Tag Archives: Jack Shephard

“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?

“It’s good to see you out of those chains.”

Posted by Marco Sparks on

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!!”

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 3: Only fools are enslaved by time and space!

Posted by Marco Sparks on

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 1: WWAAAALLLTTTTT!!!

Posted by Marco Sparks on

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!

“It’s fate. Some people are just supposed to suffer.”

Posted by Benjamin Light on

We thought we’d start with a countdown of some of the great flashback moments of Lost. Surely this list alone could be dozens of moments long, but in the end, you just have to make some cuts and go with it. We decided to slant these towards character more than plot.

So without further adieu…

The 10 Greatest Character Flashback Moments of Lost

10. Jin visits his father in Korea

Season 1, …In Translation

We forget sometimes that Jin started off the show as kind of a chauvinist jerk. And Sun’s first flashback episode didn’t do anything to dissuade us of that notion. But Jin going back to the father he was ashamed of, and getting some much needed support, was the kind of moment that Lost is famous for: taking a character who was two-dimensional and giving them depth and nuance.

9. Kate and her childhood friend dig up the time capsule

Season 1, Born to Run

I’m cheating and also using this to rope in the part where Kate goes to see her mother and the mom totally freaks out. But the scene with Kate and her childhood friend Tom who became a doctor has the right kind of burned nostalgic poignancy. Hearing their own hopeful, naive younger selves on tape is a punch to the gut. ‘It’s not fair you know, you coming back,” the doctor says.

8. Boone and Shannon have hate sex in Sydney

Season 1, Hearts and Minds

“We’ll just go back.” “To what?” “To what it was.” It’s kinda surprising in retrospect that a show that aired at 8pm was able to work in hate sex between two step-siblings. Not just the gratuity, but the idea behind it. Boone gets what he wants, only it’s horrible, drunken and fleeting.

7. Desmond meets Faraday at Oxford

Season 4, The Constant

Always thrilling to see two characters meet in a flashback, and putting time-crossed Desmond together with physicist Daniel Faraday was A) awesome, and B) perfectly allowed the writers to establish a little science behind the time travel they were about to dive into. Suddenly the purple sky, the electromagnetic phenomena and the Island started to make sense. A little. Plus, Faraday is rocking some righteous hair.

6. Juliet’s Ex-husband gets hit by a bus

Season 3, Not in Portland

You knew it was coming, and Hollywood has really perfected the special effect of someone getting hit by a car, but it was still pretty sweet to see happen anyway. As an audience, we begin to learn what the Others are capable of, even off the Island.

5. Ana Lucia shoots her attacker

Season 2, Collision

Other shows might have had Ana Lucia confront Jason before backing down and just arresting him. On Lost, she kills him. And when she says, “I was pregnant,” it’s easy to see her side of things.

4. Christian and Sawyer meet at a bar in Sydney

Season 1, Outlaws

Up to this point, Christian had seemed like a pretty terrible father, but drinking with Sawyer, we get to see another, more humble side of him. “To Sawyer, may he find what he’s looking for in the bottom of a glass,” Christian says. It would have been impossible for Christian to ever share a moment like this with Jack, but due to cruel twists of fate, at least Sawyer was able to relay the message.

3. Desmond and Penny first meet

Season 3, Catch-22

It kind of came out of nowhere, this whole episode where you’re like ‘Holy shit, Desmond was a monk?’ And then he gets fired and boom, there’s Penny, love at first sight and all that.

2. Young Ben encounters Richard in the jungle

Season 3, The Man Behind the Curtain

A fateful meeting and the kind of flashback scene you watched over and over after it happened. 1) Richard Alpert appears to be ageless. 2) Richard doesn’t appear shocked in the slightest at the idea of Ben seeing his dead mother. 3) “Maybe this can happen, maybe… but you’re going to need to be very, very patient.”

1. Locke gets thrown out of a window by his dad

Season 3, The Man From Tallahassee

The writers had been teasing this moment for years. You knew something terrible happened to cripple John Locke, but you never knew how it happened. When the writers finally revealed it, they didn’t disappoint. Locke flying out the window was one of the more shocking events of the series, and there really isn’t a single other flashback moment that compares.

Lost in real time…

Posted by Marco Sparks on

As a nice prelude to the upcoming 100 Greatest Moments of Lost, an awesome new discovery on the internets…

The crash of Flight 815 in real time, done 24-style. Culling material from: The Pilot, “The Other 48 Days,”  “Live Together, Die Alone,” “A Tale Of Two Cities,” “One Of Us,” “The Other Woman,” and also the mobisodes “The Envelope” and “So It Begins,” and I believe that’s it, but I could be wrong. Am I missing something? Anyway, kudos to whoever put this together and I’ll have to agree with Damon Lindelof about it: Wow.

Also, new season 6 promo, finally with new footage:

Exciting, right? Claire in Rousseau mode. And kind of heavily hinting at the return, which we already knew about, and just isn’t that exciting. Oh well. Everything that has a beginning also has an ending.

The impossible gets real!

Posted by Marco Sparks on

Everyone knows this is nowhere, Faraday.

Young Daniel: “But I can make time.”

Eloise: “If only you could.”

Being as eloquent and erudite as I can here, but last night’s episode of Lost was fucking awesome, am I fucking right??

The answer is a simple, undeniable yes. Some thoughts on “The Variable,” on the quick:

Daniel Faraday. Man, the ending kind of sucks there. But is also perfect. Which kind of sucks. But in a perfect sort of way. Oh shit. Ouroboros!

Uh huh.

Charles Widmore. More and more, especially after last night’s episode, I just don’t see this guy as the larger villain of the piece. Like so many characters, he’s just another cog in the machine. And another victim of time, fate, destiny, etc.

Eloise Hawking. Cold blooded!

I think Faraday being the love child of Hawking and Widmore makes a kind of sense, but how cool would it be if they just had him because of their knowledge of the future? And also, one has to presume that they take his journal to have further knowledge of the future, right?

The sad thing is… Faraday was really the continuing agent of fate/destiny and was causing events to unfold exactly as they happened, aided and manipulated into doing so by his parents, and yet, it would see that if anyone in these chain of events could be the trigger for change, wouldn’t it have been them?

Bad parenting! (Also, there just hasn’t been enough slaps across the face this year.)

Kate. I got nothing this week. Good job, Kate. Actually, speaking of Kate…

Sawyer. You’ve upped your game by doing a good job reacting to anything that’s come your way this year so far, but now… Calling the girl you’ve had intense feelings for by her intimate nickname in front of your current squeeze who’s already feeling a bit put out? Dick move, man. Dick move.

Juliet. You know I love your fire, baby. So far this year, Juliet’s walked a fine line between doing what she wants to do, staging little rebellions towards that end, but still remaining loyal to those she cares for and her giving Kate the code was another example. So far I’ve dug that the writers have essentially maintained that Kate and Juliet don’t really have a beef with each other, it’s just a bad situation for both.

Phil. That guy can stay in the closet for all I care.

Radzinsky. I’m ready for this guy to get himself locked in a closet. Granted, that’s not going to happen, but that moment when he blows his head off down in the Swan? I can’t wait.

Little Charlotte. Man, what a heartbreaking scene, especially since you knew Faraday wanted to avoid it, yet just had to end up here. Predestination is a bitch (just like Charlotte will grow up to be). And as much as Faraday wants to break free from this chain of events, he justifies to himself that he has to have this conversation with her. If she doesn’t leave the Island before the Incident, she’ll never grow up to live the life she had, so he’s faced with the impossible choice: Have her die on the Island as a little girl in just over four hours or have her die in his arms kinda sorta 30 years later.

Jack! He doesn’t actually do any drinking in this episode and he starts to shake off that post-pills daze he’s had all this year so far (part of me wonders if his confrontation with the drunken mess that is Roger Linus puts Jack permanently back on the wagon)(or is it off the wagon?)(whatever), and quite possibly (at least, according to the previews for next week’s episode) starts to hunt down that destiny he was promised.

“The Super Power Issue.” Nice cameo by Wired as Widmore moves it aside to plant his ass down and offer Faraday a job, especially considering that J.J. Abrams guest edited the latest issue. Did I mention that already?

Pierre Chang! I totally did not forget him! I love how he just isn’t going to take Faraday’s sass about time travel. I still say that Faraday’s voice in the 1950s video, and I hope that’s something that comes to fruition. Oh, and another thing…

The guy who plays Pierre Chang was Shredder in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 2: The Secret Of The Ooze. That’s the one with Vanilla Ice and “Ninja Rap.” How wild is that?

Richard Alpert. Seriously. How cool is this guy?

He’s not scared. He’s not even concerned. He’s all like, “Please. You’re not going to shoot me, bitch. I’m not even going to put my coffee cup down.”

“The Fork In The Outlet“ is the code name for this season’s big finale moment and my current theory for the end of the season is: The Lostaways get back to their “present,” or at least what should be their correct year, somewhere in the vicinity of 2007 or 2008, only to find… Everything’s different! Shades of the ending of the novel version of Planet Of The Apes by Pierre Boulle. That’s my current guess. What do you think?

Daniel Faraday (again). This is a character I’m going to miss. Of course, he could always come back in some form, but I did just read something with the producers about how Jeremy Davies has ended his full time association with the show, so… well, that’s kind of sad. but as we’ve learned from Shannon, Mr. Eko, and Charlie before him… when your song is over on Lost, well, your song is really over.

See you out there, space (and time) cowboys (and girls).

Disappear here.

Posted by Marco Sparks on

You know what they say, man: Whatever happened, happened.

Some quick thoughts on last night’s Lost:

And Commander Light kind of confirmed for me what I was thinking here, that this was just a little bit of a bland episode, yeah (it was a Kate episode, after all)(but I am glad to see the return of the single character-centric flashback/forward format), but man… even the dullest episode of this show (and no episode is exactly what I would call “dull,” but even if it was) just needs a little appearance by Richard Alpert to turn it all around.

Not only is this guy slick and cool at an almost Sayid-esque level, but he just exudes mystery. And answers. That you’re not gonna get from him.

A guy with a torch who says “Fuck you and your sonic fence,” isn’t going to be the most forthcoming expositional figure. Who says the stong, silent types are a thing of the past? But, then again, this is 1977 after all.

Okay, back to those quick thoughts:

Kate. Seemed like she kinda had her life together, but then reset to being the fuck and run gal she’s gotten too comfortable being. She says she’s coming back to find Claire (to which the audience says, “Who? Ohhhhh, right. Her.”), which I don’t think any of us really believe, but then again, I’m glad she didn’t say it was about Sawyer alone. I’m glad that he’s just a part of it.

Sawyer. Possibly the most positive and upwardly mobile character development on the show?  You know, maybe. I was joking with someone the other day that I can’t wait til we get those Lost action figures where you press the button on their back and they spout out one of several different catch phrases. All of Sawyer’s will just be, “Son of a bitch!”

Juliet. I still love her. And the thing about Juliet, especially evident in this episode, is what I’ve been saying about her all along: The creators have clearly given this character all the DNA of a tough, strong person who is both resilient and fragile at times, a go getter, and someone who can make things happen. The catch is with her always being the fourth wobbly leg on the love triangle table, she can only show these sexy lioness qualities when somebody is off in the jungle delivering Hitler, Jr. to the Others.

Jack. I kinda feel Jack here. He kind of drops some real talk on Kate, harshly, but it needs to be harsh. He loves her, and because of that, both her and he have turned him into a welcome mat. And now… well, now, he’s basically Locke. He doesn’t know what the fuck he’s doing or why he’s there, but he’s strong in the idea that there is a purpose out there for him and he’ll find it. And until then, he’s going to make some sandwiches and maybe take a quick shower if you don’t mind.

Ultimate Wolverine vs. Hulk. Wait… what? The third issue of this miniseries written by Lost‘s Damon Lindelof came out this past week, following hot on the heels of the riveting issue #2, which came out like… three years ago? Just reading this thing I can tell you right now with some certainty that Lindelof is the guy who rights a majority Ben’s dialogue. This whole issue (and series so far) has his beats and his cadence can be imagined a little too easily as the “conversations” progress. Also, it starts off with a man being torn in half, which is always nice.

Hurley and Miles. Coupla post modern Cassandras, am I right? Two things here. First: The characters have been through so many crazy shit moments that I think they kind of accept some of it a little too easily. And thusly, when they try to reason out the logic of, you know, shit like time travel, they come off as idiots. And by idiot, I’m really specifically referring to Hurley here, though I like his reference to Back To The Future (an important collection of pro tips when one is doing the temporal quantum nasty). Thankfully we had Miles sitting in for Faraday, who I have to say, is sorely missed.

Secondly, Miles proves here what I’ve been saying about him for a while: He’s totally Charlie 2.0, but with a much cooler and heretofore far too underused ability.

Little Ben/Hitler, Jr. You know, I liked this kid better when he was laying face down in the mud, and before his gaping bullet wound changed ventricles, but hey, whatever. Now he’s… about to be changed? The not remembering anything that happened, well, that just makes sense, and the “always be one of us,” yeah, that too, but what fascinates me is Richard’s saying: “He’ll lose his innocence.” Oh? Really?

My theory: Remember when those wacky French kids got sucked down that Cerebrus vent a few episodes back right outside that simply fascinating fucking temple that we’ve seen far too little of? And later Rousseau accuses her lover at gunpoint of having been changed by the Monster (which he claims is not a monster, but the temple’s security system)? I think that whatever is about to happen to Ben is along those lines. I think that’s why Ben is able to slip off into the hieroglyphic room during Keamy’s siege last year and summon the Monster.

Also, Ellie and Widmore (whom Richard Alpert does not answer to, he tells us). I’m fascinated to see what Widmore is up to at this point (I kind of assume that he’s the leader of the Others somewhere around this point in time) but am I the only person who has no problem seeing (1950s) Ellie again?

Oh, and that ending… Man, what a wonderful reminder of why we all love Locke, whom I feel shines possibly his brightest in his moments playing off of Ben. “Welcome back to the land of the living… you bug-eyed son of a bitch.”

Next week: The mother fucking Temple! And quite possibly the answer to whether or not Ben’s violently murdered Desmond’s family! See you in another week, brotha!