Friday, January 23, 2009

Lost - Because You Left/The Lie - 1/21


One of the most enticing and appealing features of LOST are its questions. More accurately, OUR questions. There is nothing more exciting than a television show that makes you ask non-stop, never-ending questions about its characters, its formulas, its events, its WORLD. There is nothing more exciting than jumping up and down around your living room after having some of those questions finally answered. But there is a very thin line that these shows can walk upon. Some shows, like Heroes for example, wander off that line and it's at that point that they start to lose their audience. Luckily for LOST, it has some very smart show-runners and producers. In a recent LOST podcast, Damon Lindelof, one of LOST's producers, said, "Have your characters ask the same questions as your viewers", or something to that effect. It was an answer to a question about how the writers expect to keep their audience from...well, getting lost themselves throughout a season filled with flash-forwards, flash-backs and flash-presents. It's a great idea which causes the often times confused and frustrated audience to not feel so alone with their oh-so-many Island-based inquires. So they gave us, the Islanders (Juliet, Sawyer, Rose, Bernard, Daniel, Charlotte, etc) and the Non-Islanders (Jack, Kate, Sun, Sayid, Hurley, Aaron) people like Daniel Faraday, Richard Alpert and even Ben to answer some of our and their never-ending questions and to keep us from getting too...lost. But let's face it...we don't mind being lost all that much, do we? In fact, I might venture to say...we love it.


So, let's talk about our new questions, theories, about what we now know and most importantly about how sexy Sawyer looks when he's minus a shirt and how sexy Jack looks minus his mountain-man beard. We'll attempt to start from the beginning...

Daniel, at some point, is going to be back in the 70's (?), when Dharma had some controlling stock in the island and he's going to go undercover as a Dharma worker. This would be one of the scenes where Brett and I were jumping up and down and WTF-ing the heck out of my living room. How is Daniel in the past? Why is he undercover and what is his purpose for being in the caves close to the Island's main power source? Well, we know by the end of the episode that the Island is constantly moving through time, back and forth through different time-periods. My best guess is that at some point in the future (can we really even SAY that?), the Island shifts to around the 70s (?) and Daniel is able to infiltrate the Dharma for some as yet unknown reason.

Doctor Pierre Chang, the scientist from the Dharma Orientation films, has/had a family. Who knew?! Who even thought to ask? Well, now we know. We also know that it was by his instructions, his "specs", that the digging crew discovered the Island's "donkey wheel". We also know that the good doctor knows more about the Island than we do. Was he purposefully guiding the workers in order to find the Island's super power, time-traveling chamber? If so, then why have them stop once they discovered it? Were they merely digging to create the Orchid station and just came across it? Though it may not seem like it, this scene answers a lot more questions than it raises. The most important being, we now know that the Dharma Initiative wasn't just on the Island to conduct social and animal experiments. They were there to test and experiment with time and space. Tricky buggers.

Still concentrating On-Island, thank God for Daniel Faraday! Not only is he adorably cute, but he's very informative to boot! We would be so lost without him. So, either the Island or the people or both are moving throughout time. We aren't sure quite yet, but it's interesting to note and question why The Others aren't moving throughout time. Why are only the people from the freighter and the crash moving? On this same note, did the Island just move through time or did it move locations also?


Neat note: Daniel likened their time-traveling situation to a skipping record; one of the first shots we get in the episode is a skipping record in Dr. Chang's house.



Since there are a million ways to ask a million questions about time-travel and you're bound to have a headache by the end of it, let's skip past the meeting between past-Desmond and Daniel Faraday. What we do know is that once Daniel changed the past, it became real, a real memory to present-Desmond. What we don't know is if Desmond is a individually unique case. We believe he is, since Daniel said he was, but we still don't know what this means. Can the Islanders really not change the future by changing the past, as Daniel said, or can they, like he did with Desmond? See...too many questions.





Let's move Off-Island for a bit...

Some things we know:

1) Hurley can certainly make a bad situation worse.
2) Sayid has a new and highly effective weapon: the dishwasher.
3) Sayid seems to be no longer working for Ben.
4) Kate is on the run with Aaron. She can no longer go back home.
5) Sun blames two people for Jin's death: her dad and Ben Linus. But we also find out that she blames Kate and Jack too.
6) Ben has people working Off-Island for him.
7) Jack looks much better without the beard. But we already knew that.






Questions this new knowledge raises:


1) Why would Hurley fore-go Ana Lucia's advise and go and get himself arrested? He has always listened to his dead friend's advise, at least eventually. Is Ben really that scary?
2) When did Sayid stop working for Ben? What happened between them that made him say those things to Hurley, therefore causing Hurley to do whatever he could to get away from Ben? And why didn't Ben know where Sayid was, that he was looking to break Hurley out of the nut-house?
3) When is Kate going to learn? When is she going to start listening to Jack and her nutty friends? And who is the law-firm's client? Is it Ben, so as to give Kate a reason to run and therefore be more willing to go back to the Island? Or is it maybe Charles Widmore and if so, why?
4) We understand why Sun blames her father and Ben for Jin's death, but why not Charles Widmore? He is a much, or even more so, to blame for Jin's death. Is she playing him? Trying to find a way to being him down? What's her game plan?
5) Ben has a huge network of people. If The Others On-Island are no longer following his orders, who are these people Off-Island? Are they maybe still following him? Endless questions abound...




Some other things to think about:

One might think that Richard never ages, that he might be immortal, but it seems now that he had just been traveling through time. Maybe he traveled through time to be at John's birth and then again to see John when he was older, to test him. If that's the case, how is he doing it? A machine? If so, where's said machine? Were the Others so hostile to Dharma so as to keep them from discovering the time-traveling secrets of the Island?


Is the Island just moving back and forth between two different time-periods...or is it changing to multiple different times every time it moves? That would seem more correct, seeing as we see Daniel back in the 70's with Dharma and we see John at some point later with Echo's brothers plane, and then will we see them three years in the future at some point...


Therefore giving the Non-Islands a chance to go back in time and catch them on the Island? Is this the hope we need, the chance we see, for Jack and Juliet and Kate and Sawyer to all meet up again? For Jack to keep Locke from ever leaving the Island and therefore keep him from being killed?


Who shot the damn flaming arrows?!!! I would guess The Others, from the past...but who knows? All we know is that it was a very effective fire-attack.


Ok, so there are a TON more questions and a lot of them revolve around Daniel's mother, who turned out to be the same lady who told Desmond that he couldn't propose to Penny, therefore sending him on his horrifying Island path. But let's leave those to next week, where hopefully we will discover more about her and her part in the Island scheme.




Until next time, LOST lovers!


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The views expressed on this blog are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views of my employer.