Tag Archives: The Smoke Monster

Progress.

Posted by Marco Sparks on

And so here we are.

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

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

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

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

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

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

from here.

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

01. “LA X.”

02. “What Kate Does.”

03. “The Substitute.”

04. “The Lighthouse.”

05. “Sundown.”

06. “Dr. Linus.”

07. “Recon.”

08. “Ab Aeterno.”

09. “The Package.”

10. “Happily Ever After.”

11. “Everybody Loves Hugo.”

12. “The Last Recruit“

13. “The Candidate.”

14. “Across The Sea.”

15. “What They Died For.”

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

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

Destiny found.

Posted by Marco Sparks on

IN THE BEGINNING was the word, and it was the most important thing there was, from the Alpha to the Omega, but that word was also something else, something equally important to all that came after it. That word which begat all else was also the answer to a question, a choice made when a decision was presented.

And that was only a small part of last night’s penultimate word of Lost, the appropriately and devastatingly titled “What They Died For.” And much in the same vein as last week, but vastly more important, let’s tackle 23 stray observations about last night’s episode…

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“A means to an end…”

Posted by Marco Sparks on

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

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Objects at rest, objects in motion.

Posted by Marco Sparks on

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…

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Four letter worlds.

Posted by Marco Sparks on

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

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

Man, where to start?

“Hey guys, I’ll be right back…”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Proverbs 8:23.

Posted by Marco Sparks on

We have been waiting for this one for what feels like ages now…

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You’ve got the touch.

Posted by Marco Sparks on

Holy crap, another week, another new episode of Lost. This time it was a Ben episode, entitled “Dr. Linus.” And the often misleading promos promised us that Ben would face his own mortality, and he did, but he survived the encounter, unlike Corey Haim. Or the dude from Sparklehorse.

And it was interesting episode with Ben on the Island being even more broken down, all the shards of his manipulative sad personality being stripped away. He tries to get over his anger and abandonment issues by assuming roles of power. He wants to be a leader and he wants knowledge, but he never understands why he needs to know these things.

And Sideways Ben… well, it was interesting to see a Sideways flash of someone who wasn’t on either Oceanic flight 815, but I like the reminder that this is the same little Ben that was shot by Sayid and taken to the temple. He’s been changed by Others, but what does that mean in the real world?

Apparently that means an unhappy life of teaching in the public school system and only getting motivation to do something when a guy in a wheelchair at the next table suggests it.

And probably means you’ve left less of a body count in your wake.

The thing I think you have to ponder about the Sideways world is… Well, remember last season when we suddenly went back to the Island with the Ajira flight and there was Locke alive again? And we were invigorated by this new Locke, this man in full control of himself and capabilities? For half a season there we had something of the season ending twist just hanging there in our faces but there was no one way we could tell what was happening. You have to wonder if that’s what the Sideways world is. Is this the world that the Man In Black/Smokey has promised his followers? Is this the epilogue? Because, with the exception of Sayid’s sideways flash so far (arguably), these characters are all doing fine, getting second chances and doing what they should’ve done, perhaps.

I mean, there’s Ben, taking care of his asshole dad (oh, the IRONY as he’s trying to keep his Sideways father alive and instead of poisoning him with gas he’s changing his oxygen tank), and finally getting the opportunity to “choose Alex,” the choice he didn’t make before when Keamy had the gun to her head. And it’s not like he’s not getting to do a little scheming, blackmailing his principal and all. Good times for all. Especially Jeff Goldblum:

from here and here.

But back to the Island. And back to Jack and Richard Alpert and perhaps my favorite moment of the season so far…

We always told you Jack was crazy. Who else would do a bro a favor, lighting the fuse on his stick of dynamite so he can kill himself and then deciding to sit down and have a little chat while it burns. This new Jack is still crazy after all these years, but it feels like he’s finally accepted it. Being a slave to destiny is fucking insane. Might as well do some fun, crazy shit while you’re at it.

“When Jacob touches you, it’s not a gift, it’s a curse,” Richard Alpert tells us cryptically, right after he appears from somewhere, and when asked where that somewhere is, he says, “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.” I think you’d be amazed what these characters and us would believe/accept after all this time. Though I think I’m getting tired of Hurley as the proxy for the audience’s questions, especially when he makes the audience’s sound so fucking stupid: “Are you a cyborg?”

And Ilana? I respect the seriousness of things, the hopelessness of it all, and how you’ve personally been fucked by destiny – and in that regard, Lost is kind of like the bible: the women get the short end of the stick over and over again, sadly – but having Ben dig his own grave for a few hours? That doesn’t seem like the best use of your time, I would think. But then again, time stops for a little vengeance.

Time will always pause for you to wrap your hands around the big flabby neck of revenge.

And Miles… still annoying, but still a better version of Charlie, right? And now he’s got those Nikki and Paulo diamonds. I neglected to mention in a dorky nitpick last week that Lennon fucked up when he offered Kate two minutes with Claire when it should’ve been three (the Others always offer you three minutes)(but maybe that’s because the situation was a little stressful and two was all they had?), but I’m glad that they didn’t forget Miles and the desired 3.2 million dollars.

And I feel like Miles’ “superpower” is both underused and overused. Sadly, it kind of pales in comparison to Hurley’s being able to talk to ghosts, but I’m fascinated by the fact that Miles’ ability is tactile in nature…

He has to literally touch the dead in some way, which is amazing with the way that this show is now, with everything that these characters have been through, and death just hangs over everything like a cloud. A smoky black cloud, perhaps? As Dr. Arzt said, “You know what gets out formaldehyde? Nothing.”

And Charles Widmore is returning to the Island! Kind of like Napoleon perhaps? Will he have Mrs. Hawking/Desmond/Penny with him? And, just out of curiosity, what if Charles Widmore is his own grandfather? What happens if a future version of you touches you? Oh, the questions!

“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?

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

Posted by counterforce! on

We know your LOST BONERS must be huge by this point. Only a little while until the premier. Why don’t we knock out the Top 10 in the meantime, eh?

The 100 Greatest Moments of Lost!

PART FIVE

10. Marco: The “LA X” Premier. Can you feel it? I mean, can you fucking feel it as it gets closer? That beating you hear, those loud insane drums, that’s your heartbeat. That’s the sound of your blood rushing through your body, to your brain, to your genitals, getting you ready as the circles closes tighter and we get near tonight’s premiere episode. I could make it even more surreal for you there, but let’s just say that we’re taking a chance here and saying that THE SHEER EXCITEMENT alone for tonight’s episode, “LA X,” especially after watching that new promo, is in the top ten greatest moments of this show.

9.  Benjamin: The pan over to the plane crash in the Pilot episode.

I don’t want sound like a broken record here, but Lost’s first episode is the best television pilot ever made, and it’s not even close. Who wasn’t floored when the camera panned around some bushes on the beach to show us the carnage of a motherfucking plane crash?

The shot, on just a technical level is superb. Then you throw in the excellent sound editing, the way the noises slowly resolve into screams, and the creepy music.

And the clever camera trickery that at one moment gives us an idyllic beach and the next chaos just around the corner. I don’t think anybody who watched this first 10 minutes of this show changed the channel.

8. Marco: The giant FOUR-TOED FOOT STATUE.

Let me just quote Sayid for a moment here: “I don’t know what’s more disquieting, the fact that the rest of the statue is missing, or that it has four toes…” Exactly. I’m glad that they gave us a lot of glimpses of rest of the statue in season 5, especially in the finale (for the longest time we were like, “OMG, is it Tawaret or Sobek?” Ancient Egyptian God intrigue!)(Team Tawaret won. Go fertility!), and wonderfully, it only confuses us more. But ever since the introduction of this massive mysterious beauty in the season 2 finale, “Live Together, Die Alone,” from the biggest minds to the most infinitesimal, there’s no way you couldn’t have been just a little captivated by this tease.

7. Marco: Eko meets the Monster. From one thing that’s kept audience enthralled for years now to the mother of all mysterious goings on on the Island of Lost: The motherfucking Smoke Monster. In particular, the scene in which it was revealed to us in all it’s bizarre, gorgeous glory there in “The 23rd Psalm,” when it comes screaming out of the jungle to confront Mr. Eko, who merely turns and faces it down, and he doesn’t have the sonic fence that Juliet had in “Left Behind.”

There, as Charlie watches from a tree, Mr. Eko stares into the eye of the black foggy beast, and it seems to stare right back into him, with flashes from his life off the Island appearing in little electrical surges through it’s wisps. And if I just take it there for a moment, this moment alone, with all it’s possible implications that one couldn’t even begin to fully grasp at, gave me a boner.

…and further ignited my hatred of Charlie. I can understand his climbing up into a tree to hide, that makes sense. He’s no Mr. Eko, that’s for damn sure (even though Charlie did have a weird crush on Eko throughout season 2), but what kills me is after the Monster apparently judged Eko okay and left him there in peace (for the time being), how does someone like Charlie not go running back to camp and scream, “OMG, guys, guess what I just saw out there in the jungle? THE MOTHERFUCKER MONSTER is what, and you know what? IT’S MADE OF A NANOTECH-like SWARM OF INTELLIGENT BLACK SMOKE!!!”

Benjamin: Not to defend Charlie, but let’s be honest, if he dude had run back to camp, the rest of the castaways would have been all “yeah, sure, black smoke. Fucking tweaker. Go play some more shitty guitar and stroke it to the pregnant chick, limey.”

Marco: Side query: Do you think that the man in black/the dark man/Jacob’s nemesis/Esau (too many Stephen King references there, sorry) is actually the smoke monster when he’s not taking on the guise of deceased human forms like Locke, Christian, Eko’s brother, Yemi, or Alex? If so, go back and watch the scene between Jacob and his nemesis at the beginning of “The Incident,” and when Jacob asks him if he’s hungry, the man in black merely says, “No thanks, I just ate.”

6: Benjamin: Desmond asks for Penny’s phone number. “I won’t call you, for eight years!” Maybe it’s my own fantasies of disappearing from the world for while, but the wrap up to “The Constant” gets me every single time.

How would you react if an ex demanded your phone number, promising not to call for 8 years and giving you an exact time to expect the phone to ring?

And then, 8 years later after being missing for years, he calls? I love this whole sequence. “Eight years from now, I need to call you. And… I can’t call you if I don’t have your number.”

Des and Penny, who are kind of the heart of the show, finally get their reunion. “I’ll find you!” Penny gasps, crying. If you didn’t get a little misty during this scene then you’re a fucking robot.

5. Benjamin: Jack and Locke’s argument in “Orientation.” “Why do you find it so hard to believe?” “Why do you find it so easy?” “It’s never BEEN EASY!” Three lines of dialog that distill Jack and Locke to their base ideologies.

Our two tortured heroes were perhaps never so honest with each other. If Lost were  movie, this would be its Oscar reel. And I think it gives necessary weight to Locke’s conviction: he’s not just a blind follower, he’s gone through quite a lot to arrive at this moment, but he needs someone else to share it with him.

4. Marco: Locke screams and bangs on the hatch in “Deus Ex Machina” after Boonie dies, and then… the light comes on. The thing about characters like Jack and Locke, the men of science and faith, respectively, isn’t just so much their belief systems, but their failings. Jack represents our very base, very human failings and insecurities. His suffering is so tragic and real, and not unlike the things we can all go through. And Locke, well, Locke is no stranger to similar failings, but he’s also a man looking for answers, for a place in the larger context of the world and what it all means.

And when you begin to scream out big questions to the universe of that nature, you’re bound to be let down, in a much bigger way. You’re going to fall from such a larger height, only in this case, it wasn’t just John’s hopes that took a tumble, it was also Boone, “the sacrifice the Island demanded,” Locke later reasoned. And there, when Locke was at another in a long series of moments of crushing defeat, screaming and banging on the door to the impregnable hatch, essentially asking the universe why he was nothing in it’s eyes, a light from inside comes on. And John Locke, at his very lowest there, is bathed in this new light…

3. Benjamin: Jack’s “Live Together, Die Alone” speech in “White Rabbit.” He wasn’t always the greatest leader. Ok, he usually wasn’t one, but for this shining moment, Jack really was the leader and hero of the castaways. Bonus points for a speech that doesn’t just have to apply to plane crash survivors on an island. If there’s a message in Lost, it’s in this scene.

2. Marco: “Not Penny’s Boat,” from near the end of “Through The Looking Glass.”

So vague, and yet, so heavy with potential meaning are these three words written on Charlie’s hand that he shows to Desmond as the room he’s in fills up with water and he drowns.

Just like Locke can find the light to continue on when he’s literally at his lowest, covered in another man’s blood, these two guys in a thirty year old DHARMA station underwater can find victory snatched away from them at the last possible moment, when they were at their highest. And Desmond can’t really fully know what Charlie meant by that or what he saw/heard to make him convey this message, but he knows what that moment isn’t: the happy ending they were hoping for. Perhaps you can’t cheat fate. Whatever happens, happens. The universe will always course correct, right?

Benjamin: This is my favorite scene in the series. Who would have guessed that a sodding tool like Charlie would go out with the most epic and moving death scene of all. Love the message on his hand, love the understanding that comes between Desmond and Charlie. Crossing himself while he drowns is a beautiful grace note to end the scene.

and here we go. The greatest moment in the history of Lost…

1: Benjamin: Jack’s flashforward revealed in his meeting with Kate at the airport.

This was the moment that forever changed the show. It was an excellent show before this scene, and a legendary one after it. “I’m sick of lying. We made a mistake… We were not supposed to leave,” Jack pleads to Kate.

The twist isn’t just neat on a plot level, it’s devastating on an emotional one. We learn that they did make it off the Island, but rather than triumph, somehow it’s all gone terribly wrong. It didn’t just feel like a glimpse into our characters’ futures, it felt like a warning about our own. What awaits our heroes isn’t rescue but tragedy. Narratively, it’s genius, and the kind of story-telling structure they’ll be teaching in writing classes in 20 years.

After this flashforward, we not only had the excitement of the events on the Island, we got a peeks into the future at lives torn asunder, and on top of every other mystery in the show, the question of how did it all go so wrong to end up like it did at the airport, a drugged up Jack, completely bottomed-out, screaming “We have to go back, Kate! WE HAVE TO GO BACK!!!”

The 100 Greatest Moments of Lost, part 4: “It only ends once, everything else is just progress”

Posted by Benjamin Light on

If you haven’t already, you might want to check out:

But before you do, make sure you put on some trash bag diapers, you know, like the astronauts wear.

We have already been taking a wonderful ride down memory lane, and at this point, every scene on this list is one of those “fuck me, I don’t believe what I just saw” moments. That reminds me, nowhere in this whole list did we find time to recall one of my favorite lines of the series. “Boone was a sacrifice that the Island demanded,” should go into the Dialog Hall of Fame. We love you, John Locke, and we left off with John in a mass grave, mortally wounded by Ben for being Jacob’s pet. And now let’s look back at a classic encounter with Ol’ Smokey…

The 100 Greatest Moments of Lost!

PART FOUR

25. Kate and Juliet face the Smoke Monster at the sonic fence in “Left Behind.” I think we all learned a lot from this scene. One of the A-team finally sees the Smoke Monster in all its glory. We know the monster will attack an Other. We know the sonic fence is a defense against it, perhaps the only reason for the fence. And we also learned that Kate + Juliet + handcuffs + rain & mud + popping shoulder joints back into sockets = hot!

24. The Frozen Donkey Wheel. Ben will help John move the island by blowing a hole in the Orchid’s containment chamber, climbing down a ladder, through a tunnel and then turning an ancient-looking ice-covered wheel. Millions of theories about the Polar Bears being trained to turn the wheel are born.

23. Sayid confronting ‘Henry Gale’ in Lockdown. “It was all there, your whole story, your alibi, it was all true. But still, I did not believe it to be true. So I dug up that grave. And found that there was not a woman inside, there was a man. a man named Henry Gale.” Fuck Yeah, Sayid! This is possibly my favorite Sayid line in the whole series. Marco and I often joke that the writers must continuously contrive ways to separate Sayid from the other Castaways, because if he was there for a lot of these other moments, the show would have only lasted a season, he’s that fucking competent.

22. Keamy executes Alex. You never saw this coming. There are tons of action and drama shows where somebody’s got a gun to a family member’s head, and the relative always relents rather than let the other person die. Always. Except on Lost. Not only did Ben not relent, he disavows Alex as she pleads for mercy, and Keamy actually pulls the trigger, killing a teenage girl on primetime TV. Shocking, tragic, riveting.

21. The hidden map. “Lockdown” was one of Lost’s classic game-changer episodes, and nothing got more buzz than the map. Entertainment Weekly did a whole spread on it in their next issue, enhancing and translating all the tantalizing latin clues, references to Cerberus, the Sickness and other hatches painted all over the blast door.

20. Sawyer slaps Faraday in “Because You Left.” Not only do we get a passible scientific explanation of the time-jumping from Faraday, we get: “Shut it, Ginger, or you’re getting one too!” Nobody talks down to Sawyer. Plus, there’s just something hypnotic about Jeremy Davies’s stilted, hazy delivery as Faraday explaining Science.

19. The Incident. We heard about it way back in Season2, and it didn’t disappoint. Jack had a bomb…

and Juliet was determined to set it off, leaving us with the most wide-open cliffhanger ever. Literally anything could happen in Season 6 at this point.

18. Walt is kidnapped from the raft in Exodus, pt 3. A classic “out of the frying pan and into the fire” moment. Just when the raft folks think they’ve found rescue, they get Mr. Friendly and “Only the thing is, we gonna have to take the boy.” WALLLLLTT!!!

17. It’s Locke in the casket. This secret was so big the producers filmed a fake take with Desmond in the casket, just in case. After seeing everything that happened in between, it makes perfect sense for Jack to attempt suicide after learning of John’s death. They were philosophical opposites, but they needed each other.

16. Sayid shoots little Ben. I bought Marco a shirt that says “Guns don’t kill children, Sayid does!” This was the ultimate question, can they really change the timeline? Apparently not in this way. Sayid is faced with the decision you often hear about in hypothetical: “if you could go back in time to kill someone evil when they were still a child and innocent, in order to prevent future suffering, would you? Should you?” Sayid makes the choice only men like he are capable of making. But as Faraday warned, “whatever happened, happened.”

15. The sky turns purple in “Live Together, Die Alone.” We all wondered what would happen if the button didn’t get pushed. The answer: it’s not just a psychological experiment. Desmond finally finds his courage and turns the failsafe key, turning the sky purple and imploding the hatch. Des would never be the same afterward, communication was apparently cut-off from the mainland at this point, and the magnetic disturbance was enough to point Penny’s search team in the right direction.

14. Ben summons the monster. How epic was “The Shape of Things to Come?” It’s all over this list. Among the many, many shocking moments was the reveal that Benjamin Linus apparently has the power to summon the monster. Smoky shows up in all it’s terrifying glory and makes quick work of Keamy and his men. The monster, much like Enoch Root, remains a mystery, but it’s always awesome when he makes an appearance.

13. The Island disappears in “There’s No Place Like Home.” When Ben said he’d move the Island, he wasn’t kidding. With a flash of light, boom, it’s gone, nothing but a ripple in the ocean where it used to be. The writing in this episode was so crafty, not only was the disappearance amazing, it took away the only land mass for Lapidus to land the helicopter on, causing them to crash.

12. Jacob and the dark man have a chat on the beach in “The Incident, pt 1.” The music is excellent in this scene, so foreboding and mysterious. Unlooked for, the season 5 finale stuns us by starting off with an introduction to Jacob and his dark opposite. The scene crackles with hidden allegorical meaning. “It always ends the same.” ”It only ends once. Everything else is… just progress.” Not often you get a primetime network TV show that encourages its viewers to contemplate the great mysteries of life. We’re all better for it.

11. Locke in the wheelchair in “Walkabout.” This reveal was so good we took it out of the flashback moments. Lost’s Pilot episode was perhaps the best pilot ever, but it was “Walkabout,” and the revelation that Locke was paralyzed before the crash, that took the show to the next level. “Don’t tell me what I can’t do!” shouts John, nicely establishing his key character trait: the belief that his is destined to do great things. When we saw John in his wheelchair, we knew this show was something special.

Up next, the top 10 greatest moments of Lost (though we suspect Season 6 will have something to say about this before it’s all over with.)