The Candidate

Wow.... just holy smokes.... wow... this show continues to, I mean, it absolutely continues to impress and stupefy and just amaze me... and based on some of the responses you guys sent me, you're in full agreement...
So let's cut right to the chase...some things were CLEARLY made obvious in this episode:

Locke is EVIL.....
He had a plan this whole time to get all of the candidates together...put them in a situation where they CHOOSE to make a decision to get them killed.. Jack was right that Fake Locke/Smokey wasn't allowed to kill them...based on some sort of "rules"... which is how he got Ben to kill Jacob and Sayid to kill Dogen... I know I've been on the fence on whether or not his intentions were pure...maybe he really just wants to get off the Island, but I think more importantly, Fake Locke just wants "out"... he wants to be done with the game.... look for more answers on the "game" next week...but more on that later...
Sayid is the MAN....
He found the "light" and grabbed that bomb like Archie Griffith.... "He...could...go...all... the...wa..." BOOM!
Probably the single most heroic act seen on LOST...it was a little reminiscent of Desmond turning the fail safe key but with a lot more impact... I loved the way Sayid went out... I don't want to see the baddest dude on the Island suffer some crappy drawn out death...live by the sword, die by the sword... the only thing that might have been better would have been a hail of bullets...or with a knife in his teeth, jumping onto the back of a fire breathing dragon...wait...that was Matthew McConnaughy in "Reign Of Fire"..... but that still would have been just as cool...
as it stood, Sayid knew he wouldn't get far with the bomb but he knew he could get far enough to buy some time... super, SUPER sweet redemption...
But before he went, he laid the lines of the night on Jack:
(I'll paraphrase because every time I watch this scene I get an adrenaline rush and I can't go 2 nights in a row waking up from cold sweats)
Basically he tells Jack that Desmond is in the well and that Jack is going to need him because obviously Locke wants Des out of the picture.
Jack says "why are you telling me this?"
Sayid: "Because it's going to be you, Jack"

Jack is the Chosen One...
Now this could still be a switcheroo on the part of the writers..."Look at what's in this hand!!"...meanwhile they are stealing your wallet with the other... meaning, based on the hit movies of the last couple of years, this thing could have an ending NO ONE saw coming, like The Usual Suspects...or The Departed...or No Country for Old Men...or the Sixth Sense.... for all we know, the damn dog could be the next Jacob...but the fact that Sayid said it, leads me to believe that Jack is the One...at least for this week... lol....

Sun and Jin are Charlie...
I'm all for duel deaths...its a great way to thin the herd in an ensemble cast... it raises the stakes of the story and makes it more real...it gets the tear ducts working and it really speaks to the essence of partnership, watching 2 people die simultaneous under water deaths.... that being said: We've seen this before with Charlie, except he did something heroic which lead to his death...I felt like with Sun and Jin, they kind of ran out of story... they were finally reunited and it feels so good, but then it was "ok..now what?"... I know! Let's have them drown together!....now I'm not totally heartless...when Jin used Korean to tell her he'd never leave her, well ol El Prez let a tear drop... I'm not going to lie... Then I got over it by getting all high and mighty about seeing another underwater death...
Of course now I'm watching it again, and seeing the exchange of looks between Jin and Jack, as Jin knows its not going to work out his way...well that was just priceless...

Locke knows how to fly a plane....
Well wasn't that an interesting reveal? It kind of seemed random, but as we know, there is nothing on this show that's not carefully planted... is it at all possible that Fake Locke will "tap" into this knowledge and light the fires on that plane? I mean, they just have easily could have said Locke was injured in that old VW bug he had back in the day... those things were notorious for catching on fire...but no, it had to be a plane.....
But the shared moment at the end between Sideways Jack and Locke was really just a great scene.. They both are trying to get the other one to jump first...something tells me when these 2 realize they are connected, something powerful is going to happen to the Island versions...
and then Jack laid the line on Locke: I wish you believed me....which is what Locke put in his suicide note to Jack...CRAZY....

The beach scene where Kate Jack and Hurley all cry... I truly believe that those were real emotions from the actors about how their time on this amazing show is coming to an end...that may seem a little hokey but these people are artists...highly emotional... you gotta tap into that to make a scene feel real...and Jack standing in the ocean, about to just curse whatever God or what brought him to this place... that was a great scene... you have to feel Jack's pain and think, really...what's this ALL FOR???

And finally, Locke knew they weren't all dead....I think he knew because maybe something is supposed to happen to him when that happens...when all the "good" is gone, he will change....will he get his body back?... will he no longer be tethered to the Island and "feel" that?....I don't know...
Next week we should get a LOT of answers, Ab Aeterno style, as we see the back story of Jacob and the Man in Black... I cannot wait!!!
That's my time tonight...I gotta go back and watch it again...lol..
Later!

The Last Recruit

I'll be honest...I'm late on this particular episode and now I've seen The Candidate and it was such an amazing episode that I'm fixated on it and unable to really get into the meat and potatoes of this episode...
I will say that I had some favorite moments:
Jack willingly jumping off the boat when Sawyer told him to... that was so cool...
And then the mortar attack and Jack blowing clear up in the air..

That was pretty much it.. I hate to slack off on this post but I want to get to the one above this one...which you may have already read.... so sorry again..

Everybody Loves Hugo

Well I must admit that this final season hasn't really produced my best work... I don't know if it's the kid, the wine shop, the full time job, the wife, the trips to Argentina tracking down former Special Ops-turned-bad guys who sell secrets to Russia, the house or what....but we are near the end and I think the over arching theme for ol El Prez this year has been to sit back and just take it all in...
The mysteries are essentially over...I don't need to dive into the secret meaning of some obscure, cool sci-fi book from 1950 in order to enjoy the show..I appreciate the effort on the part of the writers but nowadays, with the end coming soon, I really just want to see stuff blow up....
And in this episode we got a lot of cool stuff blowing up, specifically Ilana... I'll be honest: these disciples of Jacob have met some pretty crappy endings, considering all of their sacrifices in his name... Remember the guy Ben put 2 in the chest in? Yeah...He was with Team Jacob... That dude who ate smoke in the statue? Dogen? The guy with the glasses? All these fools have had their moment in the sun, only to lose out....
Which makes me wonder about who is really in charge? Is it Jacob? Is it the Man in Black?

I don't think it's either... My answer is going to be a little more... environmental. I am proposing a new-ish theory of who is in charge....The Island itself... I think Jacob and MIB are merely agents of the Island.. I don't know if even they have total control... so in my mind, I think Fake Locke is the only sane one on the Island...The only one who wants off the damn rock.. I don't know.. that may just be the theory of the day...the more I think I know, the less I actually do...

But this episode was about Hurley's road to love..very well played by the always sweet Cynthia Waltros..another character that met an untimely, kind of crappy way to die off the show... it was nice to see her again...and she has magic lips, cause she made Hurley see another world... but what does it mean?? I DON'T KNOW!!!!!!! aarggg....

The other highlight of the show is that Desmond took particular enjoyment in running down Locke.. I'm not sure if he caught a glimpse of Locke throwing him so carelessly into that well and that's why he did it, or if he really likes running over handicapped folks... I don't know how he spends his free time..

A mystery was sort of solved in this episode: the whispers.... Michael identified them as spirits who can't "move along"..I'm sorry, but didn't we already see the episode where the Island let him know that it was done with him and blew him to smithereens on the boat? Was that Jacob who used Michael back then? Or was it MIB? I mean, one of those damn people needed him and then used him and then blew his butt shy high...somebody has to answer for the fact that they can pull him back anytime they want to!!
And that somebody is the Island.. I think Jacob needed Michael, used him and then let him die....but the Island wasn't done with him... so now the Island is using him before it lets him move on...confused yet? I sure am!
But the other thing that this whisper explanation eluded to was the fact that the Island was some sort of limbo land between heaven and hell or the afterlife or what have you... that sounds a LOT like Purgatory and the writers have adamantly stated numerous times over that it's not Purgatory... I mean, adamantly.. so I'll allow them to tell their story before I cry foul... I've made it this long and been entertained, so I'll give them a little more rope...hell, there are only 4 more episodes... I think I can hold out..
That's really all I had on this episode...that's not to say I didn't see a bunch of other things but with all the excitement in my life these days, this episode was 3 weeks ago and I'm doing my best to remember it...
I did love the end and the reunion of the 2 groups, finally... hijinks from the old gang, sure to come!

Random

I happened to look through the archives to the right of this blog posting... 2008 was apparently the most intriguing year of LOST for me...32 posts... I haven't come close since... haha.. so far I've posted 91 blogs...only 5 more episodes left until the Series Finale... that would put me at 98 posts in my career, if I limit myself to talking about episodes... but I'll probably throw in one more random and then the Final FINAL blog posting summarizing my reign as El Prez... that would get me to 100. Not a stellar blog record but that's not counting the over 200 emails I sent before I got wise to this Internet thing.... that first year was a posting every day... those were the days, Edith.. those were the days....

Happily Ever After

YES!!! Desmond time!! I'm typing this up as I'm watching for the second time.... Its hard to believe that it's been FOREVER that we've seen Desmond but in LOST time, it's only been 3 days since Ben shot him at the marina and then received an A+ beatdown from Des....just like Papa Widmore is getting as I type....
I'm not sure what Desmond's purpose is...the dude survived an electromagnetic explosion in which the Hatch IMPLODED on itself, sending his consciousness on a free ride through time and space... all it seems to have gotten him was a one way ticket back to the Island so that his freakish new power can be used for some "greater good"....
So the Widmore gang built this shack with a giant set of speakers...Widmore claims that he wants to see if Desmond can survive another electro blast... so that question, combined with last week's revelation that Zoe was looking at other electromagnetically strong spots on the Island makes me think that Desmond is going to have to blow up the Island again..SO that would make 3 times the Island has blown up.... how many more times does this place have in it to survive such events?
The Sideways world has Des travelling the world as Widmore's right hand man, although Des has never met the man's family... so no Penny....nope..this Des is without his Constant..
Sorry... just noticed the painting of the scales in Widmore's office....black rock and white rock hanging in the balance... all is right in this Sideways world....
I'm not going to hover a lot on the Charlie side of the story....long story short, when Charlie was dying from trying to choke down some heroin, he saw a "vision" of a woman... "A blonde...RAPTUROUSLY beautiful..."....now I'm not going to claim this idea as my own but my friend Doc Jensen at Entertainment Weekly had a great point: perhaps Charlie saw Claire...but Jensens proposed that what Charlie saw was the Statue of Mary..the same one that housed all of that heroin on the Island... my contribution to this theory is the use of the word "rapturously"...as in caught in the Rapture.... look it up...I think Kirk Cameron has something to do with it...
Anyway, Charlie's near death experience caused him to catch a glimpse of his Island experience...perhaps it was Claire.. and he fell in love after seeing her again... but then, didn't he see her on the plane? Wouldn't he recognize her? Maybe he will in a future episode and they will reconnect...who knows...
Desmond gives Charlie a choice at the bar...Charlie responds by saying that doesn't seem like he has a choice...Desmond replies"
"You always have a choice, brutha"
THIS is the key to the 2 worlds colliding...the unreal Sideways world and the On Island world... I think that all of our key LOSTIES are going to be faced with this choice and they can decide on how they want to live... they can take the red pill or the blue pill... yep, Matrix style!! Sort of... time will tell how the writers change up one of the seminal tales of Alt universe duel existence..
The cool part of this episode was the way Charlie kind of woke up in the car when it was underwater and put his hand to the window... this caused Des to flash to the other world... very cool reveal...it was like he was possessed or something... crazy....
So this all leads Des to Mrs. Widmore, AKA Eloise Hawking...when Des starts poking around about Penny, Eloise goes all postal and puts Desmond in his place..or in some place.... She tells him that what he's looking for is in "violation" and that he's "not ready yet"...WTF??
Not to worry, here's Daniel Widmore, the artist formerly known as Daniel Faraday, master physicist.... he describes to Desmond that he spotted a redhead with blue eyes who works at the museum(Charlotte) and that he knew immediately that he loved her... and that's when things got "weird"...LOL.... yeah.. THAT's when things got weird... hahaha...you know when things got "weird" for me? September 24, 2004...when this DAMN SHOW AIRED!!! It set me on a course of blogging and reading and expounding in hallways and bars and restaurants about space and time and duel universes and Bible studies and polar bears....turns out, it's all about LOVE...
Anyway, Daniel woke up and wrote out the equation for Space Time travel, specifically using the term Imaginary Time...here's where knowing El Prez and his maniacal machinations comes in handy: I paused the old DVR and pulled this phrase from Daniels notebook. I then went to the all knowing Wikipedia and extracted this gem:

Imaginary time is also used in cosmology. It is used to describe models of the universe in physical cosmology. Stephen Hawking popularized the concept of imaginary time in his book A Brief History of Time.

The relationship of real and imaginary time can be visualised as perpendicular axes of direction.

Imaginary time is difficult to visualize. If we imagine "regular time" as a horizontal line running between "past" in one direction and "future" in the other, then imaginary time would run perpendicular to this line as the imaginary numbers run perpendicular to the real numbers in the complex plane. However, imaginary time is not imaginary in the sense that it is unreal or made-up — it simply runs in a direction different from the type of time we experience. In essence, imaginary time is a way of looking at the time dimension as if it were a dimension of space: you can move forward and backward along imaginary time, just like you can move right and left in space.

The concept is useful in cosmology because it can help smooth out gravitational singularities in models of the universe (see Hartle-Hawking state). Singularities pose a problem for physicists because these are areas where known physical laws do not apply. The Big Bang, for example, appears as a singularity in "regular time." But when visualized with imaginary time, the singularity is removed and the Big Bang functions like any other point in spacetime.

HAHAHA...WHAT.THE.HELL..... this show is amazing... so the question remains as to whether this really is "imaginary" like unreal or made up...yes, the definition above doesn't mean it that way but the definition above is REAL....LOST is all about imaginary...imaginary people, imaginary stories... brilliant..just brilliant...
Daniel then goes on to mention that in order to stop a catastrophic event, a person could set off a nuclear bomb... I am assuming that doing so wouldn't lead to the destruction of everyone involved, but merely set everyone on a new course or it's like hitting a reset button.... and Daniel did that by having Jack blow up the Hatch before it was created...which split the worlds, giving us this Sideways world...
Now this is all some heady shiyite... so let's keep it to the simplest principle: LOVE
Daniel "felt" it when he saw Charlotte
Charlie "felt" it when he caught a vision of it(we'll presume it's Claire and not the H)
Desmond "felt" it when he saw the vision of his past life and then it was re-enforced when he shook Penny's hand....
Now he's on a mission to make sure that everyone on Oceanic Flight 815 sees the same thing... the question is: Has everyone already seen it? Case in point: Jack seeing Kate on the plane and then her seeing him when she hijacked the cab....could that have been their souls recognizing each other?
Or more succinctly put by Rachel McAdams in Wedding Crashers: "True love is the soul's recognition of it counterpoint in another"...hahaha... I was going to go with motorboating but this is a family blog....lol
So I'll leave it at that... I think Widmore exposed Des to the magnetic jumbo thingys to get him to send his consciousness to the Sideways world, in order to convince the other candidates to "wake up"... that's why Desmond was so ready to help when he woke up on Island... in the Sideways world, he was "awake" and starting to work for Widmore...even while his On Island counterpoint was trekking through the night jungle with Sayid, Ninja Assassin..... I can't wait until Desmond and Fake Locke meet up!! Woo hoo....
That's my time(and space) folks...har har... Peace!

The Package

Holy cow...I just realized I never wrote about this episode! I have much respect for the love of Jin and Sun...I think I finally figured out why...I have a lot in common with them...My wife speaks 2 languages...of course she didn't learn one so that she could move to America and leave me behind..... My wife and I have a daughter...born roughly around the same time as Sun and Jin's daughter.... of course, I was actually in the room when she was born, not assumed dead when the freighter I was on blew to Kingdom Come... Sun and Jin's wedding had a guy named Jacob there... so did ours.. my buddy Jacob Tolley.... of course my buddy Jake just drank a lot of booze and ate 2 dinners...he didn't reach out and mark us for Candidate duty... Jin and Sun like to fish and garden, respectively...my wife likes to garden and, of course, I like fish sticks..
The other point is, when it comes to "true love" like we saw last week with Richard and Isabella, or with Desmond and Penny, sometimes I just don't get the same feeling with Jin and Sun...
But apparently the writers like them and they keep ramming the journey of 2 souls reconnecting down our throats... I'll take it but only for 6 more episodes...then I'm calling it quits!
We learned that Sun's pops wanted to off Jin for stealing his daughters heart... good to see that not much has changed with Papa Paik in the Sideways world... and who would do this dastardly deed? Well we finally got the answer as to why Jin was locked in the freezer of the restaurant Sayid happened upon.. Martin Keamy...
I love the homage to Pulp Fiction that is the Sideways World... random connections, told in differing time segments.. now if only Christopher Walken would show up to tell a story about this watch he carried with him for 4 years...
Like the Sawyer ep a couple of weeks back, this one served as another "bridge" episode to get the Sideways world moving along a certain path... more connections, more intrigue but really just a ruse for whatever seems to be happening in that world.... its all smoke and mirrors folks!! OMG I just figured it out... Smokey has figured out a way to trap our LOSTIES in this weird little Sideways world...All of the reflections that we've seen are the biggest clue for this: Smoke and Mirrors... wow, I think I just blew my own mind...
I'm going to leave it at that because honestly, I have the knowledge of the Desmond episode in my possession so it's time to tell that story.. but with the way the blog updates, you may have already read that entry... so without further ado: scroll up!

Ab Aeterno

Ahhhhhh.....FINALLY, the Richard Alpert Story.... Man, I have been waiting on this FOREVER!! And when it was over I had more questions than before! WTF?!?!?
So I thought the episode was pretty straightforward...Guy has girl, guy is losing girl to the whooping cough, guy seeks out doctor, guy kills doctor accidentally, guy loses girl to whooping cough, guy gets caught, guy gets sold to slavery, guy lands on Island, guy sees everyone killed by Black Smoke, guy gets befriended by Black Smoke, guy tries to kill Jacob, guy gets his arse handed to him in a beach fight, guy gets a new job, guy gets to live forever.....whew!
I'm kind of in this frame of mind right now where I just want to list out my favorite moments of the show...
1. Seeing the actor who played the Man in Black again... Titus Welliver... simply just to spell his name... This guy plays cool like nobody's business... I thought it was HIGHLY interesting to see how he tried to lure Richard into helping him...I mean, he basically directly approached him...told him who he was, that he had his body taken from him and just wanted to leave the Island... I found the honesty refreshing.. apparently Smokey learns his lesson years later, hiding out and waiting to trick his way into a body, ie Locke....
2. The love story between Richard and Isabella...LOST gets this right most of the time(Desmond/Penny) and wrong(Locke/Helen...I just don't believe that they have the same eternal love)...anyway.. The scene at the end, I really believed that Richard could hear Isabella talking to him....and it had been 130 some years since he saw her and he was still a raw nerve.... great scene and finish... and then the fade to Fake Locke looking across the valley was perfect... he was too late...
3. I guess it should be mentioned that apparently Hurley can channel ANY dead person....I found this a little convenient.. but I won't go questioning the show too much...
4. I loved the scene where the Black Rock absolutely destroyed the Statue.... great visual effects! but that must have been a tumultuous storm to throw the Black Rock half a mile inland and still keep it intact... they don't make em like that anymore..
5. The cramming down the throat to all of the people who think everyone on the Island is dead and they are all in hell... Jacob's beat down to Richard was a reminder to us all that there are real stakes, real lives being affected...A dead man wouldn't care if he drowned..
6. Jacob's highly effective battle skills...
7. The Island is a cork analogy...it turns out that LOST has been an anti drinking show all along.... as a guy who co-owns a wine shop, I have to say I didn't like this development.... corks are bad, mmkay? Let the wine be FREE!!!! It's only evil if abused..... which makes me think: If Jacob knows that there is Evil in the world already, then how evil must the Black Smoke be if he's trying to keep it there?
8. I think it will soon be revealed that the Man in Black and Jacob are brothers.. I mean, this really isn't a stretch but it only makes sense to me.... just as a side note, I think that the 2 bodies in the cave are actually Adam and Eve....from the Bible.... and Jacob and MIB are Cain and Able... I've often contended that the Island in the Garden of Eden...you can travel back through the old posts to find that theory...it was pretty good from what I recall...a mild spoiler!!!! Episode 15 is all about the MIB and Jacob....an origin story in the same vein as this Richard ep...stay tuned for that....
9. I was slightly disappointed that Jacob touching Richard was all it took to give him everlasting life....and I couldn't figure out why Jacob wouldn't use his influence on people... free will... doesn't he know people have to be told how to be free? Organized together? Every Sunday?
10. And lastly...I don't know how people could come to the Island and live and then fight each other and kill, when the Smoke Monster pretty much wiped out everybody on the Black Rock... I guess he was tired or something when Oceanic 815 landed... he only killed the pilot...

That's all I got right now... if anything else comes up I'll add it to this week's blog.. so I'll see you then, my friends!!!!