[Remember That Time On LOST is a daily post running the entire month up until the season premiere of LOST on February 2nd. I’m going to just pick something awesome, noteworthy, or ludicrous about LOST when I wake up that morning, and hopefully get you geeks talking about it with me.]

Yeah, I said it. Mr. Eko was fucking dumb. I ain’t got no love for the guy. Every day, I try and think of something to write, and everyday Pepsibones goes “Write about Mr. Eko! Write about Mr. Eko!” Well, let me tell you something. Fuck Mr. Eko.

Fuck.

Mr.

Eko.

The entire tail section of the plane is pretty fucking boring and forgettable. And even if they were all fired from the show for fornicating with barnyard animals and drinking while driving and the whatnot, I’m glad they’re gone. As my friend Crackbaby used to say, “Good riddance to bad rubbish.”

Why does Mr. Eko suck so much? Well, for starters, the dude’s character is a smorgsborg of other tropes that are already working throughout the show. He comes off uninspired to me, and all of his themes were already being done better through other characters. It’s as if the writers realized during some brainstorming session, holy shit, we already have all of this guy’s storylines covered! What the fuck is this guy doing on the Island? Yeah, he’s got a huge stick or something! But I mean, come on!

It was only in death that Mr. Eko served any sort of awesomeness, because his unrepentant ass let us see the Smoke Monster gobble someone up. Or whatever the hell it did to him.

Derivative #1 – Man of Faith

So get this, there’s a guy on his Island who isn’t proud of his past. And he’s also a man of faith. Yeah, doesn’t that pretty much sum up everyone on the fucking Island? And while Mr. Eko turns towards blind silly faith towards building a church, he has the same sort of blind passion towards the immaterial that really just makes me say “He’s like Locke except different and not cool.”

Eko’s righteous derivativeness is compounded when he replaces Locke as the guy who sits all day and slaps numbers onto a keyboard down in the Hatch. So while Locke has better things to do like channel the Island and kill himself so deities can betray one another, Eko picks up where he left off.

And I mean, how many faith versus faith storylines do we need going on here? Jack versus Locke, faith versus science. And then Eko comes flying into the ring like Mick Foley with a steel chair of blind faith and then Locke and him throw down? Science versus faith versus faith versus Cactus Jack!

Yeah, it’s no wonder that they killed this guy off.

It’s like he’s getting from the garbage pail of other characters.

Derivative #2 – Foreign Guy With Military / Mercenary Past

Oh wait! Stop me if you’ve heard this one! There’s this foreign guy, and he used to kill people as part of a questionable company. Wait, you’re thinking of Sayid, right! Wrong! It’s fucking Mr. Eko, who used to be a warlord. Sorry guys, this doesn’t impress me. You already played out the Foreign Guy Who Shot People card for me when you introduced Sayid as a member of the Iraqi army. And now we have this other guy running around, and you’re like, oh hey, he used to shoot people!

And push drugs or indoctrinate kids into child militaries.

Derivative #3 – Dumb Ass Who Gets Eaten by Smokey

This is my favorite role that Eko performs. After running around as a Man of Faith like Locke, and after being a member of a foreign military organization like Sayid, he gets to be another dumb ass that gets owned by Smokey. And to be fair, Eko even had his chance to save his own life. But instead of dealing with the fact that he was a drug-pushing piece of shit that got his brother killed, Eko then gets munched upon by Smokey. Listen dude, you’re going to be judged by the Island, and like all the other douchebags who refuse to face their sins, you failed the test.

Au revoir!

Derivative #4 – Specter of Dead Oceanic 815 Member Who Visits Hurley

Even in death, Eko’s unoriginal, boring ass is derivative as fuck. Like Ana Lucia and Charlie, Hurley sees Mr. Eko. And apparently they place chess. I don’t know why they didn’t play wiffle ball with an ethereal form of his dumb Jesus Stick, but whatever. The dude sucks, why would they do anything cool.

Mr. Eko was a dumb thug who carried around a Jesus Stick, got eaten by the Smoke Monster, and got little kids and his brother killed. I don’t miss him one god damn bit, and if you do, I’m hoping this Ode to his Craptastic Character has sated your desire to see him memorialized in internet file.

[Remember That Time On LOST is a daily post running the entire month up until the season premiere of LOST on February 2nd. I’m going to just pick something awesome, noteworthy, or ludicrous about LOST when I wake up that morning, and hopefully get you geeks talking about it with me.]

You the only thing that’s cooler than accompanying the Fellowship to the fires of Mount Doom to destroy the One Ring? Being a junkie. Wait, that sounded way cooler in my head. In the early days of LOST before madness, they could afford to spend episodes talking about junkie hobbits that desperately needed to get their latest hit of heroin. They were simpler days. And I’m sure I miss them for about fourteen seconds before I remember how much I want to bang Daniel Faraday, and spin crazy wheels of time.

Charlie’s initial storyline where he totally went head to head with his drug addiction is something I would interpret as one of those obvious stranded-on-an-island tropes. You have the pregnant lady, the fat guy, and the druggie. It seems a bit paint by numbers, but I found it interesting nonetheless. The writers wanted to have a character wrestle with an addiction that was going to have to come to an end, because he was stuck on an Island in the middle of nowhere. And while I don’t even know what heroin is, or how you make it, I assume that it isn’t made on forbidden Islands.

I could be completely wrong.

It’s such an obvious storyline, but it was appealing back at the beginning of the show. At some point, the show was very interested in examining the effects of being stranded on an Island through a variety of archetypes. And the druggie who is being plunged into recovery through sheer lack of choice was something I found engaging. It was the spiral into the desperation that was great; to see the mind of an addict swirling with anxiety at the incessant need.

As a caffeine addict, I can tell you that if I crash landed on an Island, and there were no twelve packs of something caffeinated around, I would begin to lose my fucking mind. I would be hacking down trees as I ran through the dense vegetation searching for a hatch, Dharma cave or something. Watching LOST has me convinced that should I ever find myself plummeting to my death on an airplane, I’m probably just being summoned by Jacob anyways, and it’s all good.

Charlie’s a respectable, if not implausible character to me, because he gives up the heroin on his own. Locke, who not only has super hunting skills, also appears to have a sonar for crashed planes herding massive amounts of heroin. And when Charlie asks him a third time to hook him up with the smack or whatever, Locke obliges. At that moment, Charlie the junkie hobbit is at a crossroads, and somehow manages to convince himself to toss the heroin into the flames.

Are you kidding me?

If I ever was given the choice between throwing a can of delicious Diet Mountain Dew into the flames, or drinking it, I’d be burping Dewy goodness before you even had time to deliberate over whether I was going to take it or not. The fact that Meriadoc wasn’t pushing through the flames for one last hit is pretty damn impressive.

But again, it’s like, fiction and stuff.

What is particularly impressive is that the hobbit passes this crucible twice. When Charlie comes across the Jesus Heroin towards the end of Season Two, he once again flings that shit into the seas and out of his yearning veins and gums. It’s pretty impressive, especially for a character on this show.

Most of the assholes on LOST are perpetually perpetuating their own misery. They continue to flail and bring the shitstorm that is their lives onto themselves. But Charlie, the heroin addicted hobbit, somehow defeats the urge to rock out junkie style twice. It’s a remarkable feat, and the fact that he dies anyways makes me wonder what is being said.

I always operate under the idea, perhaps incorrectly, that the Island punishes those who fail to correct their ways. But if a character like Charlie can surmount something like this, and he dies anyways, the question becomes, why?

Perhaps Charlie’s death isn’t a punishment, but rather he casts himself in sacrifice. We know that he died after Desmond told him that he saw him dying over and over. So there is a sense that he had finally accepted his fate. But maybe Charlie is a token that shows that while death is a certainty, how you carry yourself up until and at your death, may define how you are as a person.

I mean, the guy was going to die. But he was never had to sacrifice himself. Sure, maybe it seems easier because he knew he was going to be sneezing worms sooner or later, but aren’t we all? Let me tell you what, Imma be sitting on my futon playing video games until my heart stops, ain’t no nobility in me. So a character that is willing to lose their live in an effort to save his peeps? Sort of commendable. For a junkie hobbit.

[Remember That Time On LOST is a daily post running the entire month up until the season premiere of LOST on February 2nd. I’m going to just pick something awesome, noteworthy, or ludicrous about LOST when I wake up that morning, and hopefully get you geeks talking about it with me.]

When we first met the Others, they came off like a pack of child-stealing pederasts. Their beards were fruitful, and filled with childrens’ screams and the echoes of a dungeon’s walls. At least, that’s what I imagined. I mean, all they seemed to want was Claire’s kid, and Walt. How the hell else am I supposed to interpret that? I made sense with the sort of preconcieved notions the viewer holds about the Island. It appears to be largely uninhabited, or scourged by the advancements of modern man. Anyone who would be on the Island would have to be a pack of savages.

I mean, what is man without a twenty-gallon drum of pretzel sticks, and a thirty-nine liter bottle of Diet Mountain Dew? A fucking savage!

So when Tom Friendly rolls up crackin’ about needing Walt, and the dude looks filthy and has a giant beard, it made sense to me. Typical, non-colonized world. Over time though, I began to realize that the Others were something scarier than a pack of homeless child molesters, and that’s saying something. They were a well-organized, modernized peoples whose agenda was even more murky and unfathomable than kidnapping little kids.

Things started getting really bananas at the end of Season Two. The bearded guy who seemed like he just wanted to snag kids to diddle rips off his beard after The Chick Who Breaks Up Every Good Relationship tells him that she knows it’s fake. The Slut Who Probably Made Out With the Smoke Monster calls the guy out after realizing that the shitty beard she found in some Dharma birthing-baby-stealing center belonged to the same creepy guy. For some reason the dude instantly complies, and tears it off. I imagine in the real world of Secret Island Cults and Gangs, this breaks all sorts of protocol. I mean, if someone admitted to lies every time someone hurled a blind guess their way, nothing would stand up for very long.

Then a newly freed Ben rolls up to our boy Mr. Friendly and is all “Where is your beard?”, making it pretty clear that they only wore the shitty ragged clothes and fake beards in an effort to confound the already ridiculously confused survivors of Oceanic 815. I mean, weren’t they already confused enough? They’re on an Island with Smoke Monsters, Mysterious Distress Calls, and glowing Hatches. If you guys couldn’t divide and conquer them amidst all that, you’re riding the fail boat.

And this is when things begin to get complicated. At the time, you begin to wonder, wait, are Dharma and the Others really the same entity? Or are they separate peoples, on the same Island? Huh? What the fuck?

And then comes the intro to Season Three. The opening starts off mundane enough. It’s a bunch of people palling around in some typical suburban neighborhood. You know, typical happy bullshit. Everything is modern, comfy, gorgeous. A bunch of douchebags sit around and debate the merits of a Carrie by Stephen King. Some asshole named Adam rails against the book, saying it lacks metaphor and whatever. And then you get to meet this big breasted, intelligent chick who is pissed off at his dissin’ some Mr. King flavor. And as she’s spouting off “Here I am thinking that free will still exists on…” there’s a rumbling.

Props to them for both working in Stephen King, and the obviousness theme of free will from the show into the first two minutes of the season.

I don’t remember if I realized that they were on the Island at the time. I probably should have, since the writers used the same gimmick at the beginning of Season Two. They show you something that absolutely, positively, cannot be happening on the Island. And then, oh shit! They’re on the fucking Island!

The merry band of suburbanites run outside and look up at the sky, and holy shit, there she is. The exploding, rupturing steel eagle that dragged everyone into the heart of the Island in the first place. There’s madness, and then Ben comes out, and he starts addressing everyone. Ben, whose name we still don’t know, tells Ethan and Goodwin to each address one of the crash sites. And at that moment, I began to barf with excitement.

What the fuck is a neighborhood doing in the middle of an Island, in the middle of nowhere? The Others weren’t a bunch of monkeymen running around demanding children! They were a bunch of suburban pedophiles! Or something! Who the fuck knows.

It’s amazing, since we still don’t know who the others are. I mean, they work for the Island. Maybe. Or something. And they’ve been here for a long time. Maybe. And they are Jacob’s pals. Supposedly.

What we do know is that they’ve managed to defeat the initial idea of people inhabiting the Island. Instead of savages, or ruffians, they’re living out a quiet, mundane lifestyle. They’re comfortable in the same way that we’re all comfortable. Vomiting up nonsense at book clubs, repairing cars, populating our lives with the white noise of existence.

That is, until Oceanic 815 plummets to a thud, seemingly at Jacob’s behest. A boat, a plane, dude brings people here it seems. And it shatters the lives of the Others, who seem content to engage in the same sort of life you’d expect from any middle class neighborhood.

Who are the Others? Who fucking knows! But we do know they like themselves books, and modern appliances, just like the rest of us.

[Remember That Time On LOST is a daily post running the entire month up until the season premiere of LOST on February 2nd. I’m going to just pick something awesome, noteworthy, or ludicrous about LOST when I wake up that morning, and hopefully get you geeks talking about it with me.]

For awhile there was a mystery (go figure!) surrounding the funeral of one of the Oceanic 815 who managed to make it back to shore. For some reason, everyone referred to said corpse as “That guy” or “Him“, playing the pronoun game. Clever. And though the writers toyed around with the dead dude’s identity for awhile, when they dropped the name Jeremy Bentham, it became apparent to me who it was that was currently sucking non-wind. It was our pal, He Who Can Walk Again, the monster or the Island, tamer of Smokey The Monster Bandit, champion of faith, John Locke.

John Locke unto himself is a reference to the famous empiricist of the name name from way back in the day when dinosaurs roamed England and witches used magic to conjure rifles and other chicanery. That a man of faith was named after an omega lad of reason and empirical evidence is totally, like, ironic. But then they gave him the name of another real philosopher, that ofJeremy Bentham, and all of a sudden, dudebro had a named that fit him like a glove.

This is the real philosopher Jeremy Bentham. Dead and stuffed, and on display. I know I’m full of shit usually, but I’m not fucking with you:

Via Wikipedia:

As requested in his will, Bentham’s body was dissected as part of a public anatomy lecture. Afterward, the skeleton and head were preserved and stored in a wooden cabinet called the “Auto-icon”, with the skeleton stuffed out with hay and dressed in Bentham’s clothes. Originally kept by his disciple Thomas Southwood Smith,^[13] it was acquired by University College London in 1850. It is normally kept on public display at the end of the South Cloisters in the main building of the college, but for the 100th and 150th anniversaries of the college, it was brought to the meeting of the College Council, where it was listed as “present but not voting”.

The Auto-icon has a wax head, as Bentham’s head was badly damaged in the preservation process. The real head was displayed in the same case for many years, but became the target of repeated student pranks, including being stolen on more than one occasion. It is now locked away securely.

Can I get “Stranger Than Fiction” for $500, Alex?

I know of Jeremy Bentham because I’m a philosophy nerd who spent way too much time in college taking classes that had absolutely nothing to do with my degree. As I waltzed around campus for thirty-five years I ran across Bentham in Social Ethics, Modern Philosophy, and Medical Ethics.

Like I said, I’m a nerd.

Bentham was a utilitarian, a group of intellectual swaggernauts who operated under the belief that mortality was defined but whatever benefited the greater good the most. This is a super watered down, super base, utterly awful description of the philosophy. I promise. But it gets the point across. It’s the same idea that empowered Jack Bauer to shoot a dude in the face if it will stop a nuclear blast from wiping out the Eastern Seaboard. Again, super stripped down. Cut me some slack. I’m writing pop-culture slop, not teaching you philosophy. You unlearned fucks.

John Locke has always operated under some version of utilitarianism that places everything at the mercy of whether or not it benefits the Island. The Island is his equivalent of ‘the people’, and the dude will slice you, cut you, betray you, smash your shit, if he thinks it’ll help prevent the Island from being besieged by some sort of serious shit.

In a Season One episode called The Greater Good (GET IT?!), Locke thrashes the shit out of Sayid’s head in order to protect the group. Later on, the dude throws a knife through Naomi because he believed she and the rest of her posse from the freighter posed a threat to his little patch of paradise on the Island. And then? Then the dude, knowing he must die to save the Island, undertakes the quest of trying to bring Oceanic 815 back to the Island. The dude is totally in love with the Island. If the Island were a chick – and who knows, maybe it is – he would ask her to go steady.

The dude is straight up Jeremy Bentham rockin’ out on the Island stylee. He’ll do whatever it takes to save her, even if it means hanging his own ass. ‘Course, he never gets to pull off that wicked feat, because Ben chokes him out and all, but seriously, he would have.

Dude is ballin’.

Still though, the reveal was pretty awesome at the end of Season Four. I had the idea that it was going to be him, rocking the moniker Jeremy Bentham, but it didn’t do anything to reveal why he was dead, or if someone had killed him, or the what not. You have to appreciate someone as dedicated to preserving the greater good, even if it means sacrificing yourself. If Jack’s Dead Dad told me that I had to save the Island, I would have told him to kiss my ass, and that he could find me eating cheetos in the Hatch with Hurley.

[Remember That Time On LOST is a daily post running the entire month up until the season premiere of LOST on February 2nd. I’m going to just pick something awesome, noteworthy, or ludicrous about LOST when I wake up that morning, and hopefully get you geeks talking about it with me.]

LOST didn’t jump the shark. Lost jumped the fucking Island.

Do you remember where you were when Ben jumped the Island? Do you remember when you were? I sure do. I was sitting in a pile of my own disbelieving fluids on my futon. It was the moment where LOST went from sort-of-crazy, to absolutely insane. It went from the guy who used to come into the Shell station I worked at who always ordered forty-two cents of gas, to the other guy at Shell who used to pick cigarettes out of the outdoor ashtrays and mumble to himself while drooling. Both crazy, but different shades for sure.

LOST had always hinted at time-travel. You know, played with the penis tip of insanity. A little flick here, a little rub there. But it was just toying with the concept. And I mean, can you really blame them? The unwashed masses who vomit up onto themselves while watching Everybody Likes Three And a Half Pedophiles Named Raymond aren’t much for time traveling, are they? They like jokes where the unfunny guy makes a comment that casts him as a buffoon to his wife, who just happens to be way too good looking for such an inept douche.

Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse, who shall be known as The Geeks With Balls of Enormity introduced time travel into a big budget show on a major network. Maybe my generation aren’t just a bunch of people spray-tanned orange and strung out on pills! Maybe they’re a people spray-tanned orange, strung out on pills, and down with some serious mind-intercoursing!

The moment itself is epic. It is so wonderfully apparent that the writers of LOST can’t do anything simple. There’s no magic lever that Ben pulls to jump the Island. There’s no single red button. No, Ben descends into an ancient cavern, cast in frost, and yanks on a wheel. It’s all so absurd and wonderful and it makes me gleeful that they’ve been able to tell this story, despite the fact that I have absolutely no idea what the Island is, why a donkey wheel can shift bodies of land, or why this wheel is in the heart of the Island, which just so happens to be bound in ice and snow.

And so Ben shifts the Island, and in doing so unbounds the show from yet another set of rules. Forwards, backwards, even perhaps laterally, the show can move in time. The show wipes its ass with past conventions of narrative and has sort of just made it up as it goes along. They take hypertextuality to a new level.

At first the show moved backwards from the present to the character’s past lives. Then it moves from the present, to the past, and also to the future. And when Ben moves the Island, dislodging the weird wheel that looks likes its from a Zelda game, the show moves in well, any direction. The present is an illusion, cast upon our lives by our mortal brains! In the next season, the present becomes a variety of moments, differing from character to character. And even then, the ‘present’ for someone can be all totally like 2004, then 1952, then 1976! Or something! Holy shit! Free your mind from common ideas of linearity!

Or be like me, and get nosebleeds and dance in the blood of your confusion! MUWHAHAHAHAHA.

The Island jumps and takes with it the remnants of narrative structure holding it in. Or maybe. I don’t know. As a literature major, I sort of want to argue with myself about this. I mean, clearly there is a structure, it is just not a linear one. Or maybe it’s a linear one, but perhaps that straight line appears non-linear, because of the times it weaves through. Or is non-linearity just an illusion, and…Alright, I just had the hugest moment of deja vu typing this, and I’m wondering if the donkey wheel is off its fucking axis.

But poof! The Island disappears! And it suffers a fate onto the writing of the show other than really taking away any constraints for what the writers can do. It also allows the Island to jump around in time, showing characters as we have never seen them, as well as giving us glimpses into what the Island looked like before. We get to see Taweret in her entirety, we get to see Alpert looking all gorgeous and brooding in the past. Never aging. Eternally smoldering with immortal importance and knowledge.

Anyways.

And so the Island moves in time-space-something, I don’t know I’m not a physicist, but Ben also jumps onto the Tunisia desert. And apparently, that jump gifts him with powers of kicking ass. I mean, I love Ben, but all of a sudden he’s in the desert and now he’s not a fucking dweeb anymore? Ben go karate-chop-chop! Who the hell knows, maybe they’re in the fucking Matrix. It was awesome.

Ben jumps the Island, plunges the story into more righteous absurdity, and explodes the expectations and conventions the show seemed to be working under. One of those pants-filling moments, of which this show is filled with many.

Ten days.

[Remember That Time On LOST is a daily post running the entire month up until the season premiere of LOST on February 2nd. I’m going to just pick something awesome, noteworthy, or ludicrous about LOST when I wake up that morning, and hopefully get you geeks talking about it with me.]

Isn’t he dreamy?

[Remember That Time On LOST is a daily post running the entire month up until the season premiere of LOST on February 2nd. I’m going to just pick something awesome, noteworthy, or ludicrous about LOST when I wake up that morning, and hopefully get you geeks talking about it with me.]

LOST is a perpetually unfolding storyline, filled with constantly shifting lanes of purpose and never-ending chasms of mystery. Yeah, suck on that fucking epic sentence! Oh my god! There are certain moments when the entire show tilts on its axis, veering towards something you never fucking saw coming. And you have to give it up to the writers for continuously having the forceful and ripened genitalia to introduce these paradigm shifts into the show even deep into its run. And don’t pretend you didn’t shit your pants the first time you heard the phrase,

What lies in the shadow of the statue?

The first time you hear it, the dude we know know as Bram, but who for months I could only remember as The Chubby Guy Who Asked That Question, has shoved Miles into his van. Have you ever wanted to get shoved into a van by a bunch of cloak-and-dagger motherfuckers? I have. If you get shoved into a moving van while guys scream shit like “C’MON, C’MON GO-GO-GO!”, you’re probably a bad ass.

So Miles does what anyone would do in that case, he’s really fucking confused, and has no idea what they’re talking about. Chubby Guy turns down Miles’ request for mad money-money, and tells him he’s playing for the wrong team. They then kick Miles out and speed off. Because that’s the second part of getting thrown into a speeding van, you’re then shoved out and left to wonder what the fuck is going on.

And once again, I’m like, what the fuck is going on with this show! All of a sudden there are clandestine teams and shit? Who is the Chubby Guy rolling with? And what the fuck is laying in the shadow of the statue? I mean, the statue itself was pretty obvious. It was Taweret, that enormous fucking thing formerly known as The Four Toed Statue after it was reduced to rubble.

But Jesus Christ, once the question is asked, the show tumbles further down the rabbit hole. Or perhaps closer to its true premise, of which I still have no god damn idea. What lies in the shadow of the statue, and what team does Bram consider himself to be working for? There’s countless factions in the show, be it Jacob versus Facob, Locke versus Ben, Locke versus Jack, Charlie versus Heroin, Ben versus Widmore.

If Miles was working for Widmore, and Widmore is against Ben, does that mean that Bram is allied with Ben? Or does it go beyond that, and it deals with Jacob and Facob, and it has been Facob pulling both Widmore and Ben’s strings? I think I’m going to vomit confusion onto the ground and then dance in it.

Just how far does this rabbit hole plummet? Anyone?

My guess? Bram and Ilana and their b-boy posse are rolling with Jacob. Consider this. Ilana recognizes Jacob when he comes to visit her when she’s all blown up and shit. Jacob straight chills in the foot of the statue. And Richard Alpert, who has forever been known as Jacob’s right-hand man is the only man to answer Ilana’s question correctly.

What lies in the shadow of the statue?

Ille qui nos omnes servabit.

Lostpedia provides “He who will protect/save us all” as the translation, but also goes on to elaborate:

Via Lostpedia:

More accurate translations might be either, “That man who will save us all,” or, “That which will save us all,” if the noun in question is of the masculine gender. The Latin word ille does not necessarily refer to a person.

Alright, so I suppose it’s safe to assume that it is in reference to Jacob. But do you think that answers anything? Of course not. What is Jacob going to save them from? Or who is Jacob going to save them from? And are Jacob’s intentions truly pure, or are they merely aligned with him and buy into his propaganda. Who the fuck knows!

But once the whole “What lies in the shadow of the statue” bullshit is introduced, the game got a lot more complex. We’ve gone from a plane crash to two warring deities? Holy good god this is like Spanish Fly for nerds. Just thinking about it makes me gooey in all the wrong (right) areas.

[Remember That Time On LOST is a daily post running the entire month up until the season premiere of LOST on February 2nd. I’m going to just pick something awesome, noteworthy, or ludicrous about LOST when I wake up that morning, and hopefully get you geeks talking about it with me.]

Desmond Hume getting unstuck in time was one of those episodes of LOST that left you absolutely rocked. It was pure undiluted win. It tugged on your heart strings, it made your mind melt with time traveling insanity, and it features Daniel Faraday rocking out with the mullet to end all mullets.

I remember watching Desmond catapult through time with the idea that they were going to kill off my boy Mr. Hume. Instead, the dude seems to be an essential linchpin in the entire series. He’s a Scottish time-bandit stud, who just so happens to have surfed the slipstream of time and space before being saved by love. Awwww, how fucking cute! No seriously, I shouldn’t act hard. When he finally dials up Penny at the end of the episode, I was pretending to sneeze a lot, because I was a weepy mess.

Penny! Oh Penny!

Desmond gets rocked on his ass when Locke and the Band of Merry Assholes decide to stop punching the numbers into their sweet ass 1982 Apple II or something. The resultant EMP alters him in some way and his consciousness allows him to be hurtled back and forth through points in time in his own life. Sounds awesome, right? I mean, who hasn’t wanted to go back and remember that first awkward kiss, or your first wet dream, or the horrible acne you had, or being dumped by the girl you loved.

Wait a second, fuck traveling through time.

Desmond’s ability to travel through time makes him uniquely equipped for the bullshit that’s going on with the Island. I mean, we have a mass of land that is jumping from point to point in time, just like our boy Desmond. And there’s been more than one reference to him being special. When the Island gets unstuck in time and everyone is jumping around and partying with Mayans and shit, Faraday goes to Desmond and is like, yo bro, you have to remember this shit: if you escape the Island, go find my Mom. She’s going to help you out, even though she shoots my beautiful, algorithm-computing ass before I’m even born.

Why is it up to Desmond? Per Faraday, the rules don’t apply to Desmond.

Whatever the fuck that means.

Desmond seems to be the guy most equipped to sort shit out.   He seems to cage all of his memories in his dome-piece regardless of the where he is in time. I always try and figure this out, usually loudly and during an episode, and it goes something like this:

Wait, so if Faraday told him in the past…why wouldn’t he remember now? Or does he remember now? And wait, if Faraday visits him in 2001 on the Island, wouldn’t he recognize him in present day? Wait, I think I have a nosebleed and uh, wait, I’m so confused.

And then my friend Dave tells me that it isn’t going to make sense outside of the show, and I need to relax. This usually holds me over to the next commercial break, and then I’m back at it, raving wildly.

But I mean, if someone can alter the course of events, wouldn’t it be Desmond? Faraday says that there are Variables, and those variables are people. If we take it to be more than a throwaway existential moment on the show, it means that someone on the Island has the ability to prevent, or change, or fix something.

Yeah, I have no fucking idea.

But maybe Faraday The Gorgeous Physicist and Desmond the Scottish Wundersexkind can team up to fix reality, right? Let’s say the hydrogen bomb went off, and instead of fixing everything, it just wiped their dumb asses out.

This is what I think happened. As I said, they’re the source of their own misery. They wipe themselves out, and they’re condemned to dying.

Wouldn’t it be within Desmond’s power, during the past, to prevent Oceanic 815 from crashing in the first place? Or the second place? Can’t a man, unstuck in time, prevent the whole clusterfuck from happening? Or at the least altering it in some way? I’m getting that nosebleed again. Good thing I have Diet Mountain Dew as my constant. Stick a sock in my nose and let’s continue on here.

So basically, I’ve said the following: Desmond is awesome, because he has pecs of steel, a sweet accent, and he’s unstuck in time. His total unstuckness is totally important, I just don’t know why. And Daniel Faraday with a mullet makes my groin seethe with sexual inspiration.

[Remember That Time On LOST is a daily post running the entire month up until the season premiere of LOST on February 2nd. I’m going to just pick something awesome, noteworthy, or ludicrous about LOST when I wake up that morning, and hopefully get you geeks talking about it with me.]

[I tried to do a solid to all of those who haven’t seen LOST yet in my title today. As an aside: Watch LOST, you schmucks.]

When Michael shot Ana Lucia, I could literally feel my asshole unclenching and fluids beginning to leak out. When he then spun around and shot Libby, my mouth opened and I couldn’t believe what had just happened. It was one of those moments when you praise writers for having serious balls. And I also resented them for significantly bumming me out. Hugo’s date with Libby was interrupted by gunshot wounds, and as the blood spilled out and the episode ends, you’re left there trying to comprehend what the fuck just happened.

The entire episode is excellent, and it is wrapped around the push and pull of relationships between children and their parents. There are several threads running through the episode with this theme. We have Christian Shephard, running from his confrontation with Jack. We have Ana Lucia, deserting her mother, incapable of facing a parent and the shame they have for letting them down. And we have Michael, who in a desperate move to save his son sells his soul to the devil. Or at least Benjamin Linus, who seems close enough to El Diablo for me.

At the forefront of this episode is Ana Lucia and Christian Shephard, and their inability to deal with their mother and son respectively. While Lucia has fled her mother from guilt, Shephard’s storyline is an inversion, and he can’t deal with the shame he feels for firing Jack, despite his son’s correct condemnation of his lifestyle. And what is most telling is that both of these characters are ultimately condemned to death for their inability to change their ways.

We got Christian Shephard straight chillin’ in Australia, trying to see his daughter, who just so happens to be Claire. Having fled both sobriety and his family out of guilt, he seems to want to make it up through a proxy, his illegitimate daughter. Who may or may not be carrying some sort of Satan-spawn to term. The dude rolls up in the middle of the night, banging on the door completely shit-faced. I’m not sure what continent this is a good tactic on, but just like in North America, the dude gets shoved out the door by Claire’s aggravated mother.

What I’m wondering is, where was the koala bear? Aren’t they standard protocol for individual protection?

Shephard takes this shit hard like woah, and eventually spirals into his drinking binge that will kill him. There’s a moment, a CROSSROADS if you will, where he could have saved himself. Lucia is all like, Christian, don’t go into that bar and get hammered again. You’re just hiding from your troubles and you smell like piss and vodka. And instead of confronting his baggage, he turns to her and comments, I SAY TO THEE NAY. Except he didn’t say that, because he isn’t Thor. Unfortunately.

Actually, who the fuck knows, this is LOST.

Then there’s Ana Lucia. She was suffering some serious shit over the fact that she totally PEW PEW‘D some guy who tried to kill her when she was a cop. Dude was rigor mortis, and instead of dealing with the guilt she had over her Mom knowing she totally ventilated a guy with her bullets, she fled. Physically and emotionally. Totally deep, man. She takes off to Australia with her buddy Christian “I’ll Be Walking As A Ghost Soon” Shephard.

You think Ana Lucia is going to do a solid, and right her ways. I mean, she sees what a clusterfuck Christian is for not dealing with his problems. She’s getting ready to return to LA with him, save for the fact that he’s encased in pine. So she calls up Moms Lucia and is like “Yo, I fucked up, let’s be friends again and watch The Fast and the Furious”, and her Mom is like “Solid, let’s do it. I’ll bring the popcorn, extra butter, I know. Love you!, ttyl.”

But then! Then the fucking plane crashes. You knew that already.

Ana fucks up and is sentenced to death when she fails to move beyond her desire for vengence. You think she’s done gone and been good when she can’t bring herself to kill Benjamin. I was like, hey personal growth! Well played, girl. Did I mention I think you’re so sexy with your curly hair? And I dig how strong you are and how you can probably take me in a fight, pin me down, and then take advantage of me.

But instead, she gives the gun to Michael. And we know how it goes from there! Blam, blam! Everyone thinks you died because you got a DUI in real life Ana Lucia, but at least your death fits thematically! Blam, blam! Ana Lucia’s death stems from her own ability to move past her faults. Which is a decent message, but it means I’m totally fucked. I can’t stop swearing, passing gas in public, and overeating. I wonder what sort of death I’ll have on LOST.

It’s interesting though, since Ana Lucia does resolve her parental issues. If the plane had just landed, maybe she wouldn’t have regressed into a vengeful chick. Who knows.

And then there’s Michael. Unlike Christian who can’t face his son, and Ana who can’t face her Mom, dude just wants his fucking kid back. Snagged by the Others, who appear to be pederasts or harvesters of uber-children like Walt, he is on a one-man machine to get Walt back. Maybe he’s trying to make up for the fact that he’s been an absentee Dad and shit. Or maybe he saw Taken – don’t give me that it wasn’t out yet, we’re time-traveling hurr on the Island – and was really inspired by Qui-Gon’s performance. Cutting a deal with the Devil, he blows away Ana Lucia, after her gluttony for vengeance gifts him the gun, and releases good ole Benjamin from captivity.

If Christian and Ana could be condemned for fleeing from their problems, Michael seems to be battering into them with a head full of steam, fuck the consequences. I’d call the killing in cold blood, but Pepsibones disagrees, and we had a conversation that went something like this:

Me: I’m Michael, blam blam! I kill you in cold blood

Bones: It wasn’t cold blood

Me: Sure it was, he killed her

Bones: But it wasn’t in cold blood, he had a reason

Me: It was cold blood!

Bones: What’s “in cold blood”?

Me: Whatever he did! So there!

Bones: No, no, no

Me: Christ, you’re going to kill me in cold blood, and be like, “I did it for your Uncanny X-Men collection”

Cold blood or not, it was jaw-dropping, and it finished an episode which explored the relationships between children and their parents, and once again called on the LOST coda of people serving their punishment for an inability to face and conquer their own flaws.

[Remember That Time On LOST is a daily post running the entire month up until the season premiere of LOST on February 2nd. I’m going to just pick something awesome, noteworthy, or ludicrous about LOST when I wake up that morning, and hopefully get you geeks talking about it with me.]

Sometimes there are just random cool things on LOST that don’t bare any hyper-analysis. Or so you think. Take for example the case of Sawyer getting shit-faced in a bar with Jack’s Dad, Christian. At first blush, it doesn’t seem like anything more than a cool coincidence. But if you talk to people like my insane, brilliant, socially-disruptive brother Pepsibones, their chance connection is one of the focal points of the show.

Sawyer and Christian are just straight-chillin’ in a bar in Australia. Christian would later go on to be impersonated by the Smoke Monster, or at least walk around as a corpse, depending on your perspective. Sawyer ends up being a lover, a helicopter-diver, the head of Dharma security and more. But for that moment, they are none the wiser of their fates.

The two of them talk about a variety of things, from the Red Sox never winning the World Series, to Jack. And little did either of them know that they were going to be on Oceanic 815 together, one of them a corpse, the other one a sexy brooding dude bent on killing the man who wronged his family. It’s an enormous confluence of coincidences. Christian is there in Sydney, because his daughter is Claire, who will also be on the plane. Sawyer talks about Jack, and will end up being both his friend and adversary on the Island.

What are the chances?

Pepsibones believes that one of the themes running through LOST is the concept of interconnectedness. The theory that everything is interwoven, and it is the links between all that is connected that makes it interesting. I could be wrong. I think I was halfway to the bathroom and hopped up on six Diet Mountain Dews when I had the conversation with him. I’m sure he was blasting some sort of music and trying to concentrate on grading papers.

Christian and Sawyer drinking in some bar in Sydney is perhaps chance, but it also ties into the tendrils that jump from one character’s fate to another’s throughout the entire show. Everyone is connected through some means, it seems. Sawyer talks to Jack’s dad, but he is also hunting down Locke’s father. Boone is related to Shannon, but he also walks by Sawyer in jail in Australia. Sayid fought in the Iraq war, and so did Kate’s step-father. Kate is friends with one of Sawyer’s would-be cons whose child he also fathered.

It goes on and on and on.

Remember that time on LOST when Sawyer had a drink with Christian Shephard?

In a show whose meaning really hasn’t made itself apparent, it is by sifting through the strands that connect the characters that you can create your own meaning from it. Christian and Sawyer share a drink, Jack and Desmond bump into one another, and Desmond just happens to be the Guy Unstuck In Time, perhaps the answer to everything, the savior of all.

What is LOST all about? It seems up to us, following the strands from one storyline to the next.