Can Lost Pay the Piper?

I'm probably well past due to pontificate on this season of Lost now that it's back for the final run. Seasons one and two came out last summer on Blu-Ray and I convinced Karin to watch all of it up to date so I watched the first five seasons again last fall and therefore I'm pretty current on events in the show. I would imagine there might well be spoilers below, consider yourself forewarned.

I was really unsure about the new "flash sideways" at first and as usual it took a couple of episodes to put my finger on the issue. I found it difficult to care about this new storyline. They've changed enough that we can't really assume anything carries over, and although the characters seem to be similar I think that's a false assumption: something the writers are deliberately lulling us into thinking. For example: if Locke isn't angry at his father and is still seeing Helen then is he at all the same character we already know?

Then as a few more episodes aired I began to see what was happening. The "LA timeline" is showing us what happens to these people if the island doesn't exert any influence on the world past 1977. At first I was thinking that we were just seeing them without Jacob's influence (the visits we saw at the end of season five), but it goes deeper than that. Hurley didn't meet Jacob until after the plane crash for example but if the island sinks then the numbers aren't broadcast and therefore Hurley never hears them and won the lottery through random chance, not because he (thinks he) is cursed.

Jacob's influence on some of the characters can be seen as major and when I reflect on those visits they begin to look a little sinister. Buying Kate that lunchbox means she doesn't learn consequences. Giving young Sawyer that pen means he finishes his letter: a letter that warps and dominates his entire life. Maybe Jacob saved Sayyid's life but it seems at least as reasonable to say that Jacob caused Nadia to be in the intersection. Others are less clear. His interaction with Jack seems perfunctory and Locke is debatable. Karin thought Locke was dead and Jacob brought him back to life. I'm less sure that happened but otherwise it is difficult to read much into the Locke/Jacob interaction. I'm tempted to say that Jacob told Locke everything would be alright and that caused Locke to not accept his new situation but I think that might be looking too hard. Certainly in the "LA timeline" Locke is more accepting of negative events and I think he is clearly happier than he was otherwise.

I'm really curious to see Kate's story in the alternate timeline: my guess is that she's on the run for something less grim and possibly that she really is innocent (as she asks Claire if Claire would believe).

One thing I'll guarantee you: this is about good and evil but I don't think Jacob is all that is good and the Nemesis is pure evil. Jacob is smug and manipulative and seems perfectly willing to sacrifice people to advance his goals. Meanwhile the Nemesis makes an argument that all he wants to do is leave the island and Jacob is keeping him prisoner. There is in fact quite a lot of evidence that points to Jacob containing the Nemesis on the island. For the first few seasons it appears the Nemesis was contained in the cabin, ringed in by ash. Of course, the smoke monster was able to roam the island freely and in guises as Yemi and Christian Shepherd but perhaps he was more constrained then. (As an aside that's a rule that works wonderfully: The Nemesis is able to assume the appearance of people who died off the island and had their body brought there: Yemi, Christian, and later John Locke.)

My last theory? I think both Rousseau and Claire actually died before they went feral. I think it happened to Rousseau offscreen, and it happened to Claire when Keamy's men destroyed the house she was in. She seemed remarkably unharmed from that incident but she was weird and distant after that and soon disappeared. For some reason the Nemesis has the ability to raise the recently dead in some conditions. I think we'll learn more about that soon. This means Sayyid, Claire, and Rousseau all have the same sort of condition applying to them. This is pretty clearly drawn with Claire looking and acting so much like Rousseau and the explicit connection Dogen makes between Claire and Sayyid.

Those last two theories bring one interesting point: the Nemesis seems to have taken the form of Alex when Ben was in the temple. According to my taxonomy Alex wouldn't be a form he could assume, Alex would be somebody that possibly got brought back to life and was "infected" - thus more like Sayyid or Claire then Yemi or Christian. I'll be interested to see if we see any more of Alex in season six. (If we do it will likely be in a Ben-centric story. A "live" Alex would probably cause Ben to switch allegiance from the Illana camp to the Nemesis camp.)

Lost is Back Tonight!

Lost season five premieres tonight and I'm pretty excited. I picked up season four on Blu-Ray via a holiday Amazon gift card and re-watched it over the last couple of weeks. Wow, season four was just really good. Watching it a second time just emphasizes that. Last year I posted that I didn't like the flash-forwards and I stand by that analysis but season four works despite that issue. I'm a little worried that moving forward the "guess the chronology" game is going to spread but maybe it won't. (Minor spoiler alert I suppose: Damon Lindelof has said in several places that this season the viewers are asking "Where is the island?" and hopefully following that with "WHEN is the island?" I like the idea of the question, but I'm afraid it's going to turn into a series of "What year did that cell-phone come out?" or "Wait, which year is the year of the Dragon?" games.)

One "blog nubbin" I have in my file is an announcement that seasons one and two are coming out in Blu-Ray during 2009 which isn't worth an entire blog post, but I'll combine into other Lost talk.

Rewatching season four made me really want to watch the first two seasons because I got quite a bit out of the second viewing of seasons three and four. I'm especially curious if I can identify the point where it seems to shift from "Are they just making this up as they go along?" to "No, I really think they have a plan. At least now they do." Personally I think that point comes somewhere during the second season, but I watched the second season in quite the hurry (catching up on DVD to watch season three), and I wasn't always paying as much attention as I'd like. Having said all that there was no way I'd want to *buy* them on DVD, and renting them from Netflix is a pain because some times I want to go back and review a particular part of a particular episode. (I'm seriously considering keeping season five on my DVR in it's entirety for that reason.)

I have to say I was a little disappointed with the commentary and extras for the season four Blu-Rays. There's a commentary on The Constant (the episode where Desmond becomes "unstuck" in time) and I was really looking forward to insight with the writers. Unfortunately it's also a commentary with the editor and so most of the discussion is about the editing of the episode. Now, I need to be crystal clear here: I actually found the commentary very interesting in its own right and you don't usually hear much about the process of editing a TV show. I guess I just wish that episode had two commentary tracks because I really want to hear more about the writing of it and the story of it. The only other commentary from Lindelof and Cuse is the season finale and they are obviously still completely exhausted from the race from the strike to the end of that episode. The extras on S4 aren't bad, but they are nowhere near as extensive as what came with S3. I guess if the actors strike during S5 maybe we'll get a LOT of writer's extras on the eventual Blu-Rays.

One I did quite like is you can watch the flash-forwards in chronological order, with snippets from the scripts shown as well. It's interesting to realize that A ) the Lost writers use foul language in the scripts for emphasis (I've read that before, but this really brings it home) and B ) how they tell the story in script form. It's an interesting balance between normal prose (where you carry everything via the words on the page) and giving directions to the actors, camera operators, and directors about how things should be played. I realized I'd buy the Lost scripts in book form. Especially in hopes that there's clues in there.

Anyway, set your DVR's! Tonight! Huzzah! There's a recap episode and the two episodes back to back so that's quite a bit of Lost.

Why I don't like Lost's "flashforwards"

Ever since I saw the season three finale I'd been saying that I didn't like the Lost new "flash-forwards". Of course, after the finale I wasn't sure where they were going with the idea so I cut them some slack. Then we had that first batch of S04 episodes and the writers' strike and I didn't like them but I couldn't quite put my finger on why until last week. Now I should be clear, this is not "I think Lost is falling apart" just a "I wish they weren't doing this".

Warning: the rest of this post will contain spoilers about Lost season 4 up through episode 10, titled "Something Nice Back Home".

What I really don't like about them is that building the chronology in my head is detracting from watching the episodes. When the episode started my first thought was "Is this a flashback or a flashforward?" Then we see Kate. OK, now we know it's a flashforward, but we don't know where it fits with the other events we've seen in flashforwards. I spent the rest of the episode mainly focused on that question. I think they answered it fairly clearly right at the end, but I would have rather watched the show for it was instead of working on timeline theories in my head.

The episode that was the worst for this in my mind was Ji Yeon. In that episode a Sun flashforward was combined with a Jin flashback. I realize this was on purpose to attempt to confuse the audience, but early in there was a scene where Jin is attempting to buy a stuffed panda and the shopkeeper tries to sell Jin a dragon instead since it's the year of the Dragon. I thought about it said, "Wait that doesn't sound right". Eventually I paused the show, went to my computer and Googled the Chinese Zodiac which confirmed Jin's story was taking place in 2000. Now there's an argument that it's cool that I was so invested in the show, but I would counter-argue that I'd rather watch the show without having to fact check obscure items. "Something Nice Back Home" did something similar with baseballs scores in the newspaper but I didn't bother to try to figure out what time window was represented there.

The flashbacks have never had this problem. I don't recall worrying whether a given flashback occurred before or after another one. Usually it never mattered and if it did I think the order is made clear early on. But the flashforwards have always had this element of playing with the audience and making the viewers not trust what we're seeing.

There are other aspects of the flashforwards I don't like as well. The coy way everyone talks around "them" is just annoying. It sounds artificial and the only purpose of the construct is so that the characters can have a conversation that the viewers can't completely follow.

All in all, I still really enjoy watching Lost and it's not a matter of me thinking the show is falling apart or anything. There's just a major difference between the way the flashbacks and the flashforwards work and I find it distracting. I have some hopes that the flashforwards we've seen so far are in fact just to the end of season 4, and that something else screwy will happen in the S04 finale. I'm sure there will still be flashforwards in seasons 5 and 6 but I'm hoping the writers won't play with identifying the chronology proper as a puzzle element.

A Lost summary that everyone can stand behind

If you had told me somebody could sum up three and a half seasons of Lost in two minutes, eight seconds I would have told you that you're crazy. And yet:



(via Chris Roberson)

Lost's official podcast - surprisingly refreshing!

So I've been listening to the Lost podcast lately. I've gone through the handful of season 4 podcasts and actually went back and downloaded some of the season 3 ones. I don't even remember what it was that prompted me to check out the podcast originally, I tend to have a dim view of "official" TV show podcasts. This mainly stems from the Battlestar Galactica podcast, which got some discussion in blog comments here and here. My original objection to the BSG podcast was mainly that I didn't want to watch the show twice, and I as understand the BSG podcast it is designed to play alongside the episode. As time wore on I got increasingly annoyed at the fact that important story information seems to be revealed in the podcasts. If you browse around BSG fan web sites you'll run into things where you say "I didn't know that!" and it turns out that you didn't know it because it's not in the show, it's in the podcast.

So the Lost podcast isn't like that. For one, it's much shorter than the show, usually less than half an hour. But the part I like best is that it turns out that a large part of the podcast is Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse reading questions submitted at an ABC online forum. And they make fun of the questions, they make fun of the posters, and they occasionally reveal something interesting and insightful. They'll often say something like "This question comes from LockeIsTheBest48, who has posted 400 times in the last 90 days. That's a bit too often with the posts, you may want to get outside for a bit." or something to that effect.

My favorite so far was somebody asking whether the injuries inflicted in the hatch explosion were based on the "four monkeys". They went on to explain that Locke was mute, Charlie was deaf, Desmond had been blown into the jungle naked, and thus they predicted Eko would be blind. (This was early on in season 3.) Carlton and Damon discussed this a little, running down the Hear No Evil, Say No Evil idea before there was a pause and Carlton said, "Wait, what's the fourth monkey? Don't be naked? THERE ARE ONLY THREE MONKEYS!" After a pause then Damon said, "Yeah, so interesting theory, but no." Then they move onto the next question.

I don't know how I existed without the internet to feed me a constant stream of mockery-worth content. To find out that it comes *pre-mocked* in the Lost podcast. Well, that's exciting!

On a more serious note, they do say interesting stuff. One of my favorites so far was that they say they knew that ABC couldn't resist promoting the episode where Eko dies as "Somebody on Lost will DIE!" promos and the whole "Don't miss this episode!" sort of vibe. So they claim that's why they introduced Nikki and Paolo when they did, that basically the audience would assume that Nikki and/or Paolo would die and the whole thing would be a big tease. That way, when Eko dies it was even more as a surprise. I have to say, that warms the cockles of my cold, marketing-hating heart. The idea that they deliberately inserted "red shirt" characters into the show just to confound the marketing expectations is brilliant. It almost makes up for the fact I hate Nikki and Paolo for their spider-throwing ways! Both of them got exactly what they deserved if you ask me.