So Lost premiered on Tuesday
Feb. 5th, 2010 12:00 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chaniI'm still processing the double episode of this last season of Lost.
I guess I need to rewatch if I want to post something articulate, but I have a lot of work and I'm invigilating a three hour essay tomorrow afternoon so I won't be able to rewatch it before a while. And there's a new episode of Caprica tomorrow evening!
Sometimes I think that I should be paid to watch tv and review my favourite shows...
I have mixed feelings, but as I said above, I need to rewatch the two parts of LAX to figured out whether it's good or not so good.
What I liked:
Seeing Desmond near Jack on the plane. It's always good to see Desmond. And he's still a wild card in that universe since he vanished. He was reading a book by Salman Rushdie about the power of imagination. Is it a clue that the new flasbacks are just a fantasy?
The Locke/Jack scene in the airport. At least! I mean, if there's a character who could do soemthing for Locke it's Jack since he is a spinal surgeon. It's about time they adressed it.
Terry O'Quinn stole every scene he was in. He is amazing. I loved him as Locke (my favourite character) and now that he is Not!Locke he has new facial expressions and the look in his eyes is quite threatening.
I liked that Oceanic airline lost the coffin with Christian Sheperd's corpse and Locke's knives, and above all I liked how Not!Locke behaved holding a knife while Locke's corpse lay on the sand. It was a nice echo. The knives and the coffin/corpse seem to be an intersection between the two universes. Besides Jack put his father's shoes on dead Locke feet in the flashforwards.
I like the fact that the former stewardess keeps offering drinks even in the temple!
I liked Toshiro Mifune (I know it's not him).
I also like the fact that they didn't just do a reset. I guess there are various possibilities about the parallel universes that seem to unfold before our eyes.
I liked what Non!Locke said about being a "who " not a what was intriguing. And he said he wanted to go home...Mmmm.
1. The bomb that Juliet triggered in the 70's created a sort of quantum state allowing two simultaneous states of the island like Shrödinger's cat in the box.
2. The flashbacks aren't real, it's all a fantasy (but then why did dead Juliet say "it worked"?)based on "what if"...a fantasy for the audience's pleasure.
3. The islandverse, which includes all the flashforwards we got and the return of Jack/kate/Sayid/Hugo and dead Locke, is a fantasy and the flashbacks we now see are actually the reality in which the plane never crashed. But there's the shot of the statue under the sea...
4. The islandverse and the oceanicverse are both fantasies. Juliet died and woke up in the reality hence her "it worked", they all have to die to wake up and go home, escape the island for good(hence Charlie's line about being meant to die...Charlie didn't die and lost his freedom). But if they wake up the fantasy people who live in the temple would stop existing.
5. It's all a fantasy that J Jacob (Abrams) created to keep The Man in Black captive. Who's the anonymous guy who's using Locke's guise? A personification of the audience maybe, and we'll be released once the show is over...
Things that I am not sure about or am confused about or that I disliked or that make no sense at all:
So Jack, Hugo, Miles, Sun, Sayid, Jin, Kate, Sawyer and dying Juliet were back to the future, a future that is posterior to the destruction of the Swan, and that seems to be same timeline as the one when Not!Locke killed Jacob(hence Jacob telling Hugo that he died not so long ago)...Okay, but the van being back with them was a bit too much! The van should not be there! Of course without the van they couldn't have given Sawyer and Juliet a last moment...which I would have prefered.
I didn't like the faux suspens about Claire whom we didn't see on the plane but who was in the taxi that Kate hijacked.
I didn't like how Juliet's death opened the way for a new Jack/Kate/Sawyer triangle. Not interesting!
I still don't like Jack. There's something about the character that gets on my nerves. I read that the writers consider him the core of the show...well, not for me!
Not sure I liked Sayid's resurrection, even though it echoed former resurrections (Mikhail's for instance, but also Locke after Ben shot him)and it carried on the theme of the healing island. Of course the temple bath is an interesting rewriting of the myth of the Fountain of Youth. A story of the "Water of Life" appears in the Eastern versions of the Alexander romance, which describes Alexander the Great and his servant crossing the Land of Darkness to find the restorative spring. Now we know why Richard Alpert didn't age, how young Ben was saved after Sayind had shot him and why the island healed both Locke and Rose. The idea of a curative water is a recurring theme in many mythologies. In the Christian's one there's the account of the Pool of Bethesda in the Gospel of John, in which Jesus heals a man at the pool in Jerusalem. The native stories about the curative spring were related to the mythical land of Bimini or Beniny, a land of wealth and prosperity. The spring was purportedly located on an island called Boinca.
In the episode, the fact that the water of life became red seems to be an obvious hint at the myth of the Holy Grail, with Jacob being a new avatar of Jesus. Jacob's body disappeared in the fire but somehow bled through the pool in the temple.
Methinks that Jacob is the island so there would be a parallel between his murder and Juliet triggering the bomb that destroyed the island.
I hope that the show won't stick too close to the Christian gospel.
The ashes thing bothers me. In earlier season, the ashes were used around the cabin in which Jacob was supposed to live, the cabin where Ben led John to see Jacob and where Locke heard a voice asking him for help, the cabin where Ilana and her boys were looking forJacob as well. Now it seems that the ashes are a barrier against the smoke monster...holding it back. So who did stay in the cabin? Was it Jacob? If it were jacob, as ben seemed to think at the time, why did he need to protect himself from the Smoke Monster (or rather if the Smoke Monster could have hurt Jacob why would Man in Black need Ben to do the dirty job?)? So was it the Man in Black aka Not!Locke that actually inhabited the cabin? I'm tempted to say yes given what we saw and given that Ilana said that someone else had been using the cabin...but we also saw the smoke monster on the island several times since season 1, so if Man in Black and Smoke Monster are the same, it doesn't make any sense.
What about Rose, Bernard and Vincent? Should't they be back to the future too?
I guess I need to rewatch if I want to post something articulate, but I have a lot of work and I'm invigilating a three hour essay tomorrow afternoon so I won't be able to rewatch it before a while. And there's a new episode of Caprica tomorrow evening!
Sometimes I think that I should be paid to watch tv and review my favourite shows...
I have mixed feelings, but as I said above, I need to rewatch the two parts of LAX to figured out whether it's good or not so good.
What I liked:
Seeing Desmond near Jack on the plane. It's always good to see Desmond. And he's still a wild card in that universe since he vanished. He was reading a book by Salman Rushdie about the power of imagination. Is it a clue that the new flasbacks are just a fantasy?
The Locke/Jack scene in the airport. At least! I mean, if there's a character who could do soemthing for Locke it's Jack since he is a spinal surgeon. It's about time they adressed it.
Terry O'Quinn stole every scene he was in. He is amazing. I loved him as Locke (my favourite character) and now that he is Not!Locke he has new facial expressions and the look in his eyes is quite threatening.
I liked that Oceanic airline lost the coffin with Christian Sheperd's corpse and Locke's knives, and above all I liked how Not!Locke behaved holding a knife while Locke's corpse lay on the sand. It was a nice echo. The knives and the coffin/corpse seem to be an intersection between the two universes. Besides Jack put his father's shoes on dead Locke feet in the flashforwards.
I like the fact that the former stewardess keeps offering drinks even in the temple!
I liked Toshiro Mifune (I know it's not him).
I also like the fact that they didn't just do a reset. I guess there are various possibilities about the parallel universes that seem to unfold before our eyes.
I liked what Non!Locke said about being a "who " not a what was intriguing. And he said he wanted to go home...Mmmm.
1. The bomb that Juliet triggered in the 70's created a sort of quantum state allowing two simultaneous states of the island like Shrödinger's cat in the box.
2. The flashbacks aren't real, it's all a fantasy (but then why did dead Juliet say "it worked"?)based on "what if"...a fantasy for the audience's pleasure.
3. The islandverse, which includes all the flashforwards we got and the return of Jack/kate/Sayid/Hugo and dead Locke, is a fantasy and the flashbacks we now see are actually the reality in which the plane never crashed. But there's the shot of the statue under the sea...
4. The islandverse and the oceanicverse are both fantasies. Juliet died and woke up in the reality hence her "it worked", they all have to die to wake up and go home, escape the island for good(hence Charlie's line about being meant to die...Charlie didn't die and lost his freedom). But if they wake up the fantasy people who live in the temple would stop existing.
5. It's all a fantasy that J Jacob (Abrams) created to keep The Man in Black captive. Who's the anonymous guy who's using Locke's guise? A personification of the audience maybe, and we'll be released once the show is over...
Things that I am not sure about or am confused about or that I disliked or that make no sense at all:
So Jack, Hugo, Miles, Sun, Sayid, Jin, Kate, Sawyer and dying Juliet were back to the future, a future that is posterior to the destruction of the Swan, and that seems to be same timeline as the one when Not!Locke killed Jacob(hence Jacob telling Hugo that he died not so long ago)...Okay, but the van being back with them was a bit too much! The van should not be there! Of course without the van they couldn't have given Sawyer and Juliet a last moment...which I would have prefered.
I didn't like the faux suspens about Claire whom we didn't see on the plane but who was in the taxi that Kate hijacked.
I didn't like how Juliet's death opened the way for a new Jack/Kate/Sawyer triangle. Not interesting!
I still don't like Jack. There's something about the character that gets on my nerves. I read that the writers consider him the core of the show...well, not for me!
Not sure I liked Sayid's resurrection, even though it echoed former resurrections (Mikhail's for instance, but also Locke after Ben shot him)and it carried on the theme of the healing island. Of course the temple bath is an interesting rewriting of the myth of the Fountain of Youth. A story of the "Water of Life" appears in the Eastern versions of the Alexander romance, which describes Alexander the Great and his servant crossing the Land of Darkness to find the restorative spring. Now we know why Richard Alpert didn't age, how young Ben was saved after Sayind had shot him and why the island healed both Locke and Rose. The idea of a curative water is a recurring theme in many mythologies. In the Christian's one there's the account of the Pool of Bethesda in the Gospel of John, in which Jesus heals a man at the pool in Jerusalem. The native stories about the curative spring were related to the mythical land of Bimini or Beniny, a land of wealth and prosperity. The spring was purportedly located on an island called Boinca.
In the episode, the fact that the water of life became red seems to be an obvious hint at the myth of the Holy Grail, with Jacob being a new avatar of Jesus. Jacob's body disappeared in the fire but somehow bled through the pool in the temple.
Methinks that Jacob is the island so there would be a parallel between his murder and Juliet triggering the bomb that destroyed the island.
I hope that the show won't stick too close to the Christian gospel.
The ashes thing bothers me. In earlier season, the ashes were used around the cabin in which Jacob was supposed to live, the cabin where Ben led John to see Jacob and where Locke heard a voice asking him for help, the cabin where Ilana and her boys were looking forJacob as well. Now it seems that the ashes are a barrier against the smoke monster...holding it back. So who did stay in the cabin? Was it Jacob? If it were jacob, as ben seemed to think at the time, why did he need to protect himself from the Smoke Monster (or rather if the Smoke Monster could have hurt Jacob why would Man in Black need Ben to do the dirty job?)? So was it the Man in Black aka Not!Locke that actually inhabited the cabin? I'm tempted to say yes given what we saw and given that Ilana said that someone else had been using the cabin...but we also saw the smoke monster on the island several times since season 1, so if Man in Black and Smoke Monster are the same, it doesn't make any sense.
What about Rose, Bernard and Vincent? Should't they be back to the future too?
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no subject
Date: 2010-02-04 11:27 pm (UTC)I didn't like how Juliet's death opened the way for a new Jack/Kate/Sawyer triangle. Not interesting!
Me neither. I did like their last moment because I'm a sucker for emotional!Sawyer, but I also think that whatever Juliet didn't get a chance to tell him will turn out to be important.
Did you ever see the movie "The Stepfather" - the original, not the recent remake? It's a horror movie, and Terry O'Quinn is absolutely terrifying in it - I was reminded of that film while watching Not!Locke the other night.
no subject
Date: 2010-02-05 09:46 am (UTC)By the way we didn't see Walt and Michael, and we didn't see the tailies (Ana-Lucia, Mr Eko, Libby...)either. Does it mean that they weren't there?
I haven't see the movie you mentioned but I believe you. Terry O'Quinn is an incredible actor with a wonderful charisma.
no subject
Date: 2010-02-05 11:30 am (UTC)Did you read my analysis on Sin and Tacos? It is here:
http://www.voy.com/139517/56205.html
You missed the book that Hurley found on the dead guy, it was Kierkegaards' Fear and Trembling.... in a French edition!! Following that vein, LOST is a test of faith. And it might have different outcomes. Check out my posts, there are some more after the first one but in the same thread.
But I am like you.... got a lot of questions. But we have to figure out what the right questions are to ask. Some may be superfluous.
;-)
...
no subject
Date: 2010-02-05 06:12 pm (UTC)I spotted the book in French but didn't want to get into that isssue. :- )
Desmond bothered me too because his round trip happened three years before the flight. What was he doing on the plane on his own? Where's Penny? Penny/Desmond is the most romantic pairing ever, I want them to be together!
I forgot to say that Jin being in trouble at the airport reminded me of bad memories (even though I didn't carry that much money!); I know how those security guys behave so I felt for him and wanted to slap Sun in the face. Just before I watched LAX I rewatched on the cable the episode in which Sayid pointed out that she knew a thing or two about lies (with the flashbacks about her affair and how her lover died)so I wasn't very Sun friendly! ;- )
no subject
Date: 2010-02-05 11:37 am (UTC)Who are they? Jack, Kate, Hurley, Sayid, Sawyer, etc....???
Or someone known only to Jack and FauxLocke/Man-in-Black/SmokeMonster.
no subject
Date: 2010-02-05 06:21 pm (UTC)We really have to find a shorter name for Not!Locke/Man In Black/Smoke Monster! LOL
I'm really intrigued by what he told Ben about wanting what John Locke didn't want to that is "to go home"...Did he mean that the island is his home and that he is really back now or that it's his prison and that he wants to leave it?
I tend to think it's the latter.
no subject
Date: 2010-02-06 12:45 pm (UTC)Terry O'Quinn was amazing - the contrast between Locke and Not!Locke was spectacularly well-done. If it hadn't been for him, I think, I would have been very disappointed with this season opener.
I didn't like Sawyer and his "I'm going to kill Jack", and yeah, the whole triangle thing bores me to tears and makes me roll my eyes.
You see, I didn't get that the stewardess was in both realities, but then I watched this over two evenings.
I didn't like the Japanese guy much - too much "Inscrutable Oriental" cliché for me, but we'll see what they'll do with him, maybe the writers come up with something new.
As to NotLocke! - seems they're going down the evil entity that has been banished route.
no subject
Date: 2010-02-06 01:06 pm (UTC)