giving them his blessing?

Who/what is the mysterious Man in Black seen in “The Incident”? What is his relationship to Jacob?  The conflict between the M.I.B. and Jacob reminds me of the Biblical story of the conflict between Jacob (a farmer) and his brother Esav (a hunter), which casts a whole new light on John Locke’s declaration (in the season 3 episode “Further Instructions,” when we see that he once lived on a marijuana-growing commune) that he’s not a farmer, he’s a hunter.

Who/what is Richard Alpert? I have been delightfully perplexed since his first appearance as a representative of Mittelos Biogenetics trying to recruit Juliet in “Not in Portland.”  Why is he apparently age-less?  (In season 5’s “The Incident,” he claims that Jacob made him that way.  What does that mean?)  What is his connection to/relationship with Jacob and/or the Man in Black?

On re-watching Lost, I’ve come up with a crazy notion:  Is Richard Alpert the smoke monster? Or a manifestation of the smoke monster?  (Remember above, I noted that we’ve seen the smoke-monster appear to take human form.)  In “Whatever Happened, Happened,” we see Richard take young Ben into the Temple, the same place we saw the smoke monster drag that poor French dude in “This Place is Death.” Are the two one and the same?  If Richard Alpert is just a manifestation of Smokey, would this explain why he never seems to age??

Is Christian Sawyer actually alive on the island? We’ve been seeing glimpses of Jack’s dad ever since “The White Rabbit” in season 1.  Has Christian been reincarnated by the island?  Has some other entity taken his form (which is what was revealed happened to Locke in the season 5 finale)? I just suggested the possibility that Richard Alpert is a manifestation of the smoke monster — could Christian Shephard be as well??  Or have the glimpses of Christian all just been visions that the island has given people?  What are we to make of the time when Jack heard Christian’s voice through the ancient speaker in his Hydra station cage (in the season 3 premiere “A Tale of Two Cities”), exhorting him to “let it go, Jack” as Christian before did in Jack’s flashback??  How about Christian’s appearance in Claire’s dream in “Something Nice Back Home,” in which she sees him holding Aaron (who is his grandson, after all) and then follows him off into the jungle?  Most perplexing is his appearance in Jacob’s cabin in “Cabin Fever,” in which he claims to speak for Jacob.  Is Christian (or this apparition that has taken his form) really working for Jacob?  Or is he an agent of the M.I.B.?  (He facilitates Locke’s leaving the island in “This Place is Death” which sets up Locke’s death and resurrection and ultimately the murder of Jacob in “The Incident,” which seems to be the M.I.B/’s ultimate goal.  Also, in “The Incident,” when Ilana and her team visit Jacob’s cabin, she states that Jacob hasn’t lived there for some time.  Would that imply that whoever we have seen there — Christian — is not connected with Jacob?)  Or is Christian pursuing some other agenda, separate from Jacob and the M.I.B.?

What entity was posing as John Locke in season 5? Was this the Man in Black?  Or could this undead Locke also be a manifestation of the smoke monster?  Consider the season 5 episode “Dead is Dead.”  Ben attempts to summon the smoke monster from his house in the Dharma barracks, but it never arrives.  What does emerge from the jungle?  John Locke!  Then, later in that episode, Ben seeks out the smoke monster in order to be judged for allowing Alex to die.  Notice that Locke is conveniently somewhere else (looking for rope) for the whole time that Ben was being confronted by the smoke monster in the Temple.  Is the reason why both Locke and the monster can’t be seen at the same time because they’re the SAME ENTITY?

Speaking of people with mysterious identities and agendas, who are the “in the shadow of the statue” people lead by Ilana? This group seems to be in opposition to Charles Widmore (since they try to convince Miles not to go on Widmore’s freighter in “Some Like it Hoth”).  In “The Incident,” we see Jacob visiting Ilana (who somehow has been grievously injured, another mystery) and he asks her to help him, and she agrees.  This seems to indicate that she and her group are allied with Jacob somehow.  But who are these people, and what is their goal?

What is the origin of The Others, and what is their purpose? Where did this group of people living on the island come from?  What was their original goal/purpose?  How much of what we’ve seen them do over the course of the show has been at the whims of Benjamin Linus, rather than their true/original purpose?  How can we reconcile the apparently rugged group of feral Others glimpsed in season 1 and 2 (I’m thinking particularly about the group that Eko and Michael see walking through the jungle in season 2’s “…and Found”) with the civilized group living in nice suburban-looking houses seen in the later seasons?  Are there different factions of Others (perhaps a more tribal group headed by Richard, in contrast to Ben Linus’ more urban group)?  Or are those more rugged Others just in disguise (the way we eventually learned that Tom Friendly’s beard was fake)?  Locke’s accusation to Ben that he and the Others have been “cheating” by living in nice houses with electricity (in season 3’s “The Man From Tallahassee”) is interesting, especially since season 3’s “The Man Behind the Curtain” seemed to indicate that the Others only started living in those nice Dharma barracks after Ben Linus became their leader.  Did Ben try to “civilize” the Others after taking over?

What exactly is the nature of the Widmore/Linus feud? We see how Alex’s death drives Ben to set out to destroy Charles (in “The Shape of Things to Come,” in which Ben vows to kill Penny in revenge), and we see the origins of their feud in “Dead is Dead” (in which Widmore is banished from the island).   But I am still unclear as to what Charles Widmore and Ben Linus’ ultimate goals are.  They both seek to control the island, clearly, but is there more to it than that?  Is either one of them really a “good guy,” or are they both entirely selfish and corrupt?

Who is allowed to leave the island? Widmore is banished because he “broke the rules” by leaving the island, and it is implied that the Oceanic 6 had to return because they weren’t “supposed” to leave.  (At least that’s what Locke believed.)  But we’ve seen Richard Alpert off the island (when he recruited Juliet).  We’ve seen Ethan and Tom Friendly off the island.  Why are some allowed to leave when others cannot?  Is the issue one of not leaving without permission?  If so, permission from whom — Jacob?  In “The Incident,” we saw that Jacob himself has left the island at various points over the years, in order to interact with several of the castaways!  So what’s the deal?

Who were the ancient inhabitants of the island? Who built the enormous statue of the Egyptian goddess Taweret, and the Temple in which the smoke monster seems to dwell (seen in season 5 in episodes such as “This Place is Death” and “Dead is Dead”)?  Is Jacob connected to these people?  Or was it Jacob himself who built those places?  Did The Others and/or Richard Alpert descend from these people?

Why can babies not be born on the island? It doesn’t seem like this was always a problem on the island, since we saw Ethan get born in 1977 in LaFleur.  So did something happen to create this issue at some point after “the incident”… or after the Purge of the Dharma Initiative?  When Richard Alpert shows Juliet a slide of a 26 year-old island denizen’s womb (in season 3’s “Not in Portland”), she comments that it looks like the womb of a 70 year-old.  What exactly has happened to cause this phenomenon on the island?  What eventually changed in order for Claire to be able to give birth to Aaron?  Which leads me to a connected question:

What is/was the nature of the infection on the island? We saw that Desmond and his button-pushing predecessor, Kelvin, (played by Clancy Brown) were concerned about some sort of contagion on the island.  We saw that they gave themselves a regular inoculation, and that they wore hazmat suits anytime they left the hatch (in season 2’s finale “Live Together, Die Alone”).  We saw the Dharma folks administering inoculations to new recruits when young Ben Linus and his father first arrived on the island in the ’70s (in season 3’s “The Man Behind the Curtain”).  We saw that various Dharma stations on the island (like the Swan and the Arrow) were labeled with “quarantine” warnings.  We know that Rousseau spoke in season 1 of a sickness that infected her ship-mates.  But we also saw that Kelvin was able to survive just fine on the island even though his hazmat suit was torn.  We’ve seen the castaways and the Others apparently able to live just fine.  And we’ve seen that it was the smoke monster, not any type of illness, that “infected” Rousseau’s crew.  So WAS there ever an island-wide infection — perhaps something connected to the purge in which the Dharma folks were wiped out?  (If I have the story straight, as revealed in “The Other Woman,” the Tempest station was used to release some sort of toxin.  That’s what Widmore’s mercenaries on the freighter wanted to do again in season 5 to kill everyone on the island.)   Did this toxin (or whatever) just fade away over time?  Or was there never any sort of infection at all?  (If so, then how did Kelvin get the idea that there was?)

Can the past/future be changed? Obviously, that is the big question left hanging by the Season 5 finale.  Have the actions of the castaways in the ’70s changed anything?  I would argue that the critical season 3 episode “Flashes Before My Eyes” (in which Desmond, after having turned the failsafe key in the hatch, wakes up in the past, still living with Penny), suggests that changing the time-line is NOT possible.  In that episode, Eloise Hawking tells Desmond that, try as he might, the universe has a way of course-correcting itself.  She illustrates that point by describing how she would be unable to stop the man in the red shoes from dying, and of course that point is played out over the entirety of season 3 by Desmond’s inability to save Charlie from death.  This idea that the time-line cannot be changed is repeated by Daniel Faraday.  In season 4’s “The Constant,” Daniel tells the time-hopping Desmond that he can’t change the future.  He repeats this assertion in the season 5 premiere, “Because You Left.”  Time is a string, he says, and you can travel up and down that string, but never create a new strong.  ”Whatever happened, happened.”  But then again, in that very same episode Daniel IS apparently able to change the time-line, by seeking out Desmond in the past and telling him to go to Oxford.  We then see Desmond in the future wake up having apparently just gained this new memory, which seems to imply that Desmond was able to make a change!  And by the end of season 5, as seen in “The Variable,” Daniel has become convinced that human beings are capable of making choices that could change the time-line.  I am eager to see what further wrinkles the show’s final season has for us on this matter…!  But, wait, more thoughts on time-travel are coming right up!

What are “the rules”? Mysterious rules have been hinted at several times over the course of the series.  After witnessing the death of Alex in “The Shape of Things to Come,” Ben mutters quietly: “He changed the rules.”  When he encounters Charles Widmore off the island (in that same episode), it seems clear from their conversation that, for some reason, the two men are unable to kill one another.  Is this because of the rules?  Do these rules govern what sorts of actions the island will permit?  When Jacob and the M.I.B. chat in “The Incident,” the M.I.B. speaks of his search for a loophole, which implies that he too is controlled by some sort of rules.  But I wonder if the rules don’t have something to do with time travel.  In the season 5 premiere, “Because You Left,” we see Dr. Marvin Candle, in the 1970s, at the point when the Dharma Initiative was building the Orchid station.  The diggers encounter a mysterious pocket of energy, which Dr. Candle says is connected to the Dharma Initiative’s experiments in time travel.  The foreman laughs and asks him if he wants to go back and kill Hitler, to which Candle replies: “No, there are rules.  Rules which cannot be broken.”  I have started to wonder if the reason that Ben always seems to know so much about everyone and seems to be prepared for every situation is because he somehow has fore-knowledge gleaned from the future.  (How else did the Others know that they had to build a run-way in season 3 that would eventually be used by the Ajira plane in season 5?)  Was Ben so confident that Keamy would not kill Alex because he knew, somehow from the future, that he would not?  And when Keamy DID murder her, did that imply that someone had made a change to the time-line, which is why Ben stated that the rules had been changed?

What exactly was the “loophole” that the M.I.B. used in order to kill Jacob? It seems that the M.I.B. was unable to kill Jacob himself, so had to manipulate things so that he could get someone else to do the job.  It seems that much of what happened in season 5 was about setting up Locke and Ben to make this happen.  But why did Locke have to be dead for the M.I.B. to assume his form, and why did the M.I.B. have to go through the whole convoluted scheme of getting Locke to leave the island and then return.  Wouldn’t it have been much simpler for the M.I.B.to have just found a way to get Locke killed ON the island?  Or was there some reason why Locke had to get killed OFF the island and then brought back.  Is that what happened with Christian Shephard?  Is that the “loophole”??

OK, whew, that’s all for now — but come back tomorrow for LOTS more Lost questions!!