Lost thoughts

I am ridiculously excited to have this show back. It's so refreshing to have shows like this one that ask you to turn your brain ON in order to enjoy it, rather than requiring that you turn your brain OFF in order to fully appreciate it (I'm looking at you, Heroes!!).



Here are my random thought, theories, and questions after Wednesday's show:



- I knew this season was going to be awesome, just based on the interviews that Darlton has done leading up to it, but you got an idea of just HOW awesome it could be in the very first scene. Dr. Candle/Halliwax/Chang waking up to a little Willie Nelson, in an eerie callback to the opening scene of season 2 with Desmond in the hatch (I actually thought they WERE in the hatch for a minute, until they showed him walking through New Otherton), on his way to film an orientation video that I don't think we've seen yet. Interesting to me that this film was much darker in content than the ones we've seen before...this one was all about military maneuvers, monitoring the "Hostiles," etc. I think we may find in this season that the ole D.I. may not have been the peace-loving beatniks they have been made out to be so far.


Follow that up with the discovery of the Frozen Donkey Wheel (and subsequent death of a worker due to the "Minkowski Effect), and then, of course...Daniel Faraday, not looking a day older or younger than when we saw last saw him ferrying people to the freighter! At that point, I just shouted "YES!!" at the TV screen and settled down for a couple of mind-blowing hours.


- Something about Ben fussing around doing domestic things (like when he was worried about drying out the ham he was cooking for Juliet last season) just cracks me up. Watching him meticulously packing for their trip to the island struck me as funny.

- I do not believe that Ben doesn't know what happened on the island after the Oceanic 6 left. As usual, if Ben's mouth is moving there is at least an 80% chance that he is lying.

- Why didn't Richard and the Others move when Locke moved? This is a question that has to be addressed at some point. I think it will be, since it was mentioned in the later conversation between Locke and Richard. Did they not move because they are somehow anchored to the island? What are the "rules" as they pertain to the Others?

Another random thought about the Others...we have lumped them all into one group that we call the "Others," but there are actually several different subsets to that group. You have the Natives (or Hostiles), which includes Richard and his group that seems to predate everybody else. You have at least one person (Ben) who was part of Dharma and lived through the Purge, with the possibility of there being others like him. You have Cindy the stewardess and the children, who were survivors of 815. And then you have people like Juliet (and Ethan, in my opinion) who were brought over from outside the island to fulfill a certain purpose. Remember, Ethan was a physician. I wonder if the same "rules," whatever they are, apply the same way to this whole group?

- My wife really appreciated the fact that Sawyer went shirtless for the first hour.

- "Your camp isn't gone. It hasn't been built yet." Cue goosebumps.

- Locke watches the Nigerian drug plane crash. Cue many more goosebumps. So cool that Locke is the one to see this, since this plane factors so much into his time on the Island. This is the plane that he and Boone found, it's the plane that convinced him that he did in fact have a destiny on this Island, it was this plane that fell and killed Boone, which led to him pounding on the Hatch door and simultaneously saving Desmond's life and also producing one of my top 3-4 favorite moments in Lost history, when the light comes shining through the Hatch window.

- OK, they have obviously been drawing similarities between Locke and Ben for a while now. Did anybody else get a "Ben" type vibe when Locke all of a sudden pulls a piece of info out of seemingly nowhere in order to temporarily save his hide? "I know you, your name is Ethan." How often have we seen Ben pull this same trick? Maybe now we know one way Ben was able to know all this stuff he "shouldn't" have known...

- Something is going on with Sun, I just can't figure out what it is yet. For some reason, I don't believe her when she says her goal is to kill Ben...I think she's just telling Widmore that in order to get him to help her. And that later scene with Kate was filled with a really strange tension. "Maybe we would have all died, and not JUST my husband. So...how's Jack?" AWKWARD. Also, shouldn't Ji Yeon be about three years old by now? Why does she only have a baby picture? We've all known new parents in our life...don't they all carry the most recent picture of their kids, at least until they get to be a little older? That was weird. Something is up with her.

- "You know maybe if you ate more comfort food you wouldn't have to go around shooting people." Hee. And now you know why I've never been a serial killer...I eat LOTS of comfort food.

- Very smart of Sayid to load the dishwasher with the knives facing UP. Maybe he's time traveling, too, and he did so for just this occasion?
(Just kidding....)
(sort of)
(unless that turns out to be right, and then I was serious the whole time)

- Obviously, a very important conversation between Daniel and Sawyer...time is like a string: you can move forwards or backwards, but you can't create a new string. This is one of the rules we will be paying attention to this season.

- Loved the scene with Locke and Richard. Some really great exchanges here:
LOCKE: How did you know I had a bullet in my leg?
ALPERT: Because you told me there was, John.
LOCKE: No...no, I didn't...
ALPERT: Well...you will.


ALPERT: Next time we see each other, I'm not gonna recognize you, alright? You give me this.
LOCKE: What is it?
RICHARD: It's a compass.
LOCKE: What does it do?
RICHARD: It points north, John. (I loved Richard's delivery of this line....like, "DUH. It's just a compass. Who do you think you are, James Bond?)

Also, this scene kind of sheds new light on the whole "Pick the item that ALREADY BELONGS TO YOU, John" scene from Cabin Fever last season, doesn't it?

- My favorite Sawyer line of the night: "Open up, it's the Ghost of Christmas Future!"

- My inner geek was geeking out all over the place over the Desmond/Daniel conversation. My first thought was, "Wait...if they met when Desmond was in the Swan, why didn't Desmond recognize him when they met on the beach?" Then it hit me...it's only Desmond's consciousness that time travels...so he did not have that memory until the conversation actually happened, which in Desmond's actual time line was multiple years later, as he was in bed with Penny. So he didn't remember it earlier because it had not happened yet. That's AWESOME.

- Charlotte is in TROUBLE. Nosebleeds, headaches, memory loss...where have we seen that before? I don't think she's going through EXACTLY what Desmond went through, since we haven't seen her go catatonic while she was mind-tripping. I think it's more like what Daniel was going through last season when he couldn't remember the playing cards. But then, he found his constant (Desmond), and he's been fine ever since. The only thing that has bugged me about that is that Daniel said it had to be something or someone you care deeply about...does he really care that deeply for Desmond? Maybe something happens in the future (past?.. whatever) that causes his and Desmond's relationship to take on a deeper meaning?

- After the tension-filled hour of the first episode, "The Lie" had some very welcome lighter moments thanks to it being a Hurley episode.
"Yeah, I like Shih Tzus."
"Looks like you heart them."

HA!

- The Ana Lucia thing was surprisingly entertaining...in case you didn't know, the story with Michelle Rodriguez (who plays Ana Lucia) is that she was supposedly written out of the show because she had too many run-ins with the Hawaii police, including at least a couple of DUI arrests. So her last advice to Hurley ("Don't get yourself arrested...stay away from the cops") was a nice little self-deprecating jibe.

OK...here's my working theory on Hurley. I think he may just be having hallucinations, not being communicated with by the Island, or Jacob, or Ben, or whomever. Hurley has some tendencies towards crazy, as we know (he was in a mental institution before he ever went to the island). As we saw in his conversation with his mother, he is distraught over the fact that so many people died on the island, and now they are lying about it and what happened to them. As we saw in the scene where Sawyer clinked his beer can against Roger Workman's dead skull, dishonoring the dead is a big deal to Hurley. I think his subconscious is haunted by the thought of those left behind, and the fact that they are dishonoring their memories by lying about what happened to them.

The only wrench I can think of that would throw this off is if one of his "visions" gave him information that he would not have known on his own. If you can think of any instances of that, leave it in the comments, and I'll have to reconsider my position.

- The scene with Hurley and his mother is priceless, and I could never do it justice, so here:

What a great mom, huh? "I don't understand, but I believe you." Kind of like we feel about the Lost writers sometimes, huh?

By the way, Jorge Garcia (Hurley) is extremely underrated as an actor, in my opinion. Watch him break down in that scene, or the scene when he had to tell Claire that Charlie was dead, and then try and tell me he's just playing a big goofball funny guy. He has range.

- "Why is there a dead Pakistani on my couch?"

- Interesting exchange between Jack and Ben:
JACK: He's dead, isn't he?
BEN: (no response)

OK, so maybe not an "exchange," but certainly raises some interesting questions.

- Anybody recognize Frogurt (the guy who took the first flaming arrow)? Two words...."Aawon Buwww." That's right...he's the guy from the original "Got Milk?" commercial! And, yes, of course he was wearing a Red Shirt.

- I think our beloved Losties got caught in the crossfire in a battle between two different factions, one made up of Island "natives" (the ones with the flaming arrows), and then the other militant organization that we don't know yet (the ones with the guns).

Something interesting I thought of: remember Danielle speaking of one of her crew members (Montand) losing his arm...and then in the Swan video Dr. Chang has a prosthetic arm (in the video released at Comic Con this year, he seems to reference losing it in a "violent purge"). So, when Juliet is captured, what do they threaten her with? They are going to cut off her hand. Hmmm....

- And FINALLY...the scene with Mrs. Hawking at the end was awesomely spooky. When I first saw it Wednesday night, it was very late and I was very sleepy, and I had to really concentrate to make sure I wasn't having some sort of weird dream.

Some details I have gathered from the interwebs:
Looking at the screen captures over at DarkUfo, it looks like the map on her monitor is marked in specific points...maybe the Vile Vortexes that have been theorized about? Special places on the Earth that are like wormholes, where you enter in one point and end up in a completely different point?

The equations on the board apparently have to do with radiation and probability formulas.

Also, did anybody else get the vibe that Ben is working for her rather than with her? He did not want to tell her that he lost Hugo, and then she cut him off really quick with the admonition that what he NEEDS is of no consequence...what he HAS is 70 hours.

Or God help us all.