Friday, May 16, 2008

Thoughts on Lost - "There's No Place Like Home"

Ok, here are a few thoughts about the show last night, the show in general and an updated list of who I would be hanging out with on the Island. Please feel free to discuss whatever in the comments section.

First, I direct you to the Entertainment Weekly recap of this week's episode. While heavy on inferences and outside references, it does a good job of linking actions to past episodes that you might have forgotten.

As for last night's episode, I'm not a huge fan of the direction they’re taking the finale. Right now, I'm done with the Oceanic 6. I've always hated Hurley, Sun isn't much better, Kate and Jack are getting annoying, and taking a baby along for that ride, and we've kinda already seen where Sayid is gonna wind up. I want more Ben and Kemy. Hopefully we get it in 2 weeks, but with the way they’ve set up the Oceanic 6 (they’re as spread out as they could possibly be in the Lost geography) it’s going to take a lot of storytelling to get them all back together and in the hull of an airplane.

A couple of random thoughts/theories of mine about the island:

* How the hell did Faraday have the orchid drawn in his notebook without being there?

* Abbadon = Walt grown up? – popular theory on the web. Not sure I necessarily agree with it, unless they explain that aging weirdly on the island also gives you a bizarre accent.

* The “crash” site of the plane they keep saying was a hoax? Not really a hoax. I think they’re all dead in another timeline. (read below).

* Moving the island means moving it somewhere in time.

* Jack Shepherd is not dead.

The orchid station has a cool video, which we've linked to before here.

Current list of people I want to be close to on the Island right now. I define this list as who I’d currently want to be with on or near the island, to increase my chances of survival (and feel good about my survival.):

10. Jack – He does something he’s not proud of I bet. Something that is going to be eating at his conscious. Still, he’s got a sense of loyalty that won’t quit.
9. Locke – He might be the savior of something, but that doesn’t mean he has any clue what he’s doing. In fact, it always seems he’s going against what he should be doing. Of course, right now he’s positioned as a savior, so it wouldn’t be a terrible place to be by his side.
8. Kate – She’s a survivor, no matter what. And she’s easy to look at.
7. Desmond – Glad to hear his decision about not going back to the island. You can get killed there just for looking at a tree funny. Not so happy to see he’s on a soon-to-be-exploding freighter. That doesn’t bode well. Kinda get the vibe when Faraday gets back, Jin is going to put Sun on the raft to go back to the island, and he’s going to stay with all those other survivors (you know, the ones that we never saw before that suddenly got to escape) and Desmond as the Freighter explodes once they kill Kemy – that thing on his bicep has to be involved here. My suspicion? We all think Desmond dies in the finale but he’ll wind up alive in the next season. Ok, that’s more my hope than anything else.
6. Sawyer – Like Kate, he’s a survivor. So far, he seems to be picking the right sides, which makes him smarter than Jack. How much smarter, I don’t know.
5. Sayid – Well, we know he survives into the future, we just don’t know how. He’s running off into the wild to get Jack…not sure why he’s loyal to Jack. Perhaps he’s been with Ben since the beginning and is a mole? There are a lot of earlier connections to Sayid and the island (that army guy that sees him Iraq and then winds up in the hatch when desmond gets there? Hmmmm?
4. Faraday – Talk about secrets. I don’t think he’s keeping them because, I think he’s actually keeping them from himself. As in future Faraday has left clues for past Faraday that present Faraday is slowly starting to pick up? Yeah, I can’t follow that either. That notebook of his contains some powerful things though.
3. Kemy – Yes I know I suggested earlier that he will probably die, but still – he’s a badass and apparently has intel that gives him a leg up on most of the people on the island. And he came out of a scrap with the smoke monster fairly unscathed. And he does at least go into a firefight with a decent bargaining chip (the device I believe will blow up the boat if he’s killed.) There are worse people to be near when SGD.
2. Alpert – He never ages. That’s kinda cool. He’s always one step ahead of people when we see him. That’s really kinda cool. And he apparently knows a place on the island that others don’t, where he can kinda chill out, not age and probably bang chicks. And that’s the coolest.
1. Ben – How can it not be? He said it last night. He has a plan for everything. Sure, he got his daughter killed, but aside from that, when hasn’t be been in control of the situation. I don’t like his tactic of allowing people to beat him up to make them feel like they have the drop on him, but it’s better than being a corpse.

And finally, here's my bizarre totally not thought out theory about the island that makes my head hurt...

I see the island as a place that sits at the edge of time travel. With the island you can travel through time , which is basically a different dimension. Each time you travel, you start a different strand which becomes your timeline. These strands eventually come back tog

Lets consider our “present” as a cord of rope. Now, with the island one can travel within time. But once they do, it splinters off and becomes a different stand of rope (one of the strands that make up the rope). It remains to be seen whether these strands go off into nowhere; I believe they eventually must come back together to keep the large cord of rope as one. That then means while one may be able to manipulate certain events in the past, the overall constant cannot be changed. Or perhaps the island can change events in the future, and that’s why it’s so dangerous to move it. Regardless, that’s why I think these characters are so intertwined with their pasts. I think they know each other in the future, and that when they travel back in the past, their consciousness retains this information, so that they will still all come together so as not to ruin the time structure of the cord of rope.

Could you imagine seasons 3 and 4 the same episodes as the first two season just from a different perspective? Or maybe that’s just the series finale.

I won’t even pretend to think I understand what I just wrote. It’s obviously thrown together without a lot of thought.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

My one theory on Lost (i only watched past 2 seasons) is that the island is a Utopia where you can not die, except by the hand of another person, and new life cannot be reproduced on the island. So if you are "lucky" enough to make it there, you can live there forever if you choose. Has anyone died by means other than someone killing them? I know some people have been healed on the island. I also know they haven't been able to have a baby conceived on the island(i think). Its some kind of statement on society, about living freely and such.

I proclaim to be a Lost novice, and my "theory" may already have been debunked, or incorrect. I'd also buy some kind of fountain of youth thing going on. As to the parallel time segments, i haven't the foggiest about that.