Month: May 2010

Unbelievable. It’s been a day since I watched the LOST series finale, and I’m still thinking this through. I might review this baby twice – one emotional review (the one you’re reading now) and one later on, when I’ve digested it all. It was just so much to take in – it was incredible. And I still don’t quite get it. I understand, but I don’t get it. Yet. Ah, such is LOST. It offers answers when you least expect them. You just have to look. That’s the great puzzle, isn’t it?

The Episode…

I love LOST finales. What they tend to do is set up something exciting, watch that situation play out in the first half of the episode and then switch to an entirely different, more complex problem. In Season 1 we had to hide from the others but ended up blowing up the hatch door, in Season 2 we wondered what information Desmond would bring and saw the hatch blow up, in Season 3 there was the fight with the others succeeded by the rescue, in Season 4 we wanted everyone on the boat but not on the boat. Season five appears to be the only exception: everything was in place right off the bat. Season six continues the trend set by the first seasons: smokey dies about halfway through the episode. But saving the island is what needs to be done next. It’s great – it always leaves you wondering what’s next and keeps you on the edge of your seat.

It turns out the cave with the light is a metaphor for the island – and the thing actually has a fail-safe key. It’s a cork. For those who don’t remember: Jacob told us the island was a cork. So now we know how literal we have to take that. Very, apparently. I like the symbolism – even if the presence of a crafted chamber inside a cave was a bit weird. Where does it come from? Obviously, this is one of those questions leading to another question and can be answered when you consider things for a second, but still. Then again, it’s those little moments that make LOST’s mysteries into LOST’s mysteries.

The Flash Sideways…

They were the obvious question going into the finale – and the segments that showed us the emotional end to this saga. The revelation – that they shared a subconscious space in which they were waiting to move on together – is nothing short of breathtaking. Obviously, it seems corny at first. But imagining being together in death is just such a wonderful though, in my opinion. So peaceful. It works even better on a second viewing: you can sense that these people are finding each other again, but that rediscovery is also final, and as they are doing so, they are actually already saying goodbye.

So, for me, the flash sideways make perfect sense. Things that seem strange and illogical finally seem right. Jack has no son. He created him to let go of his daddy issues. And him being a “dural sack expert” is just another way of him being told to quit counting to five – he can do it. It’s nothing short of brilliant, and it delivered such an emotionally gripping final episode that it sends shivers down my spine when I even think about it.

There were so many little things. The flash sideways noise being the noise of the Ajira plane taking off. Jack’s wounds. Sayid leaving Nadia. Locke getting his back fixed. Rose telling Jack “You can let go now” right after the turbulence hit. The final piece of the puzzle is so pretty you can just stare at the picture over and over again. Even if it’s corny. I don’t care.

In All…

My first reaction is that there could not be a more fitting end to this show. We got delivered the craziest bunch of broken people, and what better way is there to end the show than to heal them all. At the moment, I don’t get why people would feel cheated for not being told certain mystery elements. Granted, they are exactly why I got into the show, but experience has taught me that answers to questions can be pretty damn disappointing (Horcruxes, for example).

It’s going to be hard letting go. I always have one series that complete eats me up. Before LOST, it was 20th Century Boys. After LOST… I don’t know yet. After I finish one of these obsessive series, there’s always a period of mourning. I just can’t get into anything else yet. There’s plenty of things I want to watch, but just… not now. Not yet.

I’m looking forward to watching it all over again in a few months. If I’m up for it, I might write down the questions I have trouble finding an immediate answer for, and seeing what I can come up with. I don’t need the instant gratification of knowing what every little detail means. I’d rather open the pot and taste exactly what kind of island stew is brewing.

What a crazy trip it’s been. Thank you for a great six years, LOST!

Favourite Quote: Locke: We’ve been waiting for you.

If it’s not clear to you by now, let me give it on a silver plate: the final episode will be an emotional roller coaster ride, with some awesome action in between. If you’re still in denial, thinking you’re going to get answers to all your questions – think again. What this season has been doing is different, more subtle: they’ve been leaving a bread crumb trail for us to follow. Yes, that means that when it is over, you’ll have to watch it all over again.

The Episode…

After a mythology heavy episode, this one really nailed the character counterpart: most of this episode was all about people trekking through the jungle, shooting each other unexpectedly, or being eaten by the smoke monster. And that’s what LOST has been doing at its finest for the last six years, so why complain now? The episode was a brilliant set-up to the final one. The pieces are in place (although some seem to be missing, like Desmond) – now it’s up to Jack and Locke to play their game of island chess.

On the flash sideways side, there was some pretty nifty stuff going on too. It’s taken a while, but it appears that the Losties will finally be meeting – at a concert, nonetheless. I love the idea of them gathering in one place, I wonder what that will mean? Giacchino also went all-out with some magnificent musical wonderwork, making the scene where Desmond meets Hurley unforgettable.

The Questions…

So Desmond is the fail-safe. What does that mean? It appears that Desmond is the emergency Jacob in case Jack fails. But what if the logic stretches out beyond that, and hints us to what the sideways universe might mean?

Look at it this way: Desmond seems awfully close to being Jacob in the flash sideways. He’s gathering everyone, showing them what it’s all about, trying to make them remember. Does this mean that the flash sideways are what happens after Jack failed to kill the man in black? Is Desmond trying to set everything straight again? I think this is an interesting possibility for the flash sideways – they would finally make sense.

In All…

I didn’t talk about so many things – Richard, Ben, Miles (where is Miles?), but with the final coming up, I’m trying not to overthink things and just see where they go. It’s going to be one hell of a battle in the end, and I have no idea what’s going to happen. I wonder how much excitement they can possibly cram into a series finale. I wonder if my head will explode?

It’s the same typical thing with LOST fans: they spend years asking for answers, and when they finally get them, they throw a temper tantrum because, hey, their theories were wrong. And what plotline is more likely to be overtheorized? That’s right: Jacob and his nemesis, our very own Man in Black. This my review for “Across the Sea”, what may go down into history as the most controversial LOST episode ever.

The Episode…

So, apart from one throwback montage, there were no cast members to be seen in this episode. Obvious: it enrolls sometime around the birth of Christ. Interesting time to begin this, right? LOST finally opens the cupboard entirely, and shows us what started it all: an ancient myth, not quite unlike Cain and Abel (what we were already guessing). The myth shown in this episode is one of the oldes myths around – a myth about rivaling brothers – and, for me, it suits its purpose: it shows us that this story is as old as time itself. There’s no point in asking where the mother came from – because she also had a mother. That’s just the way the universe works.

What I am finding a bit hard to swallow is the following: in the last episode, we witnessed how the Man in Black killed three – or four – of our beloved friends. In this episode, however, we see that this evil wasn’t always evil, that it’s actually pitiable. I’m not sure whether I want to feel pity for this guy or not. I know this fits perfectly into the LOST idea of thousand shades of grey, but I’m not sure. The easy way out of this show would have been if there was ultimate evil. It might still happen, though. I’ll see where they take it.

On the other hand, Jacob was shown in a very bad light. He’s a crybaby, a mother’s boy, and obediently does what he’s told. Just like his brother, he’s not polarized anymore. Do I want this? How will I understand this when the show is over?

The Questions…

In general, the viewers seem to be in two groups about this episode. There’s the people like me, who think this episode did provide us with answers, and there’s the ones who feel cheated: that LOST created a mystery to solve another one. I think the problem with choosing a mythical path for your end-game is that you’re bound to reach the end of your logic, of your why-questions, and end up asking whether there is a God or not. Because LOST doesn’t want to ask this question (as it is a spiritual show and not a religious one), people are annoyed. Don’t understand me wrong though – they would have been more annoyed if a God actually came into play.

That being said, on to why I think this episode delivered. Obviously, the most visible explanation (who Adam and Eve are) isn’t the most important one. It was – in my opinion – executed with the sole purpose to give the viewership an immediate reward. But the best LOST rewards are usually so deep under the surface that you just have to dig a bit more to understand it.

What this episode delivered, in my opinion, was a sense of how this island works. The key lies in the Mother’s line, later uttered by the Man in Black: “It always ends the same”. There’s a mythical island, with powers you’ve never seen before (powers we have witnessed: the Swan, the Incident, Desmond’s flashes…), powers that seem semi-scientific but really go way beyond what science can understand. People want to find this island (the people who built the statue, the temple, the Dharma Initiative…), but they always wipe themselves out in the end. Someone else over at the SomethingAwful forums said it a lot better than me:

Jacob needs to find a replacement, he simply can’t guard the island forever because eventually he’ll grow so tired of it he’ll let the smoke monster leave just so it’ll end. If Jacob admits that the smoke monster is right, that humans are all evil, then he’ll have lost the right to keep the smoke monster from getting loose and destroying them. He’s been bringing candidates to the island since the early days of man, sometimes they study the island and build temples and monuments to their homeland’s gods and sometimes they try and learn the secrets of the island for themselves. Eventually they’ve all killed each other. They have never known more about the island than the characters we know so they aren’t really important. The smoke monster is not able to kill any person that Jacob has touched, marking them as a possible replacement. The people are able to kill each other though, which is the point of the game. If the smoke monster can get a candidate to kill Jacob and then get the replacement to decide the world isn’t worth protecting then the smoke monster wins.

Those are the rules to the game. Everything else can be brought back to that. Obviously it reeks of Deus ex Machina, but it’s a damn nice Deus ex Machina if you ask me – because it’s a literal one. How else can you explain the mysteries on this show? Did you really want to see Jack, Kate, Sawyer and everyone else going “Yes, I too have diabetes! That’s why crashed on this island! And that’s why Walt killed those birds!”?

Next Week…

Next week marks the return of our Losties, who apparently will be starting their quest to find Desmond. Is Frank truly dead? I hope not, but hey, what better ending would there be for this guy?

In All…

I liked this episode. It’s very hard to the take the LOST way of writing seriously if none of the characters we know and love are in it, though. We’ve come to expect a certain way of acting, of delivering strange lines, and it’s just weird to focus and entire episode on actors who aren’t used to this. We’ve never had anything like this before, and it was kind of alienating.

I think that in retrospect, we’ll look at this episode as a quick briefing to get into the season finale. All this stuff about LOST jumping the shark – three episodes from the ending! – will be forgotten once Hurley returns to the screen. It’s kind of the commercial break before the third act.

A long review – for a very, very intellectually tiring episode. See you next week!

In a normal LOST cycle, this would have been the season finale. It was gripping, it tore me apart, we found out some things that enlarge the scope of the mystery, and we had to say good bye. That kind of sums it up. That means I’m threading on unknown grounds now: the third act of the movie is over, the curtain has fallen. So what’s next?

The episode…

This episode was, without a doubt, the most disturbing LOST episode ever. I can stand losing Sayid – him deciding to do something good on a whim showed us that he was a good guy. Obviously, some of his storyline is left hanging. I personally think this will be the case with every character on the show (and will cause some people to be disappointed): Sayid incorporated the sickness, but what was it, in the end? Was it being persuaded by Smokey? It must have been. This makes the Sundown episode even more tragic: Dogen told Sayid – who had been fighting internally for six seasons – that he was a bad guy, and Sayid, tired by the fight, believed him. Interesting take on the sickness, and it makes sense if you look at Rousseau’s crew in season five. They were all persuaded by the monster, that was “only a security system”. Which was a downright lie. Oh LOST, you deviously humanist series.

Sayid had only been gone for moments when Sun and Jin got the axe in what I think to be the most disturbing LOST death ever. Just like Juliet’s death in the Incident, it was torn over multiple scenes – but opposed to Juliet, who had been a tragic-fated character right off the bat, it was never quite clear whether Sun and Jin were indeed tragic. It so appears they are: they spent six seasons trying to find each other, only to be killed in doing so. Makes sense why their reunion wasn’t the big tear-jerker scene. It’s really, really harsh, but I understand. I just would’ve wished for Jin to see his daughter. At least she’ll be in good Korean hands; and Mr. Paik will have a chance to redeem himself for all the mistakes he’s made towards Sun and Jin. You can do it, Mr. Paik.

Closure, twice over. Surely, it didn’t come the way or at the time we expected it to come, but it fits. It’s hard to admit it, and it makes me boil inside, but from a narrative point of view, these deaths fit. But what about Frank? Sure, it would be awesome to have him say one line per episode for about three seasons and have him go down saying “Aw Hell” and being hit in the head by an exploding door… But I want to see Frank again. Hey, I guess they filed him in the Ilana column. That’s the column where they put newly added characters that won’t get exposition because the fans get pissed every time one does. Nikki and Paolo were still awesome to me (in an sarcatic way), so meh.

The Questions…

The cat’s out of the bag. For anyone left in doubt, we now know that Smokey is a bad guy. But what about Jacob? He’s responsible for a lot more deaths than Smokey is – after all Jacob caused the Losties to crash on the island, killing hundreds. Smokey, on the very next day, killed one person: the pilot. A few red shirts and an angry black priest later, he might have reached half of Jacob’s death amount.

Is this a “greater good” kind of thing? Is Jacob indeed an evil bastard? Oh LOST, I guess we’ll only know for sure who’s light and who’s dark in the near future…

Next week…

Next week promises to be something we’ve never seen before. Apparently, the episode will feature next to no cast members. Instead, we’ll get a more than healthy dose of Jacob and Smokey. The rules of the game might finally be revealed. I wonder if our man in black will finally get a name?

This might sound stupid, but whether or not a name is given to our nemesis seems very important to me personally. I remember that, when the show had only just begun and J.J. Abrams was still actively involved, Abrams gave a lecture about a box: it’s not about what’s inside, but the mystery of what might be. The thought of this box – also alluded on LOST sometime in the third season – intrigued me. Now, the question remains: do we want the ultimate thing in this series to have a name? Won’t every name be a disappointment?

In All…

Gripping, sad, so sad. There’s just nothing to say about this episode. Even if I did write so much, words appear to fall short. Getting on that submarine was the worst decision they ever made. In doing so, the LOST writers have effectively done the hardest there is to do for an author: kill your darlings.

Favourite Quote: Jin: “I won’t leave you. I will never leave you again.”

I always have the greatest difficulties writing something about set-up episodes. It’s obvious why: the pieces on the board are moving, preparing for a tactical strike, but how that plan will work out remains a mystery.

The Episode…

I love how, ever since the fourth season, you can pretty much take the “moving pieces on a chess board” metaphor literally. There was no way we could know that Claire would be joining the team, or that Jack would be staying behind. I even remember seeing promo pictures for this episode and being convinced Jack was with the group when Sun and Jin were reunited. Something was wrong with that scene, by the way. It wasn’t nearly as emotional as I thought it would be.

I’m not one for explosions and guns and stuff, but the moment where Jack and Locke got hit by a bomb was nothing short of awesome. It appears that the stunt team – who, apparently, kick ass – is pulling out all stops for the last few episodes. I understand perfectly: after LOST, it’s back to the real world for them – a world not nearly as flammable and explosive.

It appears the sideways stories are coming together. Two epicentres are forming: there’s Sawyer’s police station on the one hand, and Jack’s hospital on the other. I wonder how they will connect those two threads in the end? They have nothing to do with each other. Unless a deus ex machina comes along, I don’t see how they can pull it off. But they will – they always hide their dei very cleverly…

The Questions…

I wonder what happened with Sayid and Desmond? It’s obvious that Desmond is alive, and that Sayid has somehow woken up from his evil dream thing, but what exactly happened? Will they ever tell us, given there are no flashbacks? Is it actually important? I mean: we can practically guess what the talk was about. About how the dead don’t come back (well, Sayid excluded), how he has to move on, blah blah. But still, leaving it open is odd. Maybe there was no time?

In All…

As I said: setup. It’s incredible when you realize that this is the season that started with the temple. Remember the temple? The game must have changed a dozen times since they left that place, and even if the stakes were already high back then, they seem to be even higher now. I can’t really judge before I’ve seen the final episodes and rewatched the entire season, but season six? It’s pretty damn good.

Favourite Quote: Claire: “What’s going on?”
Hurley: “People are trying to kill us again.”