[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.]

If LOST started off as some drama dipped in a coat of science fiction, or uh, fantasy, or uh, science fantasy, or whatever you want to call it, the opening of the Hatch began the show’s march down the hall towards something more weird. It was the first time we were introduced fully to one of the beauties of LOST, one of the reasons we’re so addicted to it. It’s called, “The answer to your question is two more questions.” How many times has it happened on this show? Something is finally revealed, but it is merely a garden of forking paths, that leads to more questions. And more questions. It also introduces a good example of LOST writing technique called, “You don’t know that what you’re seeing is sort of a big deal, until like two seconds before it is made obvious.”

This may also be called the “Ian can’t put anything together as quickly as the rest of you”, but whatever.

So, Season One ended with Mr. Locke and Mr. Shephard peering into the exploded dome of the Hatch. You can also recall the groan we all had when we realized we were going to have to wait nine months or some shit to actually see what was down there. That’s okay though, since Lindelof and the rest of the writers had even less time to figure out what they were going to say was down there. Build all your big reveals into the back-end of a season finale/season premiere, guys. It gives you tons of time to figure out just what the fuck you’re going to say.

And then Season Two begins much the same way Season One did. With a good lad’s eyes opening. Except this time, the guy isn’t Jack. It’s uh, some guy. And then there is a typical morning ritual going on. Guy gets up, types something into his old ass computer. Okay, that’s weird, but whatever. And then he works on his fitness a little bit, and that’s cool. Eats a shitty protein drink, also pretty standard. His breakfast is a bit different from mine, since he isn’t eating three cold slices of pizza and a Diet Pepsi, but I’m not going to fault him. He jams out to some music, on a record player.

The impression you’re given is that this is a flashback. Between the old Apple computer, and the record player, you’re like, okay, cool. Flashback, who does it belong to? Eh! And then slowly, like rolling thunder, it breaks upon you. Probably right around the time that you see him open up a cabinet with the Dharma logo, and hear an explosion. You realize, they’re inside the fucking Hatch! What?!

It is the same sort of storytelling that they used at the end of Season Three to show the scenes between Kate and Jack. It was a slow build, and by the time you realize what is going on, you come to understand that they’ve been showing you something mind-blowing, you just didn’t realize it. Again, you don’t realize you’re seeing something that is a big deal, until it’s too late.

When I was watching the episode, I had the feeling that something important was going on, on the screen. I mean it was the first glimpses of a season premiere. But even as he worked out and walked around the Hatch, I had no clue that we were getting a glimpse at the inside. And then when I finally realized it? It blew my god damn mind. One of the best things about LOST has been the fluid concept of what the show is about. I mean, it is about a lot of things; time travel, people’s dramas, an Island, a plane crash, destiny, and others. But back then? Back then it was about a bunch of people on a mysterious Island. And now? Now, I have no idea.

The opening of the Hatch was the first time I was like, “Maybe I have absolutely no idea what the fuck is going on, on this show.” And it has been a feeling that has carried through the subsequent five seasons. I mean, sure, I know a lot of what is occuring, but as Pepsibones asked me a couple of days ago,

Dude, so like…We don’t really know what the show is about..or like, who the true players are, do we? No, we don’t? Okay good, I wasn’t sure.

I mean, now we have people in the shadows of statues, we have possible resurrections, time travel, deities. We have vaguely referenced “good guys” and “bad guys”, of which they haven’t all been revealed. We have absolutely no idea what the Island is, who is belongs to, who or what Jacob is or was, and on and on. And all of this stems from the opening of the Hatch; this idea that there are forces at work they we can’t perceive, and all of our static notions about the show are probably wrong.

The Hatch opening was awesome, and it was the first time when they really started rocking out to the idea of answering a question with two more questions. Or three. Yeah, this is the inside of a hatch. It is a modern, if it were the 1970’s or some shit, apartment. But here, have a handful of other questions. Why is this apartment carved into the middle of the ground, who is this guy, why is he typing commands into a keyboard, how long has he been down there? And you just sit there, and you marvel. You marvel because you know they have you hooked by the squishies, and worst of all, you love it.

It’s a formula us fans have learned to loudly scorn, “Oh yeah, here we go, answering more questions with questions!”, but quietly love. Because we’re addicted, and we need to know.

[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.]

Charlie: You’re insane mate, Superman can fly around the entire planet in the blink of an eye!

Hurley: Dude, if we’re going by a pure foot race, Superman would get dusted by the Flash.

Charlie: Well, why would the MAN OF STEEL, agreed to a sodding foot race?

Hurley: Uh for charity, and Flash would totally win, cause he can like vibrate through walls and stuff

One of my favorite bits of dialogue in all of LOST is when Hurley and Charlie got into a debate over who was faster – the Flash or Superman. It spoke to me in a volume of ways, because I am a geek of the highest rank. Throughout my life, I have engaged in countless arguments over trifling things like this. Who is faster, the Flash or Superman? What’s the coolest X-Man’s power? Do you really think Batman could beat Superman in a fight? You do? Dude, Superman can move so fucking fast, he could punch Batman’s head-off before Batman could even measure a thought. What, you think Batman would win anyways? Oh, that’s true. I suppose Superman always holds back, and that’s what condemns him to losing. But if he wanted to? Yeah dude, he could punch Batman’s head off. He’s fast, really fucking fast.

But?

Not as fast as the Flash. Yeah, I’m with Hurley on this one.

What the fuck does a hobbit know about god damn Barry Allen?

The episode featuring this conversation was written by Brian K. Vaughan. You may known him as the dude behind Y: The Last Man and other comic books. It seems fitting that a guy who wrote comic books would interject some of that nerdery into LOST. I mean, it doesn’t seem out of the realm of something for Hurley to be discussing. The dude was the owner of the issue of JLA that Walt uses his Prepubescent Voodoo on, and he’s also seen reading Mr. Vaughan’s Y in the airport prior to his return to Doom Island.

The dialogue serves two purposes, though. Not only does it reignite the engines of nerdfroth and debate amongst comic book geeks about who is faster – again, it’s the Flash you assholes. Seriously, Superman is fast as fuck, but he can’t leap forward in time or vibrate molecules like Barry or Wally. The real debate is which Flash is fastest. And I’m going to tell you the truth, I have no idea. I’ll leave that question up to other flocks of nerds. But secondly, the dialogue serves as a nice amount of relationship building between Hurley and Charlie.

When Charlie dies at the end of Season Three, no one feels it harder than Hurley. And let me tell you, when Charlie returns at the beginning of Season Four and tells Hurley he has to go back? I was trying to keep from weeping in front of friends and family. It decimated me, like the big over-emotional lug that I am. And it was this type of conversation that really built the friendship between the two of them. You felt that there was an actual palpable loss, not that it was some throwaway tug on your heart strings. Or maybe you did, and I’m just a weepy mess.

Seeing the two of them shoot the shit as they walked through the forest sold me on their friendship. I mean, as I said, that’s what friends do. They talk about stupid shit. They run their mouths and make one another laugh and engage in pointless arguments. The scene opens up with the two of them, already in the middle of the conversation. Amongst all the epic journeys and the WE HAVE TO GO HERE AND SAVE THIS THING AND STUFF, you don’t really get to see the relationships much. Well, outside of flashbacks. And maybe Sawyer and The Promiscuous And Unfit Temporary Caretaker of Aaron boning in polar bear cages. But aside from that, it was nice to see this dialogue. It was great fanservice to the huge portion of the LOST crowd that were geeks like me, and it also helped add to the emotional resonance of Charlie’s death in the forthcoming episodes, and its effect on Hugo.

Don’t know anything about photography — but I know this is a great photo. The image is equal parts sexy, haunting, and just damn cool. In a way, it reminds me of something out of a PT Anderson flick or some shit.

Oh yeah, +5 points for the Clark Kent glasses.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                  [ source ]

[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.]

Do you remember thinking that Walt was some awesome Mind Powers Guy back at the beginning of LOST? Yeah, me too. And now those days, like the days of yore when I didn’t wake up with creaky knees and the shakes from caffeine withdrawals, are gone. There was a time when the kid seemed super special, and figured to be an integral part of the show.

Now? Now he just seems to be around living on the real world, for Locke to go and visit. Like some sort of creepy bald child molester. You ever notice that Locke is playing the part of creepy older guy with a lot of guys? Both Boone and Walt seemed to be courted by Locke, and I don’t blame Michael for being like, dude, stay the fuck away from my kid.

The first time we got to see Walt’s awesome ability to manifest shit when he is pissed was when he conjured up a polar bear. And through the polar bear, LOST conjured up some of the worse CGI I had ever seen. My friend and I were watching it and we both turned to exactly and were like “Really? Wow.”

So let’s see. Walt is all pissed off and getting butthurt over his dumb dad Michael. And then all of a sudden through the forest comes some rampaging polar bear. Michael then does the obvious thing and gives his like eleven year-old kid a knife, which the son uses to stab the living shit out of our artic friend.

The implication at the time was that when Walt was angry, he could conjure up things, apparently from books and shit on his mind. You see, earlier in the episode, dude was reading a Spanish copy of Justice League of America with a polar kicking some ass. And then later in the episode, holy shit, a polar bear! I remember thinking, sweet. This kid has a Laser Brain or some shit, and maybe he’ll lift trees with them. And then Jean Grey and he will fight the Smoke Monster, and maybe the Island is just the Danger Room. I turned out being very, very wrong.

The same sort of creepy shit went down in a flashback in the same episode. Walt was straight chillin’, reading a book about birds. I know, not nearly as exciting as a Spanish copy of JLA, but what can you do. His Mom was probably a dick, and said something like “Don’t read those god damn books with the guys with the capes and the women with the big boobies, they’ll rot your brain!” She ended up dead, so what the fuck does she know! And I turned out fine, too! Sorry Walt’s Mom, fuck you!

Anyways, Walt wants to show his Mom and her boyfriend who was a choad incarnate the book. And they keep ignoring him, preferring to argue with Walt’s dad in front of him, scarring Walt irrevocably. I mean, you stuck this kid with a shitty book, the least you could do is pay attention and be encouraged when he wants to talk to you about it!

Walt, feelin’ the Dark Side of the Force conjures up a sweet ass dead bird on their porch. They hear a righteous thunk, and then go out to investigate.

Oh damn! No wonder Walt’s Mom’s boyfriend was so up in arms! You don’t sign on to take on a Demonic Step-Child! A dead bird all stinking up his porch, probably ruining his property value.

So there we go again, Walt has sweet mind powers! He conjures up both a nasty rotting bird and a sweet ass polar bear when he gets pissed off, though it seems like he doesn’t know how he is doing it, or if he is doing it. So I watch the episode, and I’m stoked. Sweet, some supernatural sci-fi shit! And just to push it home that he’s special, the Others decide to kidnap his ass. Why else would they want some little snot? LASER BRAIN. A bunch of creepy people are vying for the love of little Walter, and who ends up getting it? No one!

Because he damn disappears off the show.

All I ever hear about is how they ended up writing Walt off the show because they knew he was going to hit puberty and grow a ton of inches and get acne. So…why did they ever give him ridiculously sweet mind powers in the first place? And don’t fucking tell me he didn’t have them!

They ended up parlaying the polar bear’s appearance into a sweet idea. I mean, having the bears spin the wheel so when the Island jumps, they’re transported, die, and leave no evidence? Fucking awesome. But clearly they weren’t there in that first episode for that reason. Don’t give me it! I’ll shank you. And then there’s the dead bird. The boy was special, a male Carrie or some shit!

And now? Fare thee well, Walt. He left the Island, but his astral ass has appeared a few times. Including one time when Jin was taking a shit, and Walt was like “Locke!” and Jin got all worried and shit harder, and Walt was like “Fuck, I teleported to the wrong place, my bad. Sorry about that, looking for Locke.” Aside from that though, not much.

Who knows though, with the last season coming and all. Maybe they rebooted time, and Walt will be back with everyone else. I wouldn’t be surprised. That’s the pain in the ass about commenting on a show that you know is just going to blow your mind out your puckered rectum, any predictions or certainties you have, are probably wrong.

[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 guys probably don’t remember Artz, do you? That’s because you’re dicks. No, he’s not gorgeous, even though he has a sweet beard. In fact, he was sort of downright pathetic. In a lovable sort of way, of course. And if you do remember him, it’s probably because he blew himself up with a righteous stick of dynamite. A thundering boom of oblieration, sending chunks of his own dumb ass into the air, landing on everyone around him. Kaboom! A blast of appreciable proportions, that sent that son of a bitch Locke onto his ass.

Artz was just a lonely dude who wanted to come on a sweet adventure with the cool kids of the Island. He was a chemistry teacher at some shitty high school. I bet the kids drew pictures of him in his chemistry class, and they always made those funny odor lines around his armpits and had him saying things like:

You fucking kids, how many times do I have to tell you that salt is NaCl! You’re never going to get anywhere, I’m fat!

Deep down inside though, he seems like a lovable guy who just wanted to have some fun. Hated by his wife, he was probably absolutely stoked to be on the Island.

Whether you remember it or not, Artz served as a conduit for all the complaints from dickheads who can’t suspend disbelief. You know, the guys who were like, what about the other survivors! It is so improbable that they’d just let these eight people run around saving the world while the rest of them hung out with Bernard and like, played grab ass.

It’s great that the Brigade of Dorks and Philosophy Nerds that write LOST decided to address it through Artz. Using our boy Mr. Chemistry Teacher, they threw all the geeks who spend their days talking about implausbility in shows that feature Smoke Monsters a bone and shit. Here, we won’t ignore it, we’ll talk about it. Using a squishy dork to wear the mask of the complaint.

While Jack and That Chick With the Linebacker Shoulders and Locke rummaged around in the Black Rock for dynamite to blow up the Hatch, Artz and Hurley shot the shit. Realizing that they’re both fat, lovable losers, Artz felt a really deep connection with Hugo, though that’s because he didn’t realize Hurley was batshit insane and communicated with dead people. He probably thought that he was just a better placement in the crash away from being in Hugo’s place! You see, there’s only room for one fat unsexy person in a clique, and he thought it was just chance that Hugo got to snag it. But uh, that’s probably also what he thought because he didn’t realize Hugo was part of DESTINY or something. It was during this opining that he launched into his classic dialogue on the whole “situation“.

Hugo was all ignoring him, and probably thinking about pizza-covered spaghetti, when Artz says:

Am I boring you? You know what, I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry I’m not cool enough to be part of your merry little band of adventurers. I know a clique when I see one, I teach high school, pally. You know you people think you’re the only ones on this island doing anything of value. I got news for you, there are 40 other survivors of this plane crash, and we are all people too.

Pretty great. And then he mentions how Kate gets all the sweetest wreckage to build her shelter, and how Jin only catches food for the cool kids, and then he calls Hurley out for being a fat ass and having lost no weight on the Island. Mind you, addressing another complaint of nerdbombers who hyper fixate on pointless details on a show filled with fantasy.

And then? Then they blow him the fuck up! Artz seized his moment in the spotlight, screaming about dynamite breathing, and stuff that I don’t remember, because he was a chemistry teacher. Finally the fat dork’s time to shine. And while he is bragging, ka-pow. Later Artz, it has been real. They blow up the manifestation of all the grief given towards the implausibility of the show. See you later fat griping nerd! It’s pretty stellar, and when it happened I jumped because I’m a little nancy.

What follows is fantastic, though sort of odd. Not one of the Cool Kids gives a flying fuck! It’s the only time in the show when a death is addressed without any sort of seriousness. The dude is reduced to gut-cinders, and the rest of the gang just giggle! Yeah, it is sort of fucked up, but it fits with the guy’s whole premise. A big bloated conglomeration of complaints that the writers don’t care about, that are then addressed, and blown up, as the characters laugh at the character.

Just like, I’m sure the writers laugh at the complaints.

Cool kids, what a pack of dicks.

[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.]

One of the forgotten things about LOST was the really interesting moral dilemma they brought up back in Season One. What moral dilemma, you ask? Well, it’s no other than this: when is it cool to make the sexual intercourse time with your sister? Yeah, I know. It’s a tricky, tricky situation. Boone banged the hell out of his hot sister, Shannon. It all happened off screen, but I’ve read some fan fiction, and while it isn’t exactly canonical, it’s pretty hawt, trust me.

Let’s examine the situation here. Boone’s mom and Shannon’s dad got married when the two will-be-awkward-lovers were just kids. Already, I mean, they aren’t bursting out of the same wombs! And furthermore, they don’t have the same last names! Boone Carlyle, Shannon Rutherford. I mean, you wouldn’t even know they’re quasi-related, just from being introduced to them!

Continuing, there’s also the fact that Shannon’s dad is totally pushing daisies. That’s right people looking for reasons that their behavior as acceptable, Mr. Rutherford is fucking mortis, man.

So they’re not blood-related, and the union that made them even tenuously related has been severed. By death. Never to be rekindled, unless Boone’s mom is a necrophiliac. Which would be pretty interesting, but I doubt that they’re going to delve into that in the finale season since they’ll be busy answering and not answering everything.

LOST is a smart show, man. What an interesting question they pose to the viewer: are you ashamed or completely okay with the burning sensation of love and the terse nature of your underloins as they become engorged with blood when you see Boone and Shannon make out in some dingy Australian hotel room? And as an aside, it is so obvious they didn’t film the episode in Australia, there’s not one fucking kangaroo in the shot! I’ve been to Outback Steakhouse, I know Australia. They should have ponied up the cash for it. Cheap bastards.

Me? I’m okay with it! It is a bit awkward, since you know that they pretended to be brother and sister for a while. But I mean, come on! I appreciate the issue you have raised, LOST writers, but it seems quite obvious. Two siblings, only by marriage, after the marriage has been destroyed by the scythe of the Reaper, are completely okay to bone. I mean, stop being such prudes! This is 2010. There are people painting each other in fluids on the internet, and we’re going to get up in airs about this? Oh puh-lease!

Let the two love birds have their fun. Of course, after they finally make sweet, sort of bizarre love, Shannon tells him that they’re going to just pretend like it didn’t happen when they get home. What a bitch she is, even if she is probably being properly practical. I mean, as much as I am for free love and shit, they can’t really thrive in a world that isn’t filled with liberal, lawless, godless heathens like me.

“Oh yeah, this is my wife. How did we meet? Well, we were taking baths together before our pubic regions had been activated by the Hand of Hormones. Yeah, step-siblings. And then, like, her Dad died, and we were both lonely, and here we are! What do you mean stay away from your children? Don’t fucking judge us! Love knows no bounds, and laughs at conceptions perpetuated by contemporary social power structures!”

Boone and Shannon’s screwing was a pretty good picture of what LOST was in Season One. As Pepsibones Krueger pointed out while talking to me, “At that point the show was a drama exploring people’s lives, with a little Sci-Fi thrown in”, which sums it up better than I could have. It’s interesting to see an episode like this, where it is centered around Boone and his incestuous Messiah Complex. Which makes me wonder, can it be a Messiah Complex when the whole reason you’re saving that person is because you were smuggling panties out of their bedroom when you were thirteen and confused?

I’m not sure.

But I mean, what were these two characters around for? Every one else on the show seems to hold some sort of amazing, important connection to the Island and they were like beckoned there by the hand of Jacob or whatever. These two? Who the fuck knows. Did they die because they weren’t important? Or were they never made important in future episodes because they were killed off? Or more than likely, were the writers just wanting to write an episode with a sweet ass moral dilemma?

As anyone in the know…knows, today is Bayonetta Day! Happy fucking Bayonetta day! Much less importantly, it is my birthday. And whenever my Mom has asked me what I wanted for my birthday, I told her point blank: Bayonetta. So when I woke up this morning, I found the above awesomeness sitting on my keyboard. Thanks to a boatload of antipsychotics in my system, my Mom was able to sneak into my Dungeon Lair, and place this gently on my keyboard. She is the best Mom ever.

[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 didn’t realize it at the time, but Daniel Faraday’s entrance into the LOST mythos was even more fucking spoogeworthy than initially thought. I had a feeling the quirky guy with the sweet facial hair and the stringy body was awesome. I could just tell from the moment he was walking through the forest after bailing the hell out of the helicopter. But after rewatching Confirmed Dead this afternoon, something so obvious hit me that I was actually upset that I didn’t notice it.

Daniel Faraday’s initial conversation with Jack and The Whore Known As Kate was an homage to Luke fucking Skywalker. Yeah, isn’t it awesome? Faraday struts up to Kate, wrangling to get his helmet off. A little pipsqueak in an enormous, foreboding get-up. A stranger, even. After taking the helmet off, he’s asked, you know, who the fuck are you?

And dude drops, “I’m Daniel Faraday, I’m here to rescue you.”

Awesome! Usually LOST has me in a frenzied state. I’m watching it, but I am trying to pay attention to every thing on the screen. Convinced that there’s something encoded onto the tree bark or something that I’m missing. That I should be seeing. Because obviously it holds the answer to everything, from the Island to the Smoke Monster. And then I end up missing awesome homages to Star Wars and shit. It makes sense that they’d throw this sort of reference in, since Lindelof himself is a huge Star Wars geek, and wore something The Force-related to his first meeting with Abrams during his hiring process.

Anyways.

There’s a multitude of reasons that Daniel Faraday is awesome. In short order,   he had a mullet back in the day. Which obviously means he listened to sweet hair metal. Even though it was 1996 when he was a Professor, you totally know that he was pissed off about grunge and was still blaring Queensryche and wearing a leather jacket at night. And there’s also the fact that he’s a genius, and time-travels with the frequency that most of us make our daily commutes. Getting caught in the slipstream? Pfft man, I’m Daniel Faraday. I do that shit before lunch. And it’s so blase I don’t even celebrate with some fine eatery, I get a peanut butter sandwich. Grape jelly? Ha! That shit is for pussies. Straight up chunky peanut butter, no milk. I’m a bad ass, I have a mullet!

But more than anything, Faraday seemed to represent the shift into insanity that came with the beginning of Season 4. Here we had a time-traveling physicist who was sent to measure temporal cross-dimensional shifts and uh, other stuff. No, I really don’t get what he was up to. But it all sounded incredibly difficult and I knew he was the only one who could do it, because he had a Ph.D. and a mullet. If Season 4 was a shift into a time-traveling exploration of man’s own inability to save themselves, of the idea that man creates the same demons that ultimately claim him, who better than Faraday to represent that. Faraday was channeled down to the Island by the writers themselves to embody the concept of the rest of the series, and perhaps retroactively and with the entire premise in focus, the show.

Faraday was a gentleman hurdling through time set on a course to be killed by his own creation. Literally. All of the characters of LOST are sent through the cosmos, destined to create in the past the same things that will lead to their own suffering in the future. It happens on both a micro and a macro level; for they seem not only responsible for the events on the Island that lead to the Incident, but they also wrangle with the idea that all their past actions and inactions are resultant in them being on the Island in the first place.

Jesus Christ, the Diet Mountain Dew is rocketing through me, and I have absolutely no idea what I’m talking about anymore. You know what would be crazy? A hydra, but instead of heads, it just has like sixteen dongs, and every time you cut off a dong, two more spawn.

And then, Faraday is killed by that which created him. It was a goddamn tragic moment. I pretend to sneeze and fart at the same time so my friends wouldn’t realize I was trembling with tears. My friends looked at me, and I was like “Sneeze and fart! One of the most deadly combinations ever known! I’m lucky I didn’t die! I’m just shaking and covered in snot and remorse! Now look away, LOOK AWAY!”

Eloise shoots down her own son, and lives with the tragedy throughout her entire life. Eloise Hawking is condemned by the situation which she created – her own son. Faraday is not only a stud, a phyicist and the lead singer in a Maiden cover band, he’s the essence of the show. People suffering over and over again as the sum of their actions. I could be completely wrong. It’s hard to make any certain conjecture without having seen the end of the show; maybe all the plight can be avoided, maybe there are variables or constants that can be relied upon to change situations. But Faraday, the time-traveling maestro of pure sex and intelligence seems to embody where the show was going.

[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 have a soft spot for tortured Jack Shephard. Why, you ask? Well, I find a bearded, miserable, pill-popping mess to be an eminently relatable character in my life. I should probably be sticking to more fringe ideas this early into my month-long extravaganza. But I was driving around today in my car, and I was like, you know what totally sold me on LOST? Bearded Jack at the end of Season 3, screaming “We have to go back!”

It blew my god damn mind. Up until that point, LOST was a pretty cool show, but it never succeeded in blowing my mind. The hatch kicked my ass, but episodes covering them setting up mini-golf courses and shit had me snoring.

In fact, I had zoned out during the middle of Season 2, leaving it behind while the gang scavenged around the island and spent entire episodes walking from Point A to Point B interwoven with character back story. However, at the behest of a couple of friends, I caught up, and watched Season 3 enjoying myself. I mean, there were polar bear cages, and we got to see Locke get shoved out of a building by his own father. All of this was pretty awesome.

But the moment where I realized, and let’s be honest, you too realized, that the writers of LOST had given up sanity for awesomeness is when this show kicked it up another notch. There are moments in television when I run around my room screaming, too excited for my big squishy to handle. And when it was made known that not only Jack gotten off the island, but also that he wanted to go back on it? Fucking extreme, man! Extreme!

It was a game changer, because it completely demolished the existing structure of the show. The show was enjoyable, but it seemed rather static. They’re marching around an island they don’t know shit about, trying to escape. There’s a pile of smoke chasing them, and some old bastard named Ben Linus has a weird voice and spends episodes reading The Brothers Karamzov. But after that episode?

I had to ask myself, what the fuck was going on? Let me get this straight, they…got off the island? And they’re off, but where and when are they? And who died? And wha..what? Jesus lord, hold me. And they want to go back? And how did they get off? And my nose is bleeding from awesomeness, or the thirteen Diet Mountain Dews I drank during it, or maybe a combination of both?

Also, it marked a rather curious shift away from the Jack we had known and loved. Sure, the dude had his demons, and he had clashed in an epic throwdown between him sporting…Lockeian Empricism versus Locke’s Unwavering Faith. But here was the dude laid low, unraveling before the viewer’s eyes. He’d come along way from being total Maverick from Top Gun being able to sew up his own gashes and shit.

And since then? They’ve seemed to shift away from Jack. He’s been edged out by the Helicopter Brigade, and Richard Alpert, and a bunch of other bullshit afoot. Not in a bad way, mind you. But I still think the dude has something left to give the show, and ever the optimist, I can’t help but feel he’ll be the hero of the show. This is while acknowledging of course, that this type of show probably won’t have the archetypal hero. All of their characters coming packing a minimum amount of loathsome. Perhaps I’m putting too much significance to how central he was to the early portions of the show, and perhaps I just love the guy too much to have some correct perspective in the house.

But what I do know, is that when Jack: Sexy Bearded Hobo edition warbled to Kate that they had to return to the Island, I began to worship at the altar of Damon Lindelof. I began speaking with Pepsibones yesterday after kicking off this crap, and we talked about how brilliantly the show unfolded.

You see, even though I’m convinced the writers were directionless and flailing in the night at first, the show’s slow boil into time-traveling madness made it all the better. If they had shoved the show into some mind-warping merry-go-round right from the start, it wouldn’t have developed the world and the characters. And sure, there were times where I yawned and probably tugged the pud in the middle of S2 and S3, but the laborious groundwork they laid through the first three seasons have resulted in S4 and S5 being the best damn television I’ve ever watched.

And it all changed when snot-covered, oxy-snorting Jack asked that whore Kate to come back with him.