Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Pt. 1 – Grim Victory [Movie Reviews]
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The Good: Continues the trend of the Harry Potter movies increasing in quality, complexity and original material. As a result of the two-part format, doesn’t rush through important segments or thematic moments. Special effects and music blend well into the story to create the most epic fantasy-mission film since Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings. Doesn’t shy away from the adult themes of the book, including the racial and political messages. And, really, it’s Harry freakin’ Potter. Also, Dobby.
The Bad: Awkward, plot-forced dialogue. The continuing obsession with the dark and cold light filters that have plagued the series since Cuarón’s Azkaban. One wildly out-of-place sexual fantasy. Pacing drags in the middle, mirroring the book’s major flaw. Do not watch before July if you hate cliffhangers.
Bottom Line: Come on, you’re probably going to watch this. And if you’re so much as moderately into Harry Potter, you’re going to enjoy it.
The Social Network – Pride Goeth Before the Billions [Movie Reviews]
The Good: A well-paced plot filled with the right mix of intrigue and humor. Competent and believable acting by the entirety of the cast. Sympathetic portrayals the controversial characters (which is to say, all of them). Eisenberg’s occasional flashes of high-functioning-nerdtastic rants. Trent Reznor does the music.
The Bad: Loses a little bit of its funny perspective toward the end. Has the potential to be devastatingly uninteresting to people who don’t remember college that way or have no interest in the emergence of social media.
The Bottom Line: It’s Shakespeare, but instead of kingdoms and starcrosssed love, it’s about billion-dollar enterprises and repressed social anxiety. Also, you get to watch programmers drunk-code. Cool.
In the Elizabethan era, audiences could experience the schadenfreude of watching proud protagonists lose something valuable through Shakespearean epics like King Lear. In the 70’s, our parents’ generation could see the dramatization of real-life political power plays in movies like All the President’s Men. Our generation has The Social Network, a movie about the overlap between ambition and voyeurism, the success it brings one socially awkward youth, and the personal loss that allegedly follows.
Coming off telling the modern-fantasy adaptation, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, director David Fincher brings his unique-narrative-format touch to the story of young billionaire Mark Zuckerberg, CEO and co-founder of Facebook. Screenwriter Alan Sorkin also flexes the interpersonal-relationships-amid-real-scenarios muscle that he sharpened as head writer on The West Wing.
The effect is a story that college students like myself will follow by recognizing the almost-insultingly simplistic formula with which Facebook snatched us up in the mid-2000s. Older audiences will either appreciate the archetypal story of greed, ambition, and betrayal or be lost in the apparently self-indulgent story of an uppity nerd who launched a website fairly recently.
Spoiler: Turns out Mark Zuckerberg was just a figment of Eduardo's imagination.
I have to admit, I balked at the idea of The Social Network when I saw the trailer. I mean, seriously. A movie about Facebook? How blatantly 18-to-35-demographic could Hollywood get? As entertaining as the trailer was, I assumed the worst in my interest and staved off TSN for as long as possible, even after the reviews came in hailing it as a pretty smart movie.
While the idea was probably greenlit because of its built-in audience, Fincher and Sorkin rarely take the concept for granted. The Social Network is entertaining on its own merits. You could swap out Facebook for Twitter, Foursquare, or a fictional website and still have a snappy script centered around relatable characters.
The dramatization, based on this book, follows Mark Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg, Scott Pilg–er, I mean Nick and Nor….wait…Zombieland. He was the kid in Zombieland.) from his undergraduate days in Harvard, where a blindsiding breakup leads him to create a girl-rating website that generates unprecedented traffic on the university’s servers. This gets the attention of smarmy Ivy-League-douchebags the Winklevoss twins and their token minority patsy, Divya, who want to enlist Zuckerberg’s coding genius to create a Harvard dating site.
Mark initially accepts, but stalls on the Winklevoss project in favor of creating thefacebook.com with the help of his only friend (and his only friend’s start-up money), Eduardo Saverin (Andrew Garfield). As most of us know, Facebook makes it big, which attracts the litigious ire of the privleged “Winklevi” as well as the attentions of infamous Napster founder, Sean Parker (Justin Timberlake). Sean and Eduardo have different visions for the future of the company, with Mark’s ultimate decision leading to the legal deposition we see him in throughout the movie.
Then, Arnold Schwarzenegger shows up to punch Mark Z., I shit you not.
I rag on Jesse Eisenberg a lot for taking the Michael Cera typecast and somehow making it more generic, but his aloof-nerd approach fits the character of Zuckerberg pretty damn well in this flick. Garfield and Timberlake are each convincing in their own roles, avoiding moral absolutism when judging the film’s characters. There is clearly a bias here originating from the book, but you can understand every individual’s perspective.
The movie’s main selling point is the humor. Ivy League kids are just wittier than the standard frat-movie-du-jour, it seems. We’re constantly reminded that these characters are just kids, getting patronized by their elders and participating in traditional rituals of fitting in, like carrying a chicken around all day. The characters rarely stray into melodramatic or implausibly-grandiose territory. When they get angry, it’s for damn good reasons, making the escalating tension among the characters more palpable.
Zuckerberg is not portrayed as a moustche-twirling villain, though given some of his on-the-record comments, he might actually be more of an asshole than TSN implies. Instead, the movie portrays him as a lonely and isolated genius, compensating for his social idiocy by applying his savant knowledge of the Internet for profit. The real antagonist in this movie is Pride, which is essentially embodied in Timberlake’s character halfway through. But even Sean Parker’s actions are at times understandable from a business perspective, which makes the ultimate conflict that much more tragic. No one is clearly wrong or right in this morality play — there’s just enough money at stake to make any 20-something’s head spin on its moral axis.
The last twenty minutes or so suffer from back-to-back dramatic scene fatigue, but the movie thankfully wraps up rather than dragging its epilogue too far and we are left with a particularly poignant image as the pre-credit “true facts” appear on the screen.
Babewatch
Whatever eye candy this film has is primarily for the ladies. Defying standard college-film convention, there isn’t much focus on Zuckerberg’s sex life. Of course, girls will squee at JT and overlook the fact that he’s essentially a hedonist playboy. But straight females will probably also gravitate toward Andrew Garfield’s character, because, I freely admit, the dude is easy on the eyes.
And if they’re into curly-headed, rodent-type creatures, well, there’s Jesse Eisenberg.
And despair not, XX-chromosome-seeking babewatchers. That girl from the Suite Life of Zack and Cody has a few scenes in this film and she’s cute, despite being a batshit-crazy pyro.
- Uh…don’t do that?
Rashida Jones (The Office, I Love You Man) also has a supporting role.
Ultimately, I could see how The Social Network can be seen as a premature and masturbatory ode to our petty, Facebook-obsessed society. If you don’t give a damn about social networks or the politics of starting a Dotcom with your friends, this movie could seem as irrelevant to you as a blog post detailing Hannah Montana’s bowel movements (Hannah Montana’s still a thing, right?).
But, then again, several critics have taken a liking to it and I think that’s because TSN tells a larger story than its parts. We’re all familiar with stories where hubris leads to a character’s destruction, but what about a loss that is more intangible than death or poverty? We all know Zuckerberg makes it out of these events filthy rich. The interesting question is what he loses in the process or whether he really had anything substantial at all.
There are a lot of contrived motivations which I think are clearly extrapolations for the movie, but at its core, The Social Network is a character study of an outsider whose attempts to connect with society elevate him above his peers. But, as far as character arcs go, you’re left wondering if he really gained anything, since it can be as lonely at the top as it is at the bottom.
To the point: It’s a good movie and funny too, though the subject matter limits its ability to be mind-blowing. It also serves as a relevant cautionary tale for this modern era where our desperate attempts to validate social standing may be leaving us stranded on our digital islands.
YEAH, BUT I'M RICH, BITCH!
The Social Network gets EIGHT out of TEN lawsuits from your best friends.
Facebook & Privacy: Do we have anything worth hiding? [Social Media]
Facebook knows my phone number.
Well, I thought it already did, because I had entered it in my contact information for “only my friends” to see. Not that it matters, because the only Facebook friends I have with the modicum of intelligence necessary to realize they could find my number on Facebook already have it. But, still…in case their phone is seized by the Zuckerberg Gestapo and they need to call me from a landline to warn me that they’re coming, I like to keep the number there. If only for completion.
There seemed to be no correlation between my phone number existing in my contact info and strange, telemarketing assailments on my phones, so I chalked it up to one thing that Facebook hadn’t sold to its hungry advertising clientle…yet.
Then I activated Facebook Mobile. And that’s when I feared that I had really given Facebook my number.
“Do you owe $10,000+ to the IRS?”
“Hey, is there any way you can send me pics?”
Uh….
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[LOST] 06.05 – “Lighthouse”
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Congratulations, season 6. You have delivered that most rare of rarities – the quality Jack-centric episode. Bravo. Bravo.
Not even my inexplicable destructive rage can ruin a season 6 episode.
Flashsideways: Jack and the Looking Glass
“Mom, when did I have my appendix taken out?”
We open with alt-Jack getting home from work and checking out his bod. He seems taken aback by a scar above where his appendix would be, if it hadn’t been taken out in an emergency surgery by Juliet, I mean…if he hadn’t gone through a normal appendix-ectomy procedure when he was seven.
The flashsideways drops a WTF bomb on us with the introduction of alt-Jack’s son, David. We know he’s Jack’s son, because he’s sulky and a pain. The good news is that it seems to have sucked some of the insufferable out of alt-Jack, leaving just this very awkward, estranged father who you feel pretty sorry for.
Although the David character is teeth-gnashingly angsty, it is pretty fascinating to see Jack play out the father role…all the while with the burden of his own father on his back.
HEY! HEY, DAVID! LISTEN TO ME! .... Um...have sex with any chicks?
The episode teases us and gives us no indication on who his mother is.
Jack makes the most out of his visitation rights and abandons his son to look for his father’s will (hey, he’s only a doctor, he must need the money). Inexplicably, his mother, Margo, offers him alcohol, then congratulates him on not succumbing to her temptation. Geez, no wonder he’s an insecure parent. His own mom is still pulling the “think carefully before you answer” game on him.
Karma gets her back when she finds out that her husband is bequeathing some of his money to a heretofor unknown Claire Littleton. Whether or not Christian’s will reveals that she’s Jack’s half-sister we don’t know, but he doesn’t seem to care either way the rest of the episode, since it doesn’t get brought up again.
References:
1. Jack’s continuing affinity for the Red Sox. Maybe in this reality they’re a team worth watching, amirite sports fans?
…Okay, I don’t watch baseball, actually, so, moving on….
2. Alice in Wonderland – Interestingly, a book Jack-prime read to toddler-Aaron back when he lived with Kate and now a book alt-Jack read to his son. Also, the source for the names of two episodes — “Through the Looking Glass” and this episode’s “mirror,” “White Rabbit.”
Trust and the Temple
“I just lied to a samurai.”
Why, yes, I suppose a poison pill *was* the most logical option for dealing with me.
Hurley is still searching for the food court when he finds Ghost Jacob (no child Jacob to be seen this episode). Jacob directly instructs Hurley to help “someone” find the Island. Little does Hurley know that this is all a ruse to get Jack to throw a hissy fit.
Sayid continues to display trust in Jack and in reward, Jack reveals that Dogen was trying to kill him. Sayid’s like “oh, cool.”
Like everyone else, I thought the funniest moment was probably Jacob coaching Hurley into asserting his authority with Dogen as a Candidate, though Hurley has no clue what that means. Dogen responds in what I initially assumed were a string of Japanese curses, but which Lostpedia translates as “You’re lucky that I have to protect you. Otherwise I’d have cut your head off.“
Jacob also instructs Hurley to push the “Daddy” button on Jack by using the “you’ve got what it takes” line. Most normal people would write this off as a generic statement ripped off a motivational poster, but Jack immediately hears Christian’s voice tell him otherwise and, sure enough, he’s ready to prove his dad wrong. Oy.
Memory Lane
“Very old school….you and me trekking through the jungle on the way to do something that we don’t quite understand. Good times.”
You can’t have a Jack-centric episode witout Kate popping up and she almost kills Jack when he surprises her…that would have been awesome.
Anyway, he tries to follow her like the puppy he is, but she orders him to stay, intent on meeting her doom at the hands of Claire the Wild Woman. This is fine with Hurley, who has gotten very cliquey now that he’s in direct communique with Jacob.
Hey, guys, long time no see...Who, me?...Just chillin'.
Jack and Hurley come across the caves and reminisce about season 1. Hurley pays lip service to theories concerning Adam and Eve, casting doubt on the idea that the corpses are time-traveling Losties (after all, if they guess it, it must be wrong).
I appreciated Hurley’s acknowledgment that, despite the fact that they knew less back then than they do now, there’s a certain nostalgia to the first few days on the island. Overall, it was good to see a nod to some of my favorite moments of the series and I’m sure we’ll get the real answer to Adam and Eve this season.
There’s also some crap about Jack’s motivation to return to the island, but that’s all painfully contrived.
All the Best Pianists Have (Resolved) Daddy Issues
“I will always love you no matter what you do. In my eyes, you can never fail.“
Jack discovers that David is secretly as talented as the six-fingered guy from Gattaca and that he has a major piano audition coming up. I don’t know why he goes, since the little punk wouldn’t even return his call when he was grieving over his dead dad. But props to his piano-playing ability, I suppose he’s a tortured genius – a savant like his father, good at a career skill, basically retarded at everything else.
Following the theme of last-minute cross-timeline cameos we see…Dogen???
I knew I should have made him play violin-baseball.
There’s a legitimately touching scene between Jack and David and it hints at a trend in the flashsideways. Most of the characters seem to be getting past their hang-ups. Rather than relive the cycle of pressure and failure, Jack reassures his son that he loves him no matter what. It’s a cliche message, but it’s the type of cliche message that Matthew Fox delivers well.
And do we get a mom? Hint of a mom? No?
Damn.
One if by Land, 360 if by Time-Traveling Candidacy Process
“He’s been watching the whole time. All of us. He’s been watching.”
Doors are getting whooped on this season.
So it was cool to see yet another addition to the mythos: the Lighthouse. You know what wasn’t cool? Jack using Jack-logic to smash the mirrors. “WHERE IS JACOB? I WANT ANSWERS! I BET IF I BREAK THINGS I’LL GET ANSWERS!!!” Geez, he’s like the embodiment of a clueless Lost commentator who insists the show isn’t answering questions.
WHY WON'T THEY TELL ME WHAT'S GOING ON? I'M JUST GOING TO STOP WATCHING THE SHOW!!!
He also drops the little bombshell that the Temple is in for some serious shit.
Claire-BEAR
“Oh, I’m not by myself.”
What’s happened to my Claire???
I can understand the survival mode. It was pretty harsh what she did to Justin, but better him than Jin, right? I can even understand her terrible, terrible hair. I would still date her, even if she smells like boar poop. But what creeps me the Eff out is that skull-doll in the bassinet. WHAT?
Not surprisingly, the LOST line of children's toys did not sell well.
Much as it disturbs me to see Claire lose her innocence, I think it’s a clever way to bring her back on the show after Emile de Ravin’s contract-related absence. Rather than just have her pop up, kind of perturbed at being lost in the jungle for three years, she’s…definitely different. It just makes me wonder what happened to her at the end of season 4 all the more.
Also, what was up with Jin going so far with the Aaron-at-the-Temple lie? Is he trying to get her help? Get her killed? Either way, it looks like he’s unwittingly helping the Anti-Jacob’s cause. So that puts 3 Losties on Team Smokey.
Biggest Mystery Solved So Far This Season
Shannon’s. Freaking. Inhaler.
Victory.
So for yet again a compelling flashsideways, a healthy dose of batshit-crazy Claire, advancement of Jacob’s plan, and, most of all, a Jack episode that doesn’t suck major Donkey Wheel, “Lighthouse” gets 4.5 Apollo Bars out of 5.
Next episode airs Tuesday, March 2 at 9/8c.
Theories & Questions from this episode here.
[LOST] 06.04 “The Substitute”
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I am with everybody who enjoyed this episode tremendously. As usual, Locke-centrism delivers, giving us a flashsideways reminiscent of the storytelling in the first few seasons and pulling back the curtain on a significant part of the show’s central mystery.
– –
The episode opens with alt-John Locke returning from the airport in the alt-2004 timeline. Sadly, he experiences technical difficulties with his handi-capable van and ends up lying helpless on a lawn while the sprinklers douse him.
Could have been worse. He could have been driving a Toyota.
Apparently, Locke’s obsession with his father’s abandonment hasn’t arisen in this timeline to tank his relationship with Helen. In fact, Helen suggests that they elope with his father in tow, meaning alt-Locke’s relationship with alt-Anthony Cooper is very different…and it implies Locke is paralyzed for a different reason. It’s one of those inevitabilities that will occur no matter the circumstances, like Aaron’s name. Another constant in both timelines is Locke’s fixation on proving his abilities. He’s still trying to go on his Walkabout and still demanding that no one tell him what he can’t do.
Another constant is that Randy Nations, Locke’s boss in both timelines, is a douche. This is confirmed by alt-Hurley, who may have still worked for him at Mr. Cluck’s before winning the lottery. Alt-Hurley is still a genuinely nice guy, but he seems to be enjoying his fortune a lot more in this timeline, freely giving alt-Locke an opportunity to find another job through his temp agency.
I was enjoying seeing the contrast between alt-Locke and the Locke-prime we came to know, but these turn of events make him even more interesting.
Back on the island in 2007-prime, we get to see traveling from the Smoke Monster’s perspective. I found this somewhat hilarious, but it’s still one of the cheesiest shot-gimmicks in the show.
When the Anti-Jacob tries to tempt Richard, the latter remains loyal to Jacob. Perhaps to a fault, as we find out that he knows less about the Island than we’re about to know at the end of the episode. While anti-Jacob promises transparency much like a politician, Richard is content to know that Smokey is bad and Jacob was good. This may all have to do with Richard’s past (most likely getting freed from slavery on the Black Rock and granted immortality by Jacob).
Look, man, I just want to be a performer, with my own trailer and make-up team.
While Richard’s loyalty is admirable, his panicky moments with Sawyer are a little sad. Richard was one of the few characteres who you could expect to be calm and collected. If he was worried, like when he realized who fake Locke was, you knew something was wrong. Now he’s running around the jungle like the White Rabbit, stripped of his supernatural superiority. Rest in peace, calm steward of the Others.
I’m glad we’re following the Ilana clique again. We get to see Ben weaving his web of half-truths as he converses with her. It’s also clear that Ilana holds a good chunk of the answers concerning Jacob and the Smoke Monster. She already knows more than she should (such as the fact that Jin and Sun are looking for each other). And she knows that Anti-Jacob is “stuck” as Locke. So he can either be the Smoke Monster or Flocke, no more Yemi’ing, or Alex’ing, or even Christian’ing, if we’re to believe that Christian was Smokey all along.
Also, I don’t know what her plans are with Jacob’s ashes, but I hope she’s not a fetishist.
Sun insists on burying the real John Locke. Through the magic of television, they hike from the statue to the original beach in one afternoon and we bid farewell to the body of John Locke, much as we did to Boone, Shannon, Libby, Steve (Scott?) etc. It’s not as touching as other funerals, since Terry O’Quinn is still acting in two roles, which is more than any of those characters, but it is moving to hear Ben give a eulogy.
Aw, you're ruining the suit!
“Weirdest damn funeral I’ve ever been to.” Haha, thank you, Frank. I’m glad he’s still around.
Speaking of Ilana and Jacob, is she aware that there’s a child version of him running around and trolling Smokey? Assuming it’s Jacob and not Aaron like half of us think it might be. What is up with that kid? He definitely raises the most questions for this episode. But I guess the show has to give us a sense that there’s still some supernatural force out there trying to interfere with Anti-Jacob’s gambit.
He's sort of like the bomb you become in Mario Kart when you lose all your balloons.
As I predicted, the Sawyer-Flocke scenes in this episode were some of the most entertaining, on several levels. It was excellent to see Sawyer drinking his troubles away to an old record (“Search and Destroy” by the Stooges). It took some alcohol to bring out the old, witty Sawyer, but he’s there and he’s welcome to stay.
The whiskey also seems to have made Sawyer unusually perceptive. If a guy who looked identical to Locke started acting a bit different, my first instinct wouldn’t be “you must be someone else using Locke’s image,” but I guess Sawyer’s finally starting to guess at Darlton’s tricks.
In alt-2004, Locke is fed up with the usual B.S. temp agency questions and leapfrogs the interviewer so that he can get to the point (I was wondering why she looked familiar and it’s because she’s the fake fortune teller in one of Hurley’s flashbacks). The supervisor is none other than Rose, making up for her lack of screentime in season 5. The constant in her life seems to be the terminal cancer, unfortunately, but it gives alt-Locke some perspective.
Why do I always have to be the one that makes sense on this damn show?
On the first day of his new job as a substitute teacher, we see a touching scene between alt-Locke and alt-Helen with pretty violin music by Michael Giacchino. It drives the point home that this Locke is somehow “saved” by his love with Helen, which gives him motivation to live his actual life, rather than solely seek escape.
I had a WTF moment when we see that alt-Ben Linus is, in fact, alive and well and is a nerdy history teacher. This messes up some of my understanding of what happened with The Incident, but I guess the writers couldn’t resist having some Michael Emerson in the flashsideways’s.
Back on Island-prime, Smocke gets ready to drop one of the big Answers. After a suspenseful cliff-dangling scene, he brings Sawyer to the cave, tossing out the white stone on the scales in a symbolic gesture. Stepping into the back, we see the List, scribbled all over the cavern walls with over 300 names, some familiar, some not. This is one of the biggest reveals of the show, ranking alongside the existence of Jacob and the nature of the Smoke Monster.
In our next episode of LOST Fear Factor, Smocke makes Sawyer eat a bucket of rancid boar guts.
I don’t remember any other time where LOST employed traditional “cut to scenes we’ve shown you before” technique in an episode. It’s a little insulting to hardcore fans, but I suppose it’s useful for casual viewers who are like “How did Jacob know which names to write? It’s not enough that he’s a supernatural being, duh dur dur.” It could also be a clue that what Flocke is saying isn’t entirely true.
At the end, we get an interesting partnership between the jaded Sawyer and the Anti-Jacob; his first recruit.
This episode had some great elements, including major mythological revelations and well-done character moments in the flashsideways storyline. Perhaps it wasn’t as tense in the action as other episodes have been and is more focused on pushing the plot forward than enjoying some subtleties, but it’s definitely an unforgettable turning point in the show.
“The Substitute” gets 4.5 out of 5 Apollo Bars.
MAJOR Questions/Theories/Implications
1. What are the Anti-Jacob’s Intentions?
Ilana says that the Smoke Monster is “recruiting” which implies a war. This is consistent with all the hints dropped over the past couple of seasons. My major question is how this war will ultimately be fought and what “victory” means for each side.
Anti-Jacob has thusfar given us a litany of motivations. He wants to find a loophole to kill Jacob. Check. (Except not really if there’s a chibi version of him running around?) He wants go home — Where is home? Off the island? But he also didn’t seem fond of the idea of “players” being brought to the Island in the first place. Does Jacob’s tendency to bring game pieces to the island impact Smokey’s ability to leave?
One thing I don’t believe Smokey on is the Island’s ultimate insignificance. That should be a major clue that he’s not being completely transparent with Sawyer. I side with people who think that the events on the Island are of the utmost importance and I think if Smokey gets his way, whatever his way is, that there will be a lot of suffering.
2. Is Jacob a Bad Guy?
I know a lot of people are convinced that we’re going to see the ol’ reversal pulled on us and find out that Jacob is the Big Bad and we should have been rooting for Smokey all along. This is more than a little cheap to me and it goes against good archetypal storytelling. It’s one thing to find out Severus Snape is a good guy. It’s another to find out we should have backed Voldemort all along.
Remember, Smokey has directly murdered people. Seth Norris, the pilot. Montand, Rousseau’s friend. And Mr. Eko, which is unforgivable. You could argue Jacob brought a lot more people to their doom by bringing them to the Island, but there’s a difference between murder and manslaughter.
I think, at best, Smokey has some interesting intentions which make sense to him. He may very well have been wronged by Jacob, but ultimately, I think Jacob is trying to save the greatest amount of people possible.
Keep in mind that everything Smokey tells Sawyer in the cave about Jacob can be applied to him. “When you were miserable and vulnerable, he came to you, manipulated you. Choices that you thought you made were never really choices at all.” So, if people are trying to fault Jacob for being manipulative, you should take a good look at the circumstances in this episode. Personally, I still believe Jacob tries to give people a choice like he tried to tell Ben in “The Incident.”
So I guess you could call me Team Jacob on this one, though I’m sure the Anti-Jacob has some intriguing reasoning of his own. By the end of the series, I’d like there to be evidence for both their cases.
And yes, I’m aware of the damn Twilight references.
3. What is the purpose of “The Game?”
….I lost.
Anyway, we’re aware that this whole show, we’ve been watching one side play another (light vs. dark). Smokey, using an ex-player as an icon, is telling one of the pieces, Sawyer, what his options are.
- Do nothing, see how it plays out, risk getting “crossed out”
- Accept the job and protect the island, but it’s “just a damn island”
- Leave. Quit the game.
What I’m having a hard time swallowing is why Jacob, an immortal being, would want to give up stewardship of the Island – especially to people like Jack or Sawyer. Several things said about that second option seem wonky to me. Also, if Sawyer were to accept option 2, how does he tell the Island that he accepts? Yell “Jumanji?”
Also, why would Jacob need a replacement if he’s been reborn….
4. Who is the blonde child?
The fact that Smokey doesn’t seem more upset and that there’s still some importance in keeping the remaining “Variables” alive, implies that Jacob as we knew him is dead. So who’s the kid that Anti-Jacob and Sawyer can see? A ghost? A new incarnation who isn’t up to full power?
If it is Jacob, maybe he’s stuck in puberty until he wins The Game. Maybe after having “died,” he can only exist in that form, but can’t take his place as the Island’s spiritual guardian again. Or it could not be Jacob at all.
Everyone seems to wonder if this isn’t a version of Aaron that we’re seeing. This isn’t a complete accident. We’ve been led to believe that Aaron bears some significance, what with the whole “raised by another” speech. However, considering how few episodes are left, it’d be tough to justify how Aaron-from-the-future got to the island, learned all the rules, and time traveled to mess up Smokey’s day. So, for now, odds are on some incarnation of Jacob.
Whoever it is, he lets us know that there are rules that the Monster can’t break, even after Jacob’s passing. One is “you can’t kill him,” which I assume means that Smocke can’t kill Sawyer or any of the other candidates…directly.
5. What happened after the Incident in the flashsideways timeline?
So I really did think Ben Linus didn’t exist in alt-2004. Why? Because I stupidly figured The Others would just sit and twiddle their thumbs when Richard Alpert knew that Jack was trying to set off a hydrogen bomb. At the time, Ben Linus was in the care of The Others and I figured only the people who got off the DHARMA sub survived.
But Ben Linus is alive and well in this timeline, which means he somehow got off the island.
Some people on the Internet seem to have trouble grasping what happened with the split timeline. Many claim it’s perfectly possible for Ben to be off the island, because he may have never come to the island in the first place in this reality. But that doesn’t make sense. The timeline split in 1977. Everything that happened before that, which includes Ben being brought to the DHARMA Initiative and Anthony Cooper conning Sawyer’s parents, still happened in this reality. This also means Ben was shot and revived in alt-2004 as well as 2007-prime. What the flashsideways are revealing are changes in the time between the nuke and Oceanic 815′s landing and, perhaps more importantly, the things that stayed the same.
So my main question is how long did it take for the Island to sink? Did the Others’ evacuation protocol leave the island at the bottom of the ocean? Or did they manage to get off the island right before the nuke set off whatever chain reaction that led to its submergence?
(Subquestion: What was it about this particular time travel trip that managed to make the timeline split? We know that Jack and company were briefly in the DHARMA Initiative in the prime-timeline, because pictures of them exist. Alpert-prime tells Sun that he saw them all die somehow. Is it just that in one timeline the nuke goes off when it doesn’t in another? I think I’ll have a further thought-out theory in the future).
My guess is we’ll find out more when we get to see Desmond, Eloise Hawking, and Faraday in the flashsideways.
6. The Numbers and the Candidates
Okay, so LOST played a big hand this episode with the concept of “The Candidates” and revealing that not all Losties may be created equal. But this leads to a lot of subquestions.
A. Is this relevant to the Valenzetti Equation? Is the Valenzetti Equation even canon?
Now, I love the concept of the Valenzetti Equation. I still believe that, when all is said and done, what the Losties are doing is no less than preventing the end of the world/humanity. But I think the fact that Damon and Carlton let this explanation for 4, 8, 15, 16, 23, 42 out of the bag so early means that it’s not the heart of the mystery behind LOST.
Damon very cavalierly explained what the numbers were as they related to the Equation in an interview with E!, close to when the show was going to reveal its own little gambit. I do think they’re playing a game with us. Yes, hardcore fans have known what the numbers meant for ages now…but that wasn’t the full story, and not even necessarily the most important part of it.
For example, they always made it clear that nobody could figure out why those were the Variables.
I suspect we won’t be hearing the words “Valenzetti Equation, nor the variables’ relation to doomsday foretellings on the show itself. But there will still be the option to reconcile what we see on the show with what we know from the ARGs. And I think that’s clever. It really would be extremely cheesy to get into all of that stuff on a show that has always been more about characters than sci-fi.
B. Why are the remaining candidates represented by the Numbers?
This gets into some confusion questions about causality.
Now the Numbers, whether referenced as part of the Equation or not, have been prominent throughout this point. They were broadcast by DHARMA until Rousseau changed the signal in 1988. They were on the blast door to the Swan. They were the number code to reset the magnetic field beneath the Swan. DHARMA was quite aware of the Numbers (and yes, Valenzetti). But was Jacob?
Because one of the two options here are that it’s a complete coincidence that the possible candidates correspond to a Number. And Jacob had no idea this would happen. That seems unlikely.
But it’s also strange to consider that Jacob knew about the Numbers and yet bothered to write over 300 names on the wall in the first place. If you knew that 4 was Locke, 8 was Reyes, 15 was Ford, 16 was Jarrah, 23 was Shephard, and 42 was Kwon, why would you bother with anyone else? I mean, there are tons of possibilities. Maybe the candidate shouldn’t be a variable from the Numbers. Maybe Jacob was hoping there would be other viable candidates.
After all, much as it pains me to say it, we still haven’t seen Kate’s name on the wall.
C. Which Kwon? Which Shephard?
This is a card the writers seem to be holding on to for a future episode. They left the Jin or Sun question ambiguous with Aldo’s statement at the end of “What Kate Does” (“he MAY be one of them). There’s also the fact that Jacob touched both Jin and Sun at their wedding. So doesn’t this imply that it’s either both or a union of both that fulfills the magical “42″ spot?
Personally, I would love to see Ji Yeon achieve that significance, though it would take some creative writing to bring her back into the story.
Also, I don’t think we’ve seen the last of on-island Christian Shephard either. I think both Jack and Kate were told that they weren’t “on the list” in season 3. These may been throw-away lines, but I think it leaves the door open for 23 to correspond to a different Shephard (hell, technically Aaron is a Shephard).
D. Where do the names come from?
Well, the short answer is from different groups that arrive on the island. Thus far, we seem to have confirmation that these include:
- Oceanic Flight 815
- The Kahana Freighter
- The U.S. Army team that dropped Jughead
- People who came to work for The Others
- The DHARMA Initiative
I wouldn’t be surprised if the Black Rock didn’t bring some candidates on it too.
Here’s Lostpedia’s list on all the names made out so far via screenshots.
Here are some names of note, all crossed out:
Mattingly, Jones, Rousseau, Brennan, Lacombe, Rutherford, Troupe, Pace, Littleton, Faraday, Lewis, Straume, Linus, Chang, Goodspeed, Pickett, Burke
Again, no mention of Austen or Lapidus for that matter. Also, Miles’ name is crossed out, but we know he’s alive. Claire may have been “claimed,” but she’s still walking around on the island. So what eliminates a candidate other than death? No Dawson or Lloyd either.
Also, there is clearly someone vital to the whole show missing.
Someone who could bust this whole thing wide open.
Perhaps, Candidate 108 is…
VINCENT!
Episode Predictions
Okay, so far, seasons 1 and 6 have been mirroring each other in pattern.
The first two hours were premieres. The end of the first hour of “LA X” showed Oceanic 815 landing. The end of the last hour of season 1, “Exodus,” flashbacked to all the main characters on the plane before it takes off. The first character-centric of season 1 was Kate’s “Tabula Rasa.” The first character-centric flashsideways episode was “What Kate Does.” This was followed by the Locke-centric “The Substitute” in season 6, which mirrors the progression to the Locke-centric “Walkabout” in season 1.
The episode after that in season 1 was Jack’s “White Rabbit.” Promos for next episode imply that Jack will be back for some whining and yelling in “The Lighthouse.”
So I’m going to predict….
- Season 6, Episode 6 will be about Jin & Sun
- Season 6, Episode 7 will feature flashsideways Charlie in some way
- In Sawyer’s flashsideways, we will meet flashsideways Juliet
- We will have a flashsideways that focuses directly on Claire
- Both Boone and Shannon will return in flashsideways in the middle of the season
- We will also see Michael and Libby around that time
- Flashsideways Desmond, Eloise, and maybe Faraday will play a part in the series finale
I guess it’s pretty obvious that this episode has me in full geek-out mode. I’m going to detox from LOST. See you all next week.
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[LOST] 6.01 “LA X”
So this week was the LOST Season 6 premiere and it was basically everything I could have hoped for and more. The following is a lengthy review followed by a list of questions/theories/whatnot.
Part 1
The premiere really was split cleanly into two separate episodes, so I’m reviewing each part separately.
As “LA X” opens, it seems that Jack and Faraday’s plan worked without a hitch. Oceanic 815 stays in the air and the island which was the source of many a misery is now composed of chunks and ruins at the bottom of the ocean. (Can a nuclear explosion do that? I suppose if you combine it with a pocket of supernatural magnetic energy.)
WHERE IS YOUR OTHER TOE?
Many of us saw the “what-if” scenario coming, but it didn’t make the scenes any less fascinating. It’s a pull on the nostalgia heart-strings to see Boone, Charlie, Cindy Chandler, and the Marshall again. It’s also interesting to note how much the Island changed characters like Jin and Locke. The latter is forced to lie to escape his personal prison and the former never learns to be less controlling to make his marriage to Sun work.
Personally, I figured that the nuke wouldn’t completely wipe out the events that had occurred involving Ben, Fake Locke, and Jacob, since that part of the story was too interesting to negate. So I agreed with my friend Dino’s parallel universe theory, which proved correct. What I didn’t expect was for the 1977 characters to get flung forward in time, essentially creating two Jacks, two Kates, two Sawyers, etc. That was the first mindscrew the episode subjected me to.
Sawyer grieves over Juliet and vows to fix the multiverse...or something.
Let’s call the alternate universe where Oceanic 815 doesn’t crash Alt-2004 and let’s call the regular timeline LOST-prime.
In LOST prime, there’s some overly dramatic tension over whether Sayid or Juliet will die. Unfortunately, that’s one of those moments where savvy fans know that Naveen Andrews is still part of the main cast and that Elizabeth Mitchell has commitments with V. So, at first, the scenes that pretend Juliet might have a shot seem silly. Especially when everybody temporarily forgets Sayid’s gaping gunshot wound to try to save the attractive blonde woman who fell several hundred feet, got crushed by piles of metal, set off a nuclear bomb with a rock, and was hurtled through time. But I guess since Sayid is Iraqi, that’s not as pressing. You’d think the script got temporarily hijacked by Fox News producers.
But, upon further reflection, I suppose it’s nice to have an Elizabeth Mitchell bridge between season 5 and season 6. This avoids the “and they never saw that character again” issue that often occurs when actors’ contracts change. It also proves to be a major plot point when Juliet, on death’s door, posthumously hints that, technically, the plan worked (or at least did something other than subject them to a final time flash).
One thing though, Juliet. As Snuggly pointed out, if you have something really important to tell someone as you’re internally hemorrhaging massive amounts of blood, don’t preface the really important message with “Listen to me. I have something important to tell you.” Just say it. But that’s neither here nor there.
The only lingering complaint with keeping Juliet alive for a couple of scenes was the underwhelming dramatic acting by Josh Holloway and Elizabeth Mitchell. The scene where Juliet lets go of Sawyer’s hand at the end of season 5 was one of the most emotional in the series and provided as good a sense of emotional closure to that relationship as you could get. Compared to that, this seemed slightly contrived, but…oh well. At least they got to make out one last time.
BRB, gonna fight Inara and some aliens.
In fact, Sawyer seems to be the weak point in this entire half of the premiere. He employs some trademark Jack logic when threatening to kill the Doc if Juliet dies. Because that’ll solve things. It’s particularly bad when you see him admit that he was full of hot air in Part 2. So the writers were just building up unnecessary tension in an already tense episode. I understand that the whole thing is to set up the inevitable Jack and Sawyer confrontation and have some juicy Teh Drama later in the season, but I’m not looking forward to it. I had my Jack and Sawyer fight. Sawyer kicked ass. I’m satisfied.
Back at Four-Toed Foot Statue, Anti-Jacob / Fake Locke is seriously setting himself up as a force to be reckoned with, especially when he reveals himself to be none other than the Smoke Monster itself. As far as LOST action goes, seeing Smokey beat up on Bram and his team was one of my favorite scenes. You can also tell Terry O’Quinn really enjoys playing a creepy villain like the Anti-Jacob.
Also, this justifies me hating the Smoke Monster for killing Mr. Eko.
Also, the Smoke Monster is a dirty racist.
In alt-2004, we’re treated to a scene of Sayid kicking down the bathroom door like a bad-ass and Jack saving Charlie again. I’m honestly confused by what Charlie was trying to do with that bag of heroin. Kill himself? Smuggle it? Get ultra-high? He doesn’t seem very grateful to Jack for saving his life, which implies suicide. But LOST fans know his talk of fatal destiny is bull, since he’s not due to die for another couple of months according to LOST-prime time.
I hope it’s not the last we see of Charlie, or Boone for that matter, but they probably won’t show up very consistently.
The flight did seem a tad light on original characters. However, I understand that it wouldn’t have worked logistically to bring back every original passenger of Flight 815, including the Tailies, Michael and Walt. This is especially true in Walt’s case, since he’d somehow be 16 in 2004…but wouldn’t that have been a massive twist?
No? No one cares about Walt? ‘Kay.
But, with Emile de Ravin back in the cast, why not show her on the flight? Was she actually not on it in this reality? We know she was at LAX after glimpsing her in Part 2, though. Curious…
The scene where Flight 815 lands safely in Los Angeles is one of the most beautifully scored in the series and has emotional weight when we get a look at what could have been, with all of its improvements and imperfections. Honestly, if you’re watching LOST and hoping to get some semblance of a happy ending, ironically, this is probably the best place to stop, even if it is a little cheap. After all the trouble on the island, all the talk about destiny and fate, these versions of the characters are freed from facing their psychological issues in such a violent fashion, moving on to fight their demons the way the rest of us do; ambling through mundane life, unsure of what it all means. Composer Michael Giacchino builds up a wonderful piece that could serve as a coda to the entire series and seeing that final glance between Jack and John Locke highlights that crucial relationship.
Hey...hey, maybe everything's gonna be all right.
In a strange sense, the end of Part 1 provides a feeling of closure. We know that these alternate characters aren’t done in the story by any means and that there are terrible things on the horizon, but for a moment there, you agree with Juliet. “It worked.” I, for one, am glad that this isn’t where it ends…but it’s an interesting place to take a breather before diving in to the final season.
Part 2
The second part of the premiere was less playing around with the subtleties of the alternate timeline and more moving the action forward
Part 2 opens with Jack and company trying to get Sayid some supernatural medical attention by bringing him to the Temple, a.k.a. the place near where Rousseau’s friend Montand lost his arm. I don’t know why Jin didn’t really hesitate at this idea, but sure enough, some mysterious Others abduct them. They’re taken to the long-referenced but never-before-seen Temple, where the faction of the Others that are fond of recreational drugs have been recreating Woodstock.
Two new Others are introduced, the hippie Lennon and the somewhat excessively harsh Japanese leader, Dogen.
LOST answers questions you weren't expecting, like what happened to Yoko Ono.
Dogen and the Temple Others are the latest batch of characters to be unnecessarily hostile and secretive. The motif runs a little old with LOST as they mainly act that way to make the episode longer and leave mysteries for later in the show. But I prefer these Others to the ensemble group of bad extras that comprise the Others that following Richard and Anti-Locke to the statue. These seem more like the traditional Others from the first two seasons — the threatening, wild community with spiritual connections to the Island. Also, major props to the writers for re-introducing Cindy Chandler-prime and Zach and Emma, the abducted children from the tail section. I always wondered what they were up to.
In alt-2004, Kate Scooby-Doo’s Edward Mars and then knocks him the hell out. She proves that LAX has terrible security loopholes, especially for 2004. She also hijacks the cab that happens to have Claire in it. Claire being my favorite female character, I’m a little peeved that she had a total of 20 seconds screen time, but I assume the next episode will feature her and Kate more heavily, given the title.
Are you starting to think this scene is a metaphor for the writers forcing her to come back to the show?...Nah.
Meanwhile, Jack can’t seem to catch a break, even in this reality. Christian Shephard’s body disappearing is another WTF moment that sharpens my curiosity. It also provides for an interesting Jack and Locke interaction. Despite the fact that Jack is not a man of faith, he seems receptive to Locke pointing out that his father and his father’s corpse are not the same thing. Jack, ever eager to fix problems, offers to give Locke a free consult about his spine, dropping the philosophical gem, “Nothing is irreversible.” This should mean more Locke and Jack interactions in the future.
In LOST-prime universe, Locke is dead and anti-Locke is shedding some light on his plans. Terry O’Quinn manages to give one of the creepiest looks I’ve ever seen on his face as he proclaims his desire to go back home. The entire scene is important to LOST as it’s the closet thing we get to a eulogy for poor John Locke-prime. It’s the sad bookend to “The Life and Death of Jeremy Bentham,” highlighting the failures of Locke’s life ending in Ben Linus’ final betrayal. Meanwhile, the new Locke is kicking Richard Alpert’s ass and bellowing at Ilana, Ben and the Others as if he were their leader all along.
At the temple, the Others accidentally drown Sayid.
Hey, man, med school was for squares, okay? How was I supposed to know holding a passed out dude underwater was dangerous?
Then they freak out about Anti-Jacob approaching and decide to shoot off a loud rocket to let Anti-Jacob know that they know, thus eroding any advantage they already had with their large quantities of ash.
We’re also treated to more tender Sawyer and Kate scenes, which I had hoped we were done with. Geez, Sawyer, Juliet’s body is still warm and you’re already cozying up with Freckles? Sick.
Jack-prime is sulking after failing to pull off a repeat of the impossible CPR for Sayid that he did for Charlie in “All the Best Cowboys Have Daddy Issues” five seasons ago. But that’s what this Jack does. That and also pick fights with people with weapons who outnumber him. Because this Jack has nothing to lose, you’d better watch out!
I prefer alt-Jack. If I had to pick one Jack to live, it would be him.
Hmm, a cut. I wonder if I should react completely disproportionately and put a lot of people's lives in danger?....Nah, that would be silly. What was I thinking?
Luckily for Jack-prime, Sayid comes back to life before he can get his ass kicked, much to Lennon’s surprise. Sayid himself appears to be shell-shocked after not breathing for a few hours. Again, it’s kind of silly to pretend-kill Sayid for the sake of tension just to turn his resurrection into a cliffhanger. But his temporary brush with death might just be one of the largest plot points in the show…
Overall, “LA X” was a solid premiere…perhaps the best one since the Pilot. It’s introduced an extremely original narrative structure to replace the old flashbacks and flashforwards and had a lot of easter eggs for the fans. The bittersweet idea of seeing how the characters lives would have played out if LOST had never happened is worth watching again and again for fans of the series. And with the disappearance of Christian’s body and Desmond’s mysterious appearance, we know that the alternate timeline is going to have some familiar supernatural occurrences down the road. Back in the prime-universe, the Temple seems to be a good stage for an Anti-Jacob showdown and hopefully a Jin and Sun reunion.
Despite some of the silly old motifs popping up and a severe under-use of Claire, this was a solid episode and really has me wishing I had the whole season to watch. I give “LA X,” the premiere of season 6, 4.5 out of 5 Apollo Bars.
Questions/Implications
1. What is a shark’s lifespan? If there’s a DHARMA-branded shark floating around the sunken island in the alternate universe, wouldn’t he have been branded over 30 years ago? Maybe the tattoo is genetic. Or maybe they simply made an immortal shark. I’ll go with that.
2. Desmond is clearly the first sign that things aren’t quite on the straight-and-narrow in alt-2004. For one thing, there’s the implication that he wasn’t really there in the first place and possibly just in Jack’s head. For another, we’ve been told for three seasons now that Desmond is special — Faraday tells him he can break the rules. So I’ll put my money on Desmond being a sort of link between alt-2004 and LOST-prime.
3. Juliet’s final thought is “it worked.” This is a clear implication that the two separate realities are still linked on some level, since Blondie has some insight into the events of alternate 2004. Some of her last words are “We should get coffee sometime. We can go dutch.” At first, you figure her synapses are firing randomly, leading to romantic babble. But my assumption is that we’ll hear some version of Juliet say those words again…
4 So the Smoke Monster doesn’t like rings of ash. This sheds light on why Ilana freaked out when she saw the broken ash ring around “Jacob’s Cabin.” Perhaps what was once Jacob’s hang out spot was compromised, leading to its use by Smokey. I don’t remember if we saw the ring being broken in the series itself, but we know Smokey’s been active for quite some time, before the Losties even crashed on the island. So this might mean that the ghostly presence that shocked Locke, Ben and Hurley and the Christian-Claire apparation that led Locke to move the island in time might have been the work of Anti-Jacob all along.
....Maybe I'll just shut up about the Smoke Monster, lest he come at me through a sewer grate.
5. Hurley being lucky in the alternate reality may seem like a silly red herring put in there to unsettle us, but it has larger implications for the show. Hurley won the lottery in the prime universe through use of the Numbers (4, 8, 15, 16, 23, 42). However, with the island nuked 30 years ago, there’s no guarantee that Hurley even knew what the numbers were this time and used different ones to win this prize. Or, the Numbers may simply have lost their “curse” in this reality.
Hardcore LOST fans know that the Numbers are the variables in the Valenzetti Equation, which predicts the end of the world. Does their lack of presence or lack of power in this universe imply a change in the Equation?
WHAT WAS UP WITH LIBBY? DARLTON, LEAVE A COMMENT ON THIS WEBZONE.
6. I realize most of the absences on the plane are due to casting logistics. For example, I read that they planned to have Shannon on the plane, but Maggie Grace had other commitments. But I’ve also heard that Darlton have worked this into the plot somehow, though they could always just be trolling Jimmy Kimmel. Still, I wonder what did happen to Ana Lucia, Eko, Michael, and, of course, Libby.
Eko, for one, might have had the butterfly effect change his course. On the wild assumption that his brother Yemi’s body being on the island was responsible for drawing him to Oceanic 815 , then perhaps he never ended up on that plane in alt-2004. Perhaps he never became a fake priest. What little we know about Libby’s past may also have changed. Maybe she never gave Desmond the boat that he apparently didn’t use to sail across the world. Maybe she wasn’t in the mental institution. So maybe she wasn’t stalking Hurley on the plane (I mean, that’s one theory of what she was doing there). Maybe it doesn’t matter and I’m reading too much into it.
Also, speaking of missing characters, did Faraday realize that the nuke would essentially destroy the entire island? Because that would mean that Eloise Hawking is a goner…which would mean that Faraday himself ceases to exist in alt-2004. So, congrats, you may have saved Charlotte, but you sure as hell made sure that you’ll never get with her again.
7. The book Hurley finds near Montand’s corpse is Fear and Trembling by Soren Kierkegaard. I skimmed it for Philosophy of Religion a couple of semesters ago. Basically, it’s a really confusing book that uses the allegory of Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice his son Isaac to explore the true meaning of faith. We know LOST is full of biblical influences, so, for what it’s worth…
8. Okay, seriously, what is the deal with Christian? Is he so über-ghost-weird that he can’t exist in alt-2004? Has he been working for Smokey or Jacob? Maybe they honestly misplaced him and he ended up on a flight to Istanbul.
9. So why were some Others at the Temple and other Others with Richard? It seems the Temple Others are more aware of what’s going on and have a stronger connection to Jacob. My bet is that Dogen outranked Ben Linus himself…Ben may not have known Dogen even existed.
10. Sun is told pretty clearly that the only way to help Jin is to admit to knowing some English. She insists she only knows Korean. So Sun is either extremely committed to her lie or neglected to learn English in this reality. My money is on the latter, though what significance this has on the parallel dimensions is beyond me.
11. Well, it’s pretty clear that Richard Alpert was a slave on the Black Rock, the ship that was seen approaching the island when we first saw Jacob and the Man in Black talk.
12. Okay, so the major question is, why did Sayid have to live? My initial theory had to do with my theory on the Valenzetti Equation and the human variables. Basically, I figured Jacob needed everyone that he “touched” before coming to the Island to be present to win at this strategy game he’s been playing with the Man in Black. The prevailing theory among fans, though, is that Jacob took the opportunity to possess Sayid’s body while he was a vegetable. This would mean a Locke-Sayid final confrontation and I’m not sure how I feel about that. It seems a little too obvious for LOST, but it’s still an interesting possibility and certainly Jacob had some sort of hand in Sayid coming back to life.
Whoa...that's how it ends?
The next episode is called “What Kate Does” and airs Tuesday, February 9 at 8/7c.
The Top 23 episodes of the first 5 seasons of [LOST]
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Lost Season 6 starts really soon and I’ve been marathoning episodes which led to this list, but I have no time to give it a grandiose intro, I have to get to a TV!
——
Well….that premiere was….a lot to digest. But it was awesome.
Anyway, I compiled this list. What do you think?
THE TOP 23 EPISODES OF THE FIRST FIVE SEASONS OF LOST
23. The Life and Death of Jeremy Bentham
Locke-centric episodes appear often on this list and that may be because he is the best character in Lost. The seventh episode of the fifth season succeeds in exploring the range of Locke’s character, from all-powerful Christ-figure to emotionally wrecked failure. It highlights the struggle that has defined the character throughout the entire series — Locke’s need to be special.
In this episode-long flashback, John tries to convince the Oceanic 6 to return to the island and set things right and is rebuffed at every turn. In a key scene, Kate plants doubt in Locke’s mind about his progress since crashing on the island and assuming his supposed destiny.
The episode is made more tragic when seen after the season finale and we realize that we may have seen the final moments of the character John Locke as we knew him.
It also finally answers the Matthew Abaddon question raised in the first episode of season four….though that turned out to be somewhat anticlimactic.
What the episode is truly missing is the old Lost narrative framing devices that bring complexity to the storytelling. As it is, it’s a straightforward television episode that fills in some holes in the plot. But for a fan of John Locke like myself, it’s certainly an episode worth re-watching.
22. LaFleur
“LaFleur” brought Sawyer back from a cartoon redneck to a full-fledged character. It sets up the unique situation of the Left Behinds becoming trusted members of the Dharma Initiative and gives us our first look at Juliet and Sawyer’s relationship. The episode begins with our first look at the mysterious statue, but really kicks off when we find out that the LeFleur character that DHARMA security seems to revere so fearfully is none of than James Ford himself. The rest of the episode flashes back and forth revealing how the Left Behinds ran into DHARMA in the first place. Throughout this, we get to see the evolution of the character from the lost, freshly heartbroken black sheep of the Lost family to the secure and confident family man who is about to have his world shaken by Kate’s return.
21. Ji Yeon
Sun and Jin usually don’t get particularly interesting episodes in the series, but I suppose I’m not the correct demographic for episodes that focus heavily on romance. This season 4 episode, however, is not only one of the best Sun & Jin episodes, it’s one of the best of the series.
“Ji Yeon” is set in a tense part of season 4 — Sayid and Desmond are being held captive on the Kahana freighter while the beach-Losties anxiously wait for news of their rescue. To comfort Sun, Jin looks toward the birth of their baby, showing a sweet, caring side that was hardly noticeable in season 1.
The romance is rocked after Jin finally learns about Sun’s affair (flashbacked in season 2). After a fishing trip with veteran husband, Bernard, Jin learns a valuable lesson about marriage and tearfully communicates his forgiveness and understanding, representing a huge step for the character.
The fascinating parts of the episode are the “flashforwards” which display Sun giving birth off the island and Jin running around in search for a toy panda to bring to the hospital. Jin’s flashes are comedic and sweet…until the episode reveals that the scenes featuring him are flashbacks. Sun’s flashforwards eventually disclose that Jin was somehow lost on the island, in one of the saddest moments of the series.
Thus far, it is the only episode to combine flashbacks and flashforwards in such a manner. I suppose it’s a trick that could only really work once, but it was original and brought some of the heaviest emotional weight to the Sun and Jin storyline.
20. Maternity Leave
I love Claire. So I may be biased in including two of her centric episodes on this list. But at least I’m objective enough to admit that “Par Avion” was awful.
“Maternity Leave” is notable for being Claire’s only second season episode and the first to include character-centric flashbacks limited to on-island happenings (the next was Michael’s “Three Minutes,” though the series had already explored “The Other 48 Days” for the entire Oceanic 815 tail section). It finally explains what happened to Claire after she was kidnapped by Ethan in season 1 and highlights Claire in all her maternal determination. The entire episode is one of Lost‘s “Girl Power” episodes, featuring the adventuring antics of Claire, Kate, and Rousseau.
Looking back on it, viewers are reminded of the Great Sickness macguffin that was looming in season 2. Personally, I think it would’ve made for a better plot device than “The Others run a secret small island” in season 3, but Lost can’t mirror all of our expectations.
19. Not in Portland
“Not in Portland” did many things for Lost, the most important of which was end that awful stretch of episodes that marred the beginning of the third season. ABC and Darlton both screwed up in creating the semi self-contained “mini-season” which aired in the fall and basically should have been called “Days of Our Lives Spent Torturing Each Other on Hydra Island.” This episode finally kicked the season into gear by getting Kate and Sawyer out of captivity, throwing some mythology tidbits to the fans, and giving us a reason to care about Juliet.
It’s Juliet’s first flashback episode and it makes her much more sympathetic. Up to this point, she’s just been this vaguely frustrating piece of eye candy that gums up the process of finding out who The Others really are. More importantly, we get evidence that the writers haven’t forgotten about the mysteries of the Lost universe with Room 23, a research facility that seems to be focused on Jacob, time, and space.
We also meet Karl, who was kind of annoying, but after what happened to him in season 4, you kind of feel nostalgic for the guy. That was rough.
18. Dave
Hurley is awesome and every episode featuring him is worth watching. But of all the Hurley-centric episodes, “Dave” is one of the best explorations of Hurley’s character and the highlight of his relationship with the mysterious Libby.
Throughout the episode, Hugo has visions of his old imaginary friend, Dave, who taunts him and shakes the recent confidence he found through dieting and getting to know Libby. The revelation that Dave was imaginary was a classic Lost blindside, as was the suggestion that the entire island existed as Hurley’s delusion. But the giant bombshell was finding out that Libby was also a patient at Hurley’s mental institution…a five-second scene raising questions that never quite got resolved.
But we get to see Hurley kiss a chick, so that makes up for it.
17. Cabin Fever
The next John Locke episode on the list centers around the character’s youth. No story of a messiah is complete without witnessing his birth and Lost delivers this dramatically. Most interestingly, we see the moment when Richard Alpert first tries to determine Locke’s destiny and foreshadow the upcoming rocky road.
“Cabin Fever” also features the unlikely trio of Hurley, Locke, and Ben. After Locke talks to Christian, the events of season’s 4 finale are set into motion with the revelation that Locke’s task is nothing less than to move the island.
16. Outlaws
One of the most interesting aspects to Sawyer is his backstory, centering around his search for vengeance. “Outlaws” is one of the shining examples of season one’s character-centric episodes. Through flashback, we discover some of the darkness in Sawyer’s past. On the island, the episode makes surprising use of a boar as metaphor and we’re treated to several shots of Sawyer making an ass of himself. “Outlaws” does a good job of humanizing James Ford and giving the character enough weight to make him an indispensable mainstay of the series.
15. The Shape of Things to Come
Episodes centered on Ben Linus are always some of the highest quality of the series. This is the second time we’re treated to an episode based on the conniving villain’s perspective and it’s chilling to see events unfold on the island in the future.
It’s one of the most high-octane episodes of the series featuring the attack of the Kahana mercenaries on the Barracks, complete with huge explosions and the smoke monster. It’s also one of the most revelatory of the flashforwards, showing us Ben’s first moments off the island, his manipulation of Sayid, and his threat to Widmore. The danger to Penny Widmore creates a tension that lasts until season 5.
The most emotional moment is the death of Alex, as Ben Linus looks on, lying through his teeth about his feelings. It’s sad, because Alex was cute and the last remaining bit of Rosseau we had left. But it gives Michael Emerson some meat to chew on with his acting chops and makes Ben’s character much more complex and sympathetic…aspects that will be constantly revisited and reversed throughout the series.
14. Orientation
“Orientation” encapsulates most of the addictive mystery of the second season of Lost with the introduction of the DHARMA orientation video, an explanatory tutorial which manages to raise more questions about the Swan station than we had before. Key parts of the series are introduced with this video: What was the Incident? Who’s that Marvin Candle dude? Why was this island overrun by hippies?
It also features some good Locke flashback sequences and introduces us to Katey Segal’s Helen, a cougar Futurama fans may recognize as the voice of Leela.
13. The Man from Tallahassee
This episode is awesome for two reasons.
1) You finally find out how Locke lost the use of his legs.
2) There’s a giant submarine explosion.
‘Nuff said.
12. The 23rd Psalm
Mr. Eko is a character that should not be dead. He was responsible for at least 10% of Lost‘s awesome-ness and that’s a large share of awesome. Unfortunately, Adewale had other show business expenditures to take care of and so the character was unceremoniously offed in a confusing fashion in season 3. That scene mirrored a superior one in this season 2 episode, where we find out about Eko’s violent past and the spiritual evolution he’s experienced since crashing on the island.
For being the first Eko-centric episode, featuring him staring down the smoke monster and not dying, and including one of the best flashbacks, “The 23rd Psalm” is an excellent episode.
11. Flashes Before Your Eyes
This is one of two Desmond-centric episodes on my list and while Desmond is an awesome character in his own right, it’s his time traveling experience that makes his episodes especially great. Desmond fans will cry sacrilege for failing to include “Live Together, Die Alone” on the list and while that is a solid episode, “Flashes Before Your Eyes” explores Desmond’s past and his relationship with Penny in a more entertaining fashion (also includes less stupid Jack moments).
It’s a unique flashback episode since it presents an uninterrupted flash featuring a Desmond fully conscious of the events of the future. It’s also our first look at Eloise Hawking, a key player in the Lost chess game who brings up one of the best philosophical questions of the series: Is a man fated to certain destinies or does he have free will?
That question’s still on the table and it was this episode that served it up.
10. The Incident
“The Incident” was the end to a shaky season which moved away from the “flashback-flashforward” narrative in favor of more conventional television tropes. However, it introduced the highest stakes in the series yet as Jack and company debated setting off a nuclear bomb and John Locke proceeded in his mission to kill Jacob himself, who, by the way, was finally revealed.
Though it was full of enough soap opera moments to make your eyes fall from their sockets, the introduction of Jacob and the mind-blowing final scene secure this as one of the top 10 episodes.
9. Exodus
The first season’s finale was full of hope and, ultimately, despair. Sawyer, Michael, Jin and Walt finally manage to shove off the island while Locke and company get the hatch open. We get to see flashbacks for everyone, including the recently deceased Boone. But, of course, the season leaves us with huge cliffhangers when Walt gets kidnapped by the Others and when they blast the hatch open with no indication of what lies at the bottom.
And so the addiction takes hold.
8. Deus Ex Machina
This is one of my personal favorites and it’s hard not to put it higher on the list. It’s the first episode that really shows some of Locke’s lingering weaknesses and his fear of becoming a crippled nobody again. It’s also the episode where Boone falls in the Nigerian biplane and first makes contact with the tail section. As Locke is ready to give up for the first time, he stops Desmond from killing himself (or so we find out in season 2) and Locke’s faith is restored. It’s one of my most memorable episodes for season one.
7. Through the Looking Glass
This season 3 finale had a lot of nail-biting action and one of the most touching death scenes from the series – the drowning of Charlie Pace. And while it’s exciting to see Jack finally make contact with someone of the island, the face-melting revelation that the flash we were seeing was the first flashforward propelled this episode into classic territory.
6. Raised by Another
The episode where we find out Claire’s pregnant past as she’s hunted down by Ethan is probably the first hook that had me marathoning the series. It helps that I had the beginnings of a crush on Emile de Ravin and that the implications of Aaron’s special significance were crazy-intriguing. This episode had all the elements of a great episode — mystery, action, and excellent characterization.
5. The Constant
“The Constant” is a huge fan favorite and for good reason. It involves a new form of flashing back and forth and truly starts to make time travel a viable option for the series. At its heart, it’s one of the most romantic episodes of the series, further displaying Desmond and Penny’s devotion to each other and throwing fans a bone by having them finally communicate, albeit briefly. It also features Daniel Faraday heavily, who became a great addition to the show.
4. The Man Behind the Curtain
This episode is notable for being the first that explores Ben Linus’s past and also giving fans a huge revelation about the conflict between the DHARMA Initiative and The Others. It’s always a great episode to go back to and sets up some of what we know of DHARMA for season five. It also makes it clear why Michael Emerson was such a great addition to the cast.
3. There’s No Place Like Home
I don’t think there’s any season finale that had me more riveted than season 4′s. Flashing forward to the first days of the Oceanic 6′s rescue and finally discovering what happened to them and other favorite characters was tense, exciting, and fulfilling. It also still managed to leave us with burning questions that made season 5 such a breath of fresh air. Hands down my favorite season finale.
2. Walkabout
I think this is typically the episode where newcomers do a double take at the show. At first it seems like it’s simply a high-quality survival story, like Survivor without the ugly nudity. But Locke’s first flashback reveals the writers’ ability to play intricate games with the episodes and hints at some larger themes in the show’s progression. If you want to breed a Lost fan, you have to show them “Walkabout.”
1. Pilot
Amazingly, in five seasons of gripping plot, unsurpassed characterization, and grade-A production values, no episode has been able to top the reign of the Pilot. From the very first moment, viewers want to see the story unfold and start to care for these seemingly random group of characters. It’s an episode that you want to revisit again and again and again if only to revisit the nostalgia of first witnessing Lost. Truly a work of genius.
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Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission [Objection!]
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In a move that further puts us on the track toward Corporate Personhood outweighing normal personhood, the Supreme Court of the United States has voted to strike down the part of the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law which restricted political broadcast advertisements funded by corporations, labor unions and advocacy groups.
Pictured above: Several buttheads.
Subject: Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission
U.S. Supreme Court case decided January 21, 2010
Repeals a provision of the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act that restricts political ads on broadcast networks funded by corporations, unions, and advocacy groups
Overturns previous Supreme Court decisions: Austin v. Michigan Chamber of Commerce and McConnell v. FEC, which had upheld the restriction on corporate financing of political speech
Majority opinion: Associate Justice Anthony Kennedy
Joined by: Chief Justice John Roberts, Associate Justices Antonin Scalia, Samuel Alito, and Clarence Thomas (Parts I-III)
Dissented: Associate Justices John P. Stevens, Sonia Sotomayor, Stephen Breyers, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg
Links: Wikipedia – Citizens United v. FEC
Supreme Court of the United States – Opinion of the Court, Citizens United v. FEC
Liz Sidoti, the Associated Press – Analysis: Winners, Losers in Supreme Court Ruling
Reuters Article by James Vicini:
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Corporations can spend freely to support or oppose candidates for president and Congress, the Supreme Court ruled on Thursday in a landmark decision that allows massive sums to be spent to influence future elections.
The 5-4 ruling split the high court along conservative and liberal lines. It was a defeat for the Obama administration and supporters of campaign finance laws who said that ending the limits would unleash a flood of corporate money into the political system…
…
Writing for the majority, Justice Anthony Kennedy said the limits violated constitutional free-speech rights.
“We find no basis for the proposition that, in the context of political speech, the government may impose restrictions on certain disfavored speakers,” he wrote.
In his sharply worded dissent, Justice John Paul Stevens wrote, “The court’s ruling threatens to undermine the integrity of elected institutions across the nation.”
The justices overturned Supreme Court precedents from 2003 and 1990 that upheld federal and state limits on independent expenditures by corporate treasuries to support or oppose candidates….
The ruling will almost certainly allow labor unions to spend more freely in political campaigns also and it posed a threat to similar limits that had been imposed in about half of the country’s 50 states.
The top court struck down the part of the federal law that restricted broadcast advertisements for or against political candidates right before elections that are paid for by corporations, labor unions and advocacy groups…..
The court’s conservative majority, with the addition of Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito, both Bush appointees, previously voted to limit or strike down parts of the law designed to regulate the role of money in politics and prevent corruption.
The court’s four liberals, including its newest member, Justice Sonia Sotomayor, who was appointed by Obama, dissented.
Some dry dude from the Associated Press sums up the implications in 2.5 minutes:
A History
So the suit was brought to court by a pleasant group called Citizens United.
Citizens United really hates Democrats. And they really hated Hillary Clinton, as evidenced by this trailer for their “documentary,” Hillary: The Movie.
“She’s deceitful, she’ll make up any story, lie about anything, as long as it serves her purpose at the moment,” says one of the haters in the trailer.
Sounds like he described every major political candidate in the United States. But I digress.
Citizens United, also the group behind such Academy Award worthy documentaries as ACLU: At War with America and Ronald Reagan: Rendezvous with Destiny, wanted to air some promos for this movie on broadcast networks. And it happened to be around primary season that they wanted these to air. And they were so intent on spreading their art, that they were willing to pay broadcasters to carry it (that’s like the opposite of selling out…buying out?).
Enter the big bad Federal Election Commission which stops Citizens United from running their promo ads for the film on the grounds that this type of speech conflicted with campaign finance federal law. Basically, since the movie is reportedly partially financed by corporate funds and the ads themselves lacked a statement of who paid for them, Hillary couldn’t be advertised or broadcast 30 days prior to a primary election. It could be shown in theaters and sold on DVD and such…it just couldn’t be advertised on the public airwaves in such a way, since it was clearly a statement about who not to vote for.
Citizens United sued the Federal Election Commission at the U.S. District Court of the District of Columbia. The court looked at the case, pretty handily determined that the ads ran afoul of McCain-Feingold and ruled in favor of the FEC.
But this wouldn’t stop Citizens United in their quest to influence indecisive voters.
Their appeal went to the Supreme Court where the most conservative members of the court decided that the free speech rights of non-persons were being threatened.
The Opinion
The full Supreme Court opinion, including majority opinions and dissents, can be found here.
The majority opinion was written by the ostensibly right-leaning moderate Associate Justice Anthony Kennedy, who decided to put on his “think of the poor large business special interests!” hat for this decision.
The First Amendment provides that “Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom of speech.” Laws enacted to control or suppress speech may operate at different points in the speech process…..
….The law before us is an outright ban, backed by criminal sanctions. Section 441b makes it a felony for all corporations—including nonprofit advocacy corporations—either to expressly advocate the election or defeat of candidates or to broadcast electioneering communications within 30 days of a primary election and 60 days of a general election….
…Section 441b’s prohibition on corporate independent expenditures is thus a ban on speech. As a “restriction on the amount of money a person or group can spend on political communication during a campaign,” that statute “necessarily reduces the quantity of expression by restricting the number of issues discussed, the depth of their exploration, and the size of the audience reached.” Buckley v. Valeo, 424 U. S. 1, 19 (1976) (per curiam)….
….The right of citizens to inquire, to hear, to speak, and to use information to reach consensus is a precondition to enlightened self-government and a necessary means to protect it.
Keyword: CITIZENS!
A corporation is not a citizen! A PAC is not a citizen! Citizens United, though they are cleverly named for just such a bonehead opinion, is not a citizen. They are entities created by citizens to accomplish certain goals and should always be subject to the general wellbeing of the populace. We shouldn’t be the ones who live in their world, THEY should have to answer to US.
And you know what our alleged tool to create standards that hold them accountable is?
It’s supposed to be CONGRESS!
Such as the Congress that passed the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act which interfered with this type of speech in the first place. It’s perfectly constitutional, because it’s not a CITIZEN being muzzled. It’s just a partisan political group with corporate backing. Conservatives like to point to the Founding Fathers. Well, I’m pretty sure the Founding Fathers weren’t writing the Bill of Rights with the East India Company in mind.
"George, do you think we should make it more clear that this applies to corporate entities too?" -- "Nah, they'll get it."
By Kennedy’s logic, isn’t it unconstitutional that I can’t just send in a videotape of myself giving the finger to a picture of Dick Cheney to a station and have no guarantee that they’ll air it? Obviously, the FCC is infringing on my First Amendment rights because I can’t wave my bare ass in the face of millions of viewers with “PALIN” on one cheek and “2012″ on the other.
My understanding was that I have the right to hold up a sign saying “Palin Sucks” or “Go Green: Recycle Congress” anywhere I want without the federal or state government getting in my way. Citizens United has a right to put up a huge projection screen on public property and show photoshopped pictures of Hilary Clinton having sex with Satan as far as I’m concerned. But when it comes to the airwaves managed by one corporation who essentially sells its adspace to the highest bidders, we’re not talking about that type of case anymore. This is a jurisdiction that the government has meddled with, often times out of necessity, since the medium’s inception. The only logical recourse is that the FCC is unconstitutional too, so I can go and claim some radio space and just air the word “FUCK” on endless loop.
I wasn’t feeling oppressed by limitations on partisan hackery. I don’t think your average Joe was clamoring for MORE baseless, unaccountable political ads on his TV. I don’t really see how this is in the public interest.
Kennedy goes on to say that the ads couldn’t have been aired anyway, because they still needed a statement attached disclosing who was behind the political ad. On this part, the liberal Justices jumped on board while Scalia’s clique righteously dissented. They then went on with their business of giving Justice Sotomayor n00b swirlies in the Supreme Court toilets.
The Consequences
Many liberals and progressives are decrying this as the end of integrity in political campaigns, to which I respond:
What integrity?
It’s no secret that our politicians are already bought out by powerful interests. There’s a reason why Ron Paul and Dennis Kucinich get laughed out of political races by the media. At this point, Obama can shake his fist at insurance companies and bankers all he wants and the entities just blink at him unphased, because they know that he doesn’t believe in anything necessary to actually hurt them. So what we’re complaining about here is that our already-corporately-mandated bag of choices is going to be further determined by who has the richest corporate interest on his side. And it was headed that way anyway, campaign finance reform or no.
My primary concern isn’t this ruling but the precedent some idiot Justice in the future might take from it. The idea that corporations are, on one level, equal with a citizen of the United States, which makes them superior because a citizen doesn’t have the advantage of a public stock market price (yet). When push comes to shove, future Supreme Courts are going to have to face the decision of either overturning this decision or simply handing all remaining power to our corporate overlords who have obviously just been fighting for civil rights for centuries.
"I HAVE A DREAM! That all of Skynet's children can exterminate humans TOGETHER!"
It’s coming. Get ready.
We’re moving!
Hey, blog faithful.
Just a quick note to let you know that I’ve claimed a domain, installed WordPress and have exported this blog to its new home. From now on, the latest updates shall be posted to my new home:
Let me know what you think!
To truth.
Founder of Taco Bell dies at 86 [Notable obituaries]
My last post before school starts will be to note the passing of an influential man in my life.
Article by the Associated Press.
Glen W. Bell Jr., an entrepreneur best known as the founder of the Taco Bell chain, has died. He was 86.Bell died Sunday at his home in Rancho Santa Fe, according to a statement posted Monday on the Taco Bell Web site….
….Bell launched his first restaurant, called Bell’s Drive-In, in 1948 in San Bernardino after seeing the success of McDonald’s. His restaurant sought to take advantage of Southern California’s car culture by serving hamburgers and hot dogs through drive-in windows.
The World War II veteran next helped establish Taco Tias in Los Angeles, El Tacos in the Long Beach area, and Der Wienerschnitzel, a national hot dog chain.
Bell launched Taco Bell in 1962 in Downey after cutting ties with his business partners and quickly expanding around Los Angeles.
He sold the first Taco Bell franchise in 1964. In 1978, Bell sold his 868 Taco Bell restaurants to PepsiCo for $125 million in stock.
Taco Bell is now owned by Yum! Brands and is the largest Mexican fast-food chain in the nation, serving more than 36.8 million consumers each week in more than 5,600 U.S. locations.
Bell is survived by his wife, Martha, three sisters, two sons and four grandchildren.
A private funeral is planned.
Now, clearly, Taco Bell is not a particularly healthy place to eat. Nor is it somewhere that you should frequently patron if you stand for supporting local foods, environmentalism & sustainability, or the dignity of Hispanics in the United States. But, despite the egregious sins of Yum!, I’ve always had a soft spot for the Bell.
For starters, it’s got the best deals. I’ve always thought fast food items should cost less than a dollar. And their value menu has many edible items at around the 80 cent mark. They also have a mean steak quesadilla. And the idea of providing tacos as a side to more tacos has always tickled my fancy.
...I mean, my bowels can take a little bit of suffering, right?
So, today will be a special occasion in which I walk up to Taco Bell and commemorate the life of Glen W. Bell Jr., in a misguided attempt to capture some of the simplicity of my high school years, where I didn’t realize that most of my food choices are harmful to everyone and everything.
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