All men are beasts.
On the last night of the marriage, my husband and I went to the ballet. We sat behind a blind man; his guide dog, in harness, lay beside him in the aisle of the theater. I could not keep my attention on the performance; instead, I watched the guide dog watch the performance. Throughout the evening, the dog’s head moved, following the dancers across the stage. Every so often the dog would whimper slightly. “Because he can hear the high notes we can’t?” my husband said. “No,” I said, “because he was disappointed in the choreography.”
-from the title story in Amy Hempel’s collection, The Dog Of The Marriage.
from here.
Don’t cry, don’t raise your eye…
I found a reason.
“Be not afraid of life. Believe that life is worth living and your belief will help create the fact.”
-William James
from here.
“Your belief in God is merely an escape from your monotonous, stupid and cruel life.”
-Jiddu Krishnamurti
“No man is great enough or wise enough for any of us to surrender our destiny to. The only way in which anyone can lead us is to restore to us the belief in our own guidance.”
-Henry Miller
“Man is a credulous animal, and must believe something; in the absence of good grounds for belief, he will be satisfied with bad ones.”
-Bertrand Russell
“I had therefore to remove knowledge, in order to make room for belief.”
-Immanuel Kant
“The mark of your ignorance is the depth of your belief in injustice and tragedy. What the caterpillar calls the end of the world, the Master calls the butterfly.”
-Richard Bach
from here.
“It’s good to see you out of those chains.”
I’m going to be as eloquent as possible here, okay?
HOLY FUCK, LOST IS BACK!
Last night’s premiere episode, “LA X, parts 1 and 2,” which was #10 on our Top 100 Moments Of Lost, if you didn’t notice, was easily the most anticipated two hours of television this year (so far, at least), right? And, to me, it was extremely satisfying, and in typical Lost fashion, frustrating with the new questions it sets up, and anticipation it builds.
Did Jughead explode and reset the timeline?
The answer is yes! We see our favorite characters right back there on Oceanic flight 815, flying from Sydney to Los Angeles, encountering a bit of turbulence as it soars over the submerged Island we’ve been getting to know so well over the last 5 years.
We see a few familiar faces, and notice some absent ones, and learn that this timeline wasn’t born out of Oceanic 815 not crashing on the Island, it’s was created specifically by the explosion on the Island in 1977.
That’s 30 years of a whole new world to explore, and one that we’ll get to do flash… sideways… backs (technically we’re flashing back to an alternate universe 2004 from 2008, right?) all the while…
We’re in our regular “timeline” on the show, on the Island, with our favorite castaways, and those wacky, crazy Others. Jacob’s dead. Sayid is dead, then not. And the Jacob’s nemesis? Turns out HE IS ACTUALLY THE FUCKING SMOKE MONSTER. And also kind of badass, right?
And more than a little scary, which is, not surprisingly, a nice fit.
High praise should be more than paid to Terry O’Quinn, who has played the broken and weary but always hopeful John Locke so perfectly the past 5 years only to turn it all on it’s head, to be a new character, seemingly evil incarnate with a masterful ability to fool and manipulate. That mad gleam that Locke always had in his eye? Now it’s fully shiny.
And we’ve spoken volumes before about Matthew Fox’s performance as Jack, who’s always been a little broken, a little deranged, and he’s the same here, always feeling hunched over with grief and the vapors of failure that hang over like black Smoke Monster clouds. He just feels like an outsider, in the “real” timeline and in that “sideways” timeline, as he watches Rose and Bernard canoodling across the aisle from him. The only real shine that enters his eyes is his momentary passing Kate on the plane and later when he meets wheelchair-confined alterna-John Locke, a man who did go on his walkabout and maybe feels that bit of hope again when the spinal surgeon tells him nothing’s irreversible.
That looks suspiciously like connective tissue to a looming mystery, friends and readers. That, or Jack really missed a spot when he was shaving his chest.
Also, I would love it if our only glimpses of sideways Charlie are just those as he’s being lead away to jail for trying to kill himself in the airplane bathroom.
RIP Juliet. Oh, and Sawyer and Juliet’s love.
Also, the Others! Well, no just the Others, but the temple dwelling Others. With their leader, Dogen, who only speaks Japanese because English leaves a nasty taste on his tongue, his aide and translator, Lennon (named for the fact that he wears the same glasses as the famous Beatle?), and the return of Cindy and those fucking kids, with their waters of life that are seemingly polluted by their messianic figure’s demise. And with the news of Jacob’s passing, they’re afraid of the rise of the Smoke monster? Isn’t he the security system for the temple? And if he’s a smoke monster, is it possible that Jacob was also a smoke monster in some natural form?
It wouldn’t be a Lost season premiere without new mysterious characters, new mysterious locations, and well… new mystery, right? And also this:
And we’re all here, on the edge of our seats, ready to discover it together. Now, I’ve said too much, way more than I had intended to, but the excitement and the curiosity, it just springs forth. More importantly, what did you think?
The 100 Greatest Moments of Lost, part 5: “I’m sick of lying!!”
We know your LOST BONERS must be huge by this point. Only a little while until the premier. Why don’t we knock out the Top 10 in the meantime, eh?
The 100 Greatest Moments of Lost!
PART FIVE
10. Marco: The “LA X” Premier. Can you feel it? I mean, can you fucking feel it as it gets closer? That beating you hear, those loud insane drums, that’s your heartbeat. That’s the sound of your blood rushing through your body, to your brain, to your genitals, getting you ready as the circles closes tighter and we get near tonight’s premiere episode. I could make it even more surreal for you there, but let’s just say that we’re taking a chance here and saying that THE SHEER EXCITEMENT alone for tonight’s episode, “LA X,” especially after watching that new promo, is in the top ten greatest moments of this show.
9. Benjamin: The pan over to the plane crash in the Pilot episode.
I don’t want sound like a broken record here, but Lost’s first episode is the best television pilot ever made, and it’s not even close. Who wasn’t floored when the camera panned around some bushes on the beach to show us the carnage of a motherfucking plane crash?
The shot, on just a technical level is superb. Then you throw in the excellent sound editing, the way the noises slowly resolve into screams, and the creepy music.
And the clever camera trickery that at one moment gives us an idyllic beach and the next chaos just around the corner. I don’t think anybody who watched this first 10 minutes of this show changed the channel.
8. Marco: The giant FOUR-TOED FOOT STATUE.
Let me just quote Sayid for a moment here: “I don’t know what’s more disquieting, the fact that the rest of the statue is missing, or that it has four toes…” Exactly. I’m glad that they gave us a lot of glimpses of rest of the statue in season 5, especially in the finale (for the longest time we were like, “OMG, is it Tawaret or Sobek?” Ancient Egyptian God intrigue!)(Team Tawaret won. Go fertility!), and wonderfully, it only confuses us more. But ever since the introduction of this massive mysterious beauty in the season 2 finale, “Live Together, Die Alone,” from the biggest minds to the most infinitesimal, there’s no way you couldn’t have been just a little captivated by this tease.
7. Marco: Eko meets the Monster. From one thing that’s kept audience enthralled for years now to the mother of all mysterious goings on on the Island of Lost: The motherfucking Smoke Monster. In particular, the scene in which it was revealed to us in all it’s bizarre, gorgeous glory there in “The 23rd Psalm,” when it comes screaming out of the jungle to confront Mr. Eko, who merely turns and faces it down, and he doesn’t have the sonic fence that Juliet had in “Left Behind.”
There, as Charlie watches from a tree, Mr. Eko stares into the eye of the black foggy beast, and it seems to stare right back into him, with flashes from his life off the Island appearing in little electrical surges through it’s wisps. And if I just take it there for a moment, this moment alone, with all it’s possible implications that one couldn’t even begin to fully grasp at, gave me a boner.
…and further ignited my hatred of Charlie. I can understand his climbing up into a tree to hide, that makes sense. He’s no Mr. Eko, that’s for damn sure (even though Charlie did have a weird crush on Eko throughout season 2), but what kills me is after the Monster apparently judged Eko okay and left him there in peace (for the time being), how does someone like Charlie not go running back to camp and scream, “OMG, guys, guess what I just saw out there in the jungle? THE MOTHERFUCKER MONSTER is what, and you know what? IT’S MADE OF A NANOTECH-like SWARM OF INTELLIGENT BLACK SMOKE!!!”
Benjamin: Not to defend Charlie, but let’s be honest, if he dude had run back to camp, the rest of the castaways would have been all “yeah, sure, black smoke. Fucking tweaker. Go play some more shitty guitar and stroke it to the pregnant chick, limey.”
Marco: Side query: Do you think that the man in black/the dark man/Jacob’s nemesis/Esau (too many Stephen King references there, sorry) is actually the smoke monster when he’s not taking on the guise of deceased human forms like Locke, Christian, Eko’s brother, Yemi, or Alex? If so, go back and watch the scene between Jacob and his nemesis at the beginning of “The Incident,” and when Jacob asks him if he’s hungry, the man in black merely says, “No thanks, I just ate.”
6: Benjamin: Desmond asks for Penny’s phone number. “I won’t call you, for eight years!” Maybe it’s my own fantasies of disappearing from the world for while, but the wrap up to “The Constant” gets me every single time.
How would you react if an ex demanded your phone number, promising not to call for 8 years and giving you an exact time to expect the phone to ring?
And then, 8 years later after being missing for years, he calls? I love this whole sequence. “Eight years from now, I need to call you. And… I can’t call you if I don’t have your number.”
Des and Penny, who are kind of the heart of the show, finally get their reunion. “I’ll find you!” Penny gasps, crying. If you didn’t get a little misty during this scene then you’re a fucking robot.
5. Benjamin: Jack and Locke’s argument in “Orientation.” “Why do you find it so hard to believe?” “Why do you find it so easy?” “It’s never BEEN EASY!” Three lines of dialog that distill Jack and Locke to their base ideologies.
Our two tortured heroes were perhaps never so honest with each other. If Lost were movie, this would be its Oscar reel. And I think it gives necessary weight to Locke’s conviction: he’s not just a blind follower, he’s gone through quite a lot to arrive at this moment, but he needs someone else to share it with him.
4. Marco: Locke screams and bangs on the hatch in “Deus Ex Machina” after Boonie dies, and then… the light comes on. The thing about characters like Jack and Locke, the men of science and faith, respectively, isn’t just so much their belief systems, but their failings. Jack represents our very base, very human failings and insecurities. His suffering is so tragic and real, and not unlike the things we can all go through. And Locke, well, Locke is no stranger to similar failings, but he’s also a man looking for answers, for a place in the larger context of the world and what it all means.
And when you begin to scream out big questions to the universe of that nature, you’re bound to be let down, in a much bigger way. You’re going to fall from such a larger height, only in this case, it wasn’t just John’s hopes that took a tumble, it was also Boone, “the sacrifice the Island demanded,” Locke later reasoned. And there, when Locke was at another in a long series of moments of crushing defeat, screaming and banging on the door to the impregnable hatch, essentially asking the universe why he was nothing in it’s eyes, a light from inside comes on. And John Locke, at his very lowest there, is bathed in this new light…
3. Benjamin: Jack’s “Live Together, Die Alone” speech in “White Rabbit.” He wasn’t always the greatest leader. Ok, he usually wasn’t one, but for this shining moment, Jack really was the leader and hero of the castaways. Bonus points for a speech that doesn’t just have to apply to plane crash survivors on an island. If there’s a message in Lost, it’s in this scene.
2. Marco: “Not Penny’s Boat,” from near the end of “Through The Looking Glass.”
So vague, and yet, so heavy with potential meaning are these three words written on Charlie’s hand that he shows to Desmond as the room he’s in fills up with water and he drowns.
Just like Locke can find the light to continue on when he’s literally at his lowest, covered in another man’s blood, these two guys in a thirty year old DHARMA station underwater can find victory snatched away from them at the last possible moment, when they were at their highest. And Desmond can’t really fully know what Charlie meant by that or what he saw/heard to make him convey this message, but he knows what that moment isn’t: the happy ending they were hoping for. Perhaps you can’t cheat fate. Whatever happens, happens. The universe will always course correct, right?
Benjamin: This is my favorite scene in the series. Who would have guessed that a sodding tool like Charlie would go out with the most epic and moving death scene of all. Love the message on his hand, love the understanding that comes between Desmond and Charlie. Crossing himself while he drowns is a beautiful grace note to end the scene.
and here we go. The greatest moment in the history of Lost…
1: Benjamin: Jack’s flashforward revealed in his meeting with Kate at the airport.
This was the moment that forever changed the show. It was an excellent show before this scene, and a legendary one after it. “I’m sick of lying. We made a mistake… We were not supposed to leave,” Jack pleads to Kate.
The twist isn’t just neat on a plot level, it’s devastating on an emotional one. We learn that they did make it off the Island, but rather than triumph, somehow it’s all gone terribly wrong. It didn’t just feel like a glimpse into our characters’ futures, it felt like a warning about our own. What awaits our heroes isn’t rescue but tragedy. Narratively, it’s genius, and the kind of story-telling structure they’ll be teaching in writing classes in 20 years.
After this flashforward, we not only had the excitement of the events on the Island, we got a peeks into the future at lives torn asunder, and on top of every other mystery in the show, the question of how did it all go so wrong to end up like it did at the airport, a drugged up Jack, completely bottomed-out, screaming “We have to go back, Kate! WE HAVE TO GO BACK!!!”
The 100 Greatest Moments of Lost, part 4: “It only ends once, everything else is just progress”
If you haven’t already, you might want to check out:
But before you do, make sure you put on some trash bag diapers, you know, like the astronauts wear.
We have already been taking a wonderful ride down memory lane, and at this point, every scene on this list is one of those “fuck me, I don’t believe what I just saw” moments. That reminds me, nowhere in this whole list did we find time to recall one of my favorite lines of the series. “Boone was a sacrifice that the Island demanded,” should go into the Dialog Hall of Fame. We love you, John Locke, and we left off with John in a mass grave, mortally wounded by Ben for being Jacob’s pet. And now let’s look back at a classic encounter with Ol’ Smokey…
The 100 Greatest Moments of Lost!
PART FOUR
25. Kate and Juliet face the Smoke Monster at the sonic fence in “Left Behind.” I think we all learned a lot from this scene. One of the A-team finally sees the Smoke Monster in all its glory. We know the monster will attack an Other. We know the sonic fence is a defense against it, perhaps the only reason for the fence. And we also learned that Kate + Juliet + handcuffs + rain & mud + popping shoulder joints back into sockets = hot!
24. The Frozen Donkey Wheel. Ben will help John move the island by blowing a hole in the Orchid’s containment chamber, climbing down a ladder, through a tunnel and then turning an ancient-looking ice-covered wheel. Millions of theories about the Polar Bears being trained to turn the wheel are born.
23. Sayid confronting ‘Henry Gale’ in Lockdown. “It was all there, your whole story, your alibi, it was all true. But still, I did not believe it to be true. So I dug up that grave. And found that there was not a woman inside, there was a man. a man named Henry Gale.” Fuck Yeah, Sayid! This is possibly my favorite Sayid line in the whole series. Marco and I often joke that the writers must continuously contrive ways to separate Sayid from the other Castaways, because if he was there for a lot of these other moments, the show would have only lasted a season, he’s that fucking competent.
22. Keamy executes Alex. You never saw this coming. There are tons of action and drama shows where somebody’s got a gun to a family member’s head, and the relative always relents rather than let the other person die. Always. Except on Lost. Not only did Ben not relent, he disavows Alex as she pleads for mercy, and Keamy actually pulls the trigger, killing a teenage girl on primetime TV. Shocking, tragic, riveting.
21. The hidden map. “Lockdown” was one of Lost’s classic game-changer episodes, and nothing got more buzz than the map. Entertainment Weekly did a whole spread on it in their next issue, enhancing and translating all the tantalizing latin clues, references to Cerberus, the Sickness and other hatches painted all over the blast door.
20. Sawyer slaps Faraday in “Because You Left.” Not only do we get a passible scientific explanation of the time-jumping from Faraday, we get: “Shut it, Ginger, or you’re getting one too!” Nobody talks down to Sawyer. Plus, there’s just something hypnotic about Jeremy Davies’s stilted, hazy delivery as Faraday explaining Science.
19. The Incident. We heard about it way back in Season2, and it didn’t disappoint. Jack had a bomb…
and Juliet was determined to set it off, leaving us with the most wide-open cliffhanger ever. Literally anything could happen in Season 6 at this point.
18. Walt is kidnapped from the raft in Exodus, pt 3. A classic “out of the frying pan and into the fire” moment. Just when the raft folks think they’ve found rescue, they get Mr. Friendly and “Only the thing is, we gonna have to take the boy.” WALLLLLTT!!!
17. It’s Locke in the casket. This secret was so big the producers filmed a fake take with Desmond in the casket, just in case. After seeing everything that happened in between, it makes perfect sense for Jack to attempt suicide after learning of John’s death. They were philosophical opposites, but they needed each other.
16. Sayid shoots little Ben. I bought Marco a shirt that says “Guns don’t kill children, Sayid does!” This was the ultimate question, can they really change the timeline? Apparently not in this way. Sayid is faced with the decision you often hear about in hypothetical: “if you could go back in time to kill someone evil when they were still a child and innocent, in order to prevent future suffering, would you? Should you?” Sayid makes the choice only men like he are capable of making. But as Faraday warned, “whatever happened, happened.”
15. The sky turns purple in “Live Together, Die Alone.” We all wondered what would happen if the button didn’t get pushed. The answer: it’s not just a psychological experiment. Desmond finally finds his courage and turns the failsafe key, turning the sky purple and imploding the hatch. Des would never be the same afterward, communication was apparently cut-off from the mainland at this point, and the magnetic disturbance was enough to point Penny’s search team in the right direction.
14. Ben summons the monster. How epic was “The Shape of Things to Come?” It’s all over this list. Among the many, many shocking moments was the reveal that Benjamin Linus apparently has the power to summon the monster. Smoky shows up in all it’s terrifying glory and makes quick work of Keamy and his men. The monster, much like Enoch Root, remains a mystery, but it’s always awesome when he makes an appearance.
13. The Island disappears in “There’s No Place Like Home.” When Ben said he’d move the Island, he wasn’t kidding. With a flash of light, boom, it’s gone, nothing but a ripple in the ocean where it used to be. The writing in this episode was so crafty, not only was the disappearance amazing, it took away the only land mass for Lapidus to land the helicopter on, causing them to crash.
12. Jacob and the dark man have a chat on the beach in “The Incident, pt 1.” The music is excellent in this scene, so foreboding and mysterious. Unlooked for, the season 5 finale stuns us by starting off with an introduction to Jacob and his dark opposite. The scene crackles with hidden allegorical meaning. “It always ends the same.” ”It only ends once. Everything else is… just progress.” Not often you get a primetime network TV show that encourages its viewers to contemplate the great mysteries of life. We’re all better for it.
11. Locke in the wheelchair in “Walkabout.” This reveal was so good we took it out of the flashback moments. Lost’s Pilot episode was perhaps the best pilot ever, but it was “Walkabout,” and the revelation that Locke was paralyzed before the crash, that took the show to the next level. “Don’t tell me what I can’t do!” shouts John, nicely establishing his key character trait: the belief that his is destined to do great things. When we saw John in his wheelchair, we knew this show was something special.
Up next, the top 10 greatest moments of Lost (though we suspect Season 6 will have something to say about this before it’s all over with.)
The 100 Greatest Moments Of Lost, part 3: Only fools are enslaved by time and space!
We’re creeping closer and closer to the return of Lost on Tuesday, and the hits just keep on coming!
And let’s return to our countdown looking back at how we got here with…
The 100 Greatest Moments of Lost!
PART THREE
50. Locke, bouncing around through different time periods on the Island like a skipping record in “Because You Left,” asks Richard Alpert possibly the most important question one can ask in that situation: “When am I?”
49. Ben produces a shotgun from the piano bench in “The Shape Of Things To Come.” A classic example of the other reason we love Ben: He’s seemingly prepared for anything (which makes those times when he encounters a situation he’s not prepared for all that more delicious). He’s got a hidden room of suits and passports in his home, so of course he’d have a sawed off shotgun hidden in his piano bench in case Charles Widmore send killer mercenaries to the Island to get him, right?
48. Sayid makes a wager on the golf course in the Seychelles with Mr. Avellino at the beginning of “The Economist.” It ends with Avellino, a target on the list of people that Sayid is murdering in these flashforwards for Ben, ending up dead and Sayid being his own caddy.
47. Arzt explodes in “Exodus, part one.” Such a simple, cheap gag, but an entertaining one, and a brilliant one, especially since we were told in the media that Daniel Roebuck (previously famous for playing Jay Leno in The Late Shift) was joining the cast in season 2. Those few Arzt lovers out there instead had to wait for his awesome return in season 3’s “Exposé.”
46. Boone’s surgery and aborted amputation in “Do No Harm.” How, this was a forever ago. Boone was the sacrifice the Island demanded, and rightly so, because he kind of sucked. And because his death was needed so that Aaron could be born? Jack went all out trying to save him, even giving him a transfusion of his own blood and was prepared to amputate his leg to save his life before a delirious Boone finally said, “Jack, just let me go…”
45. Faraday’s rocket test in “The Economist.” Our first real glimpse at the time distortions around the Island.
44. Locke reveals in ” ” that he’s the one who knocked out Sayid to prevent the radio test.
43. Charlie’s dive into the ocean to go down to the Looking Glass station at the bottom of the ocean in “Greatest Hits.” As much as we hate Charlie here at Counterforce, “Greatest Hits” was a pretty great episode, and this was an epic swim, the first part of the hero quest that would lead to Charlie’s death.
42. Jin runs out of the jungle at the end of “Adrift,” screaming to the newly washed ashore Michael and Sawyer: “Others! Others!”
41. Sawyer’s running for cover in “The Shape Of Things To Come.” If you haven’t watched this episode again recently, you need to. It’s fucking amazing, but nestled right there in the middle of it is a bizarre action sequence in which Sawyer is running away from bullets in Otherton/the Barracks as Keamy and the mercenaries are clearly just toying with him. Either that or the picnic table, the picket fence, and the barbecue that Sawyer uses for cover are just that good and perhaps James Ford belongs in an 80s action movie?
40. Mr. Eko’s speech to Locke about Josiah and the discovery of the old testament before revealing the missing portion of the Swan’s orientation film, the one that warns of what could lead to another “incident.” Eko also gives Locke a brilliant piece of advice here that Locke will only seldom take: “Do not mistake coincidence with fate.”
And #40 is another TIE with a favorite moment of mine: Locke’s speech to Boone about Michelangelo in “Hearts And Minds” as he’s mixing up the psychedelic paste to give Boone a hallucination of what he needs to see, in this case to let go of his obsession with his step sister Shannon.
39. While Sayid, Ana Lucia, and Charlie are off to find the balloon of “Henry Gale,” to check the validity of his story, Jack and Locke feed Henry/Ben some breakfast in the Swan station, where he casually tells them a “what if” tale of how, if he was actually an Other, he’d be sending their friends off into a trap… And for the first time we see the menace and ease of which Ben can and loves to manipulate people that goes so perfectly with his bug eyes and Vincent Price-like voice.
38. Sawyer kills the original Tom Sawyer/Locke’s dad in, quite literally, “The Brig” on the Black Rock. It’s not so much the kill here that’s interesting, but the confrontation itself, which we had been waiting for since the first season. Locke’s dad, Anthony Cooper, the old time con man starts recounting off the various aliases he’s used in the past, Sawyer stops him after the mention of Mark Twain’s literary hero. “Sawyer’s my name too,” he says through gritted teeth.
37. Vincent uncovers the bodies of Nikki and Paulo in “Exposé,” and really, just all of “Exposé” in general. Not only do Nikki and Takes A Shit Guy get one of the most cold blooded offings in all of television, but you get some awesome glimpses from a different perspective of events that have occurred on the Island with the 815ers.
Bonus: Mr. LaShade is The Cobra!
Extra bonus: The original intention of these two characters was for them to actually have two episodes in the third season. In the first one, we’d learn that Nikki was an Alias-like spy prior to coming to the Island, and in the second, much like this one, we’d learn that she was actually just an actress on an Alias-like show. Personally, I kind of love that. Razzle dazzle!
36. Richard carries young Ben, whose been possibly fatally shot in 1977, into the temple of the Others to be saved in “Whatever Happened, Happened.” And we still don’t know what it means! All we were told is that if the Others save Ben’s life, he’ll lose his innocence and forever be one of the Others.
35. Ben is judged by the smoke monster/Alex in “Dead Is Dead.” And thus begins the endgame of season 5 as Ben is told that he’d better do everything that (fake) John Locke asks or Alex/the smoke monster will kill him.
34. Ben and Widmore have a nasty late night conversation in Widmore’s penthouse in “The Shape Of Things To Come,” the episode that seems to get the most hits in this round, right? The venom between these two gents is palpable and I feel like we still haven’t begun to see all of what they were referring to as threatens to kill Penny in retaliation for the loss of his daughter, and Widmore, made of grit and steel, reminds him: “I know who you are, boy. What you are.”
33. From “Not In Portland,” Sawyer and Kate are trying to make their way off of Hydra island, and Alex will help them on one condition: They have to rescue her boyfriend, Karl. And where is he? Room 23! The trippy brainwashing room that looks like something fresh from A Clockwork Orange, where Karl is drugged up, forced to watch bizarre videos with subliminal messages and listen to blaring jungle music with backwards voices playing through them…
Just remember, kids: “God loves you as He loved Jacob,” and “Only fools are enslaved by time and space.”
32. Ethan Rom is not on flight 815’s manifest!
31. The Swan station’s orientation film from “Orientation,” giving us our first glimpses of Pierre Chang, and first whispers of just what the hell the DHARMA Initiative is.
Just as Locke says after the first time he saw, “I think we’re going to need to watch that again.”
30. Michael’s death in “There’s No Place Like Home, part 3,” as the bomb explodes on the boat, but not before the ghostly Christian shows up and says one of the most chilling things ever: “You can go now, Michael.”
And then:
29. The opening to season 2 in “Man Of Science, Man Of Faith,” as we meet Desmond for the first time down in the hatch and hear Mama Cass’ lovely, “Make Your Own Kind Of Music.” There’s a lot of people who saw that scene for the first time and said it wasn’t that impressive to them or that their minds weren’t blown by it, and we have a simple name for those kind of people here at Counterforce: Liars.
28. Michael shoots Ana Lucia and Libby, making them “Two For The Road,” ha ha!
But, no, seriously, kids, don’t drive and drive, okay?
27. Mysterious Walt visitations all over the place! One of my many unanswered questions that I’d like to see the show take a stab at in it’s last season is WTF was going on with Walt, and why exactly did the Others need him so badly? Presumably they had him in Room 23 for a while, but how was he practicing the art of bilocation, the first few times to Shannon…
and then…
…to John as we get to our last moment for today…
26. Locke and Ben go to visit Jacob’s cabin in “The Man Behind The Curtain,” and have what you might call… a strange encounter.
A strange encounter and a half, really.
And Locke clearly hears the words of somebody other than Ben or himself say, “Help me.”
Which upsets Ben a good deal:
…who then leaves Locke to rest with the remains of the DHARMA Initiative, and that’s where we’ll also leave you for today…
See you tomorrow with Part 4!
The 100 Greatest Moments of Lost, part 2: “You knew… and you sent me anyway.”
Awwwwwww yeeeaahhhh. We are just getting started.
The best part of making this list has been that, after me and Marco locked down the top 100, I’d go back and watch an episode and it was like, “fuck, I totally forgot about this moment! It’s not top 100, but it’s still fucking awesome.”
For example, In an early Season 2 episode, Sun loses her wedding ring. Jack tries to make her feel better by telling her a story about how he lost his ring once and had to fake a replacement. Then Yunjin Kim delivers the slightest of glances down at Jack’s left hand. Pregnant Pause. Jack looks down at his empty ring finger too and shrinks a little.
It’s a perfect snapshot of a character who’s both the calm, reassuring hero and also a manic, damaged failure. And it didn’t even make the list.
Continuing on with Counterforce’s list of Epic Lost Moments, we find ourselves at the electric encounter between the mysterious one-eyed man and Motherfucking Sayid.
The 100 Greatest Moments of Lost!
PART TWO
75. Cut to “Enter 77,” with Mikhail and Sayid taking turns tightening the screws on each other. Sayid sez: “At least we were able TO KILL one of them.” and then Mikhail tosses off this immortal, badass line: “Why are we continuing to play this little game… when it all know it has moved to THE NEXT STAGE!” Fight!
74. Charlie gives Kate her shirt back after they ran from the broken hive and delivers what might be his best and nearly only good line of the series. Kate: “It was full of bees.” Charlie: “I’d have thought C’s, actually.” Even Jack laughs, so you know it was a good joke.
73. Faraday meets the young Ellie, stares at her enough to lay the creep on her (must be weird to meet your mom back when she was a young hottie), and then gets a look at jughead, the massive Chekov’s Gun of Season 5.
72. Jack’s first fistfight with Ethan, where he gets his ass handed to him, then discovers Charlie left hanging in “All The Best Cowboys Have Daddy Issues.” Unfortunately, Jack is able to revive Charlie.
71. Pierre Chang questions a helpless Hurley on 1977 to out him as a time traveler. “So you fought in the Korean War?” snarks Chang, “There’s no such thing?” Hurley flails. Also during this moment we finally see Miles and Pierre acknowledging their connection.
70. Sayid kills a guy with a dishwasher in the safehouse/hotel room in “Because You Left.” Not only was this move awesome, but it resulted in an entire episode where and unconscious Sayid gets toted around “Weekend at Bernies”-style.
69. Team Jack finds the dump of forgotten tube canisters sent from the Pearl Station in “Live Together, Die Alone.” A kind of haunting image of futility, and a seeming answer to the question of whether or not the hatch was just a psychological experiment.
68. Richard Alpert walks into Dharmaville in ‘74, slams the torch into the grass. This is where Richard was officially elevated to “This guy could walk into any scene in any timeline and I won’t bat an eyelash” status. It’s not often we get to see him display the kind of authority he levels at Horace here. “That fence may keep other things out, but… not us.” Nobody sticks torches into dirt like Nestor Carbonell.
67. Sayid meets Rousseau, and we finally get a face to the mysterious French Woman on the radio distress loop.
66. Locke blows the Hatch door. I love the way John just ignore’s Hurley’s plea to stop. What a way to end the season: a long shaft into the darkness.
65. The monster kills the pilot in the “Pilot.” Our first taste of the mysterious Island security system.
64. Sawyer and Jack meet Mr. Friendly in the jungle, “Light ‘em up!” from “The Hunting Party.” Just when Jack is feeling cocky enough to call bullshit on Tom Friendly, the Others call bullshit on Jack and we finally get to hear a little about their point of view. “This is not your island.”
63. Montand loses the arm in “This Place is Death.” It was teased so long ago, and finally seeing how Montand lost his arm in the Dark Territory, as Rousseau mentions in “Exodus” was extremely fulfilling and satisfying.
62. Sawyer puts down the US Marshall in “Tabula Rasa.” Or, tries to. Wonderful that Sawyer does what no one else has the guts to. And fucks it up. So Jack goes in and finishes it, bare-handed.
61. Teams Jack and Locke form and split at the cockpit in “The Beginning of the End.” Marco and I love quoting the Jackface standard, “Are you INSANE!?!?” at each other. Later in the series, Locke would softly comment, “You put a gun to my head, and you pulled the trigger.”
60. Ben confronts Jacob, and stabs him. I didn’t make the connection for months, but the “What about me?” “What about you?” exchange is basically an allegory for Man confronting his God. Ben wants validation, but to Jacob, he’s just not important in the grand scheme. Even Ben killing him means nothing to Jacob. It’s as though you were given a chance to ask the Supreme Being about your purpose in life, and God responded, “I really don’t care, fuck off.”
59. Ellie shoots Faraday in “The Variable.” I love the stunned realization on Daniel’s face. “You knew. You always knew… And you sent me anyway.” Only at the end, does the last puzzle piece for Faraday fall into place. He neglected to consider the one threat that would kill him: his own mother.
58. “What lies in the shadow of the statue?” The one who will save us all.
57. If anything goes wrong, Desmond Hume will be MY constant. And we begin to grasp just how deep into the rabbit hole of time Lost is about to take us.
56. Locke says “I was wrong” to Mr. Eko right before the Swan implodes in “Live Together, Die Alone.” Terry O’Quinn does such an excellent job revealing the shame and fear of Locke’s failure. Despite the wonderful, fantastical elements of the show, it’s these kinds of raw, honest character moments that make Lost the amazing drama that it is.
55. The return to the Island in the opening of “316.” We all thought it would take a whole season to get back to the Island, and then BAM, six episodes in and they’re back.
54. Meeting the tail section of Oceanic 815 in “The Other 48 Days” Really the whole episode was excellent, but getting to relive the crash, from the spinning tail fuselage falling out of the sky, to the desperate panic to rescue survivors on the beach, was the perfect less-hopeful mirror to the same scenes from the Pilot. You just kinda knew from the start that these tailies were fucked.
53. The Others purge the Dharma Initiative in “The Man Behind the Curtain.” With bonus points for Ben killing his own father with gas. Horace sitting dead on the bench, the sad realization on his face that he would never understand the Island. Or perhaps he’s grasping that Alpert really meant it about the 15-year limit on their truce.
52. Desmond talks to the older Eloise in “Flashes Before Your Eyes,” sees the man with red shoes, and learns about “course corrections.” Just another brick in the “fate” wall that Team Eloise is building against Free Will. I love that a popular television show has been dramatizing the philosophical debate between fate and free will for 6 years.
51. Jack says “Forgive me” and almost jumps off a bridge. Another thing I love about this show is its willingness to give us characters at their absolute lowest. Jack is the hero, the lead, the protagonist, and here he is about to kill himself. But even in his darkest hour, he’s still inexorably pulled towards an emergency he can fix. Excellent direction in this scene: the off-screen car crash, the cry for help and the fire brightening Jack’s face. Some of Michael Giacchino’s best musical work as well.
See you tomorrow with PART 3!
The 100 Greatest Moments Of Lost, part 1: WWAAAALLLTTTTT!!!
There was a year, probably the year that Return Of The King and the third Matrix movie came out, where I kept hearing the same tagline: “Everything that has a beginning has an ending.” Talk about pompous and wanting to be epic (and falling short, especially that year). And yet, sadly, this phrase works for Lost, but maybe with some modifications: Everything that has a beginning, a middle, and an ending will end, but not necessarily in that order.
Fuck me, this has been a long time coming. It feels like those last few moments of “The Incident” ended a forever ago and we’re so close, and I’m freakishly excited. You know how you finally go on that date with that hot person and you’re nervous and you’re worried about having shit in your teeth or how your hair looks and are you funny enough? And you’re freaking out this date is just tanking (this is obviously a very cliched date, I know), but then that hot, amazing guy/girl says, “Hey, why don’t you come back to my place for a drinky drink?” I’m like that excited. That kind of excited with a mixture of a 100 Hiroshimas. So, you know, the return of this show on Tuesday night is serious business.
And let’s start looking back at how we got here, and how I could possibly be this excited as we begin looking at…
The 100 Greatest Moments of Lost!
PART ONE
100. Workman: “So are going to go back and kill Hitler or some crazy shit like that?” Marvin Candle/Edgar Halliwax/Mark Wickmund/Pierre Chang: “Don’t be absurd! There are rules!” From the season 5 opener, “Because You Left,” this is quite the meta statement. And I think it’s safe to say that Miles’ dad is one of Counterforce’s favorite characters.
99. Ben ditches the sling after the Ajira 316 crash in “Namaste.” This is a personal favorite of Benjamin Light and Occam Razor, and makes you wonder if Ben’s broken arm could be fixed after such a short time back on the Island or were his injuries just another ruse?
98. Jack shoots the oil cans in “The Variable,” while loading up on guns with Faraday and Kate before heading out to see the Others. Jack in 1977, when not making sandwiches and doing janitorial duties, is pretty nuts, man.
97. Regina (stunt woman Zoe Bell) kills herself on the Galaga. (Sea madness!)(Or, is it… time madness?)
96. Locke breaks his leg on his fall towards the frozen donkey wheel/meets with Christian/Smokey down there in “This Place Is Death.” The sound is so visceral and you feel Locke’s pain as he struggles to get up and move to that wheel, to pull it, and then… “Say hello to my son!”
95. “WAAALLLTTTTT!!!” from “Adrift.” I remember this annoying the shit out of me all 700 times that Michael screamed it out, but it clung to the inner walls of my memory like a tattoo.
94. Locke meets young Charles Widmore in “Jughead.” This moment, to me, is classic Locke, the man who deals with obstacles, but considers no one his enemy. Has any of the other characters met this 17 year old piece of snot who would cause them so many troubles in the future, they’d probably kill him. But not Locke. Once he learns the young man’s identity, he unleashes that trademark smirk. When asked what the name means to him, Locke merely replies, “Nothing. Nice to meet you.”
93. Jack and Sawyer’s poker game in “Lockdown.” It doesn’t take long before Kate, who’s watching the whole game, appropriately adds, “Should I get a ruler?”
92. “I screwed her, man.” From seeing who has a bigger dick to this, this touching confession that Sawyer makes to Jack about Ana Lucia in “Three Minutes” is some damn near heartwarming potential bromancery, right?
91. Rose and Bernard re-united in season 2’s “Collision” after 50 days apart.
90. Kate and Jack’s hate sex encounter the night before Ajira 316.
89. Jack’s “I married her!” line to Desmond in “Orientation.”
88. Jack and Kate get caught in a net. Why is this one of our favorite moments? Because of the SEXUAL TENSION! Duh. And it’s kinky.
Also, I’m gonna cheat here a bit and declare lucky #88 a TIE with another of my favorite moments: the scenes between Jack and the then (and still, as a lady sometimes should be) Juliet in the aquarium in “A Tale Of Two Cities.” Jack is held captive, at his wit’s end, his entire being frayed and stressed to the limits, and there’s Juliet, with the face of an angel, pushing him just a little further. It’s an amazing mash up of smoldering and vulnerability and one of several examples I would provide to anyone foolish enough to tell me this show isn’t sexy. (Another example would be #90, obviously.)
87. Sayid, in the rain, with a gun, from season 1’s “Homecoming.” Ethan is back and he’s threatened to kill someone every day until Claire is returned to him, so our 815ers form a posse to take him down. And of course Sayid is the badass Angel of Death.
86. Phil gets killed during “The Incident.” This guy was a serious itch in second half of season 5 and then they scratched it.
85. Karl and Rousseau are killed by Keamy and the mercenaries at the end of “Meet Kevin Johnson.”
84. Ana Lucia and Goodwin face off in “The Other 48 Days.”
83. Jin and Mr. Eko hiding from the Others, in season 2’s “…And Found,” and those bizarre glimpses of dirty bare feet, and teddy bears being dragged along, further tantalizing the mysterious of who the fuck are these people?
82. Hurley is writing The Empire Strikes Back in in “Some Like It Hoth.”
from here.
81. “He walks among us, but he is not one of us.” It’s what it says, but it’s not what it means,” Jack, from “Stranger In A Strange Land.”
80. Sayid hears the mysterious whispers while escaping Rousseau in “Solitary.”
79. Jack and Kate’s conversation in the Others’ rec room in “The Man From Tallahassee.” Just another link in the long chain that has been the Jack/Kate/Sawyer/Juliet/Ana Lucia love “triangle.”
78. Faraday sends the message to the future via Desmond’s head and his being an exception to “the rules” referred to at#100 at the end of “Because You Left.”
77. Jack gets to see the Red Sox win the world series in “The Glass Ballerina.” This is a simple but powerful moment that shows why Lost is more than just some gimmicky show, taking a simple line of dialogue from season 1 about Jack’s dad’s baseball team, the Red Sox, always the team of losers, and showing that sometimes losers can win. Emotional resonance!
76. Nadia the cat silently judges Sayid at the end of “Enter 77.”
See you tomorrow with PART 2!
“Don’t ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody.”
“What I was really hanging around for, I was trying to feel some kind of a good-by. I mean I’ve left schools and places I didn’t even know I was leaving them. I hate that. I don’t care if it’s a sad good-by or a bad good-by, but when I leave a place I like to know I’m leaving it. If you don’t, you feel even worse.”
from here.
“That’s the whole trouble. You can’t ever find a place that’s nice and peaceful, because there isn’t any. You may think there is, but once you get there, when you’re not looking, somebody’ll sneak up and write ‘Fuck you’ right under your nose. Try it sometime. I think, even, if I ever die, and they stick me in a cemetery, and I have a tombstone and all, it’ll say ‘Holden Caulfield’ on it, and then what year I was born and what year I died, and then right under that it’ll say ‘Fuck you.’ I’m positive, in fact.”
RIP J. D. Salinger, 91 year old reclusive author of 1951’s The Catcher In The Rye, which is almost universally and immortally beloved, and several other books, including his collection, Nine Stories, featuring the fantastic short story, “A Perfect Day For Bananafish.” And, you can find more of his short stories here. He’s been on the run from fame and possibly the rest of society since 1965, being both a hater of the world of phonies and drawing inspiration from it. Salinger is a writer that loved the art of writing, but just for himself, and it’s said that he’s written as many as 15 books since he stepped away from the public eye.
from here.
“I hope to hell that when I do die somebody has the sense to just dump me in the river or something. Anything except sticking me in a goddamn cemetery. People coming and putting a bunch of flowers on your stomach on Sunday, and all that crap. Who wants flowers when you’re dead? Nobody.”
