LOST as an 80's TV show

I don't have speakers here at work, so I'm not quite sure what the music here is like.

Enjoy!

John's Late-in-the-Week Post: "He's Our You"

So my wife has begun watching LOST again from the beginning, as she missed a few episodes that were vital in leading us to where we are now.

(No need to panic; I've seen every single episode).

Currently, she's nearing the middle of Season One, and Claire's (bring her back, Christian!) about to have her baby (Kate you dimwit! Only Claire is supposed to raise Aaron!). I'm looking forward to the episode when she actually does have it, as I'm excited to see whether James "I used to call myself Sawyer to fool people; now I call myself LaFleur to fool people" Ford is visible at all as an Easter egg.

I'll keep you posted.

But watching the episode "Confidence Man" leads me to rescind some of the character changing that I've seen James go through.

The example I'm considering:
In "Confidence Man," Sawyer is taken by Jack and Sayid as they "inquire"about the inhalers James supposedly has stashed away (no one ever asks for them, and he never says that he has them). Their inquiry includes hitting him over the head, tying him to a tree, and shoving bamboo slivers under his finger nails to get him to talk. In a word: torture.

Of course, James is innocent, though allows Jack and Sayid to do this partly to lead others away from who he really is.

(In a darker "revelation" I had, I feel James in this episode is a lot like The Joker from The Dark Knight in that he also seems to be allowing his own torture to ruin the hero complexis of Jack (Batman) and Sayid (Harvey Dent). Remember that The Joker was mostly interested in seeing how far he could push Batman and Harvey Dent. Dent was the only that broke (think Sayid). I know--I'm a nerd.)

This brings me "He's Our You." James leads Sayid to the Dharma "psychopath," where the roles are reversed, to allow his to give Sayid a magic sugar cube in order for him to talk. In a word, I call this sort of interrogotory: torture.

And yet, James allows it to happen. Why? To keep people believing that he is someone other than himself.

And though he seems to have changed, and I believe he has, some unwanted characteristics will be much harder to overcome.

But to do that, he did the right thing; he stayed on the island.

Theories on He's Our You

It's interesting... the episode title seems to indicate that the pivotal moment this week should be when Oldham drugs Sayid, right? This Oldham guy is set up to be one scary dude, but all he does is put LSD or something onto a sugar cube and force feed it to Sayid.

I mean, sure, there's something about Oldham that creeps me out... part of it is that he lives in a teepee in the middle of the jungle. Do the Others not bother him? Are they afraid of him? Do they respect him?

But when we boil it down, the drugging scene was meaningless. Sayid told them the truth and Horace and the others didn't believe it. Sure, they (especially Radzinsky) were freaked out that he knew about the Dharma stations, especially the Swan, but other than that, no harm done. They just figured they'd given him too much of the drug and decided to kill him, just like they wanted to in the first place.

And we find out how Illana captured Sayid and who she is. My only question here is: how did the family of golfer guy find out Sayid did it?

But on to the meat of the episode. I've been saying since last week that Sayid was thinking about killing lil' Ben. There are two main points here:

1. Either the timeline is all shot to kingdom come, or lil' Ben isn't really dead. That's what it comes down to. Note that Sayid did not stop to check for a pulse or make extra sure lil' Ben was dead by shooting a few more rounds into the body, so I'm leaning towards "lil' Ben will be saved by Richard and/or healed by the Island powers" right now. It makes the most sense and we don't have to deal with the aftermath of the timeline falling apart.

2. Sayid shoots Ben because he believes lil' Ben will grow up to be a manipulating, lying, evil man, responsible for a lot of the suffering he and the other 815-ers have gone through. He probably suspects Adult Ben had Nadia killed in order to turn Sayid into his personal assassin.

Now here's where it gets fun. Adult Ben makes life hard for Sayid and the other 815-ers (including probably having Nadia killed) because Sayid shot him when he was 12.

And Sayid shot lil' Ben because Adult Ben made Sayid's life hard from 2004-2007.

The whole thing is a time-travel revenge circle.

See why I hate time travel? Ugh.

This is also the basis for the conversation Ben and Sayid have in the Dominican Republic. Ben believes Sayid to be a stone-cold killer, because Sayid shot him, an unarmed boy who had just helped him escape from Dharma, in cold blood.

This theory contradicts another theory floating around: that people don't develop memories of "altered timeline events" until they happen. For example, Desmond never met Faraday (outside the Swan during the jumping phase) until the Island disappeared and the time skipping began. This makes no sense to me in light of Faraday's "one timeline" theory, so I'm going with the idea that Adult Ben already knows Sayid, Jack, Kate, Hurley, etc. in 2004, and knows Juliet before he recruits her in 2001. He doesn't suddenly develop memories in 2008 of knowing them as a child in 1977 when this is all "happening" along some parallel timeline. Does that make sense? I need to draw a chart.

Other stuff: lil' Ben is probably responsible for the burning van. He was waiting outside the holding area and sprang into action the moment Phil was gone.

And the writers were worried we wouldn't feel bad watching lil' Ben get shot, so they included a "remember how his dad is an abusive jerk?" scene. Oh Uncle Rico, where did you go wrong?

What will Sayid do now? He's alone in the jungle in 1977. I doubt the Others will let him join them, and Dharma sure as heck want him dead now.

Good episode.

He's Our You

Things we learned from last night's episode:

1. Sawyer really, really likes his life with Dharma. He's all hooked up with Juliet, he has a position of some power, it's a fairly comfortable existence, etc. He likes it so much, he won't risk losing it to help a fellow 815-er. That said, I wonder if he'd react the same way if it was Kate or Hurley locked up and suspected to be a Hostile.

2. We see who Illana is and how she captured Sayid. See where sexual promiscuity gets you?

3. We meet Oldham.

4. Oh, and Sayid decides to kill lil' Ben.

As always, let me know if I missed anything. Theories up next.

Namaste re-re-revisited (Tired of talking about this episode yet?)

Since John Gagnon's posting on the blog now, I'm somewhat rethinking my comic relief role...I'll let you know what happens there.

In the meantime, I have some questions that weren't answered in the three posts about Namaste so far:

Number A: Can Ben not meet himself in the past? Is that why he didn't time jump?

Number B: Why didn't Sun time jump? Because someone from the Oceanic Six needed to fix the island and not time jump? Is this really the first time Sun learns about Christian?

Another one: Why did the Others build the runway? So when planes are about to crash on the island, they'll land semi-safely (sorry redshirt copilot) and they'll have more people to choose from? Or to land their own planes for supplies and transport? I thought the only way off the island was the sub - although, Ben could have been lying. He probably was.

Juliet almost gets Kate hosed - does anyone else think that's a great moment? Is it all part of Juliet's plan? Or just to show Kate who's in charge and how much power Juliet has?

Theories on Namaste

-I think the big question I had after watching this last episode is this: when are Ben, Sun, Lapidus, etc.? The show labels the time as "30 years earlier," which would put them at 2007. However, Sun and Lapidus end up in what look like Dharma barracks.

Now, we know the Others lived in the Dharma barracks for an unspecified amount of time, and when they moved in, they removed all traces of Dharma. They are there from at least 2001 (when Juliet is recruited) to 2005 (when they abandon them after the mercenaries land on-Island).

The Purge occurred in 1992 (Horace Goodspeed tells John he's been dead for 12 years in 2004), so that means there is a time period of about nine years where Dharma is gone, and we're not sure if the Others have taken over their compound or not.

This puts Sun somewhere between 1992 and 2001.

Unless, of course, this isn't the barracks, and is instead a part of the Dharma Initiative that was never used by the Others. We don't know for sure that the Processing area and the living quarters are in the same place. It doesn't seem to me that the barracks are so close to the ocean, and Sun and Frank only walked a few feet before finding the Processing building.

-Did anyone else notice, during the scene with Christian, that there was a few seconds where the camera centered on an open door with smoke coming in? It jumped out at me because the focus was not any of the characters, and the smoke didn't seem like Smokey smoke... it was more like there was a campfire outside and the wind was blowing smoke from that in.

-To echo John's sentiments: where is Faraday? The way Sawyer said he'd left was a bit ambiguous. Is he insane? Did he leave the Island somehow? Is he off living with the Others?

-I think Sawyer's moved past the "con" phase of his relationship with Dharma and is now firmly entrenched in an "identifying with them" phase. Count how many times he uses the phrase "my people." That's going to be a problem.

-I mentioned to my wife while watching that Christian is much more specific about what he wants to get done than Jacob is. Whether Christian IS Jacob for all intents and purposes is another discussion, but I am leaning more and more towards the idea that they are competing forces on the Island. Jacob has his lists, which have an unknown purpose. Christian tells Locke to move the Island (though to be fair he didn't tell him how). I get the feeling he'll tell Sun exactly what she needs to do if she wants to find Jin.

-There is good reason to believe that Ben manipulated Sun into going to the Processing center. Remember, every time he appears vulnerable or beaten, he comes out on top somehow. This guy seems to be the king of the Xanatos Gambit.

-I believe that in 1977, young Ben is tight with Alpert and the Others. When he asks Sayid if he is a Hostile, what he's really saying is, "because I don't recognize you." In a related tangent, if we believe Faraday's "one timeline and one timeline only" theory, this means Ben knows Sayid when they "meet" for the first time in the Swan in Season 2. It also means he knows Sawyer, Juliet, Jack, etc., which adds layers upon layers to the previous seasons. How did he have such large files on people like Jack and Kate when they'd only been on-Island for relatively short period of time? I believe it is because he'd been working on them for years beforehand.

-To beat a dead horse, I believe if you're going to get into time travel as a writer, the only feasible way to do it without screwing up or going crazy is by using Faraday's "one timeline" theory. As long as LOST stays here, we'll be good. As Gagnon said, the first five episodes of this season were overwhelming enough, and we're using the simplest form of time travel theory there is.

And to conclude, boy do I not care about the Jack/Juliet/Sawyer/Kate love square. Just pair off and do your thing. I don't need 10 more episodes of furtive looks and hurt, tortured expressions. Ugh.

"Namaste" revisited

OK, so I'm going a bit ga-ga over the last couple of episodes, merely because it is producing more and more story, and less time travel craziness. Don't get me wrong, I dig the time travel mythology of the show, but it had been a bit overwhelming the first five episodes or so.

And does anyone just love Sawyer---er, LeFleur---right now? From season one to now, I can't think of anyone that has had such a change in arc than James Ford. And he's probably pulling the biggest and coolest con of his life.

One thing that I'm not sure of (among many) after Wednesday's episode:

Is Faraday gone from Dharma, or is he just out of his mind (hence James' indication that he isn't here anymore)? Either way, I'm curious to see what has become of Daniel. His "aptitude test" would probably be off the charts, and remember that he was seen in a mine that Chang was inspecting in "Because You Left." So I'm not sure what Faraday has up his sleeve.

Cue Twilight Zone music.

That was my biggest question. Lots more to come as I stir theories in my mind.

Namaste

DO NOT CARE ABOUT RELATIONSHIP ANGST

Okay, with that out of the way, here's what we learned from Namaste.

1. Radzinsky is an overbearing, arrogant jerk, and a hothead. While Kelvin claims Radzinsky committed suicide, I lean towards believing Kelvin offed him after an extended period of being stuck with him in the Swan.

2. Ben is already on-Island. This sort of bugs me, because if he has been on the Island for a while, why aren't Sawyer, Juliet, etc. more freaked out?

3. Ethan is the son of Amy and Horace.

4. Faraday is no longer with Dharma.

5. Ilana and Caesar did not know each other before the flight.

6. Dharma on-Island does not communicate with Dharma off-Island in regards to recruiting. The Islanders check the passengers' names against the sub manifest, but that's it.

In my opinion, meh. I still feel like the writers are dragging their feet.

Theory to come later.

The Numbers

No new LOST episode last week (boooo), hence no new posts her for a few days. Since I can't think of anything new to discuss, I'm going to tackle The Numbers today.

For a quick rundown of every time they are brought up, see the Lostpedia article.

From the same article:

It has been revealed in The Lost Experience that these six numbers are the core values of the Valenzetti Equation, a mathematical formula designed to predict the end of humanity. The numbers in actuality are said to represent human and environmental factors in the equation (given numerical form), though their precise meaning is uncertain. One purpose of the DHARMA Initiative was to change the factors leading to humanity's demise, which will be indicated by an alteration in at least one of the human/environmental factors - i.e. the numbers. However, in all its years of research, the Initiative failed to reach its goal. Despite much research and manipulation of the equation's values, the end result was always the numbers.

If anyone can translate what that all means, I'd be appreciative.

Bottom line, The Numbers are the highest-profile, least-explained mystery in the show. It seems that Hurley's entire character is based on The Numbers. The Swan hatch (and subsequently all of Season 2) was based around The Numbers.

And then the Swan blew up, and it seems they disappeared.

Sure, random numbers show up from time to time, but that just seems like the writers messing with us.

To cap off the frustration-fest, here is a long quote from Damon Lindelof (one of the LOST producers):

There are some questions that are very engaging and interesting, and then there are other questions that we have no interest whatsoever in answering. We call it the midi-chlorian debate, because at a certain point, explaining something mystical demystifies it. To try and have a character come and say, "Here is what the numbers mean," actually makes every usage of the numbers up to that point less interesting.

You can actually watch Star Wars now, and when Obi-Wan talks about the Force to Luke for the first time, it loses its luster because the Force has been explained as, sort of, little biological agents that are in your blood stream. So you go, "Oh, I liked Obi-Wan's version a lot better." Which in the case of our show is, "The numbers are bad luck, they keep popping up in Hurley's life, they appear on the island." ... But if you're watching the show for a detailed explanation of what the numbers mean—and I'm not saying you won't see more of them—then you will be disappointed by the end of season six.

Well. I wish the producers would give us a list of mysteries they aren't going to bother explaining so I can stop worrying about them.

And the problem with the mitochlorian thing, Damon, is that it is terrible. Lucas didn't make fans mad merely because he explained the Force, he made them mad because the explanation was totally lame.

Foreshadowing of your own future? :)

Theories, comments and questions on "LaFleur"

Good ol' LOST. Just when you think they'll start answering questions you've had for years, they switch focus and start creating even more puzzles.

*I'm talking, of course, about the four-toed statue mystery. The Left-Behinds get skipped to a time when said statue is standing tall, in all its glory, and then three seconds later they're in 1974 and it's gone. My wife's initial reaction to seeing it was that it was Anubis, Egyptian god of the afterlife.

However, a Lostpedia contributor posted this picture to support his/her theory that it is in fact Taweret, another Egyptian goddess.


Here is what the Wikipedia has to say on Taweret:

Consequently, Taweret became seen, very early in Egyptian history, as a deity of protection in pregnancy and childbirth. Pregnant women wore amulets with her name or likeness to protect their pregnancies.

Pregnancy, eh? This theory seems very likely, given the focus of the episode and the ongoing theme of pregnancy for the show.

*Next we have Sawyer, back to his old conman ways. I realized that it's been a while since we've seen him try to manipulate anyone. Seems like he's gone entire seasons just reacting to other people and trying to get what he wanted through aggression and sarcasm. In a weird way, it was kinda nice to see him work his trickery on Horace.

*For those who don't remember, Horace shows up a few times in LOST prior to this. He is the friend of Ben's dad who gets Roger the work on the Island in the first place. In short, he's the reason Ben is on the Island. He also shows up in the episode "Cabin Fever" in one of Locke's dreams. It's an interesting encounter.

*Where the heck are Rose, Bernard, and the other redshirts? You'd think with Sawyer, Jin, etc. looking for them for three years they'd have found them. Different time skip, somehow? I haven't seen a satisfactory explanation for this.

*Where is Faraday? The rest of the Left-Behinds seem to have assimilated well into the Dharma culture. And speaking of Faraday, it's highly unlikely the red-haired girl he saw was Charlotte. The math doesn't add up.

*If there was a truce, why did the two Others kill Paul and appear to be ready to off Amy? My guess is that the couple was "trespassing" on a part of the Island they weren't allowed on. Maybe the deal is that if you trespass you are killed, and killing Others in retaliation was against the rules.

*Along those same lines, why did Richard want Paul's body? Does it have anything to do with the ankh he wore? And why did Amy accept this so quietly? Does she know something?

*Why does Richard portray himself as a regular dude to Horace, but appear as a stereotypical "hostile" to young Ben?

*Ben is either on the Island already in 1977, or very close to arriving. As a Lostpedia writer put it:

Ben Linus is stated to have been born in the early 1960's. Sterling Beaumon, the actor who portray's Ben as a child is 13, so it's safe to assume that's the age Ben is at the time he arrives on the Island. Going by this, he is already there, or, if he had been born in 1964, he has yet to arrive, but will very shortly. I'm going with this, as it would make a great episode seeing how Sawyer and the gang respond.

*Remember when we first meet Juliet, and Harper tells her that Juliet "looks just like 'her'"? What if Juliet looks just like Juliet?

*And finally, something a lot of people seem to be misunderstanding: THE TIMELINE IS FIXED. As Faraday says, what happened, happened. So Juliet saving Amy's baby did not change anything. Sawyer becoming a fairly high-up in Dharma did not change anything. Saving Amy from being killed did not change anything. They did these things the first time through the timeline, and any "changes" they made are already manifest in the 2004-2008 timeline. The Left-Behinds were always part of Dharma from 1974-1977.

*What does the Star logo on Jin and Sawyer's jumpsuits indicate? Security of some sort?

And that's all I've got. I still see this episode as a filler; all it answers, really, is "how did the Left-Behinds get into Dharma and how long were they there before Jack, etc. returned?"

LaFleur

I still feel like the writers are dragging their feet right now, but we did learn some interesting stuff in last night's episode.

1. The "women who get pregnant on the Island die" issue was not present in 1977 or whenever Amy gives birth. This further lends evidence to the idea that this problem did not show up until around 2002, (or three to four years before 815 crashes) when Ben recruited Juliet.

2. The four-toed foot was once an entire statue, and it looked kinda like Anubis, the jackal-headed god of the afterlife in Egyptian mythology. This Egyptian theme is furthered by the fact that Paul wore an ankh, which Amy kept after he died.

3. We learn how the Left-Behinds managed to infiltrate Dharma.

4. We learn that the sonic fence cannot keep the Others out. Of course, we could have inferred that from the episode "The Man Behind the Curtain," where young Ben is in the middle of a "Hostile" attack and there's apparently a real chance the fighting could reach the school.

5. We further established that while Alpert is special in some ways, he doesn't know everything, as he doesn't recognize Alpert.

6. We learned that you can get through the fence (as a non-Other) if you are wearing special earbuds, and that Dharma definitely built it.

7. And we know for sure that Locke fixed the time-skipping issue (apparently) caused by Ben.

I miss anything?

Reality subtext as applied to LOST

The website tvtropes.org discusses a concept called "reality subtext," which essentially means real-life events cause certain things to happen on-screen. An actress becomes pregnant, so the show has her character become pregnant (Samantha Stevens in Bewitched), have her take a leave of absence (Sculley in the X-Files), attempt to hide the baby bump (Angela in The Office), or use a combination of any of the three (Benson in Law and Order: SVU).

The point is, writing angles can be entirely changed by stuff like this. In LOST, the actor who played Eko, Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje, requested to be let off the show after the death of his parents.

Bottom line, that means the smoke monster killed Eko because of the reality subtext, not because of to any planned storyline from the writers. (I always knew the "he refused to repent so he died" explanation seemed off...)

Maybe this was already obvious to everyone else, but the concept kinda cracks my perception of what I thought the show was. I believed the writers had a fairly intricate vision of where they were going, and their job was to keep the train on the tracks, so to speak.

Of course, I knew about the Nikki and Paulo thing, but I never made the connection that we could see more of that. The writers made a mistake, the viewers hated the two, that was that.

But now... now I know. Shoot, major plot lines could be entirely dismantled by one hissy fit thrown by a star. And the writers have enough to deal with as it is, seeing that they have around 25 more episodes to resolve this whole thing and the 23,000 loose ends that are dangling in the breeze like the cherries in Amy's car James.

This discovery, combined with my recent realization that nothing is answered in J.J. Abrams' Cloverfield (good movie nonetheless) is making me very worried that the LOST experience will end badly.

Conversation on "The Life and Death of Jeremy Bentham"

Brandon: so like I said, better episode than I thought it would be.

Amy: Mmm hmm

Brandon: big question of the day: why did Ben kill Locke?

Amy: And the teaser wasn't as revealing as I thought it was

No kidding

Why didn't he let Locke kill himself?

I have two theories in that way:

Brandon: something vital changed

Amy: Either Ben wanted to know what he knew and then found out he knew too much (how cliche) and therefore killed him

Or something with him being able to come back to life means he can't kill himself...

Why did Ben look so angry at the time, though?

Did he find out later that he actually needed Locke to get back on the island?

And he's like, "Crap. I killed him. Oh well, I guess I'll just steal his body with this van I have..."

Brandon: ok one thing at a time

Amy: Ha ha ha

Sorry

Brandon: Option A: Possible. The only thing that changed was that Locke revealed he knew of Hawking.

Amy: But why would that upset him so much?

Brandon: you think Ben looks angry as he kills Ben? Or is it just the extreme focus needed to strangle someone to death?

Amy: I think he looks at least a little angry

Brandon: we'll get back to that

Amy: Kay

Brandon: Your Option B: No, because I don't think Ben expected Locke to resurrect.

Amy: Huh

Brandon: He says "I'm really going to miss you, John."

Amy: Hence the Thomas story to Jack

Brandon: why say that if he anticipates seeing him again on the Island in like a day?

Amy: That's true

Brandon: ooh but I forgot about the Doubting Thomas stuff.

Amy: Yup

I think it was a story about himself

Brandon: Maybe Ben is just the writers' vehicle for setting it up... he doesn't know about it himself.

a good possibility

Amy: Right

Brandon: and re: why bring Locke back to the Island...

Amy: He found out something later that changed his mind - I'm guessing Eloise talked to him

Brandon: the prevailing thought right now is that Ben killed Locke after Locke revealed he knew about Hawking either because A.) Ben did not know about Hawking before that moment, and once he knew she was the key to getting back he had no use for Locke OR B.) Locke was not supposed to know about Hawking, and once it is revealed that he did, Ben had to kill him, as a rival for control of the Island.

Amy: Huh

Brandon: also: Ben then decides to use Locke's body as the "Christian" on the flight, HOWEVER there's a good possibility he doesn't know that Christian was raised somehow into some vague sense of living. He's never seen him.

Amy: Ah

That's true

That makes sense

Brandon: so I'm guessing he'll be shocked when he wakes up from his plane-crash injury coma and sees John staring at him.

Amy: No kidding

Talk about nightmare coming true

But if Locke is a proxy for Christian, why did he resurrect rather than come into the sense of being that Christian is?

Brandon: Locke is a chosen Island protector like Richard, Christian, not.

also: Ben says once you turn the wheel you can't ever go back. He and Locke do go back... but end up on the Hydra island. Does the Hyrda not count, or is Ben lying (again)?

Amy: But why can Christian come back as a ghost or whatever?

Or the island changed its mind

?

It would kind of make sense that the Hydra kind of doesn't count -

Brandon: no idea why Christian was raised like he was. Maybe the Island can do freaky stuff with bodies that are dead upon arrival.

but the Hyrda moves with the main Island.

Amy: And is considered part of the island by Dharma, at least

Brandon: but they aren't Island

Amy: That's true

Brandon: and as my latest poll discusses, who is the good guy here? Widmore, or Ben? Each of them are excellent at at least playing the good guy, even when you know their body of work doesn't point to that being the case.

Amy: I think they both have agendas and do what it takes to get it done, whether being good or bad goes with it at the time or not

Brandon: right, so if you're Locke, who do you want to help? Whose agenda more closely mirrors your own?

Amy: Do we know what their agendas are?

I think they both want control of the island

Brandon: ok but to what end?

Amy: Widmore wants to commercialize it, I think, and just have sheer power of the island

I think Ben has more respect for the island and keeping it safe, but he likes the power, too

Brandon: so you go with Ben?

Amy: I'm going to say yes, even though he's super manipulative and we see his true colors, which are a bit freaky

Brandon: also, he kills Abbadon, which GRR

but I guess we found out all we needed to? He works for Widmore. He wanted to get Locke on the Island. The end.

Amy: Ha ha - because he was answering questions?

Pretty much - that seemed like his purpose

Brandon: so Widmore wants Locke on the Island, Ben doesn't.

doesn't that make Widmore the one to follow if you're John?

Amy: I though Widmore just doesn't want Locke to die

Brandon: well, he gets Abbadon to send Locke on the Walkabout, remember?

and he says something about helping Locke convince the others to go back, Locke included.

Amy: The walkabout thing is true - but how does Locke know Widmore is telling the truth this time?

Brandon: he doesn't

but he fixes his leg and gives him the means to go anywhere in the world

Amy: Yup

I guess what it comes down to is: do you stick with the person who wants the best for the island or the person who will get you there?

Brandon: turns out, Locke kinda waffled between both and ended up back there anyway. :)

Amy: Yup

Lucky for him

I felt bad for him again - I haven't felt that for awhile

Brandon: when he's all despondent before he tries to off himself?

Amy: Mmm hmm

Brandon: Mandi and I disagree on that one.

Amy: And how he's just trying to do what's best for everyone

But no one will listen to him

Brandon: is he sad because he feels like he's failed and decides to just end it all? Or is he just at the end of his rope (haha) and decides to follow Richard's advice because he feels like there's nothing else to do?

Amy: Yeah - I think he's trying to fulfill what Richard tells him, but I also think he's truly despondent

Brandon: fair enough

and then there's Walt

Amy: Random

Doesn't feel like he's part of the story anymore

Brandon: I know

all that time spent where the Others kidnapped him, and now no one cares if he lives or dies.

Amy: Nope

Brandon: did we talk about this already? About how Walt is special, but not like the Others thought he was?

Amy: I don't think so

Brandon: I think that's a big thing. The Others in Season 2 or whenever find out that Walt is special.

so they kidnap him, thinking maybe he should be their leader?

then later it shows them all being COMPLETELY FREAKED OUT by the kid, which means they had no idea what he could do.

and he was definitely not what they hoped he was.

Amy: Which makes me laugh

Nope

Brandon: exactly

so this brings up the question: what is the deal with Walt?

Amy: Which is ironic, considering it was kind of the island that wanted him

Brandon: was it, though? Did Jacob want him or did Ben or Richard do it on his won?

own

Amy: I dunno - does Locke know something everyone else doesn't, or did he really just want to visit Walt?

Somebody's going to have to take over when Locke or Ben dies

Brandon: yep

Amy: Which makes me want to ask why Alpert isn't in charge all the time

Brandon: Walt just represents all of the thousands of loose ends the writers now have 1.5 seasons to tie up.

Amy: Yup

Brandon: Maybe Alpert isn't special (beyond his ability to remain 28)

Amy: Ha ha - yeah, that's nothing

Brandon: Mandi and I have commented more than once that his function is much like an old noble in a kingdom where the new prince is in charge, but doesn't know what he's doing.

the noble acts in an advisory role as much as he can, because he knows how to take care of the kingdom, but the power all resides with the spoiled new kid.

Amy: Why does he continue to do it?

Because he's not royalty?

That seems dumb because he's ageless

Brandon: *shrug

Jacob has not deemed him to be the leader, so he can't be the leader.

but he is loyal to the Island

so he stays

Amy: He is the one who is always talking about destiny and not trying to change it - maybe his old age has helped him realize his place and to be find with it

Brandon: right

of course, then we go back to the idea that Jacob is a prisoner.

Amy: Of Alpert?

Brandon: his "help me" and the theory that the volcanic ash around his cabin makes a cage of some sort.

of someone. Usually theorized to be Ben.

Amy: But then Ben says the island is displeased with him and he has to leave - that doesn't free him?

Brandon: maybe it did. We haven't seen or heard anything about Jacob since.

Amy: Again - I think it's pointless to have so much power and yet allow yourself to be confined

Brandon: allow himself?

1. We don't know what power Jacob has.

2. We don't even know who or what Jacob is.

Amy: That's true

Brandon: one last thing

Penny

Amy: Kay

Brandon: so Widmore says he was the leader of the Island for more than three decades

say 1954-1992

he's what... 50-something?

Amy: Okay

Yeah

Penny was born on-island

Brandon: 50 when he gets off Island, 70 or so now

yeah, bottom line, Penny was either born on Island

OR

adopted, like Alex.

Amy: She's not his?

Yup

Huh

Brandon: also, if you look at Penny with a "she was born on-Island" lens, she appears to know more than she lets on.

Amy: Yes - she found the island, after all

And is pretty against Desmond having anything to do with it

Brandon: exactly

Amy: Makes sense

So she's like Charlotte

Except not wanting to really find the island again

Brandon: possibly

anything else?

Amy: I don't think so

Brandon: ok

The Big Picture

I was catching up with an old coworker/friend of mine tonight, and mentioned he used to watch LOST and then stopped. After finding out I watch the show religiously, he then asked me where I thought they were going with it.

That put me at a bit of a loss. 

I get so caught up in all the "little mysteries" that I haven't really thought about what the point of the show is. What is the worst-case scenario here? What is Ms. Hawking (and Ben and Widmore?) trying to prevent? The closest thing we have to an answer here is The Numbers (Valenzetti Equation), which "predict the time of human extinction."

Of course, as my previous paragraph shows, we don't even know who the "good guys" are, let alone what their end goals are. 

The show strings us along with all of these concerns like "Who is Richard, really?" and "what is the smoke monster?" that we can't spend much time on what the overall story is here, and even if we did spend a ton of time on it, we couldn't figure much out thanks to the plethora of unexplained smaller questions.

Well played, LOST writers.

Theories on "Life of Bentham" tomorrow.