Don’t Let Me Down

Well, I guess my episode analyses are going to mirror one another to a degree, the
way this season of Lost is at times mirroring itself, and the first season, and the series to date.


Screencap © 2010 ABC Studios.

I’ll have no individual writeup here of last week’s episode, “What They Died For”, in advance of tonight’s two-part series finale, “The End” — just as there was no writeup of the first individual hour of the season, “What Kate Does”, following the one for the two-part season premiere, “LA X”. My laptop has started acting hinky again, the Internet connection has been at a crawl, and I’ve come down with a cold.

Season 6 ends tonight and thus so does Lost as a whole. Its finale begins at 9 p.m.
EST on ABC, following a two-hour series retrospective at 7, and runs until 11:30; then, after the local news, the one-hour Jimmy Kimmel Live: Aloha to ‘Lost’ comes on at 12:05 a.m. with cast members and creative staff. That’s all true for the USA, at least. What reminds me of viewers outside our borders is that also immediately following the finale will be a live online chat at the CTV website [bad link] featuring my friend and Finding ‘Lost’ author / Nik at Nite blogmistress Nikki Stafford. My plan is to kick back and enjoy the last Lost as much as possible as television, ideally after catching up with comments from my clique at Nik at Nite and Jeff Jensen’s Totally ‘Lost’ insights for Entertainment Weekly [bad link].

I had this post’s title slotted for my episode analysis of “Across the Sea” in reference to Island Momma’s desperate pleas to Jacob and Esau — until I realized that it perfectly summed up my and so many other viewers’ hopes about what to expect in “The End”.

After the wildly uneven previous episode, overwhelming and underwhelming at the same time, I truly feared for Lost’s final hours. The campfire scene in “What They Died For” went a long way towards assuaging those fears; as I put it at Nik at Nite, I can see given this episode how the next episode would be the finale. Jacob’s conversation with the Candidates and Jack’s assumption of Jacob’s role was a nice, straightforward propulsion of the primary plot that followed well from last week’s mega-flashback episode and the Candidates’ recent Island adventures. Yet I still have the sinking feeling based on what we’ve seen (or haven’t seen) so far this season, on how little screen time is left, and on recent comments from the showrunners that the finale will leave unaddressed things that I believe should be addressed.

Here are eleven of the subjects that to my mind need to be covered for the narrative
to wrap up in satisfying fashion. Not all of them require long-winded explanations; a few might, but in other cases a simple acknowledgement that Lost’s world just works this way or even an indication that yes, that is a mystery, would suffice. Some are obviously related and others might be more related than we realize, although we have little beyond our own suppositions to go on.

2005-2007: We saw glimpses of the Oceanic Six’s lives off the Island during this
time, and know that the rest of the main characters lived a relatively normal life in the past during the equivalent 30 years ago. Did Jacob, Smokey and Claire, or Richard and the Others do anything significant in this period, and if not why the heck not?

The Numbers: I know we had them explained in “Lighthouse” as corresponding to the Candidates. But it’s still unexplained as to why 4 8 15 16 23 42 were on the Hatch door and in the radio transmission, how they ended up as Hurley’s winning lottery numbers if that was mere coincidence, and why, say, Kate’s 51 wasn’t among them.

Connectivity: How did these characters’ paths cross so astoundingly in the original and variant timelines? Is their tangled web meant to be an indication of fate, an example of how everyone is connected, or an example of Jacob and/or the Island at work?

“Specialness”: Walt has powers that seem to include willing things into happening. Desmond can not only survive bombardment by electromagnetic radiation but when doing so have his consciousness travel through time or perhaps across parallel dimensions. Miles and Hurley can communicate with the dead in different ways. Are there people with similar abilities all around the world? Is that simply a fact of life in the universe in which Lost takes place? Are these abilities tied to the light that’s within us all and if so tied to the Island?

Pallet Drops: Yeah... How did those work, exactly?

Eloise Hawking: When and how did she acquire the awareness she has, which
clearly is not just limited to “book smarts” gleaned from Daniel’s journal? How many spacetime cops like her are there?

Apparitions: Souls get trapped on the Island when they can’t move on for some reason. Hurley sees dead people on and off the Island. Smokey can take the form of those who’ve died but has never been off the Island. There are still apparitions that took place on and certainly off the Island that aren’t explained by any of these facts.

The Cabin: Was it ever one of Jacobvs haunts? Did it serve a prison for Smokey, and if so, for how long? How does it move around, why does it appear when and where it does, what was up with Horace building it if that was indeed Horace, whose eye did Hurley see, and most importantly who or what was in there when Ben first brought John Locke to it, since we’ve actually never seen Smokey be invisible?

Weird Stuff: Even given time travel, healing powers, immortality, telekinesis, and necrotelepathy, wet backwards-talking Walt and comatose Sawyer’s channeling of Wayne in front of Kate is some danged weird stuff.

The Island: How exactly does it travel through time and space? How does it stay hidden? How can anybody get to it? I’m not looking for mathematical equations but for clarification on the bits of apparently contradictory information that we’ve gotten on whether it exists fully in the same dimension as the rest of the world, how often it moves outside of turns of the Frozen Donkey Wheel, and what hides it from outside observers if a spike in the very energy that’s apparently responsible for most of its unique properties is what revealed it to Penny’s research team.

The Dharma Initiative: Its organizational history, fascinating though it must be, doesn’t concern me as much as its presence on the Island as that ties into the previous questions. Why did Jacob let the Dharma folks flourish for as long as they did, and what led him to eliminate them if indeed the Purge was undertaken at his orders? Why would he let anyone come to the Island, beyond the need for a potential replacement, which wouldn’t seem necessary if the sole populace of the Island was him and his brother? Why did the Oceanic Six and friends need to recreate the conditions of their original crash if Jacob can bring people to the Island? Right now I’m not sure if Jacob summons particular vessels or just makes the Island accessible to those in the vicinity when he’s ready for another batch of people to observe, and whether his actions, usage of an appropriate bearing, and outright accidents are the defined ways of ending up there. Apparently people have successfully escaped the Island to talk about its funky nature, beyond those given the secret knowledge of proper bearings by Jacob’s followers, because the military and the Dharma Initiative, among others, made it a specific destination.

I’ve prioritized putting together one more round of free association in advance of tonight’s episode, despite having further hopes and opinions to share along with some nifty links; my energy is low and there’s no guarantee how long it or my Internet connection will hold out. One of the burning questions on viewers’ minds is who David Shephard’s mother will turn out to be, so once again I’ve opened up my consciousness to the universe and let the answer come to me by going with the next thing that pops into my head until arriving at an appropriate answer. You may scoff, but I correctly predicted that the mysterious Wallace named in the episode “Lighthouse” was actually Charles Widmore this way back in February. Ready? Enjoy and be edified!

[Note: Images for the free association, which of course make it much more fun, are temporarily down thanks to HTML gremlins.]

David.

David Duchovny.

Gillian Anderson.

Wes Anderson.

Rushmore.

Rush.

Geddy Lee.

Harper Lee.

To Kill a Mockingbird.

“Tequila”.

Pee-Wee Herman.

Herman Munster.

Monsters Inc.

Infinity Inc.

The Justice Society of America.

The Justice League of America.

Superman.

Batman.

The Joker.

Jack Nicholson.

“Jack and Jill”.

Jill Sobule,
who must be tired of having her song “I Kissed a Girl” constantly
associated with the newer one of the same name sung by...

Katy Perry.

Matthew Perry.

Friends.

“With a Little Help from My Friends”.

Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.

The Queen of Hearts.

Royal flush.

Straight flush.

Dire Straits.

“Romeo and Juliet”.

Juliet!

So as most of us thought, Juliet is David’s mom. Actually, since this didn’t get uploaded until after the finale aired, you can change “most of us thought” to “all of us now know” and “is David’s mom” to... well... however you want to describe it given what this season’s flashes were revealed to be.

I hope this wasn’t too anticlimactic.


Previously: Birthday / Next: The End
Related: Any Time at All • Norse Code • All Togther Now