Posts Tagged ‘ Lost ’

– well, aside from LAFleur.

Bad voice over, but worth it once the music kicks in.

…which means that Lost from the Start is updated with a new episode.

This week it’s ep 1×02 – in which Charlie gets high, Locke gets cryptic, Sawyer gets a gun, a polar bear gets the short end of the stick, and Shannon and Kate get semi naked.

What are you waiting for?

According to E!, ABC are so desperate to get the next ‘it’ show not Lost has gone that they’re considering rebooting Alias.

E writes:

Again, it’s only very initial talk at this point, but I’m told that the development folks over at the Alphabet network are considering doing a new version of Alias that would borrow some elements of the original series that starred Jennifer Garner (and Michael Vartan, Victor Garber and some guy named Bradley Cooper who must have slipped into oblivion since). But the series would most likely not include any sort of complex mythological throughline such as the Rambaldi prophecy (a storyline that lost some of the fans).

No.

Let me just say, no.

Alias wasn’t a perfect show by any means. It had massive gaps in internal logic, it relied too much on JJ Abram’s favorite maguffin (a big red ball of red stuff) and, yes, it did rely on Rambaldi’s prophecy too much.

And, yes, it was ridiculous. It killed off regular cast members and had them replaced by evil clones. It leaped forward in time by a couple of years (before every show was doing it), during which time the main character had been believed dead but actually had been running around as a brainwashed bad guy (apparently). It had characters that did about-turns at the drop of a hat. It had Sloane-Clones. It had crosses, double crosses and triple crosses. It had long lost relatives appearing out of nowhere. It had At one point, it had zombies.

Yes, the final season was weak because of Jennifer Garner’s reduced presence because of her pregnancy, but it ended strongly and actually made me like Balthazar Getty – and that’s pretty impressive in itself.

But you know what? For all that, it was fun.

It embraced it’s silliness with gusto and had a cast of talented actors and Michael Vartan playing it deadly straight amidst all the hijinks. It was anchored by a career-making performance from Jennifer Garner. It reminded us why Carl Lumbly was the coolest thing to come out of Cagney & Lacey. It gave use Greg Grunberg in a role where he didn’t have to squint real hard to make the camera go wobbly. It gave us a Q for a new generation in the form of Marshall Flinkman. It gave us a pre-Lost Terry O’Quinn as FBI Director Kendall. It gave us Jennifer Garner in post-Superbowl lingerie…

…er. Where was I?

Oh, yes. Most importantly it gave us Ron Rifkin and Victor Garber as Arvin Sloane, the best-realized and developed villain in TV history, and spy-daddy respectively, where they proved that being over fifty (or in Rifkin’s case, over sixty) is no impediment to being incredibly bad-ass.

Alias doesn’t need rebooting, especially when the tendency would probably be to make it deadly serious. Alias just needs rewatching.

Lost from the Start, my site that’s going to run down Lost one episode at a time to see if all hangs together is up and running today!

Why not head over and take a look?

Episode 1×01 – recap with comments and thoughts on how it fits in with how the series ended

JEARS – Jack’s tears, episode by episode starting with the pilot

Survivor Count – just how many people did die in Lost anyway? The pilot claimed two lives (well, not counting everyone who died in the crash) – guess who?

Were questions raised in the pilot actually answered?

Plenty more including an island timeline, character pages over at the site!

I suspect there are quite a few people out there writing about the end of Lost today, assuming they didn’t do so last night so I figured why not join them?

As at this stage there are probably people who haven’t seen it, click on through to read on…

As it’s Lost’s final week I’m giving away the following Tee today:

All you have to do to get the XL (and obviously new and unworn!) Tee is tweet the following (and live in the 48 States) before 10PM Eastern (and the end of the episode) tonight:

What Would John Locke Do? @richl1 is giving away a #LOST Tee – http://is.gd/ceNhn RT To win!

Tomorrow I’ll post the winner. Easy!

EDIT – and the winner is…Clay Harrison – the envy of men everywhere!

Via

Learned

CJ can be bad some times. Not to mention crazy.

The color of a baby’s swaddle decides their destiny.

People have always come to the island through shipwrecks and airline crashes because – presumably – the island needs people (oh, let’s just call them candidates) to be the next guardian of the island.

There’s a glowy thing at the heart of the island which is always protected by that guardian even if you don’t really know what it is, much like the glowy thing in Marsellus Wallace’s briefcase is protected by Vincent Vega and Jules Winnfield.

All men have some part of the glowy thing inside them, and it makes them want more of it, and if they ever get their hands on it it will go out for ever. Under no circumstances is this to happen.

Going into the glowy thing is worse than death.

Jacob? Not that smart after all. Sticks with mom after she reveals his matricide, even though she loves not-Jacob best, throws not-Jacob into the glowy thing because goddammit, he had it coming even though (a) worse than death, and (b) goes out forever. And, oh yes, turns him into a smoke monster.

Just because someone calls your skeletal remains ‘Adam and Eve’ doesn’t mean that you’re a couple.

Smokey’s beef with Jacob and the island is actually kind of understandable. I mean, not justifying-death-of-Sun-and-Jin understandable, but still.

The guardian of the island can’t apparently kill themselves – but they can be killed by others (just not other candidates perhaps), hence crazy CJ’s ‘Thank you’ as she dies.

The island might have it’s guardian, but that doesn’t mean that the island isn’t above screwing with you. The island appears to young Smokey as his dead mother – which throws into question how many of the previous appearances of dead characters on (and off) the island were Smokey as I’ve been assuming. In fact, I’m now thinking that the island may not necessarily want to be protected after all.

Not learned

Why Jacob got to basically pick and choose his candidates from a list, get off the island to influence their lives, watch them from a lighthouse, and generally be all Yoda-like whilst mommy dearest settled for smacking someone over the head with a stone and taking the first baby that came along.

How said mommy dearest managed to make it so that Jacob and poor, nameless not-Jacob couldn’t kill each other – although that apparently didn’t extend to not being able to batter each other senseless and toss them in a river towards a fate worse than death.

How Jacob – in spite of an apparent policy of pretty much non-interference – managed to get a bunch of failed candidates (a) to stay on the island, (b) to build a massive temple, lighthouse and statue, and (c) to operate in the outside world as well. I mean, other than his winning personality.

As I was watching the episode I was feeling vaguely disappointed – the big mythology episode didn’t seem to answer all the questions that I had, or at least it explained what the answers were without actually answering them.

Afterwards though, I liked it more. The more I thought about it the more I wondered – what did I really expect? The episode was well written, very well acted (especially by Titus Welliver and Mark Pellegrino playing less assured, less experienced versions of their familiar characters) and had a suitable mythic tone to it. There’s enough information there to satisfy most answers even if it isn’t spelled out word for word.

I mean, you know what you get when you do spell out things word for word?

Midi-chlorians.

And nobody wants midi-chlorians.

Make your own animation

As I said last night:

Seriously. I know that I haven’t been blogging about Lost this season but as far as I’m concerned last night cemented it as (a) the best show on TV, and (b) the most callous.

Four main characters were killed, at least one of which I was convinced was safe, and three of which we’ve known since the start. And yes as this is Lost we’ve not seen the last of most of these actors – as we were reminded seconds later in an alternate world scene – but still, last night’s episode hit me where it hurt.

Heartbreaking.

Ah, Jacob and Smokey, two sides of the same coin. The jailer and the jailed.

For your consideration:

– Smokey is now trapped in the form of Locke, aside from when he’s, well, smoke.

– Jacob was searching for candidates to replace him.

– Jack says leaving the island feels wrong.

Is it too much of a stretch to think that the final scene of the show may reflect the scene above, where jailer and jailed sit on the beach and await the next arrivals to the island?

With the jailer replaced by the candidate and the jailed trapped for now in the form of another?

So kind of like this?

…and this is how.

1) Daniel writes in his journal.

b. After some time travel hi-jinks, Eloise kills Daniel and reads his journal.

iii – Juliet blows up Jughead.

This creates an alternate time line created where Eloise (who just killed Daniel on the island) still has Daniels’ original journal.

Finally – Eloise meets Desmond, whose name is in Daniel’s journal, and doesn’t want him recreating the world where she made her son into a mad maths genius at the expense of his love of music and then killed him.

Ta-da!

Incidentally, the fact that Eloise had Daniel’s book prior to Jughead being blown up also means, I suspect, that she had it in the original timeline too – which explains just exactly how she knows so much about how to get back to the island, and why she knew to subtly influence Desmond’s life prior to his going to the island.

I appear to be short a blog post this morning, unfortunately.

This is a shame as there’s a lot I want to blog about…

Lost, and how much I’m enjoying this season, where I think it’s going and what’s bugging me about the Man In Black. Oh, and that I’m maybe thinking about doing something kind of big and kind of cool when it’s all over.

Fringe, and (again) how much I’m enjoying this season, and what’s bugging me about all this alternate world stuff.

Supernatural, how much I love it and why I only watch it on DVD so I’m years behind.

Doctor Who, why I wasn’t sold on it when it relaunched, how I’ve come round to it slowly, and what I think of the new Doctor and the first episode of the new season.

Torchwood, now that I’ve watched it all.

And that’s just on the TV side, not even counting comics…

How the characters that returned in Blackest Night weren’t worth the characters that died.

Why I’ve bought the Fantastic Four through every crappy creative team in the past twenty-plus years, and yet the pretty-much universally acclaimed Jonathan Hickman’s run has it on the chopping block.

Which other ‘Forever‘ branded books I want in light of New Mutants Forever being announced.

What else I’m on the verge of cutting, but what trades I’ve got on preorder.

Why I loved Criminal, yet was disappointed in Incognito.

Then there’s books that I want to recommend, movies I want to recommend – and things that I really, deeply want to not recommend but warn people away from.

So there’s a lot around that I want to blog about, I just need to get around to it.

I also need to get around to answering some Formspring questions – just as soon as I get a few more…

You know what this island is…but if you were the Man in Black, how would you get off it?

I mean, you can’t get the cork out of the bottle, right?

Easy…

…you break the goddamn bottle!

Tshirt for men available here

Tshirt for woman available here

Last season (well the last few seasons, really) I tried to do weekly updates on Lost and fell away after a few weeks.

This season, I’ve learned my lesson; I’m not even trying – well, not yet.

Even so, loved the first two hours of the season as the expected alt-universe Lost kicked off, with most of the cast looking different in the new 2004 than they did in the old 2004.

Some had different haircuts, some were older, greyer, heavier; one’s outlook on life had changed completely; at least one wasn’t even on the plane; another was on the plane who hadn’t been; others may just have been not seen as they were in the tail end of the plane.

It’s funny, but when I originally thought about the reset, I was thinking that  everything right up to the point of the crash would be the same – not that everything from the point of the bomb exploding would change.

It made me think of the butterfly effect – never mind that everyone on the island died, which would have a great impact in the lives of anyone who left the island after that point (although I guess most Dharma folk would have been killed by the Others anyway) – what about the people that never went to the island, like Juliet?

Also, with Widmore and Mrs Hawkings on the island when it was destroyed, it looks like Penny and Faraday were never born.

And how did Hurley win the lottery? He can’t have heard his mental-hospital patient friend reciting the numbers, as that man couldn’t have heard them while out on the boat, as the numbers could never have been transmitted.

I do like the idea of Jack trying to repair Locke’s back though – for some reason, that never occurred to me before, and I’m sure it will have a large impact in the old faith/science debate.

There are some interesting possibilities here, though, and the fact that Christian’s body didn’t make the trip to LAX makes me think there’s more to this alternate time line than a simple ‘what if’ scenario. After all, if this doesn’t fold back into the main timeline somehow or other, what’s the point in exploring it?

As for the original timeline back on the island, I’m not really sure how I feel about the introduction of another group of Others. It looks like they’re actually part of the main Others group, as indicated by Richard Alpert’s recognition of the significance of the flare signal, but even so – a temple in the middle of the jungle that’s only a short walk from the hatch that nobody ever found?

Irritating…but I can let it go, I suppose. It would at least explain where the Others were living when they weren’t hanging around the Dharma village.

I’m also more than a little curious about what Jacob and not-Locke (Nocke?) were doing on the island. It seems that Jacob may have been Nocke’s guard for all these years, and has been helping the Others survive through the waters used on Sayid.

Anyway, I wasn’t going to write much on this and as usual, that seems to have gone by the wayside.

Ah, well, on to the next episode!

I know I haven’t been blogging about Lost - or TV in general – recently ( and I know this because the better half constantly tells me that she doesn’t stop by as often because of it) but I am very excited about Lost returning in a few weeks.

Of  course, I also like 24 even if I haven’t caught up with this season yet, so this…well, this is pretty awesome.

via

Posted via web from Comic By Comic’s Wonderous Posterous!

Posted via web from Comic By Comic’s Wonderous Posterous!

In the JJ Abrams-edited Wired issue that came out a few months ago, there were a bunch of puzzles and meta-stuff hidden.

There was a massive meta-puzzle that’s deciphered here, but Jon at Good Times has also found a hidden Lost clue.

Well. So I guess the statue –

- doesn’t represent Sobek at all but, rather, Taweret, the protector.

So maybe what lies in the shadow of the statue will protect us all.

But I still don’t trust Jacob. Just saying.

Of all the storylines in the Lost finale this year, this was the most surprising for me. Sure, a whole lot of it hinged on the Jacob backstory but even without that, this was a crapload of fun.

Following on from the previous episode, Ben seems all a-flutter over Locke wanting to kill Jacob – even more so when he tells him that he wants Ben to actually do it – until Locke points out all the reasons that Ben has to do so.

Cancer.

Alex.

Exile.

Never getting a pat on the head.

And then you can almost see ol’scary eyes’ brain working. It’s a superb bit of manipulation, and a nice reversal on the Locke/Ben relationship of time gone by. It’s very obvious – and has been since his return from the dead – that this Locke is not the same as the Locke who died, at least in terms of confidence. (Dum-dum-dumm!!!)

There were some nice moments between Locke and Richard too about not often seeing people who come back from the dead – or people who don’t age, for that matter.

Then there were the Ajira flight survivors; it seems from the flashback of Jacob visiting Ilana that all of them were working for Jacob the whole time. When you couple that with the fact that Jacob told Hurley to get on the Ajira flight knowing it would return him to the island, then it makes me wonder if Jacob’s plan all along has been to get his people onto the island somehow.

Frank’s brought along because he’s the C-3P0 of Lost - it seems to be his lot in life to suffer. Not only that, but Bram and Ilana wonder if he’s a candidate for something. A vessel for Jacob? A replacement for Jacob? Access to their clubhouse?

The traveling group and their big box – which they show the contents of to Frank, much to his dismay – make a beeline for a cabin where they expect to find Jacob. Now it might just be me, but this looks very much like the cabin where Rose and Bernard were living, and I think it’s meant to be the cabin where Hurley and Locke have both been in the past (and Locke heard someone asking for help) – but this cabin was also apparently built by Horace Goodspeed. So maybe it’s a different cabin. Or maybe Horace’s ghost was just used by Jacob or Esau to point the way. Or maybe it’s a screw up. Who knows?

The cabin is surrounded by a circle of ash (as it has been seen to be before, on occasion) but there’s a break in it – suggesting that someone’s got out. In fact, Ilana torches the cabin after ascertaining that nobody’s lived there for some time, although someone’s been there recently.

The cabin has always been presumed to be Jacob’s home, because it was where Ben took Locke to fake him out – although Locke heard someone ask for his help there; it’s where Hurley saw Christian and another person (or at least another person’s eye) which was presumed to be Jacob’s; it was where Locke met Christian and Claire and was told to move the island.

But we only think it was where Jacob lived because that’s what Ben told Locke. And in this episode, Ben admits it was a lie.

More surprising (or perhaps not surprising at all) is the fact that the one person who seems to know what lies in the shadow of the statue is Richard. Or was that Ricardus? (I swear I got an Obi-Wan Kenobi vibe when she asked him under that name…”I haven’t been called that in a long time…”)

The answer it seems, is “Ille qui nos omnes servabit,” which, depending on who you ask seems to translate to “He who will save us all” or “He who will protect us.” Which I guess is the same thing.

They then finally show everyone what they’ve been lugging around in the box – a body from the plane. Specifically, John Locke’s body!

This is obviously a Very Bad Thing because a few minutes earlier, Richard showed Locke and Ben how to get in to see Jacob.

And so in the foot of the statue, it becomes clear that the man we’ve been calling Locke is actually Esau – and he’s finally found a loophole. He might not be able to kill Jacob, but Ben sure as hell can. (This rule seems to be similar to why Ben can’t kill Widmore, as we’ve seen before).

If Jacob had acknowledged that Ben had suffered on the island (and I thought Michael Emerson was fantastic in this scene – I really felt for him) then it’s more than likely that he wouldn’t have killed Jacob. Instead Jacob’s cold “What about you?” sealed his fate – but not before he croaked out a warning – at least I think it was a warning – to Esau/Locke: “They’re coming.”

So here’s what I think – the cabin is where Esau was trapped at some point by Jacob (or more likely Richard). Kept within by a circle of not ash but potash which functions, like salt, as a magic circle to entrap demons – which means that Esau is a kind of demon.

Recently, someone has broken the circle – my money is on Ben when he set smokey on Keamy’s men at the end of season four. I think that when we’ve seen smokey or manifestations in human (or horse) form before, like Christian, or Eko’s brother, they’ve never been there for sustained periods.

I suspect they were almost like projections – sometimes with solidity, sometimes not. In addition, I think that Esau can project off island – which is why Jack saw Christian off the island, and probably why Hurley saw Charlie and Libby (which is why Jacob told him he wasn’t crazy; he knew better).

However, in his desperation, Ben released Esau fully by breaking the circle – and that’s how he was able to sustain the appearance of Locke after the Ajira crash. Presumably for the three years in between, he was just chilling.

EDIT: I forgot to say that I’m assuming that Esau and Smokey are one and the same (more or less) – and that’s why we didn’t see Locke while Ben was being told to follow him by Smokey/Alex. As a result, Ben doing whatever Locke/Esau wants at the will of Smokey is purely because Locke/Esau is Smokey. Also, the wife said back when that ep aired that she was getting a definite vibe from Locke and I, like a fool, poo-poo’d her. I have some humble pie coming.

As for who’s coming, I have no idea – unless a certain hydrogen bomb didn’t change anything, and merely bounced some time-displaced people back to the present day.

This is why I love the show – even when I’m a bit disappointed (as with the 70s portion of the finale) or uncertain (as with the final introduction of Jacob and Esau), there’s so much to think about.

And in retrospect, I think the game between Jacob and Esau doesn’t exactly come out of the blue either; we’ve had power struggles on the island in all time periods, from Jack and Locke through to Ben and Widmore. These two are merely the precursors to it all. And there’s clearly been some kind of mystical hocus pocus at play for at least the last few seasons with the appearance of Richard Alpert through the ages, too.

I mean, it’s not like the hallucinations in people’s heads turned out to be angels, right?