Category Archives: Ten Reasons Why I Love Lost

Lost – There’s No Place Like Home (3)

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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)

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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: Confirmed Dead

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Taking a cue from Masticator, it seems right to post about last week’s incredible episode of Lost on the day that the next episode is aired. It’s even more right to praise that episode following the great news that that pesky strike is over and more Lost is being promised. Unfortunately it’s not the full season fans were hoping for, with only five more until the end of the season, but the good news is that we will get those missing three at some point in the future. They might not fit into the season schedule, from the way Carlton Cuse was talking in that interview. Whatever. More Lost is fine by me.

Especially if it’s of the quality of Confirmed Dead, which might not be my favourite ever episode, but is still one of the best and most shocking hours yet. All of my Reasons To Love Lost were present and correct, especially the WTF quotient. Most amazing of all is Miles’ ghostbusting abilities, which for a moment made me think the show had gone too far before I realised that even though Cuse and Lindelof have stressed that everything in the show has a scientific explanation, the show has plenty of instances of what could be seen to be hauntings. If there are scientific island-based explanations for the “hauntings” we’ve seen so far (visitations by dead people, Jacob’s appearance, the mysterious whispers), then there might be one for the haunting that Miles investigated. Whatever the secret here is, it’s not breaking the rules of the show, and it leads to some amazing story possibilities.


One other great ??? moment came when Daniel Faraday, the nervy physicist played by an almost tolerable Jeremy Davies, comments that the light doesn’t scatter right (AICN’s Herc seems to have really loved the comment). It seemed apt, as this week director Stephen Williams pushed the show into even more glorious visual territory than before (and it looked pretty amazing even then), and that’s kind of the direction I want to approach Confirmed Dead.


From the FX-heavy opener, beginning underwater before moving into the air, to the litany of revelations and plot twists in the final act, the episode barely paused for breath. While previous seasons spent weeks setting up plot threads, this week we were introduced to four new characters, and given a peek into their lives. I liked all of them instantly, even Faraday, but with special mention to the wonderfully snarky Miles, filling in for the now tortured Sawyer as island bitchking.


As you can see from that photo, the castaways now have a helicopter to play with, though whether it will be able to move around freely is debatable (as I ranted last week, helicopters don’t do so well above the island). Note also that Stephen Williams was using the island vistas to great effect, though his most incredible work came early on in the episode, his director of photography Cort Fey capturing an incredible image of Locke pondering his future on the island.


Williams has been responsible for some of the best episodes yet (Adrift, Enter 77, Not In Portland), and Fey was the camera hero who photographed The Man Behind The Curtain. Confirmed Dead represents their best work on the show, possibly of their entire careers, with beautifully crisp images throughout. As I mentioned earlier, Faraday’s comment seemed to resonate throughout the episode, with the recurring red light motif, introduced this episode in several ways, most notably the flashing transponders attached to the rescuers.


It reminds me of the repeated instances of red lights appearing throughout Grant Morrison’s Invisibles, showing up as a warning to the protagonists that they are not to proceed any further. Eventually the green light appears and humanity moves onto a higher level of consciousness, and one wonders if a similar thing is going to happen here.

Miles’ exorcism featured another unusual lighting moment as he sat in the murdered boys room and the camera dollied towards him. Light sneaks in through a gap in the curtains above him, and a spectrum of colour flashes over his face as he talks to the boy’s ghost. With the comments about light later in the episode it seems fair to see it as being an intentional choice on Williams and Fey’s part, and reminded me of the soul effect from Wes Craven’s underrated horror thriller The Serpent And The Rainbow. (Whenever Cathy Tyson and Bill Pullman shatter a jar containing a zombie’s soul, a rainbow of light rushes upwards).


I also liked that even in this dark room the light could burst in. Most of the episode was set during daytime, with only the first few scenes with Kate, Jack and Faraday in darkness, which meant that this episode glowed with colour and life. The only major exception to that was Naomi’s meeting with Matthew Abaddon (another chilling performance from Lance “Intensity” Reddick, and yes, I always refer to him that way). The grays and blacks of that scene were in direct contrast to the palette employed elsewhere in the episode.


Okay, enough about the magnificent lighting. Some new mysteries were introduced that have been picked apart already, and there’s not much I can add to them. Who is Ben’s boat mole? I took his comment literally and thought he was referring to Minkowski and Zoe Bell, that it was one of them, but apparently it also applies to the four rescuers we have already met. Many think it might be Michael, but would he ever be Ben’s cohort? He might have done Ben’s dirty work before, to protect Walt, but I doubt he’d do it again.


And what about the polar bear skeleton? I’m a bit concerned that my adamant pronouncements that the bears were being experimented upon by Dharma to make them thrive in warmer climes might have been wrong, and that they were actually test subjects in a time-travel experiment. How will I be able to maintain the moral highground when haters bitch about the polar bear question not getting answered? I’ll look like a bigger fool than usual.


My favourite OMG moments, however, were the little character moments toward the end of the episode. When Lapidus asks Juliet her name I gasped, realising that the earlier reveal of his job as an Oceanic pilot was timed perfectly to get the maximum oomph from his deduction that she was not one of the survivors. Still reeling from that elegant shocker (and bless writing gods Drew Goddard and Brian K. Vaughan for their excellent work), I was floored by Miles’ revelation that they were on the island to find Ben. Is he the world’s most secret wanted man? The ongoing revelations that there is this secret history of the world being slowly uncovered delights me.


Even better was Ben, who not only is dealing with the galling knowledge that Hurley is also in Jacob’s good graces, but is also getting the tar kicked out of him on an even more regular basis than before. What’s shocking for us is that his terror in the previous season may have actually just been more lies, which makes the events of the final episode yet more ambiguous. More fodder for the haters, but manna for us. Nothing is ever as it seems. Only time will resolve this one, and possibly a lot of dead bodies. And was his act of shooting Miss CS Lewis an act of survival? Or is she the mole and he was just leading everyone away from that assumption? Oh, happy confusion.


Other thoughts from this episode: Who is the lady living with Faraday? We don’t see her face, and I didn’t catch her voice.


Is Miles’ landing site the same place Desmond accidentally killed Kelvin? And if so, what is the significance? Because there is always significance. Honest.


How happy am I to see Jeff Fahey in something again? I know he’s been teaching kids in Afghanistan or something equally noble when he’s not appearing in direct-to-DVD movies, but with this role and his recent show-stealing performance in Planet Terror, it’s like the promise he showed in his early career (What?! I liked him in Lawnmower Man) might yet be realised.


How long is Sawyer going to last if he keeps beating up Ben? He spent most of this episode knocking him about, and if Ben gets to the Barracks and manages to escape, could my hero get iced? I’m worried about him. His personality has changed drastically since killing the original Sawyer, and I’m worried this is a prelude to a horrible death.


How many easter eggs were in this one scene? Number fifteen? Battle Royale? (Kids stuck on an island and forced to kill to survive?) If I was able to “ENHANCE” that shot like in the police movies, who knows what I would find.


Ben’s admission that he didn’t know what Smokey is was a genius touch. Again, the showrunners talk to their fans, referencing their frustration and joking about it.


One final thought: the awesome Naveen Andrews sure is grumpy. Here is an interview with UK’s Metro newspaper, and he sure seems miffed about everything. Except for the quality of season four. Something I can agree with him on. Enjoy tonight’s episode, lucky US Lost fans! I can’t wait.

Lost: The Beginning of the End

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One problem with being in the UK is having to wait to see episodes of Lost without having the experience ruined utterly by accidentally stumbling across spoilers, but the other is, what can anyone write about when nearly a week has passed since an episode aired? The Lost fanbase has picked over every last scrap and easter egg and ambiguous line of dialogue until there is very little left to be said. It might have been easier if I’d tackled that excellent first episode a little closer to when I actually saw it, but after a week of writing about the show, even I had overdosed on it, and I love it, so I can only imagine how horrible it might have been to anyone who doesn’t share my obnoxious passion. Anyway, I’m going to try to find something to talk about, if only because not talking about it after getting as excited as I did seems a little odd.

What I did like is that the reasons I had for loving Lost turned up in force during the episode, and afterwards. Seems as good a place as any to start.

Reason 10: Awesome Character Actors

The first new character introduced in this episode is played by Lance “Intensity” Reddick, who looks like an angry Woody Strode. I already wonder if any other new character can eclipse him even though he’s only been onscreen for a couple of minutes. The moment he asked Hurley if anyone was left alive on the island, my blood ran cold. His expression was purest diabolical evil.


I’ve not watched much of The Wire, but his stony glare caught my attention. I hope he gets a lot of screentime as Matthew Abaddon, because next to Jacob and his shack (see below), he is the scariest thing on the show, and could possibly be this season’s Juliet/Desmond. Sadly, the episode also featured the arrival of Daniel Faraday (will there be a Tesla at some point?), played by the singularly annoying Jeremy Davies.


I’ve not seen everything he’s been in, but his performances in Saving Private Ryan and Solaris very nearly ruined both movies. In particular, why Soderbergh let him use more acting tics than those employed by every student of Lee Strasberg combined just perplexes me. So no, I’m as unhappy about his arrival on the show as I was when Michelle “Snarl” Rodriguez visited. Let’s hope a trigger-happy Sawyer makes up for ridding us of the lovely Tom by offing Faraday too.

ETA: The showrunners were nice enough to give Marsha Thomason another chance to appear on the show after her ignominious death last season. She’s on a magic island that doesn’t like it when people die, so she gets a few minutes of pointless exposition before dying for proper good no comebacks.


I felt bad for her getting murdered like that. In a crappy Lost documentary made for Sky and presented by the dire Iain Lee, she went on about how great it was being on the show and how welcome everyone made her feel. It was probably filmed after she did the murder scene (complete with glurgy death noises), but still, it was sad. So yay! Four more minutes grappling with Kate! And maybe an appearance in next week’s rescuer flashback episode. Better than a knife in the back, I suppose.

Reason 9: Beautiful Hawaii

A throwaway shot of the castaways relaxing after contacting the boat:


Stunning.

Reason 8: Echoes

The most distant callback of the episode came towards the end, when Kate and Jack hang out in the fuselage of Oceanic 815 and discuss their initial arrival on the island. It’s a clear imitation of a shot from the first season that I would be able to find if I knew which episode it was in, but now all I can do is ask that you trust my dodgy memory.


It reminded me of Kate’s terror as she was chased by Smokey, and how she conquered the fear by counting to five. That was revisited with Hurley’s reaction to his visions on and off the island, where he counts to five until they disappear. I wonder if this amazing technique works? I also liked the opening shot of the pile of fruit.


It reminded me of the visual collage of green and yellow images spotted at intervals during the Room 23 brainwashing tape. There was also the moment where the castaways split into two groups, just like the first season when the survivors split between the caves and the beach. At least this time one of the two groups will be able to live in relative luxury in the Barracks (though how will Locke get the group through the sonic fence?).


Shame that it meant Kate and Sawyer went their separate ways, but considering Jack has been declaring his love for Kate and is now attempting to shoot people who have annoyed him, perhaps it’s a good thing he’s gone for a while. I don’t want anything bad to happen to my boy Sawyer. Look at his bottomless islandy sadness in that picture! His scene with Hurley, trying to get through to him and help him through his grief, choked me up.

Reason 7: Easter Eggs

The best visual Easter Egg of the episode (other than Christian Shephard’s appearance in Jacob’s shack) was Charlie’s underwater appearance.


At first I thought it was someone in scuba gear, but it’s obviously a hoodie. And the note on his hand is a brilliant touch. There were many other touches, like the reoccurence of H and O (like some kind of sci-fi version of Sesame Street), which of course are the 8th and 15th leters of the alphabet, not to mention the appearances of Hurley’s former fast food boss Randy Nations, and Ana-Lucia’s former partner Mike Walton. However, my favourite return appearance was Hurley’s Camaro, last seen being fixed by Cheech Marin in Tricia Tanaka Is Dead.


Many thanks to Lostpedia’s trivia section for these finds. Even though my love for Lost is vast, even I’m not devoted enough to have spotted all of these things.

Reason 6: ZOMG Michael Giacchino

As usual, his work was stunning, but special praise for the cannonball scene, where a euphoric Hurley leaps into the ocean in celebration of the coming rescue.


Giacchino’s brilliant reprise of themes from the first season brought tears to my eyes, especially knowing that Hurley’s joy was going to be short-lived. Heather Havrilevsky of Salon has carped that the show is needlessly dour, and maintains the episode should have allowed the castaways to enjoy their moment of relief instead of rushing headlong into misery (funny that the show is now being slated by critics for not taking its time after years of them moaning that events were progressing too slowly).


Even off-island the Oceanic Six are miserable and drinking what looks like posh vodka with their cornflakes and orange juice. It’s not the first time she’s complained about the tone of the show. Her particular beef is that Lost is depressing and offers no relief from this atmosphere of misery, and perhaps she has a point, but complaining about the characters leaving the island and still being depressed and having miserable lives misses the point.


Yes, they get off the island and still have problems, but then the story isn’t over when they leave. They haven’t had closure yet. When the series is over, and whatever is drawing the Oceanic Six back to the island is resolved, then they might get some peace. To make things worse, she claims to have a plan to save the show (save your energy, it’s doing fine), and just to prove she hasn’t been paying attention, complains that the helicopter doesn’t land on the island. You mean the helicopter that is being buffeted in mid-air and won’t even try to land because the last copter that flew over the island crashed?


Does she not remember the entire episode that revolved around that crash? Or Creepy Ethan Rom’s comment to Juliet that the trip to the island is “bumpy”? Of course not, because as with all of the doubters, she’s confused the show with Heroes, another long-form nerd favourite, and assumed no one is paying attention to these details. If she gave the show enough credit she would realise that whereas Lost takes care to avoid narrative errors, Heroes is riddled with mistakes. To those of us paying attention, Lost isn’t perfect, but it tries hard enough to more than earn our patience and trust. So yet another critic misses the point of the show. (Man, I’ve got to stop criticising the critics, or I’m going to end up sounding like Sexman.)

In conclusion, yay Michael Giacchino!

Reason 5: Awesome acting

The episode totally belonged to Jorge Garcia. His happy moments with Bernard were endearing, which is what he is reliably good at, but his ever-darkening demeanour through the rest of the episode worked brilliantly.


Desolated by the death of his friend (and begging to be committed in the flash-forwards), he was enormously convincing, and by the time we got to his decision to leave with Locke, he was firing on all cylinders. When the show started, who knew he would be able to pull a performance like this off? And yet here he is, carrying an unusually emotional (for Lost) season opener, which is usually the province of Matthew Fox.

That said, Foxy managed to get a lot of flash-forward time as well, but his finest moment was when Locke appeared and got a fist in the teeth for his troubles. As Jeff Jensen said in his episode review, it’s a bit much that Jack would try to kill Locke in front of everyone, even if he was really attached to Naomi (which he wasn’t, as far as I could tell), but he did a great job of expressing that frustration with Locke, and looked totally homicidal in this shot.


He looks like a proper bad ass there, though he should be glad Locke only used a knife on Naomi. The last two times he sabotaged their departure from the island, he used C4. He’s mellowing, perhaps.

ETA: In all my talk of the acting on this show, I realised I have said nothing about Naveen Andrews. I love Sayid! He doesn’t get enough to do. Here he is looking very sad as Hurley tells Claire about Charlie’s sacrifice.


He has pain on his face. It is similar to the pain I suffer seeing this fascinating character given so little to do. Hopefully he is one of the Oceanic Six, so we can get to see him do stuff off-island. It’s not like he’s going to get any more flashbacks.

Reason 4: The quirky mystery

Not much in the way of esoteric phenomena this week, although the question of how much of all this is happening in Hurley’s head looms large. Is it a manipulation of his vision, or is it a ghost? Whatever is happening there, it scared the hell out of us. It’s not just that Christian Shephard is chillaxing in Jacob’s shack, or that someone with a creepy eye is in there too; it’s the incredible and unearthly mobility of the shack itself.


When Hurley ran away from the shack and it reappeared in front of him, I had a little freak-out inside my brain. It’s bad enough that the island has a haunted house on it, but you can’t get away from it? ::covers eyes::

Reason 3: The WTF moments

Biggest Holy Shit! moment of the night had to be the reappearance of Charlie. Even though his face had been spotted in the season premiere trailers, thus lessening the impact of seeing him again, having Charlie take the place of Dave in Hurley’s head was still a masterstroke.


Looking pretty good now that he’s had a haircut and a proper wash, Charlie acted as a figment of Hurley’s imagination, or a ghost, or an emissary from the island. Even though he could be wished away, it’s obvious that Hurley is never going to get any rest until he resolves some unfinished business. What pleased me most about this how much it resembled a stock Stephen King plot; the reunion of people united by adversity early in life.


Though the show has an obvious debt to The Stand, it also now feels like a homage to It and Dreamcatcher (the book, not the wonderfully bad film). When an alarmingly well scrubbed-up Jack visits the institution (see above for the surprising change in appearance, possibly due to losing weight as a result of doing stunts in a leather jumpsuit for Speed Racer), Hurley says that “It” wants them back on the island, which makes Jack leave in disgust. Referring to the force compelling Hurley (and later, Jack) in that way is probably nothing more than a way to avoid revealing something important at too early a stage, but it’s the same kind of narrative device that King used in those books. I was very pleased by this, even if it wasn’t intentional (though I’ll bet it was, what with the showrunners being such big King fans).

Reason 2: The fanbase

Not much to say here, other than it was business as usual. In both the US and the UK a lot of the reaction on the internet from the non-fans has been predictably sour, but AICN and the AV Club were enthusiastic, with talkbacks that grew in length at a massive rate. Jeff Jensen was in fine fettle as well. ::sigh:: It was just like old times.

Reason 1: Locke and Linus

Locke was markedly subdued this episode, even though he managed to rally a number of survivors into following him to the Barracks, quite an achievement considering most of the castaways looked disgusted at him for being a big knife-throwing ass. Ben, on the other hand, was on great form, panicking over the fate of Alex, and gloating over Jack’s gullibility in the face of Kate’s deceptions.


Best of all was his oleaginous request to be allowed to go to the Barracks with Locke. Was this because he actually fears Jack now? Or the rescuers? Or was it yet another ploy to undermine Jack’s hold over the survivors? Whatever his reasoning, it was a hilarious moment. I will say this, though. With Locke getting smacked down by Jack and Ben being knocked about by Danielle for daring to care for her daughter, my boys sure are suffering at the hands of their fellow islanders.


Though Locke will probably return to that state after a short period of saviour-like prestige and power, Ben’s retribution will most likely be terrible to behold. Once back at the Barracks, who knows what he will do.

This week! Rescuers! Possibly more quality Abaddon time! Brian K. Vaughan and Drew Goddard script! Jeff Fahey as Frank Lapidus (which, according to Wikipedia, is a Jewish family name meaning “torches” or “candles”)! Ken Leung! Herc from AICN has seen it and reckons the fans will go crazy over it. Needless to say, I can’t wait.

Lost Countdown: No. 1

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With only a few hours left until Lost returns to US screens, I finally, after several million words of guff, get to reveal my number one reason for loving this show, heartened by the coverage on several websites and the generally positive reviews for tonight’s return, as well as the ABC webisodes entitled Missing Pieces, the last of which features the kind of event that makes Lost fans lose their minds. Remember my ravings about the extra content? This is what I was talking about.

And look! Yahoo! was inspired by this very blog and has listed five reasons to watch Lost. Not a single use of the word “metatextual”, though. Pfft. So what’s my number one reason for loving Lost?

John Locke and Ben Linus:

As I’ve said before, if I had to nominate a Lost character as my favourite, I would probably plump for Sawyer. Though I love the show (perhaps by now you, poor reader, will have a better idea of how much I love it), it can be quite dour and humourless, a situation barely rectified by the arrival of Buffy and Angel writer Drew Goddard. Like a Southern version of Han Solo, Sawyer’s grubby charm and vaguely inept tough guy mannerisms bring the show to life whenever he’s onscreen.

However, love him though I do, it’s the “religious leaders” on the island that fascinate me the most. John Locke’s transformation from worthless, put-upon loser to hero and possible messiah of the island would already have been fascinating, but even better is that that new power is so tenuous that he is forced to connive and work against his fellow survivors in order to maintain that power. Or is he? Perhaps he is actually trying to figure out what the power of the island is and then utilise it for the benefit of humanity. I don’t believe that for a second, but still, we should keep that option on the table.


One of the most appealing things about Locke, something that most viewers can relate to, is that he has spent his life getting shat on repeatedly, but still believes his mother’s comments that he is special and cut out for greatness. Most people will have had their ambitions go unfulfilled and feel they’re not getting their due. Little does Locke realise that the greatness thrust upon him by the island is not for him alone, and others have been visited by people or animals from their past that are either manifestations of the island or are formed from Smokey matter.

In season two his position as top prophet of the island was threatened by the arrival of Mr. Eko, whose faith in his role in the scheme of things, not to mention his ability to stare down Smokey, was much more instinctive. While Locke’s communion with the island appears more fragile, with episodes of paralysis and occasional breakdowns of communication throwing him into periods of extreme doubt, Eko just seemed to get on with it, perhaps because he already has a faith that Locke lacks.


That would be little comfort to Locke, whose faith is entirely based on the island’s healing power and the presence of the button. Of course, even that wasn’t enough to subdue his doubts, reinforced by the continual reveals of deeper levels of mystery on the island. His freakout upon finding Pearl station was memorable. Nothing could sway Eko, but Locke fell apart, almost dooming them all. So was Eko the real emissary of the island’s message? Adewale’s early departure from the show for what seems like obnoxious behavior on set tends to suggest he was intended to have had a bigger role to play, which is gutting. I really miss Mr. Eko.

Locke’s mania at the end of season two was thoroughly depressing, seeing him slip back from his position of power to a state of fury and doubt. It makes you wonder if the island (standing in for God) has chosen Locke as his emissary because he is the right person, or because there is no one else who is able. As far as I could tell from SmokeYemi’s speech in Eko’s final episode, Eko disappointed it. If so, then Cuse and Lindelof will have redeemed their Eko plot by using his introduction and speedy demise as a way to show how ruthless and arbitrary the island/God is. It also means Locke was probably only around as a backup, and SmokeWalt’s intervention in Through The Looking Glass was an act of desperation.


Locke’s egotism, sense of entitlement, and desperate attempts to maintain what he considers his dialogue with the island are fascinating to watch, because despite all of this I still consider him a hero, even though he’s doing really terrible, stupid things. He’s even crossed the line to murder. Way to go getting Sawyer to do your dirty work killing your dad, but did you have to screw it up a few days later by killing poor Naomi?

So why do I still empathise with him? How much of myself do I see in Locke? Would I go to such crazy lengths to be considered special by a sentient and/or haunted land mass? I guess as I haven’t had my kidney stolen by the man who would then throw me out of a window, I couldn’t really say.


I’ve always thought Terry O’Quinn was a talented actor, but in Lost he excels, giving the joint best performance on TV. As well as his swing from self-pity to confident hero and back to whining, self-hating doubting Thomas in season two, his terrified reaction to his wheelchair-bound fate in The Man From Tallahassee was also incredible, as I have already bleated on about. There was only one thing that was bad about his Emmy win; he couldn’t share the award with the other best actor on TV, the astonishing Michael Emerson as head Other Ben Linus.


Hired for a handful of episodes and kept on for good after Cuse and Lindelof rightly realised they had just stumbled on pure gold, Emerson’s arrival on the show gave the slightly flagging second season a massive burst of energy. His duplicity in those episodes where he was trapped in the Swan station armoury was hugely entertaining, made even better upon realising that the terrified little man we’d come to know and hate was in fact the horribly confident leader of a murderous bunch of islanders with a mysterious plan. His unveiling in the second season finale made me ridiculously happy, and finding out he would be a series regular in the third season was even better. Perhaps that’s why I didn’t mind the first six episodes of season three; lots of quality Ben Gale action.

Whereas Locke’s arrogant assumption about what he sees as his destiny comes from being cured by the island (something that might have happened anyway; who knows how the island’s healing powers work) and not being killed by Smokey (though that belief got tested in the season one finale when he got dragged into a Cerberus Vent), Ben’s belief comes from the appearance of his SmokeMother, and Richard Alpert’s comments about how that means he has a special connection to the island (as with Locke, Alpert and Ben are wrong). There is also his sense that there has to be more to life than his miserable childhood, with no mother and an abusive father. I’m not sure his lot is as bad as Locke’s, but I can see why he thinks he is deserving of the island’s attention.

And not just the island. His position as leader of the Others and emissary of Jacob’s wishes has already been defended with betrayal and mass murder, which means Locke was never going to be strong-willed enough to get the better of him. Thankfully a combination of Sawyer and Jack means he is in a position to take over from Ben, which means he gets to lead characters as unsavoury as Indestructible Mikhail the pro-grenade anarchist and the creepily fresh-faced Richard “BatManuel” Alpert. Erm, yay?


For now Ben remains as much an enigma as the island, and we’re only going to find out more about his past as we find out more about the island, but even so we get hints as to his nature. Now that we know the new visitors to the island are not what they seemed to be, his efforts to prevent them arriving seem far more sincere. If the island and Alpert’s people are so desperate to keep visitors off in order to protect their secrets, the murder of the Dharma Initiative makes more sense now (in interviews Michael Emerson has said he thinks Ben might turn out to be a good guy after all, though his methods are even more unpleasant than Locke’s).

We’ve also come to realise that his control of his “daughter” Alex is borne of his worries for her health, which would be jeopardised by possible impregnation by her boyfriend Karl. That’s fair enough, but does that mean the airdrops that still land on the island don’t contain any Dharma condoms? There must be a better way to keep her safe than sticking useless Karl in Room 23 for a spot of brainwashing. ZOMG! Is Lost a satire of conservatism? “If you have unprotected sex you will die, young lady!!!”


Perhaps Ben’s most diabolical scheme involved Locke and his really just outrageously beyond evil dad Anthony Cooper. What does Locke killing his father have to do with anything? It’s obviously some kind of initiation, but it hints that the Others have a very odd concept of morality if they consider themselves Good People despite all of the murdering and kidnapping (or if not a twisted morality, then knowledge of the island so incredible that protection of it is more important than our own concept of right or wrong).


It also seems that access to Jacob depends on some act of evil or sacrifice, which Locke tried to sidestep. Either that, or Ben feels guilt about his actions when betraying the Dharma Initiative and killing his own father, and thinks Locke shouldn’t get to win over the island without going through what he went through. Perhaps he also fears that if the island chooses Locke over him without this act of murder, then he killed his father and the Dharma Initiative for nothing. Or rather, he did it because he wanted to kill him, but can’t take the moral high ground. That said, how cold is he in this amazing award-worthy scene? That might be a guy who isn’t going to worry about the rights and wrongs of murder, at least not the rights and wrongs we worry about.

This is why I adore these two characters so much. Not only are they played by two incredible actors at the height of their powers, but their desperate need for acceptance by some unknowable force makes them do terrible things that we cannot really understand fully. Hopefully this will be left open to interpretation when the show is over. As I’ve said before, the show is a joy to ponder, and though I want answers to a lot of the questions on the show, I also want some room to hypothesise even when the final episode has aired.

Some fans have tried to describe the events of Lost as a metaphor for modern concerns, and with effort it’s possible to make any work of art fit into a topical hole of any shape. The Others are the Taliban! Oceanic 815 is the American empire! Jack is George Bush, unable to govern effectively! Ben is Ahmadinejad! Whatever. I’m not as impressed by topicality in art as I once was, and didn’t really want to think of Lost as fitting some contemporary straightjacket.

And yet, I still see Ben and Locke as two religious leaders, reverse Abrahams (did JJ Abrams come up with this idea?), sucking up to their God and getting the terms and conditions wrong. That’s topical in the sense that it’s a story that’s being told now, but it’s not exactly new. It’s been told over and over again through time, but never like this. And that’s what I like about Lost most of all. It’s influenced by many myths and stories and legends and belief systems and scientific theories and delusions about the paranormal, but even as the story chimes with all of these other elements, in itself it is something new, told in a different way than we have been used to. It’s every story ever told, and it’s a story we’ve never seen before. I don’t think I could love it more. And it’s back, goddammit. It’s back! OMG I’m hyperventilating!!! Welcome back, Lost! You have no idea how much I’ve missed you!!!

Lost Countdown: No. 2

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Perhaps this one should be a reason to both love and hate Lost.

The fanbase and their interaction with the show creators:

I’d bet that there has been no sci-fi or fantasy show ever made that doesn’t have some kind of nerd following. The net is full of Adam Adamant fanfic, Threshold slash, petitions to bring back Surface, and craziest of all, millions of people who think Torchwood is actually competent (kidding, Torchwood fans! I’m sure there are only a few hundred thousand). So pointing out that Lost has a rabid fanbase is not exactly news.

Nevertheless, part of the joy of the show is diving into the sea of speculation and discussion that boils up in the days after each episode. The Fuselage, Sledgeweb and the excellent screen captures of the Easter Eggs, Lostpedia updates, AICN talkbacks, Jeff Jensen’s wonderfully demented Entertainment Weekly column, Cuse and Lindelof’s podcasts on ABC.com; I spend the post-Lost hours poring over this content. Though it’s possible to enjoy Lost on a surface level, the textual density of the show demands that amount of attention if it’s to be treated seriously.

The AICN talkbacks are an odd one. Most of the time the threads are populated with dedicated fans of the show, dissecting what they have seen and throwing out new theories. However, the show also attracts huge opprobrium from a lot of haters who consider the show a busted flush whose creators are clown shoes and think the fans are idiots for sticking with it. Every show with an adoring fanbase has to put up with some amount of negativity, which is just the way of things, so I’m not saying Lost is any different, but Lost talkbacks get hit more than most by trolls bellowing that Cuselof are making it up as they go along or that, or that it will all fall apart before the end, or that the flashbacks are boring and stupid.


That’s nowhere near a deal-breaker for me, obviously. It’s also something it would be hypocritical for me to rail against. Much as I don’t want to rain on anyone’s parade, let alone that of my nerd brethren, expressing your opinion can often lead to being the party-pooper. Pointing out that Torchwood is a multi-level failure puts a damper on the party atmosphere of the fanbase, which is a shame, but still an inevitable consequence that I cannot apologise for. While Battlestar Galactica fans debated the significance of the season three finale, I had to resist the temptation to run in, all guns blazing, and start screaming, “All youse muthafukkas whose been saying Lost is being made up on the fly? What the hell was that? I know Dylan has embarked on the Never-Ending Tour, but his fifteen dates on Caprica are news to me. And Boring Tyrol is a Boring Cylon? What about his kid with Dopeyface? It’s a hybrid too? Doesn’t that make Sharon and Helo’s baby less important? Bullshit, I say! Bullshit!” It struck me as ill-thought out and clumsy. How can Lost get slated all the time with the accusation that it is a series of ill-thought out twists, but BSG get away with so much inconsistency? There are arguments that Ron Moore and his cohorts knew where they are going, and I reckon their final plan is worked out even if the getting there has been a horribly up-and-down affair, but why does that show get a break, but not Lost? My boy Bobby D is similarly displeased, to the extent of wanting to punch things.


What interests me about this attitude to Lost (which seems to be borne of some disappointment that the show isn’t what people thought it was going to be, as well as having a very slow pace), is that it’s practically a metacomment on the main theme of the show; faith. Just as Ben and Locke battle to prove over their faith in the island, and Locke and Jack fight over their contradictory attitudes to what epistemological approach to take towards the island, fandom battles over whether the show means anything when the show hasn’t been conclusively finished yet. Without the ending to wrap everything up, the fans could be wasting their time watching a show that will amount to a series of non-sequitur events and pointless digressions.

Hell, even one-time producer and writer David Fury, in an interview with Rolling Stone, has said that he thinks Cuse, Lindelof and Abrams have no solid idea of how it will end, and has warned the fans they’re in for a disappointent. I think the showrunners really should have stumped up for that samovar of coffee he wanted. Javier Grillo-Marxuach, who was a producer at the time, commented on Fury’s criticisms on LiveJournal, and this kind soul reprinted them, minus some content Grillo-Marxuach removed later.

As I’ve pointed out already, I’m convinced the showrunners know where they’re going. Though sometimes events happen that are totally unexpected (the reveal of Jacob, for example), in time they make an an instinctive sense within the rules set by the show, and I have faith they will be resolved and explained. The polar bears make sense within the context of what we currently know, and eventually when we have more information, Jacob and the Incident (which could be linked to a drilling experiment gone wrong) and the longevity of Richard Alpert will make sense. Note that I said “instinctive”. I can’t speak for any other fans of the show, but so far the writers have done nothing that is too weird, and whenever they throw a curveball, it feels right somehow. It’s like a test of Lost fanaticism — you have a feeling that it’s making sense even when it’s gone nuts; if you don’t, you’re missing the point.

While those who have lost patience with the show will think new twists are just arbitrary crazy events thrown out during frantic writers’ meetings and take it as proof that the show has gone off the rails, those who still believe in the show will sense that the Lost train is still on track even though they might not fully understand how or why. This is not meant as a diss to those who don’t have time for it any more, and I’m not saying I’m right so there. I just have a very strong suspicion that the final answers will almost certainly turn out to be explicable and not just a series of arcane “facts” that only make sense to the 108 viewers still watching while clutching their Sawyer action figures. However, at this point in the show, watching it and being willing to give it a break when weird things happen is pretty much an act of patience and faith, and that’s where the fracture in the sci-fi fandom massive lies.

Luckily there is that network of believers who have confidence in the creators, and I really don’t think it’s much of a stretch to accept that maybe the weirdness of the show isn’t inexplicable and random. Here’s another article of faith; I’ve had so much fun watching this show and parsing it and dissecting it, that even if the finale is an enormous letdown, I’ll still think the experience has been worthwhile, partially because of the speculation within the fan community (my most recent lovable crazy theory find; the numbers correspond to boardgames loved by Abrams and Lindelof). I know I’m not the only one who enjoys the waiting game (when it’s not delayed by production problems or strikes). Even the writers are listening and joining in, creating a dialogue between them and the fans that has had huge ramifications for the show. It’s another thing to love; the showrunners interacting with the fanbase and tailoring the show towards them. When the fans complained (for no justifiable reason, IMO) about Nikki and Paulo, they were dealt with in a witty manner in the episode Exposé.


When fans became convinced the show was all occuring in the head of one of the characters (either Walt or Hurley), Edward Kitsis and Adam Horowitz (who also wrote Exposé) wrote Dave, in which Hurley is told by the mysterious Dave that he is imagining his time on the island. The purgatory theory is brought up within the show from time to time, and the fan rumours about a bird calling out “Hurley” led to the bird making a reappearance in the second season finale. That in-show dialogue from the showrunners is certainly flattering, but it also shows they give a damn about what they’re doing. Well, that and the amazing attention to detail within the show. I’ll shut up about that now.

ETA: I’m really not suggesting people who don’t get Lost should piss off. If anything, I want more people to get into it. I’m forcing my season three boxset on anyone who will take it right now, and even though one total hater dared, DARED, to suggest that Torchwood was as good as Lost, I won’t be deterred. The Church of Lost is all inclusive. Even Torchwood fans are welcome!

Lost Countdown: No. 3

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Not long now until the pop-up primer version of Through The Looking Glass screens on ABC, which could very well look a lot like Amelie Gillette’s version for the A.V. Club. Also excited is Jeff Jensen, as usual, who has written a list of things we need to keep in mind prior to the first season four episode, airing tomorrow night. All I need to remember, Mr. Jensen, is my list of reasons to love Lost! Here’s another one, which is fairly self-explanatory. So I’ll go on about it for way too long anyway.

The many WTF moments:

For a sci-fi show Lost has very few fantastical elements, and those that feature heavily (such as Swan station) are treated in such a matter of fact way that they become part of the furniture. Much of the mystery revolves around misinformation, deceit, subterfuge. It’s often just about people on an island of indeterminate and invisible power, with the bulk of the episodes focusing more on flashbacks that dramatise and reveal character moments from the past. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again; if you don’t want to know more about these characters and their psychology, don’t watch the show. The ratio of character reveals to sci-fi nerdery is about 100:1. That is bound to annoy some people. If I was still a kid, I would hate the show. Where are the UFOs? Why don’t they have jetpacks or teleporters? Why should I care if Sun had an affair with some bald guy? (Of course, I did end up caring, as mentioned before.)


However, every so often the show has a conceptual and/or visual blowout, changing the direction of the show with a big shock moment. Opening season two with the reveal of Desmond’s civilised set-up in the Swan station, followed by the 108 minute countdown, and then the total headfuck of the Orientation video, is the point at which my admiration for the show transformed into total love. It all came from nowhere, totally changing the tone and direction of the show, while remaining thematically true to the previous season (Locke’s faith in the island became faith in the button and the numbers).

It happened again with the reveal of Jacob. Set up to be a meeting with a shady character whose identity had been kept a secret from the public with a shroud of secrecy hiding the name of the actor playing him, speculation ran wild. Jack’s dad, Christian, was the most popular candidate, with some fans backing Locke or Sun’s dad instead. Of course we got none of those, and once again the showrunners changed everything with a nerve-wracking and surreal sequence that alone posed more questions than had been answered in three whole seasons (see below for a clip). It was probably my favourite six minutes of screentime in all of 2007, and that’s including the amazing gamechanging finale.

That finale worked so well because so much time had been spent setting up the parameters of the show format, to the point that you take it for granted. That structure rarely gets messed with, so whenever it does, it’s an event. Even more than The Other 48 Days (showing what happened to the tail survivors) and Exposé (what happened to two characters assaulted by a bafflingly hostile fanbase), the Desmond flashback episode, Flashes Before Your Eyes, was the biggest departure yet, and maybe changed the way we should view the show format. It not only created some huge WTF moments, and introduced the creepy Ms. Hawking (described in a Lindelof commentary as a kind of temporal enforcement agent making sure the time lines don’t get messed with), it made you wonder if the flashbacks are more than just a narrative device. A popular theory is that they are false memories implanted in the castaways, but this episode made you wonder if there was even more going on than that. I don’t believe that theory, and still think they’re a narrative tool, but for a moment there, I wasn’t sure.


Of course, the most astonishing and iconic WTF moment came in the first episode, as Smokey/Cerberus announced its arrival. At that moment the show became something more than just a really well-produced soap opera based on Survivor. Over the season we were teased with hints of its true nature, and when it finally revealed itself to us (and not just to Locke), it utterly confounded expectations. Destroying trees and dragging Locke into a Cerberus Vent (which seemed to me to open up as if alive, but I might be mistaken), it was terrifying. Even better was its next big appearance, photographing Eko’s memories. The first half of season 2 has longueurs, but this appearance by Smokey redeemed it.


Many who claim to have figured out what the mystery of the island is have to take into account that there are still new mysteries being introduced even now, so how can anyone truly figure out what the endgame will be? At any moment the rug can be pulled out from under us just like before. I love the speculation (love it!), but even know, past the halfway mark, we’re just pissing in the wind.

Lost Countdown: No. 4

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Last one for today, and look, only three more to go! Then we can talk about something different. And less AWESOME, probably.

The quirky nature of the mystery itself:

Sci-fi TV and movies of recent years have tended to follow certain formats, with rare moments of invention that give fans of the genre hope that new possibilities are available. Yes, yes, I know, I’ve gone on about it before. It’s one of the main reasons I started my occasional feature Sci-Fi Through Space/Time, in an attempt to find something fresh happening within the genre and then document it.

If it’s on film, chances are you’re more likely to find something more odd, be it Shane Carruth’s Primer, or Michel Gondry and Charlie Kaufman’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. On TV, sci-fi suffers by comparison. It’s almost always spaceship/portal-based exploration adventure, and even though some of that can transcend the limitations of the format (BSG‘s ambition and topicality mark it out as one of the best, and Doctor Who‘s quirkiness hides the format to such an extent that it’s easy to forget about it), much of the time it been done before.


Instead of sticking characters on a ship and making them meet rubber people, or badly translating modern scientific theories into layman-friendly action plots or allegories, Lost goes back twenty years into territory covered well by The X-Files, and then improves on it by avoiding that show’s episodic nature. Whether it manages to create a series-long mythology that works better than that of X-Files remains to be seen, but I’m hopeful.

When I was much younger, around the end of the 70s, my grandparents bought me a weekly magazine (sorry, partwork) called The Unexplained, which ran for about 167 issues and covered the arena of the paranormal. Week after week there would be in-depth accounts of UFO and ghost sightings, poltergeist hauntings, psychic phenomena and characters like Uri Gellar and Sai Baba: stuff that was very much in the popular sphere at that time.

Even better, it would investigate things that were not as commonly discussed as UFO abductions, such as the supernatural town of Rennes-le-Chateau, or Ted Serios and his ability to put his thoughts on photographic film (see the photo above, where he is going BZZZZT at some film with much mental strain), or Hollow Earth theory. There was stuff on the weird effect of certain types of electromagnetism on humans, areas of the planet that have peculiar properties, the strange theories of Nikola Tesla, Kirlian auras, timeslips, coincidence, the Cosmic Joker… To a kid, this stuff was scary and fascinating. I couldn’t get enough of it.

Cuse, Lindelof, Abrams and the writing staff of Lost remember these kooky theories, and have created a fiction set in a world where highly funded individuals of great influence have found that this fringe science actually pays dividends, and have tried to harness this power to save the world. This is sci-fi borne of the forgotten kookery of the 70s and presented in a modern form with a huge budget and even bigger ambition. I also like that whereas most episodic sci-fi has to be set on a ship or near a portal to be able to go places, this show avoids that dreary fate with flashbacks that allows the protagonists to travel within their own lives. With that internal exploration taking the place of the played out external voyage format, the show has room to look to the past (to the time when psychology and paranormal studies were most popular) for its inspiration instead of the near or far future. Retro sci-fi without the rocket packs and laser guns.


So closely does it follow the 70s template that the show is beginning to introduce more themes from that era. It was a period where people began to distrust the power and ambition of big business. Whoever is coming to the island, be they emissaries of Widmore Industries or some other group, are bound to be businessmen trying to take advantage of the island’s properties. The Hanso Foundation, though more willing to experiment with odd science, seems similar to the eerie Rand Corporation, which had been busy trying to map the human mind using game theory for a decade, as seen in Adam Curtis’ astonishing documentary series The Trap, in which he shows the adverse controlling effects upon the modern psyche by people like John Nash and R.D. Laing. That this show has already dabbled with experiments similar to those created by B.F. Skinner, and has featured a brainwashing device straight out of The Parallax View style (see the clip below), is apt. Lost has plundered the recent past and come back with tons of quirky, long-ignored material and a unique tone for the show. It truly is like nothing else on TV.

Of course, the future direction of the show might take it away from that 70s-era sci-fi paranoia, and perhaps towards a scenario involving either more modern scientific theories (parallel universes seem to be a possibility at the moment, or perhaps time travel), or something even more ancient (the possibility that the island is connected to Atlantis is a popular theory), only time will tell.

Lost Countdown: No. 5

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Lost is almost here, and now I have to race through the reasons. But that’s what love does to a guy. It makes him blog like the wind.

Seeing the main cast improve in leaps and bounds:

This is probably going to sound incredibly bitchy, but I’ll say it anyway; when I saw the pilot of Lost, the one thing that didn’t impress me was the performances by almost all of the cast, who seemed to have been cast for their sometimes excessive pretty rather than their ability. I’d liked Harold Perrineau from his work on Oz and the Matrix sequels (where he was the only human in the cast), Naveen Andrews was suitably enigmatic and awesome as Sayid, and I was happy to see Daniel Dae Kim finally stop jumping from show to show to land on a hit. Best of all, Terry O’Quinn was around, and he had always been reliable. The rest? Nothing going on. A bunch of anonymous faces of no interest. I doubted they would hold my attention.

As I have said before, the supporting cast is filled with great character actors, and the second season added the imposing Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje to the main cast (a plus negated by the presence of Michelle Rodriguez, whose appeal escapes me), but still I was unsure. And yet, by the end of season three, I was convinced the casting directors had been almost totally right. Over time the cast has grown into their characters and several actors I thought so little of have shocked me with their intensity.


Dominic Monahan and Jorge Garcia had been the comedy relief for so long that seeing them break out of that was a great pleasure. Monahan had a lot of big dramatic moments to pull off, especially in the third season, and even though I’d grown tired of Charlie Pace, I still spent most of Greatest Hits crying. His scenes with Henry Ian Cusick (who also grasped great opportunities in both Catch-22 and Through the Looking Glass and ran with them) were especially affecting.

Meanwhile Garcia has had to portray a man on the verge of a nervous breakdown, his first season enthusiasm and gregariousness swallowed up by grief and regret. With the mysterious Libby gone and no one on the island taking him seriously, Garcia has done an amazing job of portraying the miserable effects of his low-self-esteem while still coming up with the comedic goods whenever necessary. Thankfully that sadness was lifted in the underrated comedy episode Tricia Tanaka is Dead, and especially when he proved himself to the “cool kids” and saved the day in Through The Looking Glass, one of the many great moments in that absolutely phenomenal finale.


Through The Looking Glass had several impressive performances, but I’d hand the award for best performance in a Lost season finale to Matthew Fox, an actor who struck me as blandly handsome when I first saw him in the pilot, but has shown an impressive willingness to make the heroic Jack seem weak and self-doubting even in his most noble moments. Another of the things I’ve loved most about this show is that the main character is almost insane with grief and confusion for almost the entire duration of the show. Canyon will disagree with me vehemently, maintaining he is nothing more than a weepy jerk, but she is lovely and wrong. The arc with his increasing mental degradation pays off brilliantly in Through The Looking Glass, not just in his weepy drug-crazed moments but in my favourite scene in that finale, his confrontation with Ben and subsequent violent breakdown. As he beat Ben to a pulp, I found myself gasping in horror, stuck on the edge of my seat with my hands over my mouth.

Violence on TV shows, certainly on action shows, can often mean nothing. It’s all throwaway cool and flash, which is fine if that’s what you need at that time (I watch 24 for exactly those reasons). However that scene in the season finale was loaded with all of the frustration, misery and anger that Jack has tried to hold back for the three months he has been on the island, and the knowledge that for once Ben might have been telling the truth made it all the worse. At that moment, Jack lost. I’m amazed that the showrunners are brave enough to make the hero of their show become an animal, even though he was motivated by the thought that Sayid, Bernard and Jin were dead.


The strongest actresses on the show, Yunjin Kim and Elizabeth Mitchell, have had a variable third season. Yunjin Kim (and Daniel Dae Kim) have had little to do for a while now, and their flashback episodes are the ones I tend to think will be the most uninteresting. Of course, whenever I think that there is often some astonishing and terrifying piece of Paik-instigated violence perpetrated by Jin, which always upsets me.

This season saw all of the dreary adultery setups from three seasons pay off, with the knowledge that the date of conception of Sun’s child was of crucial importance, and I realised how compelling and powerful she could be with good enough material. During D.O.C., my heart was in my mouth throughout. Yet another thing I love about the show is how it makes the tedious stuff pay off well. Perhaps not everything has worked out as well, but this plot, which had often made me drift off, suddenly became fascinating. Maybe that’s my failing, and I should have even more faith in the showrunners, but nevertheless, I know I’m not alone in rolling my eyes whenever this plot comes up. Only the two Kims save it, and Yunjin has begun to really shine. D.O.C. and facing up to Sawyer in Exposé were her season highlights, and I enjoyed them greatly.


As great as she is (and I do think she’s really really great), Elizabeth Mitchell has, in a third of the time, become the most compelling female character on the island. At first seemingly nothing more than another impenetrable Other, it soon became apparent that she wears two faces. In front of the castaways she appears cold and scheming, but in her flashbacks, and in front of her captor, Ben, she is scared and heartbroken. Her second flashback episode, One Of Us, was another series highlight, as Ben manipulated her with images of her sister and the outside world into doing his bidding.

Mitchell had already impressed me during the season, serving as a great foil for Ben (much more on my love for Ben later) and possible love interest for Jack. However, n that episode she absolutely blew me away. She was so totally robbed of millions of acting awards! Previously I only knew her as Kerry Weaver’s neglected girlfriend in E.R., and had little to do. Here, acting showcases like her confrontation with Ben in the kitchen, or seeing her sister on the Flame station monitors, should get her a lot of work when she leaves this show (I’d like her to get awards as well, but she really got messed around this year. I’m genuinely annoyed by that). Also in her favour, on the Tale of Two Cities commentary she is endearingly obsessed with hott Matthew Fox and bondage. It’s really cute. And a bit weird.


So, yay for the cast! They have proven me wrong and become superawesomespecial, and yet almost all of my love is reserved for Josh Holloway, as lovable rogue turned haunted victim and vengeful misanthrope Sawyer. While watching the first few episodes I despaired at the casting of this square-jawed lunk, pouting in the background or getting up in several grills with his macho idiocy. Though I understood that the dynamic of the show depended on the conflict between castaways (at least until the Others provided a much more worthy source of drama), it pained me to see him growling and seething.

And of course, I ended up loving him. His half-hearted tough guy act, his doomed attempts at reconciliation with the castaways he has annoyed, his growing love for Kate, and the flashbacks showing his painful upbringing; I was powerless in his thrall. Holloway had initially struck me as a pretty boy with a bit of charm, but I sold him short. He’s immensely charming, and it’s a joy to see him bouncing off the other characters, most of whom seem to loathe him. The conflict between many of the other characters creates tension; a lot of the time, conflict with Sawyer means funfunfun. You could randomly pick almost any scene with him and Hurley and you’d be onto a winner.

Of course, I was also wrong that he was just a charmer. Not to say that charm means nothing; it may come from his natural likeability, but he sure knows how to play off it with expertise. Anyway, on top of even that, he has become a compelling dramatic presence. His early season reaction to facing death at the hand of evil Other Danny Pickett was nerve-wracking, and even though I knew there was no way they would kill him off, I still got all panicky. Best of all, his final confrontation with the man who destroyed his family, the unbelievably evil Anthony Cooper, was another season highlight. Provoked by Cooper’s indifference to his pain, he kills him in a deliberate echo of Jabba’s death in Return of the Jedi (a wonderfully nerdy touch), and from his behaviour in the finale it looks as if his future self will be haunted by the hollow victory he scored over this life-ruining face from the past. I’ve even forgiven Sawyer for killing the lovable Other Tom, even though I’ll miss M.C. Gainey terribly.

Holloway’s agonised reaction to the taunting of the real Sawyer haunted me for days after. He had proven himself to me a thousand times over, and my admiration is boundless (and kudos too to Kevin Tighe, who gave a career-best performance in that episode). I can’t remember who it was who said Holloway was the breakout star of the show (it was in something I read a long time ago now), but that scene proves they’re onto something.