Fishbiscuitland

2010-06-06T03:47:00.000-07:00

THE LAST WORD ON LOST

"Heaven,
Heaven is a place,
a place where nothing,
nothing ever happens." - Talking Heads

What should be the last word on LOST? Cheesy? Lame? Cliched? Cheap? Vapid? Insulting? All good options, but I think there's really only one word that ends up describing what LOST became in the end.

Stupid.

I'm not trying to be smug, but I predicted it would turn out like this. I knew it. I think we all did. It didn't happen all at once, but gradually the sloppiness and laziness of this much anticipated season became obvious. There was the wrong date on Aaron's sonogram, then Kate's name not being on the cave ceiling even though it supposedly was on the cave ceiling, the pointless Temple subplot, the Stargate Lighthouse, finally the awkward, stiff, so bad it made me cry scene where Michael was trotted out to give the lamest possible explanation for the whispers.

This scene was when it hit me. I can pinpoint it as the exact moment in time when I knew that this grand finale season was going to suuuuuuuuuuck. I didn't want to accept it just then but as the weeks went by, there was no escaping the reality.

As LOST's finale season careened to its dreadful clusterfuck of a conclusion, carrying the reputation of a once great series on its back, even The Darlton tried to warn us away from hoping for too much. They started to say stuff like this:

"We're going to get killed," said executive producer Damon Lindelof.

They'd been all but screaming from the rooftops that we wouldn't be getting any goddamn Answers. It was all about the characters, yo. Those stupid questions were all red herrings! Not just the big ones, like Walt and Aaron and the Numbers. All of them!

Lindelof: As much confidence as we have in the story we’re telling, we are also comfortable saying, “But what do we know?”

They seemed genuinely shocked that anyone had been expecting any answers from them.

We actually really just set out to make a show that we thought was kind of cool and entertaining, and we never imagined that people would get wrapped up in the intricacies of it to the degree that they have.

At times they got downright insulting about it:

Lindelof: It’s like when you spend time with a 3-year-old, you quickly find out that one question just begets another — there’s a “why” in the wake of every “why” — and the only way to end the conversation is to say, “Oh look, a Chuck E. Cheese!” The show is doing its best to say, “Oh look, Chuck E. Cheese!” For example, we’ve now given the viewers as much as we’re willing to say about the numbers, and we’re moving on.

Not only did Damon inadvertently describe the process by which American kids grow up both stupid and fat, but he made it clear exactly how much respect he had for his audience. Which is to say - he thought we were chumps. He thought we weren't really interested in answers to the gajillion questions he'd posed. We didn't want to see the design behind the mysteries and characters revealed in a brilliant fashion that would reward us for our years of devotion. All we really wanted was cheap, generic junk food. So that's the way he ended his series.

To be fair, we should acknowledge that putting together a great series finale is a daunting project. The history of tv finale success is spotty. There are the famously poignant.

The famously funny.

The infamously awful.

The controversial

And the sublime.

Obviously the boy wonders knew everything LOST had ever been was hanging in the balance on May 23. Carlton Cuse himself described the metric by which he knew they'd be judged.

We don’t know whether the resolution between the two timelines is going to make people say, “Oh, that’s cool” or “Oh, fuck those guys, they belly-flopped at the end.”

So which was it? Cool? Or a belly flop?

I've been MIA the last third of this wretched finale season. It turns out it's not really much fun to hate on something that you once loved. It feels terrible actually.

I'm embarrassed to remember how naively I approached this season, described by Cuse as a precious Christmas present they were going to slowly let us unwrap. I even went back last fall and recapped the glorious Season One in excrutiating detail, believing the hype that we were finally about to revisit that masterpiece and watch all its mysterious potential be fulfilled.

I tried to imagine how cool, how fun, how satisfying, it would be to see the big clock come together under the hands of the master watchmakers.

Instead what we got were gears and springs and meaningless numbers strewn all over the floor like a fish kill of red herrings, while the "watchmakers" mocked the audience for ever mistaking them for people who cared. Yes, if you're wondering, I do feel kind of stupid. I had faith in these two bozos. What can I say?

As tempting as it may be, it's probably wrong to blame Darlton. After all, it was our own choice to keep watching. We decided all on our own to imagine that we were playing some kind of puzzle. No one told us to expect that! Why would we think that a story about six magical numbers that were magically connected to cataclysmic events, or a story about an island where diseases are cured but pregnancy kills, or a story that wove intersecting timelines into a vast interdimensional web of coincidences and fate - why would we think any of that was meant to be a puzzle??? We must really be stupid!

It was our own free choice to gabble away on message boards these last few seasons talking about wormholes and string theory and exotic matter and Schrodingers goddamn cat. We did it long after it became obvious that these two guys weren't able to write that kind of story. It was obvious they weren't quantum physicists. Or even the kind of guys who passed physics in high school.

No one told us we had to prattle like morons about determinism and gnoticism and Manicheism and Buddhism and Catholicism and Egyptology and Philip V. Dick. I mean look at these two guys. Why would we think they had some kind of wisdom to offer?

You know who these two really remind me of now? The two con men who pretended to be tailors in Hans Christian Anderson's The Emperor's New Clothes. They convinced the dopey Emperor he was getting a new set of gorgeous threads, but really he just ended up walking down the street with everyone laughing at the pimples on his butt. The Emperor, it turns out, was us.

At least we were in good company. In the days after the finale, I got calls and emails from pretty much every family member, friend, frenemy or casual acquaintance who had ever loved LOST, or knew that I once did. There were sighs, sad shakes of the head, muttered expletives, viral video exchanges and the always hilarious fancraft that LOST fans had raised to an artform.

The consensus was unanimous:

But how did the finale fare out in the land of media, both old and new? Did they stick their landing or did they ...

I realize there were some in the fast food media who, as expected, were bowled over by the cliche overload of the finale. USA Today not only found it "thrilling", " clever" and "profound", but they mocked those of us who'd bought into that silly mystery crap.

If you were looking for explanations for every twist and turn, you didn't get them. (Some viewers won't be satisfied until the producers churn out a multi-volume island manual that answers questions that were never actually posed.)

And as expected, both "I live next door to Damon" Kristin dos Passos and Cheerleader in Chief Jeff Jensen dissolved into predictably soggy heaps of teary satisfaction.

“The End” was an emotionally draining epic that had me crying with almost every single “awakening” and has left me mulling the true significance of the Sideways world, which was revealed to be a Purgatory-like realm created by the souls of the dead castaways themselves. (Purgatory! The irony!) I was so happy The Island was saved. I was so moved by Jack’s heroism and sacrifice and the glorious significance of ending where he began, as well as that Doubting Thomas allusion there at the end. … I loved Ben’s contrition. I loved Locke’s forgiveness. I loved it when Ben told him to stand up and walk again, and Locke did.

But if Darlton let themselves listen to anyone other than their friends in lowbrow places, they probably realized they're going to have to stay in that bunker a little bit longer than anticipated. The New York Times trashed it on both the Arts page:

But you have to think that the gauzy, vaguely religious, more than a little mawkish ending of ‘Lost’ – “Touched by a Desmond” — will not sit well with a lot of the show’s fans. ... The “Sopranos” finale was ambiguous and a bit of a shrug, but not puzzling; to me the “Lost” finale, in the immediate aftermath, felt forced and, well, a bit of a cop-out.

and the Editorial section:

Across six seasons, it’s true, we learned endless facts about the island — about its geography, its inhabitants, and what had happened on it across decades and centuries. But we never learned the whys behind the facts. And with the final season in the books, there’s good reason to think that we never learned them because the show’s creators never had a well-thought-out “why” for their story in the first place. The island wasn’t a real mystery — it was just a MacGuffin.

Max Read at Gawker thought "The Lost Finale was incredibly Dumb", which pretty much sums up the consensus of my inner circle:

Once upon a time, there was a television show about a bunch of people on an island. For six years it was one of the most fascinating things on TV. And then it ended, in the worst way possible. ... Lost ended tonight, and with it the hopes and dreams of millions of people who thought it might finally get good again. SPOILER ALERT: It didn't. What did we learn? Nothing. We learned nothing from two-and-a-half hours of slow-motion bullshittery backed with a syrupy soundtrack.

Televisionary's Jace Lacob tried really hard to hide his disappointment in this piece at The Daily Beast, but he couldn't quite do it.

“The End” didn’t so much answer the long-dangling mysteries—Why do pregnant women die on the island? Why was the character of Walt (Malcolm David Kelley) special? What is this island? What was with all of the Egyptian hieroglyphics? What was the character of Desmond’s ultimate purpose on the island?—as it did ignore them altogether....Considering how much time viewers have spent trying to figure out the relationship between the island timeline and the Sideways one, it is also frustrating that it turned out that there is none—or more precisely, that what happened in the Sideways timeline didn’t affect what happened on the island at all.

Aside from coining the pithiest descripiton of the finale - "a prom of the dead in a chapel of love where everybody is farting rainbows" - Chadwick Martin of Slate nailed one of the finale's main flaws:

There are second chances in life, but there are no do-overs. At least all the time travel, the donkey wheels, the smoke monsters were vehicles to explore the human condition. They were as fantastical as purgatory, yes, but they were also grounded in the terrestrial realities of life, death, and the pursuit of happiness. The show's purgatorial clusterfuck is not. It is a venue for wish-fulfillment. Thus, the finale wronged not just me, but the show itself.

As did Laura Miller at Salon :

A series like "Lost" doesn't need to solve all of its riddles, but it does need to address the right ones.... The comic-book paraphernalia and texture of the island -- its secret bunkers with their code names, Jacob's migrating cabin with its creepy paintings, the ersatz normality of the Others' compound ringed by those sonic pylons and the fantastically mechanical grinding and dragging sounds that used to accompany the appearance of the smoke monster -- were not peripheral to the heart of "Lost." They were the very essence of its appeal.

And David Zurawik of The Baltimore Sun :

And the message of the Hero Quest in mythology is certainly not the gauzy, happy, angels-at-the-doorway one "Lost" fans had to settle for last night. Once Jack stepped into the church it looked like he was walking into a Hollywood wrap party without food or music -- just a bunch of actors grinning idiotically for 10 minutes and hugging one another.

Scott Mendelson's fine essay, republished at The Huffington Post, decided that the finale was so bad that it managed to nullify the series almost as a whole, although he - like me - hopes it will still be possible to enjoy the first three seasons before this series started its sad, end date driven decline:

By leaving everything unanswered right up to the end, and then pulling a narrative switcheroo instead of finishing the story that was being unveiled, Lost basically mocked those who bothered to watch from the very beginning, as such rabid viewership proved entirely unnecessary. Thus, the finale of Lost rendered the entire series run relatively pointless and effectively killed any and all rewatchability of the prior episodes. So, in the end, Lost ended for me with season three.

With all that and so much more being said, is there really any point in me writing anything else about this sad spectacle ? Is there anything left that really needs to be said? I'm over it. I could live without never giving LOST another thought. I'm literally itching to erase it off my dvr. But I promised I'd do this. Inquiring minds seem to want to know what it all meant to me. So, here we go, one last time, for old time's sake.

I think others have pretty much covered the shameful way we were taunted with questions that were never intended to be answered, even as recently as the run-up to this season. They were running full speed ahead right up until late April, not only implying that we'd be rewarded for our detective work, but throwing new questions at us! Of course everyone was excited to see what the answer to the puzzles would be. And then we got this:

The superclunker episode Across the Sea. We found out the only thing worse than getting no answers was getting the LAME answers they came up with. Why did they even bother to answer the pointless Adam and Eve "mystery", for instance? Was that at the top of anyone's mind? As compared to things like - who bankrolled all Ben's trips off the Island, who was Penny's mother, why did Libby give Desmond a sailboat, what was the sickness, why did Rousseau's crew hear the numbers on the radio, why did Claire leave Aaron ... not to mention all those silly little trifles like why was Walt so special and why did pregnant women die and what the hell was up with those numbers? But nope. They didn't feel the need to address any of those mysteries. They needed to give us a bogus backstory for two skeletons that almost no one remembered. Why?

My guess is because Damon had stupidly bragged about it back in 2007:

When all is said and done, people are going to point to the skeletons and say, ''That is proof that from the very beginning, they always knew that they were going to do this.

Of course, in his hamfisted way, he managed to prove exactly the opposite. It added nothing to that remembered moment to find out that Jacob, the 40,000 year old virgin, buried his bad twin and his another raising mother in the cave after a night of interfamily murder. We just met these people. They meant nothing to us.

Their story was tacked on, like everything else in Season Six. In fact, the whole finale could have been slapped on at any random endpoint. It wasn't a culmination or an inevitability or a hard earned catharsis. The message that after death we'll all live happily ever after with our bestest BFFs could have been, as one reviewer noted, a perfectly good finale for Saved by the Bell or Happy Days. Or a kiddie cartoon, for that matter.

What's more, by bottom loading all the mysteries and saving them for the end, rather than building them organically into the fabric of the story, they belied the pretense that they were master storytellers. A good story needs pacing. I had assumed their need for a fixed end date was in order to allow them to pace their story. But we all know now that had nothing to do with it.

We could tell that Mama Clegg was not the Island's Eve. She was only another interim hermit guardian, just like Jacob. Someone came before her, maybe the people that carved the cuneiform marks into the big stone plug. Someone before Momsy built the light sealing contraption inside the big shiny hole. Who was that person? Why did they do it? We never really learned why the Island was special, what was the source of its power, what its power really was. We never learned why the Smoke Monster had to be contained on the Island, what would have happened if he'd escaped. We entered the final battle of the story without knowing the stakes.

We just knew it was really important for Jack. Because he used to be a man of science. And now he is a man of faith. Faith in the Island. OK. But why?

The story never created any meaningful metaphor for the Island. It was the "warmest, brightest light you've ever seen or felt." It was a little piece of "something that's inside of every man." The enemy was "evil incarnate". It would all "only end once", except that - since Hurley became Jacob - it didn't! It was a myth that was never told, a myth, if we can even call it that, that never coalesced into anything more than mawkish abstractons. It meant nothing. It was just pretty pictures.

What's more, the characters themselves experienced no consequences. The very same second that The Great Jacksus laid down his life, he was handed his eternal reward. His sacrifice wasn't a sacrifice at all, just the last step in him being handed all the presents and goodies and heavenly lollipops that anyone could ever dream of.

It was a pretty sweet deal. Save the world and go straight to heaven. Doesn't really tug at my heartstrings. Or make me feel anything at all. No stakes. No consequences. No metaphor. No myth.

But all this ground has been covered, and better, by others. Few disagree that in the end the LOST "storytellers" failed in their central mission - to pull together a coherent and satisfying end to the mysteries they themselves had chosen to create. But I was surprised to see how many, at least in the immediate aftermath, seemed to think that the finale succeeded in a different area - that of giving resolution to the characters. It became like the one good thing people could say about LOST - that it was a terrible ending, but at least the characters all got "satisfying resolutions". I don't know where they're seeing that. Maybe people just need to convince themselves that it couldn't possibly be as bad as it all really, really was.

To be fair, not everyone was fooled. But far too many were. If I have to pick what I consider to be the Number One Inconvenient Truth about the LOST Finale, it would be this:

It was NOT "about the characters."

The biggest secret that Darlton managed to hide from us was that the characters never really mattered. At all. Yes, LOST had a great cast of mostly wonderful actors, who emoted the shit out of the material they were given to work with, even if it was often insane nonsense. But charismatic acting is not the same thing as good characterization.

I think the primary failure of LOST's end story was its failure to respect and resolve its characters. Except for Jack, none of the characters got any better resolution than the mysteries did.

Let's start with a somewhat minor, but nonetheless pivotal, character. Claire and her baby, who she'd been apocalyptically warned must not be raised by another, seemed to be mystically connected to the Island.

But then Claire dropped Aaron in a cabbage patch. He got raised by another anyway. And Claire became a crazed axe murderer.

That was her character arc. We never saw how she went crazy. We never saw what happened when Aaron got his Mad Mama back. We missed every interesting thing that Claire's story could ever have been about. All we know is that Claire eventually died and re-birthed Aaron in her self created purgatory while she waited for her big brother Jack to arrive, so she could spend eternity with Charlie - the guy whose death she never even mourned.

How was this character arc resolved? What is satisfying about this characterization? How is it even a characterization? It's a collection of cutesy coincidences - She's Jack's sister! She's crazy like Rousseau! Only worse! - that ultimately went nowhere and meant nothing.

Ok, maybe you say Claire's a bad example, because she wasn't an important enough character. Let's take the great John Locke then. Because no one can say Locke wasn't an important character. How did this great character get his resolution in the finale?

Well, basically he stayed dead.

Until Jack came to fix him.

John Locke, who so wanted to be special and who came to the Island and had his legs magically restored and who had a child's faith in the beautiful Island and who tried and failed to convince Jack to stay and who left what he loved and sacrificed his life for the sake of his Island - his "resolution" was that he got to wait in Limbo Land until Jack - freaking Jack - got around to not only dying, but to accepting that he was dead.

Locke's character "resolution" was to further the glory of Jack, even in death. What once seemed like an epic duel between equally matched protagonists went out with a weak, faint sounding pfffffffft. By the time the big showdown happened, Locke wasn't even there.

Like so much of the audience, Locke got screwed. Sorry, John, you were just road kill on the Highway to Jack's Heaven.

But don't worry. Be happy! It's not like there's anything we can do about it now. Except maybe this ...

Sun and Jin's "resolution" came at the end of three long seasons wherein they both did, collectively, nothing.

Finally they reunited. Then they died the next day, with not even a passing acknowledgment of the daughter who had been at the heart of their story. In Purgatory, or Limbo, or whatever the hell that Sideways bullshit was, they had to wait - for Jack, of course - until they could speak English (the language of Jack's heaven) and follow their dear leader into the light.

We can also add Sayid to the list of screwed over characters.

In post-9/11 America, it was shocking to see an Iraqi soldier in the Revolutionary Guard presented as a sympathetic character. But Sayid worked his way into our hearts, despite being the sickest killer in the bunch, because he was a passionate man. Who loved Nadia.

Nadia was at the nexus of all his moral quandaries - he betrayed his country for her, he betrayed his boyhood friend for her, he struggled off the Island and married her, only to lose her again. And with her death, he lost his soul. His character resolution? Well, first - of course - he had to wait for Jack. Obviously. Then ... uh ... he hooked up with Shannon and he got to go to Heaven!

Did this make sense to anyone???? Was this supposed to be a joke?

Sadly no. They were serious about this shit. See, Sayid didn't really love the woman he'd devoted his life to, the woman his entire story had been about. He only wanted what all men want in Geekland - a blonde American babe.

Hurley apparently lived out his roly poly life on the Island, maybe for centuries, with Ben. Although that might have made a great season of LOST all by itself, we never got a glimpse of it.

Instead we learned that the only great thing in Hurley's extremely long life was Libby, the girl he once almost went on a picnic with the day before she got shot. Nothing else. So once he finally died, he - like everyone else - waited for Jack, and then finally, I guess, he got to have a girlfriend, even if they were both dead.

Sawyer's story ended in Season Four.

We had watched his evolution, one of the most beautiful in the show,

from guilt ridden, self loathing orphan to passionate lover and hero.

But in Season Four, fanboys everywhere rejoiced as Sawyer's hotness got sucked away and he was reincarnated as a neutered Deputy Dawg, flashing big buttery grins at his tall blond Dharma-wife.

And that was it for poor Sawyer. He got to scream and cry while Juliet died ... over and over again ... then he sat on his ass until it was time for Jack to save the world. Then he did absolutely nothing for all the rest of his life until it was time for the most anticlimactic and uninspired cup of coffee in tv history. And then he hugged Jack, and he too got to pass through the pearly gates.

Character? Resolution? I can't find either one in this story. The complex, charismatic character that stole my heart and first addicted me to LOST disappeared the day he jumped off the helicopter and saved the life of the woman he loved. I watched and I hoped and I put up with Carlton's insulting insinuations that we were only watching to see him take his shirt off, but the Sawyer that I loved never ever returned to LOST.

Kate didn't do any better. We don't know when she died but we know she never met anyone better than Jack. That's sad enough. You didn't deserve that, Kate.

This is where the poor character development leads straight into The Second Inconvenient Truth About the Lost Finale:

It had a very depressing message.

In order to believe in whatever the Shiny Happy Afterlife was meant to be, we have to believe that nothing that ever happened to Kate, Sawyer or Claire after they left the Island ever meant a damn thing. They had to wait TO DIE before they could live.

Well, technically, they had to wait for JACK to die before they could live again.

If we accept that the gang in the church had to be there together because they were the only people that truly mattered to one another, we have to realize that all these people lived HORRIBLE lives here on earth. Think of all those who didn't matter to them:

Charlie Hume didn't matter to his Mom and Dad, and neither did Ji Yeon, a fetus for all eternity.

Hurley didn't want to be with Grandpa Tito or Mami Carmen or any of the people who loved and raised him.

Helen was good enough for Locke's purgatory, but she didn't rank high enough to make it into his heaven.

Jack's alcoholic, philandering daddy was the High Holy Priest in his Heaven,

but the old Moms who put up with being married to this creep didn't rate any heavenly reward.

Sorry, Margo, your son just wasn't that into you.

Juliet had no place in her heaven for the sister and nephew she longed to see for so long.

Nadia? She was no biggie to Sayid. Just a passing fling.

Boone never had anyone in his life who meant anything to him at all and the greatest moment of Shannon's life were those few weeks she spent trying to breathe without her inhaler in the Rape Caves before she got shot in the gut.

Kate and Sawyer never missed their mothers either, or Tom, or Clementine, or Kevin, or each other.

The only thing this "heaven" proved is that all of these people lived sad, loveless lives on earth. But so what if life sucked for all the Losties? They got to be in a clean, perfect heaven with all the other pretty people, paired up like the giraffes and zebras on Noah's ark.

In the LOST credo, it turned out the only thing that ever matters in life is finding a Schmoopie. Parents, children, lovers, friends - none of it means a damn thing. The key to life is The Schmoopie.

Throughout the years, LOST made a big show of flashing various religious symbols at us like stolen watches from under a trenchcoat. The Church of Shiny Happy People felt like self parody, what with all the spiritual tchotchkes stuffed into every available corner.

A dharmachakra, an aum, a menorah, a Ganesh ... I guess they couldn't find space to shove in any voodoo chicken feet or Rasta spliffs or Wiccan wands.

But no one should have been fooled. The religious message of LOST was conventional Judeo-Christian group think of the most joyless kind.

Humans must unquestioningly accept the will of a capricious, often vicious Higher Power, because he's Jacob and you're not. Life's a bitch and then you die, but in the religion of LOST, once you find your Schmoopie ... and once the great St. Jacksus arrives of course ... even cold blooded killers can all go to Hollywood Heaven together.

Damon Lindelof: This is the critical mystery of the season, which is, “What is the relationship between these two shows? ... Where’s Libby? Where’s Ana Lucia? Where’s Eko? These are all the things that you’re supposed to be thinking about.

Got that? The only question Darlton cared about answering in their finale season, the ONLY one, was this: What was the Sideways universe? The Sideways that didn't even exist until this season. And what was the big revelation about the Sideways? That it was a completely separate, non intersecting, non connecting afterlife that the characters "created for themselves" while they waited to enter Heaven, or the light, or what the fuck ever. After swearing for years their story wasn’t about Purgatory, they made their finale season all about ... frigging Purgatory! Haha! Gotcha!

It's not that making the story about Purgatory would have been such a terrible idea. It could have been a coherent theme to carry over the seasons, showing us each person's passage to Enlightenment after their death. But this mish mosh didn't even make any kind of theological sense as Purgatory. What was the point of it, except to bide everyone's time until Jackie-poo arrived? Sawyer did not create a purgatory where he could repent for the murder of the innocent sweet shrimp seller.

Kate did not atone for the wrongs she'd done. In fact, she made herself a world where she was innocent, wrongfully accused. All that bad stuff? Nevah hoppened.

Charlie was still on the junk needle in his self created purgatory, only richer than Croesus this time around.

Sun and Jin for some reason created a purgatory where they were even more miserable, where Jin killed people and Sun got shot.

And Sayid apparently filled his self created purgatory with even more murders – I guess the ones he didn’t get around to committing in his killing spree of a life.

By creating a trite, pat purgatory, all the stories we'd invested in suddenly felt shallow and pointless. In one fell swoop, they managed to dishonor almost every character and render their stories meaningless. It didn't reflect the reality of our human experience, where all our acts have real consequences, where we don't have an escape hatch into paradise, like we found out the Losties had. But this purgatory had other problems as well. Basically it just didn't make any goddamn sense.

Was the highpoint of Aaron's life really the day he was born? It's hard to imagine how horrifying this poor kid's life was if the first six hours were the highlight. Or was Aaron just a symbol, not an actual human baby with a soul of his own? Even in death, was Aaron just a prop in Jack's Heaven?

Why was Eloise worried that Desmond would take Daniel away?

If she was "awake" and understood that she was dead, why was she still in purgatory? And why didn't she understand how it worked? She had been paired with her Schmoopie, so why couldn't she get on the Ark?

What was Ben waiting for? Did he need Danielle Rousseau to wake up too?

Because of course Danielle would want to spend eternity with the mouse faced creep who made her life a living hell, rather than the dearly beloved father of her child. She just hadn't woken up yet and realized who her true schmoop was.

Why wasn't Michael allowed into Jack's heaven? He blew himself up with a bomb just like Sayid did. Why did he have to be trapped on the Island as a whisper? Was it because he didn't have a Schmoopie?

And what about poor Walt? Not only wasn't he special in any way, but none of the other 815-ers wanted him in the heaven they created for themselves. Can you believe it? They wanted Libby there, but they didn't want Walt! They wanted Penny there and most of them didn't even know who she was! Boy, they really, really held that puberty thing against him, didn't they?

Why was Juliet Jack's wife?

Seriously. Why in the hell would she create that for herself? And why would she have an imaginary son with him? Forget about the realization that her precious sister actually never meant anything to her. I'm more hung up on that numbingly redundant candy machine conversation. When Miles listened to her dead body, remember that he heard her say "it worked"? What was she talking about? The bomb worked? Her hope to never have met Sawyer worked? No! She was talking about the candy machine of course!

When Sawyer unplugged it and plugged it back in, it worked! Wow! How clever was that? I mean, that's why we all stuck with LOST, wasn't it? For stupid gimmicky shout outs and conversations written entirely in cutesy catchphrases.

See? Look! It was an Apollo candy bar! And Number 23! Holy moly! My mind, she is blown! Darlton, you iz geniuses!

So the whole Sideways/Purgatory/Bullshitland that the characters "created" for themselves after death was not about Redemption (except for Jack.) And it wasn't about Free Will, one of the other alleged "themes" of LOST. The characters may have created this place, but they didn't know they were doing it, and they didn't know why they did it, and most of the connections they unwittingly created for themselves meant absolutely nothing in the final denouement, just like all the connections built into the pre-crash flight and the off Island world meant absolutely nothing.

LOST wasn't about connections at all, you see.

It was all about how many times you can pull a meaningless WhatTheFUCK plot twist on the audience. It turns out, you can pull an entire show out of your ass based on nothing but constant gotchas and contrivances, and you'll be able to fool ... well, a whole lot of people. For a really long time. Like for six years.

I think so far we’ve established one thing: Thinking about the LOST finale is not a useful exercise. The whole Man of Faith vs. Science debate, as presented on LOST, was designed to undermine the value of thought and contemplation, to degrade intellectualism. Just believe. Just have "faith". And what we were asked to have Faith in on LOST was ... Nonsense. On LOST, the Faith argument was used to hide lazy thinking and cheap storytelling. The only thing we were having Faith in all along was Chuck E. Cheese.

So here's another Inconvenient Truth that we learned from the finale:

LOST had no intellectual design behind it.

In the past if I'd seen this image of the Monster being thrown off the cliff:

I'd have dug out my favorite Dore print of Lucifer being thrown out of heaven. But at this point that feels like it would only be giving them a respect they don't deserve. I wasn't impressed that Jack's hicky turned out to be a mark from the tip of a knife. I really didn't care that Jack stumbled to his death from a wound to his right side, like the wound Doubting Thomas pondered in the picture Jack gazed at in 316. I can't be bothered to dig out images to illustrate these things. I get it. Symmetry. Mirrors.

I always did love the visual imagery of LOST, but you can't just throw random symbolic elements onscreen and call that a story.

By the end, LOST had lost all its intrigue for me, 100%. Without a story behind them, symbols alone feel superficial, and cloyingly facile.

I had given up on the idea that there was an intelligent design behind LOST's Famous Thinker Namedropping, but I was still dumbfounded by how incredibly facile and superficial the use of imagery became.

Not only could we tell that a man was good based on whether he was blond and blue eyed (Aryan=Good) and wearing a white tunic, but we could even tell the moral destiny of a baby by the color of his blanket! And see! They were playing a game. Like how the LOST writers were playing a game with us.

I can't have been the only one who misread Damon Lindelof's New York Times editorial some years ago. Remember how he had the audacity to lecture J.K.Rowlings on how she should end the Harry Potter books? I think a lot of people thought he was advising her to be brave, to do the unexpected, to do the unpopular. But re-reading that thing, it's obvious he was saying no such thing. In point of fact, he was laying out exactly the way he planned to end LOST - catering to what he considered to be the stupidity and short attention spans of the American public.

THE BOY WHO DIED...

"We Yanks, however, do not want froufrou endings. We want things definitively tied up. And by “things” I mean lots of people dead."

"We really like gratuitous explosions."

"Because if there’s one thing we like more than explosions, it’s surprises."

I kind of wish, as an American, that people like Damon wouldn't speak for what "we Yanks" appreciate. I'd just like to let the global audience out there know that not all Yanks tell their kids to shut up and eat cheese and not all Yanks are proud of being stupid and unimaginative.

I am one Yank who became totally enchanted by the "froufrou" of LOST's endless literary, religious, scientific and philosophical allusions. Yes, I gradually recognized that it was an exercise in futility, but I still hoped against hope that there was some bare bones design behind it all, some order to the chaos. But the truth is out now: There wasn't any. Ever.

Cuse and Lindelof have dropped plenty of guideposts along the way. Several characters are named for authors or philosophers (Locke, Milton, Rousseau, the Zen master Dogen) whose concepts play into the story, and classic works of literature sneak into key scenes. The writers say they use these references as "a tip of the cap" to their influences, as Lindelof puts it, "as opposed to saying, 'Hey, we came up with this idea for the first time."

In other words, they were saying that great minds in history had addressed great issues and told great stories ... but Lindelof and Cuse weren't trying to do that. They were just copycats. Who didn't have the skills. Sort of like this:

I think Darlton should have taken this full disclosure thing one step further. The writers who influenced them weren’t Lewis Carroll or James Joyce or C.S. Lewis. Come on, guys! Be honest. The literary influences in your writing room were more along these lines, right?

Killer the dog WAS. Now Killer was born to a three-legged bitch mother. And he was always ashamed of this, man. And then right after that, he's adopted by this man, Tito Liebowitz. He's a small-time gunrunner and, uh, rottweiler fight promoter. So he puts Killer into training, next thing you know Killer's GOOD! He is DAMN good! But then, he had the fight of his life. They pit him against his brother Nibbles. And Killer said, "No, man, that's my brother, I can't fight Nibbles!" And he made him fight anyway. And then Killer, Killed Nibbles. And Killer said, "That's it!" And he called off all his fights, and he started doing crack, and he ffffffff-FREAKED OUT. And then in a rage, he collapsed, and his heart... no longer beat. Wow.

Anyone who ever followed Damon Lindelof on Twitter, begging people to vote up LOST on some poll where it was losing out to Ghost Hunters or something, knows that this dude believed in the power of the button pushers. He said as much in another inadvertent admission hidden in that infamous NY Times editorial:

"I read an article recently saying that 80 percent of American poll respondents said they thought Harry wouldn’t survive the final book. As is the case in many polls, there’s probably a degree of wish-fulfillment here. In other words, we want the little bugger to die."

I don't see how poll watching could ever be a good practice in any creative enterprise. It seems to me that "conventional wisdom" is in itself the death knell of originality. But we do know the boy wonders liked to follow polls, and given the dumbassery of the LOST fandom, this may possibly explain how LOST managed to fail so utterly. Let's look for a minute at the kind of fans who truly and deeply loved this LOST finale. First of all there's people like this lovely young Jate fan:

Fuck you all, dirty whores. Yes I'm talking abotu real people because you suck and fail at life. I loathe you all haters, you deserve all the spit and shit on your faces as you can get for all those years trolling the internet. Our fandom doesn't have any respect? STFU you son of a bitch you! Keep fooling yourselves that Skate was eyefucking the whole season. You're only embarrasssing yourselves, even some decent skaters can see. Yes, there are sane skaters out there who appreciate them sanely.

These are your fans, Damon. You own them now. Don't look now, but they may be all you got left. We've learned now that fanmail campaigns and obsessive poll rigging pay off when the writers have neither balls nor any kind of plan. Sure, you managed to destroy your show's reputation and legacy, and sure, your name will be mud to any LOST fan who ever tried to follow the show on an intelligent level, but you did manage to satisfy geniuses like the poster quoted above. So, uh ... Congrats?

It would be wrong for me to blame the batshit Jate/Suliet fans entirely for how inane and angry the LOST online discourse became. By far the bigger culprits were the vicious, often misogynist fanboy types who camped out at the site run by my old friend DarkUFO. Given Darlton's addiction to pandering to the lowest common denominator in the fandom, there's no way they weren't aware of the whims of Fanboy Central. On that loud, big, spoiler whoring board, any sensible disagreement or alternate viewpoint about LOST was systematically shouted down, mocked to shit and banned out of existence by the torch and pitchfork carrying villagers.

It's sad to think that LOST was once considered cutting edge precisely because of the cyber-conversation that had grown up between fans and writers, a conversation that may have ultimately destroyed the integrity of the story. Laura Miller's Salon piece makes a great case for another Inconvenient Truth:

LOST was "Ruined By Its Own Fans"

From statements the producers of "Lost" have made over the past five years, they developed a dynamic with die-hard fans (and disillusioned fans and skeptical non-fans) that was infinitely more complex than any of the personal relationships among the series' characters. Could it be that in resisting the geekiest, nitpickingest, most Aspergerian demands of their audience they swung too far in the opposite direction, dismissing as trivial everything but the cosmic (the tedious and largely unnecessary Jacob-Smokey background) and the sentimental (making sure that every character receives his or her designated soul mate or therapeutic closure of the most banal Dr. Phil variety)? If so, "Lost" may be the quintessential example of a pop masterpiece ruined by its own fans.

Infintely more complex, indeed. DarkUFO was despised, and rightly so, by the LOST inner circle, because of his thoughtless and selfish spoiling of their big Season 3 and 4 finale surprises. So, was it REVENGE that made Darlton write an endgame that fanboys hated even more than Skaters? If so then the irony of Fanboys and Skaters being on the same side is delicious. Nice job, dudes.

Fanboys and Skaters were the natural enemies of the LOST Fan Kingdom. Aside from Andy Page's smarmy egotism, the defining feature of his site was his petty vindictiveness towards Skaters, most likely because we were the ones who unmasked him for the poll rigging liar and all around skeevebag that he was. How petty was he? I don’t think anyone outside of Fishbiscuitland quite understands. For years he lurked 24/7 on our board under his chosen alias:

mary2009!

Miss Mary mostly just used our site as one of the many from which he’d steal spoilers or pictures or media mentions, all of which he’d post on his own board without credit. But in the run up to the finale, his juvenile pettiness was on full display. One night, when I guess he was getting bored down in that basement bunker, he put on his best squealing imitation of what he thought a dumbass Skater fangirl would sound like:

I juust had my friends sister email me about the finale. She works on the set if LOST She told me that in the finale that Kate tells Jack she loves him Uve now given up on this show after the Juliet kiss scen

And then a few moments later:

They are sending me scans tomorrow. And they will send to dark UFO tomorrow as well I promise I am not lying and this is real I wish it was not: (((((((((

I busted him right away, explaining that even squalid fangirls were smart enough to trace an IP, and he ran straightaway, skirts flying over his head, to erase the evidence that he was, in fact, every bit the petty, juvenile twit we’d always known him to be. Apparently he didn’t want anyone to know that the great and powerful DarkUFO loved to troll among the squalid shippergirls he always claimed to despise. We banned the bastard after that, but Lord knows how many other sock puppets this douchebag had over the years, or how deeply into the pie his poll rigging fingers really were. It’s all water under the bridge now, thankfully – one more reason to be happy that LOST is over.

LOST is over, MaryAndy. Suck it up. You have to go out and get a job now.

MaryAndy may have just been one of the creepy curiosities of the LOST fandom, but his Skate Hate was something that was shared by most of the fanboys who followed LOST, including, it seems the Alpha Nerds who wrote this dreck. It brings me to one of the biggest downers of my LOST experience. Maybe it doesn't quite count as an Inconvenient Truth, but it's a Truth nonetheless.

Nerds hate romance.

In fact, I’m pretty sure that most nerds wouldn't know Romance if it jumped up and kissed them on the mouth. That’s part of what makes them nerds, after all. Sci Fi and Fantasy genres have never been a romance friendly milieu. Romance, when it appears at all, is generally very stilted and unrealistic, and caters to the male sensibility exclusively. Most women in this genre are blond. All women are beautiful, although beauty is completely optional for the male half. It is common, and preferable, in Nerd Romance, that the female abjectly worship her mate. Strangely, though, Nerd Romance rarely features ... s.e.x.

I'm sure many are wondering how I feel about Sawyer and Kate being left flat in the finale, about them being the only couple left out of the great cosmic circle jerk. Every obscure, asexual couple in the show's history, from the non starter of Daniel & Charlotte to the anti-romance of Ben & Danielle got some kind of validation in the story, yet the long romance of Sawyer & Kate, deeply embedded into the fiber of the story, was ignored completely. I was disappointed, but not shocked, and not all that broken up over it. It's hardly the only thing that didn't make sense, and it’s not like it made the finale any worse. I don't think there was any way it could have been any worse, to be honest. It may well have been a blessing in disguise that they didn't pander to Skaters. If they had, I might have been tempted to watch it again, and this way I'm forever protected from that fate.

The gloopy cheese-bubbles that were meant to signal eternal schmoopiness in the "The End" made the Gray's Anatomy's finale look like Shakespeare. I don't think LOST could possibly have trivialized the idea of romantic love more if they tried.

Basically, the way Romance ended up being depicted on LOST, the uglier a romance was,

the less we saw it happen,

the less sensual it was,

the more weird and shallow and gimmicky it was

- the more likely it was to end up depicted as Twu Wuv in the finale.

Sayid and Nadia's series long love story, just like Sawyer and Kate's, ended up meaning nothing. In both cases, the women were swapped out for the leggy blonde at the last second. Meanwhile, Jack and Kate, who spent the last two seasons in a deep funk of apathy towards one another were magically transformed with one last WTF into the most vapid kind of Nerd Lovers imaginable.

These writers had no intuitive sense of how to write romance, and what's more they seemed to have a strange antipathy towards the concept of passionate sexual love. It's incredible, but true, in the entire run of the whole series, there was only ONE deeply romantic, loving sex scene in the full six years.

Yes, it was one of the greatest tv love scenes ever and yes, it will be remembered long after this dreadful finale is forgotten, but still ... Only one! In six years! That's shocking. It almost makes you wonder what other issues these guys were repressing. Women were never important to these writers as anything other than babymakers and schmoopies. Sex for the most part was invisible, except when it was making women pregnant so they could die. But when it came time for the Darlton to imagine what the secret in the bowels of the Island would look like, they created a big rod. And a shiny wet hole.

I know. Ew. But don't blame me. I didn't write this shit. The ultimate denouement of this phallic fantasy was that the big hero man had to stick his rod back into the hole. Then the world was saved. And Jack was bathed in an orgasm of light.

Sheesh. These two guys should have just taken their Jack Action Figure and gotten themselves a room.

The LOST writers, of course, chose to make a love triangle central to their story from the very beginning, and to keep it there and promote it until the bitter end.

For years, we heard - from the mouths of the Darlton themselves - that Sawyer was their Han Solo. Even a Star Wars neophyte understands that Han is the romantic hero of the story. He's charismatic and sexy and adorable in all the ways that Luke is not and can never be. It's a type, an archetype, and an especially entertaining one, in my opinion.

But LOST, since it couldn't be original in any other way, decided that this well loved archetype would be the one, the only one, that would stand on its head. They de-sexed their Han Solo and made sure that he ended up getting gotz in the end of the story. There could be no romantic victory for Sawyer, just like there could be no heroic victory, because nothing could be allowed to deflect any light from the greater glory of the magnificent Jackass. Sawyer's fate, and the fate of Sawyer and Kate as a love story, was one more casualty of LOST's Revenge of the Alpha Nerds.

And here's the last saddest, most Inconvenient Truth :

LOST was never anything more than The Jack Show.

All of it was just passing time until it was time for Damon's surrogate, Jack Shephard, to win all the marbles. The only character that got any true resolution in this story was Jack. Jack became Jacob! Then he gave up being Jacob! Then he killed the bad guy! Then he saved the world! Then he died a great hero, knowing he'd saved the world! Then he won the Kate trophy! Forever! In heaven! If you ever doubted that this was The Jack Show, check it out: No one could go into Heaven until Jack got there. He was even the most important person in Heaven!

It's a very inconvenient, but unavoidable, truth that these two rich, mainstream Hollywood white guys could only envision a story that revolved around a privileged mainstream white guy like themselves. It's laughable to think back at how LOST was once considered a groundbreaking show because of its multicultural cast. As the years went by, the black people disappeared, the Asians learned to speak proper English, the Middle Eastern man became an evil beast and the females all became interchangeable schmoopies. Even the lesser white men had to take a backseat to the Great Jacksus. Locke ended up inert,

Desmond ended up not being very special after all,

and Sawyer was kept around as nothing but eye candy.

The decks had to be cleared to make sure no one, at any time, outshone the Great White Hero. Face it, even Purgatory was Jack's Wet Dream. Who besides Jack got a damn thing out of this Sideways world we're told they all allegedly created for themselves?

Claire was still the unwanted bastard stepsister who was pregnant with a baby she didn't really want. Kate was still a fugitive. Sayid still a killer. Charlie still a junky. Locke still crippled. In Jack's wet dream, Sawyer couldn't even get a woman! If nothing else, that proved that we were living in Jack's fantasy world.

But look at what Purgatory was like for King Jacksus. He was the generous kindly brother to Claire that he had never been in real life. He got both of Sawyer's women before he did, and even impregnated one! He magically cured Locke’s spine. Who needs a miraculous mystical Island when you’ve got St. Jack? Miracles were just all in a day’s work for him.

Purgatory was so custom made to make sure Jack would be comfy in his new afterlife that he even got a whole fake person tailor made for him - David.

Now, David, of course never really existed. Poor kid, I'm sure it would ruin his day to find that out. Once Jack had been convinced that he would have been the bestest daddy in all the world, David, I guess, just poofed away. Jack was done with him, he returned to the void to which all things go that Jack no longer has any need of. His only function was to help Jack work out the all important Jackiness of being Jack.

I really can’t think of any way they could have undermined their quasi-spiritual “message” any more completely than by focusing the entire endgame on the glorification of only one character. I know LOST prided itself on making pseudo-religious pudding out of all the world’s great faiths and philosophies, but I’d really like clarification on which mutant religion they drew their inspiration from for this final act. In what faith is the individual ego considered a viable path to salvation or nirvana or enlightenment? Make no mistake: this final episode was about about one person and one person only. It was about Jack fulfilling all of Jack’s dreams,

about Jack becoming the hero that Jack always wanted to be,

about Jack not being a drunk or a stalker psycho ex husband,

about Jack having the perfect son who loved him perfectly,

about Jack getting the respect from Dad that Jack always wanted,

about Jack fixing everything for everyone just like Jack always obsessed over,

and about everyone loving and wanting and waiting for Jack before any of them could start their eternal afterlives. The message wasn't "Live together or die alone". It was "die alone and wait for Jacksus to lead us into paradise."

With this predictable, but disastrous, narrative choice to focus on only one character above all the others, Lost managed to destroy the last hope that LOST could ever have been a great story with a message that was universal or transcendant. The strength of LOST had once been in the variety of its characters, in the way, that each one of them represented a slice of humanity, a slice of heroism, a slice of each of us. If there had been a truly humanist vision behind the LOST story, each of us could have seen ourselves in some incarnation within the story. We could have come away with some unifying vision of what it means to be human and to be connected to other humans. I think this is what many of us had hoped for. I know I wasn’t the only one who imagined that's what we were witnessing. This TIME Magazine article gives a great interpretation of what LOST could have been, what so many of us thought it would be, but what it sadly decided it didn't want to be:

But Lost has not a single protagonist but a huge ensemble of heroes and antiheroes with checkered pasts. The loser, the con artist, the arrogant doctor, the fugitive, the junkie: each has his or her part in the quest, which has less to do with good beating evil than determining how to be good, less to do with getting the happy ending than finding out what it means to have a happy ending. Collectively, they are — to borrow the title of Joseph Campbell's classic study of myth — the Hero with a Thousand Faces, or at least a dozen or so. It's a concept of heroism for our complicated, connected world, where problems are too complex for a single savior.

LOST's problems weren't too complex for Jack. He solved them all, all by himself. Locke tried to save everyone but only ended up giving the Monster a body to use. Desmond thought he could do it, but he couldn’t. Sawyer, Kate, Sayid, Sun, Jin, Charlie, Claire, Hurley, Ben – they may have moved the problems along, but none of them helped to solve or fix a damn thing. It was Jack, all Jack, only Jack.

The Geniuses in Chief liked to say that the show was telling them what it wanted to be about. We couldn't hear it, being mere peons of the audience, but I guess what the show was telling them was that it wanted to pretend for a really long time to be about cool, intriguing characters and ideas and mysteries ... but then at the last minute it wanted to be about Jack getting his ass kissed, his balls washed and a big fat halo super glued on to his head.

So, LOST is over. Finally. And good riddance to it. Sometimes I still find questions popping into my head. Like:

Why did Kate wear a dress into the church but then showed up inside wearing pants?

Or, if Michael said the whispers were souls trapped on the island, why was Duckett who died in Australia trapped there telling Sawyer “it would come back around”?

And like why did Hurley and Ben have to stay behind on the Island if the Smoke Monster was finally DEAD?

But then I slap myself and realize – I don’t have to think about this shit anymore! Ever! And that’s good, because finally it's safe to admit what many of us suspected, but never wanted to say: It was all bullshit.

Is there anything good to say about LOST in the wake of this debacle? Well, the music of Michael Giacchino was always stirring and emotional. The visuals of this show were magnificent. All kudos to the Art and Cinematography departments of LOST. The acting was often stellar and I hope to follow many of the actors into bigger and better careers. And of course, I’ve made some great friends, some of the smartest and wittiest people on the internet, and we made a home at Fishbiscuitland, which is staying open for business. But that’s about it. This was the kind of finale that nullifies a series, that ruins it forever, that renders any rewatch moot. And that’s not an easy thing to do. That kind of failure comes around only once every few decades. So I guess Darlton can claim that distinction. However, I really don't think they should ever show their faces at another Comic Con.

It occurs to me we still haven’t settled on an actual, literal last word. I think we know what Darlton's last word to the fans was:

But as for myself? I always enjoyed sprinkling quotes on my LOST recaps. How about this? LOST was ...

... a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

Oh, well.

2010-04-24T06:14:00.001-07:00

POINT OF NO RETURN

"Life must be understood backwards ... but it must be lived forwards."-Soren Kierkegaard

We've been through a lot these past six years, we LOST fans, since we first met 14 plane crash survivors on a deserted tropical Island.

We've flashed forward and backward and sideways and all around the timespace continuum.

We've experienced the hatches and the cages and the purge and the nosebleeds and the flaming arrows and the visitations of ghosts. We've travelled on the outriggers and the raft, Ajira Flight 316 and a Beechcraft full of drug smuggling Nigerian priests, the Black Rock, the Elizabeth, Penny's Boat and Not Penny's Boat.

We've been through pushing the button and not pushing the button and how the Donkey Wheel blooped away the Island and how the pendulum in the Lamppost showed the way to get blooped back on to it. We've been to Jacob's cabin and his lighthouse, the cave of numbers, the above ground Temple, the below ground Temple, the inside of the giant four toed foot. We've played I Spy with the numbers and the hieroglyphics, the mirrors, the Virgin Marys, the snowglobes and polar bears, black and white rocks, White Rabbits!

We've picked through the cultural detritus of Enlightenment philosophers, quantum physicists, Joseph Campbell, Stephen King, Star Wars, the Matrix, evil twins and bad daddies, Faustus and Satan and Job, Genesis, Exodus, the Book of John.

And we've wondered and wondered about all the many mysteries. About how the Island gave John back his legs and made him special. About Walt's secret powers and why Aaron couldn't be raised by another and why the super!sperm! made babies that consumed their mothers from within and whether dropping the atomic bomb caused the Incident or prevented it and why Jack's dad's body wasn't in the coffin but was wandering about the world looking for ways to make Jack cry.

Our heads are spinning. How could they not be? If the ultimate intention was to make sure the audience entered the finale sequence as LOST as a bunch of disoriented drunks who've just been strapped to a chair in Room 23, then they've succeeded.

Mission Accomplished, dudes!

We all knew this time would come, when our individual visions of what LOST could be or should be or might be would inevitably have to yield to the oncoming reality of what LOST actually is.

It's time to recalibrate our expectations and prepare for landing. I think we've all realized by now there's no way LOST is ever going to come together like a clock. If you had any doubts, just check out how Sun (injured the day after Flight 815 landed) and Locke (injured at least a week after Flight 815 landed) ended up side by side on stretchers in the emergency room.

When did they stop trying? I've stopped looking for an overall design or even any kind of coherent theme. Not with Jack the Man of Science becoming a Man of Faith who swims back to be with the Monster who engineered the murder of the actual Man of Faith. What the hell does he have faith in exactly? Becoming another sucker?

Is there any way Fate v. Free Will can come out of this garble meaning anything? Is Redemption still a concept with any definition in this tale where "justice" is so random and never lands on the right people?

To make matters more muddled, the Sideways Reality, which initially felt like an amusing puzzle, has gradually devolved into a mindless child's fantasy where no one dies and Twu Wuv hits you like a lightning bolt from a star many galaxies away. I'm waiting for the teddy bears and pink unicorns to appear any episode now.

There have been times in the past few weeks when I've felt like this whole warm and fuzzy ending they seem to be dumping on us feels about as profound as when the Brady Bunch took that awesome vacay in Hawaii.

But I've come this far. I'll slug it out til the end. I can't imagine what a daunting prospect this endgame had to be for Darlton. There's still an element of suspense involved here. As Carlton Cuse said recently, no one knows yet if they're going to belly flop or whether there's still a way they can land this baby without making an absolute mess.

Either way, I'm going to speak my mind. That's the beauty of having your own blog and no boss to answer to. So read on at your own risk and if the things I write piss you off, then I don't really know what to say. Except this:

That being said ... I liked this week's episode. LOL. It was fun. I was surprised and sad to see it end. It wasn't a brilliant episode, but it entertained me. Maybe it's because no matter how inane the storyline, LOST is always such a beautiful visual experience. Or maybe it was because, like the Locke Monster said, it was just so nice to have everyone all together again.

No, I don't think it brought us any closer to understanding anything, but I've learned something over my little mini break. Most of us dweebs still left haunting the LOST online community - and there aren't that many of us left, if you notice - have obsessed each week over the minutia. The Easter Eggs and book titles and odd surnames of the side characters we otherwise wouldn't give a shit about.

Forgive me if I'm late to the party, but I've just come to the realization that, aside from the fun factor, none of that means anything. Chasing down those dead end rabbit holes is how we wind up getting so lost. This episode was pretty Easter Egg lite, for example, and I've noticed how much that frustrates a lot of the fandom. They want Easter Eggs. They think they need them to understand LOST. But I think they're wrong. Take, for example, this apple.

A lot of people latched on to the apple in this scene and jumped, predictably, on to the Adam and Eve bandwagon. Might Sawyer and Kate be Adam and Eve? What was the significance of Kate not taking the apple? That means she can't be Eve, right? Cause Eve took the apple. So Sawyer must be the snake! Satan! He's tempting her!

And she's refusing! She's redeemed!

Uh, yeah ... except, you know ... Not.

I know this is a difficult concept for LOST fans, but I think it might be worth considering. Sometimes an apple is just an apple. James isn't tempting Kate. He's bringing her a freakin' snack. Think of it as an apple shaped fishbiscuit, if you like.

In any case, the apples were beside the point entirely. They were only there to give the most nerd-afflicted among us something to fixate on while they ignore all that nasty sexy chemistry Sawyer and Kate can generate in a world without Ghost Juliet haunting them. (Some day I really want someone to explain to me why fanboys hate sexy hot chemistry.)

Since I'm trying to leave minutia behind, I won't comment overly much on the symmetry of the two characters. The way they're dressed the same.

The way they cock their knees up when they talk to one another, while those tempting Easter Apples sit there in between them, being distracting.

The way No. 15 and No. 51 can't help but flirt with one another, even under less than ideal circumstances, in this Mirror World they're in.

The way, as Det. Ford so astutely observes, it's like "someone" is trying to put them together. I read this week that Vozzek thought this scene was all but pointless. Seems like there's a lot What Vozzek Didn't Notice. Like the way that Kate can read Sawyer in any universe, even a universe where he's never been Sawyer.

She knew he helped her in the elevator because he wanted to keep his trip to Australia secret. OtherKate knows James the same way Kate knew Sawyer on the Island. Intuitively. She sees into him without even trying. Even though she just met him for the first time ... if there is such a thing as a "first time" in OtherLOST.

If you followed the bouncing Easter Apple, you'd see the other half of this puzzle clicking into place in the Island storyline. Sawyer, who was looking mighty fine as the take charge manly-man this week, was keeping his Freckles close to his side at all times.

He made a unilateral decision that Claire wasn't coming with them - because she'd tried to kill Kate.

For those of us not wearing our Suliet goggles, it was made redundantly clear that Sawyer's priority has shifted back to protecting Kate. And Kate knows it.

In order to get Claire on to the boat, she gives Sawyer an ultimatum she knows he can't refuse.

If he doesn't let Claire on the boat, she won't be coming with him either. Game over. Kate wins. She knows that, when it comes to Sawyer, she is still the only bartering chip that matters.

Same as it ever was.

So what does that mean about where the story's headed, about where the Lurve Triangle is headed? Danged if I know. I'm just observing it, not predicting anything. Hell, if Hurley can experience a mind meld from a kiss on the cheek by a doppelganger of the crazy lady who tried to help him with his eating disorder four (?) years ago in a different dimension (?), then all bets are off. Kate may end up being the person who conned Sawyer's parents .... and no, it won't matter that she wasn't born yet at the time. Only fools are enslaved by time and space, baby. You should all know that by now.

This episode, like all Season Six episodes, was designed like a tapestry, a quilt of nostalgic building blocks. I think every viewer has finally grokked to the patterns of Season Six. There is very little that is new. It's all about revisiting the past, remembering things we loved and lost.

No matter how I feel about LOST this season, it will always have a piece of my heart. And all season long, whether we've been aware of it or not, they've been giving us our last chances to hug and kiss LOST goodbye.

The Elizabeth returned,

after not having been seen since Season Three's Glass Ballerina.

OtherJack found out he had a sister,

and he reacted the exact same way he did the other time he found out he had a sister. Head pinch!

OtherJohn ended up face down with his spinal column filleted open like a fish's.

Just like Ben, John's mirror person, did in Season Three's I Do.

Although in this season of old home reunions, I can't believe they didn't have Big Gay Tom show up as one of the male nurses in Jack's operating theater. Talk about your missed opportunities!

Locke's dural sac was "obliterated". Dural sacs are the body parts Jack operates on during moments of self discovery.

Just like he was doing when his dad taught him about conquering fear through the Power of Five.

Jack finally took that leap of faith that Eloise had been urging on him in 316.

And even if it was kind of dinky and ... uh, lame,

it was meant to remind us of the far, far greater leap his Lurve Triangle buddy took in Season Three.

Poor Jack. He just can't look cool no matter what he does, can he? I mean, how bad did he need that knapsack? And wouldn't it make more sense to jump off the back of the boat?

When Jack washes up exhausted onto the beach, his new master, The NotJohn Monster, greets him with the words "Nice day for a swim."

The very words Juliet used when Sawyer made the same (but yes, cooler) kind of beach landing in No Place Like Home.

Other phrases are repeated.

Ben tells the ambulance attendant "His name is John", the same Biblical phrase Locke's teenage mother used when she gave him that name.

But we're not really looking back as much as it might appear. When Kate asks Sawyer "When were you planning on telling me this?" - just as she did in the cages -

Sawyer doesn't answer "Never", as he did back then. He says "Now."

And when Kate repeats the famous chorus of "We have to go baaaaaack", Sawyer makes it plain he's had enough of that shit.

"We're done going back."

We can only hope that line turns out to be true, because the time has come. It's nice looking back at old seasons and episodes and faces and places and phrases and such. But we're running out of time to wrap this thing up. All this self referential perpetual looping isn't going to get us any closer to the solution to our puzzle. Unless, of course, the solution is that there isn't any solution. Maybe the whole point was just to get us lost, and if they ever let us get found, the whole story will evaporate from its own lack of weight. Maybe they can't give us the solution because the big secret is they don't have one.

I can't blame them for dallying, because it's always sad to see a long trip end. But LOST has become like a too long road trip in a too small car. The fandom is cranking on each other's nerves (not to mention leaving really nasty comments on recappers blogs). For better or worse, for richer or poorer, we need to finally get to our destination.

We were reminded again recently that the intent was to focus the story on the characters above the mythology in this final season.

The executive producers of Lost have explained that they always wanted viewers to engage with the show's characters....Cuse continued: "By not having the audience talk about the mythology, then people are engaged in, 'Is Kate going to end up with Sawyer?' and, 'I'm really compelled by the complexities of Benjamin Linus'. Those are the things we wanted the audience to obsess about, not whether the Valenzetti equation had any relevance to the functioning of the island's magical time travel properties. ... Meanwhile, Cuse's co-creator Damon Lindelof explained that the narrative of the series had been driven by the characters."

I like to think that's true. I like to think the characters will come to conclusions that feel real, even within this fantasy world. I don't want it all to hinge on a trivial gimmick. I'm not a fan of the WTF-Gotcha! style of storytelling. I can admire the brilliance of a long con done right, but I'm never impressed by cheap tricks. I want to believe Darlton when they say it's the characters that matter most to them. So I will.

This episode might have been subtitled "Catching Up", a phrase that was repeated twice.

Two long awaited character reunions shared the spotlight. First there was the awkward, but sweet, reunion of Christian's two kids. In both worlds.

I'm not going to nitpick and say it would have meant a little more if it happened a little sooner. Or if Jack had ever given the smallest indication that he gave a fiddler's fart about Claire.

Or if there seemed to be any actual point to them being brother and sister. I'm not even going to comment on the fact that, within an hour of this grand reunion, Jack was already bailing on his crazy haired kid sis.

Because, you know, big brothers will do that kind of thing. Sad, but true. They never want their baby sister around when they're hanging out with the kool kidz.

And I'm not going to quibble about the quality of the looooooooong awaited reunion of Sun and Jin either. It has been so long since that fateful day.

I had almost forgotten how vibrant their storyline once was, how real their loss once felt.

It was good just seeing them in the same frame again.

Kissing in front of an admiring audience and speaking ... English.

OK, so it was a little less intimate, a little less authentic, than we might have wished, but you'd have to have a heart of stone not to tear up just a little.

And if nothing else, it was a great relief to see that neither one of them got fried by the electric fence.

Claire and Kate's misbegotten relationship took another baby step forward this week.

Kate had agreed to leave Claire behind when she swam out to the boat with Sawyer, but you could tell she didn't really want to. When Claire put her on the spot, she spoke from the heart.

She didn't mention that Claire was the one who left her baby lying around like a juicy hamburger in a boar infested jungle. She just took all the blame. And then, just to be safe, she also took Claire's gun. Trust, but verify.

I also enjoyed Jack and Sawyer's confrontation in this episode. I agreed with Jack that he didn't belong on that boat. But, dude, if you love the Island so much, why did you get on it in the first place?

Jack has become a total Moonie. It's not just the Island that has cast its spell on him. He's also under the spell of Big Bad NotJohn.

As the group sails away on the Elizabeth, Jack sits in the prow, doing his Man of the Island pose.

The one he was practicing after his encounter with Jacob's Lighthouse.

Jack and Sawyer are switching places. Hell, there were a few times I almost wondered if Jack was switching genders.

Jack has obviously become Locke, but I wasn't seeing Sawyer as the new Jack. To me, this week, he was all Han Solo.

Not just Han Solo. When he ordered Jack to "Get off my ship!", he was channeling his namesake, Harrison Ford. Dig it.

Sawyer isn't taking any shit from anyone anymore. He's had it, he's fed up, he's done.

GTFO, Jack. Time to paddle away and embrace your inner sucker. And, of course, in keeping with the total snowjob they've done on Jack and Kate's relationship this year, Jack doesn't even bother to throw Kate a parting glance, let alone plant a spectacular kiss on her. Sorry, Kate, looks like he's just not that into you. Turns out that Jack's true love is the Island.

Before he took his little dump into the drink, Jack spoke hypnotically, reverentially, about the Island he'd just tried to blow up a few days before. He confessed to James - calling him "James" just like Locke used to do - that when he'd left the Island, he felt a part of himself was missing.

I laughed when Sawyer told him there were pills for conditions like that. Ha! As if Jack doesn't know that. He's a doctor. Duh.

The true "ultimate relationship" of LOST has become a bit of a muddle, along with everything else.

It's still all about Jack and Locke. Except now Jack is Locke, and Locke is ... no more.

I'm not sure what the characters of Jack and John represent any longer, since it's not as if Locke himself ever had a meaningful identity in the first place. Sucks to be called a sucker by the alien being that made you believe you were special just so he could get you killed and make you into his meat sock, doesn't it?

Identity has always been a flexible concept on LOST.

The Oceanic Six pretended to be heroes and wore that false identity with flair.

Kate took on the identity of being Aaron's mother and really seemed to believe her wishes could make it be true.

Sawyer pretended to be LaFleur, which goes to show how fragile identity really is. If they could turn a hot badass like Sawyer into a happy housepet, then it's as if anyone can be anybody. There are no limits.

They're certainly pushing the envelope with this season's absurdist journey into OtherLOST. Are we really meant to think that the OtherPeople we've been meeting are the same people as the Island Losties we've known for so long? Is this kindly gentleman helping John in the ambulance

the same person who strangled him dead on the floor of a hotel room?

Is Jack, the father of David,

the same person who has lived 40 some years in a world where his Mini Me doesn't exist and never will?

I have the feeling the only way I'm going to understand the ending of LOST is if I turn off my brain and just enjoy the detour from Crazy Town onto Stupid Street. I'm starting to think they want us to embrace OtherLOST because it's a shinier and happier world. Who cares if it's fake and has nothing whatsoever to do with the story we watched for five years? We get to see Jack has what it takes to be a great dad! Isn't that what it was always all about?

I'm starting to wonder if the man who once described a happy Harry Potter ending as cowardly is honestly going to let his story end in a world so treacly sweet that it will send us all into diabetic shock. Dead people will come back to life! Twu Wuvs will kiss and get their memories back! It will be like a Disney cartoon. You'll be able to bring the kiddies.

I won't go into the philosophical detail I did last time trying to explain how counterfeit this kind of ending would be. But I do have one question: If they all remember their lives from the original timeline, what happens to the memories they already have?

Does innocent little Claire raise her baby with a memory of the time she wasn't raising him, but was putting axes in people's bellies instead?

Do they all get diagnosed with multiple personality disorder and spend the rest of their lives together in Santa Rosa?

I have a few other questions.

Like why did an un-fridged Ilana stop being Russian?

Does Frank's continued survival mean we may see Ajira 316 fly again?

How did the well shrink?

I know Sayid didn't kill Desmond, but does Sayid's ability to decide against the Monster's orders mean he's getting his soul back?

What was it that Desmond promised him? Was it better than what the Monster promised?

OtherDesmond has become OtherJacob.

He's stalking all the Losties, in that same inappropriate personal space invading way that Jacob had.

I'm not sure what the method is to his madness. It seemed like he was an interdimensional Suzy Matchmaker, but now he's also reading minds. He knew about Libby and Hurley's picnic, for instance, which made no sense, since the only thing he ever knew about Libby was that she had a boat she wanted to get rid of.

And now we see he somehow knew the secrets of Christian Shephard's will and was making sure to put his longlost children together.

Is that going to trigger a flash for someone? What triggers the flashes anyway? The past few weeks made it seem like the flashes were the lightning bolts of true love, but that doesn't match with what we saw this week.

Why didn't Sun flash on Jin or Jin flash on Sun or one of them flash on little abandoned Ji Yeon? WTF does it mean that Sun flashed on John Locke?

Have we been deluded all this time? Was it really Locke and Sun we should have been shipping? What would we call that? Socke?

NotJohn tells Jack that yes, it was him that appeared to Jack on the Island as his father.

That's not a stretch, but it's also not a perfect fit. I can buy that this was the Monster.

It was consistent that the Monster would be leading Jack to water. We saw that the Monster likes to hydrate his candidates before he recruits them.

But who was that guy appearing to Michael right before the bomb on the Kahana blew?

And who was the white shoed apparition sitting in the lobby at St. Sebastian's in LA?

If the Monster could be Christian, why did he have to wait for Locke to die? And where's Christian's body? And who took his shoes off?

How long has the Monster looked like John to Claire? She seems so protective of him, like a little girl who loves her daddy, but isn't it true that he's only looked like John for the past few days?

Ah, fuggedaboutit. Time doesn't mean anything on LOST. We still have no idea what happened on the Island between 2004 and 2007, when no one we know was living there. And we're never going to know. My guess is they're all going to die on the Island, but before they do, they're going to mind meld with their OtherSelves and all the dead will live again and it won't make any sense but no one will care because it will finally have ended. It makes me sad that it's looking like there will be no intelligent metaphor for us to mull over when it's done. A world where gimmicks can erase death isn't a metaphor that means anything to me as a thinking adult. Sorry.

I admit after all this time I expected something more formidable from this ultimate season of LOST. But the road trip's almost over. It will all only end once. And in the meantime, as we near our destination, I'll try not to obsess over the fact that the travel brochures kinda lied about where we were headed. That always happens. I'll just try and sit back and appreciate the fact that, no matter what, the scenery has always been pretty. We've had a lot of fun, made friends, laughed our asses off. And I've learned a lot writing about this show, dug into some interesting topics I'd never much thought about. I remembered, and discovered, some great film and literature as well, thought a lot about the creative process and what goes into making a truly great story. LOST isn't going to rise to that level, I don't think, but that's ok. It still reminded me that such stories do exist and that's a lot more than most tv shows are able to do. The really important thing right now is this:

Also ...

We're not all the way to happily ever after, yet, but we're getting there.

2010-04-24T05:41:00.000-07:00

Just a quick drive by to let you all know I WILL be posting a recap this week. Just taking my time, enjoying the beautiful spring. Plus, we've got a mini hiatus going here - two weeks til the next episode. No point in rushing things. Let's all go out and get some fresh air. Maybe even go for a swim!

See you real soon!

2010-04-17T04:58:00.000-07:00

Taking a pass this week ....

2010-04-07T17:08:00.000-07:00

THE ONE

The story of Desmond has its own mythology. There is an order to the HumeVerse. There are things we can predict will happen.

Like lights flashing before eyes.

Unexpected magnetic side effects.

Weird Science.

Extrasensory phenomena.

Alcohol consumption is much encouraged.

Preferably of McCutcheons - LOST's very own fictional brand of antique Scotch whiskey that is as precious as liquid gold.

It wouldn't be a DesBack without a big splashy appearance by that old battleax Charles Widmore.

And if an episode is about Desmond, then that can only mean one thing: Charlie is in trouble.

Of course, the most indispensable common element of all DesBacks is ... Penny.

Who, as always, has a spectacularly consciousness altering effect on our Desmond.

It's pretty typical for Desmond to end up splayed out unconscious in his episodes. In fact, I think it's required that he spend a part of each of his episodes dead to the world.

Usually it's because his consciousness is taking an unscheduled road trip. In Desmond centric episodes, time is typically telescoped, so that while Desmond spends only a few seconds or minutes passed out, his mind gets to take a very extensive trip into some very freaky territory. This episode was no different. As the White Witch of the Des-o-Sphere accurately described things, "It's about Time."

Sometimes, his consciousness travels back in time, as in Season Three's Flashes Before Your Eyes, where he turned the failsafe key in the Swan Hatch.

Subjecting him to his first "catastrophic magnetic event". Which he survived with flying colors.

He lost his clothes, but it was a small price to pay for the mind altering experience of taking a trip back to his 1996 self and learning new things about the life he'd already lived.

In The Constant, there was a different twist. This time Desmond's 1996 consciousness came forward to the future ... or the (then) present, however you prefer to look at it. Remember that?

It was extra added confusing. 1996 Desmond was living inside 2004 Desmond's mind on the freighter and didn't know WTF was going on until Daniel figured out 2004 Desmond could pay a visit to 1996 Daniel and together they managed to knit the two moments in time together and save Desmond's mind from exploding.

All thanks to Desmond's once and forever Constant.

In this episode, magically entitled Happily Ever After, Desmond's consciousness really expanded. He is proving that in fact it's true that "Only fools are enslaved by Time and Space." - a clue that was right there for anyone to see, if only they'd known to reverse the audio on the brainwashing video and listen for it.

Desmond's consciousness has been liberated. He's no longer limited to traveling along the consciousness of his own life, in his own timeline, he can now transmigrate into the existence of a totally different version of himself, living a totally different life, in a totally different time and place than he ever lived before.

You may ask yourself, how do I work this?
You may tell yourself, this is not my beautiful house....
- Once in a Lifetime, Talking Heads

Desmond's mind can now go anywhere. Anywhere in time. Anywhere in space. Anywhere in any reality or dimension. All he needs is the right kind of electromagnetic force field and he becomes the portal between worlds. It's utterly groovy. What we're watching, I think, is the Neo-fication of Desmond. Or maybe it's the Birth of a Superhero. Desmond's specialness is triggered by magnetic shitstorms, but only because a magnetic shitstorm is the thing that made Des special in the first place. This is what happens to normal people in the Hydra Island Chamber of EMF Horrors.

This is what happens to Desmond.

It's in the long tradition of comic book heroes. Think "intrinsic field subtractor", if you're looking for a reference point.

Is Desmond the Dr. Manhattan of the LostVerse?

Desmond episodes have more than just their own mythology and cast of characters. They have a certain look and feel to them. Maybe it's the higher density of Easter Eggishness that creates the unique aura. The great LOST pastime of playing polypopcultural I Spy reaches its apex in Des-centrics.

"I remember when I was a kid — my dad was a huge Beatles fan, as am I — looking at the album cover for 'Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band,' and seeing all the things that were in there," says Lindelof, who thought "if you could do the same kind of thing for a television show — where people had to kind of pause it and say, 'What do you think this meant?' — that would be really cool.

Click on the album cover if you want to see where Darlton borrowed their egg hiding techniques from. The Beatles were nothing if not eclectic. You can find everyone from Shirley Temple to Snow White to Ghandi, Carl Jung, Lewis Carroll, Einstein, Lenny Bruce, Mae West, Lawrence of Arabia ... and that's just for starters. In Flashes Before Your Eyes, when Desmond first sat down in Widmore's office, the painting behind him was also rich in cultural flotsam.

It makes me nostalgic for the old days when LOST still felt like an open book. When it still felt possible that something like Buddhist polar bears might be the key to it all. I guess it was inevitable that, as the series winds down, as an endpoint must be reached, our symbolic pool is being drained and we're left with something a lot more cut and dried. Apparently, the last symbol standing will be ... a scale.

A scale just like the Monster had in his cave. A scale balancing black stones with white stones.

If your head isn't hurting from being pounded so hard with the Binary Stick, maybe this will convince you. On one side of Widmore's office, the painting has a black frame.

On the other side, the painting appears again. With a white frame.

Do you get it? Can you miss it? A scale. Balancing Black and White. It's getting harder and harder to ignore the cold, hard fact that all these many seasons of murky ambiguity were a set up to a denouement that may have been shoved in our face right in the Pilot, Part. 2.

As simple as that solution would be, we're still blundering our way towards it, if that's in fact where we're headed. It's all still about as clear as mud, but Season Six is starting to congeal into some kind of final form. We can all navigate the landscape now.

Mirrors.

Phantom OtherTwins of each character populating the shadow world of OtherLOST.

Matthew Fox making his weekly quarter million dollar cameo. This week Jack dropped the funniest line of the night. Who woulda thunk that in Season Six Jack Shephard would become the comic relief?

"Hold on. He was on our plane? ... And now he's here? ... In the hospital?"

I can't help but notice that things do seem to be circling more and more around the hospital where Jack works. Sayid is there now visiting his brother, Nadia's husband. Claire is presumably going to return shortly to pop out Aaron. Sun just got shot in the belly. And Charlie can't have gotten very far without his pants. He's probably still around there someplace.

St. Elsewhere was another show whose ending was highly anticipated and much debated. It was set in a hospital. I never really watched it, but I know one thing about it. It ended with the revelation that the whole story had happened inside a snowglobe being shaken by an autistic child who had been a minor character on the show.

It's almost the prototype for a fuck-it style of ending a story. It's just a way to shut the book without having to bother to write a real ending. I'm starting to wonder if this might not be the road LOST is also going to go down, although maybe not quite as abruptly. If you're interested, you can follow my reasoning below, but be forewarned: I'm not paid to pimp out the greatness of LOST. I'm not trying to sell a book or a magazine about LOST. I'm just a fan like anyone else, trying to finish the puzzle that I started, trying to figure it out. I reserve the right to make my own judgments about the quality of the story they tell in the end. That's where I'm coming from, dear readers. Take it or leave it, because you know what they say. There's always a choice.

This week we learned that OtherDaniel - who has never been to the Island - "remembers" how he launched the plot to set off the bomb on the Island he'd never been to, creating the existence he is now living in, which he is only living because he never went to the Island where he set off the bomb. He is remembering a life he never lived but which had to have happened, because it created the life he is currently living. At least I think that's what he was saying. It's always difficult to say with LOST, but there's been an element of strange loopiness ever since we started down the timespace traveling road.

"not a physical circuit but an abstract loop in which, in the series of stages that constitute the cycling-around, there is a shift from one level of abstraction (or structure) to another, which feels like an upwards movement in a hierarchy, and yet somehow the successive "upward" shifts turn out to give rise to a closed cycle. That is, despite one's sense of departing ever further from one's origin, one winds up, to one's shock, exactly where one had started out. In short, a strange loop is a paradoxical level-crossing feedback loop."

For a story that has been everchanging, the goal of a fixed ending is beginning to feel like an impossible dream. Every week it gets curiouser and curiouser, less tangible, less intelligible, more ...

and ...

and really, really ...

But we know that it will indeed end. Somehow. And soon. When it finally does end, Desmond - the character who is defined by his fixed and permanent Constant - will have to play a pivotal part.

Desmond is the only non Season One character that has ever captivated my imagination. Maybe that's because technically he was a Season One character, if an offstage one.

The chapters in the book of his life are well known to us. He's always been seeking something.

He's tried everything. Praying.

Drinking.

Soldiering.

Voyaging.

He became one of the magical Island's mythical prisoners.

He was LOST's Odysseus, the man of the sea, having mind altering adventures all on his relentless journey home towards his constant - the faithful, longsuffering Penelope.

When Desmond and Penny's story ended in Season Four, it felt premature. Since then, he has seemed a peripheral, nearly irrelevant figure within the everweaving tapestry of LOST. But with this episode, he returned to center stage.

In a way, Desmond Hume is an anomaly.It's almost like he's been a concurrent parallel reality the whole time he's been in the story. He has not been involved in most of the major adventures in the story, didn't crash in Flight 815, never met the Smoke Monster, wasn't captured by the Others, didn't live in Dharma, wasn't an O6 celebrity. He has never physically time travelled. Except for his daytripping consciousness, hIs life has been on a linear path since the beginning. He has existed mostly on the fringes of the plot.

But in other ways, Desmond is a nexus for all of LOST's most important themes and plotlines. Although he has not personally time travelled, the mysteries of time travel have been mostly revealed to us through him. He embodies the theme of romantic love at its most idealized and perfect. He bears the name of David Hume, the great Enlightenment philosopher who taught that fate and free will are not inconsistent with one another, but interdependent. And while he isn't a candidate in the same sense as the six uncrossed names on the Monster's cave, he is so exceptional that he may be far more vital than any of them in the end.

Of course we've got more than a mere Desmond to deal with now. We've also got to consider OtherDesmond. Like all of Season Six's OtherPeople, he's different but also the same as the Desmond we've known.

This version is a super successful globetrotting dealmaker for the great and powerful OtherWidmore. In Flashes Before Your Eyes, Charles Widmore used a bottle of McCutcheon's scotch to demonstrate to Desmond just how little he thought of him.

He appeared to pour them each a drink, but ended up pouring only one and drinking it alone, explaining to Desmond that, no offense, but his existence was worth less to Widmore than a spitball of distilled barley mash. Charles Widmore made no secret of the fact that he held Desmond Hume in utter contempt.

Things are quite the opposite in OtherLOST. There Charles holds Desmond in high regard. He considers him indispensable.

A point is made to show that OtherDesmond not only gets his own glass of precious McCutcheon whiskey, he even gets a hug!

To complete the comparison, in case you were somehow missing it, OtherCharles loudly proclaims that "nothing's too good" for OtherDesmond.

OtherDes may be a power player, but he still seems like a really nice guy. He's polite, friendly and not at all condescending to his underlings, despite his elite social stature. Sure, he's kind of a slave to Charles Widmore, but he seems satisfied with the perks.

When he meets up with OtherEloise, she reminds him that he now has the one thing he always wanted most - the respect of Charles Widmore. It's a very odd thing to say, actually. Sure, Desmond and Widmore have always had a contentious relationship.

But how did Eloise know that? Isn't she meeting Desmond for the very first time? With that remark, a window creaks open on the possibility that Lady Eloise may bear more responsibility for the existence of OtherLOST than we've imagined. She makes it sound like Desmond has been given some kind of reward. Like someone decided what it was he wanted most and then created a world where he could have it.

It's true that Desmond once craved Widmore's approval. In fact, as we saw in Flashes Before Your Eyes, Widmore's contempt was what sent Desmond into the tailspin that landed him on the Island. But how could you create a wish fulfillment existence for Desmond and not include Penny? And why position him in a world where she'd be right under his nose the whole time and then expect him not to find her?

Eloise made it pretty clear she wanted Desmond nowhere near Penny. She was probably right in guessing that once these two crazy kids found each other again, something was going to kink up her little utopia. But why does Eloise think Desmond is "not ready yet"? Why is finding Penny, or even asking about her, a Violation? A violation of what code, what rulebook? Is this OtherWorld a kind of Matrix? Is Eloise the Oracle?

Neo: But if you already know, how can I make a choice?
The Oracle: Because you didn't come here to make a choice, you've already made it. You're here to try to understand why you made it.

Eloise is the Queen of Cryptic. She obviously knows far more than she's letting on. And she's a control freak par excellence. She knows all the rules.

She also seems to know that Desmond is "The One." In 316, she told him that he might think he was free, but "The island isn't done with you yet."

In Happily Ever After, her OtherHubby Widmore tells Des the very same thing, word for word. This couple may not be any kind of advertisement for the glories of true love, but they sure do seem to have their fingers in every interdimensional pie.

We first met Eloise in Desmond's centric, Flashes Before Your Eyes. She was the lady selling rings. Even then she was trying to keep Desmond and Penny apart. She told him he should not buy the ring, that he must not marry Penny. Instead he must plod back into the life he'd already lived, making no changes, until he landed back underground in the Swan Hatch, pushing that infernal button until his soul died inside him. With the now familiar apocalyptic warning: " If you don't do those things, Desmond David Hume, every single one of us is dead", Mrs. Hawking had promised Desmond that the only great thing he would ever do was push that bloody button.

"You don't do it because you choose to, Desmond. You do it because you're supposed to."

Des still has to do whatever he's supposed to do, however unpleasant and even tragic it may be, because otherwise it means ... Oblivion? Extinction? Armageddon? Dunno. It's still not clear. But the point is that Desmond has to do what he has to do, or dire consequences are sure to ensue. That's a constant. (Also, it rhymes.)

Now unbeknownst to Desmond, or to anyone else back in our original storyline, his two nemeses were inextricably linked. They were Others together back when they were just a couple of kids in love themselves. Eloise, who we'd previously seen wearing the pin of the Ouroboros

was seen in this episode wearing a flashy little bit of jewelry

that looked very much like the kind of thing the Others burned into Juliet's back the time she "violated" their rules.

The most important thing about Widmore and Eloise's connection was this guy. Their pride and joy, their only begotten son.

In OriginalLOST, Daniel was given the name of Faraday. Why? We will never know. It was probably a quickie way of cuing us to his electromagnetic purpose within the plot. But why did his Mom choose it? It wasn't her name. It's hard to get into the head of the woman we formerly knew as Eloise Hawking.

She's the one that tore her budding piano genius away from his instrument and pushed him towards his brain frying mastery of quantum physics, apparently all so she could manipulate his life to the point where he could time travel back to when she was pregnant with him, so she could shoot him dead and kill him ... and then go and give birth to him. Original Eloise made Mommy Dearest look like Mother Theresa.

But OtherEloise has been given - or has stolen - a second chance with her bouncing boy. She learned her lesson. In her alt reality lifeboat existence, she nurtured his musical gifts, she married his father, and their boy was allowed to thrive and grow into a coddled, pampered rich kid tickling the ivories while living in their swank gilded cage. It's entirely possible that this entire universe of OtherLOST is nothing more than Eloise's elaborate attempt to make up for all her wrongs and finally give her child the life she'd always wanted for him.

It was inevitable that Daniel and Desmond's stories would collide. After their partnership in The Constant these two will be forever linked. Naturally, since they're in Mirrorland, Daniel first appeared to Desmond as a reflection.

Although we were told OtherDaniel was a musician, he seemed remarkably unchanged. Same skinny tie and untucked shirt. Like a uniform. Only since he plays piano, now he gets a goofy hat!

Other icons of Daniel's history were scattered about the episode. Chopin's Fantasie Impromptu - the piece we saw him practicing as a boy.

The same piece David Shephard played for his audition to conservatory.

A white lab animal. This one named Angstrom. (Book alert! See John Updike.)

Clever names for doomed test subjects are part of DesBacks. Who could forget Daniel Faraday's dearly beloved Eloise?

OtherDaniel still carries his trusty notebook. He confessed he'd been spending time staring at a chocolate eating redhead at the museum - obviously the floozy known as Charlotte Lewis, last seen shagging Detective Ford's brains out on a blind date - and just the sight of this ethereal creature had inspired him to an almost out of body experience, where he was able to scribble down this diagram proving ...

that he, Daniel NotFaraday, had somehow invented a way to create a new universe through the miracle of nuclear fission! And they were all living in it now!

He'd prevented the still unexplained "catastrophic incident" by detonating a bomb to "release all the energy". Sorry, but I still can't tell if the creation of this brave new world is supposed to be a good thing or a bad thing. Hell, I don't even know if the catastrophic incident was prevented and that's why we have OtherLOST or whether we have OtherLOST because they failed to prevent the catastrophic incident! Come on, admit it. You don't know either, right?

But I'm pretty sure, after OtherDaniel's speech, that we are meant to think that what Daniel felt for OtherCharlotte was a blinding kind of pure distilled love, so powerful that he had a savant like flash and this brilliant dimension busting mathematical formula just splashed out of his head. At first I didn't get this, because to be honest with you, the whole Daniel - Charlotte thing never seemed to be all that. For me, it was one of those dull side non-romances they scatter around on LOST, one of the devices whose primary purpose seemed to be killing off the extraneous womenfolk.

It seems a little over the top to call them one another's "true love" or to credit them with Daniel's momentary burst of inexplicable genius. It's not like Charlotte is even Daniel's constant, right? Because, we all know who that is.

And lord knows, OtherCharlotte does not seem to be pining for the geek who's stalking her at the museum.

So what is Daniel talking about when he describes this mind altering love he feels for Charlotte? I think he's talking about her.

The little girl who couldn't eat chocolate before dinner, the child who grew up to die in Daniel's arms, the child that inspired him to invent a way to link Imaginary Time with Real Space

so he could create a new timeline where she wouldn't have to die. And now, even though his mind can't connect the dots, OtherDaniel is remembering that the reason he found a way to blow up the world was the love he felt back then, in a time when he was someone else.

That brings us to the Constant part of every Desmond episode. The love part, the Penny part. As we know too well, Desmond and magnetic objects are not a good mix. Desmond being strapped into the claustrophobia chamber like Hannibal Lector may have been the scariest scene in the episode.

Once again, he was a prisoner trapped in a magnetically charged enclosed space, with nothing but a button to push.

"Magnetic events" are the catalysts for Desmond's mind travel and this time his mind traveled, not in time or in space, but into another ... dimension. Or something. Whatever separates parallel coexisting universes. I couldn't find it on google, so I can't say what they call it, but when Desmond's mind is magnetized, it can topple even that barrier. The sequence of honey infused images that flashed before Desmond's eyes in the MRI machine flooded his memory with Penny-ness.

How they met, loved, lost, found one another, how together they created a beautiful child. OtherDesmond was seeing Original Penny and little Charlie through Original Desmond's eyes, and yet somehow it was as if he were remembering his own past experiences. Which he couldn't have done, since he's lived his entire life in OtherLOST.

That set him off on his quest to reconnect with his interdimensional constant. When he found Penny again, even though technically she wasn't the woman in his memories at all, it was like the perfect eHarmony meet up. Just like they describe on the ads. They were already perfectly matched across all 29 Dimensions of Compatibility.

It was cool to see them return to the site of the famous stair jogging scene between Jack and Desmond in Man of Science, Man of Faith.

The place where we got our first ever glimpse of Desmond Hume.

We just have to accept that OtherPenny, despite being completely alone in a vast, dark football stadium, put out her hand to the stranger who surprised her, rather than, I don't know, a police whistle or a canister of mace. Maybe that was also the power of Love. She felt his aura and knew he was "the one".

Even the way he passed out like a sack of flour didn't diminish his charm in her eyes. Most women would have gone for the cell phone panic button by this point, but Penny just waited patiently for him to resume consciousness and ask her out on a date. For coffee. Naturally. "Coffee" has become the new codespeak for "let's hook up in OtherLOST."

They arranged to meet in an hour at the corner of Sweetzer and Melrose. Just for the record, and as a pretty cute point of interest, it seems that there is no coffee shop at the corner of Sweetzer and Melrose in L.A. There is a little shop there, however. An antique shop. Named, oh so appropriately, Thanks for the Memories. I just want to say this is maybe my favorite Easter Egg of the season. Touche, Darlton. Very clever.

After finally finding the Penny that he didn't know he was looking for, Desmond was a changed man. Right away, he got his man Minkowski on the job of locating the manifest of all Oceanic 815 passengers. You know, because that's part of the standard job description for L.A. limo drivers.

Why does Desmond only want to show his big secret to the other passengers of Flight 815? How did he make that connection? And why does he want to show it to them, assuming of course that he's able? What does he expect that to accomplish? Does he think this window into a concurrent reality is the kind of revelation all of them want to know about? Or has he had some other kind of epiphany that he is convinced they all need to know about?

That question brings us to the sequence that was, for me, the heart of the episode.

Both of the guys giving Desmond advice from the lovelorn in this episode were musicians. Like OtherDesmond, OtherCharlie seems to be much more successful at what he does. In Greatest Hits, Charlie remembered when he and Liam heard their song on the radio. It was one of the greatest moments of his life.

But in this episode, Charlie is jaded to success. In OtherLOST, Driveshaft isn't a one hit wonder. They've hit the big time.

In the hierarchy of the DesmondVerse, Charlie's role is Jester. However, of all the escorts Des ran into on his little timespace adventure this week, I think Charlie spoke the most truth.

"I am better than art thou. I am a fool, thou art nothing." - King Lear

Charlie also spoke to Desmond about the power of love. He described a near beatific vision of a blonde whose very presence engulfed him in a state of pure rapturous bliss. I can see why Jeff Jensen got the sense he was talking about his heroin filled Virgin Marys, because it sure sounded more like a drug induced euphoria than like any kind of earthly love between human beings. But I'm pretty sure we were meant to assume he was talking about Claire

- who he never even noticed was right there on the same plane with him -

but the description he gave didn't sound like he was describing a person. It sounded like he was describing ... Nirvana.

NIRVANA:n. In the Buddhist religion, a state of pleasurable annihilation awarded to the wise, particularly to the wise enough to understand it. - Ambrose Bierce, Devil's Dictionary

Charlie seemed to be describing a near death experience, a feeling so transcendant it doesn't exist in this mortal realm.

And of course one of the things we need to remember about Charlie is that in the only reality we've ever really known him in, he is, in fact ... quite DEAD.

Death is the actual endpoint of all of our journeys, a destination none of us are going to be able to avoid. The entire underwater sequence brought me back to Season Three in a big way. It really hit home to me, in a way the rest of the episode did not.

For one thing, the whole underwater experience seems like it's going to become increasingly relevant. Underwater is where this whole thing seems to be headed.

But I also loved this sequence because it reminded me of how much LOST used to make me feel. I have to confess I'm one of those fans who has felt that, ever since Darlton began to write towards their end date, the show's abandonment of its earlier character driven storylines sucked a lot of the heart out of the show for me. I've heard the endless crowing of the fanboys that Seasons 4 and 5 have represented a refined acme of all that is best about LOST. But sorry, I just can't agree.

Watching the water crash through the windshield, just like it had crashed through the portal of the Looking Glass hatch ...

reminded me of how much more emotional investment I had in the stories and the characters back then. When Charlie died, it felt real. It was a true loss, just like death is in the real world. Charlie's death meant something. He died for love. He died a hero.

He made a choice to die. And he bore the consequence of his choice. The ultimate consequence. Death.

"Reality means you live until you die. The real truth is nobody wants reality." - Chuck Palahniuk

Watching him play Frogger with the L.A. traffic, it looks like Charlie wants to get back to that state as soon as he possibly can.

But Desmond presents Charlie with a choice. He can keep drinking or he can leave the bar. Sounds simple enough. However, as Charlie says, and as is so typical of LOST, it's not much of a choice. Charlie has the choice of a luxury hotel, piles of money and the undying gratitude of the ominpotent King Widmore ... or he can just go to hell and try and score a fix on a corner somewhere. Seems like a no brainer. But that's assuming that Fried Charlie still has a brain. Charlie scoffs at the idea of choice. And he's actually got an excellent point.

One of the continuing frustrations of LOST for me is the disjointed and inconsistent way they've presented us with the idea of Choice. Free Will. How much choice did any of the characters ever have over their initial fate of being dumped out of the sky onto LOST Island? How much choice do they have even now, as an entire OtherWorld of different choicemaking swirls around them, just outside their dimensonal perceptions?

Charlie returns the favor to Desmond and presents him with an even more Hobsonian choice. He can get out of the car or he can be "shown" the thing that Charlie knows.

As he once asked Mrs. Hawking "Why would I ever go to an Island?", Desmond asks Charlie "Why would I get out of the car?" Just as Charlie chooses to make his choice for him.

"You don't do it because you choose to, Desmond. You do it because you're supposed to."

I think it all comes back to another old school LOST Easter Egg, one of those we've lost sight of over the years: Enlightenment Philosophers.

David Hume, 18th century Scottish philosopher, and namesake to our own Scottish timetravelling mascot, grappled with the dilemma of determinism vs. free will. Ultimately he decided that free will was not incompatible with a fate-based view of the universe, because in his view, the only way a person could make an actual "free" choice was if they knew ahead of time what the consequences would be. In other words, unless cause and effect were fixed and immutable, a person would be unable to evaluate the potential consequences of his actions and would therefore never have any basis on which to make a choice. In Hume's philosophy, it's the consequences of our choices that make them free. Without consequence, choice is meaningless.

This, I think, is the dilemma we are presented with by the alternate parallel reality of OtherLOST. The way I see it, there are two possible outcomes in front of us. Either the Sideways World is a false world, an illusion, as both Charlie and Daniel implied, and must be destroyed. Or the Sideways World will become the ultimate reality.

Let's take the second possibility first. Perhaps OtherLOST is the clean slate we heard talked about as far back as Season One's Tabula Rasa. Maybe all of them will die on the Island - which seems ever more likely each week - and thanks to Desmond's discovery of the powers of "spectacular, consciousness altering love", all of their consciousnesses will just time trip over to the fresh shiny new world where they can get a spectacular, consciousness altered do-over. They'll be allowed to pack up only the schmoopiest of their memories, the ones drenched in honey colored memories of blissful, rapturous love, and armed with that battery pack of Twu Wuv, they'll live out the rest of their existences in a better, happier place. A place without magical mystery Islands and course corrections and warring gods and tropical polar bears. A happy ever after befitting the fairy tale title of this episode. That would be nice I guess. A kind of bland, lifeless denouement to my way of thinking, but it fits with a St. Elsewhere snowglobe kind of ending. I think it's possible. Anything's possible with this freaking show.

But here's the problem with it. It's also a world without Consequence. It's a world where it doesn't matter that Sawyer killed an innocent shrimp seller. It doesn't matter that Kate was the only mother Aaron ever knew. Or that Sayid shot a 12 year old kid for the crime of who he'd grow up to be. It doesn't matter that Locke went on a mad odyssey sacrificing his life trying to be special. It doesn't matter that Jack and his Dad crisscrossed time and space trying to hunt one another down and thrash out their daddy issues. Hurley's numbers don't matter. It doesn't matter that Sun and Jin made a baby girl together, who is growing up somewhere in Korea, waiting for her mommy and daddy to come home. None of it matters. All the consequences of all the choices just get brushed into the trashpan and everyone starts over fresh, as new people, making new choices. But if consequence is an irrelevance, then what meaning will those new choices have? What is the point of Choice without Consequence?

Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away.
- Philip K. Dick

Charlie tells Desmond that the vision he had of Claire was real. It was the truth. Is that so? Maybe it is, but maybe it's not in the literal sense that we may be understanding it. As I noted, there was little in Charlie's orgasmically ecstatic speech that sounded like human love the way we experience it here on earth.

It's easy to idealize love, but the transcendent love Charlie is describing happens in the realm of deep Zen meditation, not in the bedrooms and kitchens and streets and parks of our workaday world.

The best that most of us can ever hope to experience in our human relationships is a love that transforms us, that makes us better people. The kind of love Charlie died for.

The kind that Sawyer felt when he jumped from the helicopter. The kind that Kate felt when she left Aaron behind to find his mother.

The kind of love that has consequences. The kind of love that has meaning precisely because of all the blood, sweat and tears that's invested in it. The kind of love that requires sacrifices.

What sacrifice is Charles Widmore referring to when he says he intends to ask one of Desmond? Is he asking Desmond to help save the world that his little boy lives in? Or is he asking him to help destroy it - and little Charlie along with it - so they can all hop-skip over to OtherLOST?

I think I'm finally starting to figure out why children have always been such an important feature of the LOST story. By far the most striking difference betweeen this season's two universes has been this one.

Some might argue that another Charlie Hume can be effortlessly conceived in an OtherLOST scenario. I think the science of genetics would beg to differ with that theory, but that's beside the point. The creation of David Shephard is proof that not everything is interchangeable between our two worlds. There is no David in Original LOST and there never will be. And if OtherLOST is a false "reality" that must be collapsed, then the blue eyed prodigy is going to disappear instantly, in the blink of an eye. And if he lives, then Ji Yeon, Charlie Hume, even poor unwanted little Clementine ... all get sucked into the vacuum of nonexistence. However this thing ends, there are consequences involved.

Perhaps David is the clue we need to keep our eyes on then. It forces us to ask ourselves what is the nature of our own reality? Of our existence as separate individuals, each of us a unique and irreplaceable human being. Are we just the inevitable cellular results of our own encoded DNA? Or is our essence contained in the sum total of our experiences? Of what we've thought and done. Of who we've loved, hated, lost, found. Most of all, can we ever be separated from the consequences of the choices we've made?

And the moral of that is: Be what you would seem to be, or if you'd like it put more simply: Never imagine yourself not to be otherwise than what it might appear to others that what you were or might have been was not otherwise than what you had been would have appeared to them to be otherwise. - The Duchess in Alice in Wonderland

In true reality, the kind we all have to live with, this isn't a question. We never ever get the chance to escape the consequences of our choices. In point of fact, those consequences are what our existence is all about. It's the only thing it's about. We may all indulge in juvenile fantasies of erasing the past, but the option to escape reality is one none of us will ever have. Most of us spend our lives distracted by the simulacra of the material world, unable to see the underlying Truth behind our existence. Most of us spend our lives living in some self created version of Plato's cave.

That's why I think the metaphor of the Matrix is such a powerful one for this season of Lost.

But I believe that, as a species, human beings define their reality through suffering and misery. The perfect world was a dream that your primitive cerebrum kept trying to wake up from.

For all the fantasy of its setting, the Matrix presented us with a choice as profoundly real as the one the Buddha wrestled with in the years before time. Will we stay asleep in this world or will we awake to reality?

My friend, what are you?
Are you a god?"
"No"said the Buddha.
"Well, then, are you a wizard?"
"No."
"Are you a man?"
"No."
"Well, my friend, then what are you?"
The Buddha replied,
"I am awake."

LOST is also a fantasy, and maybe in the end, that's all it will be. Maybe fans will be satisfied with a synthetic and sentimental end, such as many interpreted this episode to be pointing at, an ending where "spectacular, consciousness altering love" - at least as experienced by the male halves of the three psuedo-couples in this episode - buys them a free pass out of reality and into an up and running OtherVerse where none of their misbegotten choices will ever haunt them again.

Hell, I'm ready for anything in these last few episodes. Certainly all doors are still open. There's still time for ancient Egyptian sailors to disembark on Hydra Island. Or for unicorns to come flying in and carry all the Candidates away on their backs. Who knows? Eloise might pull off that hair helmet and reveal that underneath it all, she's been an alien being all this time.

Or maybe they'll just reveal that OtherLOST was nothing more than one last entertaining diversion. A place for everyone who doesn't really exist to have one last curtain call. A Bohemian Rhapsody for the Zombie Season.

That might be fun, right? It would certainly be Spectacular! If slightly less than Consciousness Altering.

Nothing can stop each of us from having our own personal preferences. Speaking for myself, the only thing I ask from any fantasy is that it have a metaphor within it that I can apply somehow to the world as I know it. In The Matrix, Neo has a choice. He can take the blue pill and go back to sleep, or he can take the red pill and Morpheus will show him "how deep the rabbit-hole goes." Personally, I'm hoping Desmond chooses to see how deep the rabbit hole goes.

As OtherWidmore tells him, he is a man without attachments. Were we meant to take the obvious implication from that, that poor OtherDesmond had no love in his life and was to be pitied for it? Should we be assuming that non-attachment is a bad thing? Both Christ and the Buddha taught that freedom from worldly attachents was the essential first step to any kind of enlightenment.

Widmore seems to be prepping Desmond for some final battle with the Smoke Monster, a battle that his magnetic superpowers make him uniquely qualified to wage. At the end of the episode we see that Desmond is more than willing now to cooperate. What has happened to him? What did that last gargantuan struggle with the EMF Beastie do to him?

There's no saying, but he seems to have attained a Zen like state of Enlightenment. In both worlds. He agrees to work with Widmore.Then he turns around and leaves just as easily with the impassively murderous Sayid.

It's like he knows now that there's no point in reasoning any of this out, because he's seen the ultimate truth.

OtherDesmond seems to have had the same revelation. He needs to find the other 815-ers, not to tell them anything, but to show them. This "show, not tell" mantra is repeated throughout the episode so many times that I think it's wise for us to pay attention to it. But once everyone has understood the thing that Desmond is about to show them, what choices will that leave them? Will they choose to abandon the world of reality and hop aboard the spaceship of perpetual fantasy? Or will they stay put and discover the thing that is real, the thing that is true?

Make truth your island.
Make truth your refuge.
There is no other refuge.

2010-04-04T05:37:00.001-07:00

DÉJÀ VU ALL OVER AGAIN

Another Tuesday night, another stop on the Great LOST Farewell Nostalgia Tour. Season Six is turning out to be like a trip back to the old neighborhood. Before it all ends, we're getting one more chance to see all the faces and places we remember. Look! There's the big bully who terrified all the locals.

Oh, and over there! The garden where Sun used to grow healing herbs, until she got conked over the head by Charlie so Sawyer could steal the guns.

Yay! Bpo Bpo lives!

And OMG! Whaddayaknow! There's that super kewl brainwashing room from all those years ago! Room 23!

The purpose of which was ...

... uh

... ?

Oh, whatever, it was wicked cool.

I've got to admit LOST is losing me. Here we are just past the halfway point of the grand finale season, a perfectly legitimate point at which to stop and take stock. So where are we? What has this season been all about? Where is it headed? Where are we going now that we're close enough for the end to be in sight? I don't know about you, but I'm totally lost when it comes to trying to figure out LOST.

I'll start with something fairly basic - the unmistakable pattern that has emerged, where each character's centric is framed as an homage to centrics past. This week it was KwonBack Time. For the last time.

The Kwons have become background furniture on LOST in recent years, but in this final season, it's only right that they should be honored for their rightful place in LOST history. As with other KwonBacks, in The Package Jin and Sun weren't two separate people. They were a pair.

Sun was playful and adventurous.

Jin was straitlaced, conservative, restrained ... and hard as a rock. Yeah, baby. Even Omar wanted a second look.

They had the same passion for each other.

They feared Sun's powerful father the same way.

OtherSun, just like original Sun, had made a careful plan to run away from home. Only since she'd never married Jin, she hadn't had a chance to hate him, she hadn't had a chance to cheat on him, hadn't had a reason to learn English from her English speaking lover and so therefore it wasn't Jin that she was dying to get away from. She was trying to run from Daddy. This time it was Jin she wanted to run to.

But just like Sun's plan to leave Jin ended in an unplanned disaster,

OtherSun's plan to flee her father ended horrifically as well.

In the Season One KwonBacks, ...In Translation and House of the Rising Sun, Jin insisted that Sun's father acknowledge him openly, that they marry, even if that meant he had to work for the sturgeon faced Mr. Paik.

But in OtherLOST, Jin and Sun were not that honest. They were sneaking around doing the wild thing while putting on a big front about booking separate hotel rooms.

Their hanky panky had aroused the wrath of the great and powerful Paik, and he had come up with a brilliant solution: OtherPaik sent OtherJin on a mission to L.A., to deliver a watch ...

... the same thing original Paik had sent original Jin to do.

We never found out who Jin was bringing the watch to. It ended up in a pawnshop in Brooklyn after Michael Dawson sold it to buy the gun that wouldn't kill him.

In OtherLOST we found out that Jin was bringing the watch, along with a fat wad of cash, to pay off Martin Keamy, who was then going to deliver services on the spot ... and kill Jin dead.

Jin was paying his own assassin. That's how much OtherPaik hated OtherJin. He wasn't going to just kill him - he was going to make him kill himself. A perfect closed loop of conserved energy.

Other circles and loops were closed as we took our weekly trip down Memory Lane.

Jin's "button your sweater" byline was recycled to good use in this episode. Jin's domination of Sun was tweaked seductively into Sun's ability to effortlessly control Jin.

In ...And Found, a Season Two KwonBack, Locke enters Sun's garden while she's working and asks her, "Bad day?"

In The Package, Locke's doppelganger, The Smoke Monster, approaches Sun the identical way and asks the same question.

In Glass Ballerina, Sun shoots Colleen in the stomach, killing her.

In The Package, Sun is the one who takes the gut shot.

Women dying from bullets to the belly is one of LOST's most hallowed traditions.

In fact, it's a rare woman on LOST who dies any other way! Does this mean OtherSun will soon go the way of Colleen ... and of Shannon, Ana Lucia, Libby and Danielle Rousseau?

It wasn't only Kwon memories that got reprised. Sawyer and Kate drank imaginary cocoa under the watchful green eye of Widmore's spies -

- a dimly lit shoutout to the imaginary peanut butter that once sustained Charlie and Claire during hard times.

Jack was acting very Season One doctorlike, calmly traipsing around with his backpack full of helpful life lessons.

His scene on the beach with Sun, where he gently offered help as a caring human being, reminded me of the scene long ago in Walkabout when he reached out to Rose in much the same way. Oh, Jack, where'd you go all these years?

And having Desmond and Sayid meet up again at the submarine dock,

while obviously under very changed circumstances,

couldn't help but remind me of the last time Desmond ended up one of Widmore's boats.

Like other Kwon centrics, this episode was slight, delicate, concise. There's a kind of origami feeling to all the Kwonbacks.

Sun was first introduced to us as the Korean wife who secretly knew how to speak English. In this episode, that talent left her. Apparently it got knocked out of her head by the tree trunk she ran into.

She can still understand English and she can write it. Just can't speak it anymore. Of course, Jin can speak English now. It should make for a very interesting kabuki dance when the two lovers finally reunite and try to have a conversation.

While Sun was forgetting how to speak English, we were watching OtherSun, who apparently never learned it.

This was one of the ways that the relationship between the two realities began to evolve in this episode. The correlations between LOST and OtherLOST are becoming more intriguing. Did Sun forget to speak English because she hit a tree trunk, or did she hit a tree trunk and forget to speak English because her OtherSelf never learned how?

Mikhail Bakunin was back in this episode, looking decidedly less grizzled with two working eyes and a nice suit on.

But then Jin put his eye out! So that's how Mikhail lost his eye, right?

Uh, except no. Original Jin didn't shoot original Mikhail. So even though Mikhail would always lose his eye, the way he lost his eye could be different in differing realities.

I'm sure that further explains the relationship between the two worlds as well. Except I don't think anyone can figure out exactly HOW it explains it. Which means it didn't explain much.

Of course the most important interdimensional interface, the only one that really matters, is this one.

Original Jin had been diagnosed as infertile, making it something of a miracle when Sun conceived a child on the Island. OtherJin's swimmers, on the other hand, do not seem to have ever had any such problems.

Since we're all tripping down Memory Lane these days, this reminds me of one of the first reviews I ever did.

Season Three's KwonBack, D.O.C., was an episode of unalloyed hilarity, where Juliet famously tried to date Sun's pregnancy by the date when she'd last had sex, proving that she may have been a fertility genius, but she'd skipped seventh grade sex ed class. That KwonBack was the episode that first introduced us to LOST's most outlandish male fantasy - Super!Sperm!

Super!Sperm! turned out to be one of the great blind alley wild goose chases for those of us who once regarded every kooky LOST plotline as an ingenious mystery to be solved. In the past, I could joke that maybe this was how the mystery would be solved.

And wouldn't you know it? All these years later, I think that's probably as close as we're ever going to get to solving that particular mystery!

When Sun conceived on the Island, it was feared the child was in jeopardy, since one of the Island's misogynistic properties was that it killed young mothers dead for the crime of having a working uterus. In this episode, we saw that OtherSun and her baby were similarly endangered.

Ji Yeon survived. Will OtherBaby make it? Is OtherBaby going to be OtherJiYeon? Or would a baby conceived from normal non-Super!Sperm! be an entirely different baby? Will we ever find out? Maybe. Maybe not.

One of the things I'm beginning to do with LOST is try and define it in terms of what it is not. Since I really have no frakking clue what it might actually be about these days, I'm trying to use the process of elimination to whittle down the possiblities.

As we were told long ago, it's not about Purgatory.

Even though last week they seemed to be hinting very hard that it might be about Hell.

I know there's still some science fiction fans hanging onto hope for some pseudo-scientific pseudo-explanation for the shenanigans of the Island. For years many have suspected that the freaky magnetic properties of the Island are the reason that Widmore has prized it and sought to possess it. It's interesting that scientists at MIT have recently discovered that magnets can distort our ability to make moral evaluations. Maybe that's what's at the heart of our story ... but I really don't think so. At this point, I'd say it's a fiction that any of LOST's mysteries will ever be explained by anything remotely resembling science.

I don't think it's a Christian allegory either, despite the enthusiastic certainty some fans have that it's all devolving down to some clearcut Calvinist demarcation of good vs. evil. I don't see that happening. Jacob's willingness to drag civilians into his family feud is too evil for me to ever consider him good. And there is nothing in the OtherLOST storyline that looks to me like either reward or punishment. I don't think the story is going there, though it's certainly putting on a fine show of pretending.

It's not a Buddhist allegory either.

Although there is an occasional nod to the concept of balancing good and evil, yin yang style, it's going to be a hard sell for them to make that philosophical point conclusively at this point. It's a great idea, and something LOST could have been about, but I no longer see it happening.

LOST has always been a confusing story, but nothing really has befuddled me as much as trying to piece together the reason behind this season's sudden lurch into an alternate reality. Yes, I know we're not supposed to call it an alternate reality. We were told that it isn't alternate or less real than the reality of the six year storyline we were striving so mightily to comprehend.

That leaves us with a Many Worlds concept of infinitely diverging realities.

With each decision, each turning point, a new set of possibilities and probabilities spring into being. In a Many Worlds universe each new possibility creates an entirely new, entirely unique reality. The new realities do not intersect. They go off into infinity as separate lines, always diverging, never converging. The moment of choice is like the moment of conception, where something that never existed before comes into being.

But now we see that on LOST, the realities are starting to converge. Mikhail's lost eye, Sun's lost English, the baby who may be lost ... all these things seem to be echoing between the two realities.

There are other echoes. Jack's new slaphappy demeanor seems to have taken hold just as we met an OtherJack who seemed a lot less type A.

OtherSayid seemed more deadeyed in this episode, just as Sayid has become more zombielike on the Island.

What is OtherLOST trying to tell us? The timespace for OtherLOST is 2004, while LOST Is taking place in 2007. Time travel has not stopped after all. If 2007 LOST is converging with 2004 OtherLOST, does that mean that a new past is being written? If consciousness is now skipping across time and space and theoretical multidimensionalities, then it's not really a Schrodinger's cat situation any longer. It's not like the cat is both alive and dead until we make a final deciding measurement. It's more like the cat itself is ping ponging through quantum states, interfering in the mechanics of its own hypothetical dilemma. I'm starting to get the real sense that the reason they've referenced Alice in Wonderland so often on this show is they want us to just shut up and bathe in the pure nonsense of it.

"That's one stubborn tomato."

Some have theorized that OtherLOST represents the final reality. That this time in the past will become the one true reality once the characters in the present resolve all their issues on the Island of Mystery.

This would mean a number of things. For one thing, it would mean that if this child exists,

then this one does not. Or vice versa.

It would mean that people who died on the Island could be alive again, at least for a little while.

It also means that some characters that now exist, no longer do.

In fact, since the characters of OtherLOST are not the same characters that we've watched evolve all these years, it would mean the entire story we've been watching all these years will have never happened.

We were just running around in circles, caring about and learning about and wondering about characters that never really existed. The joke was on us.

One fun fact about this episode is that it's the first since the Season Three finale where all the credited cast members made an appearance. The Powers That Be even found some facetime for the annoying new character they decided in their infinite wisdom to spring on us in this final season.

Nerds!

Ben and Ilana traded some choice snark, which was fun, but redemption seems to have worked its magic on Ben and made him kind of ... boring.

He can still bring the funny, but he's a neutered puppy. The devious mastermind, murderer, and once omnipotent overlord of the fearsome Others has become just a witty schlub tagging along for the ride.

Ilana seems to have quite the crush on Richard.

If only he could manage to forget dead Isabella.

Claire is still seething. She's realizing that even if she were to see Aaron again, she'd be a stranger to him. A batshit crazy stranger, at that.

But her friend, Mr. Monster, assures her that she'll still have a chance to punish Kate. He tells her "Whatever happens, happens", a telling change of verb tense that seems to give Crazy Claire carte blanche to murder Kate once his mission is accomplished.

Kate appeared in this episode, but aside from drinking imaginary cocoa and staring impassively into the fire, she was just a placeholder.

Sawyer's plan to walk The Monster into Widmore's trap didn't turn out as planned, so the elaborate set up in Recon seems to have fizzled out already.

He confesses to Kate that he's as frightened as she is, but he's hiding it, still trying to deke out the Monster's weakness and find a way to defeat him.

Jack, on the other hand, has become a zealot, a true believer, a faithful apostle of the Gospel of Jacob.

He tries in vain to convince Sun that having a Purpose! and a Destiny! is just the bestest thing ever, but she's not buying it. Poor Sun still seems to think she's got a chance of going home with her husband to their three year old.

Jin finds himself captured in both realities.

But we can see how his confidence has grown. On the Island, he demands that he be allowed to confront Widmore directly. And in the Other Reality, he takes command of the situation and does not hesitate to kill as needed.

At first I thought OtherKeamy seemed like a markedly less evil version, but then I realized that he was probably only sparing Jin long enough to get his paycheck.

Keamy has gotten a lot of facetime in this final season of LOST. We've seen more of him than we have of Rose or Boone or Charlie. I guess they figured we'd just like to watch him die a few more times. Bastards! You killed Keamy!

Since I have no idea where the storytellers are taking us with their parallel coexisting reality storyline that is bleeding into and out of their original storyline, I think I'll revisit a storyline of considerably longer standing - the Great Almost War of LOST Island.

The one that has been almost about to happen for going on three years now. It's not that they have always been at war. It's more like they have always been talking about how they're going to be at war. Like any day now.

In The Life and Death of Jeremy Bentham, Widmore told John Locke that a war was coming to the Island. The Monster again had one of those deja vu moments where he experienced the memories of the dead man he was impersonating, and he repeated Widmore's line to Sawyer.

The NotLocke Monster and Widmore had a face down on the beach, separated by the pylons that Widmore erected to keep the Smokey One at bay. In Recon some questioned whether the Monster could have gone to Hydra Island and killed the survivors of Ajira Flight 316. We know that he can travel back and forth to the Island in his man form, so I assumed he did just that and then converted to Killer Smoke once he was there. But it's an interesting point. Perhaps the Island has been such an effective prison for the Smoke Monster precisely because he can not travel over water. Now that he's inhabiting a human organism all he needs is a seaworthy vessel.

However that does not explain the pylons, which appear to still be an effective anti-Monster shield. Do they also repel the Monster when he's inside his humanoid Locke shape? Or was NotLocke just respecting the boundaries that not-yet warriors must respect? I mean, Monster has been waiting for Widmore and now there he is. Why not just leap across the invisible boundary, turn into Smokey and swallow him down like a little tasty morsel?

The Great Monstro-Widmore War can't happen yet because that would be the end of the story. In the meantime, I guess we can still try to understand why it is that Widmore wants so badly to kill poor old Monster. Was this what Widmore was always doing on the Island? Was he Jacob's General, and if so, why was Ben allowed to kick him out? It seems pretty obvious that Widmore is here to lead the final charge for Jacob in the battle against the Monster.

His people used darts and tazers to subdue the Losties, just like the Others did.

We can see that the Others learned their tricks from Widmore.

Widmore speaks to Jin about the Monster in apocalyptic terminology. It's obvious that the Monster isn't just the embodiment of evil, or that evil is being kept out of the world by keeping the Monster on the Island. The world has plenty of evil in it, with or without the Monster. Plenty of death and destruction and cruelty and violence and sin. But Widmore describes the Monster as something worse than evil. It almost seems like the Monster represents total annihilation.

"If that thing masquerading as John Locke ever got off this island, your wife, your daughter, my daughter, everyone we know and love - would simply cease to be."

Cease to be. Is Widmore talking about this timeline, on the Island? Or does that go for all existence everywhere of everyone? Does the Monster have the power to obliterate all existences in every reality for all of infinity? Does he represent pure nothingness? Is he The Void?

I am become Death, the destroyer of Worlds.

- Bhagavad Gita

Maybe we're headed for a showdown where the Monster wins and wipes out this reality, but since OtherLOST is a reality already in progress, all of their consciousnesses can just hop skip and jump over there and go on as if nothing happened. Or maybe the Monster will be defeated and that will be how the Island sinks to the bottom of the ocean ... but everyone's consciousness will still get to hop skip and jump over to OtherLOST. Maybe that's why they zapped this other reality into the storyline at the last minute, to give our Losties a lifeboat after the Titanic of this hopelessly muddled storyline finally sinks into oblivion.

If that is where this is headed, then what to make of the everpresent Fate vs. Free Will contest that has shadowed the plot since its beginnings?

It was interesting to me that the Monster did not snatch Sun after she'd fallen to the ground while running away from him.

Clearly he must have her. Sun was told by Ilana that she is a Candidate. It struck me as a little weird that Sun could be important in that way, after spending the better part of two seasons restricted to a one note storyline.

But it seems to be the case. We are learning a few things about the making of a Candidate. First of all, a Candidate can not be killed - not by Jacob, not by the Monster, not by Widmore. Why? I don't think it's because they are unkillable. I think it's because they are all necessities. The winner in this game of unknown rules must gain possession of all six Candidates in order to prevail.

But the intriguing thing is that the Candidates must choose to align themselves with one side or the other.

The Monster can not win the game if he takes any of the Candidates by force. I am only guessing at this explanation and as with any other LOST theory, there are holes in it. Did Locke choose to be killed by Ben and donate his doppelganger to the Monster? I don't think so.

Did Sayid choose to be drowned in the dirtywater mikvah and be resurrected as a soulless zombie? Not really.

Sawyer has chosen to be with the Monster, but he's only there in body, not in spirit, only hiding out to try and game the system.

Now that Jin is lost, it will be harder for the Monster to ever convince Sun to join him.

And what does it mean that Widmore has now brought Jacob an unwilling "package" that quite clearly has NOT made the choice to be there?

And so at the midpoint of this last ever season of LOST, I'm not giving myself very high marks for figuring anything out. I can think of lots of things LOST is not - it's not much of a science fiction, it's not a monomyth, it's not holding together as any kind of philosophical allegory. It seems like maybe it could be entitled Six Numbers in Search of Characters in Search of a Plot that Might Tie Them Together.

Maybe it's an anthology of character studies wrapped up inside a fairy tale where the characters have stumbled into an ancient family feud and are being forced to play out parts in a story that has nothing to do with them. Once the feud is settled, perhaps the fairy tale world will just collapse, and we'll watch all the characters, the dead ones and the live ones, head out into a non magical mundane reality that is entirely incidental to the story we thought we were watching.

There's a problem with all this of course. We've known the Smoke Monster for five years, and have heard Jacob's name for three, but their overarching myth only began in last season's final episode. I hate to say this, but sometimes it seems like the gods came out of the machine just in time to wrap up a story that never had an ending of its own.

And as for OtherLOST ... how can OtherLOST ever become the one true underlying reality? Since all of it happened the way it happened only because Flight 815 never crashed on LOST Island, wouldn't that mean that for the last six years we've been watching an actual Show About Nothing?

Your guess is as good as mine.

What else can we do but keep guessing to the end? At this point we're all prisoners.

2010-03-27T18:27:00.000-07:00

I ALONE AM ESCAPED TO TELL THEE

And I, the last, go forth companionless,
And the days darken round me, and the years,
Among new men, strange faces, other minds. - Tennyson, Idylls of the King

When all is said and done, when the last white LOST logo falls backwards on the last black screen, it won't be the quality or the quantity of the Answers we'll remember. It will be the story.

Like kids around the campfire we've been riveted to this great big sprawling yarn, coming back year after year, begging to hear the next chapter. Soon it will all be over. But fortunately a great story - like Poor Richard - is immortal.

Now that's not to say we didn't get our share of Answers this week. In fact, I'm guessing that the Answer junkies out there in the audience were probably giddy that they could tick off so many boxes on their Answer checklist.

Magnus Hanso was, as many guessed, the last Captain of the Black Rock. Check!

The Black Rock carried convicts to Australia to help to populate that infamous slave colony. Check!

It landed in the middle of the jungle on the top of a giant wave during a terrible storm. Check!

The ship and the wave smashed into the Tawaret statue and left nothing standing but a four toed foot. Check!

Richard doesn't age because Jacob magically granted him immortality. Check!

And the mysterious, bewitching, inscrutable Island of infinite possibility, it turns out, is a ... cork.

Hmmm. Check?

You know what I found out this week? I found out that for me Answers don't much matter anymore. They're always going to be only the icing on the great LOST cake. I know we need to start accepting them one by one, but each Answer rubs off just a little bit of the wonder and makes me just a little bit sad. Like, I always imagined the Black Rock taking flight somehow, before landing on its belly on the forest floor. Knowing that it rode in on a tsunami, and that it took out Tawaret's noggin along the way, was useful information ... but it felt just a little unsatisfying. Like finding out Santa Claus is really just Dad drunk on eggnog. It's part of growing up, part of letting go of LOST, but my relationship to the Answers has changed. I'll take them as they come, but I'm done with using a checklist. Answers, I'm convinced, are never going to be what LOST is all about.

This episode was called Ab Aeterno, which translates as "since the beginning of time." The title reminded us not just that Richard is very old, but that the elements to any really great story are immeasurably older. It's the Big Picture we need to be looking at now. Not each intricate, individual Answer Tree, but the eternal, universal Sea of Stories.

The Richard we've known all these years as an immaculately groomed Island ombudsman started his very long life as a humble stuttering peasant.

His was a tale of infinite woe. Trying to save his doomed wife, he killed a fat greedy doctor.

Which sent him into the clutches of a fat, greedy priest.

Which left him at the mercy of a mean, greedy lieutenant named Whitfield. Very possibly an ancestor of Widmore. (Whit = wheat= Wid + field = moor = more)

He navigated each harrowing turn in his bleak little life with the unselfconscious aplomb of a cork bobbing about loose in a bottle of wine until finally he washed up on the shore of the Fate he's been enduring for 140 years: as a plaything of the gods.

Richard came from a time before antibiotics, indoor plumbing or iphones, a time when life, especially for the poor, was nasty, brutish and short.

Except for his trip on the Black Rock, Richard had lived his whole long life on an island. He came from Tenerife, one of the Canary Islands - a fittingly tragic place for a LOST luminary to hail from.

In 1977, Tenerife was the site of history's deadliest air disaster, with 583 souls lost in a horrifying runway crash between two airliners. In this melancholy place, Richard lived a life of hardship and misery, looking not to this crummy world but to the glorious afterlife for his reward.

Like so many others in this story, it was a murder that sealed Richard's fate and brought him to the Island. Having accidentally killed the despicable doctor, the hoped for gates of heaven were locked to him.

All Richard could see ahead of him was the gaping maw of eternal damnation in a fiery Hell. And for someone of Richard's time and station in life, there was nothing hypothetical or metaphorical about Hell. It was so real to him he could smell the sulphur.

The local padre was a slob who used his Godly connections to run a very lucrative con with destitute beggars like Richard. He doled out absolution like it was his own private possession and enriched himself selling criminals to slavetraders. Richard was the perfect mark for this conman.

He was above all else, a Man of Faith. Denied absolution, he wanted only the chance to accrue enough penance to save his soul from eternal damnation.

And it was that same gullible faithfulness that made him an even more convenient mark for the two ultimate Con Men he ran into on LOST Island.

Mr. Whiteshirt and Mr. Blackshirt. Or, as they could just as easily be called, Mr. Whitepants and Mr. Blackpants. I wonder why no one thought to call them that. Because I really don't think it makes any difference. The whole black and white thing has only always been a ruse. I'm convinced of that now. The relationship of these two dudes is fascinating.

They're like Sheepdog Sam and Ralph Wolf, who clock in every morning to battle one another to the death, and then clock out every night to share a cocktail.

It seems that the Flim Flam Twins are running contiguous cons. Jacob offers tabula rasa, a clean slate, a new life unstained by past sins.

His brother offers freedom - freedom from Hell, from being Jacob's prisoner. He offers free will.

Jacob has magical powers, but they're a little bit half assed. He can make a person live forever, but for those who have already died, he can't do a thing to bring them back.

His brother's extraordinary powers are different. His magic is that he can take on any form he chooses. He can turn himself into whoever you want him to be ... or whoever he wants you to see. I think most of us have surmised that the manifestations of those whose bodies lie on the Island were The Smoke Monster taking their form.

But it's conceivable that The Monster has always been more flexible than that. How many of the other curious things we've seen were ploys from his bag of tricks?

The Monster says Jacob is the devil. Jacob says The Monster is lying. The Monster says Jacob is lying when he says The Monster is lying. Last week, the NotLocke Monster told us that his mother had been insane. The more we learn about her kids, the more that starts to make sense.

Divine providence didn't shine on these boys equally. Jacob gets to have a human body. He gets to have a name. His brother gets neither - although he does seem to like to be called "Friend". What's more, he's Jacob's captive. Like Richard, he can not be killed, but like Richard, he's trapped within a place that's more purgatory than paradise.

Jacob compares his no-named brother to the darkness inside the wine bottle. Jake has the job of keeping the evil genie inside the bottle.

I'm not sure what Jacob thinks he's actually accomplishing. It's not as if he's got all the evil in the world bottled up on LOST island, no matter how proud he is of himself. The world that Richard came from was already full of greedy doctors and wicked priests and slavery and sickness and violent, painful, terrifying death. How much worse is it going to be if Jacob takes the cork out of the bottle? Are we talking the Hellmouth here?

Is No-Name the Master?

It's worth noting that the Hellmouth did not spring forth fully formed from Joss Whedon's imagination. People in the Middle Ages believed in a howling chasm below the Earth squirming with fiends, gargoyles and demons.

The concept of a Hellmouth corresponds to the pocket of supernatural energy that seems to be trapped within LOST Island. And there is still a lot of credence for that idea.

I'm in the camp that believes, not that it matters, that the ship we'd seen approaching the beach in The Incident was indeed the Black Rock.

As it approached the Island, it became trapped in a violent electrical rainstorm, much like the one Frank had to steer Desmond through in The Constant. Passage to or from the Island seems to involve navigating some kind of turbulent EMF-infused moat.

For those still looking for science fiction in this fairy tale, there is plenty of evidence left over for a theory that the Island represents a pocket of super forces, created by an electromagnetic anomaly of ginormous proportions. But that wasn't what this episode was about.

As a 19th century Spanish Catholic, the Hell that Richard feared was a place of merciless, incessant torment, a place that made perfect sense within a universe where insignificant humans accepted their plight as toys to a capricious God. A God who could punish men for failing to avoid the Evil that he himself had forced into their path.

The black and white morality of the Catholic Church made perfect sense to Richard, made him an easy subject for the Flim Flam Twins to manipulate. The question for us to consider is whether the writers are also expecting us to buy into this binary moral universe - where black is bad and white is right - or if they're counting on us to have just a wee bit more intellectual sophistication.

LOST has winked or nodded at almost every religion and spiritual belief system known to man. I am not ready yet to accept that they've settled on something this simplistic as their final metaphysical metaphor. I don't consider myself all that demanding when it comes to LOST's endgame, but I might just have an actual cow if LOST turns out, after all this, to be about nothing more than:

When Richard finally decides to align himself with Jacob, he brings a message back to The Monster.

The white rock that he hands to The Monster is the same rock we see NotLocke toss into the ocean in The Substitute, calling it an "inside joke". I think the joke is on us, or on any of us who are being tricked by this black-white sleight of hand.

I have no problem describing The Monster as Evil. He's done enough coldblooded killing to qualify hundreds of time over. But there's no way I'm ever going to be able to see a way clear to indentifying Jacob as Good.

It's not just because he's a smug, sanctimonious dick. It's not just that he's the one who is free to go "walking up and down in the world", like Satan does in the Book of Job. He tells Richard that no one gets into his temple unless invited by him. He says arrogantly that the is the one who brought the ship to the Island, that he continues to bring people to the Island - in order to prove The Monster wrong.

Does that mean he brought everyone who came to the Island? Even the Dharma Initiative?

I'd like to have seen that negotiation process. From what we've witnessed, Jacob doesn't exactly invite people to the Island. He more or less connives and manipulates or, when necessary, has his playing pieces arrested in order to get them to the Island.

Everyone on the Island, it seems, is there as a function of Jacob's imperial Will. What gives him the right to control the lives of people this way? He doesn't say, doesn't seem to care about that. He needs to bring people to the Island so he can use them as pawns in the blood feud he's got going with The Monster. He seems to think he's giving them a great gift when he washes their past clean, but he doesn't address the fact that they're getting this second chance while trapped on an Island of Mystery with a bloodthirsty Smoke Monster that eats most of them for lunch and then spits out the bones.

Those who don't get killed by The Monster more often than not suffer and die some other way. But Jacob takes no responsibility for what happens to the pawns he throws into the Thunderdome. He seems to think he's hot shit because he doesn't "intervene" ... you know, after he intervened all these poor suckers onto the Island in the first place. Jacob grants himself a clean conscience, but does that mean we have to give him a free pass? In the end, who is more responsible for all the suffering we've seen on LOST Island? The Monster that terrifies and destroys, or Jacob who feeds him fresh victims every chance he possibly can?

Since this is LOST, even an Answerpalooza episode like this one raised more Questions than it answered. For instance, if Jacob is the only thing keeping The Monster trapped, why isn't he free now that Jacob is dead? And what kept him caged in on all the occasions when Jacob went off Island, shopping for Candidates to give his magic touch to?

Speaking of magic touches, I don't believe we have any explanation for the black gloves Jacob wore so he wouldn't have to touch Ilana. Does Ilana have cooties? Why was she bandaged? And what meaning does it have that Mr. Whitey was wearing black when he travelled to her bleak Russian hospital bed to ask for her help?

Jacob asked Ilana to help protect the six remaining Candidates. So this group represents the end of the line. What then? What happens when the last Candidate dies? Or leaves? Does that mean The Monster wins? Is that what makes the stakes so high?

Why would anyone be willing to replace Jacob anyway? Does this look like a fun job? Alone for all eternity, keeping watch on a Monster who tries every day to kill you, all while constantly interviewing candidates for the inevitable day when he succeeds ... Who would ever want a job like that?

Why did Jacob fight off Richard's attack but not Ben's? Why can't Jacob just destroy The Monster? And why can't The Monster kill Jacob himself?

Richard was given the ceremonial dagger to kill Jacob, the same pugio that Dogen had given to Sayid.

It came with the same instructions - to use it before the victim had a chance to speak - and in both cases it failed to hit its mark, although for different reasons.

The Monster seems to be quite literally unkillable, but Jacob, as we know, can die.

What exactly is Jacob trying to prove to The Monster? If Diogenes finally finds that one honest man, that one incorruptible soul, will that somehow neutralize The Monster's Evil? Is that what the Candidates are for? Not to take over Jacob's seat as Prison Warden, but to turn the Island's secret power from Evil to Good? Is that what OtherLOST is all about? If Jacob finally proves his point to The Monster, does the Island just go away ... or sink to the bottom of the sea? Become a non factor in the world? Can all the Candidates have alternate destinies and just live ordinary, middling happy lives in an ordinary, middling world? Is that what we'll ultimately see happen at the end of the story? And if the story ends with the Island on the ocean floor, where will that leave our battling bros?

While we continue to ponder all the puzzling possibilities, the rat race continues. The Monster torments Richard as he lies suffering alone in the hold of the ship.

"Alone, alone, all, all alone,
Alone on a wide wide sea!
And never a saint took pity on
My soul in agony." - Coleridge, The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner

Like Lloyd Heinreid in The Stand Richard is a sole survivor, desperately using a nail to try and dig himself free of his chains. When exactly does The Monster start manipulating him? Is it when Whitfield comes down into the hold and starts slaughtering the prisoners?

Is it when they hear the officers being torn to shreds on the deck above them? Or when The Smoke devours Whitfield?

The onslaught of serial horrors serves the Monster's purpose of freaking Richard out of his bugfucking mind.

In fact, it's much the same series of events that happened to our Losties in The Pilot, when after witnessing the death and mutilation of their fellow passengers, they watched The Smoke Monster execute their pilot and toss his bloody remains into a treetop.

The Smoke Monster evaluates Richard, much as we've seen him do before - to Locke, to Juliet, to Eko

- and for the time being at least, he spares his life.

Is the boar that comes in to eat the rotted flesh also The Monster? Is it another atrocity designed to pulverize Richard's defenses?

We know from Outlaws in Season One that The Monster sometimes enjoys being a boar.

The Monster lets water pour into the cell, but none of it is within reach of Richard's mouth. The whole time he is dying, we keep watching him try to live.

But when the boar runs by him and knocks the nail out of his hand, Richard's despair is complete.

That's when The Monster decides to pull the trigger on his scam.

"And is that Woman all her crew?
Is that a Death? and are there two?
Is Death that Woman's mate?"- Coleridge, The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner

The Monster brings Richard one last false hope before he reels him in.

Ghost Isabella warns Richard that they are both dead and in Hell - the very words we hear Richard say at the beginning of the episode, the words Anthony Cooper said to Sawyer before he was killed in the belly of that same ship.

The Monster grants the lovers one scant joyous moment of reunion

... before he kills "Isabella" one more time, rips her to pieces and lets Richard hear her agonized screams. Richard tries desperately to save her one last time, but it's futile.

Totally bereft, totally helpless, totally hopeless, Richard is softened up well and good by the time Randall "The Monster" Flagg finally climbs down the ladder to claim his prey.

The Monster asks one thing of Richard in return for saving his life - the same thing he asked when Ben summoned him in the Temple basement. Like the resentful child I think he is deep down, the only thing the monster wants is "anything I ask" - which in this case means "kill the devil". Richard agrees. In return, The Monster promises Richard, just like he promised Sayid in Sundown, that he'll grant him his heart's desire. Isabella.

Richard, not stopping to consider the limitless possibilities for unintended consequences in this situation, sets out to slay the dragon. Little does he know, as he races along on his rickety bowlegs, that he's only running from one con game to another.

"As flies to wanton boys, are we to the gods; they kill us for their sport." - Shakespeare, King Lear

Richard is weak and easily bested by Jacob, who rudely baptizes him and then makes him an offer he can't refuse. Still pretending he's the High Priest of Free Will, Jacob decides he could use a translator, an intermediary to help him influence all that free will he says he's not going to influence.

Like when he sends Richard to Portland, Oregon to recruit Juliet for the imaginary firm of Mittelos Bioscience.

Or when Richard is sent to test the specialness of the six year old future Candidate, John Locke.

Jacob freed the trembling peasant who feared God's eternal damnation as a murderer. But a funny thing happened on the way to redemption.

Somewhere along the way, the good God fearing Man of Faith became the co-author of a gruesome Island genocide, along with one of Jacob's other murdering acolytes, Ben Linus.

Somewhere along the way, something went horribly wrong.

I think we're probably going to have to face the fact that this is a story without a Good Guy. Just like it's not about the Answers, it's not about Good Guys and Bad Guys either. So what is it about then?

It's not about Prophets. It's not about following the leader. It may be reminiscent of Biblical chapters where God and Satan played dice with the lives of human beings, like they did with Job or with Adam and Eve, but it's not really about that either. Jacob can't absolve sin. He can't reverse death. He isn't God. He just plays one on the Island.

"The absurd is sin without God." - Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus

The Monster has a bit more charisma than Jacob, I think, and there's something oddly sympathetic about him. As NotLocke last week, he told Sawyer his philosophy was "Kill or be killed." We hear Whitfield use the same phrase as he systematically butchers the captives so he won't have to compete with them for resources.

What happened to The Monster that he settled on this ethos to guide his life? He doesn't have a body himself. What does he mean when he says he was betrayed and his humanity stolen? Was he once killed, at least in the physical sense? Was he the victim in some ancient melodrama we have yet to witness? Did the Island keep his spirit alive after death and has it now distilled into a supernatural force of rage and retribution? Did Jacob create The Smoke Monster?

Whatever happened, Richard is now caught between two masters. Having faithfully served Jacob for a century and a half, his disillusion drives him back to The Monster, to take him up on his ancient offer.

He calls out to the omnipresent Monster that "I changed my mind", but though he hears, The Monster doesn't answer.

And it's just as well really. Running from one false prophet to another is an exercise in futility. In absurdity. It's the same madness the button pushers were driven to by the 108 minute clock in the Swan Hatch.

Richard may not be trapped in Hell, but he is trapped in a world where God is dead. Without God, without death, without love, without freedom, what can save Richard from his vast despair? Isabella is dead, on the other side of that great unknown where Richard can never go.

That's where Hurley comes in. We see him early in the episode, looking surprisingly sane as he babbles in Spanish to the night air.

Later, after he has translated Isabella's ghost-speak for Richard, Hurley talks briefly to the air again, after Isabella has gone. Who is he talking to when he says "Got it"? He tells Richard that Isabella told him he has to stay and stop the Man in Black from leaving the Island and sending them all to Hell. In other words, he has to stay to save the cheerleader and save the world.

Personally, I think Hurley lied to Richard when he said Isabella told him that. That sounds to me like Jacob talking. By the end of the episode, I think we see just how completely Hurley has fallen under Jacob's sway.

Hurley was the last Candidate that Jacob chose, and he was chosen for a very special talent that he alone possesses. Miles may be able to speak with the dead, but only Hurley can actually see them and talk to them person to person.

It's a beautiful scene when Whoopi Reyes brings Hurleybella to Richard for one last sad goodbye. The camera swirls slowly around the ghostly trio, delicately revealing Isabella as she comes to Richard and speaks lovingly to him and then just as delicately, as she goes away again.

"Devils can be driven out of the heart by the touch of a hand on a hand, or a mouth on a mouth.” - Tennessee Williams

It is as sad and sweet a moment between lovers as we've ever seen on LOST. It's also profound. Richard can never be with Isabella, but that doesn't mean he has to bury his heart underground like he did her necklace.

When he puts the necklace back around his neck at the end of the episode, Richard is making a choice.

He chooses to be human. He chooses to live. Trapped in the absurdity of a life without death, Richard's only choice is between life and despair. And as he showed throughout this episode, as all the Losties have shown time and again throughout the story, what Richard wants most of all is To Live.

“…because races condemned to one hundred years of solitude did not have a second opportunity on earth.” - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Like I said, I don't think the Answers really matter all that much anymore. I used to think it was all going to come together like a clock, but now I'm pretty sure that if it did, it wouldn't be the kind of clock that would ever be able to tell time. Maybe something more like this:

Having seen the statue crumble, I'm not sure we really need to know how it got built.

I don't know if we'll learn why the Others spoke Latin. I don't really care what the Black Rock was doing between leaving Portsmouth, England in 1845 and taking on its human cargo in the Canary Islands in 1867. The puzzle has shifted now from this kind of arcane fact checking to trying to unravel the bigger questions of good and evil and loving and hating and living and dying.

This episode wasn't about Richard after all. It was about the Big Brothers who are grappling over this scrap of Island real estate. Why are they there? Why do they keep dragging civilians into the middle of their battle? And why in the world should any of our Losties be cooperating with them? If the Island gods want to kill each other, what business is it of anyone else? Sawyer had the right idea last week: Let them fight it out and let everyone else get the hell out of Dodge. Not that that's going to be easy.

If the Island is a metaphor for Pandora's Box, a place where unspeakable Evil is kept trapped so the world can be safe from it, then there was an interesting image about halfway through the hour. As Richard lay on the wooden planks of the beached ship, surrounded by the stench of death and feeling his own end creeping nearer, he looked up and saw a buttefly fluttering around in the wisps of sunlight.

Maybe I'm just being a cockeyed optimist but I think that was an important moment. Because when Pandora stupidly opened the box and freed Evil into the world, she managed to slam it shut and keep one thing still trapped inside it: Hope. Maybe that's the only Answer that's going to mean anything in the end.

“Too much sanity may be madness and the maddest of all, to see life as it is and not as it should be.” - Cervantes, Don Quioxete

2010-03-20T13:25:00.000-07:00

MAN SOLO

Now that Jack has become destiny's child and John has become the smoke monster, the last LOST alpha male left standing appears to be Sawyer. When last we saw him he was sitting around in his dirty drawers guzzling ethyl alcohol and thinking that he'd been born to be alone. But a few days R&R at the Monster's backwoods campgrounds, and it looks like he's almost a new man. He's taking care of his friends.

And he's starting to click into place the combination locks on a new con, one that will hopefully get him and his friends off the Island for good.

It's like he wrung the last bit of Dharma dweeb out of his hair and remembered that he is the awesome James Ford, badass extraordinaire.

Or not.

OtherJames wasn't that much of a badass. He was a lonely sad manwhore who ate frozen dinners at night in his dreary apartment while watching corny vintage tv by himself. In some ways his life, like the lives of the other OtherLosties, was marginally better than it had been in the original timeline:

He was a cop, not a crook. He didn't seem as angry, but he wasn't half as good at playing women.

He did have one good close friend.

He hadn't killed anybody. He hadn't yet become his enemy.

And even though he was on the right side of the law this time,

he still got paid to get laid.

Badges and Sawyer have gone together since the Pilot Part Deux.

And a badge was very useful to him during his long con as Dharmatown's Deputy Dawg.

The pigeon drop in the opening scene of OtherLOST paralleled our first glimpse of Sawyer in his mirror episode - Season One's Confidence Man.

One thing I did wonder about: can cops have sex with their suspects? While their backup listens in electronically? Wouldn't that be entrapment or invasion of privacy or something else that would get a case thrown out in five seconds? I know, I know, that wasn't the point. The point was that OtherJames was still a sexy ass beast. That's a constant.

OtherJames, like the other OtherLosties, was sorta like Sawyer and sorta kinda not. He told Charlotte his inspiration to become a cop had been Steve McQueen in Bullitt.

And he definitely had a little bit of that going on.

But he was also a shady, sketchy, roundheeled kind of cop. We'd already seen how he let a handcuffed Kate escape the authorities in LA X.

In this episode, he was abusing his LAPD credentials to track down the same lifelong enemy, Anthony Cooper, that Sawyer had dedicated his life to killing. Which means he had the same horrifyingly tragic event in his past.

The big important things don't seem to change in OtherLost. Hurley still wins the lottery. Locke is still in a wheelchair. Jack is still a big spinal surgeon. Kate is still a fugitive. And James Ford is still the broken boy whose father killed his mother and then himself because he got so jealous he lost his mind.

Just like Sawyer, OtherJames is bent on murder. He doesn't seem quite as dedicated in his vengeance, but it still dominates his life.

He still uses sex as a drug to numb the pain. He still lies and schemes and hides behind his charm as he waits for his chance to kill his enemy. And he still hates himself.

The mirroring we've grown accustomed to in Season Six continued in this episode.

This eighth episode of Season Six was titled Recon, an obvious shoutout to the eighth episode of Season One, Confidence Man,

where Sawyer confessed to Kate the same sad tale of family woe that he confessed to Miles in this episode.

There were echoes of other Sawyer-backs. OtherJames on patrol wore an outfit a lot like the one Sawyer wore in Outlaws on the most fateful night of his life.

He made a trip to Hydra Island,

the place where he'd learned his most life altering lesson in Every Man for Himself.

LaFleur was the safe word that was used to call an end to his charade with the pigeon.

He was engaged in the same kind of sophisticated fakery that he demonstrated with such flair in that same episode.

And, as in every prior Sawyer centric, the character that dominated the subtext of the storyline was ...

... Kate.

This was a great Skatey episode. It had tackles, just like the old days.

Hell, it even had bars!

It may have been Sawyer's episode, but every other scene, rotating in a kind of back and forth flip show, was about Kate. Just as Kate's latest centric featured the critical moment when Sawyer let go of his Dharma dream,

Sawyer's centric focused on the moment that Kate and Claire had their long awaited confrontation.

And I'm going to have to say this flat out, to all those besotted fanboys who haven't yet accepted that Juliet is ...pssst ... dead, the reason for that is this: Sawyer's story and Kate's story are indelibly linked. They always always have been. And not to rub it in, but it's starting to look like they always will be.

I'm not sure how this glaring, boldly presented plot point has been missed by anyone. Last season, we watched Juliet turn from complex scheming genius to a clinging, whining female who killed herself - much like Sawyer's father - because she got so jealous she lost her mind. Some fans apparently dug this sad deconstruction so much that they have been steadfastly refusing to let it go ever since, to the point a kind of derangement syndrome seems to have set in. This episode should have hit them like a big red flying toolbox to the noggin.

But if not, maybe I can help.

You see, LOST is a tv show that has been weaving the tapestry of its story for more than five long years. And all across those years there have been certain common threads. In the case of Sawyer, the common thread from the beginning has been ...

... Kate.

Let's start with the books on Sawyer's dresser. All of them are books we've associated with LOST's most famous reader, but I'm not going to get all esoterically literary here. It's not half as complicated as all that. In fact, it may just be the utter simplicity of it that makes it so invisible to the nerd herd out there.

First there's Watership Down, the book "about bunnies" that was left lying on top of Sawyer's clothes when he was skinny dipping, only to be discovered by ...

... Kate.

Then there's A Wrinkle in Time, the book Sawyer was painfully reading right before he was dragged off for an eye exam by ...

... Kate.

And then there's Walker Percy's Lancelot, the book Sawyer was reading the day he gave one of his guns for a recon mission to ...

... Kate.

I'm been befuddled about this memory lapse by reviewers who seem to have otherwise photographic memories of LOST's arcane plot twists and mysteries. Is it part of the same Kate Hate that causes fanboys to repeat the same lame PleaseKillKate "joke" on every message board they can find? Do they secretly long for a leggy blond to become fixated on them to the point she'll kill herself if she can't have her man exclusively to herself? Or do they just have a thing for really big, ugly flowers?

I'm not going to belabor this point any further. I'm just saying that it's time to move on. Juliet is as dead as Claire's squirrel baby. This is a show with a history that didn't start last year. Sawyer's moving on and so can we all. It's time.

Besides, it's not as if you won't see Juliet again. I love these avis that were made by geekfreak over on Oh No You Didn't. They picked up on the hat thing over there too, and you know what they say about what it means when the hat fits:

There is one important book that isn't sitting on James' dresser.

Sawyer already mentioned Of Mice and Men in The Substitute, when he asked The Monster if he'd read it, and The Monster said no. Maybe OtherJames hasn't read it yet either. Maybe that's because he's still living it.

"A guy goes nuts if he ain't got nobody. ... I tell you a guy gets too lonely and he gets sick." - John Steinbeck, Of Mice and Men

There was a very poignant quality to James' life in the OtherLOST. He seemed somehow softer, more breakable.

Especially when compared to the hardbitten badass he's become on the Island.

Nothing much can hurt Sawyer now. He's been through so much, he's bulletproof. It's not that he wants to die exactly. He's still trying his best to survive. I think it's more than he's willing to die now. But he's also willing to live. He's not giving up. It's just that he's lost all fear.

Sawyer has been engaged in some very high level diplomatic discussions with both the Island's Deity

and its Royalty.

He's taking a very interesting tack. The Monster tells Sawyer that he trusts in his ability to bring back good reconnaissance - because he says Sawyer is the best liar he's ever met. Considering The Monster is probably about two thousand years old, that's a pretty bold statement. But is it accurate?

"Truth alone wounds." – Napoleon Bonaparte

Sawyer never seemed like a good liar to me. He's a good faker. He can pretend to be somebody else with complete ease. He's James Ford who became Sawyer who became LaFleur who became ...

the man with no name. Sawyer's looking more Clint Eastwood than Steve McQueen on the Island. He's not a dashing action hero. He's more the noble loner. And he's got his own Fistful of Dollars game going on between the two warring clans. Maybe Sawyer's higher purpose has been revealed.

On Detective Ford's desk in L.A., there's a small statue in the corner, a Franciscan monk, holding a child, perhaps the Christ child, in his arms. It could be St. Anthony, patron saint of lost things.

It adds another grace note to the mystery of Sawyer's purpose on the Island.

Who is Sawyer protecting and how will he be able to do it? Will it be him that has to end up protecting the Lost Souls by staying behind - or dying - to protect the Lost Island?

The Monster has sent him to the other island, Hydra Island, to gather information on the situation there.

The Monster pretends he is sending Sawyer to discover the fate of the Ajira passengers, but of course he already knows their fate. Since obviously he killed them himself! That's not really why he's sending Sawyer over there.He needs to find out what's happening with the man who has been coming to the Island all season, the one - I'm guessing - that Jacob has been expecting.

It's a familiar face, but one that represents one of LOST's least understood mysteries. What is Charles Widmore's agenda after all? Does anyone really know? We know he came to the Island as a very young man. Or perhaps he was even born there.

We know he grew into middle age on the Island, that he comforted Ben after his trip to the Temple and that he fathered a crazed genius son with Eloise Hawking.

We know that he was eventually banished from the Garden of Eden by Ben Linus, after he'd created a mutant Human-Island child with some as yet unknown Earthling.

Ever since then, Widmore has apparently been tootling about the world in his submarine, trying to come back to the Island. But why? What does he want with it? And what is his connection to The Beast who has been trapped there for all these centuries?

It's a tessellated mystery that feels like getting lost in a maze. For instance, let's assume that it was The Monster, in the form of Christian Shephard, that sent John Locke back to the mainland to look up Eloise Hawking, an appointment that Locke unfortunately had to adjourn due to some unavoidable unpleasantness.

The upshot of Locke's journey was that The Monster took over his likeness and the five potential Candidates (or Recruits?) got returned to the Island. So who did this benefit?

Clearly The Monster. That's all well and good, but there's one hitch in all of it. The Monster sent Locke to Eloise Hawking - who is a person very intimately connected to Charles Widmore.

Does that mean The Monster and Charles Widmore are in cahoots? Is this The Monster's ride to the freedom he craves?

Why then is Jacob looking forward to his arrival? Is Sawyer being walked into a trap? Is the con man getting conned again?

That's hardly the only possibility, of course. Widmore is setting up pylons to keep The Monster penned away from him. So, it's also very likely, just as likely, that when The Monster gave Hawking's name to John, it was Eloise - and by extension, Widmore - who was being conned. The Monster knew exactly how Mrs. Hawking would react, knew she'd tell the Candidate-Recruits how to get back to the Island. He couldn't have known Ben would also go and murder Locke, I don't think, so that part might have been a bonus. The Monster's con of Widmore was even more successful than planned. But now Widmore is back to even the score, and Jacob has been counting the days until he gets there. So what's in the closet?

Sawyer is now in the middle of this grudge match. And he's handling it in an interesting way. He's not telling any lies at all. Not to anybody. He's just letting himself be used as a conduit. He tells Widmore the truth about NotLocke. Then he tells NotLocke the truth about Widmore. He's hoping to let the two of them duke it out while he rides out of town in a puff of smoke. With Kate. Naturally.

Sawyer's con may or may not be successful, and he may yet get caught in his own trap. Widmore knows they don't trust each other and Widmore doesn't look like an idiot to me. He's not taking Sawyer's word at face value. I'm guessing Sawyer realizes that. The Monster, on the other hand, strikes me as rather gullible. Almost the way a child might be.

This is just my impression. I admit I'm bewitched by the beauty of Terry O'Quinn's portrayal of this fascinating creature. I find myself imagining the details of the fairy tale that underlies his existence. He reminds me at times of a big misunderstood monster who is trapped on an enchanted Island by a spell he is struggling to break. He lives in a cave, like Grendel from Beowulf and he is, like Grendel, a bit of a twisted mama's boy.

In this episode, The Monster confessed his secrets, separately, to Sawyer and to Kate. He told Sawyer that he wanted only to leave the Island. He whined petulantly, like a peeved adolescent, that everyone thinks they need to protect the Island from him, but all he wants is to get the hell off of it. He just wants to leave home, dammit. Can't the bloody authority figures stop trying to keep him caged up and let him do whatever he wants?

Maybe The Monster chose to kill John Locke, because Locke was so hell bent on protecting the damn Island. But the only reason he was trying to protect it was because he'd looked into the Monster's eye and found it beautiful. In other words, the Monster forced Locke to protect the Island he didn't want protected. See? The Monster, among other things, is insane.

The Monster also confesses to Sawyer that he does not want to be killed. In other words, he still considers himself to be alive.

The being inside Locke's body, the force within the Black Smoke Monster's tornado - that spirit is the essence of a soul that has never died. At least according to him.

This is one of the deepest mysteries of life. And it's one of the deepest mysteries on LOST.

“Dying is not romantic, and death is not a game which will soon be over... Death is not anything... It's the absence of presence, nothing more... the endless time of never coming back... a gap you can't see, and when the wind blows through it, it makes not a sound...” - Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead

As children, we wishfully refuse to believe in the finality of death. It is easy to get children to believe in a heavenly place where those we love will wait for us, just as we remember them, until we get there ourselves to see them again. It doesn't seem to dawn on children that they'll have to be dead themselves before they get there.

That's part of what Papa Ingalls is telling Laura in the Little House on the Prairie scene that Sawyer watches in his sad little apartment.

The episode is called "Remember Me", and in it Pa tries to comfort Laura as a neighbor's death approaches, reminding her that as Christians they believe in an eternal heaven where her soul will travel after death. He tells her that "people aren't really gone when they die." And as ironically presented proof of this, in typically subversive LOST fashion, we have our unkillable Smoke Monster. Who is all kinds of dead. But definitely not gone.

How did he get trapped on this Island? Why is he being trapped there? Who is he to begin with?

Ever since the bloody handed boy appeared to NotLocke in The Substitute, I've been imagining that The Monster has been on this Island since he was ... that boy. Something horrific happened to him, or was done by him, when he was just a child on the magical Island. After this week, that explanation feels a little more certain.

The other person The Monster confided in was Sawyer's mirror character in this plot - Kate. On the surface, The Monster seems to be playing Kate, offering her something she really wants, just like he did Sayid. He saves Kate from Claire's killing rage, and then goes to comfort her, to assure her that she will not be harmed because of him. He takes her aside and tells her a long story, about how he was badly damaged as a child by a mother who was insane, and now he wants to be sure that little Aaron doesn't end up with a pyscho mommy like he had.

He conveniently leaves out the part where he is the reason Claire went crazy in the first place. He plays into Kate's heart's desire - her love for Aaron, her wish to be his mom. But it didn't seem to me like Kate was taking the bait.

She gave The Monster a sympathetic ear, but she kept her wits about her. Now that Kate has been wedged out from under Jack's left butt cheek, she's starting to seem like an intelligent human being again. And it sure looked like the Monster appreciated her. What was he looking for from Kate? Why so courtly and polite?

There were a few moments during their talk on the beach when The Monster looked for all the world like a troubled little boy, trying to get someone to understand how hard he's had it. He knows he's messed up. He's trying to be honest with himself, and face up to his personal issues. But you know who's really to blame, don't you? It's always the mother's fault!

The Monster is the true Man with No Name in this story. We still don't know what to call him. When we first learned that Jacob had a companion on the Island, many began to refer to him as Esau - Jacob's twin from the Book of Genesis.

Now we have a new piece of information. We know that The Monster considered his mother to be a crazy woman, and whether or not that's true, it adds a new dimension to the story. Esau, after all, was the son the mother shunned.

"Now Isaac loved Esau, because he had a taste for game, but Rebekah loved Jacob. " - Genesis 25:28

She actively colluded with her preferred son Jacob to have him receive the family birthright, the blessing of the firstborn, bestowed upon him by his dying father. She may not have been crazy, but I don't think Esau ever quite forgave her. So, is The Monster really the son of a crazy mother, or is this just a case of "Mom liked you best? "

Was the older boy - the stern one who scolded NotLocke in the jungle - was he the son that Mom liked better? Was he Jacob?

Is The Monster the bestial Esau, the brute who sold his birthright for a big pot of greasy stew?

I am imagining a story where this younger boy did something very bad. Perhaps it was the mother that he killed instead of the father, a little twist on the standard man myth. Perhaps he could not be killed because he was yet a child, so instead he was put under an enchantment to keep the world safe from his original sin. Maybe he was a baby psychotic and this was the best way for him to be punished fairly, to keep the world safe from him while still showing mercy for his youth. In his dealings with the children from the Temple, and his behavior around Claire, The Monster seemed like a kid playing Daddy.

He's like the Boy King of the Island. Sometimes he's Locke, sometimes he's The Smoke Thing. But inside, he's still just a child.

He's Peter Pan trying to keep order amongst his Lost Boys. And what does he see in Kate? Does he see what Peter saw in Wendy? Is he looking for someone to tuck him in at night and tell him stories?

This was the big episode where Kate and Claire's drama came to a head.

Claire was acting super creepy throughout, most creepily so when she took Kate's hand and odd little smileys kept twitching around her mouth.

She showed her pretty dolly to Kate.

She explained resentfully that she had to make do with the little Jar Jar Baby because that was "all I had".

Kate didn't quite get the hint, but she figured it out a few minutes later when Claire tried to butcher her up like a rabbit for dinner.

Zombie Sayid looked on without flickering an eyelash.

I think after this episode, we can lay to rest the question of what happened to Sayid.

Sorry, kidz. Sayid iz ded.

Adieu, you wily Iraqi. We'll miss you.

The Monster in his wisdom had initially told Claire that her baby had been taken into the Temple. This was a pragmatic move on his part. He wanted Claire to have something to hate, so that hate could give her a reason to live. That same kind of Hate is what Sawyer's story has always been about. In LOST and in OtherLOST, hatred and revenge are the fuel that keep James Ford moving forward. In OtherLOST the hatred feels more muted. He seems like a pretty nice guy when he hooks up with Charlotte.

Rebecca Mader made her encore appearance in this episode, joining the cavalcade of reappearances in Season Six of People Who Died in seasons past. I guess Darlton still owed her some payback after that whole kerfuffle about her age ... because they gave her more face time with Josh Holloway than she probably had dared wish for. I wonder if they even had to pay her.

Charlotte looked like she could definitely have had a return engagement on James' hot sheets if she'd played her cards right. But she totally blew it. Offered a T-shirt from his top drawer, she began shoveling through his stuff like she was on an archaeological dig site. I mean, how rude can you be, Miss No Manners Nosy Pants?

I didn't blame James for tossing her out after she yanked open his private possessions and started poking around in them. But I know the message we were meant to take from it: OtherJames is still keeping too many secrets.

"Nothing makes us so lonely as our secrets." - Paul Tournier

He's not just hiding his private family tragedy from his one night hookups. He's still unwilling to open up and tell the truth to his best friend. Miles and James had a funny little bromance going on. James flirts with him, but Miles is too serious to be distracted. When James won't admit to his lies, Miles breaks up with him. But OtherJames isn't as hardcore as original Sawyer. He feels bad when Miles wants a divorce. He wants to kiss and make up.

They have a real heart to heart, and James' defenses finally start to come down. He tells Miles the truth about his vendetta against "Sawyer", knowing that Miles will never let him carry through a plan like that. He gives up on vengeance. Ruefully, he starts to hand over the folder he's been hoarding, and at just that redemptive moment ...

Boom! Who should come crashing into his life, in perfect Bullitt fashion but ...

... Kate!

Sonuvvabitch! Of course! Who else could it have been? Because like I told you in the beginning, Sawyer's story has never been about just Sawyer. It's always been about Sawyer ...

... and Kate.

The woman who met his child's mother before she ever met him. The woman who was the first to learn his terrible secret and to slowly begin to draw him back into the land of the living. The woman that Juliet was so sure she couldn't compete with that she chose death over trying. The first woman he ever fell in love with, after thirty some years of hard, angry solitude.

When Sawyer came upon the cages where he and Kate had been kept captive together, he found her discarded floral dress still laying on the block where she'd taken it off. It might have seemed a contrivance, but it was one the story needed. To those of us who follow the story closely, the dress doesn't represent just the passion that Sawyer felt for Kate during those few hard days.

The first day he saw her in that dress was the day she was brought to the cages dressed in it, the day that Sawyer's heart broke for her fear and vulnerability.

He reached out to her, comforted her, made her laugh.

He gave her food.

Uh....Fishbiscuits, anyone?

When Sawyer held the dress in his hands, he was remembering something that will keep him going a lot better than Hate will. He was remembering Love.

In Tricia Tanaka Is Dead, Sawyer first told how when he was a lonely little boy he loved to watch Little House. And naturally the person he told this to was Kate.

In this episode, Sawyer was remembering the really important part of Pa Ingalls advice. Not the pie in the sky part, the magical thinking that we'll get to see our dead loved ones again someday. That part's not really sure, even for those who desperately wish it to be true. But the part we can count on, the part we can live by, is this part:

 "That's what life's all about...laughin' and lovin' each other."

At the end of his little recon adventure, Sawyer hasn't really cleared anything up. He is forming a plan, but its outcome is still very uncertain. One thing, though, has been decided. Sawyer didn't jump into that hole after Juliet. He didn't jump into that grave. He's alive, at least for a little while longer. And if life's about livin', like Pa Ingalls says it is, then maybe that's what he best start doin'.

As the episode ends, he returns to Kate, who is recovering from her no good very bad day at the campfire.

He does what he's always done - he makes her smile.

Then he tells her the whole truth. There's no more lying or faking left in this con man. He's letting the Truth do all his fighting for him. Widmore and The Monster can duke it out however they like. Sawyer will set the table and then he and Kate and whoever else wants to come will slip out the back door.

In the course of the episode Sawyer has moved decisively past being "not with anyone" to being part of "you and me". In What Kate Does, Kate told Jin she wanted to "figure things out together" with Sawyer. Now Sawyer wants the same thing. The two Outlaws are on the same page - a place that, for all their long and winding road together, they've never actually been before just now.

“Love is our true destiny. We do not find the meaning of life by ourselves alone - we find it with another.” - Thomas Merton

2010-03-13T03:35:00.000-08:00

SORRY!

Unfortunately, real life has intruded on my LOST life, and I won't have time this week to do a recap of Dr. Linus. Apologies to anyone who came looking for it, but I PROMISE I'll be back next week. In fact, wild horses couldn't keep me away.

Even though we have so little time left with LOST,it's still a good idea to get away from it now and then. It can mess with your head if you think about it too much.

And now that the end days are almost here, we all have to start dealing with the fact that most of our theories and wishes and way cool Imaginary Lost scenarios are about to get their Judgment Day. It's only going to End. Once.

You have to feel for our good friends Darlton who are going to have to deal with fans reacting to the irrevocable final cut of LOST.

I predict a lot of second guessing and epic message board bitchfests. A lot of cherished fantasies are going to bite the dust.

But while we still have time, we can enjoy all the great imagination of the LOST fandom, thinking up all the shows that LOST could have been, if only it weren't, you know, LOST.

I've seen a lot of great fanon out there, but this is my fave, currently. Just think about it! With this cast, and just a wee bit of CGI, LOST could have been ...

See ya next week!