THIS WEEK ON LOST: The Candidate
Oh shit! And away, we, go! You know that shit means fucking business on a show when they kill off like thirty-percent of the main cast in one episode. They call it “Last Season-itis”, and it’s typically something I enjoy. There are certain restrictions relaxed for mainstream television during a final season. You can do all sorts of bonkers crazy shit like kill people, or uh, introduce Flash-Sideways, or have Billy Adama puke all over himself in a gutter. Maybe that’s what is so exciting about the final season of LOST, or any other television show: you have no idea what the fuck they’ll do.
At all!
Sure, you can say that every show should do whatever they want whenever they want, but c’mon! Let’s be practical.
Okay, I’m not going to stunt. The death of Jin and Sun got me a little emotional. I was transfixed, yo! My friend Tommy was staring at me as I watched the scene, because apparently I was making retarded faces and had bulging eyes. I can’t help it, I’m a romantic, yo!
Even though I don’t care about the two characters: it got to me.
Even though it was overwrought: it got to me.
Even though once they started speaking the dialogue was terrible as usual: it got to me.
I think it resonated on a certain level because I felt the dilemma of watching the person you love the most in the world drown to death. Like, what do you do when you’re watching your husband or wife drown to death? Can you leave them? Would you leave them?!
Who fucking knows!
Man, it sort of bummed me out. After the episode I was sitting there with Tommy and his Better Half and I was like “OH man! What the fuck would you do! I mean, I know that they had a kid, and it was probably smart for Jin to have left, but can you leave your drowning wife?! Can you! Can you?! I mean, I don’t know what I would do!”
I really don’t.
So it worked. Fuck you LOST writers, you got to me. All I wanted to do after the episode was go over my girlfriend’s house, and creepily whisper in her ear as she slept “never put yourself in the position to drown to death as I watch.”
I wonder what sort of dreams that would give her.
Anyways.
John Locke told me I needed to stay.
How fucking bad ass was it when he dropped that line, and then shoved the devil into the lake? Amazing.
You have to hand it to Smokey, the dude is a world class manipulator. The guy plucks so many strings at once, you can’t help but tip your cap to him. I mean, I was fooled! Were you? You say you weren’t? I say you lie!
It continues the whole motif that the people will kill one another that was set-forth back in The Incident Part I last season by none other than MiB. They come, they eat some mangoes and hunt some boars, and then they fucking kill themselves.
It’s pretty dope that Smokey cannot directly kill any of the candidates. It makes things a lot more interesting. As well, if you want to continue on with the allegorical notion that MiB is the Devil, it makes sense. The Devil never directly kills someone, he condemns them through manipulation and exploitation. In turn, he gets them to give him their souls.
I can’t fudge, I dug the living crap out of this week’s Flash-Sideways. I go a bit bananas for anything that has to do with Locke and Jack and the exploration of Faith. The inversion of the two characters from their interactions on the Island is interesting. I mean, we have Jack on this one-sided mission driven by his belief in the ability to make something come about. Does this sound like anyone?
[Hint: Locke, circa the Island, before getting strangled by Benjamin.]
And then we have Locke as this sort of resigned character, unwilling to take any leaps of faith or trust in anyone.
[Hint: Jack, before he was totally like a man of faith and Lighthouses and shit.]
This week we finally find out what broke Locke’s sense of worth, and his ability to trust or have faith in anything. A plane crash. Oh, you writers. You guys really are the bees knees. So clever. Inversion! These writers love their inversions this season. Previously it was a plane crash that brought Locke to the point in his life where he became a man of faith, and in LAX it was totally a plane crash that cause him to lose said faith and ability to trust!
Mirror images!
Mirror images!
So what do you do when there’s a bomb in a submarine? Do you listen to the crazy doctor guy who is telling you to just let it count down? Or do you try and yank strands out in an effort to stop it? I can’t imagine there’s many of us who would have gone along with Jack. “Alright dude, no yeah, we’ll just let the little Casio count down to our doom. Right, I trust you.”
And that’s exactly why I love Jack’s character so much these days. He has so fully taken on the mantle of the Man of Faith, and he seems undeterred by well, anything. It seems so ridiculous to have that much faith. To the extent that I am envious of him, despite the fact that he’s a fictional character.
There are certain movements in this show that I enjoy living vicariously through. I enjoy living through them, because they are at best ideals in the real world that are worth striving for, and failing to achieve. In the sense that all ideals are impossible to actually attain, and the best we can hope to do is better ourselves in the pursuit of these impossibles.
I love the notion that mankind is innately good. I just gobble it up. And so when people are calling Jacob a douchebag and someone who has his head up his ass waiting for everyone to figure out how to be decent animals on their own, I can get down with it.
It isn’t that I agree with him necessarily, but rather it’s that I want to believe the world works that way. And should the show bear it out that Jacob is proven correctly? I’ll be one of the people who is happy with it. Is it cliche to postulate that humanity is ultimately redeemable? I don’t know man. Probably. Yeah, I guess. But I’m down with it.
And that’s also why I love Jack’s character now – it seems so absurd, so implausible to believe in something that much. Fuck man, I don’t even believe in gravity to the extent that Jack believes in his destiny. I keep waiting for my fat ass to begin floating towards the ceiling, a stack of Diet Mountain Dew cans floating up with me.
So yeah, I love Jack as the Man of Faith. And speaking of popular tropes, who doesn’t love the concept of redemption?
See that fucking segue, yo? Yeah, that’s what I’m paying thousands of dollars in student loans to master. Fucking segues.
Anyways, our boy the Iraqi Thundersex died last night. What is the Iraqi equivalent of Taps? Or uh, the Iraqi equivalent of a 40 oz. of malt liquor? ‘Cause our boy got blown the fuck up, like, into a zillion pieces. In one swift motion, Sayid packs a shit load of explosives against his guts, runs for the hills, and explodes in what is theoretically a redemptive move.
Here’s the thing though.
Was anyone else not sold on Sayid’s conversion towards the Dark Side? I mean, he was totally Vader to MiB’s Palpatine. But it just happened so quickly, that I was like “Really, you’re really a bad guy now?” And by the time I was done grousing about it, he was already not shooting Desmond in the well and saving everyone’s asses on the submarine.
Not that I’m complaining, I’m happy he did them all a solid. But still.
I dug you, Sayid. I dug you when you were torturing shitty Sawyer, and I dug you when you were building houses and shit for charity. Your hair was beautiful, your accent gorgeous. Rest in Pieces, my friend.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA. Now you have another gaping hole!
It’s easy to focus primarily on the “I wish you believed me” line from the conversation between Locke and Jack at the end of the episode. But there is another line that is just as curious, and equally an echo. “What happened, happened” was a prominent statement from my boy Danny Faraday last season, and it spits forth from Jack’s lips as well. As we saw with the beginning of the season, there was no prevention of the crash in the sense that it seems to have created a splinter and not reset anything.
Jack beseeching Johnny to give up the self-hate and move on seems equally as important as the repeating of Locke’s suicide note, especially since moving on takes, wait for it, faith in the idea that it can get better and the whatever.
And since we’re really getting into it, how does Jack’s proclamation that “What happened, happened” and “Nothing is irreversible” go hand in hand? I would argue that you reverse things not through the mistaken idea that they had last season in the sense that you prevent it from ever occurring, but rather through admitting it happened and working through the results of it.
It will be interesting to see if this sort of philosophy vomits forth in the last three episodes or so, since we still don’t know how the pocket dimension was created, or of course, what the fuck the ultimate fate of everyone will be.
And man, things are getting thick. Finally. Team Dicky is missing. Hurley has new dead playmates, Kate is shot (yes!), Sawyer is choking on H20, and the Devil seems a bit pissed off.
I’m stoked.