"Recon" Revisited

Starting today and going through to May 25, I'll be working from home, trying to make a dent in my Finding Lost: Season 6 guide (now available for pre-order!!) So over the next week, either the blog will be really quiet, or, more likely, I'll be procrastinating so much I'll be putting up new posts every 3 minutes.

Today I was watching some of the episodes again and making my extensive notes. I'm just watching "Recon" now and I've come to the scene where Smokey is on the beach talking to Kate. And in light of "Across the Sea," I found his comments to her even more intriguing now than I did then. Here is what he said:

“You referred to me as a dead man. I am not a dead man. I know what you’re feeling, I know what you’re going through. Because my mother was crazy. Long time ago, before I looked like this, I had a mother just like everyone, she was a very disturbed woman, and as a result of that, I had some growing pains. Problems that I’m still tyring to work my way through. Problems that could have been avoided, had things been different.”

When Kate asks Smokey why he's telling her all of this, he says, "Because now, Aaron? He has a crazy mother, too."

We now know that yes, he had a mother who was disturbed enough, in his mind, to kill his real mother, to raise two boys under a supernatural influence, to deny him a name, and to thwart every effort he made to allow him to leave the island. We saw how torn up he was when he killed his mother, and by killing her he suffered the consequences at the hand of Jacob.

But he clearly states he's not dead. We saw the Man in Black's body, and when Jacob laid it in the caves it looked quite dead, but Smokey doesn't think so. I've commented before that Smokey definitely has a lot of John's personality. And on the beach in "The Incident," he has the brother's personality. So the question is, did the Man in Black actually die? Or is his soul alive in the smoke monster, and if his soul is still alive, can he truly be dead? Is John Locke still alive?

Week after week, we flip flop on who is good, who is evil. But neither one of them is truly good or truly evil. They're both. They're like all of us -- we might have a lot of good in us, but we also make mistakes. We love people, we hurt people. Inadvertently or on purpose. Smokey has killed and he's vengeful, a much larger and more powerful version of Sawyer, but he's also hurting. He lives with the guilt of having killed his mother, and the knowledge of what his brother did to him. He feels hurt and betrayed, and here he says he wishes things had been different.

What do you make of this scene in light of what we find out in "Across the Sea"?

Lost: Madness and Clarity

One of my favourite writers of all time is Timothy Findley. I was crazy about CanLit (Canadian literature) when I was a student, and I was forever changed the first time I discovered Findley’s work through his masterpiece, The Wars. A gorgeous, gorgeous piece of writing about a boy’s experience as a soldier in the First World War and the mental toll it took on people, this book led me to the many, many other books Findley wrote. Findley was a lion of CanLit, a popular fave but also a critical and literary success. I’ll never forget the morning of June 22, 2002, when I grabbed the paper, unrolled it, and saw the giant picture of Findley on the front cover with his birth... and death... dates written across the top, and I leapt back as if the paper had electrocuted me. I’ve never had such a visceral reaction to a newspaper headline before, but I began crying. He’d died in France the day before after a fall, and I was devastated.

One of my favourite novels of Findley’s was 1993’s Headhunter, set in the very real mental hospital on Queen Street West in Toronto. That same year I was privileged enough to interview the man, who is affectionately known as “Tiff” (after his full initials, Timothy Irving Frederick Findley), when he had written a play, The Stillborn Lover, to be performed for the first time at the Grand Theatre in London, Ontario, where I was then living and going to school. I remember being so excited, and since I’d written numerous papers on his work, I’d read most of the interviews he’d conducted over the years, knew what questions he avoided (and was still determined to ask them anyway), and I knew his work inside and out. I was prepared.

I called him up, his partner Bill answered the phone, we chatted for a minute, and then he passed the phone over to Tiff. And what followed was an incredible hour-long phone call that went from interview to conversation. We talked about the play, about Headhunter, about his books (and there was one question I’d been trying to find an answer to for two years of paper-writing but he refused it in every interview I’d read, and when I asked it at the very end of the interview, he answered it without hesitation), and... about madness. It’s an ongoing theme in Findley’s writing: his main characters are mad, or the world around them is mad, or their family has gone mad. And he revealed that he’d had an aunt who suffered from a mental illness and he’d spent a lot of time around her, and where others would avoid her, he would talk with her endlessly. Through those conversations he discovered that this woman seemed to “see” things that no one else did... she had a sense of clarity about the world around her that cut through all the bullshit and just saw right to its core. She’d been one of the biggest influences on his writing, and he found he was often trying to work that sense of clarity through madness into many of his books based on the experiences he’d had with her.

Why am I telling you all of this? Because in the past week I’ve been thinking more about that long conversation I had with him and wondering if there could be a link with his ideas and Lost.

In the sideways world on Lost, the characters seem to need a jolt of some kind to see the original timeline, whether it’s being shot or kissed or holding hands or some burst of electromagnetism. But Libby didn’t need a jolt. Her madness gave her the clarity to see to the other world. There were no holding hands or kisses or getting slammed by a car or almost drowned... she just saw it, no jolt needed. I suggested on Chris Kelly’s site the other day that I wondered if Libby in the original timeline was in the mental institution because she could actually see the sideways world and thought she was completely mad. Is it possible someone from the original timeline had a sense of the other timeline?

Hurley has spent time in the mental institution but is really sensitive about it – we’ve seen many instances where he’s become incensed when someone has suggested he’s crazy – and he can speak to dead people. Just like Libby seeing the original timeline from the sideways world, he can see across the line of the dead. No one else can see them, just like no one else can see the sideways world except for Libby, suggesting that once again those who are mad have a clarity that allows them to see things other people simply can’t see.

Think of how many of the books that have been mentioned on the show and how many of them deal with madness... just about every character in Wonderland and the Looking-Glass worlds is entirely mad, and Lewis Carroll’s books are the most referenced ones on the show. If you look back through the show and think about every time a character mentions that someone else is crazy, usually immediately following that moment, the character who’s been called crazy has a moment of clarity. It’s definitely worth thinking about.

Oh, and to bring this all back around to me (which, those on my Facebook page will tell you, is definitely my modus operandi), after interviewing Findley I wrote that piece in the student newspaper at UWO, and the night it ran I went down to the premiere performance at the Grand Theatre. I went over to the press table to grab my packet (I was going to be writing a review for the next day’s paper) and the press woman got my name and said, “Oh! I have a message from you from Tiff.” Me = froze. “He said that of all of the stories on the show that he read today from all of the various papers, including the national newspaper, he wanted me to tell you that you were the only one who truly GOT it, and that he got that sense from you even when he spoke to you. He said he really loved your piece, and wanted me to tell you to keep up with the writing, and you will be successful at it someday.”

I barely remember that night’s performance, because all I could do was sit there in the audience in a blind haze, enveloped by the surreal notion that my favourite writer in the universe had just complimented MY writing. Wow. It was a moment I’ll never forget.

Lost: All You Need Is Love?

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Lost is about love. How love motivates us, what we will do for love, and what happens when we don’t feel loved. From season 1 it’s been established this show is about connections – how we connect to those around us, even when we’re not aware of those connections (especially in season 1, think back to how many of the paths crossed before they got on the plane but didn’t know it) but attached to many of those connections is love. It’s how we truly connect.

In The Prisoner, that amazing cult TV show from the 1960s that Lost has been heavily influenced by, the final episode was an insane drug-addled trip through this underground tunnel, with the sounds of The Beatles’ “All You Need Is Love” pumping through the cave as various strange creatures danced about (seriously, you have to see it to believe it). And while I hope this is ALL this show borrows from The Prisoner finale, it’s interesting that even though Number 6 didn’t have many real connections, if any, that one of the things we take away from that series is “all you need is love.”

I talked about this last week in the Globe chat and one person engaged me extensively on it, saying he didn’t believe it would all come down to love because they’re motivated by much more than that, and it’s about free will vs. destiny. Absolutely... I agree that it will come down to those two things, which are also choice vs. fate. But why do we make those choices? Love.

Kate has come back to the island because of her love for Aaron. This love is one of the deepest in the series... she would do ANYTHING for that child, and she has come back to the one place on earth she desperately tried to leave, just to try to find the mother of the boy she loves more than anything. She killed her own (step)father because of her love of Diane, and believing she was doing the right thing. Her pain and her constant need to run stems from the hurt she got when Diane rejected her... when her mom didn’t return that love for her. Remember how painful it was for her to walk away from her husband, or the look on her face when Sawyer jumped from the helicopter, or the anger when Jeardy Jack stood at the airport screaming that they had to go back. She has loved all three men, and she has hurt them or has been hurt by them, and many of her decisions have been based on this love.

Sayid is a torturer, but he’s also a lover. He has spent so much of his life repenting for his sins as a torturer, and looking for Nadia. He loves Nadia so deeply, so completely, that when he lands on the island and believes that maybe she really is dead, he turns to Shannon, and gives her more love and passion than she’s ever received from someone in her life. The cold person he becomes when Ana Lucia shoots Shannon in front of him stems from the love he felt for Shannon. And that coldness returns when Nadia dies... Remember the look on his face when he came out of the press conference and Nadia was standing there? It’s one of my favourite moments of the series... the way he stares at her, and then blinks, hard, as if he can’t believe the love of his life is really standing before him. He’s only happy when he’s with her, and when she’s gone, he slowly dies inside. Now he’s just a shell.

Sawyer has been motivated by revenge, but it’s a revenge that stems from the love he has for his parents and the anger that people he cared about – and who loved him a lot – could have been taken from him in such a violent way. He wants to cut himself off from everyone, but it’s his love for Kate that makes him become part of the group on the island. He cares about his fellow survivors to the extent that he becomes head of security for Dharma because of his need to take care of them (and think of him running through New Otherton with Claire in his arms... another thing he’s done because of caring for another person). He falls in love with Juliet, and even if Kate is the soulmate he continued to pine for, he truly loved Juliet and is gutted when she’s gone.

Ben loves the mother he never knew, and eventually runs out into the woods to find an apparition of her. There seems to have been a love between he and Annie, the girl we saw in “The Man Behind the Curtain,” and he ultimately kills his father. Why? Because his father didn’t love him... Ben is ALSO motivated by love, but it’s a love that was denied to him. And he loves Alex deeply – we see in the sideways world that he has a connection to her still and gives up everything for her sake – and when she dies, it causes him to go off the deep end completely and lose control. Ben loves too.

Jack was denied the love he needed from his father, and even his mother has a tendency to be cold (think of her blaming Jack for his father going to Australia in the first place). He is motivated by a desire to fix things – it’s his thang – but he falls in love with Kate on the island, something he didn’t see coming. Off the island, they fall in love, and it’s when that love falls apart he becomes so obsessed with going back to the island to “fix things,” to make him and Kate NOT HAPPEN, because the pain of losing the love he had from her is worse than anything else he’s ever experienced. He drops a bomb because of his love for Kate.

Jin and Sun feel deeply in love off the island, and Jin gave up his own morals just to be with her, having to go and work for Paik. But when that begins to eat at him, and the love that she felt from Jin at one time seems to go away, she moves away from him. She not only falls in love with Jae Lee, but she plots to leave her husband... again, she’s motivated by love. The love that she lost, love for herself that she knows she should be treated better than this. And then, on the island... things change. Jin has always loved Sun, but now that they’re on the island, no longer under her father’s thumb, his love can truly shine. They’re closer than ever, she becomes pregnant, and she manages to get off the island, shattered because she thinks he’s gone. Everything she does after that – the coup against her father’s company, seeking out Widmore and Ben – is out of revenge for the love she lost when Jin died. And when she thinks he might be alive again... she returns. She loves him so much she will go back to that island to find him. And it’s her love for Ji Yeon that makes that decision a difficult one.

Hurley loves his ma more than anything. He won the lottery and thought he was cursed, but he believes that because the people he loves begin getting hurt, and despite him always walking through everything completely unscathed, he cannot stand seeing the ones he love getting hurt around him. That scene in “The Lie” when his ma sits next to him and asks him to tell her the truth, and he spills all, is one of the most heartrendingly beautiful scenes in the entire series. He loves her so much he trusts her to listen to him. He also loves his father – the one who abandoned him and only returned for the money – because he remembers the man he used to be, and is so caring and loving (like his ma) that he believes maybe his father really does love him and want a relationship with him. And maybe he’s right. Hurley fell in love with Libby, and loved Charlie as a friend, and is motivated to do things because of the loss he felt when he lost both of them.

Claire loved Charlie, and is gutted when she finds out he’s died (for a minute and a half at least... ahem) and her love for Aaron makes her almost serene on the island. Off the island she was going to give him up for adoption, but the moment he’s born the love in her eyes shows us she’s almost grateful for not having the opportunity to give him up. Now that we have the sad Crazytown Claire, her very madness stems from the immense love she has for her son, and despite the creepy shivers it sends down my spine every time I see it, that skeleton baby of hers was constructed to give her a physical connection to the baby she lost, and it’s an incredibly sad thing to behold. Once I get past the horror of it all.

Juliet loved Sawyer completely, and she also fell for Jack. We’ve seen the love she feels for her sister, Rachel, devoting her life’s work to making her sister’s cancer-ridden body fertile for a baby. When she’s offered the opportunity to go to the island, she at first says no, but her sister convinces her to go (it’s only six months after all, right?) But when Juliet realizes that the Others are not going to keep their word, she asks to go home. She loves her sister, she wants to meet her niece/nephew, and she can’t bear to be apart from them any longer. Ben offers her the choice: go home now, and watch your sister die rather than give birth, or I will cure her cancer and you have to stay here. To Juliet there’s no choice: she stays. She gives up her life to save her sister’s. Think back to that scene we saw the day the plane crashed, when Ben took Juliet to the Flame station to show her video footage of Rachel playing with Julian. Juliet’s voice chokes and shakes as she reaches out and touches the screen, longing to touch her sister and hold her nephew, but knowing they’re as far away from her as they seem on the screen. She has fallen in love with Goodwin, and risks everything (even danger) to keep that going. She’s found that connection on the island for now, but she would give it up to return to her family. One of the tragedies of Juliet is that she died on the island before she ever got to see that nephew of hers. Juliet’s life has been all about love, and her close-to-final words before she lets go of Sawyer’s hand are to tell him how much she loves him. And her final act? To set off a bomb because of how much she loves him... to make so he’ll never have to come to the island. She doesn’t hit that bomb for herself – she hits it for him.

Characters who are now gone were motivated by love: Eko sacrificed his soul for his little brother Yemi, a brother he never stopped loving despite everything. Ana Lucia’s anger and coldness stemmed from the fact that a man shot her in her pregnant belly and killed the child she loved so much. Boone was in love with Shannon, and that love was painful and difficult, but he couldn’t help himself.

And Rose and Bernard? Seriously. Cutest couple in love EVER. Rose could feel that Bernard was alive, and never mourned him, never wavered from her certainty that he was alive and well... and she was right.

Just a couple of weeks ago we realized Richard Alpert, the man who didn’t appear to have any ties and who was stoic and almost asexual, was actually deeply in love with his wife, and he killed a man accidentally in his desperation to save her. Because of the murder he was sent to the island, and he has quietly pined for her for over a century. When she appeared to him and he couldn’t hear her talking to him, but wanted to hear her so badly, it was absolutely heartbreaking. If he could have one wish, it would be to be with her forever.

John Locke has always stood apart from everyone. In “The Life and Death of Jeremy Bentham,” Kate tells him that his problem is that he’s never loved anyone. But she’s wrong. He loved Helen. And he wanted to BE loved... but his mother gave him up and his father had nothing to do with him. His foster mother treated him like a plague, and when he finally found his parents after many years, his mother was using him to make some money and his father was using him for a kidney. The moment they got what they wanted out of him, they tossed him aside like yesterday’s garbage. Locke is motivated by a need and desire for someone to love him, and he has so much love to give, but no one to give it to. So he channels his love into a “greater good” scenario where he thinks he’s doing something for everyone. And in the end, if no one else will love him, then maybe he’ll love himself. But he can’t even do that, because he believes he’s a failure and a loser. And that’s why Locke’s is the saddest story for me.

And then... there’s Desmond. That man who brought it all here in the first place. His “I love you, Penny” will always be one of the lines that sticks with me from this series. In my first Finding Lost book, I wrote, “People have killed, fought, and maimed in the name of love on this island, but no one has given up their life for it.” And then I asked what Lost will come down to, and asked, “Will love prevail?” In my episode guide for “The Constant,” in my season 4 book, I wrote, “Unlike so many of the other people who have been brought to this island, Desmond has hope, and that hope rests with Penny. The love story between these two is one for the ages... Desmond is not shattered like the rest of these survivors, and so far, he’s the closest to salvation.” In the season 4 finale episode guide, I wrote, “Desmond represents the notion that love is the key to survival.” And in my commentary on “The Incident” in my season 5 book, I wrote, “What will conquer evil? Desmond’s story always stands apart from that of the rest of the characters’ arcs and his is the story of love winning out over everything...” Back in “Live Together, Die Alone,” when we first got Desmond’s backstory, everything went haywire in the hatch and he ran to the bookshelf and pulled off Our Mutual Friend, and when he opened the book, out fell a key and a love letter from Penny. At that moment I wondered if love might be the key to the show... it’s certainly the key to Desmond’s story. Now he’s back on the island, and he’s the only one who can perhaps save everyone. The man who was willing to die for love might be the one to help everyone else find the love they’ve so desperately needed.

As I say at the end of my season 5 book, Lost is the show for the thinking viewer, so it almost sounds like sacrilege what I’m saying here, but we do so much for love. Love for our children, our spouses, our girlfriends/boyfriends, our friends, our family, our parents... love for ourselves. Even selfish motivations are done out of a self-love.

In the sideways world, three characters in “Happily Ever After” have a glimpse of the other world, and believe that maybe this isn’t real: Desmond, who realizes it after he meets Penny; Daniel, who has his vision right after the first time he sees Charlotte; and Charlie, who, in a heroin-induced haze, sees an image of Claire and knows he’s meant to be with her. All three of them experience a moment of the feeling of love they felt for someone else in the other world, and realize that this world isn’t real – the real world is the one that contains those women... with them.

So yes, this show is about time travel and physics and philosophy and history and political science and literature and religion and heady choices and good & evil... but it’s also about love. SO much of it about love. And I don’t know why, if it all came down to that, that an ending that suggested all we need is love would be a bad thing. I would embrace that ending, for it would bring the entire series full circle.

All you need is love...

“Ab Aeterno” – The Walking Dead

There are so many little things to pull out of this episode, and I meant to do so much earlier than now but unfortunately my week has been, well, hellishly busy, to put it lightly. And next week is looking like it’ll be even worse. But I’ll pull out some tidbits we can use as talking points here.

First, a big question from this episode seems to be whether Isabella is a manifestation of the smoke monster or if she’s an actual ghost. Many people would like to believe (myself included) that when Richard sees her in the bottom of the Black Rock, she’s Smokey, messing with his head. But when she’s standing next to him with Hurley interpreting, she’s an actual ghost.

Another option might be that she’s actually a manifestation of Jacob in that scene, and he’s trying to manipulate people into killing the man in black, but it could really go either way. And I’d like to think that WAS Isabella.

So, then, who have we seen before who is a Smokey apparition, and who is an actual ghost? It would appear that whoever Hurley sees might actually be a ghost, or at the very least, in the Jacob camp: Eko, Charlie, Isabella, Ana Lucia, Jacob himself. But the others were either near Smokey or were in conjunction with him in another way: Yemi and Alex immediately come to mind.

Christian is a big question mark. Is Christian a manifestation of Smokey? Or is Jacob creating him? Or is he an actual ghost? Hurley DID see Christian – it was in “The Beginning of the End,” when Hurley looked into the cabin and saw the man in the rocking chair (Christian) and a second eye appear in the window. Miles saw Christian, and reported that a guy Claire called “Dad” came and took her and the baby. He never suggested Christian was dead, and since Miles knows the difference, you’d think that would have been a detail he’d have mentioned. Claire could see him. Jack’s seen him. And Locke talked to him in the cabin.

Walt also stands apart. He appeared to Shannon as if to warn her, and then appeared to John Locke to get him out of the pit of bodies. But Walt is “special,” and there’s something different about him, as if he’s astrally projecting himself. Perhaps he can create an image of himself in the same way Smokey can create one of Alex? The thing that sets Walt apart is, quite simply, that he’s alive. So if that’s the case, is the guy we saw standing at the pit of bodies something that Smokey created (which would be strange, since in the past he only creates images of people who are dead) or did Walt seem to know exactly when to project himself there to warn or help those people? Is the Walt that Shannon saw (covered in water, which could be an indication that the Others were dunking him in water somehow) and the Walt that Locke saw the same being? Or was one the actual Walt projecting himself and the other was Smokey or Jacob?

And then there’s that little blond boy. Smokey saw him, and was surprised when Sawyer could also see him. Is that a real ghost? Or is Jacob sending a message?

And what the heck was that black horse doing on the island?

Not-Locke = Jacob?

What if... what if... Jacob and the Man in Black are one and the same? What if his self split off into two parts, and he USED to look like Jacob, but then his body was taken over by some evil island spirit, and like Ariel in The Tempest, he’s trapped on the island as a supernatural entity and just wants his body back?

If that’s the case, then he can’t kill Jacob simply because Jacob is him, and he can’t kill himself and still have his soul live on. Perhaps he’s trying to kill the body hoping it’ll take out the evil spirit inside, but instead, because the body was so old, it just disintegrated into ashes and now he can’t jump into any other body because his real one is gone, and the evil spirit that was inside Jacob is now roaming the island.

Following this, could the little boy he saw in the wilderness have actually been him? Maybe he came to the island as a young boy and grew up and looked like Jacob before the island’s evil (the thing that needs protecting against) took him over and separated him out. Now he’s trapped on the island and can’t live until he can get back “home,” home being his body. But now that he’s destroyed it, is there any returning to it? He jumps from body to body trying to find the right one (probably the Man in Black on the beach wasn’t what he really looked like, and was just another body he was borrowing).

Of course, if he’d just killed Jacob, then how would this theory work? I know I’m missing key pieces here... can anyone help me out?

Someone suggested during the Globe chat today (it might have been humanebean) that the Man in Black lost a lady love and it’s what drove him to the angry person he is now. If that’s the case, could his original body actually be the Adam of the Adam and Eve skeletons, with Eve being his lady? In which case, it’s not clear why he’s been separated out of that body and can’t return.

Oh, and by the way, I'm aware I've just made a sharp left onto Crazytown Alley with these speculations, so please bear with me. ;)

UPDATE
And as soon as I posted that, humanebean posted a great theory onto my original blog post for "The Substitute," so I wanted to pull it out here:

I've been giving this some thought and it occurs to me that the young boy that UnLocke saw last night might be .... his own son. We've seen characters from our LOSTaways' past appear to them before, to remind them of their past transgressions or evoke in them remorse and regret. Now, a lot of these times we've later assumed that this apparitions were just Smokey (and perhaps they were) but I'm not sure.

Jack obviously sees his late father. Kate sees the horse. (interestingly, so did Sawyer) Hurley sees his imaginary friend, Dave. Eko sees Yemi. Juliet sees Harper Stanhope. Locke sees Taller Ghost Walt. Then last night, UnLocke sees ... a little boy, his arms held out from his sides, smeared with blood.

When he sees him again, he chases after him through the jungle. When he returns to Sawyer, he talks about how he was once a man, who knew what it was to lose someone he loved and to be betrayed. I'm starting to wonder if MIB had a son on the Island who was gravely wounded ... and grew angry and embittered when he couldn't save him, perhaps after a trip to the Temple of his own.

At some point, he aligned with the dark energy of the Island and became one with Smokey. Thereafter, he lurked on the fringes of the Temple, wreaking havoc on those Jacob brought to the Island time and again. Finally, his rage became all-consuming and Jacob's followers had him imprisoned at the Cabin, keeping him surrounded by ash ... until that was disturbed one day and he leapt free to seek his loophole and thereby have his revenge.

OUT there? Absolutely. But surely the vision of his lost son would haunt him in this moment, reminding him (as other apparitions have done for their charges) that repentance is the only escape from damnation.

Of course, someone might have tabbed my iced tea, too. That's always a possibility. ; ]

Richard in Chains

Wow... until now that title only belonged to some illicit fan fiction I'd written...

Not-Locke says to Alpert that he almost didn’t recognize him in the chains. We could take this literally – Alpert was a slave on the Black Rock, and the Man in Black was the slavemaster… or another slave… or Alpert was the slavemaster and the Man in Black was the slave and he overpowered Alpert, etc. – or it could be metaphorical. Maybe he’s been enslaved to Jacob all this time, and that’s why he’s so passive and laid-back. The moment Jacob was dead, Richard went all badass on everyone, grabbing Ben by the nape of the neck and shoving his face down into the sand, or showing major emotion on the beach when he realized what had happened? Is it possible Jacob made Alpert “this way,” meaning the passive, quiet servant that he’s always been on the island? And now that he’s breaking out of that, he can finally be, well, AWESOME?!

(And seriously, I saw this screen-cap of Alpert looking at Not-Locke and all I could think of was, “Don’t it make my brown eyes blue…” What is Crystal Gayle doing infiltrating my thoughts?!)

Sayid as Jacob?

Jacob was very concerned about Sayid in the jungle when he was talking to Hurley, and said it was very, very important that Hurley save him. Is it because he needed that body to enter?

If that’s the case, and Jacob now looks like Sayid, there’s a VERY huge difference between Jacob and the Man in Black right now: Jacob is in Sayid’s actual body, whereas the Man in Black simply looks like Locke, but isn’t actually inhabiting his body (that body is lying on the beach). Similarly he wasn’t actually inhabiting Yemi’s body, he just looked like him. But there’s only one body with Sayid, and it just rose up and said, “What happened?” Could it be that Sayid is now Jacob?

If so… then Sayid is really dead. As Locke said to Jack, if you lose a body you haven’t lost the person, because they were already gone. Now I’m sad… :(

And finally, did anyone think he looked more clean-shaven when he was resurrected than when he was shot? Did Death give Jacob a haircut and Sayid a shave? Death works in very mysterious ways on the island…

Desmond in "LA X"

On the first day of comments, Sonshine Music suggested that maybe Desmond wasn’t actually there, and as soon as she said that, it made perfect sense to me. Now I’m convinced that’s the case. That seat was empty on the original flight. He suddenly shows up in the seat where he hadn’t been before (on a long flight from Sydney you’d think Jack would have noticed the guy at some point… and why exactly is he just randomly changing seats?) He exchanges a few words with Jack, and then he disappears, and Jack never sees him again.

He’s wearing a wedding band, too, which is a key point. My original thought if Widmore had been killed in the blast was that Penny wouldn’t exist. But then I think she was probably born in the early 70s, not the late, so that means she would be living off-island with her mother, and only Widmore would have died. If Desmond still met up with her, he could marry her without her horrible father hanging over the two of them. Or is he with someone else?

And if he’s consciousness-travelling onto the plane, how did he figure out he had that power? Is it possible he’ll be the Constant for all of the main characters throughout the last season? He’s not a major cast member, so maybe he’ll only be Jack’s Constant. Or, as someone pointed out in the comments, he could be the Variable, the one thing changing the 815 flight immensely.

Does he really not remember Jack? Or is he just saying that? If his life had changed drastically and he hadn’t been running through a stadium in L.A. trying to get his “hon-uh back!” then maybe he never met Jack. But why would he seem familiar to Jack? Will we find out Jack retains some memories of the alternate timeline?

Spot the Differences!

Many people have pointed out even more differences between the original Flight 815 scene in “Pilot” and the one in “LA X.” I was pointing out some small ones (and as usual, left out the bigger ones so the next morning I could look at comments and go, “DUH…” to myself… seriously, sometimes I miss the forest for the trees, I swear). But let’s see if we can catalogue all of the differences. I think the best way to do this is colour-coding. Let’s put the Pilot in green, and LA X in red; it will be like Christmas!:

Cindy offers Jack two liquor bottles, and he responds that this goes against all FAA regulations
Cindy offers Jack one liquor bottle, and he tells her it’ll be their little secret

The seat beside Jack is empty
Desmond’s in the seat… and he’s wearing a wedding band!

Rose is wearing Bernard’s ring on her necklace, he’s in the bathroom, and Jack calms her down while the plane experiences turbulence
Rose isn’t wearing his ring, she ends up calming Jack during the turbulence, and Bernard returns from the bathroom

Charlie snorts heroin, is thrown up into the air and the plane crashes
Charlie goes into the bathroom, may or may not have snorted the heroin, and swallows the bag, either to hide it or to attempt suicide

Walt and Michael are sitting in the seats across from Hurley
Walt and Michael aren’t there

Hurley believes that he’s cursed by the numbers
Hurley believes he’s the luckiest guy in the world, and he’s famous because of his Mr. Cluck’s chicken commercials that he’s been running

Sawyer’s sitting further back in the plane
Sawyer’s only one row behind Hurley

Claire was sitting across from Jack and up a couple of rows
Claire isn’t in the vicinity

Shannon and Boone were traveling together in first class
Shannon doesn’t get on the plane, and Boone is sitting in the same row as John Locke

John Locke didn’t go on the walkabout and is carried onto the plane, humiliated
They have a wheelchair for John, and I believe he makes up a story about going on the walkabout. Others think in the alternate timeline he still went on it, but I don’t think so. First, he wouldn’t have been on that flight; he would have been on one two weeks later… Unless the date of the flight is different? I just think he makes it up because… maybe in the new timeline Ben Linus is in his body. Har har…

Jin and Sun are married, he’s hopeful that after he delivers the two watches they’ll be able to take off on a life together.
Jin and Sun aren’t married – he’s not wearing a wedding band at customs, and they refer to her as “Ms Paik,” which is her maiden name. He’s only got one watch with him, not two. She’s wearing a small ring, so it’s not clear if it’s an engagement ring or just a ring. It’s also not clear if she can speak English (she DOES seem to understand the guards, but is still afraid to tell Jin, if that’s the case).

Sayid is sitting closer to Shannon and Boone near the front of the plane, and keeps to himself
Sayid is sitting further back in the plane, and helps out Jack with Charlie

Kate and the marshal are on the plane and he treats her like dirt
Kate and the marshal are on the plane and he treats her like dirt. Although, I noticed where before he seemed to loathe her, there seems to be the tiniest bit of tenderness for her this time around. He gives in to her a little too easily, more easily than he did before, where he wouldn’t budge at all with her before.

The Island Go Boom?

Well, that original post of mine is up to nearly 400 comments already (?!) and even I’m finding it hard to keep up, but I’m so glad I did because you guys are amazing. I’ve watched the episode one more time since then and found a bunch of new things, but by the time I catch up on comments you guys have them, too.

I’ve written up a long post and was going to post it all at once, but people are exhausted trying to make it through all the comments on the original post, so I’ve decided to break it up into sections. That way it’ll be a little more focused and you can comment on each post rather than having to slog through comments on various aspects of the same post. I'll time them to go live about an hour apart. If you wanted to discuss a certain aspect of the premiere that I've missed, let me know and I'll put a post for it, too.

So let’s start:

The key scene of the opening of the episode is the island underwater. I think what we’re to make of this is that on the new 2004 flight, the bomb really went off in 1977, and it caused the island to sink. What does that mean? Well… not only is the island gone, but any influence that island had on everyone’s life is gone. That suggests the island – or people ON the island like Ben, or Richard, or Jacob, or Widmore – really has been controlling their lives for, well, most of their lives.

Locke is still paralyzed, but maybe he wasn’t paralyzed by his father; it could have been another way. He doesn’t actually say when Jack asks him. Hurley hasn’t been cursed by the numbers, because they were never broadcast off the island, meaning Sam Toomey couldn’t hear them, meaning he couldn’t give them to Leonard, who never would have repeated them to Hurley. YET Hurley still won the lottery. Did he use those numbers or different ones?

But let’s think of the island itself for a second. Juliet hits the bomb, and when it goes off, she, Jack, Hurley, Miles, Kate, Sayid, Sawyer, and their VW van are suddenly sent to 2007. But did anyone else come with them? If not, then when the island sank, think of who it took with it: Richard Alpert, Charles Widmore, Eloise Hawking (and the unborn Daniel Faraday!), BEN LINUS, all of the Others, the Dharma Iniatiative, EVERYONE. Did Alpert know this was going to happen? Did he conk Eloise over the head at the end of last season and immediately take her off the island somehow to keep her safe?

What are the implications of the island sinking in 1977?