Lost - There's No Place Like Home (3)

Okay, time to end this obsessive craziness. I've got other things to blog about. I hope.

Reason 3: The WTF moments

If I were to put the WTF moments of Lost into order, I think I'd have to put the first sighting of Jacob right at the top. Though the legendary gamechanging moment of the third season turned out to be the introduction of flashforwards in the finale, Jacob's first appearance was just as significant. Just as the show had taken a drastic turn when we first see the inside of Swan station at the beginning of season two, Jacob's ghostly nature injected a supernatural element into a show that had previously been more concerned with psychological experimentation and superscience. It's testament to the skills of the showrunners that this new mystery didn't wreck the show, and in fact has fed into other mysteries in the show that I, at least, had taken for granted, such as the whispers and the appearances of unexpected people or animals.


I'm debating whether to revise this list. A list I've not yet written, I'll admit, but still. If anything is going to make fairweather fans bleat about sharkjumping or fridgenuking, it's Ben climbing into a frozen chamber and turning a large wooden wheel in order to teleport the island out of harm's way. I can see that that leap into the bizarre would irk people, especially as the show has been pretty careful about introducing really weird phenomena, though that statement might say more about how quickly I have accepted the presence on the show of a magnet powerful enough to pull a plane off course and a seemingly sentient mind-reading organism or mechanism made of smoke. Plus, with the typically masterful performance of Michael Emerson there to sell it, I just went with it.



Sure, using a shaky looking wooden wheel to activate a force powerful enough to move an enormous landmass is definitely incongruous, but if the island was once home to an ancient civilisation of four-toed time-warping geniuses waiting for their Buddha-like messiah to arrive (or whatever the Hostiles are), then their technology would have involved wood and wheels and such like. Probably. The wheel wasn't the special part of the mechanism, it was just the lever. What lies behind the wall is what is important. Is it the "negatively-charged exotic matter" that Dr. Edgar Halliwax was referring to?A downed UFO? A black hole? Was Ben winding up an enormous spring that boinged the island up into the atmosphere? It could have been anything.

While that was the most dramatic WTF moment of the finale, there were other headscratchers as well, which open up interesting areas for speculation in the final two seasons. The next biggest event of the finale was the reveal of the true identity of Jeremy Bentham, which caused much anguish in my soul, mostly because Locke dying sucks, but also because the grim pallor and subtle distortion of Terry O'Quinn's face was horribly realistic.


While we have no idea how it happened, we can futilely speculate until our ears bleed. If he's no longer on the island, either he died while on a mission off-island, or after being exiled in the same way Ben was. If so, perhaps the island has been returned to the same spot it was at before. If it ever actually existed within the space/time continuum the way everything else does, that is. Now that he is dead, who is meant to run the show on the island? Has Sawyer stepped up? Or Richard Alpert? Are the islanders leaderless until Jack returns to fulfill what might be his destiny? And how did Locke die? Was it really suicide? If he knows something about the island being a null-space where death can be beated, he could have killed himself, knowing he would have to be returned to the island and therefore back to life. That doesn't help us understand what would drive him to kill himself, but it would explain why death would hold no fear for him. Though it doesn't explain why Ben has such a weird waxy face as well. Is this connected to Locke's death? Or is he aging backwards like Benjamin Button?


Luckily, with death seemingly no barrier to keeping actors on the show, we might see more of Locke off the island, as well as on island (if we get to see what happened on the island during the three years the Oceanic Six were in the real world, that is). That post-death existence has certainly made Claire interesting, at last. After three and a half seasons of nothingness, Claire is now finally doing something other than be a moody mom. Even better, she's not just a ghost, she's an off-message ghost.


Considering how the rest of the spooky visitors are telling their alloted hauntee to get back to the island, Claire is vehemently opposed to Aaron returning. If she is really an emissary of the island, and if Ben is right when he says that the only way to return to the island is for everyone to go back (which surely includes Aaron, Waaaaaalt, and probably Frank and Desmond too), then why is Claire saying Aaron must stay behind? Is it just because the growth spurt that the young actor playing Aaron would go through would render the show unfilmable, which would be understandable and forgivable? Or do the island's ghosts have free will? Harper's ghostly appearance before Juliet in The Other Woman seemed to be on the orders of the island, but Harper herself seemed very angry at Juliet, so maybe the ghosts retain enough of themselves to be considered partially autonomous. It's certainly food for thought.


If the teleportation was the most dramatic WTF moment of the episode, my favourite was quiet but so out of the blue that it shook me to the core and made me reconsider my apathy towards CS Lewis. Miles' conversation with her, during which he revealed that he knew she had been on the island before, blew my head apart with greater effect than if I had gone brujo-style berzonkers on iboga. All of a sudden her joyous expression upon landing on the island in Confirmed Dead makes perfect sense, and now I feel bad for thinking she was just a dope who liked the pretty trees. Her decision to stay on the island, in order to discover more about her past, was beautifully played, and made me remember one of the main reasons that I love the show; that what I often consider superfluous or ill-judged will almost certainly become important or moving in the future, so surely is it being crafted by the showrunners. Now I can't wait to find out more about her, or see her reunited with Faraday, if he's still intact following the sudden displacement of the island. Still, she'll have supersnarky Miles to keep her company.


Surely that counts for something, right?

Reason 2: The fanbase

To be honest, I'm slightly mad at some of the Lost fanbase, most specifically the fuckbat who put a Lost spoiler video on YouTube on the day the finale aired. As YouTube uses a picture from the video to illustrate what the content is like, I saw "Michael dies" in big letters, thus wrecking that shock. Wonderful. I was being very careful about avoiding spoilers as well, which made the moment all the more frustrating. This happened last year and infuriated the very people making the show, who are the people you really shouldn't be angering. What if they decided not to finish the show in retribution? It happened to Global Frequency!!! Stupid idiot leaking jerkoffs. And for what? To ruin people's day? Vengeance against Darlteluselof because they weren't interested in their spec scripts featuring Jack and Kate having sex on the bonnet of an enormous UFO? Or just a need to show off the level of their access to the show? Yeah, when I had Michael's death spoiled I was really thinking about how impressed I was at how well the person in question had sneakily eluded ABC's guards to bring us this information a few hours early. I totally didn't think about how I would like to give them a Chim-Chim cookie for their trouble. Or strand them on an exploding freighter.


It's especially annoying as the majority of fans, and the debates that rage between them, seem to delight the showrunners enough to play games with our expectations (as I've gone on about before). The finale had a nice example, with the showrunners addressing their method of keeping the viewers pleasantly confused while still slowly revealing more and more about the island. That battle between what they tell us and what the show shows us is a brilliant balancing act, played out in the Orchid station as Ben speaks for the showrunners and Locke speaks for the audience. We want to know what is going on with the fascinating Dharma guys, but those in a position of greater knowledge keep telling us to get over it.


To make it even more frustrating, Ben makes Locke sit down and watch another Dharma orientation video, a final cut of the Orchid station video that has been doing the rounds since last year's Comic-Con, which distracts Locke while Ben gets on with the business of making the island (i.e. the show) move. When it's over (or rather, when it rewinds at the most crucial part), Locke is desperate to know more, but Ben insists it doesn't matter. When the Vault explodes, it is as if a veil has been pulled back by Ben. We've been concentrating on that veil for three seasons now, but what lay behind it, i.e. the frozen donkey wheel and whatever the hell lies behind its housing, is where the real core of the show lies. The Dharma members themselves are important, as characters that have interacted with our heroes and villains (whichever they may have been), but what they were doing has no bearing on what else has been happening on the island. At least, that's how I interpreted that scene.

I also like that, considering how the Lost haters like to make out that the show is constructed to ignore the viewer's wishes (the mythical average viewer seemingly wanting nothing more than the answer to the question "WTF is up with that fuckin' island, man?", if they are to be believed), the showrunners seem to be eager to give the fans what they want, and will gauge their/our reactions to see what we want. At least, that's what this comment on Kristin Veitch's E Online column:

Dan: I'm part of the ABC Studios Advisory Panel, and they were asking questions about Michael's "fate" on Lost—very vague about whether he died or not, and also how interested I was in seeing him next season. Could this mean that, depending on the results, he might come back?! Also, when Ben says they all need to come back to the Island—is there any way he means Walt, too, and that he'll be a regular next season? Because, dammit, I miss the kid, and I need to know how he's special!
Kristin: I've unilaterally decided that Ben's declaration means Walt has to go back, too, but whether Darlton or the Island agree with me remains to be seen. As for Michael, well, that there info you have from the advisory panel is what Arsenio used to call a thing that makes you go "Hmmmm..."

Having been very nonplussed by the death of Michael, I hope that this hint is the real deal, and that Harold Perrineau isn't sulking so much that he won't come back. Fuck it, Lost showrunners, write a completely unearned resolution between him and Walt, if it makes him happy. Just get him back. Having Michael die so suddenly left a nasty taste in my mouth. Fix it! And let me hang out on set with you all and write episodes and everything. I promise my spec script features zero UFOs and lots of talk about free will and existentialism, mostly from the mouth of my new character, psychic French botanist Jean-Paul Heidegger.

Reason 1: Locke and Linus

So many plot threads were rushed through in the latter half of the season that some characters sadly got short shrift (and Miles and Faraday's flashbacks have been delayed to a later date), but my favourite aspect of the show, the relationship between Ben and Locke, was allowed time to develop to what has to be its natural conclusion. Little did we know at the beginning of the three-parter, with Locke and Ben traipsing through the jungle and trading jibes with Hurley, that their fractious partnership-of-convenience was soon to be dissolved.


Their progression from mortal enemies to grudging partners to bickering Odd Couple-style comrades was complete, and while they could never have become friends, Ben's apology to Locke for wrecking his life seemed heartfelt, though premature. Surely this wasn't the end of Blocke? Of course, as the show rolled to a close, and we realised Ben was never going to return to the island, certainly not before Locke dies, that would probably be the last time they spoke to each other. Perhaps there might be an unseen meeting between Ben and "Jeremy Bentham", but it's doubtful. After their hilarious snippy conversations in this episode, that's even more sad than it already was. And no, for once I didn't cry when Ben and Locke shook hands for the final time, but I was greatly ensaddenised.


To be honest, while it seemed Ben's motive for leaving the island was brought about by some kind of acceptance that Jacob was now communicating with Locke instead of him, the death of Alex seemed to have been a huge contributing factor to his sacrificial decision. His need to avenge her death certainly made him act rashly as he murdered Keamy, asking his foe if Widmore ordered the hit on Alex even though the evil mercenary was busy dying. His need to know who was ultimately responsible for her death indicates he is eager to even the score with Widmore, even though the ultimate cost is losing his hold on the island.


That's not such a drastic move if his status as Jacob's chosen one really is unalterably changed, though I now wonder if he was ever supposed to be the leader of the Hostiles. While Richard Alpert is willing to seek out Locke in an effort to test him during his childhood, he seemed to just stumble across Ben and choose him with little preamble. Was he just hoping to persuade an insider to help his band of hostiles to get into the Barracks? Perhaps making Ben the de facto leader of his group was the only way to convince him to do it, knowing that Ben's powerlessness was making him unhappy and responsive to promises of greater control over his life. Of course, that means the Hostiles are lumbered with a lame duck leader, but if our suspicions are true, that Alpert and the rest are immortal, then the time spent putting up with Ben's craziness would seem short compared to how we would experience it.


Ben being a placeholder leader certainly explains why he always seemed so frustrated with Jacob, and his parting shot, "I hope you're happy now, Jacob," makes sense in the context that Jacob communicated with Ben out of necessity rather than because Ben was his chosen one, and thus was less than happy with the liaison with humanity that he had been allocated. No wonder Ben has been so miserable and homicidal for the last season and a bit. Who knows, maybe he didn't even need to move the island. Maybe he did that as a screw-you gesture to Jacob.


As for Locke, he's in a weird position of being a leader of a group that knows more about the environment they are living in than he does. It's only by the acceptance of Alpert that he has any chance of being seen as a saviour by the Hostiles, though we do not know if his selection by Alpert is because he is a reincarnation of someone powerful, or is the past incarnation of Jacob (and therefore the only one who can properly hear Jacob in his shack).


Of course, Locke's obliviousness serves another purpose. He has been left ignorant of his destiny as a contrivance by the showrunners, keeping him unaware of the truth of the island as we see events through his eyes and any knowledge he has would be seen by us too. If I stopped to think about it I'd probably find a million contrivances in the show that would conspire to annoy me, so I'll leave it there. I'm happy not seeing the strings being pulled, and besides, I've been enjoying the games Ben has been playing so much I'm happy to be manipulated by the show for a long time yet.


There is something I'm tentatively unhappy about, though. As I hinted earlier, I had one problem with the finale that I couldn't get over, and has only served to trouble me ever since. While I loved the finale, and have watched it several times since just because it was so much fun and featured so many great moments, I'm finally becoming concerned about the amount of ground they have left to cover. The list of mysteries left unexplained remains enormous, and yet we only have two 17 episode seasons left to go. That might seem like a lot now, but this season was not much shorter but felt like it flew by. If next season manages the difficult task of running straight through with no breaks, it'll seem to fly by. Though I have no doubt we will finally understand the reason for the four-toed statue, and the electromagnetic anomaly, and the donkey wheel, and the true nature of Smokey, and any number of other mysteries, I've begun to worry that dozens of minor mysteries that have intrigued me will be ignored, or turn out to have been much more prosaic than I had imagined. Disappointment at the resolution of any story, especially one I have expended so much time and energy in following and thinking about, is inevitable to some degree, and I've been realistic about how the final episode will leave me feeling disappointed, but perhaps now it's beginning to hit home, that this wondrous story is coming toward a natural conclusion. I'm approximately this worried and upset...







In case you were wondering, that's not good. I'm not suddenly convinced the show will end up sucking; I still expect a satisfying ending. I just dread having no closure on some of the little things, especially some of the Dharma details, especially as they have been treated like a joke by Ben. We shall see.

But yeah, that minor concern doesn't alter the fact that season four was breathtaking, definitely the best one yet, with at least two absolute classics episodes (The Shape Of Things To Come and The Constant) and numerous astonishing moments. I'm sad that it's over, my obsession will be fed for some time to come. Once we have finished watching The Shield (two seasons in and we're deeply in love with it), we're going to go back and rewatch from the beginning, and see how much foreshadowing there is, and I might even join in with Darlton and ABC's Lost Bookclub, a lovely idea considering how densely layered with literary references the show is. Maybe this blog will be Lost-lite for a while. I think a few weeks of reading books by B.F. Skinner, Aldous Huxley and Nabokov might do me a world of good. ::picks up copy of Rainbow Six by Tom Clancy when no one is looking::

Lost - There's No Place Like Home (2)

Yes, my Lost obsession will not let me rest. Forgive my indulgence. Continuing my previous witterings about a show that finished weeks ago...

Reason 5: Awesome acting

Forgive me for banging on about it yet again, but I really believe the secret weapon of Lost is Foxy Matthew Fox, an actor who has improved leaps and bounds since the pilot. He's lucky that his character is not the typical strong leader, but is in fact a guy with a fragile psyche, trying to be a leader not because he is the best person for the job but because the conch shell was handed to him early on and he's so used to being the go-to guy that he's accepted it even as he suspects it could be a bad idea. Whereas Locke and Ben both desperately want to be leaders, thinking that it is their destiny (which it might well be), Jack is repeatedly given the role of leader even though his doubt, paranoia, and self-hatred make him a terrible candidate.


This season saw him broken by the realisation that his belief in the benevolence of the Kahanians (for want of a better word) was naïve and deadly, that not only was his promise to the other islanders broken, but that perhaps he really wasn't the leader after all. Jack has yet to figure out his place in the world, but even worse (and this is central to his continuing debate with Locke about faith), he doesn't yet understand that the island is able to show him what he is meant to be. With Ben exiled from the island and Locke dead, perhaps Jack is next in line; I doubt Locke's successor will be Sawyer, even though he is already on the island and thinks he is better than Jack, in much the same way cool cat and charmer Hawkeye used to bicker with straight-laced Captain America about who should be the leader of the Avengers.


Okay, that confuses matters, as Jack has only been crowned proxy leader by those around him, and not by the island. Maybe he has been a crappy leader so far because it has not yet been his time. Now it will come, when he gets back there. Shame he seems even closer to insanity than ever.


So yes, I've thoroughly enjoyed the ever deepening desperation and existential terror of Jack, and think Foxy's portrayal of that has been superb. Canyon remains sceptical, even after admitting (with maximum grudge), that Foxy gave the best performance in Speed Racer. His arc, which could well go from faux-confidence to psychic misery and then peace and acceptance of his role in life, is slowly becoming as fascinating as that of Locke and Ben. Whereas they are equally confident from an early stage that they are the Chosen One, Jack is just as likely to be the one who eventually adheres to the strictures of the Monomyth, though so far the showrunners have used his arc to display what can go wrong with that hero's journey. In a classic version of the Monomyth, the hero returns to the world with a gift that can aid his fellow man, but Jack has returned to the world with nothing but his doubt. It helps no one. Except for shareholders in booze manufacturing companies.


Yes, Locke and Ben have had their moments of doubt, but they have been temporary, whereas Jack's fears go right to the core of his soul. That's one of the things I love most about Lost. While many viewers gave up on the show because the answers they sought were continually pushed to one side in order to focus on character evolution that seemed superfluous and dull, it seems that the fate of the world relies on Jack getting his shit together. He's like a drunk and paranoid Moses ignoring the signs from God, and then leading his followers off the island but not knowing how to lead them back when it turns out he should have been paying more attention. Thankfully, Foxy is excellent at dramatising that. At least, that's how I see it. Canyon maintains he's just a whiny cry-baby bitch and his hair looks stupid. To each their own.

Sadly, it seems the Emmy judges agree with Canyon. According to Tom O'Neil of the LA Times, Foxy has failed to get onto the longlist for an Best Dramatic Actor Emmy, which is an egregious snub. Still, it's not all bad news for Lost. In the Best Supporting Dramatic Actor category, Michael Emerson and Naveen Andrews both got nominations (though last year's deserved winner, Terry O'Quinn, hasn't), and Foxy did win a Saturn award for best actor, so the nerds have come around on him, at least (there were also wins for Emerson and Elizabeth Mitchell, all of which makes me very very happy).


I'll get to Emerson later, but I am glad to see my hardcore Hero Of Teh Awesome awardwinner Sayid get some props. Naveen Andrews has complained in the past that he doesn't get enough to sink his teeth into, but this season has been his to own. Not just by being a total and utter hardcore badass of the utmostest, but for having his emotions toyed with by fate to such an extent that he throws in his lot with the man he once saw as the devil. His battle between his darker impulses and yearning for peace were only touched upon in the finale, but still, he's done enough excellent work this season to more than justify some award attention.


While Canyon and I cannot see eye to eye on the talents of Foxy, we do agree on many of the other great performances on the show. Yunjin Kim showed off some mad skills over the course of the finale. Sun's intense grief over Jin's broke our hearts, and her steely confidence and seeming ruthlessness in dealing with her father and Widmore were two of the most pleasing scenes. All of a sudden that seemingly inconsequential episode with Sun dealing with the blackmail of Jin's mother appears to have been crucial in showing her inner steel. The thought that she might become an antagonist, trying to undermine Jack and Ben's mission, is a thrilling one.


One thing that did irk me was the underuse of Michael, and of course what seems to be his death (though who knows what the arrival of Christian Shepherd means). I was thrilled he was back on the show, but having him die after what was pretty much an hour and a half of screentime during this season seemed completely wrong. I'm not the only one, if that interview with Harold Perrineau is anything to go by.


That said, he did semi-retract it later, either because his agent phoned him up and said, "NOOOOOO!", or because there is a chance he will be back. See point 2 below for more on that possibility.

Cuselof seem to be as good as Joss Whedon at seeing the inner potential of actors, and playing up to it. At the start of the show there was little reason to believe Jorge Garcia and Josh Holloway would be able to show as much range as they have, something I've commented on before. The finale gave Garcia a real chance to shine, as we see how his experience on the island has made him doubt his own sanity, a heart-breaking consequence of what he has been through. His interactions with his family are edgy, his smile becoming a rare sight. It's fair to say he's not the comic relief any more. Hell, Locke and Ben are funnier now, though Foxy seems to disagree.


I think my heart broke a little during the flight to the Kahana, when Frank said they were a few hundred pounds too heavy to make it to their destination, and we got a quick shot of Hurley looking guilty. That no one else on the helicopter would blame him would never occur to him; just like everyone else there, his self-hatred consumes him.

Holloway had less to do here than most, which is annoying but understandable considering how he has become side-lined following his murder of Anthony Cooper, as well as more reserved and unhappy, though this could well change now he is the Alpha Male of the Oceanic survivors. I look forward to that, but here all we had to really enjoy was that heroic sacrifice, during which he was superdashing.


Also great was his increasingly panicked reaction to Claire's disappearance. Still, I can imagine some hearts soared at the sight of our hott hero wandering around the island with a baby in his arms.


What a guy. He's so goddamn hot that even Kate, seemingly still hooked on Jack, can't help but melt when she sees Sawyer emerge unscathed from the forest. Evangeline Lilly sadly had very little to do this episode, but this reaction was perfect, a mixture of excitement, relief, lust, love, coquettishness, and, well, more lust, I guess.


Having spent a little time looking at this EW article about the Emmy shortlist, it seems most of the anger about the Lost snubs are related to the non-nominations for Yunjin Kim or Henry Ian Cusick, who was staggeringly good in The Constant. His finale featured some highly dramatic moments, including what looked like his death (though thankfully not).


His resurrection on the floaty raft got the biggest sigh of relief we have ever expelled upon seeing someone cough up a mouthful of water. Those bastard showrunners had to put us through the mill before we got what looked for a moment like a happy ending, as Desmond is finally reunited with his long-lost love Penny, and then proudly and happily introduces her to his fellow survivors. I have no shame in admitting there were tears shed.


Of course, this isn't really a happy ending, as Ben is now gunning for Penny, but for now, it was perfect. Without knowing we were going to see darker days for the UK lovebirds, it seemed strange to be heading towards a reunion for them, but now it makes perfect sense, yet more proof that Cuselof are not idiots and know exactly what they are doing. It was also great to see Sonya Walger return, here playing the adorable Penny instead of being subjected to her Gupta-esque performance as Carolyn, whose behaviour was restricted to haranguing her husband and peeing on countless pregnancy tests for ten weeks on Tell Me You Love Me. Here is a picture of her with Kate. Just to increase the hits to this page, I would like to point out that, while blogging about the week in TV during the run of TMYLM, I commented on the number of times we got to see Sonya Walger's boobs. We still get a couple of image hits a week with that term, and no, before you go looking for those images, there were no picture of boobs, merely shots of her entertaining facial reactions to getting bad news.


If you are so desperate to see Sonya Walger nude, internet surfing people, buy the HBO DVD. Hopefully you'll indulge for the nudity and stay for the deepening character arcs and variable-though-mostly-excellent performances. And now I will stop trying to artificially bump up hits with these terms. Honest.

Reason 4: The quirky mystery

With much of the finale showing us how the Oceanic Six left the island, and what happened to the island once they were off it, much of the off-kilter weirdness of previous episodes was lacking, but even so, we still got some pleasing Dharma Initiative moments. More and more we are told that the Dharma Initiative is not central to the plot, and to make things worse, Cuselof insist that the show has nothing to do with time-travel (which makes my Sirens of Titan theory seem like a total failure). More on how their off-show comments relate to the relationship between the audience and the writers in a bit, but for now, if we take Ben at his word, the Orchid station orientation video (documenting the Dharma Initiative's "silly experiments") never actually says definitively that organic objects placed in the Vault will be displaced in time. The tape stops before that, and when Locke asks Ben what the tape was referring to, the former head Other's response ("Time travelling bunnies") is dismissive and sarcastic.



So what is the Vault? Were the Dharma scientists really moving rabbits through time? Considering that later in the episode Ben moves the island and is displaced in time and space by ten months and several thousand miles, it's obvious the wheel chamber is a place of immense power, which could easily have leaked into the Vault. However, it could still be nothing more than another Skinner Box trick invented by the Initiative, testing the psychological responses of unwitting test subjects to bizarre criteria. The Vault could be nothing more than a big microwave that cannot handle metal.


Okay, so the presence of the wheel chamber definitively proves the existence of unnatural properties in that area. The only other possible proof (and this too could be subterfuge) is the existence of Dr. Marvin Candle and Dr. Mark Wickmund, one of whom could well be a time-displaced clone of the other, and as one of them has only one arm, perhaps he was the one to discover the negative effects of wearing a metallic watch in the Vault (this is purest conjecture, but makes some sense).

So what does this confusion tell us about the show? I've been mulling it over tonight, and I'm beginning to wonder if the Dharma Initiative have unwittingly tapped into the Magic Box aspect of the island that Ben once discussed. Perhaps the Vault and the numbers in Swan station started out as Skinner Box experiments, but the belief of the participants made them real. Maybe there was no magnet behind the wall, at least not until a test subject willed it into being. Same thing with the Vault. It could also explain the existence of the Pearl station. If the Dharma acolyte stationed in that station was monitoring the button-pressing activites of the Swan station inhabitants, perhaps his/her scepticism was what was really stopping the Swan anomaly from blowing up. It's a battle of belief systems; the Swan operative's belief in the imminent electromagnetic charge creates an electromagnetic charge, and the Pearl operative's disbelief in it (triggered by the recording of the number-punching information) dispels the charge. Though, of course, that expansion of the theory relies on someone still being in Pearl after the Oceanic crash, and we know that's not the case, so I'll shut up now.

This power to manifest physical representations of the imagination would certainly explain why everyone is after it, which made me remember the quest at the centre of Umberto Eco's Foucault's Pendulum, as various sects of conspiracy theory-believing cultists search in vain for the Navel of the World, a place of enormous power. In that book (this description from Philip Coppen's Da Vinci Code website)...

the Knights [Templar discover] secret energy flows – telluric currents – during the Crusades. The currents’ mother lode is the so-called umbilicus mundi, or “navel of the world”. By placing a special valve in the umbilicus mundi, they will be able to control the currents, to disturb and interfere with life anywhere on Earth, with vast blackmailing possibilities against entire nations. However, they cannot utilize the currents due to insufficient technology.

A cabal of ancient warriors safeguarding a vast power and using it to manipulate the world? I'd say that sounds similar.

Okay, we're not getting any answers to that big stuff any time prior to the sixth and final season, but what about the most pressing non-Orchid question of the finale; where did Juliet get her hair done? Here she is with wind-blown locks...


...and here she is with straight, styled hair just a little while later.


Is there a Dharma branch of Toni and Guy on the island?

And now I end this part of the finale pondering, to finish the rest at another time. Terrible though it is to drag this out even longer than I already have, I am currently using a computer so utterly useless and knackered that trying to make it do anything other than blink at me is futile. Once I am in front of a computer that is not begging to be thrown out of a tenth storey window onto an exploding bonfire, I shall complete this and put my Lost musings to bed until next year(ish). Apologies for the obsession.

Lost - There's No Place Like Home (1)

I'm nothing if not sensitive to the requests of this blog's regular visitors, so when blogger The Judge (aka glitternova) told me how much she loves Lost and thinks I could stand to talk more about how great Lost is, and basically just never ever shut up about it and post about it, like, every day, I realised I should hurry the hell up and get cracking on my long-delayed post about the excellent three part finale, There's No Place Like Home.

Why the delay? Other than the usual life-stuff (and the rigmarole of getting screen grabs from over two hours of intense action and mind-bending weirdness), it's hard to know where to begin with it, partially because it was so complex and dramatic (obviously), and partially because it aired about a month ago and everyone in the world has moved on. Then it struck me. Why not make this season of Lost-blogging circular, and go back to my ten reasons list, and see how it matches up to the spectacular finale. Turns out, with its focus on action and emotional drama, the show was less about the usual sci-fi weirdness (though it still featured it) and more on wrapping up the Oceanic Six backstory and getting some killin' action going on. That's more than fine by me, but I do have one strong reservation about the show now (say it ain't so!), and I'll get to that eventually. For now, let's do this list.

Reason 10: Awesome Character Actors

With a lot of story to get through, the finale wasn't the place for extraneous characters, and so the only new actor to add to the rollcall of cool guest spots was the always welcome Michelle Forbes, playing an Oceanic representative shepherding our saved heroes to a press conference in Hawaii.


I've been a fan since she played the fascinating Ensign Ro in Star Trek: The Next Generation, so I was psyched to see her here, but sadly she wasn't in it for long. TV can make it up to me by changing its mind and finally going ahead with Global Frequency, damn it. Other than her, it was good to see Cheech Marin return (again doing a solid for his old Nash Bridges boss Carlton Cuse), this time being used as a symbiotic host for Donald Trump's hair.


Another welcome return came from L. Scott Caldwell. Rose has been regrettably missing for almost all of this season, and while it's great to see Sam Anderson's Bernard getting more to do, we've missed her snark, here aimed right at obnoxious Miles after catching him snacking on Dharma nuts.


Another return, though this time not as welcome, as Andrea Gabriel as Nadia. Not because I don't like her, but just because it was horrible seeing her reunited with Sayid, knowing that they were not going to get to spend their lives together. Her appearance was practically a cameo, and not for the first time. If the fifth season is going to show more of the Oceanic Six's post-island life, perhaps she'll be back, but I doubt it, somehow.


However, if the finale belonged to any single guest actor, it has to be Kevin Durand, playing the supremely evil Keamy. From his first oily appearance to his brutal demise, he has been an unnerving presence, and by appearing to be an unstoppable enforcer of doom, he sealed his future place as a Lost fan-fave.


It's always fun to see an actor who, while having a large and interesting resume, has yet to make big waves in the popular consciousness, finally turn up in a hugely successul network show and make such an impression that viewers will hopefully remember him from then on, and his performance here, with his increasing paranoia and escalating hostility, was truly memorable. He really took the role and ran with it. It helps that before now the villainy in the show has been of the cerebral, duplicitous kind, so to have someone come along with such a menacing physical presence was a real change. This was best shown in this Bourne-esque fight scene, one of many highlights, during which Keamy gets battered and stabbed, beats Sayid anyway (!!!), gets shot by Richard Alpert, and then somehow still has the strength to make it to the Orchid station to terrorise Ben.



Keamy, even though I hated you, I'll miss you, you evil bastard.



Reason 9: Beautiful Hawaii

With Lost A-directors Stephen Williams and Jack Bender on the case, shots of humbling grandeur were littered throughout the three-parter. The only thing that could ruin this shot was the awful knowledge that those on the raft were heading for a worse fate than being stuck on an island.


These other shots are just pretty ones. No special reasons for choosing them.



Blurg! I have got to go to Oahu. Of course, it's not all natural beauty. The show still features some of the most eyeball-gratifying compositions on TV.


Not to mention some great set design...


...and "bigness", I guess you could call it.


It so rarely feels like a TV show anyway, as it is so large in scope, but with 132 minutes of finale to watch, it was like the best sequel to a really long movie ever. With so little time to shoot, edit, and score, it's even more impressive than usual that it looks so great. It's shallow, but I don't see how it's possible not to respond to the look of the show.

Reason 8: Echoes

There was some repetition of themes from previous episodes throughout the finale, though not as many as there were during last season's finale, Through The Looking Glass. That really felt like the full-circle conclusion of everything that had come before it, while this was perhaps a little less satisfying in that respect. That's not to say I didn't love it; I think we screamed and cried all the way through it. It just didn't feel as rounded, but then we are talking about a cast and crew racing to get done following the strike delays, and polishing things off to a fine sheen was right out (see also some really shaky green screen work).

I feel bad for carping about that, as the Lost team did the best they could with not much time to spare, and the overall result was superb. Plus, there were some elements that resonated. I particularly liked that Sun and Widmore's big meetup was conducted outside Le Pont de la Tour, situated on the South Bank of the Thames, in view of Tower Bridge.


A couple of seasons ago, we saw Penny and Desmond breaking up on the South Bank (with the help of not great effects), just a hop, skip and jump down the river, at about the point where the Royal Festival Hall resides (though they were unable to replicate that properly, the FX shots of the Houses of Parliament gave the location away). Considering my previous theory that Widmore has cunningly "enlisted" Desmond to act as a guardian for Penny, it's oddly apt that Widmore is now possibly organising his fightback against Ben just ten minutes walk from the place where his daughter and possible "bodyguard" split up.

I say possibly, because I'm not yet convinced Sun is really working against Ben, though that might be residual feelings from when I thought Jin might still be alive. Seeing as how Jin's ultimate fate seems to be pretty unequivocally decided now, perhaps she really is out for blood. Who knows what the price of that will be, but it will make her inevitable return to the island along with the rest of the survivors all the more dramatic (I say that with confidence as the show will otherwise make little sense if the island isn't revisited). Oh, and as for Jin's fate, according to Canyon there is NO WAY Jin is dead. I think she wants to be sure she will get to see more of DDK's guns.


Another echo, which might also serve as foreshadowing, came with the sight of Sawyer emerging from the surf following his awesome sacrifice, somehow sans shirt.


Perhaps it was removed as he passed through the bizarre time differential, which means it will always be thirty minutes behind him from now on. Shirtless Sawyer for the rest of the season, ladies! Rejoice! So why is this an echo, and not just an excuse to bump up the number of hits we get by putting these pictures here with the phrases "Josh Holloway shirtless", "Sawyer shirtless", "Josh Holloway hot wet", "Sawyer hot sexy freeware examination answers", and "Sawyer hot body water rippling pecs shirtless Moon Bloodgood" nearby?


Because someone else emerged from the surf without a shirt; Juliet (played by Elizabeth Mitchell; hot, shirtless), when having a sexy picnic with Goodwin (played by Brett Cullen; hot, not shirtless).


And Juliet was getting hammered on Dharma Rum as Sawyer approached and finally realised the Kahana had blown up...


...while in the past Juliet had been having a civilised drink with her lover while discussing porn and free things, probably.


Ergo, Juliet and Sawyer are going to close the love-trapezoid that so far has seen Kate/Sawyer, Kate/Jack, and Jack/Juliet. Excellent.

I also liked how Locke appeared to his new followers, the Others/Hostiles/Time-Travelling-Island-Supercomputer-UFO Rotary Club, on top of a hill. Not only was it a heroic pose, it echoed the sight of Ben staring down at Locke in the grave after shooting him in the space in his torso where a kidney had once been.


I also liked that Locke was now the opposite of Ben, who is willing to sacrifice himself to exile from the island in order to save it, either by turning a large frozen wheel or by giving himself up to evil evil Keamy. Here we see him from above in a position of weakness; the opposite of Locke being shot from below in a position of triumph.



I really liked the seemingly dilapidated or unfinished Orchid exterior. It was here that Jack and Locke had what appears to be their final argument about whether the island is a place of miracles or not, with Locke on the side of faith and Jack on the side of science. The visual was not too subtle, but still pleasing to anyone who has become invested in their bickering.


Jack is still sceptical at this point, and when the island disappears later, he is still in denial about it all. Man, even Scully eventually came around on the UFO thing, and she spent the last reel of the movie in an alien sarcophagus with a weird breathing tube in her mouth. Of course, one of the main themes of the show, other than the free will/determinism thread which is becoming more and more important (and upon which my favoured Sirens of Titan theory depends), the science/faith battle is the main one, and certainly the one that divides Jack and Locke, but one of my favourite things about Lost is not that the battle is between science and religion, but current scientific knowledge and the hope that there is something more there. Darlton Cuselof has said that the events of the show are explicable using science, so we can say that the island isn't God's back, or something equally dreadful. Of course, if that turns out to be wrong, I'll pretend I'm not miffed. Compare that to Battlestar Galactica, where the presence of God appears to be likely, though I hope it isn't and that the entity that is moving the Cylon and human pieces around is some natural but very powerful phenomenon.

The only other echo I could find involved Keamy, who ::choke:: managed to beat Sayid (I'm not getting over that any time soon), prior to getting shot by Richard Alpert, though it merely paused his evil rampage of evil.


Later on, still alive but bleeding badly, Keamy invades the Orchid station, and while bragging about his Dead Man Trigger, gets ambushed by Ben, and much stabbing happens real quickly.



Ben's assault of Keamy is like a very clumsy re-enactment of the hella-intense fight earlier, but Keamy ends up lying in the same position as Sayid, this time with knife wounds in his neck instead of a big bit of wood.


Of course, it is at this point that Ben responds to Locke's panic over the people on the soon-to-explode Kahana with the immortal line, "So?" The only echo that generated was the echo of my bellowing laughter. Oh Ben, I wanna hang out with you and drink Dharma beer (though I'd appreciate it if you didn't try to gas me to death).

Reason 7: Easter Eggs

The biggest screengrab moment in the whole episode was from the frozen chamber under the Orchid station, where we saw a group of hieroglyphs scratched into pillars and walls.



There are some translations of some of them at the ever-dependable Lostpedia, and they seem to revolve around violence against enemies, which is curious. The island seems to have been inhabited by another civilisation once upon a time that is just as concerned with protecting the secrets of the island as the Hostiles and Ben have been, and has encoded legends or laws about such a philosophy into the walls of its weird archaic teleportation technology.


Hurley seemed to be experiencing a lot of the weirdness this time around. For a start, he arrived home in what looked to me like the murderous Golden Pontiac of Lost myth. Okay, I accept I could be really wrong, as I have no idea what a Pontiac looks like, but it certainly piqued my attention. Just to make things weirder, he encounters a coconut (possibly delivered to his home by an errant Hurleybird, a la the African Swallows of Monty Python and the Holy Grail), and more of those pesky whispers, signalling a possible instance of Island-Meddling, though it remains unclear as to whether he has experienced any peculiar behaviour prior to that moment.


Even though it all turns out to be a false alarm, his reaction is such that you wonder just how much his already battered psyche was further damaged by his time on the island. Plus, Jesus Christ is not a weapon (a line designed to make Lost fans' brains explode with the potential significance).


A few minutes later and his birthday party is wrecked by the return of the numbers, which have been on holiday for a while. It was nice to see them back, but if we're talking about awesome cameos, surely the best was the return of Mr. Eko. A cheeky little cheat on the part of Cuselof, but the fans understand what was going on there, and it was an elegant way to acknowledge that that character was still important to the overall picture of the show, as well as providing another echo, this time of the mention of Ana-Lucia in the fourth season opener.



Reason 6: ZOMG Michael Giacchino

As ever, my musical hero Giacchino did the do, but my favourite moment came with his reworking of the Parting Words theme from the season one finale, which played over the departure of Michael's raft. Here it returns, slightly altered, as our heroes arrive at Membata, suntanned and heartsore. And yes, there were tears, he said defiantly.



How good was that? Good enough to get him into the Academy. I gather that the season four boxset will feature a documentary about The Lost Symphony, which is great news. It's out in October in the UK, folks! Rare we get to beat the US (the region one release is in December), so I'm going to gloat like crazy over that.

Okay, this is already huge, and splitting it up might be the only way to ever get it done. Hold onto your hats, folks! The finale review nobody asked for will continue shortly!