Tag Archives: Jack Shephard

Sheep have great potential.

Posted by Marco Sparks on

People whose arms were stroked by a robot nurse named Cody felt more comfortable if they believed Cody was cleaning them than if they believed Cody was attempting to comfort them. People who have low serotonin levels underestimate the intimacy shared by couples they do not know. The children of depressed fathers are four times as likely to be spanked, and the brains of depressed mothers are less responsive to the cries of the mothers’ children. Mental illness was going largely untreated among American babies. Test subjects experienced fear when they were given a third, prosthetic arm and researchers threatened that arm with a knife. A connection between violence and happy hour was noted in Wales, where officials planned to move ahead with a badger cull in Pembrokeshire and to rebeaver the countryside near Furnace. In England, Slimbridge scientists surveyed the fatness of swans’ behinds, and doctors treated a three year old for alcoholism. Welsh mountain sheep were deemed capable of following rules. “Sheep have great potential,” said Jenny Morton of Cambridge University. “They’re not as daft as they look.”

Chemists discovered why Van Gogh’s yellows were fading; a Dutch ornithologist remained unsure whether the yellow breasts of great tits change with age but found that the offspring of older females are likelier to die young. In Finland, tawny owls were evolving from gray to brown and sperm quality in humans was deteriorating. Religion was going in extinct in the Czech Republic. A sacred soft-shelled turtle in Hanoi, one of only four species left in the world, was gravely ill yet continued to evade capture. A female mite preserved in amber with her mate was observed to have been controlling the terms of their copulation. Florida could be up to 50 percent older than previously believed. Astrobiologists hypothesized that the first multi-cellular animal resembled cancer. Tonsillectomies make children gain weight. Weight-loss surgery makes children lose weight. Doctors touted the benefits of removing the gallbladder through the vagina. Texas scientists cut holes in the hearts of baby mice; the hearts then healed themselves.

The passages above are from the “Findings” section in the May 2011 issue of Harper’s and were written by Rafil Kroll-Zaidi.

See previously: here, here, here, here, and here.

Young Blood!

Posted by Marco Sparks on

Mad linkage:

Nudists are seeking the next generation.

The grilled cheese sandwich gets a trendy rebirth.

An absolutely amazing abandoned end of the world bunker.

Animals that have Jack Shephard’s face.

“Only zealots and fools will continue to bow down to the gods of social media.”

Junot Diaz on Tokyo’s insane urbanism.

Relive Bill Paxton in all his glory in James Cameron’s Aliens.

FYI: The last name of the guy who plays Magnitude (which is short for “Magnetic Attitude”) on Community is Youngblood. Pop pop!

Martin Amis on Christopher Hitchens.

Japanese graffiti artist adds Fukushima disaster to famous A-bomb mural.

The haunted pod village of San-zhi.

An interview with Werner Herzog.

Professional online poker player ponders how he’ll make a living now.

Lindsay Lohan & Shenae Grimes: This should be interesting.

Thankfully the death of Osama Bin Laden doesn’t really affect Kathryn Bigelow’s film about the death of Osama Bin Laden.

Salvador Dali’s TV ads for chocolate, alka-seltzer, and wine.

On Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley.

Roberto Bolaño’s European adventures.

The Naked And Famous.

Jim Caviezel says that playing Jesus ruined his acting career. LOL. Good.

Baby was breastfed by wrong woman!

The man most likely to take top military job has never seen war.

The collected letters of Vladimir Nabokov.

Women are changing the sex industry from the inside, by Molly Lambert.

Guy Pearce cast in Ridley Scott’s Prometheus/Aliens prequel.

Will Ferrell shaved Conan O’Brien last night.

The pictures in this post are from this awesome collection of covers to the various editions of the novel and the two film adaptations of Lolita. Some really interesting design work there, ranging from the incredibly boring to the incredibly tantalizing.

“Lolita is famous, not I. I am an obscure, doubly obscure, novelist with an unpronounceable name.”

-Vladimir Nabokov, interviewed in The Paris Review.

But I guess they just happened to miss this one:

from here.

Nikola Mihov’s fascinating photography series “Forget Your Past.”

Relive Bill Paxton in all his glory in James Cameron’s True Lies.

The billionaires go back to school.

Bin Laden’s legacy will depend in part on what Obama does next.

Al-Quaeda: the next generation?

Back To The Future 2 is totally amazing and depressing at the same time.

6 medication side effects straight out of a horror movie.

Tracing that fake MLK quote back to its source.

Hipster animals!

Hot women pandering to nerds.

Progress.

Posted by Marco Sparks on

And so here we are.

Take a deep breath. There’s this heavy fin de siècle vibe hanging over the air. A circle closing, all it so deep and meaningful and exciting and… Lost ends tonight. With a two hour clip show, then a two and a half hour finale, and then after the news, some kind of retrospective/after party with the cast and crew on Jimmy Kimmel.

Last night I was having a deep text message conversation with my friend, Lia, who thinks she never gets mentioned here, and we were talking about how meaningful it is for this show to end because, unlike real life, the ending of your favorite show gives you an experience, a journey, and then closure and resolution at the end of it.

Fictional characters are so much kinder to us in that regard. They give us what we need because, if nothing else, they simply reflect back whatever level of meaning we bring to the experience.

Earlier in the evening yesterday, another friend called me, apparently having just seen their calendar, and then deciding to wake me up (what was I sleeping at this point, who can say). “OMG!” she squealed so loud that my ears are still vibrating, “I just realized what the date is! Tonight’s the last episode, right?” Yes, it is, I told her and I walked outside as we started talking. Looking up, I noticed that it was dark, probably because of the weather here yesterday, but I couldn’t see the stars. I mentioned that and we started talking about how the stars you see out there in the sky are all dead, and their long burnt out light is still transmitting towards us. As we pondered whether or not that was a romantic notion, I started thinking about tonight’s finale, which the writers have surely been thinking about for many, many years now, and the episode was written probably months ago, probably finished filming a month and some change ago, and has been edited and done for a few weeks. And it’s only now transmitting to us. Just like the stars sending us their light, and we’re philosophizing about what it all means long after it was sent.

Mektoub. It is written. That’s basically what I said to her then.

I have just about an hour before the clip show starts. I need to go and get ready and do whatever I need to do before that. It could be an emotional rollercoaster, this night. But that’s okay. It’s okay to get hung up over a TV show sometimes. Especially when you know that you’ll probably never get something like this again. And if it’s an experience you’ll never have again, find your own level of enjoyment in it. Get ready for your own drinking game that goes with it, if you want. The important thing is to have fun and to enjoy yourself. This kind of thing only ends once, and all of this progress has lead us to the here and now.

from here.

Anyway, here at Counterforce, we only really got into writing about individual episodes somewhere last season. It was something I really grew to enjoy and something that always surprised me with how much it informed on other things that I’d like to be talking about or, at least, writing about. I’ll let you discover last season’s write ups on your own, if you want, plus all those links yesterday, but today I’ll leave you with links to this past season, the sixth and final one of Lost…

01. “LA X.”

02. “What Kate Does.”

03. “The Substitute.”

04. “The Lighthouse.”

05. “Sundown.”

06. “Dr. Linus.”

07. “Recon.”

08. “Ab Aeterno.”

09. “The Package.”

10. “Happily Ever After.”

11. “Everybody Loves Hugo.”

12. “The Last Recruit“

13. “The Candidate.”

14. “Across The Sea.”

15. “What They Died For.”

And tomorrow we’ll be writing about the very last episode, “The End.” Who knows what we’ll have to say, but I feel like it’ll be the very last time we really write about Lost here on Counterforce. At least, the real last time for me, I think. Maybe I’ll blag (blag = my typo combination of “blog” and “blab”) on about the 23 enigma or the law of fives, but it’s like the show itself, you choose your own level of involvement, and you get back what you give to it (and more).

It’s kind of funny to think that, regardless of where we go tonight and wherever we end up on the other side of this show, I already know what the last sentence of my last write up about the show will be. Mektoub. “It is written.” See you then.

Walking after midnight.

Posted by Marco Sparks on

Everyone who loves Lost loves the little bits of trivia from behind the scenes of the show, especially it’s inception. And one of the most talked about is the original notion that the Jack character should die in the pilot, that he should be played by a more famous actor (think Michael Keaton rather than the guy from Party Of Five), and that he should die, letting everyone know that this was a show in which anything could happen.

Had that been the case, the producers’ plan was for another castaway to step up and become the de facto leader of the castaways from Oceanic 815, to lead them through their trials and tribulations on this mysterious Island. That particular passenger? One Kate Austen, of course.

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“A means to an end…”

Posted by Marco Sparks on

As promised, 23 observations about last night’s episode of Lost…

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Drops in the ocean.

Posted by Marco Sparks on

Let’s start where it ends: A bunch of people on a beach at night. They’re beaten, weary, bruised, battered, and broken down. They’re all exhausted, physically and emotionally, and one of them has a bullet in their shoulder. They’re the survivors and one by one they all surrender to an uncontrollable weeping…

Elsewhere, on a deck there stands a bald man and a hot, if rather filthy looking, confused young woman. They’re staring at the water intently, trying to decipher the drama that lays deep underneath the ripples of their own reflections. The man is grim, determined fury. It’s not over and he begins to depart. The woman, who’s been left behind again, the latest of many such times, asks him where he’s going. “To finish what I started,” he says and then he disappears past us into the dark.

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Four letter worlds.

Posted by Marco Sparks on

Opposites attract. Choices break down into either/or solutions. Family size buckets of chicken (and life long love affairs with such) and hot, raw existentialism. Secrets and lies. Love and dynamite. Ghosts and whispers and murderers and attempted murders. Crazy women and Scottish advice. Good and evil and Dostoevsky and Kierkegaard. Hate turns to love, and then to loneliness. And we go on a mission, we go sideways, and we go underground again…

All that and more on last night’s Lost, a Hurley episode appropriately entitled “Everybody Loves Hugo,” which is a nice callback to a similarly titled episode in season 2.

Man, where to start?

“Hey guys, I’ll be right back…”

How about with the departures and arrivals. The departures: Ilana. I suspected something bad was going to happen to here the moment she reminded Hurley for the nth time that she has been training for this job forever, but I didn’t expect her to go all ka-bloom-y a la Dr. Arzt. Wow. And who says this show doesn’t have some surprises left for us?

And then there was the return of Michael as the latest dead person to stop by and have a chat with Hurley about what should be happening next. An interesting, but paint by numbers guest starring role, and Michael answered one of our questions left from season one: What the fuck are the whispers?

So, one long popular theory about the Island is accurate enough: It is a kind of purgatory for the spirits of those who can’t move on. People like Michael and Jacob. But seemingly others, like Mr. Eko and Charlie, could move on and visit Hurley in the City of Angels?

Back to that in a moment because there’s still an intriguing question hanging over this final season: WTF is the Sideways world?

Because, while I loved the reappearance of Pierre Chang there, narrating another video for us, it recalls my question from the Sawyer episode: When did the Sideways world begin? Does it’s genesis lay with the explosion of Jughead back in 1977 and, if so, how did Pierre Chang escape grand zero and end up back in the real world?

Perhaps the answer lies with Desmond’s mission there in the Sideways world and the real one. And that mission is… to merge the two universes? To bring love into the hearts of the Sideways people? The funny thing is that the Sideways people really have the happily ever after world. Well, except for Charlie, but who gives a shit about Charlie. I mean, he’s alive, Claire’s out there somewhere and not crazy yet, and all you need to make the world bend to your will is just the smallest bit of opportunity and chance…

But again, I’m glad that a large part of the endgame rests with Desmond. He and Hurley have always been the heart of this show, and unfortunately, while Hurley may be the proxy for the fans, he’s also a bit on the boring as shit side. Maybe falling in love with a crazy woman will change that. Sometimes a lunatic really is what you’re looking for. I can’t imagine Desmond’s big role in all of this is just to play transdimensional cupid, but apparently “love” is a big part of the ending of this show. And perhaps that’s what will keep the “cork” in the metaphorical bottle.

But, if you ask me, it seems like a lot of these characters all in desperate need of a different four letter word to make their lives a little better.

Had to love the reference to the Human Fund at the beginning of the episode. Of course they want to honor Hugo Reyes. He’s probably their Man Of The Year.

Oh, hi there. We haven’t had anything to do for a while now.

Oh well. No more spinning of the wheels. Richard and Ben and Miles are off on what smells a lot like a suicide mission. Sideways Desmond is going around, giving things a little nudge (sometimes with the front of his car). Hurley is getting that long overdue picnic date with Libby. Jack has decided to let go and maybe not try to kill himself so much anymore. Island Desmond is going down the rabbit hole and we’ll see what we find there (because he was valuable and therefore a threat to the Man in Black?). Oh, and the mysterious boy is back…

Which, thankfully, means we’re inching closer and closer to that Jacob/Man In Black flashback/origin episode.

And finally all the 815ers, with the exception of Jin, are back together again, facing off. Next week should be interesting as things start to fall into place and everyone ends up where they belong…

Intensity.

Posted by Marco Sparks on

No more tears. Let’s have some shouting!

I think if you’ve read this site before, then you’ve probably guessed that we’re fans of the Jack character on Lost. I mean, I hope you’ve gotten that impression at least.

In a nutshell, even if the show didn’t have an Island, didn’t have love triangles and quadrangles, didn’t have a giant motherfucking four toed statue or a smoke monster or flashbacks, flashforwards, or even flashsideways for fucks’ sake, you’d still have a pretty spectacular show about a man just falling apart…

And falling apart pretty spectacularly.

And it’s not just a man crying. Anybody can cry. Man, woman, children, perhaps dogs and fish too, I don’t know. Hell, you can probably program a robot to let go of a salty discharge every now and then. But, no, what’s wrong with Jack is something serious and tragic and beautiful. And it’s not just about crying. It’s not just this:

And a lot of that has to do with Matthew Fox’s portrayal of the character, something that I’ve posited before has probably been heavily influential with the direction the writers have pushed the character into, probably without a map too.

Maybe he can push the character into the lap of a stripper… Oh!

Sidenote: Is it me or, mustache aside, if and more accurately when they do the eventual remake of Magnum, P.I., how great would Matthew Fox be in the Tom Selleck role? I’m just talking out loud here, people.

Now, I’m not really trying to fully analyze the character here or crack Jack open. What would spill out of that nutshell would be far too much. But what he means to me is probably not a whole lot different from what he means to you. It’s about frailty. It’s about failure. It’s about not being what people expect you to be or cracking under the pressure. It’s about giving people a lot of really crazy, intense looks, getting up in their face a lot, and sometimes firing a gun, killing people in, like, easily the double digits. Seriously, Jack is insane, right?

But, as the ending of Lost looms on the horizon, I start to think more about the resolutions I want to see, the questions I want answers to. It’s not just about what the Island is, what the numbers are, or questions about the smoke monster or alternate realities, it’s about the characters effected by all of this too. Jack is a tightly wound ball of frustration and daddy issues and addiction and questions about masculinity and need and issues with women and leadership. He may not be the lead of this show anymore, but he’s the leader of some of these characters. He’s the spinal surgeon who became the spine of an entire show.

Here’s hoping the character gets the happy ending he deserves. But without losing any of the intensity.

“You’ve got what it takes.” Lost 6×05: The Lighthouse

Posted by Benjamin Light on

I think Season 6 is shaping up to be the resurgence of Jack. While bros like Desmond, Sayid and Richard Alpert might be cooler, I’ve always empathized with Jack’s story the most, warts and all. Funny, considering that he was originally going to be a throwaway character played by Michael Keaton who died in the Pilot.

Needless to say, I loved tonight’s episode. Loved the Island stuff, where we see Jack through Hurley’s eyes. From Hugo’s POV, Jack is both his leader and also kind of a scary nutcase. How does Jacob, through Hurley, get Jack to do what he wants? By playing mind games about Jack’s daddy issues, of course. Jack is nothing if not consistent. It was very understated, but sweet to see how much Hurley does look up to Jack. Jack may be a total mess, but he’s their leader.

And off the Island, Jack has a son (!) from a marriage that didn’t work out here either. But maybe, after the death of Christian, this Jack is beginning to pull it together. It’s interesting to see Jack puzzling at his appendix scar, not totally sure where it came from. As with our other flash-sideways characters, it’s like  our heroes are unconsciously learning from the failures of their alternate selves. “Through a Looking Glass” was all about showing us how everything went terrible wrong. The sideways-scenes this season might be about how there’s also hope that things can go right too.

Meanwhile, Claire is rocking the Rousseau gear, and, just as Dogen promised, she’s been infected with the darkness. You kinda knew she was going to kill that poor Other. But interesting to learn that they captured and tested her too, as they did Sayid. I suppose this means that Claire didn’t time jump like the other Lostaways?

I wonder if Jin really did see Aaron at the temple, or if he was just talking some bullshit to win Claire over until he could get the fuck away from her. Does Claire see the dark man as Locke, or Christian? Or someone else?

But what I really want to know is: who’s #108? Please let it be Desmond!

“Who do YOU care about, Kate?”

Posted by Marco Sparks on

The final season of Lost continues with last night’s slightly more measured, but intriguing episode, “What Kate Does,” an interesting titular callback to season 2′s “What Kate Did.”

It’s interesting how last week’s episode strongly mirrored the pilot, and this week we get a Kate-centric episode, similar to how Kate was the first character to get a flashback episode all to herself with “Tabula Rasa,” and next week’s episode, “The Substitute,” is a Locke episode, so I presume that episode 4 of this season, if we’re following the structure of season 1 where applicable, will be a Jack episode? And at some point we’re getting a Hurley episode seemingly entitled “Everybody Loves Hugo,” presumably dealing how altbro Hurley/Sideways Hurley is the luckiest man in the world rather than cursed.

Ah, but then there’s Kate…

Kate: “I’m sorry I followed you, Sawyer.”

Sawyer: “Which fucking time, you goddamn harpy?”

I was a Kate fan when the show first started, but I don’t think it’s a secret that that slowly eroded as the time flashed all about us, though I’ve probably never hated her as much as I’ve been vocal about it. But the dichotomy in last night’s episode was beyond fascinating, with the Kate we’ve known and grown with over the past 5+ plus years alongside Sideways Kate who landed in LAX and escaped the Marshal to keep on running…

In fact, really, Kate was always a fascinating character if, for nothing else, the juxtaposition of her make up. She is/was our female lead, the character would’ve stepped up to lead status in the alternate universe where the writers followed their original intention to kill off Jack (as potentially played by Michael Keaton) in the pilot, and she’s also a criminal and worse, a fugitive. And even worse: a murderer. And *gasp* worse: She’s not just a suspected murderer, she is indeed guilty. Sure, she had a good reason, as far as she’s concerned, but she did indeed pull the trigger, as it were.

That’s actually one of the things that I do love about the character. Here she is, put here, all of these things and our female lead, the woman we want to root for as she falls into a love triangle, then a quadranagle, then a triangle again, and the writers don’t shy away from it. Warts and all is how they give her to us. And you could argue that she’s just as fucked up as Jack is, but possibly more functioning. Be it copious amounts of tree climbing (something that actress Evangeline Lilly personally loves and requests for the character, it’s reported) or just getting into the mix of things, she knows how to find a goal or a task, no matter how misguided, and run to it.

And there she is on the Island, in one version of the here and now, running again, only this time she’s not being chased, she’s doing the chasing. And it wouldn’t be Kate if it wasn’t a bad decision leading her to a dead end. Only this time, the dead end’s Juliet. And a possible future of any kind of Sawyer.

And then there’s the alternate universe Kate, or Sideways Kate. Again her fate is intertwined with Claire and Aaron. She’s on the run. There’s a nice little appearance by Arzt, referencing both Midnight Cowboy, but also Back To The Future, part 2. And when Christian hit Sawyer with his car door (before they went to do that “more masculine” kind of running away from a situation: drinking). She runs into the tough guy mechanic, similar to Wayne and early Sawyer, the kind of man Kate always finds herself gravitating towards? And weren’t we all hoping for a little more from the resolution to meeting the couple who wanted to adopt Claire’s baby? Obviously that would’ve never happened, but I guess I was just hoping for… more. And then there’s those that also get swept into Claire’s fate, like Dr. Ethan Goodspeed (here again the character whose appearance is all a neat gimmick and/or a marker to let the viewer know where we are on the show’s sprawling and ever expansive totem pole of a timeline). “I don’t want to have to stick you with needles if I don’t have to,” he says and we all have a nice little chuckle. “That Aaron’s gonna be a handful!”

But there’s a lot of interesting things going on in that hospital room as baby Aaron is possibly born/not born right there. The return of the Joan Hart alias! The readouts say it’s October, not September. And Claire gives Kate a credit card, which I’m just assuming will have some interesting numbers on them. But none of it felt as special as that brief momentary glance between Kate and Jack as she was spiriting away from the airport…

Just remember, Kate: He walks among us, but he is not one of us.

But then we’re back on the Island. Kate eventually leaves Sawyer, the walking wound, who’s dumped his engagement ring for Juliet and, so he hopes, some of his grief for her. But the problem is, without those, he has nothing. Which leaves him in a perfect place for Fake Locke/”Flocke”/The Locke-ness Monster to come and find him at…

But Sawyer has nothing for Kate, that’s sure. So where does she run to next? Back to Jack? In search of Claire? Somewhere to find herself? We know what she’s done, but the question now is more about what Kate does next and it could be anything.

And the temple! So much there. Is Jack finally starting to regain some of his balls and own parts of this show again? Sayid is alive! And not a zombie! And the former torturer is tortured. Again!

There’s an awesome The Empire Strikes Back reference there, post-torture. Also, is that some of the protective ash being blown over his body during his “diagnosis?” Dogen types on a typewriter! Aldo returns! And he’s still kind of a pussy. And Sayid is… infected? By “the sickness?” By the Smoke Monster? The same as the French team was “infected?” The same as… Claire?