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.
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…
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).
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.
Private little chats, existential crises, pleas to crazy girls, men down wells, leaps of faiths, deals broken off, loyalties betrayed, and baptisms of… water.
And stuff exploded too.
Lots of stuff, in fact.
And all of that on last night’s Lost, entitled “The Last Recruit.” Savor this time, people. Savor it and cherish it. This moment, this building to… to… something, this can only come once, and this is it. And soon, it’ll all be gone…
I swear, when I start running a major TV show, I’m going to use a lot of the same gimmicks that Lost uses. People talk a lot of shit about the flashbacks, but honestly, they’re genius. And lazy. But genius. You’re not just telling one story, you’re telling multiple stories, on multiple frames, lost (literally) and found (potentially) in different modes of juxtapositions and dichotomies.
And then, in the third season of such a show, I’m literally going to have a “WE HAVE TO GO BACK, KATE!” moment and before you’ve changed your underwear from watching your main character do all that hillbilly heroin, we’ll be FLASH FORWARDING!
Where I’d change it up from Lost, though, is I’d do the Sideways flashes, the glimpses into the “wouldn’t it be nice” universe earlier. The “happily ever after” alternate existence would come much earlier, and you want to know why?
Because in the last season of my show, instead of flashbacks, flashforwards, or flashsideways, every episode would would flash to a potential spin off featuring my main characters. My Jack spinoff would be just like House, only more misogynistic and feature more pills. Jack would be less British, of course, but the SHOUTING would remain. Awww, cute baby with cancer and shingles on his face. SHOUT AT HIM, JACK! And my Kate episode would be like Run Ronnie Run, only it’d star Kate, which I think works in a lot of ways. And my Locke and Ben Linus episode would be like a sitcom version of Stand And Deliver, just less Edward James Olmos, I guess.
And my Sawyer and Miles episode would be a lot like last night’s episode of Lost, titled “Recon.” Sawyer and Miles as vice cops, going undercover together, and Sawyer would be the weird southern lead whose partner talks to dead people. Their dynamic would be entirely like Kurt Russell and his AZN sidekick in Big Trouble In Little China. And they’d say shit to each other like…
Miles: “Cutting it a little close, aren’t we?”
Sawyer: “Only way to cut it.”
And then David Caruso puts on his shades. YEEEAAAHHHHH!
As for last night’s episode itself, you know, Locke/Flocke/The Man In Black/The Locke-ness monster is evil and all, sure, but deep down, he’s not so bad. If you catch him in a lie, he’ll say he’s sorry and explain himself. He slaps women around when they’re hysterical, which is just so adorably old fashioned. It’s cutesy quaint like how crazy Claire is this season. There’s a certain bit of sex in his violence, unlike Sawyer, whom I feel like has no violence or anything else in his sex.
It’s sad that a character like Sawyer, who only has too emotions, full on redneck angry and goofy, is really just going through the motions this season post-Juliet, it seems. He doesn’t want to search and destroy, he wants to sit around in his underwear and listen to “Search and Destroy.”
He’s doing a so so job of recon on Hydra Island, discovering that Widmore’s got a stealthy interesting operation set up there and an HQ on a submarine (like a Bond villain!), and then trying to play Big Chuck against The Man In Black.
The even sadder thing is I think that Widmore and the Locke-ness Monster have to see through Sawyer’s attempts to get them to go to war with each other. If anyone who’s spent more than five minutes on this mystical, magical Island has learned anything, it’s this: everyone has a past, not everyone has a future, and you may or may not have a sideways. Also, lies are currency and the economy is broken and bleeding.
I applaud Sawyer for not planning on taking the plane. Of course not. Why would you? It’s not like he knows how to fly that thing. But he does know how to pilot a submarine? Really? I somehow feel that there’s more to it than just pressing a glowing button that says SUBMERGE on it.
If I could use another partial financial metaphor here about Sawyer: The man is just not invested. He’s completely checked out and he’s leaving me checked out too. He’s the exact opposite of Jack in major ways now. Jack is nuts, and entirely invested. There’s not a situation that Jack can’t attempt to kill himself out of us, meanwhile Sawyer’s just going to to sit around and brood and maybe tell Kate things through gritted teeth after she’s had a good sit and cry. Or after she’s seen Claire’s fake baby thing:
Taking a momentary pause here because… Here’s a promotional still from new weeks’ Richard (finally!) Alpert-centric episode:
Also, a question about the Sideways universe that made my ears perk up a bit: Miles’ dad is off the Island in the Sideways universe? Last week people bitched about Roger and Ben Linus being off the Island in the Sideways world, but they could’ve easily gotten onto that submarine on time. But wasn’t Pierre Chang right there front and center when that nuclear weapon went off at the Swan site? Unless this is a stepfather? A stepfather who works at a museum with Charlotte, whom Miles is pimping out to Sawyer.
Also, let’s face it: Charlotte is easy.
But in a great way. In a way everyone should be. Ladies is pimps too. She’s an independent woman who can fuck a guy like a Sawyer if she wants. In another time and place, a guy like Sawyer might threaten to slap her one right after slapping her fragile colleague in science and holder of an unrequited crush on her, but in a Sideways kind of world, she might let a guy like Sawyer try three, maybe four positions with her. And maybe if Sawyer had been cooler, and not left his most important documents in the world in his top drawer, he would’ve seen her whip on the second date. And not being chilling at home watching reruns of Little House On The Prairie. And not being try to win her back in the cheesiest way ever with a huge novelty flower.
But, of course Miles will take him back.
And, thankfully, Charlie is still in jail.
Oh well. Here’s a SPOILER about the rest of the season: In the finale, Sawyer reveals that he’s been at least half gay since the freighter blew up.
I really can’t let it go without being said that I really liked the incredibly vague but enticing commercial for tonight’s episode of Lost, “Recon,” that was played at the end of last week’s episode. That commercial/trailer looks like this:
I love that it uses Leonard Cohen’s “Bird On A Wire” too.
Lovely marriage of images and music. But then again, Lost has always had a formidable track record of the (diegetic) music it chooses to incorporate. Completely unrelated:
Ha ha.
Oh, and I think tonight’s episode is a Sawyer one, right?
The final season of Lost continues with last night’s intriguing episode, “The Substitute,” in which the dial is turned up just a tad on the mythology reveals.
And it was a Locke episode, which… well, by now you know of our love of the abilities of Terry O’Quinn, but it’s always good when what appears to be your show’s primary villain can get an episode all of his own.
And what a peak into the world of the Man In Black/Smoke Monster/”The Locke-Ness Monster” it was, this new semi-corporeal existence. Supposedly the only form he can take, other than smoke, is that of John Locke. In that case, who was that appearing as Alex to Ben last season in “Dead Is Dead?”
Regardless of that, the glimpses of the character were fascinating. Supposedly he was once human, knowing joy and fear and what it’s like to be betrayed. He’s been trapped so long that he doesn’t know what it’s like to be free anymore. And while he’s clearly manipulating anyone he can, tell what would appear to be at least partial truths, he wants to “go home,” to leave the Island. But where is home? And what does leaving the Island, and the needing of someone else to help him do it, entail exactly? Is it a genie in the lamp/djinn thing, in that he needs someone else to take his place?
And he clearly didn’t take just the appearance and memories and shroud of John Locke on, because he seems quite a bit like him. Maybe he’s not afraid, as Sawyer claims Locke always was (really, James Ford, was he always afraid?), but he certainly seems to be enjoying continuing playing the role of Locke, taking on his mannerisms and seemingly a little bit of his personality. And failings.
Meanwhile in the Sideways universe: How weird is it that a millionaire like Hurley can be on a flight from Sydney to Los Angeles with not just one, but two of his employees? Is it me or is this show all about WEIRD COINCIDENCES?
The Sideways universe still fascinates me because there we are, just looking for it’s reason for being, other than being neat, and while it’s not exactly revealing any big stories, it’s giving us the exact opposite. The small little human stories. John Locke, the man in the wheelchair with the douchebag boss. He’s about to woman to marry the woman he loves and seemingly still has a father in his life. He’s encountering all the echoes of another version of himself in another time and place, and he’s tired of being told what he can’t do. It’s time to start seeing what he can do.
I guess there’s another option besides farmer and hunter, huh? What’s the old joke… Those who can’t do, teach…
…like Ben Linus, European History teacher. Watching Ben’s progression in the Sideways universe will be fascinating and should answer a lot of nature vs. nurture questions we’ve been gathering up.
Meanwhile there’s Island Ben. Not quite ready to admit to the manipulated murder of Jacob (which is reasonable at this point, I think, because there’s a good chance that Ilana might just shoot him on the spot), but he can admit to not just the murder of the real John Locke, but the (possible) remorse he feels because of it.
And then there’s Sawyer and the Man In Black. The fallen man and the man who fulfills our need for “the Devil” in any story.
It’s interesting to me the mythic value of Christianity, which to me is really just a collection of interesting stories rather than the basis for being crazy, voting Republican, or blowing up abortion clinics. To the people who deemed the Left Behind series as good, I would instead submit to you a little television show called Lost. I don’t know if it represents your so called “values” any better, but it certainly presents them mixed with something even more important: How people really are.
Jacob and the Man In Black represent, to me, the very nature of what should be taken out of a story like Christianity, stories that had been around long before Christianity. Fate vs. Free Will. Or the new update, Faith vs. Science. Jacob represents so much of what we can rely on from “God,” doesn’t he? He’s good and all, righteous and true, but there isn’t a whole lot of room for innovation. And there isn’t a lot of sharing of knowledge. You’re set up to either fail or succeed, but you don’t know why, and seemingly the only thing that can save you? Blind obedience and total submission.
Meanwhile, if the Devil was a real being, then Lost tackles that character exactly how I, a mere mortal on this spinning rock, would envision him/her in the Man In Black: He’s just somebody who’ll show up when you’re at your lowest and offer you a little bit of knowledge and some choices. And that’s the kind of thing that scares a lot of people.
But not Sawyer, apparently. Seemingly he’s so hollowed out by his past experiences on the Island that he’s past the point of caring or being scared. Sitting around in your boxers talking to what is either a dead man or something that has appropriated the face of a dead acquaintance of yours? That’s no big whoop to Sawyer. Strange, almost hallucinatory little boys (young Jacob, right?) appearing to the Locke-ness Monster? Doesn’t phase him in the slightest. Neither does almost plummeting to your death from a cliff face. He just wants to sit around, drinking whiskey, and listening to Iggy and the Stooges. And I can’t blame him. That’s exactly what I do when all of my girlfriends die setting off a timeline-altering nuclear bomb.
But then there’s that cave. With THE NUMBERS. And the names attached. It seems that Sawyer and the other major players from Flight 815 are all candidates for taking over Jacob’s job. But not Kate, seemingly. And obviously Jacob’s been at this for a while, since you can see the names from the 50s military expedition crossed out there as well. I’d like to think that Richard Alpert knows a little more of what’s going on then what we were lead to believe in this episode (he at least knows when it’s time to be scared shitless enough to take off towards the temple, like everyone else), but seemingly even he didn’t know about this cave by the sea, Jacob’s version of Plato’s Cave, with it’s little inside jokes (are these Jacob and The Man In Black’s inside jokes, or Damond Lindelof and Carlton Cuse’s?).
But there they are in that cave, Sawyer looking at the list of names, seeing himself as a prisoner of fate possibly, and the Man In Black offers him choices. Not just one, not just two, but three choices. Obviously Sawyer’s being manipulated, without a doubt. But seemingly, when you’re the plaything of the Gods, all you can do is be manipulated in one direction or another, right? And if he plays along, well, then perhaps he can save his own soul.
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?
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?
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!
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…
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.
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.
