Sound off! If you're watching Lost and you're up to date, hit the comments for chatter. I'm curious how many of us are watching, so even if you don't have time for opinions give a shout out.SPOILER WARNING!!! Here's what I'm gonna do. I'll smack a buffer comment on the top of the page, so if you want to jump in to say, for instance, "I'm 50PageMcGee and I'm up to season 2," you can write that comment with no danger of ruining anything. SCROLL DOWN AT YOUR PERIL, unless you're caught up. The rest of you put your thinking toques on and type like the wind.
27 comments:
They're all dolls! The island is a Salvation Army collection bin!
Oh, I'm just kidding. That's an old Twilight Zone. Here comes the buffer.
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Well, I loved "Across the Sea" from the other night. A great amount of background that doesn't nearly wipe away all the grey, questiony stuff.
As it should be! Remember how an X-Men comic would have those annoying little narration balloons that explained a mutant's powers every page in which they used them? "Wolverine's adamantium claws can cut through anything!" I don't want to see a full laundry list of Jacob's mysterious abilities. This is way better.
Other points:
-- At this point there's a lot of revisiting to do in order to determine which dead people are the smoke monster in disguise and which people are actual ghosts (although perhaps "ghosts" should be in quotes). Does anyone besides Hurley see real ghosts? Yes, the MIB sees the ghost of his mom when he's a kid.
-- What of Walt? What were his special abilities and how were they important to Dharma (i.e. the Dharma entity of 2004)? Despite what I just said about Jacob, I would like some clarification here. I doubt I'll get it, becuase the actor grew up (no alternative timeline for Michael and Walt, I notice).
-- Is there a list online somewhere of all the loose ends? Yeah, probably. Anyone know where it is? I'm too lazy to look.
-- My prediction for a few weeks is that Jack was Jacob's replacement, perpetuating the Jack/Locke oppositional dynamic that's been going on the whole series. I reckoned it was going to come down to Jack jumping out of the plane like Sawyer jumped out of the helicopter, but at this point that's probably not going to happen.
-- Other things I liked/noticed about the last episode were:
Allison Janney! Yes.
Her character's conceit that while people are bad, she's better. Neither she nor Jacob demontrate any such superiority, just an alleged good reason for what they do.
I think the wine contains knowledge. Jacob's expression changes when he drinks it, and then he and his mom are "the same."
Holy shit! MIB is dead! Or at least his body is.
Cool repeating themes are now seen to go back as far as ancient Grecian times (or whatever era that is):
Others -- there are always others, although the precise relationships constantly shift around
Crazy lone women -- AJ's character, and the French lady, and Claire
Stolen babies -- duh.
People wanting to use and study the island
-- That's enough for now, I have to do some work!
I'll get more into this later, but:
1) I am ABSOLUTELY LOVING this season
2) I'm convinced that the "alternate universe" (in Los Angeles) will be the "last universe standing" at the end of the series
3) I did not like "Across the Sea" at all.
I forgot! I also loved the two lines that directly refer to Lost's main motif/trick of not telling anyone anything.
AJ to the boys' real mom: "Each question just leads to more questions."
MIB to his mom: "I had no idea because YOU DIDN'T TELL ME!!!"
Okay, one response point: Octo, don't confuse Dharma with the Widmore people or with Jacob's minions/influence. (In other words, it wasn't necessarily Dharma who wanted Walt or who sent those lawyers etc.)
In the grand scheme of LOST, Dharma turns out to be a fairly innocuous red herring.
I think I covered that with "i.e. the Dharma entity of 2004."
I forgot: wine = knowledge also gets them out of a lot of exposition. Which, as I hope I made clear, isn't a lazy or deceptive move, imo.
That's an interesting theory about the "last universe standing." I've been assuming that's a pocket universe that will eventually have to cede authority to the "real" one.
But typing out my Jack/Locke predictions above made me remember that this story certainly knows how to take its own direction.
Also: Jordan totally predicted the basic rundown of the seasons' plots back around season 3 or so.
Also also: I'm totally annoyed with Jin and Sun. Either of them should've said "our daughter needs all the parents she can get" and then Jin gets the hell out of there. There's a similar scene in the movie Volcano that always pissed me off, in which a guy stays with his trapped friend so he doesn't die alone. Fuck that!
This is suspect, but I read an EW article from a few months ago in which someone (I forget if this was the article's author or someone he interviewed) asked you, the reader, if the nuke necessarily sank the island, i.e. maybe it sank later.
This idea is called into doubt because it went hand-in-hand with the observation that New Otherton (seen on the sunken island) "had a chance to be built." This implied that there must've been some time post-nuke and pre-sink in which those houses were built.
Which is of course totally wrong, as everyone hung out in those houses in 1977. EW sucks.
My thoughts on this week.
When I saw the "tunnel of light" that Jacob was to protect it immediately made me think of this:
In the Talmud it is believed that all souls pre-existed in an abode called Guph. The Guph is where the spirits and souls which have still to be created are kept. The Talmud goes on to say that the Guph is to be hidden away like a treasury and guarded.
When they share the wine I believe it's an implication that the wine is not just knowledge but is a sacred (blood of Christ possibly?) part of a necessary ritual.
So, if Jack is to be Jacob's replacement will he need to drink the wine?
I know about the Guph from that Demi Moore Apocalypse movie.
My assumption is that Lost's cosmology will remain generic enough to be its own thing, but parallel the already established ones. So yeah, I think the wine/communion thing is like you say, without the official endorsement.
I hope the bottle has been replaced with a white box with the Dharma logo and the word "wine."
Octo, that was hilarious.
ground rule clarification: are we allowed to make predictions here, even if they might (if right) be spoil-y, or should we keep our hypotheses to ourselves for now?
octo, i agree about sun and jin. how could they have not been thinking of their daughter? it seems to me that sun lives on to some extent in their daughter so jin could even have honored his promise in that way.
i for one have never heard of a guph.
i loved aj's character, powerful and deceitful and singleminded. i also liked getting some answers and backstory in a context that made the answers themselves suspect.
AC, I'd say the only thing to leave out of this discussion is anything you might have heard from some arcane source that would be spoily. I don't think personal hypotheses count.
If I'd thought that tidbit from EW was anything but worthless, I wouldn't have posted about it.
oh goody! i didn't think anyone had been spoiling, octopunk; just wanted permission to submit the following (totally personal, arcane-source-free) hypothesis:
if you are right and jack is jacob's successor, how cool would it be if claire becomes MIB's successor?
Claire becoming MIB's successor would be totally cool. But what's the deal with Hurley seeing dead people?
Octo ~ "I hope the bottle has been replaced with a white box with the Dharma logo and the word "wine.""
So friggin' funny! I almost spewed my juice when I read that.
I lost the thread somewhere before the end of season 2, and with this being the final season, I've tried, oh how I've tried, to "spoil" it for myself by checking online for episode summaries, predictions, etc. Unsuccessfully, I might add. And the thought of going back through three and a half seasons on DVD just makes me tired.
So of course I've read all these comments. For the record, they might as well be dinner recipe ideas in Mandarin for all the sense they make to an outsider of the show. Spoil away!
Here's my question for those "in the know": is the four-toed foot statue a total red herring? As a semi-retarded illiterate fan of the show (even though I don't follow it, I have the highest regard for what it does and how it does it), I find that to be one of the more iconic, thought-provoking images.
A) Where's the rest of the statue?
B) What did it look like?
C) Why four toes?
D) What does it have to do with anything?
I've heard that the clip of the discovery of the foot always appears in the "Previously on Lost" segment, but nothing is ever said about it. Which is brilliant in its own right.
Sorry to waste valuable space here, that was just my only burning Lost question.
Handsome Stan, if you're out there reading this, dig it:
THERE ARE NO RED HERRINGS. REALLY. I'm sure this sounds like a dramatic exaggeration, but it's actually very close to being literally true: I've just never seen anything (comic book storyline runs, graphic novels, network series etc.) really do this great a job of structuring and controlling it all (and listening to the blogs so as to nimbly and mercilessly dispense with storylines and/or characters the fans didn't like, which was absolutely one of the keys to the show's success) so that the pieces all fit together without the slightest hint of "faking it" or "stringing me along with bullshit" (which tactic I privately always thought was the horrible rot at the core of X-Files). Anyway it sounds like I'm exaggerating, saying "NO" red herrings (and I'm aware I used the term "red herring" above but I was actually mis-using it up there); it's probably more like "92% red-herring [or, "stringing me along with bullshit"/"changing the game on the run"]-free. And that's a better statistic than either Lord of the Ringss or Star Wars (at least according to some views on Star Wars). Right?
Btw, I want those Lost Lego guys in the worst way.
Since last night I've continued reading Talmud and discovered the guph is actually connected to 2 angels. The Angel of Life (Jacob) and the Angel of Death (MIB). It states that the Angel of Death became so by removing his garment of flesh (smoke monster).Then it states, "He rests and moves, and contemplates continually the supernatural mysteries which, when he was in the earthly body, he could neither grasp nor understand."
I found it interesting, I never thought to look at the Talmud for a storyline connection until this last episode.
I'll just elaborate a bit on my feelings about Beyond the Sea. I thought that, structurally and tactically, the episode was great. To pause before the endgame to finally go back for an unhurried look at the beginning was, I think, exactly right, and a really perfect move. (It's more of the amazingly skilled pacing I was discussing above.)
My only complaints were much more mundane: I thought the story they told was dull, and no fun. It was a strain to watch; every scene was leaden and deliberate, with us, the audience, constantly straining from moment to moment, portentous exchange to portentous exchange, trying to read the tea-leaves of "what's being revealed." It's not that it was "heavy handed" or anything like that; they tried as hard as they could to play it in the most evasive, non-committal way they could, without any real foreground action or familiar characters' drama to entertain us during what plays like an old-testament fable. So you're just sitting there with nothing to do but strain to piece together a puzzle that they're not even really giving you the pieces of.
Look, it's their show, not mine, and they're almost always right about how to tell their story. I just, you know, didn't have any fun watching this one; it was like a particularly challenging and inscrutable leg of a scavenger hunt that you're tired of struggling with.
I get to answer Stan's statue questions!
A) You know that old ship with dynamite in it that's parked way inland? The Black Rock? Just this season we saw that it was tossed there by a huge wave during a storm, and it collided with the statue on the way in. Presumably the other statue hunks were moved in the 150 years or so since then.
B) While you never get a clear "full frontal," it looked to me like a depiction of an Egyptian god: a human figure in a fancy skirt and sporting a big alligator head. (There are, I think, four shots of the complete statue. One from the back as seen from the well, one looking up from the near the base (sort of a 3/4 rear shot), one of the front (except it's in the distance and it's raining), and you must see it during the ship's POV crash scene, I just don't recall how much you see.)
C) See "alligator head" above. Once I saw that I didn't worry about the toe count. It's not a statue of a particular person who has four toes.
D) Inside the statue's base is where Jacob lived. Until he, like his mom, got stabbed to death.
In your hunt for a Lost summary, have you tried Wikipedia? I often go there to find out what happened in stories I don't actually care to experience first hand.
See, even reading Octopunk's (masterful) answers immediately above, I'm drawn back to the point I keep re-emphasizing. I mean, aren't those GOOD answers? Wonderfully bullshit-free, so you don't feel like an idiot describing the concept to a smirking non-fan? It's just the best part of the whole J. J. Abrams project (including Star Trek and Cloverfield).
You know, damned if it isn't growing on me. You just have to give it to them for merely having the nerve to do it. It's not the end of 2001, but it's at least in the ballpark of the end of A. I. (and the end is the most Kubrickian part in my opinion).
Bleah, I hope they do better than the end of A.I.
I hope so too, nothing worse than a great build up to a big let down.
Sorry if I'm irking anyone but I can't stop reading into the Talmud and comparing the story. If you don't want to hear it then just skip the rest of this comment.
If I have my biblical references in order then the two brothers are Jacob & Esau. The Island may in fact be Eden which is where the Guph is rumored to be hidden. This is actually thrown at us when they refer to the 2 bodies as Adam & Eve. Therefore AC may have hit the nail on the head with Jack & Claire or perhaps they will dispel the blood relation and it will just come down to Locke & Jack.
Hurley was entrusted with the numbers that keep appearing on everything. The final number in the sequence is 42. 42 plays a significant role in Talmud as well as several other religions including ancient Egypt's Book of the Dead. In Talmud it states -"The Forty-Two Lettered Name (the divine name of God) is entrusted only to him who is pious, meek, middle-aged, free from bad temper, sober, and not insistent on his rights". Sounds like Hurley to me. Perhaps why the dead folks only talk to him, he's the guide. There's more but I don't want to bore anyone with this religious stuff.
I expected supernatural and obviously a spiritual confrontation of good & evil but I did not expect bible references so bold & old testament.
Those WERE good answers! Like I said, I hold the show in the highest regard, and even if I'm not specifically aware of the issues, events, & people being discussed, nevertheless it's the discussion itself that is fascinating to read, which says much about the source material.
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