Locke Fell Down and Broke His Crown

John fetches a pail of water and then walks like an Egyptian in the hieroglyph-covered Orchid. Smokey plays fetch with some French folks. Charlotte’s not allowed to have chocolate before dinner. Desmond shows up uninvited to Ben’s party – awkward. Christian gives Locke a D-minus in “follows instructions.” Sun puts the gun down reluctantly. Jin apparently took a crash Berlitz English class while floating in the ocean. Daniel’s been stalking Charlotte for decades. Rousseau develops some serious issues with men. And Ben does his best road trip-dad impression with an: “I will turn this car around right now!” Yet another all-killer, no filler episode of Lost last night!

Lost 5x05: This Place Is Death

In Los Angeles:
Sun gets a call from her mother and the unbearably cute Ji Yeon. She wants to know when Sun is coming back. Sun replies, “I’ll be on a plane tomorrow.” That she will, though it’s not the plane she thought it would be, I’m sure. She hangs up and leaves Aaron in the car to confront Ben.

Sun has her gun sights on Ben for causing Jin’s death. But he drops the ‘Jin’s alive’ bombshell on her and can prove it. He’s got Jin’s wedding band. She agrees to let him take her to someone who can prove it. Kate and Sayid fume off and it seems the plan is falling apart. Sun and Jack are discussing and Ben has a hissy fit, stops the van and says everything he’s done has been to keep them and their friends safe. (It will be quite the mindf--- if it’s revealed at the end of this that Ben actually is a good guy.)

Ben, Jack and Sun arrive at a church to meet the woman who can prove Jin’s alive. At the same exact moment, Desmond pulls up! Made for some nice drama. Ben looks freaked out. (Question: Is this because he knows Widmore sent him or because he wasn’t expecting Des there? Or did he not know that Daniel is Faraday’s son?)

They enter the church and – not-so-big reveal – the lady they’re both there to see is Mrs. Hawking. (The use of the filmed-from-the-back-or-in-the-shadows-and-reveal surprise is getting a bit overdone on Lost, no? Michael, Christian, Mrs. Hawking, Jin, etc…)

Somehow, despite her decree of “God help us all” if Ben didn’t get all of the Oceanic Six to the church in 70 hours, Hawking says, “I suppose it’ll have to do for now. Let’s get started.” Not sure where on the 70-hour timeline they are, but perhaps they have more time to convince Kate (with Aaron), Sayid and Hurley to come along too.

On the island:
Danielle and crew talk to Jin, who says he needs to look for the camp and the helicopter. ‘Planes, helicopters…Next it’ll be a submarine’, Montand jokes. Danielle says that they sailed from Tahiti and that it’s November 15, 1988. Robert, Danielle’s baby daddy, is listening to the radio broadcast with the numbers (4-8-15-16-23-42) that has been broadcasting and asks Jin if he knows if there’s a radio antenna on the island. Jin says yes and then they convince him to take them to the tower before he looks for the camp. They set off and immediately Nadine goes missing. They hear the clickety clack of the smoke monster and they’re looking for Nadine when Smokey crashes up through the ground and Nadine comes crashing down from above – dead. They run and Montand is scanned (?) and then caught by Smokey and dragged. The crew and Jin chase after him and grab hold of him as he’s about to be pulled into the ground. (This is just like the scene when Locke was almost pulled under by Smokey in Season 1.) Just as it seems they might snag him back, Montand’s arm is torn off and the rest of him goes down the hole. Gnarly!

The hole is in front of the Orchid station. The building is covered in hieroglyphics, similar to those on the countdown clock in the Swan station and below the Orchid when Ben went into the frozen donkey wheel room.


Geek alert:


They hear Montand call out for help, saying the monster is gone. Jin warns them not to go, but Robert, Brennan and Lacombe go down the hole. Jin convinces Danielle not to go for the safety of the baby. And suddenly the sky turns purple and Jin is in the future with the decayed arm in front of the temple still.

It’s the near future and Jin makes his way back to the beach, sees Brennan and Lacombe dead, and hears Rousseau and Robert fighting. They are fighting about the monster. Robert says it’s a security system for the temple. Danielle says he’s sick and changed. But he charms her and says he doesn’t want anything bad to happen to her or their baby and he tries to take a shot at her. Too bad…no ammo. Rousseau hits him right between the eyes. Did it seem to anyone else that Robert had been brainwashed or maybe replaced with a new Robert, like an Invasion of the Body Snatchers pod person?

Geek alert: The music box Jin finds is Rousseau’s which Sayid later fixed in Rousseau’s hideout when he was held captive in 2004.


Geek alert: Why did Rousseau’s team need explosives?






Jin steps out and Rousseau accuses him of having the sickness too. He runs into the jungle and the island skips again. Jin shows up back in the present and runs into Sawyer, Locke, Juliet and the rest of that group. It’s an “awwwww” moment when Sawyer and Jin hug. They set off again together for the Orchid and the island flashes numerous times. Charlotte’s near death and Daniel stays behind to help her. She tells Daniel that she was born on the island and lived there until she moved away at 16 with her mother to England. She was also warned by an old man not to go back to the island – and she thinks that man was Daniel. (So much for him not altering the past, huh? Though it seems the universe course corrected and killed her anyway.) More flashes, more nosebleeds, Charlotte dies. The reaction to her hasn’t been overwhelmingly positive, but I will miss her. It is interesting that she’s a person of science and died. More on that later.

At the Orchid Station:
They make it to the station and Juliet remarks, “what are the odds we’d end up in the same time as this thing.” And then Sawyer called her out for jinxing them as time jumped again and the station disappeared. (Question: In such close proximity to the station, shouldn’t some piece of it have remained when they jumped, like their clothes, their backpacks, the canoe, etc.?)

They go to look for the well that Charlotte had tipped them onto and find it. Like Alice in Wonderland, Locke decides to go down the well in a scene reminiscent of John going into the hatch in season two. Sawyer says they should lower him, Locke asks, “Where would be the fun in that?” Time flashes, light emanates from the bottom of the well, Locke goes plummeting down the well and Sawyer is left playing tug of war with several tons of topsoil.

John fell down and broke his crown…er…leg. Locke’s got some revolting bone protrusion when someone walks up, lights a lantern and reveals (again with the secret reveal) himself as Christian Shephard. He’s tells John he’s there to guide him. He also chides John for not having been the one to move the island as he told him to in Jacob’s cabin. He has to do it, but Christian can’t help him. (Seems to me this is because Christian is an appartition and not physically there.) Christian tells John he has to go to Los Angeles and look for Mrs. Hawking to help get the others back to the island. John says that Richard said he was going to have to die, and Christian says “that’s why they call it sacrifice.”

Locke manages to hobble up and into the frozen donkey wheel room. The wheel is skipping around, seemingly the cause for the island’s frequent jumping. John manages to push the wheel and Christian looks on approvingly.

“Say hi to my son,” says Christian. Of course time flashes right before he can say who his son is…

---
Question: Locke & Faraday are the only ones who don’t have bloody noses yet. Why not them?

Half-baked theory: My brother brought this up, so credit to Phil. But it’s interesting that Charlotte, a woman of science, died. Could this mean that it all comes back to faith. There’s quite a possible religious parallel:

• Jacob is God. Christian is Jacob? Or at least a messenger for Him?
• John Locke is Jesus – the son of God who has to sacrifice himself to save the world
• Ben represents Lucifer or Satan, the fallen angel who was cast down from Heaven, the island.

We'll see...

Killer episode last night. It really propelled the storytelling ahead. What did you think? Comment, debunk, debate.

Sayid and Ben cuddle up for Valentine's Day

Last night’s flash forward heavy episode of LOST was a grower, not a shower. We learn little bits of Sayid’s post-island life building up to the knock-you-on-your-ass cliffhanger moment. For instance, Flash-forward Sayid is: 1) dapper; 2) an assassin; 3) suave with the ladies; 4) able to pull it together after being shot; and…oh yeah, 5) working for Ben!

Really, we could end it right here, because it’s tough to recall most of what happened after seeing Ben in the room with Sayid in Berlin. How did Ben get off the island? And more importantly, why would Sayid be working for him? What do you think? Comment below with your thoughts.

LOST 4x03: The Economist


Sayid stares at Naomi’s corpse for a bit and admires her jewelry. (Inscription said “N – I’ll always be with you – R.G.”) Sayid makes a deal with the pilot, Frank, to deliver Charlotte back to the chopper team in order to snag a coveted exit row seat on the first flight back to the freighter. Sayid, Kate and Miles set off to get Charlotte. Frank asks Jack about Sayid. If Frank knew the passenger manifest so well that he knew Juliet was not on the flight, wouldn’t he have likely known where Sayid was from?

Team Locke can’t find Jacob’s cabin where he and Ben had visited it. Ben digs at John, saying he needs someone to ask what to do next. Clearly Ben’s mindgames are putting doubts out there. Hurley asks Locke to let Charlotte go as an act of “good faith.” Locke, always the man of faith, calls that an act of foolishness.

Sayid’s crew find Hurley bound and gagged in a closet in Juliet’s house in Otherville. But Hurley was swayed to pretend to have been left behind by Locke and crew. Sayid’s crew split up, and Sayid finds Ben’s secret room. Is this the “Magic Box?” There there are several international passports, including a Swiss one has a name of Dean Moriarty on it, and a drawer filled with various currency. An out-of-circulation ₤20 note with the image of Michael Faraday – physicist Daniel Faraday seems to be named after – topped one stack of cash. (Photo from losteastereggs.blogspot.com)

Much like Ben did earlier, Locke separates Sayid’s crew. Sayid is held with Ben in the Recreation Center, Kate with Sawyer in Ben’s house. The scene mirrors the one from last season’s “Man From Tallahassee” episode where Kate is held after trying to rescue Jack.

With all these scenes, it’s almost as if The Losties’ are transforming into The Others: Now they know the island, they ambush newcomers, they withhold information, they keep the rest of their teams in the dark, and they use people as bargaining chips.

Sayid returns to the chopper with Charlotte and says he traded Miles for her. But we didn’t see the transaction. What was it that we didn’t see?

Geek alerts:

• George Minkowski – The guy back on the freighter. Predictably, his name’s not just a name. Hermann Minkowski was a German mathematician who in 1907 theorized that in Einstein’s special theory of relativity, space and time aren’t separate dimensions, but are intertwined in what is known as the space-time continuum. Confused? Don’t worry. All you need to know is that Minkowski is a clue that perhaps space and time don’t follow the typical patterns here on the island. This theory seems to be a clue to solve Daniel’s experiment where the clock from the rocket “payload” was 31 minutes ahead of the clock he had on the island. But I’m betting that the island isn’t just 31 minutes off from the rest of the world.


• Here’s a brainbreaker for you: Jack asks Frank if the Red Sox really won the World Series, and Frank says yes. However, if time moves differently on the island, could it be that Frank was replying yes about 2007’s Series, not 2004’s, when the Losties crashed?


• Elsa was wearing the same type of bracelet as Naomi. Was Elsa actually Naomi’s “RG”? Or did Elsa and Naomi both work for the same people?
  

LOST news: The producers announced that we’ll get five more episodes this season, for a total of thirteen. The remaining three we would have gotten will roll up into a future season, meaning we will still get the planned episodes of LOST. Of course this means that we’ll get an accelerated story leading up to the season finale. I’ll take it. - Sean Salo

A physicist, a ghostbuster, an anthropologist and a drunk walk onto an island…

From polar bears on tropical islands to polar bear remains in the North African desert, from ghosts in the cabin to ghost whisperers, Thursday night’s brilliant episode of LOST continued to take the show in new directions. We meet the goofballs who are supposed to rescue the Losties, and Ben gives us even more reason to love and hate him. “Tell my sister I love her”, cuz after this episode, I feel like my brain exploded with LOST goodness. “Comment” below with your fave freak out moments.

LOST 4x02: Confirmed Dead

Under the sea - The open of tonight’s episode is an underwater mission to retrieve shipwrecks – the Black Rock? – in the Sunda Trench, in the Indian Ocean off of Bali. However, the crew stumbles upon Oceanic Flight 815 – just where Naomi mentioned they found it. The subsequent news reports triggers a series of flashbacks that introduce us to the ragtag crew of the chopper that has arrived from SS “Not Penny’s Boat”.

Animal magnetism - Daniel Faraday (Jeremy Davies) is watching the news coverage of the discovery of 815 at home in Massachusetts when he starts to weep. When asked why he’s crying, he says he doesn’t know. (Is he an “empath” who tuned into the emotions of the family seeing the report?) Next we see him on the island, in a vest and tie. I’ve never seen ties in the outdoor equipment store at the mall, but maybe I’m shopping at the wrong mall. He tells them he’s a physicist. Kate, Jack and Daniel come upon a container of gas masks and bags with biohazard symbols. Were they anticipating a “purge”, like the one where Ben and team gassed the Dharma folk, or were they expecting to defend against being “purged”? Homeboy is all twitchy and stuff, so add that to his not-so-fly paratrooper gear, and this was our first clue this ain’t The A-Team.

(Geek alert: Michael Faraday was a physicist who studied electromagnetism in the 1700s. One of his findings was named Faraday’s Law, which became one of the four Maxwell equations, which would only mean something if you were insane enough to have spent several weeks playing ABC’s Find815.com game and were introduced to The Maxwell Group who are looking for 815. Later in life, Michael Faraday also discovered what’s known as the Faraday Effect, which established magnetic force and light are related.) So was Daniel Faraday’s comment to Jack and Kate that the light didn’t “scatter right” on the island a reference to the magnetism scattering the light to keep the island invisible to the outside world?

Who you gonna call? - Next we meet Miles Straume (Ken Leung) – probably a play on “maelstrom”, or a dangerous whirlpool in a body of water. He’s entering the house of a Mrs. Gardner to remove a spirit of her grandson from his bedroom with some Dustbuster-looking contraption – while he’s at it, he removes some cash from the room as well. (Geek alert: the photo frames of her grandson are completely different on the way up the stairs than they are on the way down. No idea what this means. Did he open an alternate reality in the room?)

On the island, he plays possum until Jack and Kate are upon him and then forces them to take him to Naomi, who he knows is dead. He knows not cuz he’s all Sixth Sense, but because she relayed the “Tell my sister I love her” code for “Got a gun pointed at my head” before she died. He seems pretty attached to Naomi, and when they arrive at her body, he knows they were telling the truth about Locke having killed her.

Charlotte Sometimes - Next we’re in Tunisia and Charlotte (Rebecca Mader), a pushy archaeologist, makes her way into an illegal dig site and finds a polar bear skeleton – with a Dharma Initiative Hydra station collar! Dun dun dun… Did it get there through time travel? Dimensional travel? Something tells me it’ll take a few episodes to find this out. ;)

Her full name, Charlotte Staples Lewis, is certainly a nod to C.S. Lewis, author of The Chronicles of Narnia. (Geek alert: Narnia is a land with magical animals you can only get to through a secret entrance…like the magic box?) Her parachute became entangled with a tree and she was dangling over a lagoon. She cut free and encountered Locke and his merry band of Losties. She seems genuinely confused about why they wouldn’t be excited to see her when – POW – Ben pops a couple of caps in her chest. Good thing she was wearing body armor – it’s what all the stylish archaeologists don in the field.

Guess it's not better in the Bahamas - We meet Frank Lapidus (Jeff Fahey) in The Bahamas when he calls Oceanic’s crash info number following the discovery of 815. Frank was supposed to have been the pilot of the flight, so he knows the body they claim is the pilot in the recovery video is not that of Seth Norris, his friend who piloted the flight.

Frank lands on the island and the first thing he encounters is one of Mikhail’s cows, a nice call back to last season, and he shoots off a rescue flare. He later says the helicopter was struck by lightning, but he’d been able to land it safely.

Naomi may be gone, but she's not forgotten - Naomi was not only part of the rescue team, but it seems she was leading them. Only problem is, they weren’t there to rescue the 815ers, they were sent to get Ben. She and the spooky Matthew Abaddon, the “Oceanic lawyer” who visited Hurley in the flash forward from last week’s season opener, had a meeting in a warehouse where they discussed the crew for this mission. Abaddon was adamant that the team he assembled would get it done because she was leading them. So when he asked Hurley, “Are they still alive?”, did he mean the other people from Oceanic 815 or the rescue crew?

(Geek alert: Naomi’s last name is Dorrit, perhaps a reference to Charles Dickens’ “Little Dorrit” satirical novel that condemned his era’s debtor’s prisons, where people who owed money were held until their debts were repaid. Could the island be a “spiritual debtor’s prison”, where you have to work at repaying your debts to karma before you can leave?



Meanwhile, back on the island - Team Locke is making a detour looking for Jacob’s cabin. Hurley almost reveals that he’s seen it and Ben’s eyes bug out of his head – even more than usual.

After Ben shot Charlotte, Locke appears ready to kill Ben. Fearing for his life, he offers Locke answers. In a nod to the audience who’ve complained about the pace of answers, Locke demands to know what the black smoke is. (FINALLY!) Ben says he doesn’t know. (DRATS!) Locke is about to shoot him, and Ben opens up like a fountain – revealing he knows every detail about Charlotte and the rest of the rescue team. Ben knows this…how? He has a spy planted on the freighter working for him who alerted him to the rescuers’ identity. Who’s this mystery man? Richard Alpert? Oscar Talbot, who works for the Maxwell Group? My money’s on Michael. We all know Ben likely didn’t really let him and Walt go…


With cautiously optimistic reports of a deal in the WGA strike, there could be even more reason to celebrate LOST. Hit me up with some comments on your thoughts on the show.