Yeah, you go ahead and grimace Jacob. You’re grimacing like I am, at the uneven quality of this week’s LOST. There were some totally radical moments, and then there were some really unsubtle and painful scenes, where the dialogue made me go, wtf, no seriously? I can’t tell if I totally like the mundane action of LA X, or if it is lulling me to sleep in the middle of epic Island adventuring.

Hurley is the stud of this show right now. Almost every scene he is in, I’m totally digging on. Our portly fellow continues to mix together hilarious metacommentary on the show itself with other witty comments:

You ever try to get Jack to do something? It’s like impossible. I can just go myself…Okay, it’s bad enough you already made me write down way too much, and I just lied to a samurai.

Awesome. I love how they continue to have Hurley act as the mouthpiece for almost everything the viewer is thinking. I mean, Jesus Christ, c’mon Jacob! Everyone knows that Jack, along with everyone else on the Island are bunch of obstinate assholes, who listen to no one and only do what they please. It’s amusing to hear it out loud.

Claire is romping through the jungle with Jin and drags him back to her hut of depravity. There is something really creepy going on with Jack’s half-sister. Be it her shitty hair, or the skeleton-baby in her crib, or the fact that she’s burying hatchets in dudes, yeah, something’s up.

What is up?

Don’t you remember!

She’s infected!

With what?

AN INFECTION, DUMMY.

The big reveal at the end of the episode is that her friend that she kept referencing throughout the episode was the Man in Black. The double-twist that really wrinkled the ole proverbial testicles was that she knew he wasn’t Locke. Oh. Snap. Claire walked off with the MiB back at the end of Season Four when he was rockin’ out as her Dad. And now it seems that she’s totally down with Smokey. Interesting.

I really want to know how Claire and Sayid became infected with the infection, since I assume that once they’ve become engulfed in it they’re under Smokey’s power, and do this a lot:

Damn.

So yeah, Claire is batshit crazy and working with the Man in Black. She’s hellbent on getting Aaron back, and I’m all like, uh, bitch, you fucking left him two seasons ago! Maybe if you hadn’t wandered off into the forest in the dead of night with the specter of your father, you wouldn’t be trying to desperately to find him. Just saying. I mean, I know that there are many philosophies regarding parenting, most of which involve leaving your kid in front of a TV or video game console and then complaining when they grow up to get drunk in the woods and spend all damn day on the Tweeterbook or whatever. But I’m just going to go out and condemn the “Abandon Your Baby And Vanish Into the Forest” approach.

I can already hear the groans of people expecting more from the LA X dimension. I know this because I had two friends groaning on my futon last night about how fucking boring the storylines set there are. I’m trying really hard to enjoy them,   because I figure there has to be some value to them. Right? I mean, please?

This week we get to see Jack the Shitty Dad. Over the course of the twenty minutes allocated to LA X, we watch Jack as he tries his hand at parenting, realizes he’s becoming OMFG, just like his own father, and makes solid with his kid. I can see where they’re going thematically. They want to show you what would have been different, et cetera, et cetera. Or rather, blah blah blah. Unfortunately, what works on paper as a neat concept – show the viewers the banal existence they would have suffered had they not landed on the Island!, is just sort of boring in execution.

This is the sort of stuff that interests me on LA X; shit like Jack not remembering when he had his appendix removed in that timeline, and myself quietly begging that it has something to do with an overlapping with the Oceanic 815-Crashed timeline. I hold my breath hoping that LA X plays out more than a sterile drama, and in my darkest moments, I begin to worry it won’t.

Yo, we get it. At first all the books they were dropping in the show that had allusions to the plot were cool. But it’s like they’re just smashing us in the face with their themes. I mean, last week Al Bundy’s wife tells Locke outright, “Maybe it’s destiny! Destiny! Do you get it? Destiny!” and this week we’re handling Alice in Wonderland. RABBIT HOLES OMFG I GET IT.

Ah, the Lighthouse. I mean, c’mon. If you didn’t think this part was rad, you’re a fucking asshole. Or maybe you’re just not a fanboy like me. But Jacob, much like God, has been watching over all of the candidates throughout their entire lives. Every candidate is assigned a number, and corresponds with a point on the wheel that rotates the mirror. Am I wrong in assuming there are 360 degrees, and consequently, 360 candidates on the wheel?

Of course Jack is impetuous as fuck, as ever, and after finding himself on the wheel, goes banana-shit crazy and demands they put the dial on his number. It reveals his old-ass house and he’s all butthurt because Jacob has been watching him take craps and suffer throughout his entire life. Then Jack decides to beat up a helpless mirror, and trash Jacob’s sweet voeyeur device.

Everyone on the fucking Island is so impulsive and hard-headed, and it is infuriating to watch their stupidity sometimes. You just know they’re going to fuck everything up. Of course Jack has to make with the breaking of the lighthouse mirror, of course. Because he’s an asshole, like everyone else on that plane.

That shit is rad though. C’mon. There’s a mysterious lighthouse with a mirror that allows Jacob to peer into the lives of those he had chosen as candidates. It’s creepy, and it continues to make me wonder how these people were dubbed worthy of being candidates.

I’m going to ignore the bad line about having to let Jack look out at the ocean to figure out his destiny and just fawn over Jacob’s interaction with Hurley towards the end of the episode. I really dig on Jacob’s nonchalance towards whatever happens on the Island. The guy has been stabbed and thrown into a firepit, and he still exudes a peacefulness that I can dig. It all carries over from his initial conversation, where he   makes it known that he believes the human spirit will persevere. Guy has faith in everything working out, and even if it doesn’t, I can respect his optimism.

He is a man with a plan, and it don’t matter if you smash his lighthouse “into a billion pieces”.

When Jacob tells Hurley that he needed to get Jack and him away from the Temple, I was like, here we go, fuck, they’re going to run off to the Temple like assholes. But Jacob drops the bomb that they’re too late already, and I was totally stoked. Man in Black is going to tear some shit up at the Temple, and for once, the assholes running around the Island aren’t going to be boneheaded and run towards danger.

Next week, hopefully MiB tears up Dogen’s samurai ass (paging Freud), and Jack stops being emo and finally realizes he has to kick some ass. Remember Shephard, brother, ain’t nothing irreversible. Just because you’ve totally blown as a leader and ruined lives, you still got a chance at redemption.

Or at least give me more Hurley.

With thunder and lightning LOST returned this week to the epicness that we had all come to expect from the show. After a throwaway episode last week that left me at a frothing level of indignancy, this week threw so much at me that I have no idea how to begin to wrestle with the episode. Questions were answered, but as always, fourteen more took their place. Right after watchin’ this shit, I was like, fuck me, I have to make something intelligent out of the awesomeness that I just absorbed into my skull-plate. Because honestly, this is really all I wanted to say:

Fucking awesome!
Huh?
Jesus Christ!
Woah.
Huh?
What?
Holy fucking shit.
Tuesday is so far away.

That’s it man, that’s really it. The episode left my brain a gooey melange of confused awesomeness. But let’s try and think about this shit.

It seems obvious to start with the brain-shattering revelation that was why all of the peeps we have come to know are on the Island. Jacob beckoned them to the Island because he’s been searching for a substitute. Get it? Get the title of the Island? Yeah, me too. And from the looks of the scrawlings on the inside of whatever sort of damp, creepy cave the Man in Black brought Sawyer to, he’s been going at it for a long, long fucking time. As well, we finally get to see what the numbers were for. Sort of. MiB tells Sawyer that “Jacob had a thing for numbers”, which sort of explains why they’ve been fucking everywhere, but uh, not really. That said, I’m completely fine with that being the explanation behind them even if they don’t elaborate any further.

Of all the mysteries of the Island, this is one of the ones I give the least shit about.

It’s also worth noting that The Freckled Hussy wasn’t one of the ones that MiB mentioned being summoned to the Island. I know this because I turned to my friend Tommy and said fourteen times, “You sure she wasn’t shown? You sure? You sure? Totally sure? I should shut the fuck up? Okay, yeah…You sure?” Does Jacob’s heir have to be male? That seemed to be what we dragged out of it.

More of MiB’s revelation in a moment, but let’s diverge off this path. LOST style, hypertextual trains of thought!

Was there anything more frightening and entertaining than Dicky Alpert running out of the jungle like a fucking crackhead and accosting Sawyer? Seriously. Dude was losing his fucking mind, and it was awesome. For years the dude has been the composed, sexy, strong dude of righteous immortality. This episode? Dude was tweaking out! He scampers out of the bushes and is like, “C’mon man! We got to go! We-got-to-go! C’mon bro! Seriously, let’s fucking go! MiB kicked my ass and smeared my mascara! He is fucking legit!”

Just what the fuck is Richard? If he came from the Blackrock as a dude to potentially replace Jacob, he clearly wasn’t chosen. Was Jacob all managerial and like “Well, see here Richard. We don’t think you have the stuff to protect the Island for thousands of years, given your experience, but we’d like to take you on as a steward!”

And just like that, Crackhead Richard ran back off into the jungle, fleeing from another ass-whupping from MiB. And speaking of the MiB, how about that first-person perspective of Smokey doin’ his thang? Fucking epic! Epic with a capital EPIC! Yeah, that doesn’t make sense.

Hurley is fucking awesome. That’s all. I really enjoy seeing the inversion of his character from the I’m Totally Fucked Guy to Yo Man, Don’t Sweat It. For that matter, Hurley’s inversion is also in line with Locke’s dismissal of faith and miracle, and Jack’s belief in it.

Locke’s life on LA X fucking sucks, a lot. And as I’ve mentioned, he seems a broken, pathetic man, just like MiB mentions in the season premiere. I’m really fingering my brain over what they’re doing with LA X. My bro Pepsibones thinks it may be nothing more than a mundane drama, showing us the unremarkable lives they all would have led if they weren’t brought there. I’m not sold on that shit, but it does seem eerie that Locke’s Fiance Whose Name I Forget shreds Jack’s card, perhaps dismissing any sense of miracle and the destiny we’re expecting.

I ain’t sold though. These people are meant to be together, and they will. I just ain’t got no idea how.

Also, Ben as the school teacher? Fucking huh? I don’t know, man. Ben being a teacher makes me wonder if his ass was ever on the Island, and if not, just how long ago did the Island itself sink? WHAT THE FUCK IS GOING ON?! Is it Destiny, or mundanity?

The interweaving of destiny comes up throughout the episode, but there is no greater point than when MiB tells Sawyer that Jacob has played them all for the fools and brought them to the Island. MiB is all “Blah, blah, Jacob effected the course of your life to bring you here, as you were meant to be.” And he’s right, maybe. There were a zillion choices they could have made that would have pushed them off the course they were on. However, what MiB fails to mention is how he has been manipulating everyone just as he claims Jacob has, and maybe in even more nefarious ways.

Everything that led up to Jacob’s death has been executed by MiB. From getting Locke to leave the Island, to having Benjamin kill Locke, all of this was in an effort to gain the trust of Ben so they could put the ole stabby-stab into Jacob. Is there any free will going on, on the Island? Or have they all been chess pieces for both MiB and Jacob? Who the fuck knows.

I’m going to guess that Jacob is neither as benevolent as we may have thought, nor as cunning and selfish as MiB makes him out to be.

Either way, there seems to be an inherent necessity for balance on the Island, which MiB has disrupted. From the tilting of the scales to the eerie little fucker in the woods telling MiB, “You know the rules, you can’t kill him”, everything points towards MiB and Jacob being symbolic of the balance of Good and Evil in the world. Both are needed for the other to exist. Jacob and MiB’s conversation at the end of season five contrast the two of them, and now makes much more sense in light of the fact that Jacob summons them to the Island to replace him.

MiB: They come, fight, they destroy, they corrupt. It always ends the same.

Jacob: It only ends us, anything that happens before that, is just progress.

Jacob’s search for a replacement is centered around his notion in the potential for humanity. Despite being disappointed for what seems like hundreds, if not thousands, of years, Jacob considers the idea of a replacement for him to be plausible, if not inevitable. How long Jacob has been searching, or what his criteria is, or even further, if there was someone before Jacob? Who the fuck knows.

Yo, cheer up Sawyer! I’m sorry, you let me down, but I still love you, okay?

I’ve had a week to stew about the steaming pile of shit that was last week’s episode of LOST. It may have not been the worst one ever; there were no golf courses made or anything of that banality. But I mean, a typical “Nothing Happens in LOST” episode in the middle of the final season? An episode centered around the Freckled Whore? Jesus. Forty-plus minutes of her trying to get into Sawyer’s pants after his would-be fiance died, and giving birthing tips to that Australian chick. Youch!

I’m over it though, I’m over it. I’m excited to see you again. I’m not going to lie, I thought about you all week. So, tell you what, let’s just put this shit down as Water Under the Bridge, and try and enjoy ourselves tomorrow night, okay?

One of the things I find interesting about delving into LA X is that Jack and Locke both seem to posses a measure of the other’s Island-bound thematics. Locke waxes spiritual about the physical and ethereal location of Christian, before declaring with an empirical stamp that he is forever paralyzed. Jack comments on the physicality of his father, and then declares with an unusual amount of faith, “Nothing is irreversible.” This intersection of the two themes intrigues me, and no, I can’t stop thinking about LOST.

[ picture courtesy of slashfilm ]

And a thousand nerds creamed their pants at once, as the last season of LOST was underway. We had traveled through time ourselves, arriving in front of our televisions, our pants soggy, our lungs shuddering, our heart thundering. Sweet Jesus Christ, I had my mind fucked and left for dead last night. You know how sometimes a dog gets too excited, and it piddles on the floor? Well unfortunately, I’m a human, and I had the misfortune of running around my room screaming in-between commercials and peeing all over brother and friend alike.

Where to start? Where the fuck to start?

The episode starts and already I’m hyper-ventilating. I had a good suspicion that the episode was going to start with the plane crashing. Wrong, I’m already wrong. Jack’s sitting in the cabin and I’m vibrating back and forth and saying annoyingly out loud “Is this the actual footage from Season One? Is it? Pepsibones? Is it? Is it?” and he isn’t paying attention to me and I don’t blame him.

Turbulence starts! And I’m like, alright, they’re going back to the Island I knew it! Suck it, destiny prevails! And then I have the experience of being wrong twice in a row. So then they show the sunken Island, and I’m all like, we’re not on our Island anymore!

And then they come back from the commercial and they’re on the Island? What the fuck is going on? Oh, only one of the nerdiest things ever: alternate dimensions! As in Dimension X! LA X! Get it?! Is it only so amazing to me!? I’m shitting myself just thinking about it. Was anyone else hyper-paranoid and staring at all the passengers trying to see if they were conscious of some sort of shift? Because I think there may be one guy who knows all the different timelines.

Mr. Desmond Hume.

I mean, I’m not really basing that on anything, other than the fact that he fucking disappeared off of the plane. But if this is a guy who has been traveling through time and space for a long, long time, maybe he has been aware of the different possibilities? He’s seen Charlie die a zillion different ways, in what I assume are different dimensions.

So now it becomes apparent where the wrinkle in the narrative is coming for this season. When I was told that they were no longer doing flashforwards or flashbacks, I was like, well then, what does that leave us with? The producers are calling it “Flash Sideways”, but we can just call it following the alternate dimension that occurred when Juliet smashed a hydrogen bomb with a brick and “fixed” everything. It’s a neat twist. I had always assumed that if they had prevented the pocket of energy from being released, that reality would have rebooted. Instead, there’s another splinter reality that broke off from the one we already knew.

It’s going to be interesting watching where this LA X goes. Thematically, you can already see them suggesting that a reality in which they never crashed wasn’t the Utopia that they had perhaps deluded themselves into thinking it was. Charlie wants to die, Kate’s on the run, Locke is still a crippled mess.

During an intermission, Pepsibones began rambling about how the Island is the means through which perhaps these people were able to correct their flaws, and they needed the tragedy to improve themselves. There may be something to that.

Let’s take a break from LA X, shall we?

Meanwhile, on the Island, the grand reveal I had been prognosticating with a lot of others came true: Smokey is fucking Jacob’s Nemesis. The entire reveal was immeasurably fucking awesome, and centered around an action sequence that had me shitting my pants, and one of my favorite lines in a long, long time. After thrashing all of Jacob’s bodyguards as Smokey, Facob comes back and tells Ben:

I’m sorry you had to see me like that.

My brain actually exploded in an alternate dimension when I heard that line. In this reality I just moaned uncontrollably and pissed off my friends with fist-pumps and hand-claps. I’m slowly realizing I’m like a toddler when I get worked up. You’ve probably all known that way before me though.

And since I’m still bragging about being correct, Smokey wants exactly what I predicted: he wants to be free from the Island. The dude has been bound to the Island, and I assume Jacob, for god knows how many centuries. This entire time Smokey has been manipulating people to get exactly what he wanted: Jacob dead, himself freed. All of this was detailed in an epic speech given to Ben by Facob as they laid in the Shadow of the Statue. The speech also contained one of the most heart-breaking moments in the show for me.

Locke’s ultimate fate is heart-smashing, and the speech that Facob gives about it laid waste to my skin with goosebumps.

You should know, he was very confused when you killed him…Do you want to know what he was thinking while you choked the life out of him was, Benjamin? I don’t understand. Isn’t that the saddest thing you ever heard? But it’s fitting in a way. Because when John first came to the Island, he was a very sad   man. A victim. Shouting at the world for what he couldn’t do. Even though they were right. He was weak, and pathetic, and irrepairably broken. But despite all that, there was something admirable about him.

So what are they going for here? We have had the clash of the titans, Faith versus Reason since the show kicked off. Jack Shepherd versus John Locke. And both of them, both of them are miserable, sad bastards. My first inclination is to hold up Faith and say “See, this is what you get when you believe in something so blindly. You get choked to death in a hotel room for nothing.” But that isn’t entirely true, because as Facob said, there is something admirable about that dedication.

And I find that poor bastard’s fate to be entirely more heart-wrenching than the Sawyer and Juliet bullshit. Shit, she died. Oh well. And the Freckled Hussy still lives. But while Sawyer and Juliet hugging and making out covered in each other’s hemoglobin were one of the few times I was bored, hearing Facob describe Locke’s life nearly broke me. I got goosebumps, feeling for the guy. And I can’t help but hope that both Locke and Jack have happier lives in LA X, as suggested by the idea that Jack could cure Locke’s paralysis.

And I hope so for Jack’s sake, too. For reason has clearly failed Jack where faith has failed Locke. Jack wakes up, somehow being nuclearly-propelled back into the present day. Juliet’s dead, and they’re hanging out in the Temple of Doom with Jacob’s followers or some shit. It seems that the writers are trying to stem a bridge between the worlds of Faith and Reason, suggesting that the two of them are useless to an extent without the other, and suggest that staunch adherence to either of them gets you….Choked out in hotel rooms or fighting for you life on the set of an Indiana Jones movie.

As always, LOST follows the formula of giving us four mysteries for one answer. Alright, Smokey is Facob. But who the fuck are these people? What is this temple? What’s going on? Jesus Christ. The entire show has gotten entirely more epic in scope, for it appears that the fate of the world rests on Jack and his Buddies. They need to stop Smokey the Amorphous Cloud of Doom from leaving the Island, but how! And just who the fuck is he? Or Jacob?!

Facob is clearly heading for that Temple, where Jack and the rest are, and he does so after putting a serious stink onto Alpert’s face. Seriously, my heart seethed when I saw my boyfriend get laid out by Not-Locke. There was a serious ass-whupping dealt out. Facob comments that it’s good to see Richard out of “those chains”, which makes it clear the dude was summoned to Island by Jacob as part of the Blackrock. In addition, it would fit in with my idea that Richard was bound to Jacob just like Facob was bound to him. Not only would Facob have freed himself from serving some unaging-fish-eating master, but he would   have let Alpert off the leash as well.

And then, the episode ends with Sayid waking up, after being resurrected in some Fountain of Youth/Lazarus Pit. Two hours of mindfuck, doled out to all of our unsuspecting asses. The entire experience has blown me away, and I cannot, for the life of me, stop thinking about it. I couldn’t stop thinking about it prior to it airing, and now all I want to do is watch it again.

The questions are overwhelming: why are Jack and everyone else important? Who are the people in the Temple? The amount of awesomeness that occurred in two hours far too much for me to cover. I mean, I haven’t even mentioned Hurley, who is beyond hilarious, and scripted to say exactly what the viewing audience is thinking, “Why aren’t you answering any of my questions?!”

[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 was originally going to title this one “Remember That Time On LOST When: You Realized The Show sucked?” but I balked because I felt it was a bit unfair. If the show didn’t suck, at the very least, the show has changed how we watch television, and also our expectations for how narratives are structured on a weekly basis. It marked a change from the weekly serial to something that seems intended to be ingested at three or four episodes at a time for maximum enjoyment. I know people who refuse to watch the show save for on DVD, and while I’m a glutton for the weekly satisfaction, they may actually be correct.

The beginning of LOST was a slow boil that emphasized character driven episodes with very little occurring on the Island. My less intellectual side calls it “really fucking boring” and “the shit that we waded through to get to the awesomeness of later in the series.” And to an extent, I still feel that way. However, if you go back and watch the show on DVD, the drudgery is mitigated quite a bit. It isn’t nearly as boring, because as soon as one episode ends, you’re able to keep chugging along. Nothing happens? No big deal, next episode.

This is in contrast to the feeling of watching it while it was airing. I’d like to describe the feeling of watching the first few seasons as they aired as this:

WHAT THE FUCK, THEY JUST SPENT AN ENTIRE EPISODE WALKING ACROSS THE ISLAND?

WHAT THE FUCK, THEY JUST SPENT AN ENTIRE EPISODE MAKING A GOLF COURSE?! YOU HAVE GOT TO BE FUCKING SHITTING ME.

LOST is one of the first television shows I can remember thinking worked better on DVD, simply because of the pace of the narrative. In fact, it seems to the extent that the writers may even have been conscious of how their show was being watched. Maybe they realized that people were consuming it en masse through DVD, and they felt less of an onus to give instant gratification every week. This show has been the tantric sex of television; we’ve been in the Masquerading Goat or some shit for six years, and we’re just finally about to rocket our loads and squirt our squirty stuff. Whatever that fluid is called.

So with the advent of viewers watching television shows four or five episodes at a time, writers seem more comfortable crafting storylines out over a longer period of actual time, since for most, the next episode may be no further than a remote click away. It’s allowed the characters to be fleshed out, before they were rocketed off on the the temporal mind-fuck that the show has become.

Or conversely, maybe the show has actually changed how we watch television out of necessity, since we can’t stand to be given the minuscule amount of information every week. Either way, we’ve shifted towards watching things large chunks at a time, as opposed to the serial method.

Maybe.

I could be wrong.

As well, LOST is also a show that has lent to the viewers the desire to rewatch the show, again exploiting the use of DVD or DVR. LOST is a fucking shitload of mythos and mysteries for anyone to carry around in their head at any one time. And let’s be honest, it’s been six years since we watched Oceanic 815 explode above the Dharma barracks, and there’s so much that’s occurred across so long a period of time, that must of it has rotted in our cortexes and shit.

LOST is the first show that I’ve actively wanted to rewatch just to understand how everything is tying together. It is such a dense show that rewinding and reexamining certain scenes and flashes upon the screen has become usual, for many people.

How many times has something popped up on the screen for but an instant, and you screamed out, “Oh shit! Rewind that!”. Really, LOST is the first show that’s made the rewind button a necessary button on my grimy, food-encrusted controller.

The show has turned the viewer into voracious scavengers. We’re all trying to connect dots, most of them leading to nowhere but false ends. But because anything and everything seems to be of such tremendous significance, we want to see the writing on every chalkboard, understand the dialogue from any Dharma videotape.

We’ve become active participants in the show, and it is through DVR and DVD that we have rewatched countless scenes. I’m that asshole friend of yours going, “Dude, wait, go back!”

And along with that, it has allowed people to become purveyors of knowledge. References to philosophers, physicists, ancient goddesses and other crazy shit. It’s engaged us at so many levels, and allowed a level of scrutiny and hypothesis that you don’t usually get in a television show. It has literally transcended the medium of television and spilled into alternate reality games, enormous sprawling wiki pages, heated, profanity-filled rants on Ventrillo, and other shit.

The show has changed how I watched TV, and it has influenced other TV shows to follow suit with dense mythos and mysteries, and slower, character-build storylines that are more palatable spread across four-episodes when you get to watch them on the ‘ole digital video disc. It’s gotten people interested in philosophers, weird physics shit that I’m sure the writers butcher and I comprehend even less, and really interacting as a community. It’s gotten me flattening my rewind button from over-use, and paying attention to every conversation and setting as if I’m going to find the recipe for the elixir of life, whether that’s wrong or not.

It’s changed me, man.

Tomorrow.

[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.]

At the end of Season Five, Jack Shephard decides that the best course of action in righting the misery of everyone on the Island is to detonate a nuclear bomb. It seems like an innovative, and creative way to advert suffering. How many people contemplate atomic vaporization as a salve to their ailments?

Jack Shephard, that’s who.

It seems a bit risky even pontificating at this point regarding what exactly happens at the end of Season Five, since the season premiere has inevitably leaked and people actually know. It seems like predicting the Red Coats to take the Rebels in the American Revolution after George Washington is already rocking out as the president.

But whatever, what can you do.

The idea is simple:

Dharma unleashes a pocket of eletctromagnetism-stuff sometime in 1977, and the result is the building of the Hatch, the failure of Desmond to push the buttons in the Hatch to disperse the energy, and Oceanic 815 crashing onto the Island. To prevent this, Jack decides he’s going to tell everyone to stop drilling, and that they’re treading on dangerous ground. Just like Faraday convinces Pierre Chang that he is from the future and has important shit in his head and should be listened to, Jack is like “Listen up, I have to tell you guys something serious, you’re all about to done fuck shit up.”

Oh wait, that would make sense.

So instead, Jack decides the only way to prevent all of this awful shit from happening is to detonate a hydrogen bomb near the pocket of energy, destroying it, and preventing them from ever unleashing the unstable energy source, and uh stuff. It’s a lot less subtle than the plan I proposed, but it’s epic as fuck and it excites us all a lot more.

The idea comes from a conversation that Jack has with Faraday. After blathering for an entire fucking season that the past is the past, and nothing can be changed, Faraday eventually comes across a brilliant realization: people are variables! I have to admit, that this is one of the few times during Season Five where I actively groaned internally. The entire speech came off like a an enormous diarrhea-barf of existential verbiage. As both a furious masturbator of existential philosophy, and fan of the erratic nature of human nature, it wasn’t the concept that bothered it.

It was how it was injected into the middle of a season where all we were told is whatever happened, happens.

Faraday: We’re like, people man. They’re the rogue elements, who like, do stuff, who are unpredictable. I read Dostoyevsky man, I know about shit!

I’m done complaining. I promise. I’m all for alternate realities, splitting from destined paths, and everything like that. I actually like the idea, which makes the last fourteen sentences irrelevant. Moving on.

What I want to happen:

So Jack has the idea that he can prevent the future from happening, acting as a variable in past events. What I’d like to happen is for this ideal to fail, and the show continues on the idea that the members of the Island are, in fact, the sources of their own misery. It would seem poetic that Jack is on the Island because his desire to detonate a nuclear bomb unleashed the pocket of energy which then had to be contained and dispersed every twenty-eight minutes or whatever.

However, that would result in half the cast dying, and we know that isn’t going to happen. Unless Jack has some sort of biotic barrier that prevent nuclear blasts from wiping him and the rest of the Island out, my theory isn’t going to happen.

What probably happened:

Reboot! Somehow, to some effect, Jack is correct. Their detonation of the bomb results in…something? Yeah, I guess I actually have no idea. There’s a lot of destiny being flung around like tits at Mardi Gras throughout the show. And I have to believe that all of these characters were called to the Island, by Jacob, for a reason. And even if they skirted being brought down on Oceanic 815, they’re going to be dragged their somehow. Eventually.

As well, I wouldn’t be surprised if the opening episode, titled LA X, starts with them at the crash of the plane. Maybe it isn’t Oceanic 815, but it’s them, crashed on the Island, again. They’re there for a reason, and they have to accomplish it. Jacob spits something like a circular notion at the end of Season 5, stating “It only ends once. Everything before that is progress.”

What if Oceanic 815 has been called to the Island over, and over, and over again? Groundhog’s Day type shit! Who the hell knows.

Jack’s bomb, did it solve anything, or did it just blow their crazy asses up?

Two 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.]

Raw Fucking Awesome:

Ben: Okay, listen to me very carefully. I need you all to do exactly what I say. In a minute we have to run from this house as fast as we can At that moment, when I give the order, I want you to head straight for the tree line.

Hurley: You mean towards the guys with the guns?

Ben: No, we want to be as far away from them as possible.

I spent fifteen minutes rewinding Netflix to try and get this conversation as accurate as possible. Find an inaccuracy? Kiss my ass.

Summon thy smoke monster, summon thy goosebumps! One of my favorite moments on LOST is when Ben summoned the Smoke Monster in The Shape of Things to Come. My huggies were absolutely overflowing with brown excitement. One minute Linus is disappearing into some secret closet, and the next moment there is a bellow of death and the crackling of electricity. There is the vague sensation that something epic is about to occur, but I couldn’t believe what my brain was telling me.

Brain: Dude, he just summoned the Smoke Monster.

Me: No way, he couldn’t do that.

Brain: It’s coming dude, prepare for it.

Me: WHAT. WHAT. WHAT. WHAT.

Brain: Told you.

Me: Quiet!

Unfettered, jaw-dropping destruction is the only way I can describe the scene. Smokey had tore some ass up in his day, for sure. He laid waste to Boone, he gave a respectable ass-whupping to Eko, and he tried to drag Locke to his obliteration. But this was a different side of Smokey than we had ever seen. Smokey had been drinking green tea all damn day. He was hopped up and rocking out to Cowboys from Hell when Linus went into that secret closet and cried in his nasally voice:

Come hither,   Black Cloud of Annihilation, I Humbly Request You Rain Death!

And Smoke Monster was like:

Hell yeah! BRT, d00d!

Mercenaries were ganked and crushed and smashed into gorgeous gooey little bits. Lightning crackled and Linus and Sawyer and Claire and Hurley stared at a rather impressive manifestation of death. The cries of death and Smokey slowly gave way to an eerie quiet, and then there was silence.

I sat there completely rocked, trying to wrap my feeble brain around what I had just seen. When Ben summoned the Smoke Monster, it didn’t just give me one of my favorite moments in the entire show. It took the preconceptions about Smokey and threw them out the door. They landed in the same pile that all my preconceived notions about LOST land in, which is rather voluminous and reaches an impressive height.

Smokey can be summoned? What the fuck?

PREVIOUSLY ON LOST, they gave the impression that Smoke was this runaway formless demon thingamajig of doom. It seemed to deal out fatalities to anyone within its perimeter, displaying no particularities about who was felled or where. The whole idea was backed up by the fact that the Others still needed Dharma’s Sonic Fence to protect them when they inhabited their barracks. You want to argue they were just using it to keep out boars and mercenaries? C’mon dudes.

C’mon!

So the idea that Smokey could be tamed by some sort of summation was a significant paradigm shift. Just what the fuck was this Ball of Black? Who was controlling it? Ben showed that he had the means to summon Smokey, but could he control it? I don’t think the two are mutually exclusive.

What if Smokey is something of an independent spirit, but still answers to a higher calling? As an analogy – say there is a droid who operates under its own volition, and can do whatever it pleases. However, upon flipping a switch, it immediately has to do whatever its master demands.

If I’m going to begin flinging spaghetti at the wall, I’d argue that Smokey is a servant of the Island, and desperately hates its status as such. It has been corralled by the Others, via Jacob, and while it must do what they demand, it spends the rest of its days being pissed off and hating its situation. Which sounds like someone else.

In case you’ve missed it, I think that Smokey is Jacob’s Nemesis. Consider: Jacob’s Nemesis seems clearly subservient to Jacob, as though he is somehow bound to Jacob. He wants nothing more than to kill him, but he cannot carry out this wish. Instead he has to stare out into the sea and wish he could just go catch the plague in England or some shit. Whatever was going on in the Civilized World at the time.

But he can’t. He’s bound.

Just like? Just like Smokey! Smokey clearly serves the Island, whether or not it wants to. And since it spends a good amount of time beating whoever gets close to it into paste, I’m going to say that it resents its situation. We also know that Smokey can take the form of people – having appeared as Eko’s brother, Ben’s daughter, and I’m going to postulate, Locke. God only knows how/why Jacob’s Nemesis was reduce to Smokey’s form, but if Smokey can take human forms, and somehow Jacob’s Nemesis is appearing as Locke, it doesn’t seem impossible that they are one and the same.

All of this crazy conjecture and mind-warping started when Ben summoned Smokey. He went from some sort of rampaging immateriality into something that can be caged and controlled. And oh yeah, seeing the Smoke Monster lay waste to an entire mercenary group was pretty boss as well.

[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 Dicky Alpert, he was just a smarmy dude representing the false biosciencetechthing firm, Mittelos Bioscience. He was trying to get Juliet to come to the Island and unbreak all the uterus-areas of the women on the Island. No one could get their baby makers working, and it was an understandable source of consternation for the Others. So they sent their right-hand man out to recruit the beautiful, intelligent woman, who unlike The Woman Who Steals Aaron, doesn’t seem to spread for anything with a pulse.

(Though to be fair, both Sawyer, Jack, and Malcolm from Firefly are all fine specimens.)

I fell in love with the dude from the beginning, since he seemed to have the ability to ram buses into meddling ex-husbands, and had a prominent, strong set of eyes. There was a mystery to him, and I dug that. Obviously. If I didn’t dig mysteries, I probably would have thrown my pair of LOST underwear into the local creak a long time ago.

And I thought that was that. A bit player in the overall mythos of the show.

Wrong.

Double wrong.

My boy Dicky Alpert shows up again in the same season, looking like the Prince of Persia. And that’s when I realized there was more to this dude than meets the eye. For starters, the dude was on the Island in 1973. And aside from having shitty hair and dressing like someone from a Phish concert, the dude hasn’t aged.

This is the part where you say, alright, what the fuck is going on.

Alpert is the oldest member of the Others, from all my studies. My studies generally consist of whatever my caffeine-rotted brain can recall, as well as any minimal reading I have done over at Lostpedia. And that makes him intriguing as fuck. What the hell is a timeless, gorgeous man, doing on the Island? Eventually, we find out the answer. He’s working for Jacob.

Say it with me, what   the fuck?

HYPERTEXTUAL BRIEF ASIDE:

Here’s another tidbit you may or may not know. Like a lot of characters on the show, Richard Alpert is named after a real dude, though he has changed his name to Ram Dass. He was a Harvard professor who experimented heavily with LSD. Dude seems like the man:

Via Wikipedia:

Alpert accepted a permanent position at Harvard, where he worked with the Social Relations Department, the Psychology Department, the Graduate School of Education, and the Health Service, where he was a therapist. He was also awarded research contracts with Yale and Stanford. However, perhaps most notable was the work he was doing with his close friend and associate, Dr. Timothy Leary.

Having only recently obtained his pilot’s license, Alpert flew his private plane to Cuernavaca, Mexico, where Leary first introduced him to teonanácatl, the Magic Mushrooms of Mexico. By the time Alpert made it back to America, Leary had already consulted with Aldous Huxley, who was visiting at M.I.T., and through Huxley and a number of graduate students they were able to get in touch with Sandoz, which had produced a synthetic component of ergot wheat fungus called LSD. Alpert and Leary brought a test batch of both substances back to Harvard, where they conducted the Harvard Psilocybin Project and experimented with LSD relatively privately.

Moving on.

Alpert comes off to me like Jacob’s right-hand man. While there’s always a leader of the Others, who Richard then assists, I can’t help but feel that he ultimately answers only to Jacob. He’s like the guy who makes sure the one “in charge” doesn’t fuck up, because if he does, he’s going to stab him and roll him into the mud.

He’s done quite a variety of things in his days, from trying to recruit Locke as a child, to assisting Eloise Hawking while she ran the show. He’s always been timeless, accrediting that shit to some effect that Jacob has had on him. He answers to Ricardus, and speaks Latin. Ladies, he’s also disease-free, like dogs, and will bring your Mom flowers.

Where does Richard come from though?

I have my guess, probably the same as yours:

The fucking Black Rock!

It’s a blind stab, but at the end of Season Five, we see a ship coming ashore while Jacob and his Nemesis sit along the beach. The natural inclination is to say that shit is the Black Rock, but the idea that Alpert is on the boat is just a guess. It seems that there weren’t any “Others” at the team of the boat’s arrival, since Jacob   presents himself out in the open, which he hasn’t done at any other point on the show. Who the fuck knows.

Whatever the case, Alpert is one of my favorite mysteries of the show. It isn’t just that he’s timeless, or where he comes from, but rather his role in the entire play. If he was Jacob’s assistant, why does he stand idly as Jacob is murdered? Does he embrace fate, has he seen the future?

Or perhaps he is Jacob’s second assistant, to replace Jacob’s Nemesis/Smokey when he revolted. There’s a lot of theories bandied about that suggest that Jacob’s Nemesis can’t kill Jacob himself because he is bound in some way to him. Who knows, maybe it is that bond that makes one ageless, and when Smokey was like, fuck this, I quit, Jacob asked Dicky if he wanted in on the whole immortality thing.

Either way, it’s interesting to see what shall become of our boy, now that his BFF has been slain in his Temple of Doom or whatever. Does he answer to Locke/Facob? Or will he side with Ilana, seeing as that she seems to work for Jacob, and he was the only one to provide the correct answer to “What lies in the shadow of the Statue?”

I don’t fucking know! And I love it.

To the two or three people who actually frequent this site/blog/source of banality and vulgarity, it may be apparent that we’ve been more quiet than usual here. With the daily LOST ramblings taking up a vast majority of my mental capacity, I’ve been shying away from my usual comic book and video game ramblings.

This is all compounded by my sorry ass starting graduate school this week. And it isn’t to say I won’t have time for OL, but rather I’ve been thrown off my schedule and I’m trying to cobble together something that approximates functionality. I’m like a tard, yes a tard. If you alter the time that I’m supposed to eat my bologna sandwich I start to freak the fuck out.

I’d like to provide some programming notes, if you will.

• Monday Morning Commute comes out every Monday. It’s where I tell you what I’m digging. theoretically, you join in the fun. It’s slop, and vapid, but what is the internet for, if for not slop and vapidity?
• Remember That Time On LOST will be ending on the first day of the new season. However, I’m going to kick off This Week on LOST, so we can all gather around after the episode and speculate and masturbate. This will be posted every Wednesday.
• Variant Covers, the weekly round-up of superhero vomit dropping onto comic book shelves will be returning next week. This will be posted every Tuesday.
• Images & Words, Pepsibones’ comic book pick of the week, is a Thursday operation. I think he didn’t post this week because he was busy sculpting animals out of body hair and paste, screaming at the sky that there is no escape, only lateral movement. This will be posted every Thursday. [Update – Pepsibones managed to stop shaking his fist & screaming at the “Bearded Sky-Man” long enough to post this week’s Images &Words]
• This Week On 24 will start today, and continue to be posted every Tuesday. This show sucks.
• Friday Brew Review still comes every Friday, because Pepsibones is an alcoholic.

Other than that, party on. I’ll still be posting general impressions and reviews of video games I’m rocking out to, references to latex tentacle porn, and immaturity. Strap-in.