Lost 5.08: LaFleur

“The record is spinning again. We’re just not on the song we want to be on.”

Well, you guys certainly had a lot to say about last week’s episode. There were 143 comments on my original blog post, and 34 on a follow-up I did about part of one scene.

This week’s episode gives us a bridge between 2005 and 2008 (or 1974 and 1977...) and there’s a LOT of food for thought in it. This one will become extremely important in episodes to come, just for what has been established.

“That Was More Like an Earthquake”
So what happened with that time jump? One minute we’re facing what appears to be the back of the four-toed statue (YEEEEESSSSSS!!!!) and the next minute, we’re jumping away (NOOOOOO!!!) Everyone grabbed their heads like they were about to explode, but then realized their headaches were gone and everything had stopped. Did they go all the way back to the beginning? Could Locke heading down the well have somehow jumped them back a couple of thousand years to an ancient civilization? And then they suddenly jumped forward again? It doesn’t explain why it hurt so much to jump forward, but not back, other than the donkey wheel was involved the second time (presumably the headaches came from the, um, record turntable coming to a sudden stop). There were a few Egyptian references in this episode, but that was definitely the most exciting (see below for more).

And I thought JACK had the worst facial hair...
WHAT was up with Sawyer’s beard?? When he jumps into the filled-in well, his beard was on its way to Jeardsville. It’s dark and thick and looks like it’s been growing in real time as they’ve been jumping around. Then they head to Daniel, and it’s light-coloured and normal again. They head to the beach and it’s black again. They hear shots, and run toward them, and it’s normal again. It’s dark on and off later in the camp. I’m thinking they shaved his beard to do the flashforward scenes, and then cut pasted coffee grinds or something on his face (remember doing that when you'd go out as a hobo on Halloween?) and certainly weren’t very consistent about it.

Three Years Forward... Three Years Back
By zipping forward three years in the beginning, I thought they were setting up a new version of where we were in season 1... for the rest of the series we’d be forced to piece together what we’d missed over those three years (we’ve had quite a number of episodes filling us in on the Oceanic 6 and what we’ve missed over there). But by the end of the episode, I was a little worried that that’s ALL we’re going to see of the three years. We’ve spent 4 years watching the first three months on the island, and less than 40 minutes seeing what happened to these people over the following three years in their time. And they’ve certainly put the Skaters (those shippers who want to see Kate and Sawyer together) in a difficult position, because now you have the moral quandary of Suliet to deal with. Kate was in Sawyer’s heart for 3 months. Juliet’s been there ever since. To us, it doesn’t work – there’s almost no chemistry, we don’t have the long lead-up we got with Sawyer and Kate, and the tension of Jack glowering beside them the entire time isn't there either. But to them, it’s been a long time. Sawyer is clearly not over Kate (or he wouldn’t have lied to Juliet) but where is this going to put Juliet? Will she become the other woman yet again? Have the writers just made Kate’s decision for us, and now she’ll end up with Jack no matter what? Hm... (I know I rarely comment on the ships, because frankly for the most part I couldn’t care less, but in this case, it’s a difficult one.)

Highlights:
• The statue!! The statue!! It’s the four-toed statue! We’re finally going to see what it looked like and how big it was and we’ve gone way back to the civilization that made it and... oh, balls.
• Sawyer jumping in the well to save Locke.
• Miles jumping in the car and calling Sawyer “Boss,” and Sawyer calling him “Enos.” HAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!
• “Yeah, thanks anyway, Plato.” LOL! Sawyer’s nicknames were at an all-time high in this episode.
• Daniel seeing Charlotte again.
• Sawyer telling Alpert about John Locke, and the look on Alpert’s face.
• Sawyer seeing the Oceanic 3 again.

Did You Notice?:

•The giant statue looked very much like one of the Egyptian gods. Seen from behind, it could be any number of them, but I’m thinking it’s either Set or Anubis. Anubis (this photo is a statue of Anubis that was in London, England) has the head of a jackal, body of a man, and we can see ears sticking up on the top of the head (the ears on the island statue don't look this long). He is the god of the afterlife, and that could be essential to this island, feeding back into all the early fan theories about the island being heaven or hell or purgatory. Set the Destroyer is the other possibility, and probably the stronger one for me: he was the god of the desert (notice where Ben and Locke both ended up when they turned the wheel), but also the god of Chaos. His enemy was Isis: Set killed Osiris, and thwarted Isis’s efforts to get him into the afterlife. When Isis’s son grew up, he swore revenge on Set and fought him viciously, with Set removing one of his eyes. Eventually Set was driven out into the desert. Isis’s son’s name was Horus. Or maybe we'll eventually see the other side of the statue and it'll be Locke's face. Now THAT would be creepy. (Kind of like the outside of Dr. Evil's lair in the Austin Powers movies.)
• I pointed out a couple of weeks ago that in Jack’s bedroom he had a reel-to-reel tape deck, and we see a guy queuing one up in the Dharma station.
• How freakin’ excited was I to see Herc from Friday Night Lights (out of his wheelchair!) and Jimmy Barrett from Mad Men in the Dharma Station?? SO FREAKIN’ EXCITED! Aw, thank you, Darlton. I love when my shows come together...
• As the gang heads to New Otherton, Sawyer tells Miles and Juliet to keep their mouths shut and let him do the talking, and that they have to come up with a lie. He’s become the Jack of this gang, just like Jack was telling everyone to let him do the talking and perpetuate the lie about what really happened in the plane crash.
• The fact that Horace offers everyone a one-way trip off the island on the sub shows that the Dharma Initiative didn’t have the same interest in keeping the island a secret that the Others have. Horace clearly didn’t see how special the island was.
• When the alarm in the compound goes off and everyone is ushered into the house, Daniel runs in the other direction (he's not in the house with Juliet, Sawyer, Jin, and Miles). We don't see Daniel three years in the future, either. What happened to him??
• Well, that’s one way to make the English-speaking a lot easier for Jin.
• The necklace that Paul was wearing is the Egyptian ankh symbol. The ankh is the symbol for eternal life.
• As Sawyer is walking through the barracks, right before he picks the flower, you see two people playing chess.
• When Sawyer wakes up on the couch after being zonked by the sonic fence, Horace says, “How’s your head?” and Sawyer just says, “It hurts.” Three years later, the same exchange happens after Horace wakes the morning after his bender, only the speakers are switched.

So Many Questions...
• Presumably, Horace got the dynamite from the Black Rock. Three years earlier, he claimed to know nothing about the boat when Sawyer said he was searching for it on an expedition. Was he lying to Sawyer? Or did he find it in the meantime?
• In “Man Behind the Curtain, we see Ben arrive on the island about ten years after he was born. Fans assumed that was the early 1970s and that Ben was born in the early 60s. But in this episode, Horace has a son by Amy in 1977. Ben is clearly not on the island yet or I think Monsieur LaFleur would be a little freaked out by him. When Ben DOES arrive, Horace is married to a blonde woman named Olivia, and there’s no mention of a child, or Amy for that matter. What happened to the baby and Amy?
• Why did Charlotte disappear instead of travelling to the new time? Do dead people go somewhere else and they don’t time travel? If Charlotte is a child in 1974 when they first arrive at the camp, do the rules of time travel dictate that her dead body can’t travel to that spot? (Jeremy Davies is phenomenal in every scene of this episode, by the way.)
• What did Paul do? Did the hostiles actually kill him, or did Amy? We only see one of them reaching forward to grab a gun away from her, but she never says they killed Paul. Why was he shot? Why were the hostiles about to execute Amy?
• When Mikhail stepped into the sonic fence, he began spewing blood from every orifice. These guys had seizures and passed out. Did Amy set the fence on a lower frequency, one that she could cut out with earplugs?
• Why was Amy able to bring the baby to term on the island? What caused the women to stop having them? The Purge?
• How are they going to explain that Car Mechanic Juliet is actually Fertility Specialist/Surgeon Juliet?
• What would Sawyer know about Creole names?
• Did anyone see the title of the book that Sawyer was reading?
• Will there be any significance to Amy’s baby? Could it be someone we know? (Will they name it Boone, for example?)
• So let me get this straight: Horace isn’t a drinker, and he finds a token that Amy has kept from her dead husband, and he goes nuts, has a fight with Amy, gets really drunk and begins tossing lit sticks of dynamite around? Mountains out of molehills much??

Next week: NOTHING. SOB....... But don't worry, I'll find a way to post on Lost. Don't forget to tune in! :)

UPDATE: Here is the preview for the episode in two weeks: