Monthly Archives: February 2010

The 100 Greatest Moments of Lost, part 5: “I’m sick of lying!!”

Posted by counterforce! on

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”

Posted by Benjamin Light on

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.)