Rumors

Ahem, clears throat...
I'd like to stop the spawning for a brief announcement.
The Fish has gone under the knife. GASP! Not the knife you say!
No, not the fillet knife. Just a little refreshing new scale job.
Think of it as a new "front door." It's to provide access for more Lost fans
and to give you contact details for the Fish herself.

You may log on as you usually do to this journal.

Click HERE to check it out.

Feel free to swim on over! Read more...

Biology is Destiny
or
The Killer Within

Ah, all the parents out there remember that moment. When they show you a flickering Rorschach test design on an ultrasound screen and assure you that the indecipherable blob you see is in fact your flesh and blood and pride and joy.



It's a happy moment,



but it's scary too.



Pregnancy is scary, what with the massive weight gain and the loss of youth and freedom and the endless visits to chambers of horrors



to be repeatedly tested for things like preeclampsia and toxoplasmosis and hyperemesis gravidarum (well, actually that last one is morning sickness, but it sounds scary, doesn't it?). Childbirth is even more scary, the whole mindbending concept that something huge and living and screaming is going to push its way out of your body through an absurdly small hole approximately 1/100th its own size. It ain't easy becoming a mother. And it's especially not easy on the Island of Mystery, where Sun learned to her great dismay that among the many natural wonders of this shithole of a tropical paradise is that - for reasons yet to be explained (hopefully!) - on this utterly delightful island, pregnancy is a terminal disease. 100% of the time. The child is not the father to the man on this island. He's the assassin to the mother.

It would seem that our ever creative writers have found a new riff on an old Lost favorite. We have seen how sex on this show equals death - for women. Seemingly only for women. It seemed sad that Shannon and Ana Lucia had to pay such a heavy price for mere orgasms. But it could be that in fact they were the lucky ones. Because killing off the sexually tainted women wasn't cruel enough for these writers. They want them to suffer, slowly, painfully, and to taste the dread of impending death before they go. What's more they'll have to drag their own child into the grave with them. And what have these arrested adolescent writers created as the instrument of death for these gals?



SUPER SPERM!!!!

Although it's yet a mystery what Super Sperm is all about. Is it just a LOT of sperm? Or is it really eeeeevil sperm? Or is it just sperm that's so big and goofy it doesn't know how to make a viable baby?



Whatever it is, this stuff is not good. It's a teenage boy's potency fantasies on acid is what it is.

Now Sun has come a long way from the meek, innocent herbalist she seemed to be in Season One, kowtowing to her abusive unilingual husband from hell. She was the one to save Shannon from suffocating when Jack thought a better plan was to rip off Sawyer's fingernails... But she was also the one who poisoned Michael...We knew she was an adulteress who cheated on Jin. We know she's very good at keeping secrets and this week we learned she's kept more than one from Jin. She never told him his mother was a prostitute. Or that it was in fact Sun that got him the big invite into the wonderful world of breaking knuckles and shaking down failed businessmen... We know pretty, bony Sun is not the China Doll she appears to be.



We know she has always been a warrior. She fought her own personal Bad Daddy.



She fought Jin's Bad Mommy.



She fought Jin.



And now she's fighting

DEMON SPERM!



It seems as if Super Sperm are going to become an important virtual character here in the morality play known as Lost. And it should be interesting to see how they make this work. After all, we're dealing with writers who had a fertility specialist ask a woman when she last had sex as a way of inquiring about her due date. If she had sex last night, is she one day pregnant? Seriously, did these geeks learn their sex ed from South Park? It's a little unnerving to think this plot line lies in the hands of men who faint at the word menstruation but either way, we're stuck with them. And with...



Now who is going to figure out the cure to the Super Sperm? I'm thinking it won't be Juliet, since she doesn't even know to ask Sun when her last period was. And it's unlikely to be good Doctor Redshirt



who managed in his blissfully few minutes of screentime this week to not only freak Sun out and steal her shovel (!) ... but who is falling hugely short on his public information responsibilities. Shouldn't he be warning all the horny couples that The Super Sperm are Coming! The Super Sperm are Coming! JUST SAY NO!!!!!



oops...Too late!

Well, we can all see this is going to be a huge mess. The doctors are useless. And this island has a mind of its own and that mind is firmly set on Abstinence Only for family planning purposes. And I think we aaaaaalll know how that tends to work out. So, we leave that story for now in the hands of the sex ed challenged geeks who write Lost, cross our fingers - and our legs - and turn our attention to the other development this week.

A Failure to Communicate



Helicopter Girl speaks in tongues. Random languages spill from her lips. And while Hurley was able to translate her Spanish that she was dying, no one understand her Chinese or her Esperanto or whatever else she was saying. And Desmond was freaking desperate to understand her.



He was manic. In fact, he was downright shifty. Letting Mikhail toddle off back into the jungle after saving Helicopter Girl's life? Even after he stole the phone she brought???? Although we are used to such monumental stupidity on this show, that still stood out as exceptional. Exceptionally suspicious. What is Desmond up to here? I'm a fan of Dark Jack myself, and dearly hope the writers are kind enough to give us that, but I'm starting to think there's a possible case to be made for Dark Desmond as well.

Mikhail came running out of the bushes to the site of the flare.



It was almost - dun dun dun dun - like he was expecting someone. The someone who Desmond thought was coming from Penny to rescue him. Can Desmond possibly be that naive to think Mikhail's sudden appearance, risen from the dead no less, was a happy accident?



Like Mikhail's miraculous lifesaving talents



(er...why do we need Dr. Dickhead again? Personally I find Mikhail's charming one eyed charisma far more riveting to watch.) And, although the 99.9999% of Lost fans who don't go online will have missed it (serves them right), it turns out that Helicopter Girl gave Mikhail a message in Portuguese that he mistranslated as Thank You. But what she really said was "I am not alone." And that is pretty freaky. Where are the rest of them? Does Mikhail know who the rest of them are? Why they're coming? Do they really believe that all the passengers on 815 died in the crash? And most importantly, do any of them have the antidote...



...for Super Sperm?

Time is running out. Super Sperm may seem funny now, but just wait. Just because you can't see them doesn't mean they aren't the most dangerous thing yet on Creepy Island. I think I'd rather take my chances with a polar bear than with one of these guys...


Read more...

Three's Company...or Three's a Crowd?

Inspired by my favorite Cactus...



That Jack had to play gay on his show too.
Whatever...seems a guy named Jack can't get laid in any era. *snicker* Read more...

A Jack By Any Other Name...

Never fear, I'm tying together parachute strings and ultasound dopplers for the recap. In the meantime--

您信任杰克吗?

¿Usted confía en a Jack?

Vi fidate di Jack?

Você confía em Jack?

Вы доверяете jack?

너는 잭을 신뢰하는가?

Do YOU trust Jack?

Read more...

The Wonder that is Jack.

Thanks to Alice Karben, it all makes perfect sense now!

Read more...

Just say NO, kids

This is Jate:




This is your brain on Jate:






Any questions? Read more...

A Short Treatise on Vicious Circles

One of the great mysteries of Lost is why they seem to constantly insert sophisticated concepts derived from philosophy, literature, religion and even physics into a show where the fans tend to think on the level of:

Why do only black people fall from the sky?

Was Charlie sporting an Applause guitar by Ovation? Because I have one, and that would be really cool.

anothr epoint i would ike to mention is an assosiation of Jack and Sawyer with Grey's anatomy's (a show which i am falling deply in love with) McDreamy and McSteamy aka Derek shepard and Mark sloan....

I could go on, but I have a recap to write. The point is: WHY? Why bother to fill these episodes with obscure references to difficult concepts that the fanboys and shippergirls can't even marginally understand? References to Hume, to Locke, to Joseph Campbell, the Book of Genesis, quantum physics, Heidinger's Cat! It seems like an awful lot of work for nothing, doesn't it?

Well, let's not be like that. Let's see if we can be worthy of all the efforts these writers put into muddying up the waters and confusing us and making up shit that makes us think we should be thinking about what it means.

Let's start with Hume:



As in DESMOND David Hume, our protagonist of the week. Like Des, this bewigged philosopher from the 18th century was Scottish. And like Des, he was mostly interested in what causes what. Or how things cause other things. And whether there's any point to believing in free will, since maybe it doesn't even matter what we think we will ourselves to do. Maybe it's all set in stone and we're just drawn along and forced to play our parts like cogs in a machine. Although something causes our not-free will to act like it's free, the original cause, and that's what Desmond went in search of this episode.

How much does Desmond hate saving Charlie now?

Desmond had a dream. It started with Hurley pulling this pose



and ended with Charlie pulling this one.



It would seem, to the Philosopher Hume, that Hurley pulling the cable causes Charlie to eat the arrow, which in turn causes the next part of Desmond's vision - the part he likes, the part he wants - where his beautiful Penny comes to rescue him, just like she said she would so long ago. And Desmond clearly has had it with saving that skinny little Englishman. He decides to take matters in his own hands and MAKE his vision happen this time. In other words, Des wants Charlie to die in order to cause Penny to appear. Good for Desmond, not so good for Charlie.

But how can this work? If Desmond didn't go and recruit his band of brothers



would any of these things happen? Would the helicopter girl have just waited up in space for Desmond to get Hurley to pull up the cable and Charlie to step on the rope? What about Jin's ghost story?



Didn't see that in the vision. Maybe that's what screwed it all up!

In any case, the helicopter girl



did arrive. She wasn't Penny. If Desmond had let Charlie go, would it have been Penny? That doesn't make much sense, but...it didn't make much sense that Desmond was a monk in non-Catholic Scotland either or that they made wine in a country where there isn't enough sun available to grow grass, let alone grapes...but we digress. We're pretending the writers are geniuses here today, OK?...So. Space suit girl was not Penny.



She was however, an avid reader. Of the Portuguese translation of Catch-22. And this is where 18th century philosophy collides with the 20th century.

See, now that humankind has evolved past simple mechanistic explanations of the universe, we are still left trying to sort out the paradox of our existence, and Catch-22 is a book that reminds us what a futile, self defeating joke we're left with when we try to cause something to happen. In that book, the Army will discharge anyone who is insane...but you have to request the discharge personally...and only a sane person could think they might possibly be insane...so no one can possibly ever get discharged as insane! It really sucks. It's a circular self referential paradox. A kind of absurd HELL where every action causes an action that causes the first action to repeat itself, and there's never any escape. And this is where Desmond is now.

Come on, Charlie, would it be so bad to just die already?
Desmond is still willing to save Charlie. But he's getting damn pissed about it. Because saving Charlie only causes Charlie to be in danger of dying again. What's the point?

To help us get this point ... well, not really, because I'm pretty sure no one got it...they digressed into one of their favorite misunderstood references, The Holy Bible. The Scottish...er, wine... the monks bottled was named Moriah, for the mountain where the Original Mean Daddy - Abraham - agreed to slaughter his son Isaac like a boar to show his allegiance to God. You can see this as another paradox. Abraham had to break God's law, and commit the ultimate sin of killing an innocent because God himself ordered him to break it. Poor Abraham was as trapped as poor Desmond...but of course poor Isaac



was most trapped of all. Abraham deferred to God - the biggest Cause of them all - and he was freed from his vicious moral dilemma. But Desmond does not defer. He exercises free will, he uses his own conscience, and the cycle continues, viciously, on and on...or at least until the season finale.

So what does this have to do with SEX?



Because, face it, that's what we all really enjoyed in this episode! You think this was a subplot, unrelated to the larger story, that the blasted, infernal, nauseating triangle has no story telling function other than to cause the online shippers to make fools of themselves week after week as their hopeful predictions one by one fail to come true? Au contraire! I have found the connection!

You might think it was a little bizarre, a little unnatural, a little unrelated that Kate was mooning over Jack in this episode.



After all, he recently deserted her with murderers and blew off her apology and has been tripping over himself trying to be Juliet's white knight. And you might think it was even more unrelated that her spurned spoonlicking flirtation sent her into Sawyer's tent to...lick something a lot sweeter.



But, actually, no! It all makes sense now.

See, Kate being with Jack



causes her to seduce Sawyer,



which in turn causes Jack's heart to break



...well, actually it causes Jack to become super happy and content. Which causes Kate to go mental.



That, in turn, causes her to seduce Sawyer again! Which causes Jack to become even happier.



Which causes....well, this could go on forever, as you can see!



Will Kate break out of this hellish cycle, and start loving this beautiful man for himself?



When she does ...



will Jaters join Charlie on his death watch?

Will free will prevail or are they all trapped in the vicious cycle of Cause and Effect over which any self willed acts are an illusion?

That's how I saw the episode anyway. But I could certainly be wrong. Other Lost fans have different opinions:
Could the Island be the home of the Blair Witch? You never know. When the Losties start trekking their way through the forest they start acting a little crazy and hearing voices like those insane kids in the movie did when they started trekking their way through the forest.

Does Richard Alpert get his own make-up drop? Or does raccoon eyes buy it in the real world when he's out there stalking his employees' relatives?

Unified theory of a redneck...id rather have a redneck in the backseat of a car than bill gates in a micro-film.

I don't think there is a greater proof of the randomness of our existence than the Lost fanbase. The question really is - Can a TV show successfully throw enough high quality intelllectual red herrings at a mostly insane fanbase and cause any of them to understand whatever the hell story they are trying to tell?

Until next week...


Animation courtesy of Spunky at LF Read more...

Kate: What's...up?

So what'd y'all think of Catch-22? Any burning insights or revelations which came to you? Is Jate or Skate really over? And whaddaya mean Jack lost at something? Gag me with a spoon, ladies and gents.
Some pretties to get you in the talking mood, doesn't Kate look real disgusted by Sawyer's Afternoon Delight request?:



Oh, and who here thinks that's Naomi kissing Sawyer, raise your hand. The Bubble spin never ceases to amaze me. Thanks to Spunky again!
If the episode didn't grab your fancy, how about that latest spoiler that Five. Yes, FIVE character deaths are looming on the Lost horizon. Anyone wanting to place their bets now, for bragging rights? Read more...