Lost 5:13 "Some Like It Hoth"

Wow. If Lost's casual fans were confused before, this episode must have sent them over the edge. Norse gods fighting for island supremacy, the revelation of the DI experiment to find out if a tauntaun can actually live in tropical conditions, Marilyn Monroe appearing on the island (with Sawyer and Jin in drag next to her???) AND Robert Palmer singing on the beach?

Yep, Darlton have officially lost it.

Nope, I have officially not seen it. But this is my fantasy version of the episode. :)

As mentioned in my post yesterday, I'm currently in England, and will be downloading it Thursday morning to watch and comment on some time on Thursday. But until then, the boards are officially open for you to comment. I hope it was a good one!! Two weeks 'til the next one. I can't believe this season is almost over. :::sniffle:::

MY POST

Hey all! Spent the day at Tintern Abbey (which is breathtaking) and White Castle (which had a TWO-WAY road that was narrower than my driveway -- and I'm really, really not joking about that -- that we followed for 5 miles to get to it, and I think I left imprints of my fingers on the dashboard, like Steve Martin in Planes, Trains, and Automobiles) and now we're in Hay-on-Wye. It's pouring buckets, but it's lovely.

Anyway, we coughdownloadedcough the episode this morning and I've only watched it once, then went to dinner, and now I'm back. My husband's succinct response: "Entertaining, but insignificant." Mine was a litle more positive. I thought it was fun, and I thought there were lots of clues and numbers and such in the background, I turned off my email this morning so I wouldn't see spoilers, and when I went into blogger to edit my post and post this, it says there are 60 comments! You guys rock! (And you're worrying me that you don't need me at all!!) So here's my post, and I'm seriously crossing my fingers you guys didn't already catch every single word I'm about to say. I am now off to read comments!!!

Lost: 5.13 “Some Like It Hoth”

I see dead people... walking around like regular people...
OK. Miles. I have a few questions about how he does what he does. Miles needs to have some sort of contact with the body of the deceased. He needed to dig up Rousseau and Karl. He needed to be taken to Naomi’s body. He cannot communicate with a kid who’s been cremated and his ashes scattered. He needs to climb into the back of the van and unzip Alvarez before he can find out his horrific story about tooth fillings. So why, back in “Confirmed Dead,” was he able to go into a guy’s room and talk to him? The body wasn’t sitting in the bed. He wasn’t sitting over the guy’s grave. Is it because the guy was haunting the room? At first I thought, OK, maybe Grandma cremated him, but instead of scattering the ashes, she has them in an urn downstairs. But I’m thinking the ghost idea might be something. He really is haunting the room (he moves the dresser at one point to reveal the vent for Miles) so maybe the closeness of the ghost allows him to talk to him.

Order of Events
So as soon as I saw Miles dealing with the guy who wants to know if his son knew he loved him (another example, like Roger a couple of weeks ago, of a lousy father looking for absolution), I remembered the incident in “Confirmed Dead” with the grandson. But one thing I mentioned at the time was the fact that when Miles pulls up in front of Grandma’s house in the car, he’s listening to a news report saying the bodies of Flight 815 have been recovered at the bottom of the ocean, and he stares at the radio for a moment like he knows it’s not real. So does the grandma scene happen after Naomi has met with him? He goes to see Felix, he figures out that Felix had info about purchasing a plane and digging up bodies, and next thing he hears about a plane found with lots of bodies. Hm...

“How do you spell ‘bounty hunter’?”
Because I’m watching this episode only once before writing this, I took a few notes while writing them. One of them, written near the beginning of this episode, was, “Bounty hunter? As in Boba Fett?” Then a scene later when Hurley takes a major interest in Pierre being Miles’s dad, I wrote, “What was Hurley writing, Star Wars fanfic? Is the Darth Vader/Luke thing making him interested in Pierre/Miles?” Turns out, yep! Well, no on the fanfic thing. What the writers came up with was WAY funnier than what I did.

Highlights:
• Miles explaining to Radzinsky that he’s in the circle of trust, and Radzinsky cutting him off before he can get the sentence out of his mouth.
• “It’ll help with global warming. Which hasn’t happened yet, so... maybe we can prevent it.”
• Hurley’s reaction when Miles says maybe the smell is caused by his special garlic mayo. “Dude, that’s not possible. OK, maybe it is possible.”
• Hurley to Miles: “You’re just jealous my power’s better than yours.”
• Hurley wondering if Marvin Candle is a stage name.
• Jack doing the janitorial work he’s suited for. (Teehee!!)
• Hurley making small talk in the van and trying to get Pierre and Miles to be buds.
• The look former punk Miles gives Dad when he discovers he likes country music. Ha!
• Hurley’s grand Empire plan. Wicked.
• Sawyer: “Get some rope.”
• “Let’s face it. Ewoks suck, dude.”
• Daniel!!!!!!

Did You Notice?:
• I loved Sawyer’s little line where he’s trying to impress Kate by saying, “In case you hadn’t noticed, I’m head of security.” I do miss the swagger and arrogance that once accompanied it, though. Maybe the guy really HAS grown up a lot in the last 3 years. Too bad...
• If you were paying close attention, you would have noticed that Miles’s mom was the same woman we saw at the very beginning of the episode, rousing Pierre Chang from sleep and telling him to go check on the baby. So it was a bit of a “duh” moment when Miles announced Chang was his daddy later in the ep, but only for some viewers.
• When punk Miles goes to see his dying mother, there’s a portrait of two horses on the wall. One is brown, like Widmore’s, and the other is black, like Kate’s.
• Naomi is clearly wearing a wig. The actress has probably cut her hair short since filming and needed to wear it long again.
• Well, after seeing Roger and Kate in this episode, we can probably forget about that wonderful budding Kager ship.
• Naomi says that Felix was delivering documents of photos of empty open graves and a purchase order for an old plane. These would be the same documents that Tom showed Michael in “Meet Kevin Johnson.”
• The classroom where Jack is cleaning the boards appears to be the same one we saw in “The Man Behind the Curtain.”
• Oops: when Roger kicks the bucket across the classroom, Jack has only erased a panel and a half of the chalkboard, but when the camera goes back to him 2 seconds later, it’s completely erased.
• What he was erasing was the studies of the Ancient Egyptians. You can see the words “Writing on the words of God” written on the board, then some hieroglyphics below it much like the ones we saw in the Swan, and then the topic has been broken down into three subcategories: Old/Middle/Late Egyptians. The Late Egyptians were around from 1300-700BC, according to the board. Could this have been Alpert’s era? Or earlier?
• There’s a child’s picture of a butterfly on the classroom wall, just like there were butterflies in Hurley’s institution common room.
• I assumed when Miles and Hurley pulled up to the Swan station that he was at the Swan station (someone mentions that Radzinsky is there and we know that he built the model and has a vested interest in the station being built properly).
• Bram, the dude from Dexter who pulls Miles into the van and tells him to work for another group, is on the island with Ilana. In last week’s episode, he’s the one who holds the gun up to Frank as Ilana asks him what lies in the shadow of the statue.
• Somewhere inside there, Miles has a teeny tiny heart. He gives the man back his money (only to rip out his heart after doing it). He also gives back the grandmother’s money in “Confirmed Dead.”
• We’d figured out long ago (Because You Left) that Chang’s baby was probably Miles, so that wasn’t a huge surprise. But we’d also suggested that maybe Ben couldn’t go to 1977 because he couldn’t exist with his younger self. That’s now off the table, so there must be a more interesting reason why he can’t go back.
• There was a moment when Dan first stepped off the sub where I thought he was going to look at Miles and say, “And you are...?” Anyone else thinking that?

Hurley’s numbers:
The time on the microwave at the beginning of the episode is 3:16. (Also the Ajira flight number, obviously.) The first dead man Miles hears is in apartment 4. Sawyer tells Miles to destroy the tape from security monitor #4. When Kate shows up, Roger’s had 4 beers. Miles and Hurley were in Van #8. Naomi offers Miles $1.6 million. (And now we see why Miles asked Ben for $3.2 million... which is not only double 16, but 23 backwards, as I mentioned in my book.)

So Many Questions...
• So Miles clearly got his ability from the island, but how? Is it like Desmond, that he had some sort of involvement with the electromagnetic energy and can see dead people in the way Des can see the future? Is Miles’s mother dying of cancer because of her exposure to the radiation?
• Here’s a question I have for the folks who have seen the ep more than once (or who recognized the guy immediately) but have we seen that Russell Brand-looking dude named Alvarez before? Was he there on the big DI recruitment day?
• Miles says that the body is Alvarez, and his filling shot out of his mouth and into his brain (MAN, what a way to die. If your fillings could pull out of your mouth that way, I’d be dead within seconds of being on that island... dammit mom, you shouldn’t have given me that much candy as a kid!!) Is it because of the electromagnetic radiation? If he’s with Radzinsky, then he’s at the Swan, and maybe the guy was too close to whatever it was that Desmond blew up at the end of season 2. (Which we have suggested before in the comments is likely Jughead.)
• How did Tom get Widmore’s documents? Is he the guy who killed Felix?
• In season 4, Ben shows Locke a videotape of a man being beaten in an alleyway, and Widmore steps out of a car and looks up at the person filming. Is Felix the man who was being beaten? Is it possible BEN was the guy who bought the plane and opened the graves, and Widmore intercepted the documents? And Tom either got them back or got another set? Or did Tom get the documents, and Widmore killed him on the videotape because he'd screwed up?
• So who’s Bram? I don’t think he’s with Ben, and he’s definitely not with Widmore, as we all assumed after last week’s episode. I’m thinking there’s a third group, a “What Lies in the Shadow of the Statue” group. Who are they? Are the Shadow Seekers some sort of third splinter group? Are they the DI who survived? (They look a little young for that.) Are they the Others, just wanting to take their island back? Are they someone completely different?
• Where has Daniel been? He certainly looks a lot healthier and happier than we’ve seen him up to this point. Did he take a sub off the island and do any time traveling? Or visit his younger self? Or Eloise? Is it possible he’s starting to ignore his own advice, and believes you can change time? Could he have been trying to eff with things when he was off the island?

Next week: No new episode, but a clip show. But in two weeks... new episode!!