Screencap © 2010 ABC Studios.
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Showing posts with label Lost. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Lost. Show all posts
All Together Now
Promo images and logo © 2010 ABC Studios composited by BSL.
This post is currently down for maintenance.
The End
I was right — about the wrong thing.
The series finale of Lost, a two-hour-plus final chapter long known to have been titled...
… revealed that the so-called flashsideways scenes threaded throughout this season took place not in an alternate timeline, a theory that I espoused in my first ‘Lost’ in Thought post in February, nor in an altered version of the original timeline, as I theorized earlier this month, but in the afterlife. The storylines that many viewers expected to be the result in some way of the EM/Jughead Incident turned out to be utterly, well, incidental to the narrative of the series — except insofar as they reaffirmed how bound together these characters were and granted them a rather happy ending.
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].
Fixing a Hole
Okay. I’ve been working on a theory for a while now about the alternate timeline on Lost. At heart it’s not all that complicated (really), but I had written it up as part of a post on other general musings that in typical fashion for me keeps getting longer and revised and left fallow and revised again thanks to my intermittent concentration as
the show keeps marching on.
Screencap © 2010 ABC Studios.
The gist of things is that the apparent flashes to a new reality we’ve been seeing are
not actually flashing sideways — or diagonally, i.e. one universe over plus several years back — but rather flashing back to the selfsame universe where all the events we’ve seen to date have taken place. It’s just that in the wake of “The Incident” there’s been some very considerable course-correction.
I recall hearing at Nik at Nite that in an interview or podcast, around the time of Desmond’s head trip in Season 3’s “Flashes Before Your Eyes” and his subsequent attempts to save Charlie’s life based on visions of his death, the producers said there was only one timeline on Lost. When Mrs. Hawking appeared to Desmond during that episode’s funky flashback narrative, she explained that the universe had a way of course-correcting to what should happen, a nice way of allowing for both free will and destiny. This was illustrated by Charlie ultimately dying no matter what Desmond did, although there’s also a convincing argument to be made that Desmond’s actions in warding Charlie away from the previous would-be deaths course-corrected Charlie’s path not to a substitute death but to the one he was “supposed” to have; we’ll never know, presumably, who’d have performed Charlie’s actions at the Looking-Glass station and died his heroic if somewhat senseless death had Charlie died earlier in the jungle
or in the ocean or at Claire’s tent.
Nik in New York
The soup can is back in effect. Which signals, as regular visitors here know and the
rest of you can find oat in another post, that one’s blog is being updated more sporadically than usual. I’ve plenty of reviews and bits of commentary almost ready to go, but I keep dropping them to get my old Lost entries back up, the look at this past week’s episode finished, and my grand think-piece(s) on the series in shape.
Did I say “find oat”?
You Won't See Me
It’s time for a post that’s late, haphazard, and uninformed by any online discussion thanks to computer problems, but nonetheless my first impressions of…
While I didn’t get to jot down as many memorable lines as usual, an early one made
a lasting impression: “How do you lose a body?”
Jack’s mother said this in the Alternate Universe as they discussed Oceanic’s misplacement of Christian Shephard, but I thought immediately of Locke. He suffered unimaginable indignity in death — he was despondent to the point of suicide, only to have Benjamin Linus “save” and then murder him, after which his body was brought back to the Island but he was not; instead, Smokey manifested using Locke’s appearance. (Now that’s identity theft.)
Magical Mystery Tour
I didn’t get a look at Lost’s season premiere up as quickly as hoped for and skipped
last week entirely, but here, for my readers who don’t frequent Nik at Nite, I’m sharing my initial reactions to last night’s episode...
Holy frackin’ shoot!
I think this makes up for any perceived apathy or frustration over the previous
episode. They honestly could have run nothing but deleted scenes of Nikki & Paulo getting tattoos in Thailand last week and this still would have redeemed my faith in
the show.
The Numbers were finally explained:
Links to Love
The indefatigable Nikki Stafford yesterday shouted out Lost Valentines made by
Lee Bretschneider in her unending battle to direct readers’ attentions to every quality parody of, tribute to, or riff on the show in existence.
At some point, students of French will learn that the word for seal in that language
is phoque — which is pronounced roughly as you think — and they will laugh. I’m using that word in place of the English word it sounds most like for the sake of sensitive readers. The following links, however, are unvarnished in sound and image.
Get Back
This post is currently down for maintenance but I’ll point you towards Nikki Stafford’s recap and the literally hundreds of comments that follow including mine.
Any Time at All
It’s about time.
The final season of Lost begins tonight with a two-hour episode starting at 9 p.m.
ET on ABC. You probably either know this already or don’t care; while casual viewers
of the program are rumored to still exist, at this point it’s hard to imagine they outnumber the Oceanic 6.
Lost was one of the first things I wrote about on this blog.
Before Six
The Lost Rewatch hosted by Nikki Stafford wraps up its review of the pivotal
third season this week.
I couldn’t join in when the Rewatch began in July but jumped on board last month
with Season 3. While I’ve fallen behind again, I’m trying to catch up and looking forward to discussion of Season 4, on which more in a few paragraphs.
Quick Hits
My old buddy Stefan Blitz is running a zombie haiku contest [bad link] over on his website, Forces of Geek. Entries will be judged by FOG contributor Don Roff; the grand prize is a signed copy of Roff and Chris Lane’s Zombies: A Record of the Year of Infection, newly published by Chronicle Books.
REM Brands
At least part of the origins of a dream of mine from last night are obvious: I’ve had Lost on the brain due to peeking in on Nikki Stafford’s Rewatch of the show and lamenting that I still don’t have time to participate.
The context of the dream was me reading about an upcoming film in Entertainment Weekly — yet instead of seeing the words on a page, I was seeing the action described
in my mind’s eye, as if I had peered into Dumbledore’s “pensieve” from the Harry Potter series. And that action was Matthew Fox, in his role as Jack on Lost, standing
on the turret of a castle while a storm raged. Oddly, Julia Roberts was playing a version of Evangeline Lilly’s Kate or someone connected to her, but she was inside. Jack, in a suit and tie, shouted amidst the wind and rain about something being unfair; at one point he dumped the contents of an old-fashioned physician’s bag over the wall of the turret. I believe that the name of the movie was In Absentia.
I have vivid dreams and tend to remember at least one upon waking. Sometimes I’ll recall others later when actual events jog my memory. They’re usually not completely mundane or completely gonzo, but there are exceptions. On rare occasions I’ll have dreamt a slice of life so ordinary that only later when reality contradicts it will I both remember the dream and realize that it was a dream. Last year during a nasty bout of the flu I dreamt of nothing but thick, syrupy pitch-black shapes moving around.
Most often, however, the dreams are entertainingly improbable if not impossible scenarios like me going to a Survivor reunion after nearly forgetting that I’d been on the show, or Jim Eisenreich giving me a pep talk in the Phillies’ locker room before we take the field, or an acquaintance of mine getting me to introduce him to Marlee Matlin after I’ve moved into a new apartment. Yes, I’ve gone back to college and even high school. Yes, I’ve been embarrassingly naked. Yes, I’ve had sex, which to me pretty well belies the old saw that says when you dream that you’re flying you’re really thinking about having sex. I’ve also dreamt that I’m flying, which is utterly amazing and probably my second favorite recurring activity in dreams; first is spending time with one of my family’s dearly departed cats. The following is representative of the average levels of reality and unreality of my dreams as well as their tenuous segues.
A childhood friend whom I shall call Gary looked not entirely unlike Bill Hader of Saturday Night Live, and while I’ve not seen Gary in ages a dream from the other night began with the two of us more or less as adults in a classroom where Hader stood at the chalkboard. I was telling Hader that, like him, Gary did a killer Vincent Price impression, and Hader responded with the news that he was preparing to star in a film that Price had been working on before his death, portraying the main character as Price would have. From there the scene dissolved to what at that moment I clearly felt was supposed to be Hader’s description of the film, via the whole rubbing-the-chin, “it seems as though it was only yesterday...” trick; in this new setting, a bunch of teenagers were lying around waking up from one heck of a party the night before.