Tag Archives: Penelope Widmore

Desmond of two worlds!

Posted by Marco Sparks on

Or, “See You In Another Life, Brotha!”

Last night Desmond finally properly returned to the world of Lost and I do believe that he not only brought some of his crazy Scottish magic with him, but he also brought the endgame we’ve all been eagerly anticipating/dreading.

And with his return last night, there came not only a new spin on this season’s recurring flash sideways action, but some complicated questions and theories about whether anyone on this show will ever be allowed to live “Happy Ever After.”

Ah, poor Desmond. I’ve said it many a time before, but I truly believe that he lingers somewhere at the living, breathing, constantly raw heart of this show, that he’s immersed in the DNA of Lost like permanent alcohol poisoning. At so many points in his life he’s been not only lost himself, but a constant loser, yet still we love him. He is our sad, wayward Homeric hero and we root for him endlessly, always on the edge of our seat in his continuing quest to return to his Penelope and his Ithaca. And two years ago he found her, only to discover at the end of last season and here in the midpoint of this one that his particular odyssey is not through him.

If this season of Lost, with the continue flash sideways motif going on, has been about, it’s parallels and opposites. Whereas Island Des has always been a coward struggling to find circumstances to make him better, always been a man out of work, a man whose relationships define him more than anything, particularly his love for Penny and the struggle for approval from her father, Charles Widmore. With that family it’s always been a question of worthiness. Widmore never saw Desmond as worthy of his daughter, let alone his fucking Scotch. And though Penny was there, alive and breathing in the flesh in Desmond’s arms so many times, he still went out into the world and struggled to be worthy of her.

Of course there’s parallels to Jack’s love for Kate there. Kate was right there in front of him but Jack was willing to blow up a nuclear bomb to start over again, to be worthy of her (or to get the fuck away from her once and for all). And Desmond wasn’t necessarily as extreme enough as a nuclear weapon, but for him it was about winning a race around the world, besting her father in one of his own challenges. That fails, of course, and somehow Desmond discovers a vastly more important calling in life: Saving the world by pressing a button every 108 minutes for three years.

And then there’s Sideways Desmond! He’s a man defined by his work, both immersed in his materialistic joys and apart from the world that offers them, and he’s beloved by his employer/father figure, Charles Widmore.

You just know that 60 year old MacCutcheon tastes amazing.

And of course Charlie comes into his life again, and he ruins it all again.

from here.

Well, Charlie, and all those crazy electromagnetics.

This is a complicated episode, both in itself and what it means for the future for Lost, and the way it’s evolved from the show’s past and complicated mythology so far. Parallels and opposites: The worst three words that Desmond could ever face in his life, “NOT PENNY’S BOAT,” mean something powerfully different in the Sideways World, a call to something else he should be struggling to find. His odyssey is just beginning and his Penelope is just out there waiting for him. He now needs to seek out what Charlie called, “spectacular, consciousness altering love.”

But then again, Charlie’s a fucking junkie. What the hell does he know?

And so many wonderful returns: Fisher Stevens as George Minkowski, his driver who wants to find him some “companionship,” Jeremy Davies as Daniel Widmore/Faraday, and Finnoula Flanagan as Eloise Widmore/Hawking. Everyone seems to know something more than Desmond, to know that he’s not ready yet for… something, but in some way they’re going to aid him on his quest. Faraday is a musician (one who wants to combine classic music with modern rock) in this Sideways timeline, which was perhaps his heart’s desire even if his dreaming destiny is science, but I loved the philosophical ramblings he shared with Desmond. This is not the world that they were meant to have, he says. Something’s been changed. Like the after of a nuclear weapon going off. Do you want to blow up a nuclear bomb? Desmond asks. I think I already have, Widmore/Faraday replies.

And then Desmond meets the woman of his dreams, the love of his life in another life. Parallels and opposites: This time she’s the one running the tour de stade. She probably has a lot of frustrations to vent (she is, sadly, stuck in Flash Forward at least through this season, after all).

Unrelated, I think this episode highlights a strong difference between Americans and Europeans…

Americans drink and they get drunk. The Eurotrash have really developed and mastered the skill to just keep drinking. Pouring yourself a glass of whiskey is just an extension of your hand, something you just do, like breathing, eating, or genital manipulation. It’s an ability we used to have, but clearly lost. It’s something magical that I think we’ve really lost since the days of the swinging 60s and the era of Mad Men.

It’s nice to have you back, Penny.

Other than that… There’s so much you could say about this episode, about all of it, all over the spectrum. Too much. I typically wouldn’t recommend Jeff Jensen’s Lost ramblings over Entertainment Weekly because they’re usually pretty asinine, but he brings up some good thoughts in his write up about last night’s “Happy Ever After.” Also, I’ll begrudgingly credit him with a good phrasing for the solenoid/toroidal coil chamber room in which Charles Widmore conducts his electromagnetic experiment on Desmond: “Quantum Sweat Lodge.”

from here.

And I tell you, all those years ago, I wish that Hurley hadn’t been reading the Flash/Green Lantern team up comic (the one that teased the audience with the notion of polar bears), but had instead been reading the classic Gardner Fox/Carmine Infantino story, “Flash Of Two Worlds.” It’s the story that pretty much created the DC Comics Multiverse and gave birth to a modern look back at the Golden Age and Silver Age of comics (and has been obsessed over by numerous prominent Scottish comic book writers since). Thought the conversation about the Flash back in “Catch 22″ is a lot funnier to me now. Desmond is a man in two worlds now, he is both Barry Allen and Jay Garrick now. That is, Desmond is the Flash, and things are going to start moving faster now…

…because now the end looms larger still. Things are set in motion, and timetables are being advanced all over the place. Sayid is running around killing people all willy nilly. Desmond’s able to cross his consciousness between two worlds, and seems to have found a mission in both. We’re going somewhere now, but where? Who can say? And who knows in what direction. Up? Down? Forwards or backwards? Or perhaps Sideways.

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!!!”

Just because we saw this show doesn’t mean it has to happen.

Posted by Marco Sparks on

Flashforward is no Lost.

It’s more of an experiment done in the ABC network labs to try and replicate and cultivate a Lost variation using some stolen cells from the much more interesting, much more popular show that’s “just about a bunch of people on an island.”

It’s Lost season 6 filming now OMGZ!

One of those cells shaved off the original is that annoying little hobbit, Charlie.

I’d like to point out that Charlie was such an integral part of Lost that he was killed off three years ago and half the audience has not only moved on, but pretty much forgotten about him.

from here.

But, no, no, this isn’t going to be nothing but Charlie bashing. That’s honestly too easy.

The same goes for the lovely Sonya Walger, Desmond long lost love on Lost who he was finally reunited with. I feel really bad for Walger, who’s a fine actress, because she’s had to go from jacking guys off on cancelled TV shows to soon to be cancelled shows like this, and her lone quality stop in between the two being her being cast in a role seemingly locked into the heart of Lost‘s mythology, only to then be barely utilized. Desmond’s Penelope wasn’t content to sit around waiting for her husband to return to Ithaca, but then… well, that’s a whole other story.

Flashforward is more of a show for people who (foolishly!) stepped out on Lost a few years ago and now claim “it’s too confusing” for them to dip back into, but really what they mean is that they’re ashamed. Elements of Flashforward‘s pilot (given the appropiate meta title of “No More Good Days”) are essentially the same set up from Lost, just brought over to an urban environment. But done in a not too subtle, not too interesting way. Nothing seems dangerous or interesting on Flashforward.

I’ll admit that Matthew Fox was a gamble for Lost to cast as their lead (as opposed to their original choice, Micheal Keaton), but you’d think that conversley, Joseph Fiennes, would be an incredibly safe lock for a lead on Flashforward. But what we didn’t know is that prior to filming the pilot episode, Ray Fiennes’ little brother had any charisma or allure that he may have possessed surgically removed.

The same could be said for the showrunners on Flashforward: David Goyer and Brannon Braga. Goyer’s one of those guys that’s really only popular with comic book nerds and fans of mediocre TV and movies (his sole “win” seemingly being Batman Begins and the “outline” for The Dark Knight). And Braga’s one of those Star Trek refugees who’s best at mindless, escapist TV that doesn’t require you to care all that much (he’ll be running 24 this coming season, I believe).

It is amusing to me to see Roger Sterling’s wife as the horny babysitter.

And it’s splitting hairs, but the show falls into that category of “That’d never happen like that.” The beginning near-apocalypse seems kind of calm compared to how such a catastrophe would really affect the worlds, and most criminal, after the first twenty minutes, the characters have seemed to make a little too much peace with all the weird shit they’ve experienced. Also, it seems odd to me that the local office of the FBI would be put in charge of the worldwide phenomena that’s just happened…

Also, Seth MacFarlane as the Special Agent in charge of Exposition at the FBI? Ugh. Though MacFarlane is certainly no stranger to derivative entertainment.

The novel the show’s based on, by Robert J. Sawyer, isn’t perfect. In fact, it’s about as flawed and passion-less as the show, which isn’t a direct adaptation by any means, more taking a central concept and a few minor character archetypes and situations over. The novel feels like watered down Crichton, starting with a very interesting premise and then either moving away from it as fast as possible or getting completely mired down in the prattling on of the uninteresting self centered characters. The one thing the novel did have right about itself was that it was primarily set at CERN, and it’s main characters were scientists, afraid that they were responsible for the consciousness of the entire world flashing forward in time, and so it made a little more sense for them to get heavily involved in an investigation into this sort of thing.

For a show that should have a lot more potential and promise than was on display, how sad is it that I was more excited by the productionally challenged V remake’s commercials during the broadcast?

That said, I did enjoy the Oceanic Airlines ad in the background of one scene:

Makes me wish I could flash forward to January 2010 already.

The rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used.

Posted by Marco Sparks on

YES BECAUSE HE NEVER DID A THING LIKE THAT BEFORE AS ASK TO get his breakfast in bed with a couple of eggs since the City arms hotel when he used to be pretending to be laid up with a sick voice doing his highness to make himself interesting to that old faggot Mrs Riordan that he thought he had a great leg of and she never left us a farthing all for masses for herself and her soul greatest miser ever was actually afraid to lay out 4d for her methylated spirit telling me all her ailments she had too much old chat in her about politics and earthquakes and the end of the world let us have a bit of fun first God help the world if all the women were her sort down on bathing-suits and lownecks of course nobody wanted her to wear…

Ulysses’ Homecoming by Honore Daumier, 1842.

Above is a scene from the 2004 film adaptation of Ulysses entitled  Bloom. It’s part one of Molly Bloom’s Soliloquy, wonderfully delivered by actress Angeline Ball.

You can find part two here.

And don’t forget Kate Bush’s “The Sensual World,” which is lyrically inspired by Molly Bloom (Bush wanted to use the soliloquy itself but was refused permission by the Joyce estate, so she altered it).

And the full text of Chapter 18 of Ulysses, “Penelope,” can be found here.

“I wish, for my own sake, that I had not read it… Joyce has single-handedly killed the 19th century.”

-T.S. Eliot, on reading Ulysses.

The sun shines for you he said the day we were lying among the rhododendrons on Howth head in the grey tweed suit and his straw hat the day I got him to propose to me yes first I gave him the bit of seedcake out of my mouth and it was leapyear like now yes 16 years ago my God after that long kiss I near lost my breath yes he said I was a flower of the mountain yes so we are flowers all a womans body yes that was one true thing he said in his life and the sun shines for you today yes that was why I liked him because I saw he understood or felt what a woman is and I knew I could always get round him and I gave him all the pleasure I could leading him on till he asked me to say yes and I wouldnt answer first only looked out over the sea and the sky I was thinking of so many things he didnt know…

“I was on the platform, my heart going like the locomotive, as the train from Dijon came slowly to a standstill and I saw the conductor getting off, holding a parcel and looking around for someone — me. In a few minutes, I was ringing the doorbell at the Joyces’ and handing them Copy No. 1 of Ulysses. It was February 2, 1922.”

-Sylvia Beach, pictured up above with Joyce, standing in the doorway of her bookstore, Shakespeare and Company, in Paris. She was the publisher of Ulysses. (taken from this amazing site.)

That is Nora Barnacle up above, who was, and I love the way that Wikipedia words this, “the lover, companion, inspiration – and eventually – wife of author James Joyce.” An episode from her real life would inspire the epiphanic moment from “The Dead” and the date of her first romantic liason with Joyce – June 16, 1904 – would be forever immortalized in Ulysses as Bloomsday.

I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.

from here.

Also from Wikipedia: “Joyce noted in a 1921 letter to Frank Budgen that ‘[t]he last word (human, all too human) is left to Penelope.’ The episode both begins and ends with ‘yes,’ a word that Joyce described as ‘the female word’ and that he said indicated ‘acquiescence and the end of all resistance.’