The fifth hour of season 6 is in the books. I liked it better than "What Kate Does" but worse than "LA X" and "The Substitute." It is still suffering from the fact that we have no idea what the flashes are. Once we find out, I have a feeling that some of these episodes will get a lot better on a subsequent viewing. As of right now? I don't care that Jack has a kid. I don't want to deal with anymore daddy issues on this show. I got very little out of the flashes except that Jack doesn't want to turn into his father. Jack and David decide that they will have a good relationship after all. I suppose we can just dive in with a recap.
Jack's Flashes
First off, I have been rewatching season 1, and so far, the character centric episodes have mirrored the first season. The Pilot and LA X were mashes of a bunch of characters, Tabula Rasa and What Kate Does were both Kate episodes, Walkabout and The Substitute were Locke, White Rabbit and Lighthouse were Jack. Next episode is Sunrise and it should be a Jin and Sun episode as was House of the Rising Sun. The real question will be what happens when we get to the 7th hour. In Season 1, The Moth was a Charlie-centric episode. Its possible we could see some Charlie in a flash, but I suspect we will get one of our on island characters in the flashes.
Onto Jack. He isn't driving a car I would expect a hot shot spinal surgeon to drive but maybe I don't have good taste in cars. He notices his appendectomy scar while changing shirts and doesn't seem to recognize this. First thought is obviously, "oh he got his appendix removed on the island and just can't remember it yet." Nope. He got it out when he was 7 or 8 and collapsed at school. Christian wanted to do the procedure but they wouldn't let him. Jack can't really remember this. So he's been walking around with a scar for 30 years and is just now realizing it? Jack's mom is freaking out about finding Christian's will and Jack says he'll be over. But then he realizes he's late and rushes off. He shows up at a school to pick up David, his son.
Jack and David don't appear to get along too well, but Jack set up cable on a sweet HD tv so that David could watch the Red Sox. What a spoiled brat. I'm almost 27 and don't have an HD tv in my room to watch the Red Sox. And I get NESN, which shows every Red Sox game. Jack clearly had to drop a pretty penny to get the MLB Extra Innings package so that his son could get the Red Sox in Los Angeles. A little more appreciation would be expected. Jack tried to talk to him about Alice in Wonderland and David gives him attitude about just getting through their visit. I would have slapped him, but Jack is a stronger man than me. Jack's mother is nagging him so he heads over to find the will.
They share some conversation about Jack's father and how upset David was and how Jack and David don't communicate, blah blah blah. Jack's mom offers him a drink and he declines. She says "good for you." And then she finds the will in a fairly obviously looking location. Did Christian ever mention Claire Littleton?
Jack comes home to find David gone so he pulls a Mikey from "Swingers" and calls him about 100 times in the matter of 5 minutes. He rushes over to David's mothers place (who we haven't seen up to this point. Is it Sarah? Is it someone else we know? Is it a stranger?) and goes into his room. He finds sheet music all around and listens to David's messages to find out he has an audition with some conservatory. Jack rushes over to get to the audition. A sign reads "Welcome all Candidates." How fitting for Jack. He watches David dominate and then runs into Dogen who says something like "it's hard to watch them and not be able to help." Jack doesn't even know how long David has been playing.
David tells Jack that he didn't tell him because Jack was always so intense about it (Jack? Intense? Really?) and didn't want to disappoint him. Jack gets all nostalgic and says that his father always said he didn't have what it takes and he doesn't want David to feel that way. Jack will always love David.
Island Action
Jack and Dogen make small talk about how they like being honest with each other. Hurley and Miles are playing tic-tac-toe and Hurley wants to go grab them some food. He heads into the Temple and asks a creeper hanging by the pool where the cafeteria is. Jacob tells him that it's down the hall. Then he tells Hurley that he needs his help and it's important so he should write it down.
Jack and Sayid talk and Jack treats him like a leper. Jack says that whatever happened to Sayid happened to someone else.
Hurley is searching ancient symbols in a hallway in the Temple. Dogen comes and tells him he needs to go back outside. Jacob shows up and Hurley tells Dogen that he is a candidate and can do what he wants. Dogen gets mad and says that Hurley is lucky that he has to protect him otherwise he would cut his head off (thank you Lostpedia). Jacob tells Hurley that he needs to bring Jack and Hurley is doubtful they can get Jack.
Hurley goes outside and tells Jack to follow him on a mission. Jack obviously says no. Hurley says that Jacob told him that Jack "has what it takes." This is clearly in reference to Christian always telling Jack that he doesn't have what it takes (see: "White Rabbit). Jack decides to come along. They sneak out into the jungle and stumble across Kate. Kate is going to find Claire and she doesn't care if Jack says that something happened to her. Jack invites Kate to come and Hurley says Kate isn't invited. But Jack decides that he makes the rules and invited Kate. Thankfully Kate doesn't come. Our heroes stumble across Shannon's inhaler which is about the only thing left from the caves. Except Adam and Eve. Hurley says what we're all thinking, that Adam and Eve are characters we already know gone back in time. But they don't pay this off yet. Jack talks about finding the caves while looking for his father and then smashing the coffin when Christian wasn't in it. They talk about why they came to the island. Hurley only needed by told by Jacob; Jack thought he was broken and hoped the island could fix him.
They get to the Lighthouse and Jack breaks down the door. Upstairs is a wheel with mirrors. Hurley says they have to move the wheel to 108 degrees. As they start to turn the wheel, Jack starts to see images flash. He sees where Jin and Sun got married and he sees the church where Sawyer's parents funeral was. He sees his name on the wheel and wants Hurley to turn it to 23. Hurley doesn't so Jack does. It shows a picture of his childhood home. Jack freaks out and demands to speak to Jacob. Hurley says it doesn't work like that but there is no reasoning with Jack. Rather than maybe play with the wheel and see what other places they can see or something fun like that, Jack smashes the mirrors.
Outside the Lighthouse Hurley talks to Jacob. Turns out he really doesn't care about the Lighthouse, he just needed Jack to see how important it is. Jack has something that he needs to do but he needs to find it on his own. Some people like Hurley can be told what to do, others like Jack have to stare at the ocean for a while. Plus Jacob needs to make sure that they are far away from the Temple because someone very bad is headed there and it is too late to help anyone.
Claire
I really wasn't into the Claire storyline. She is batshit crazy in the woods, caring for her "baby" which is an animal carcass. She insists that the Others took her baby because her father and her friend told her. She was tortured by the Others at the Temple (similar to Sayid it appears). Jin tells her that Kate has Aaron in hopes of saving Justin. Claire chops him in the abdomen anyway. That wouldn't have killed Justin instantly either. It would have been a long painful death for him. Jin says he was lying about Kate to try and save Justin but that the Others have her baby, Jin has seen him and will take Claire to the Temple. Good says Claire, because she would have had to kill Kate. Then Locke shows up and Claire says that isn't John, it's her friend.
I see the parallels to Rousseau but Rousseau had her child taken from her at gunpoint and has every reason to be upset and vengeful. Claire abandoned her baby. She lost parental rights. She has no right to go accusing people of stealing her baby. While I would love to see Claire take down Kate, I think I would root for Kate in that fight. I mean she took care of Aaron when Claire left him for dead. She has no one to blame but herself. I don't care if she had the infection or not.
Thoughts
Ok first, we found out some more about the candidates. With the help of HD and DVR's you can freeze the picture to see the names on the wheel. He are some notables that I have found so far:
124 - Dawson (Michael)
117 - Linus (Probably Ben)
109 - Friendly (Tom)
108 - Wallace - Don't know who this is but this is what Hurley was going to turn the wheel to
104 - Lewis (Charlotte)
102 - Montand
101- Faraday
58 - Burke (I think)
20 - Rousseau
And finally:
51 - Austen
I'm not sure why we didn't see her on Jacob's wall but Kate is on the wheel and her name is most definitely not crossed out. So Kate is a candidate after all. I'm still interested to see if MiB knows this or maybe Kate becomes some secret weapon because he doesn't know. I'm not sure.
Adam and Eve - After watching "House of the Rising Sun" again, I'm moving away from Rose and Bernard as Adam and Eve. I lean more towards Jack and Kate. I think the black and white rocks will mean something too. Perhaps Jack will take Jacob's place and Kate will take MiB's place? I don't know that I like that explanation but I think it will be something closer to that than just a throwaway about Rose and Bernard.
All in all, not great yet, but it did set up some stuff that should pay off nicely in the future. I'm still having trouble caring about the flashes. I cared about flash forward and back because they were the same characters on the same timeline. It informed their character. These aren't the same characters. All it tells me is that they fit certain archetypes no matter what timeline they are in and I'm not sure that I really care right now. Again, I'm sure once that timeline pays itself off I will look at it differently, but right now, I'm just so-so. Lots of set up right now. I know there are still 13 hours to go and they have plenty of time to tie it together, but I'm starting to get impatient. I hate waiting a week to see more set up.
Hopefully next week we see the showdown at the Temple. I'm not sure that its good news for guys like Miles but we'll see what happens. Side thought. What is the deal with Ilana? What a useless character thus far. I mean she was set up to be this important character who knew and had a history with Jacob and we've seen her for like 2 minutes and she just cries. That's about all I have right now.
Yeah, um, I'm expediently turning into the spoiled brat at Christmas who cries when she gets heaps of presents but not the particular one she wants. Kennedy, like you, I KNOW I'll learn to appreciate and even love these episodes in retrospect but right now I'm at the cusp and becoming infuriatingly cranky because Lost refuses to finish me off now. I have a feeling that a majority of the episodes to come, at least in the first half of the season, will be like this; all set up and no satisfying release. It'll pay off in the end, I'm confident, but it's really hard to sit back and enjoy when I just want the climax so I can have my cigarette and look back at how much fun it was already.
ReplyDeleteOn a serious note, I was thinking a lot about the lighthouse dial vs. the cave wall. Obviously we've only seen Jacob near the lighthouse and MIB near the cave. Is it possible that fact refers to ownership? Could the fancy dial and not so crazily crossed off names pertain to Jacob and his quest to fins a successor (which could in turn explain why Kate was on the dial and not the cave wall)? And could the cave wall, with it's crazy-person handwriting and angrily crossed-off names belong to MIB and his quest to thwart Jacob? They both need to keep track of the candidates and subsequently cross them out when they are "taken care of." I'm not fully convinced of either Jacob or MIB being wholly good or bad, but I do think that they both view humanity in wholly different ways. Jacob desperately wants to prove that man is inherently good and can succeed on the island while MIB wants to give up this game already and prove once and for all that man isn't worth a polar bear in the jungle.
ReplyDeleteP.S. I know no one really favors Kate but clues are certainly pointing to the idea that while Jacob considers her a candidate, MIB either does not or does not know about her importance.....interesting.
Hmmm, interesting. I think the connection between the Lighthouse and the Cave could be something explored later. It does seem strange to have the 360 or so names written in two places AND whether by design or by production mistake, some of the same names appear in the Cave and the Lighthouse but with different numbers next to them. There was no Austen in the Cave that we know of (and I find it hard to imagine that the writers simply forgot to show us Kate when we got not only the names but the flashback involved in every candidate left in the Cave. Whether this means that each is controlled by Jacob or the MiB or if the Lighthouse is something that the MiB is unaware of and the only list of candidates he knows is in the Cave, thus making Kate unknown to him as a candidate, time will tell. The Lighthouse Wheel is very ordered, with each name next to a degree on the dial while the Cave is haphazardly spread around with names and numbers. Again, maybe its of no significance, but it could be something interesting.
ReplyDeleteI really like the parallels between the lighthouse/the cave, man in white/man in black, ordered/disordered, (and maybe good/evil, although this one is far from conclusive). I think the contrast could be extended to echo Plato's Cave Allegory and get into issues of reality/perceptions of reality in light of the alternate universe.
ReplyDeleteKennedy, thanks for pointing out what those images we see in the mirror are. I had initially thought that many of these candidates lived in sweet houses, but it makes more sense that these were the places you described. But those were the places also where Jacob touched those candidates, correct? So why does it show Jack's childhood home and not the hospital (or a vending machine)? Maybe Jack met Jacob earlier in his life (maybe something around the same time as his vaguely referenced operation)? I still like the idea that Shephard refers to Christian, and at the end will all say, "Oh, now if makes sense why he was the one saying 'Previously on Lost...'".
The Austen thing is intriguing. She's sort of like Jacob's ace in the hole, if the lighthouse/cave theory holds up. But I fear that they are setting her up to be at the center of the season, and ultimately the show. The upcoming conflict with Claire over Aaron (after she finds out he's not at the temple) will contrast nicely against the alt-timeline plot where she's helping deliver the baby. And there's always more room to force feed us more Kate/Jack/Sawyer drama, no matter how many times we think that horse has been put down.
As far as my thoughts on the episode--it wasn't anything special, much like this whole season. The Christmas presents metaphor is a good one. But allow me to change it around slightly. Rather than getting heaps of presents, this year you only get 18. And you're a little anxious, because your parents told you that you're getting a little too old for Christmas and this will be the last one (Kennedy, you'll have to suspend reality to follow such a foreign concept). Based on previous Christmases, you know that not every present is going to be flashy. For example, every year a few presents are something like socks, because everyone needs new socks. But this year you're hoping that, because it's your last Christmas, you'll be spared the socks. So you start opening, and the first two presents are kinda sweet. Not mind blowing, but cool. But then the next four boxes are socks.
I think you have a right to feel a little cheated. And I think you have a right to feel that way even if the next 12 boxes are the best twelve you ever receive. Because in the end, regardless of how great this season turns out, these first handful of episodes haven't done much. And following them up with awesome episodes might distract us from that fact, but it doesn't change it.
So far this season: Juliet's dead, as expected. Sawyer's upset, like always. Sayid has the sickness, whatever that means. So does Claire, who is also crazy. Kate's looking for Claire, which was why she came back. Jin will be walking with a limp all season. Hurley is Hurley. Jack is Jack. And most of the major characters are going to be important somehow because they're "candidates". Again, I expect to be proven wrong, but I don't see the value of these episodes with regards to the overall story. I haven't seen any of the characters develop in any meaningful way this season. I haven't seen the plot forwarded significantly. I get the feeling that if I decide to rewatch these episodes on DVD, I'll be tempted to skip these ones and get right into the meat of the season (which hopefully starts soon).
I'm getting to the point where I think the ultimate significance of these early episodes will depend greatly on how they incorporate the alternate timeline. And as I've said before, my hopes aren't high for that.
Another quick thought: traditionally jacob's ladder spirals upward (hello, lighthouse) to the light. On island, anti-Jacob's anti-ladder snakes it's way a shaky pattern down toward "knowlege?" and darkness. Thoughts? Oh, and don't judge the hour, I work late.......then stay up watching bad tv.
ReplyDeleteSo I have watched almost the entire first season over the past week or so. I only have the three hours of Exodus to go. The more I think about it, and when I think about the seasons that come after, this show really is about Jack and Kate and to some extent Locke. Sure some of these other characters have become central to the story and have taken on more prominent roles, but look at who dominates the centric episodes. I think Jack has more episodes than anyone else. Jack and Kate are the only two to get three centric episodes in season 1. Locke becomes a little more central in the later seasons, but the Locke that we know is gone. Ultimately I think the end game comes down to Kate and Jack. Because really, how else could you end it? I mean Jack is the classic tragic hero. He wants to save everybody and can't seem to accept it when he fails. What greater redemption than Jack being our savior. As Jacob said, he is very important.
ReplyDeleteAlso, I don't think TV gets much better than Season 1. As a fanboy, I obviously love the later seasons where they focus a lot more on the mythology of the show, but as pure storytelling and great television goes, Season 1 will go down as one of the best seasons of television. Well deserving o the Emmy and Golden Globe. It just broke all of the norms that you see on television. There were no good guys and bad guys. There were people that we liked more than others but everyone seemed to be in that gray area. They all had their faults and they all had somethings we liked (at least most all of them; see below).
On an unrelated note, I am working on my list of all-time most loathsome and/or useless characters. I don't want to give it all away but far and away the character that I hated the most was candidate #124.
I fear that it's a mistake, though, to try to view each episode as it's own individual present. LOST has always been greater than the sum of its parts, with each episode filling its own role. Surely some episodes are more exciting than others, but you're not getting 18 unrelated gifts. And while we're not sure what we're getting at this point, I'm guessing it's a pretty sweet outfit which ends up looking much better because of those first few socks we received (although I disagree that the past two episodes fit the Sock Category).
ReplyDeleteI also think it's a mistake to play the "Nothing has Happened" game at the beginning of any season. Each and every season thus far (save Season 1, which I agree can never be equaled simply due to its nature) has started slow, and fans have invariably complained. But I truly feel as though these setup episodes are a necessary evil, and each season's ending has been strengthened by the slow buildup. I understand that you might still argue that this season has been particularly wasteful, but I think that's hard to judge before we see what we're building towards. And besides, I think alot more has happened this season than, say, how slowly we learned about the hatch or the caging of Jack/Kate/Sawyer or the split-up of our Losties and the introduction of Widmore's freighter people....etc.
Finally, I understand that I'm a super fanboy (if Kennedy calls himself one, then I am SURELY one). Something about LOST has always just clicked for me, and while I could try to explain or justify the different elements which make me love the show so much, it would be as useless as trying to explain why I love The Killers' sound or how I could read The Brothers Karamazov once every few years with increased enjoyment each time. For me, LOST has always been about the journey, and so rather than expect something out of each episode, I do my best to simply take each episode for what it is: another piece in the nearly completed mosaic of our story. Not every piece is as awesome as each other, but each piece does serve its purpose...and (lest we forget this is television) each piece has been quite entertaining for me (hell, Hurley's jokes alone were a pleasure this past episode).
Amen to that, Skoks. I feel the same way. Can someone please post about last night!!!? I finally am not working 20 hours a day and want something to read.
ReplyDelete