LOST
Season 3 Episodes 22 & 23
(WARNING: SPOILERS)
“Through the Looking Glass” 1 & 2

Gentlemen, I asked you to dazzle me after enduring “Stranger in a Strange Land.”
Well, I’m officially blinded.
That has to go down as not just the best Lost season finale thus far, but also one of the most kick-a$$ season finales in all of TV history. When they said that this finale would change everything, that wasn’t just hyperbole.
I could go on about the twisty-turns of the episode itself (and it had that in spades), but the ultimate twisty-turn is that brilliant climax, of Jack, by the airport, as Kate drives away, because “he” might be wondering where she’s gone to.
Once again, Lost deftly toys with the show’s story structure, as what we assume to be the flashbacks (of a depressed and suicidal Jack hooked on prescription meds), turn out to be the present, and all the Island stuff is actually the flashbacks.
I said there were spoilers, didn’t I?

So it seems as if the Flight 815 crash survivors were indeed saved and rescued from the Island (at the cost of Charlie, who drowned in the Looking Glass station, just as Des saw in his flashes*).
Just before the off-screen rescue though, three crucial points:
1) Ben says that Naomi is “one of the bad guys,” and that she’s part of a group that’s been looking for the Island for a really long time, and that they would kill Jack and the survivors, not rescue them.
2) When Charlie gets the transmission from Penny at the Looking Glass, she does not know who Naomi is, and has no idea about any boat.
3) Locke actually kills Naomi and threatens to shoot Jack, since contacting Naomi’s people is the wrong thing to do.

And then of course, in the “flashbacks,” Jack is clearly a lost soul, and in his clandestine meeting with Kate, he says they should never have left the Island, and that they need to go back.

This is such a crackerjack finale, “brilliant” seems like an understatement. That ultimate twisty-turn opens the door to a whole host of possibilities, and raises all sorts of questions. (My head is doing a Linda Blair even as I type this.)
Whose viewing did Jack attend? A viewing apparently no one else from 815 went to. Locke’s? Michael’s? (Yes, I still hate the a$$hole’s guts.) Ben’s?
What happened to all the rest of the 815ers? Is Jack the only one who feels something is wrong, or are some of the others “lost” as well? (Heh. “Others.” “Lost.”)
Rousseau said she would stay on the Island since that was where she belonged. Is she still there? Is Alex? Is Locke? (If he wasn’t the one in that casket.)
As Jack suffers, where is Juliet? They did do the kissy-face back on the Island, so where is she in Jack’s time of need?
And did Kate really end up with Sawyer?
So many questions…

And of course, the other reality here is, Lindelof, Cuse, and company have again (for the time being) managed to evade addressing long-standing Island questions, among them one from all the way back to the Pilot (What is the Monster Alternately Known As Smokey?), to ones of more recent mint (Who is Jacob?), to the Mother of all Lost questions (What is the Island?**).

Having said that though, I cannot deny the guts it took to make that leap. I also cannot deny the skill with which that leap was made.
That was explosive television, gentlemen. The storytelling on this show continues to be some of the best on the cathode ray horizon, and as Carrie Fisher said over On The Lot, “My hat, wherever it is, is off to you.”

And thanks for not having Sun die horribly in labor on the Island. (Of course, for all I know, she and her baby have been abducted by Dharma or some other mysterious organization to undergo insidious tests. Her baby, after all, is the first child to have been conceived on the Island in what I guess is a very long time, assuming of course that the baby is alive and well.)
Speaking of babies, when exactly will Jack find out that Claire is his half-sister and that Aaron is his half-nephew? I mean, wasn’t that bit of info in the files the Others had on the 815ers? Didn’t Juliet read that? Surely Ben did.

Let’s just toss that on the massive pile of Lost questions, shall we?
I’ll admit it: I love this show, but it’s the biggest tease on television.
Onward ho! Season 4!

* Incredibly moving, but couldn’t Charlie have squeezed through that porthole, once the room was filled with water? And did he really need to shut the door in the first place?

** I’ve got a theory which grew over the course of season 3, and burst into my consciousness as I watched the 2-hour finale. But somehow I’d still feel like a raving lunatic if I voiced it here.
Tell you what. When Lost finally does that reveal, I’ll admit whether I was right or wrong.

COUNTDOWN: 48.
COUNTDOWN TO RESUME IN 2008.
THE DHARMA INITIATIVE NEEDS YOU.

(Season 3 promotional image courtesy of atnzone.com.)

LOST
Season 3
Episode 20
(WARNING:
SPOILERS)
“The Man
Behind the
Curtain”

Okay, that’s a cliffhanger. Locke, shot, in a pit filled with the corpses of the Dharma contingent Ben had a hand in exterminating.
The man is a stone cold lunatic.

While back at the camp, it becomes clear that Juliet has told Jack about Ben’s nefarious plans to abduct Sun (and any other pregnant survivors) and that Jack has been (presumably) hatching his own scheme (I apologize for not fully trusting Jack; probably lingering resentment for his having been the primary reason I had to endure “Stranger in a Strange Land,” arguably this season’s lowest point) to deal with the problem.
So everyone’s apparently on the same page now. I already apologized for calling Juliet a “two-faced lying slag,” but somehow, I still can’t bring myself to entirely trust her. Like I said, if she busts her a$$ to help Sun, then maybe.

Of course, the major focus of the episode is Ben and what he’s lied about and what he hasn’t.
“Born on this island,” my a$$. Liar.
I mean, this is the man responsible for the “hostile” takeover of the Barracks. Sure, he had a pretty miserable life, with a father who blamed Ben for the death of his mother (and perhaps herein lies the fuel for Ben’s crusade to get women to come to full term on the Island; so that other kids won’t have to endure the hell he went through), but he ends up not just killing his old man (thus giving us the back story of the VW van Hurley and company had a joy ride in in “Tricia Tanaka Is Dead,” and justifying that episode’s existence) but paving the way for the slaughter of all the other Dharma people.

And what is up with “Jacob”?
That was a masterly sequence, stretching out the question of whether Ben was completely bugf*ck crazy, talking to an apparently empty chair, then all hell breaking loose when Locke unwisely shines that flashlight (Ben did warn him that Jacob felt the same way about technology as Locke did. Refresh my memory though, ‘cause Locke never struck me as a Luddite).
Of course, it really all could have been some elaborate parlour trick, but that just seems too far-fetched (says he, as opposed to the idea of a man seen by one man but not seen by another, who hears him when the other doesn’t; that’s not far-fetched at all, is it?).

And here, I thought we’d see about the whole Alex thing, but of course, we don’t. We also don’t see what happened to Annie, though I imagine Ben got her pregnant and she died. (More personal fuel for his crusade to make the Island a conception-safe zone.)
But really, weren’t those dolls Annie gave him just creepy?
And why does Richard look like he’s younger than Ben, when he’s not?

Crackerjack episode, gentlemen.
I continue to be dazzled, as does my iguana.

(Image courtesy of sparklies.org.)

LOST
Season 3
Episode 18
(WARNING:
SPOILERS)
“D.O.C.”

Crackerjack cliffhanger right there!
But let’s backtrack, shall we?

So Eyepatch Dude is still alive?! And Desmond makes a deal with him to help Parachute Girl (who’s apparently multi-lingual like nobody’s business). Urg. These people.
And what does Eyepatch Dude do? He tries to steal the satellite phone thingie. And they still let him go!
Why do I think Charlie’s supposedly impending demise will have something to do with Eyepatch Dude? If so, it’ll all be on Des’ head, for letting the bugger go.

Meanwhile, Juliet helps Sun by bringing her to the medical station, where an ultrasound machine is kept in a secret room. The size of the fetus can help them determine when Sun conceived. If it was off the Island, then fantastic; if it was on, then she’s in the deep doo-doo I mentioned in my review 2 episodes back.
And in the flashbacks, we see Sun as a newly-married woman, approached by Jin’s mother, whom Jin was told was dead. Well, not only is she alive, she’s also an ex-prostitute! So Sun is blackmailed into getting the woman a hundred thousand dollars (I think was the sum) to keep her mouth shut regarding her former profession, money Sun asks from her father.
Interestingly enough, the price of her father giving her the money is that he’ll “promote” Jin, which is how Jin ended up being Mr. Paik’s enforcer!
In all of this, there are a bunch of really great scenes: Sun secretly meeting her father-in-law; Sun and her father, making the deal that will get all that blood and guilt on Jin’s hands; Sun and Juliet, in the medical station, where she confesses to her infidelity with bald hotel owner guy.
Man, I’ve always loved Sun, and this episode was a motherlode of Sun Moments.

Of course, she’s got about two months left to live, so… arrrggghhhh!!!
As it turns out, the baby is Jin’s. (Apparently, just as the Island is particularly brutal to pregnant females, it also ups a guy’s sperm count into the stratosphere; in Jin’s case of being infertile, well, it apparently just made him fertile. What a chauvinistic Island!)
So Sun’s got this death sentence on her now. (First Charlie, now Sun!)

And Juliet’s making tapes for Ben. And apparently remorseful about it.
Okay. Sorry for calling Juliet a “two-faced lying slag.”
Still.

And back to that cliffhanger.
Parachute Girl comes to and says that Oceanic 815 was found, and that there were no survivors…
Hmmmmm…

Parting shot: Fine. If Juliet really busts her a$$ to save Sun’s life, then maybe I’ll consider getting her off my Sh*t List.

(Image courtesy of sparklies.org.)

LOST Season 3

Episode 16

(WARNING:

SPOILERS)
“One Of Us”

There `ya go. As I suspected, Juliet’s a stone cold lying b!tch.
She’s made another deal with Ben. She handcuffed herself to Kate and lied about it, and the thing is, Jack knows she lied. So what did she tell Jack? Or is Jack part of some insanely Byzantine plot?
We also finally get to see the circumstances of Juliet’s arrival on the island, and the fact that her three-year stay hasn’t exactly been voluntary (thus shedding light on her “history” with Ben; somehow, I perversely thought it would be some sexual thing).
But the most interesting aspect of the episode is the revelation that Claire’s being pregnant at the time of the crash, which I honestly thought as I watched the pilot, was a ploy to invest the show with some potential emotional blackmail material (aww, look, she’s pregnant; let’s feel really bad about all the crap she’s in), is actually a vital plot point.
So all the women on the island can’t come to term, and they recruited Juliet for her expertise, in the hopes of reversing this alarming trend.* And she does, finally, after three long hard years… with Claire!
But now it seems Sun’s in some deep doo-doo, ‘cause she’s got a bun in the oven, a bun apparently made on the island, which could prove fatal, as per Juliet’s theories. (Claire, after all, conceived off-island. Unless… Sun has lied before, and she did sleep with what’s-his-face, the bald hotel owner who did some pavement diving. Or is that too far back in time for any possibility that he's the father? Whatever the case though, someone better tell Sun this latest turn of events, and fast.)

With seven episodes to go, it looks like the momentum to get us all to the season ender is starting now, and Juliet and Ben have a date a week from when they “left” her with Jack and company.
What happens in a week, exactly?

* Why is it so important though to get women to come to full term on the island? Is this some imagined modern-day Eden, the only flaw in that idea being that we can’t populate from here? So why don’t we just bring people here once they’re born? Let people conceive, carry, and give birth to children off the island, and shuttle the happy families here when the rugrats are born?
Or are they planning a contingency for a time that may come when there will no longer be an “off the island”?

(Image courtesy of lost.about.com.)

LOST Season 3 Episodes 1-6 Recap

With the impending return of Lost to the airwaves, I thought it prudent to take a look back at the first half dozen episodes of the season, to perhaps better prepare myself for all that is yet to come.

As the third season opens, we get to see “the Others” from up close, as a number of them become pivotal characters to the long and winding thread that is Lost. After the initial introduction to the Others (where we are given the briefest of glimpses of dearly departed Ethan and Goodwin), what becomes steadily apparent is that all is not kosher on this side of the fence.
There is a strange tension between Ben (a.k.a. The Baddie Formerly Known As Henry) and Juliet, with Jack becoming a reluctant pawn in the game being played by the factions within the Others’ camp, a tension which reaches one of its peaks with the ersatz tape of To Kill A Mockingbird which Juliet plays for Jack. We also see Alex’s repeated acts of rebellion and attempted escape.

It’s interesting to note that even as we are shown that not all of the Others are “bad,” we also see in the first 2 episodes of the season (“A Tale of Two Cities” and “The Glass Ballerina”) less desirable character traits of some of Lost’s principals: Jack’s tendency for obsessive behavior, and Sun’s capacity for lying. (And here, I bought her whole “there is no other man.” I am so a sucker when it comes to Sun…)
It is also in “The Glass Ballerina” where it is implied that Jin may know of Sun’s infidelity.

Then there’s Desmond’s new ability. (He may not have turned into the Hulk, as Hurley feared, but he’s become the Amazing Precog!)

And even as we bid adieu to Mr. Eko, we welcome Nikki and Paolo (who I sincerely hope contribute more to the show than Ana Lucia ended up doing).

And how about that cliffhanger, huh? Kate finally makes her choice, and Jack risks all on a gambit which could very well end up with the good doctor going the way of Boone and Shannon and the dodo.

Not too long left before we find out if that’s the case…

(Originally posted 020507)