UPDATE: The T-Shirt is no longer available.

I was very saddened to hear that you may not be able to attend LOST’s going away party, AKA the final season.  I’ll admit, I wasn’t a big Shannon fan in the beginning -  I was a bit skeptical of the attempts to bring depth to her character at first, but eventually – through great writing and great acting – I came to regard Shannon as a permanent fixture in the LOST ensemble. By the time of her death in “Abandoned,” her various hues had combined into one of LOST’s most complex characters.

Along her journey, Shannon’s redemption cried out for us to reexamine her past – both on the island and off.  I remember watching Abandoned and being totally dumbstruck by the fact that I actually understood why Shannon had become so self centered, and at the same time why she also seemed to be possessed by an inner need to do the right thing.  Whether it was the result of a trick of sly writing, or an artistic act of faith by all involved – it worked.  I was completely saddened to see Shannon go.

I guess the gist of what I’m saying is this:  Shannon is one of the most complete characters on LOST.  Probably because her story was told in a finite space.  Yet, even though we did not get to see Shannon listen to some records in the hatch, or get kidnapped by the others, or time flash, her story is a compelling part of the LOST story because – distilled to its purest form – LOST is a story about the journey characters take along the way to redemption.

Personally, I want to see what would have happened to Shannon if she had never landed on the island.  I want to believe that the damaged young lady with all of her suppressed artistic potential would have healed with or without need of her french translation skills.  Where would Shannon have wound up without the existential shock of surviving a plane crash?  Would she have continued playing the spoiled rich girl whose selfish nature is driven by a sense of loss and oppression, or would she have found herself again?

I realize you are busy with your film career, congrats on that, but please know that to your LOST fans – this one at least – appearing the final season would not merely be a ‘gimmic.’  Damon, Carlton, and the rest know that the only way to pay us off is by revisiting characters in a way that pays tribute to them.  I would not go as far as to assume you ‘need’ this role in a sense of artistic challenge, venue, or paycheck, but I can tell you with absolute certainty that your appearance would make your fans in the LOST community very, very happy.  Besides, I hear the weather in Hawaii is great.

Best,

Doc

On shooting Juliet’s final scene in the season 5 finale:

MITCHELL: “At the time, I didn’t think I was ever coming back.  So for me it was just a really big goodbye and easily heartbreaking. It wasn’t one of those things to think about it. Also, Josh [Holloway] is really strong, so I was on this pulley, and I had them loosen the pulley so he’d really be holding me up, and it killed both of us every time. When my hand slipped from his, it was because he couldn’t hold on any longer. So that hit us with a real punch.  And then, to be trapped in that cave and to have no way of telling anybody and to be too hurt to move—who does that happen to?  Is that not your deepest, deepest nightmare? So that was very easy to play because it was so big…. We were all broken-hearted and crying quite a bit.  Evangeline [Lilly] couldn’t have been more supportive about all of it.  Everyone came to say goodbye.  I think Jorge [Garcia] brought champagne. It was a cathartic and amazing experience.”

On why she enjoyed that scene:

MITCHELL: “It was really primal. And it was such a lovely opportunity because there’s always been this theory that I just may be a really really horrible actor because I don’t show any emotion. I love that we got to see all of her rage, because to me, that’s what’s driven her. To have the calm exterior, I always had to have that underneath.  That’s what made playing her kind of hard in my personal life because there was so much unexpressed.  So I’d be on the way home, Agggghhhhh!, crying or screaming.  That was the very first time that we got to see her naked—besides being in love. We actually got to see all of that pain and rage that had been built up for some time.  Then there it was—Juliet unmasked. And it was fun. I remember the director saying, “Can you just push it to the limit?’ And I’m like, ‘Really?’”

On the decision to off Juliet:

CUSE: “As the story is now nearing its conclusion, some characters just aren’t going make it all the way to the end. Even beloved characters aren’t going make it all the way to the end. And sometimes we have to do things that are really painful, like killing Juliet, because that’s what makes the story feel like the stakes are genuine, and people feel invested that characters who are beloved can actually perish on our show. It was an enormously powerful story that concluded the entire season of the show. So she was sacrificed in service of the story, and I think was hugely responsible for the season being viewed as successful because that was how it ended.… But she will always loom as one of our favorite characters, and even more importantly, favorite people that we’ve ever worked with on this show.”

LINDELOF: “What always gives us pause—especially in this instance—is we just love working with Elizabeth. And she always brings it, she always gives more than we expected, and transcends the material. She has always been so gracious and sweet and lovely…. That conversation [in which he and Cuse delivered the bad news] went the same way that the entire relationship did, which is Elizabeth was completely understanding, sweet, and wonderful. And she was bummed, as were we.”

MITCHELL: “I really only thought [the job] was going to be a year. I didn’t in any way think that that character would be liked because I didn’t think of her as a likable person.  I was just in love with her, so that was what was fun.  She didn’t have to be beautiful. She didn’t have to be sexy. She was someone who we really haven’t seen. It was new, it was virgin ground.… [But after season 3], I was told many, many times that they weren’t sure what to do and that they wanted to keep her a mystery.  Which I thought was great, to keep her a mystery.  I’m glad they didn’t go the other way, and make her completely nothing. In many ways a lot of it was just inevitable. [Season 4] wasn’t as exciting as season 3 was, but I was still pretty grateful to be there, to be honest with you.  They’d done a lot for me, so I still felt pretty good about it and I still loved her. Even if I was just walking around in the background, I was still having my Juliet thoughts …. [In a phone call right before the end of season 5, Lindelof and Cuse] said they didn’t have any story left to tell, and they didn’t think there was anything left for her to do… They were very open and honest and kind about it. And they seemed to be sad about it.”

CUSE: “There are so many characters in the weave of the fabric of Lost that at various times certain people get to shine and other people are forced into the background. Juliet’s character had that kind of an arc on the show: She burned brightly, but then we moved on in the storytelling and other things became more important. And it’s always painful. It’s like having a garage full of the most beautiful cars in the world but you only can drive one to work everyday. And it was frustrating for us too because we were pursuing other stories which rose to prominence and hers ended up taking a little bit of a back seat. But Damon and I came to a place where we came up with a fantastic ‘ending’ [for Juliet]. And ending is in quotations, of course, because just because a character’s died doesn’t mean that their story’s over on Lost.”

LINDELOF: “Juliet basically birthed season 6 by the actions that she takes in the final seconds of season 5. She is completely responsible for the end game of the show. So the character is going to be seen in a slightly different light this year. We gave her that action for a reason, and that’s because she’s so important to the fabric of the story.”

On later being asked to return in season 6:

MITCHELL: “The only thing I could think of was that she gets to beat the c-r-a-p out of Ben [laughs]….  I was like, ‘I think I’m going to be really busy.  But I’m so in love with this character, it’s not like you have to twist my arm. So, thank you.’ It was just a complete rollercoaster of [emotions], though, because I had already said goodbye.”

On what we should expect when we see Juliet again:

MITCHELL: “It’s probably exactly what you expect, but because it’s Damon and Carlton, you know they’re just going to turn it on its ear.”

source : EW

We dance around in a ring and suppose.

But the secret sits in the middle and knows.
- Robert Frost

As we moved on in to the midsection of Lost’s great Season One, the secrets were beginning to pile up. There were the secrets the survivors had brought to the Island.

The secrets they found there.

Secrets kept.

Secrets stolen.

And secrets finally shared.

There were the secrets that others had left behind

And the secrets the Island wasn’t planning to give up.

Recently Damon Lindelof revealed his own secret in an interview with USA Today. It seems all episodes on Lost are not created equal, and this batch contains the episode Damon considers “my least favorite episode of the show ever …” Homecoming, I think, was flawed on almost every single level that an episode of Lost could be.” It’s true the quality flagged here and there in the first season. But maybe that’s an occupational hazard of trying to put together a puzzle when it has to be kept a secret where all the pieces are being kept. It’s easy to get a little lost.

I think Damon’s being too hard on himself about Homecoming. Even a subpar Season One episode was pretty damn fun. Things jump out at you that you never noticed the first time, things there was no reason to notice. Like this scene from Hearts and Minds. Jack approaches Locke, who is sitting on the beach, looking out to sea.

There’s more to it, a conversation where Locke bullshits Jack about there being no boar, because he’s keeping his secret about the hatch from Jack. It’s only a little scene. It’s probably just a happy accident that now, five years later, it seems almost like a bookend to this scene:

Now, it’s not exactly the same. Jack and Locke don’t achieve the same level of metaphorical color coded fashion in Hearts and Minds. Instead of black and white we get a beige and checkered theme … which means – like, nothing. But later, when the two alphas are out in the jungle digging up guns, they do put on their bicolored duds, just for the occasion. I’d like to draw your attention to whose wearing which color shirt. Not that I have any theory on it. Just sayin’.

I do realize this is most likely just a fortunate glitch, but when a story is clicking, those connections have a way of making themselves. I’m still giving even money that the final scene of Lost resembles something along these lines:

And of course I’m completely prepared to be completely wrong. How could I watch this show if I wasn’t?

There were other foreshadowy moments, though none quite as glamorous. There was a tiny moment when Sun and Jin were discussing Claire’s baby, just after Claire had returned from the jungle, and they gave each other a look that told us – even though we didn’t see it then – that this was a couple where babies were a big issue.

We had NO idea watching that scene that we were being given our first signal that infertility and infidelity would one day define the story of Jin and Sun. But it was there, and it was fun to spot it. That’s a big part of the fun of rewatching Season One as a visitor from the future. You get to see all the stuff that was always right there that you never saw before.

Another pleasure of a rewatch is just getting to watch – again – things you really enjoy rewatching. Like Kate and Sawyer jumping into the waterfall and frolicking and larking around like two kids. It is one of the most purely joyous moments of Season One.

It’s sexy, but it’s innocent.

It feels so natural. It looks so fun.

Until they bump up against those everpresent dead people that turn up everywhere on Craphole Island.

The discovery of The Case begins the quest for the shiniest secret of the batch.

What was in Kate’s Case? And by extension what was the deal with Kate? She had been traveling under heavy guard with a U.S. Marshall. Aside from that, we knew that she climbed trees better than Tarzan.

She could track. She seemed to feel pretty comfy living in the wild. And that’s about all we knew about her. Then as now, she’s a very hard character to get a bead on. Finding out that she had this case, and that it meant so much to her, became a not so subtle metaphor for how much Jack and Sawyer both wanted to find a way to get inside her … head.

This episode, coming on the heels of the epic sex-ay kiss in Confidence Man, was the next chapter in the LOST Love Triangle series of stories. It starts out light and bubbly with the waterfall romp.

Then it shifts into a hotter, more sexual vibe as Kate and Sawyer wrestle for The Case

and bargain for it and come to an impasse.

Kate enjoys the cat and mouse with Sawyer and almost gets the upper hand.

But then inexplicably, prematurely, she just gives up and goes begging to Jack.

That’s when it all starts disintegrating into a long, miserable slog towards Jack finally letting Kate have her lost Cracker Jack prize. And in the end, it’s still a total secret what it all means to her.

As a matter of fact, according to this 2006 interview with ABC, Damon Lindelof regarded Kate’s toy airplane as “probably the single biggest regret that we have as storytellers. ”

Our intention was always that there be a second flashback story that revealed that that plane was part of a time capsule that she shared with a childhood sweetheart. She was responsible for the childhood sweetheart’s death when she was on the run and, therefore, the plane had great emotional investment. And we would hear “What’s up with the plane? What’s going on with the plane? When are you going to pay off on the plane?” Then we paid it off and people still are asking us. So in the finale that year the marshal gives this big sort of monologue about, “You want to know about this f–ing plane? I’ll tell you, God damn it!”

It goes to show you how much forethought those guys were putting into Kate’s storyline. Like … none. The plane meant nothing. It just showed that Kate was clinging beyond all rational measure to a childhood trinket. But let’s let bygones be bygones, shall we? This episode, the cleverly named Whatever the Case May Be was a fun one, at least for the first half. It could almost be considered a kind of litmus test for shippers. For example, if you like your romance flirty and hot and where the girl gets to be on top sometimes,

then you just might be a Skater.

If, on the other hand, you’re more of a navel gazing no fun mopey type,

then don’t look now but you just might be a Jater.

Seriously, it’s wrong to generalize. There’s more nuance than that to both these stories. The differences between them, however, are striking. Sawyer bargains with Kate over The Case, and only wants her to tell him what’s inside. He’s not even asking to see it. He’s curious, not about what’s actually in The Case, but only why it means so much to Kate to have it.

Jack on the other hand not only has to see what’s in the case, he’s going to oversee any and all openings of said case, and then whatever they find, he’s going to take it.

Except that stupid plane, of course.

When Sawyer and Kate have their close encounter with corpses, they’re as weightless and playful and graceful as a pair of dolphins.

When Jack and Kate go grave robbing, they’re gagging and tearing up and trying not to retch all over each other.

Was this stuff deliberate or did the writers not see what they were doing? Even when it came to month old dead people, Sawyer and Kate managed to make it look sexy. Jack and Kate had peaked too early with all that hot and heavy verbal copulation. By this episode they had already moved on to the numbingly miserable bad marriage phase of the relationship.

Maybe it all boiled down to respect. When Kate couldn’t go along on the jungle trek to trap Ethan, Sawyer simply handed her his extra gun. No problem, baby.

Jack didn’t think a grubby little alley cat like Kate deserved his trust.

After he dragged THE TRUTH out of her and wrenched the key out of her hand, after he’d humbled her and made her watch while he opened her damn case and confiscated the key and put it around his own fucking neck!,

he left her to have a good girly cry. When it comes to these two ships the biggest secret for me still remains: Why did anybody like watching Jack and Kate? And more than that, what were these writers thinking when they dreamed up this shite? One possible answer? It’s an aspect of season one that makes fanboys a little uncomfortable, I’ve noticed, but I’ll say it anyway. The explanation for Season One Jack & Kate, as far as I’m concerned, was the not so pretty thread of misogyny that ran deeply through much of the early characterizations.

Jack, despite being as highstrung as a tripwire, was portrayed as the reasonable man, the decent guy, the great doctor who had every right to control and discipline the white trash brat, Kate. Kate was the liar and the criminal who deserved to be treated with suspicion and resentment. We had seen her use her feminine wiles to rook the bank manager,

and we knew she’d been pulling plenty of tricks on the fool she got to help her rob the bank.

Kate used sex, heavily watered down with tears when necessary, to get whatever she wanted from life. I’m not sure if we were supposed to be distracted by the way she handled a gun into thinking she was kickass,

because in the story we saw on the Island, Kate was playing the naughty child begging for the good graces of her mad daddy Jack, as traditional and demeaning a female role as there is. If Kate were a singular case, maybe I wouldn’t have noticed it so much. But Sun was also a liar. In fact, she was such a liar that she asked Kate, right after she stopped lying about not speaking English, “Have you never lied to a man you’ve loved”? As if to say that lying and loving went automatically hand in hand for women.

And on Season One LOST, unfortunately, they did.

Shannon lied to Boone to take his money, and then she duped him into quasi-incest sex, and then she dumped him with about as much warmth as an ice shower.

And to top off the array of women behaving badly, Walt’s mom Susan lied to Michael so that she could steal Walt away for herself and then she lied to Walt his whole life by never letting him know his dad had sent him letters.

In the twisted world of fanboy-written romance, the undeniable undercurrent is that girls, basically, suck. You can’t trust them. They lie and they’ll screw you over first chance they get. It’s a throwback to the mother of all misogynist archetypes – Eve, the devious manipulator who tricked poor Adam into losing innocence, immortality and the most prime piece of real estate in mythological history.

As in the Bible, there are exceptions made, but basically only for women that weren’t considered sexually desirable. Or available. The innocent madonna Claire was sacrosanct. Never more so than when she was playing damsel in distress, which is a female role fanboys can all get behind.

And no one could ever say a bad word about Holy Mother Rose, comforting her boy Charlie in this jungle Pieta.

So while it was being well established that hot girls are all sneaky ass bitches, what story were we being told about the boys?

Most of their stories revolved around a secret as well, the kind of secret LOST really likes to get its teeth into – the secret of what it takes to turn a boy into a real live man. Manhood, baby.

The first thing it takes is the one thing most of these poor schmucks on LOST ain’t got: a real live Dad.

What they had instead was John Locke, their resident fatherless mystic crackpot – boar expert, dreamweaver and most likely a hardcore devotee of the Iron John School of Mythopoeic Manhood. Iron John is an interesting fairy tale to read if you have a minute, with echoes of LOST that are quite striking and lyrical.

“I am Iron John, and was by enchantment a wild man, but thou hast set me free; all the treasures which I possess, shall be thy property.”

Walt met with Locke secretly, every chance he could get, trying to glean the secrets of manhood that Michael seemed so uniquely inept at teaching.

Locke had been mentor to Charlie as well, imparting to him the wisdom of bees and boars and the fine art of kicking a monkey off of one’s back. But the young man Locke was most invested in was his partner in hatch finding, that dreamy boy Boone.

Since time was of the essence, and Boone was a pretty limp subject to start with, Locke was forced to resort to his homemade Instant Manhood Recipe. He bashed him over the head and then slathered his open head wound with hillbilly LSD that he mixed up himself, right on the spot.

You won’t find this method in any of the parenting handbooks, but as always Locke knew how to think outside the box. Locke told Boone he had given him “an experience that is vital to your survival on this Island”, and despite the fact that Boone ended up not surviving on this Island, it seemed to be a very useful experience.

Manhood means freeing yourself from the effeminazation of modern civilization and grabbing hold of that big ass knife.



It means rescuing damsels in distress.

And then it means, when you lose the thing you love the most, you must suck it up and “let it go”.

There’s no crying in manhood. Because really, what girl is worth getting so messed up over, dude?

Especially your not-sister who is a self absorbed airhead who’ll flirt shamelessly with any old charming Iraqi torturer that wanders into her life.

Shannon’s first death scene, even though it was just hallucinogenic wish fulfillment, was pretty gruesome, and I’m sure it felt shocking the first time around. I don’t remember how I felt the first time I watched it, if I even realized it was a dream at first. But what I noticed this time around was that Boone’s dream accuratetly depicted the way that the Smoke Monster kills.

Shannon was lifted up in the air exactly as Eko was and thrashed around until she looked like chewed up hamburger.

Boone may not have lived very long in this tale, but he was very talented in the dreamosphere. We would see him again in Locke’s dreams, a bond between father and son that would not be broken by death.

Charlie, like Boone, struggled to find his way as a man.

He had his own flashback secrets. Instead of incestual longings, Charlie’s secret was his addiction to heroin. His sad attempt at fitting in as a normal workaday man type ended with him ralphing straight into the state of the art C815 photocopier he was trying to sell.

It was one of the most pathetic flashback stories ever told on LOST, small and weak, but it revealed a central secret. For Charlie, manhood was going to be about “taking care of someone”.

It didn’t work out with the daughter of the guy who bought the paper company in Slough (shoutout to the British The Office ), especially after he was caught stealing Winston Churchill’s cigarette case,

but he was determined to make it work out with sweet little Claire. He mourned her loss and tortured himself over his failure to save her.

Then he read her diary and got real happy because he found out she liked him,

which felt like a wildly inappropriate reaction considering at the time she was still missing and in the clutches of the dreaded Ethan Rom. (Come to think of it, maybe I can see why this is Damon Lindelof’s least favorite episode.)

He gently coaxed her back to reality after she survived her trauma.

And then he did the most manliest thing of all and picked up a gun and shot another man dead.

Killing Ethan left many secrets hidden, at least for another year or so. We wouldn’t know how Ethan got all those scratches on his face.

We wouldn’t know what happened to Claire or why Ethan took her or who he took her to. All that would have to wait because Charlie had decided to be judge and jury, to give Ethan what he “deserved”. Charlie’s story, as always, circled back to Catholicism and judgment, and to the biggest secret of all – the secret of Faith and why it means so much to some people and seems so totally irrelevant to others.

Let’s take a break here and collect some of the other secrets that were raining down in these episodes. Like, who knew, when we watched Sayid’s long passionate tale about his devotion to his beloved Nadia, that he secretly just had a thing for leggy blondes.

Turns out Sayid was down with that “love the one you’re with” mentality all the way.

Yes, that was a direct contradicton of what they had been telling us about Sayid just a few weeks before, but what the hell. Romance on LOST is the soul of inconsistency.

That’s one thing I think we all can agree on.

Here’s a secret I’ve always wondered about: Why are bathroom jokes always considered funnier when they’re about a fat guy ?

Hurley had to put up with Jack snickering because he had the shits, and then they had him grabbing at Jin’s crotch to beg him to pee on his foot! It was double the hilarity. Number one and number two in the same episode!

And why is it even funny when Hurley just looks at a dead fish? Like I don’t see any joke here, but this picture still makes me smile.

Another secret: How do assless men keep their pants on?

And speaking of Sawyer, how did he rebuild his shelter up beach when all he carried with him on the great migration was a backpack?

It was still a secret, a cool one, why 815 passengers kept showing up in each others flashbacks, like Sawyer during Boone’s visit to the Sydney police station. Come to think of it, it’s still a total secret what those pre-crash connections are going to mean in the end.

And we are able to wonder now, with all our wonderful hindsight, whether it was coincidence or fate that Kate was robbing a lockbox 815

in a bank in the same city where Sawyer later told the warden to deposit Clementine’s inheritance.

When Michael was hit by the car just before he was set to go and get his baby Walt back

was that the Island reaching out to shape his fate the same way the gun he bought refused to kill him?

Was the cartoon about the Penguin with a Sunburn a secret nod to the mystery of a Polar Bear on a South Pacific Island? Is there some meaningful secret behind the cognitive dissonance of Antarctic creatures existing in tropical climates?

Why was the unluckiest boy in town the one wearing the shirt with the four aces?

Here’s a secret I don’t expect any answer for, but what was up with those slimy greenish greyish guava seeds that Jack gave to Kate?

Was it some kind of squicky method of asexual seed transfer, sort of like second base for verbal copulators?

Why were there so many antibiotics on the plane? Jack was able to blackmail Sawyer into giving up the case by playing peekaboo with his Hippocratic Oath and threatening to withhold the cure. But where did all those drugs come from? Was this plane full of hospital patients being flown to a quarantine ward?

When Scott was killed, they reminded us again that nobody remembered if he was Steve or Scott and thus the ongoing secret of the redshirts continued. How many of them were there? And why were they always lugging heavy things in the background and never allowed to talk to any of the A-team?

The A-team meanwhile was beginning to put together its own cabal of secret keeping. Jack and Locke had a discussion about whether to tell the group what was threatening them, a question that would be troubling throughout the story. As late as Season Three, Jack still felt it was his private prerogative whether to tell the nameless redshirts that they were about to be murdered in their beds. In this episode it was decided, as would become a habit, that the ever so brilliant elites would henceforth make all life and death decisions for the blissfully ignorant masses.

By far the most intriguing secrets of course were the secrets of the Island. And there were juicy ones throughout these episodes. The Black Rock that Claire told her diary she had seen in her dream was a potent source of mystery. There was of course the Black Rock ship, which had only been vaguely referenced by Rousseau, but that we now know is an ancient slave ship that is inexplicably moored in the middle of the jungle.

The same Black Rock whose ledger Charles Widmore would one day be seen buying at auction.

The same auction where a painting of the Black Rock was also sold, later to hang on the wall of Widmore’s posh apartment. But there’s more to the term “black rock” than just a ship. Volcanic islands in the South Pacific have large concentrations of black basalt, an igneous rock with weak, but measurable, magnetic properties due to the metallic elements they contain. And we saw that magnetic anomalies were beginning to be a real problem.

First the tide shifted suddenly and unexpectedly, which is something tides simply don’t do. Tides commune with the moon, and like the phases of the moon, tides repeat on a metronome of mathematical regularity. So it was a very frightening phenomenon when this happened, although, again, I think most of us hardly noticed on the first pass around.

The compass that Locke gave to Sayid deviated from true North as well, and it was plain that Sayid didn’t think it was just because Locke had given him a crappy compass.

This wasn’t quite as intriguing a story point as Locke’s magical perpetual loop compass would be years later, but it was Locke being associated early on with compasses. Without some kind of compass to trust, a traveler will be forever lost. Did Locke really give Sayid a faulty compass? Did he know it was faulty? Was the broken compass hinting about an anomaly in the Island’s magnetic field or was it pointing us instead to an anomaly in Locke’s secret hidden agenda?

Nothing much was made of the magnetic anomaly, except to show us that Sayid was on the case of trying to grok out the Island’s secrets, but it was something that would come back again and again.

Most spectacularly when Desmond had to pass through the magnetic moat on his way to the freighter and it mindwarped his consciousness and sent it skittering all over the timespace continuum.

But I still don’t think we’ve scratched the surface of how magnetism is going to figure into the final solution. Magnetism is a geek subject, and a surprisingly complex one to understand, but I do hope it all means something that average dummies like me will be able to comprehend in the end.

Some of it can maybe be attributed to the legend of the Rupes Nigra, described in the Inventio Fortunata (a/k/a “The Lost Book”) as a phantom island located at the Earth’s North Pole.

But the Black Rock has other mythological connotations, especially in Hawaii, where there is an enormous black rock cliff called the Puu Kekaa. It is believed that this is the place where Lost Souls would take the great final leap into the afterlife. This ritual is still played out for tourists today.

Could this non-stuntman’s dive by the athletic Josh Holloway have been intended as a nod to Puu Kekaa?

As lovely a view as it was, it’s also true that he was quite literally diving into the final resting place of lost souls. The Black Rock is one of those deep, multilayered symbols on Lost that means so many things it may almost be a moot point if it’s ever pinpointed as meaning any one thing in particular.

In any case, Sayid, with the help of the less useless than usual Shannon, managed to piece together Rousseau’s map into a diagram of the location of the signal tower, or so he hoped.

He was distracted, not just by Shannon’s sexaliciousness, but also by the seeming nonsense the crazy lady had scribbled all over the map. In the end, the gibberish turned out to be derived from a song lyric.

Somewhere beyond the sea, / Somewhere, waiting for me,

My lover stands on golden sands / And watches the ships that go sailing;

The lyrics weren’t particularly helpful as clues, except perhaps in confirming once and for all that this place they were lost in was not someplace that really existed anywhere in the known physical world.

It’s far beyond a star, / It’s near beyond the moon
I know beyond a doubt / My heart will lead me there soon.

Rousseau’s maps would continue to turn up when convenient for the plot twist du jour, and I know a lot of fans like to analyze them, but it has never struck me that knowing the exact specific geography of anything on this show is vital to understanding whatever the hell is going on.

“No one ever keeps a secret so well as a child.“-Victor Hugo

Most fascinating – and frustrating – is the secret of the Special child, the manboy Walt. That great enigmatic character who disappeared so abruptly from the story after this first season. Walt had the power of parapsychology. Or telekineses. Or something like that, some conglomeration of mind control tricks and talents that even he didn’t seem to understand he possessed.

We had seen in Tabula Rasa that he appeared to make the rain stop when Michael said he’d be looking for the dog if only it wasn’t raining. But we saw much more of Walt’s special powers in Michael’s flashback episode “Special”.

Back in Australia, when Walt was still living with his mom, he complained about having to study the birds of Australia. This was a special scene for two reasons. First, Walt wondered why he couldn’t be studying the Birds of Egypt instead, and this marked the first mention on LOST of the great kingdom of Egypt that would figure ever more prominently in the mythology as time went on.

Second, the scene was remarkable because we saw that when Walt got irritated, he had the power to take it out on the literal world around him.

An Australian Bronze Cuckoo bird, the exact same bird Walt was not wanting to study anymore, crashed into the apartment window and died.

This had to be one of those reasons his unDad Bryan Porter wanted to hand him off to Michael the first chance he got. The kid was creepy.

And though we lost Walt too soon to puberty and never got to follow up on his mindmelding powers, we did get to see him do more birdkilling in the future, when he killed flockfuls of birds in the pre-Season Four mobisode named Room 23.

Walt also seemed to be able to dream himself into his own nightmares.

Michael threw his comic book into the fire and Walt ran off. When next seen he was being attacked by his very own dreamed up polar bear,

prompting another lesson in manliness from the great Iron John Locke,

and a heartfelt reunion for a father and son who at long last began to feel like family.

How was Walt able to conjure up the polar bear, if in fact he did? And why did the producers hinge such a pivotal plot point on a child actor who was so close to morphing into an unrecognizable man? One theory is that this plotline was the fail safe in case LOST was never renewed for a second season. They could have just had the whole thing be a fiction concocted in the mind of an imaginative child. It could have worked – in a pinch.

The imagery of children and childhood has always been prominent on LOST. From Kate and Sawyer’s wonderment at discovering their secret waterfall,

to Michael’s childish glee about the baby on the way,

and the cartoons he drew to try and share his life with his lost son,

to Claire being left as helpless bait in the enchanted forest,

and Boone and Shannon’s protecting one another from unseen demons like an hallucinogenic Hansel and Gretel,

there were many moments when the characters reminded me of children. Especially the children in fairy tales, where innocence meets evil as a matter of course. And pinning the whole plot on a child like Walt tied it all together.

Or maybe the clue was in Locke’s command to Walt to just “see it”. Seeing is serious business on LOST, as the constant parade of eye closeups reminds us.

Maybe Walt’s ability to conjure up what he sees in his mind’s eye is akin to the “wishing box” that Ben used to bring Anthony Cooper to the Island. Unless that whole thing was just an elaborate ruse to mess with Locke’s mind, which come to think of it, it probably was.

All in all, Walt’s comic book was a treasure trove of easter eggery. He was reading the Spanish version of the Green Lantern, the comic book Hurley was reading on the plane.

It was a Green Lantern/Flash: Faster Friends #1 (1997), for all you trivia buffs out there.

Not being a comic book geek myself, I can’t make any guesses on the relevance of that particular issue, if any, but I like that it has this kind of dialogue in it: “What we did half a century ago was bad, and what we did since then was further away from any type of forgiveness.”

That seems to fit this show. Somehow.

One of the prettiest pages in the comic, the one the camera lingers on long enough for us to notice, is this one:

It shows a castle atop a snowglobe atop a magical city, sort of a “Cities in Flight” image. It also reminded me of this image from Season Five.

If this were the only image of a snowglobe we’d ever seen on LOST, it would make no impact on the repeat viewer. But the writers have made a point of scattering snowglobes throughout the landscape, albeit scantily. They’re like rare bird sightings. They take a sharp eye and a lot of patience. There is one on the counter when Michael buys the fateful gun that refuses to kill him.

I think even then we could dismiss them as meaningless teases, except for the fact that Desmond, after failing to sail his boat away from the Island, described a ring around the horizon that couldn’t be passed beyond. Like the walls of a dome, or a snowglobe.

So maybe it’s something we should think about. Is it like a Rosebud kind of snowglobe, like Citizen Kane dropped on his deathbed, symbolizing …

… I don’t know. Something about the lost innocence of childhood, maybe, or the fragile vessel of our physical lifespan. Maybe it’s like the snowglobe at the end of the tv show St. Elsewhere, where at the end they sprung on the audience, for no conceivable reason, the random notion that the whole series had existed inside the mind of an autistic child.

Or maybe it’s about a controlled environment experiment, a metaphorical universe where human beings are forced to play out the wishes of a puppetmaster god.

I guess we’ll have to see about that one. Most likely the snowglobe is a fairly innocuous clue, one of the many subtle shoutouts the LOST writers like to give to both their classical and pop inspirations. But it’s fun to speculate, especially as this is, most incredibly, the last time this audience will ever get to speculate on anything LOST. Has the last-ness of this hiatus begun to sink in for everyone?

What will we all do without the speculating? LOST has created an entire subculture of speculating nomads doomed to wander the cyberverse without another show that will ever be this fun to speculate on again.

Word is out that the Premiere Date for the Big Finale Season will be January 20 2010 – or alternately, 01.20.2010. It looks so much more significant in that format, doesn’t it? Before you know it it will be countdown time. In the meantime, here’s the FIRST PROMO of the Season. It’s real short, so don’t blink after you press Play or you’ll miss it. But it gives me just enough of the chills.

It’s coming baaaaaaaaaack.

Atherton will play the role of Principal Reynolds.  How perfect is that?  Quite, right?  But wait, there is more.  I suggest you check out Ryan’s report here, and this follow up at TVOvermind which has a few more details concerning the shoot that Ryan has passed along.

One of ABC’s press sites is giving the date of January 20th for the premiere of LOST.  A week earlier than previous rumors, but who is going to complain about that.  Since no-one has officially verified that date, it is – as always – subject to change.  I’m going to shoot some emails around to try to get verification.

There is still no word on whether LOST will be pre-empted by the Olympics.  Since the nets have rarely pre-empted for the Olympics in the past, it seems unlikely – and the earlier circulated rumor turned out to be false (way to go, Harvard.)  Still, NBC is planning a huge push for the games, whether that spooks the nets or not we’ll have to wait and see.  If LOST airs on Wednesday, it would be battling Men’s Ice Hockey.

(Thanks to LyLy Ford for the heads up.)

source : http://nymag.com

Ben vs Desmond


Bernard&Rose requirement set

Locke’s leg

more vids here : Lost location “316″ and “this place is death”

@Docarzt – http://www.twitter.com/docarzt

and if you want the TVOvermind tweets

@TVOvermind – http://www.twitter.com/tvovermind

• The Premiere Date for LOST is still not solid. (Various folks say January 27th, but that is NOT official and is not verified by any of my sources.)
• If LOST is preempted by the Olympics, it would not be for the entire month of February anyways as the events run from the 12th (a Friday) to the 28th (A Sunday).  Worst case scenario: No LOST for two weeks. (Again, none of this information has been confirmed by anyone at ABC/LOST.)

For more on this visit my article on TVOvermind.com

UPDATE

Some don’t want to believe this, which is fine. To be clear:  there is no schedule, and there is no break.  Whether they are being talked about or not is completely up in the air.  However, most reports are saying LOST will be off the air for February, which makes no sense (IGN for example) since the Olympics are for two weeks, and everyone who wants this controversy to live – for whatever reason – continues to claim they have sources verifying this despite the total removal of the one blog post that spurred this whole thing.

Folks, that is the literal equivalent of saying it is true because you read it on the internet.  Next thing you know, it will be on Wikipedia, facts be damned.

What IS true, is that the last time the Winter Olympics aired LOST was not pre-empted and in fact won it’s time slot. Now, there is something else going on in February besides the Olympics… Sweeps.  Who believes that ABC is going to forfeit two weeks during a sweeps month?  Y’know, it’s not entirely impossible and it has happened before but with the Olympics performing poorly in ‘06 I have to say, logic gives me hope for no breaks.

On the other hand, I’m not trying to be vehement about it.  There definitely could be a break.  What is clear is that right now anything that riles up the fans is good for the bloggers, meaning this manufactured ‘controversy’ over a break.  If there is a break, it will hardly be the end of the world.

What makes more sense?  That Carlton casually gave a hot scoop to someone at the Harvard office, so we bloggers could start a firestorm of discontent?  Or that ABC hasn’t actually worked out the schedule yet? And trust me, everyone will claim to have bigger contacts to verify or disprove things, I’m confident in mine.  There is no schedule, yet.  There may be a break, but right now it’s up there with pigs could fly with the proper wingspan – entirely possible, but not real.  If ABC decides to graft wings on pigs and give LOST a couple of weeks off, I’ll let you know.

“There’s craft service and he’s got a massage table,” joked Welliver, who is headed back to La-La in a couple of weeks to film episodes of “Lost,” “Sons of Anarchy” and “The Good Wife.”

The quote comes from the BostonHerald website.  Does this mean M.i.b will be abandoning his Locke meat-suit, or that a Jacob/M.i.b flashback episode is on the way?

Thanks to KevinB for the tip

I just bought the season 5 DVD here in Australia, and it has an alternate cover and a bonus disc. I scanned it and attached it to this email. I believe this is an exclusive to JB Hi-Fi here in Australia, and the bonus disc is the same as the HMV bonus disc in the UK.

As you can see, the only thing really spoilerish is that the beach camp has been reassembled.  If this is a surprise, well, you are easily surprised and I’m sorry about that.

The coolness is that Cuatro has visited the set and done some cast interviews that will air after the first of the year.  Click here to visit their site for more pics.  Thanks to SL-LOST for scooping this.

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Picture 1 of 10

By the ninth episode of Lost we had all begun to learn the rhythms and the irrationale of the story. We knew the major players. We understood they had been consumed against their will into a world of menace and magic. Their frail humanity was no defense against the terrors that surrounded them. Naturally, they were frightened.

Bewildered.

And really stressed out.

Except for Locke, who continued to enjoy his dream vacation.

For the first time we heard The Whispers.

We met our first Other.

The words “Flight 815″ were uttered for the first time.

And we heard the first clank of metal against the door of the mother of all hatches, the Swan.

All the building blocks of the mythology were being lifted into position. As with so many mythologies, the core truth could be revealed only in a dream.

Claire’s Dream is one of those first season moments that absolutely must be explained before this whole thing ends. I’m not one who needs to have every loose end untangled. I can live with it, for instance, if we never learn why the painting by Thomas the Deadbeat Dad was in Charles Widmore’s office in 1994

when he didn’t paint it until sometime in the early 2000s.

I’m not asking for perfection. I can let that one go. But if the mysteries unleashed in Claire’s Dream aren’t tied up with a neat, tight bow at the end of this show, then I don’t see how any of the rest of it can ever make sense.

Claire’s Dream was more than every pregnant woman’s favorite fantasy that she’s going to wake up and the whole dreadful waddling fat bellied experience will be instantly over. It was more than just the natural fears of a new mom. Her dream was framed as an omen. The baby’s crib was in the monster infested jungle. The baby himself was a cuddly bundle of thick, red blood.

It’s typical for mythic heroes to have their births announced with dreams and prophecies.

In ancient myth, the hero’s mother was, if not a virgin, at least a very young, pure maiden. Little more than a child herself.

Sometimes the father figure was sinister, like Luke Skywalker’s fatha,

and sometimes he was awesome, like Kal El’s,

but sometimes Dad is just somebody everyone would rather forget.

The child Claire was carrying was not ordinary. If they made nothing else clear to us in Season One, that was it. Claire had been to a psychic, a man named Malkin, who nearly had a stroke the first time he held Claire’s open palms. He was so shattered by his vision of the unborn child that his eyes glassed over, kind of like how Locke’s did when he looked into the Eye of the Island.

The problem with watching an episode like this while looking back is that we know what happened to Aaron. We’ve seen him, in all his ordinary suburban kid normality. And, while he’s cute as a bug and everything, he just doesn’t seem to be all that…special.

It really feels at this point in the story that Aaron could go on living the rest of his life in Australia with his coma-proof granny, and nothing in the entire universe would ever be the worse for it. So what was up with all the portents and omens in Claire’s Dream? Was it, as Jack so condescendingly suggested, just a pregnant woman having a hormone attack?

It’s kind of hard to accept that Claire’s Dream was made of oxytocin when you think about the fact that the person she ran into, in the middle of the jungle in the middle of the night,

sitting at her psychic’s table, under her psychic’s lampshade,

… was the great dreamer, Locke. This time with added extra-metaphorical binary colored eyes.

It’s even harder to dismiss Claire’s Dream as an aberration when you consider that the psychic whose table Locke was sitting at was the same psychic who was ultimately responsible for getting Claire onto Flight 815, even paying for and handing her the ticket. He claimed to have found a home for Aaron. He just left out the important detail that his home was Craphole Island.

There was a reason Richard Malkin worked so hard to make sure Claire would be part of the Flight 815 Plane Crash.He was desperate to keep mother and child together, and this was the one sure way to do it. According to him, it was absolutely essential that Aaron never be Raised by Another.

“Raised by another” is not a random prophetic phrase. Being raised by another is maybe the most common trait that all heroes share, whether they’re mythic or comic or somewhere in between. From Oedipus to Moses,

from Skywalker

to Superman

from Peter Parker to Harry Potter

it’s almost de rigeur that a True Hero be Raised. By. Another. So why did Malkin want to make sure Aaron escaped that fate? Did he want to prevent Aaron from having a properly heroic childhood? If that was his goal, it didn’t work. Despite all his best efforts, Aaron ended up being raised by another anyway. Specifically, this Another.

In their years apart, dreams continued to be a connection between Claire and her lost son,

but thus far, the danger surrounding him has failed to materialize. As things stand, he’s still being raised by another. And so far, no horsemen of the Apocalypse have appeared on the horizon. The state of this story really does force us to look at Malkin’s prophecy with a skeptical eye. Where’s the Big Bad that Aaron’s separation from Claire was supposed to unleash? Aaron being raised by another doesn’t seem to have created so much as a wrinkle in the fabric of infinity. Unless it’s all about to start now that Jack has dropped the big bomb, of course.

There have been other Special Boys on Lost. Certainly John Locke meets all the checkpoints: Teenage mama. Absentee dad. Raised by lots of different Anothers. By any metric, Locke is pretty goddamn Special. And yet, so far, all that specialness seems to have ended with a great big pffffffffffffffffffft.

Walt certainly seemed a candidate for specialness at one time, but his star has also dimmed considerably. I have to admit that worries me just a little.

I mean, if they were planning this thing out meticulously from the first moment to the last, you would think the one thing they could have foreseen was the tendency of twelve year old boys to get big.

Maybe we’ve been horribly deceived by this idea of a prophesized child being raised by another. Maybe it’s the other meaning of the double meaning title we should be thinking about. On Lost, we should never ignore the wordplay. It’s not Another who shouldn’t raise Aaron. It’s An Other who shouldn’t raise him. Specifically this Other – the great and powerful Ethan Rom.

What a fun name. It makes me nostalgic for the old days when Lost was still limited to Anagramz 4 Dummiez. Ethan Rom: Other Man. So easy.

Sling Blade Ethan was the perfect introduction to the world of Others. With his square Frankenstein head and his dead, hooded eyes, it’s a wonder we didn’t notice him right away. But initially he blended right in with all the other not-hot no-names that were milling around in Season One. Like Dude With The Rash.

Ethan didn’t stand out any more than RashMan at first.

He was lurking behind Kate at the golf course when she was taking Sawyer’s action.

But why would anybody be looking at Ethan in that shot? It was a classic distraction technique. Watching Ethan go from large anonymous dork to terrifying ogre in the space of two short episodes was another example of how gracefully Season One was written. And of course the hits kept on coming in the following years. Ethan wasn’t just a brute. He was a doctor, of all things, a doctor who had prepared an immaculate subterranean manger for the hero-baby it seemed the Others had been dreaming about for some time.

(The above is the single skeeviest image of Ethan Rom for me personally, but I’m sure you all have your favorites.)

Ethan’s story would be woven throughout the years, warped and wefted into all the assorted timespaces we’d be visiting. From the creepy looking guy who wasn’t on the manifest, Ethan has evolved into a critical fixture within the ever sprawling plot of Lost.

Other-ness was a concept that felt profound in Season One. If there’s anything worse than being on a deserted island all alone, it’s being on a deserted island with unseen “Others” whispering and hovering just outside your reach. The fear of Others is universal. When Sayid stumbled home from his lost weekend with Madame Rousseau, he uttered the phrase that strikes fear in the hearts of all Earth Men: We are not alone.

Sayid had exiled himself to atone for the evil he’d done. Lost on a deserted island, he sentenced himself to solitary confinement.

His penance was rudely interrupted by that noble savage, Danielle Rousseau – the infamous radio talking Frenchwoman who had been living in her own eerie isolation for sixteen long years.

Somehow after all this time, Rousseau still had charged batteries! Which she had used to create her very own shop of horrors. (Because an electrocution rack is just what you need when you’re living completely alone in the polar bear infested tropics. Natch.) What Rousseau offered Sayid was Instant Karma.

Having just tortured a man days before, for information he didn’t have, Sayid himself was immediately tortured by the crazy French lady – for information he didn’t have. It was, to put it mildly, a bizarre duet between two very solo souls. I half expected it to break down into some kind of kinky sex thing. Danielle had been alone for so long, she couldn’t decide if she wanted to feel Sayid up or stab him with her rusty needles.

Too bad she couldn’t pull herself together a little bit. No romance ever developed between the sexy Iraqi torture meister and the hallucinating French hermit. Consider it an opportunity missed.

Rousseau interrogated Sayid in five languages, asking him “Where is Alex?” in English, German, Spanish, Italian and French. It added to the disorientation as Sayid’s mind spun backwards in time, to another woman whose loneliness had once penetrated his isolation.

Sayid’s great romance with Nadia is another one of those Season One events I found on rewatch that I had misremembered. I had forgotten that, except for some childhood teasing, Sayid hardly ever knew Nadia at all. They had bonded quickly, intimately – in a dirty prison cage. Then, just as they realized they were falling in love, they were separated again.

Impulsively, Sayid sacrificed everything so that Nadia could go free. It’s a kind of love story we’ve seen elsewhere on Lost – a sudden romance and an heroic sacrifice followed only by endless separation. Despite the fact that Sayid soon fell ever so deeply in love with the nearest available blonde cutie,

we in the audience have always accepted that Nadia was his one true love.

The last thing Sayid and Nadia shared, before being parted for most of the rest of their lives, was a quickly scrawled promise on the back of a photo. Nadia wrote to Sayid, “I will meet you in the next life if not in this one.” And although we know they did meet again, very briefly, it is still the next life where their best chances of happiness will lie.

Sayid’s story, like Rousseau’s, like Nadia’s, is one of human isolation, of loneliness endured stoically and heroically. But that is not to say there weren’t windows of happiness in the dark cells of those lives.

Despite being tasered, beaten, hamstrung and drugged, Sayid turned out to be a very courteous houseguest for Rousseau.

He reattached her to her lost humanity by fixing her little Intermezzo music box, the gift from her lover Robert. In Season Five, we finally met young Robert, and we watched Rousseau kill him.

She used the same trick on him that she later used on Sayid – the old remove the firing pin trick.

Except for some reason, she decided to spare Sayid’s life. Why? Rousseau’s memories of what had happened to her crew did not jive exactly with what we later saw in Season Five. The way she described it – that she had to kill her crew because they had become “carriers” – it sounded like they all turned into zombies that had to be destroyed before they destroyed the world.

But what really happened to Danielle’s crew? We saw that they were all sucked, or that they jumped, into the lair of the Monster. And we know that they later re-emerged and tried to explain to Danielle what they had witnessed.

In what way had the Monster “infected” them? Was it like the way the Man in Black “infected” Locke’s empty corpse? What evidence did Rousseau see in her crew that they had been changed into alien beings? Although we’ve seen their fate, we still don’t know what it was that made Rousseau so sure her friends and her lover had to be put to death.

Rousseau was the second character we’d so far met who had been named after a philosopher from the Age of Enlightenment. It was those kind of details that made people start digging around into the minutiae of Lost. In hindsight there really aren’t much about Rousseau, aside from her backwoods camping skills, that bore much resemblance to the philosophy of old Jean Jacques.

There is an interesting interview available with David Fury, where he reveals that the purpose of Rousseau’s scientific expedition was …

“… in an early draft of “Solitary” when Rousseau tells Sayid she had been part of a research team. Sayid asks her what they were researching. She replies: “Time.” “

… but the reference to “Time” had to be deleted for fear of scaring off the sci-fi-phobics in Season One’s mega-sized audience. If this is true, then it’s more evidence, if any is still needed, that time travel discombobulation was what this story was always intended to be about. They just didn’t want us to know that right away.

Keeping us in the dark is Lost’s trademark, but sometimes it strains credibility. Knowing all we know now, it’s hard to see how Rousseau managed to stay so alone for so long. In our years watching this show, there have been jeeps, vans, bulldozers, construction rigs, freighters, sailboats, brigantines, submarines, Beechcraft, Boeing 777s, helicopters, hot air balloons and for all we know flying saucers with little green men in them, traveling on, over, under and around the Island. How did Rousseau miss it all? Sixteen years and she never bumped up against Othertown’s sonic fence until Sayid, Kate and Locke brought her there?

The real reason Danielle was so alone was because the last piece of her, her baby Alex, had been taken away – by Ben, as we now know. And that’s a bleak little substory that has come to a permanently unhappy end. Her child grew up without her mother ever knowing her.

Miraculously, they were one day reunited.

Then Rousseau got shot in the heart.

And her baby was murdered execution style.

With that, the entire crew of the Besixdouze was finally extinct.

It’s a story that won’t be coming with us into Season Six, at least not as anything more than an echo. It was a poignant reminder of the human toll taken by the Island, and of the damage done to the human soul by being too much alone. But it was also an interrupted melody, like so many of the meandering hitchhiking trips this story has taken. It joins the great long list of unanswered, half answered and maybe-never-asked questions of Lost.

Like: Why does a soldier’s conscience torture him when he has done something shameful

but a doctor’s conscience remains clear?

How do we know when our apophenia is getting the better of us? Were we meant to notice the little kid’s shoe

and the little kid’s glasses in these episodes?

Were these subtle hints reminding us of the children that had gone missing?

When the census was being taken in Mr. Reyes’ Neighborhood, how come he didn’t notice there wasn’t anybody named Sawyer on the manifest either?

What exactly did Charlie use to brew the tea? Was it palm frond chai?

Were we meant to notice that Christian Shephard’s children

both had life altering experiences happen in big conference rooms?

Were we meant to notice that sister Claire’s pen refused to embrace her destiny when she was asked to sign away Aaron to the “nice couple” in Sydney?

Were we meant to notice that brother Jack’s pen worked just fine when he was asked to sign on the dotted line swearing to his father’s integrity?

Since Ethan’s family name was Goodspeed, why come he calls himself Rom? Is he ashamed of his pops?

Was it a joke or a clue when Rousseau told Sayid that “there’s no such thing as monsters”?

Wasn’t it strange that Locke didn’t know the Star Trek origins of the term “redshirts”,

when he’d been a Starfleet Commander in a previous life?

These early episodes were filled with foreshadows. The cable that Sayid found on the beach

would one day lead Charlie to his watery grave in the Looking Glass hatch.

There was a sad foreshadow feeling when Kate told Shannon that the safest place her brother could possibly be was with Locke.

Except, you know …. not.

Years later Desmond would remind us that he’d been inside that hatch the day Locke and Boone were topside thumping on his geodesic ceiling.

And we didn’t realize they were punking us with a big inside joke when Hurley promised Walt that he was good for twenty thousand buckaroos.

There was no secret about the way the anti-Hero was starting to steal the show in Season One, even in episodes where he only got a few moments of facetime. He gave Hurley the manifest with nothing more than the price of one cute Ghostbusters insult. He flirted with Kate using a righteously witty punchline.

He began his pattern of speaking the simple clarifying truths for the audience when he gave a spot on summary of the plot in case we weren’t following: “So a tribe of evil natives planted a ringer in the camp to kidnap a pregnant girl and a reject from VH-1 has-beens.”

And when he came upon his torturer Sayid, flat and helpless on his back, he held no grudge. He forgave the man who tried to separate his cuticles from his fingertips and he even offered his own atonement. He knew he’d been a jerk.

He let Sayid know he’d been keeping the signal fires burning and showed us that for some people, this whole redemption process maybe wasn’t going to be all that complicated after all.

A Season One mystery that we still don’t much understand is The Whispers. It seems some geniuses, owners of high quality sound equipment, have analyzed and transcripted The Whispers for the edification of us low tech types. I’ll have to take it on faith that this is what the whispers are saying around Sayid:

Male Voice- “Just let him get out of here.”
Male Voice- “He’s seen too much already.”
Male Voice- “What if he tells?”
Female Voice – “Could just speak to him?”
Male Voice- “No.”

Who is the suspicious man and his lady friend who wants to speak to Sayid? Are they people we know? Are they, maybe, another manifestation of the Island’s Adam and Eve?

It wouldn’t be Lost if there weren’t Games being played. Walt and Hurley play backgammon.

Ethan drops Charlie’s finger letters to throw his trackers off his trail. It was like Ethan was a fan of Hangman Spoiler games, only with extra added sadism mixed in.

And of course there is The Golf Game: the prototype for all the daffy, inconsequential sideplots that Lost would use throughout the years to chew up extra screentime.

This was an opportunity for Jack to look cool,

for Charlie to be silly,

and for Noble King Kameha-Hurley to hold court.

Michael lost track of Walt during the golf tournament, giving Walt the chance he’d been looking for to finally bond with his spiritual soul daddy.

There was a kind of father-son-father triangle going on between Locke and Walt and Michael. Michael was clueless as a pater familia, but despite never having a father of his own, Locke knew exactly what a boy needed to learn to become a man,

and he was willing to teach it.

That brings us to the final theme of these episodes, the mythic element that was missing from Claire’s prophetic, heroic dream. The one thing missing from Aaron’s story is the thing that overwhelms the story of his Uncle Jack: the overshadowing spectre of dear old dreadful, drunken Dad.

There are few myths that could get past the first paragraph without some kind of dreadful daddy issue. Daddy Issues are the meat and potatoes of the stories on Lost, but we were just working our way around to all that in Season One.

When Jack gets all suspicious of Kate because she’s a good tracker and he wants to know WHY SHE’S SUCH A GOOD FUCKING TRACKER!!!! (you all remember how adorable these two were in Season One, doncha?), it gives her an opening to tell him the whole “truth” about how her “dad” taught her how to track crazy monsters through the forest,

except for the part where the Army tracker dude wasn’t really her dad and the part where she barbequed the guy who was.

The first time we heard Claire’s baby-daddy bitch about her “daddy abandonment crap”, I’m sure none of us took any special notice. But on a rewatch, that comment sticks out like a very sore thumb.

And in Jack’s episode, the over-titled All the Best Cowboys Have Daddy Issues (subtitled The One Where Jack Kills His Father and Brings Charlie Back from the Dead), center stage went, as it so often did in Jackbacks through the years, to Lost’s Number One Dad:

the illustrious Dr. Christian Shephard, Chief of Surgery at St. Sebastian Hospital, King Ghost of Craphole Island and lifetime member of the Pickled Liver Club.

In most myths, the father of the hero shapes his story. Sometimes he’s good, sometimes he’s bad, and we won’t run through another whole list of them again, because this image is as good an archetype as any for our purposes here.

The Drs. Shephard had come to a crossroad.

Christian had been drunk, had operated sloppily, and a young woman had died. But before her inevitable death, Jack had been forced to intervene, and had been the doctor on the scene who had to let her go. It was a well chosen moment of conflict between Hero and Father. It embodied two of Jack’s biggest psycho-issues, namely the thing where he can’t stand to fail and the thing where he wants to rip his father’s heart out for being such a heartless, unethical waste case.

It became clear as Jack chased Ethan through the forest, that the whole quest was another metaphor, as most of Jack’s story has tended to be, for the son who wants to hunt down the father and finally make him pay.

Everyone Jack encountered in this episode was a stand-in for Christian. He was getting pissed at Locke for trying to be a know it all about tracking Ethan through the jungle.

His suspicions of Kate were framed as another sub-issue of his preoccupation with not being lied to. He was angry at himself for guessing wrong about Claire’s dream, for being imperfect again. And when he finally found Ethan, he couldn’t stop fighting even when it was a lost cause, because he wasn’t going to let “him” get away with “it” this time. Obviously, he was having transference issues.

Ever since Zeus stopped his father Chronus from cannibalizing his own children, the age old competition of father and son has shaped the story of men.

It’s not uncommon in these myths of manhood for the son to end the madness by finally putting an end to daddy, by killing him. In this Jackback, the second, we watch Jack commit the act of metaphorical murder on his desperate, frightened father.

It’s an interesting ethical dilemma to trace.

At first Jack has agreed to cover up his father’s latest misstep. He surrenders to his father’s frantic pleading. Blood is thicker than whiskey, after all. It’s true that Jack owes all he has and all he is to this man, no matter how decrepit his Hippocratic oath has become. So Jack agrees, reluctantly but of his own free will, to swear to testimony he knows is a lie.

And nothing changes between the moment Jack agrees to protect Christian and the moment he decides to expose him. Jack discovers only that his father kept a piece of information from him, something not medically all that relevant, but just something that Jack didn’t know. The dead woman had been pregnant. And that word – pregnant – always a loaded word on Lost, is the cut that lets Jack drop the guillotine on his father.

You can see Christian’s shock. It really is as if he’s already dead, even though we know he’ll take a long roundabout walkabout before he finally hits the Kings Cross morgue. But for all practical purposes, this is the moment when Jack kills him.

The resolution of father and son doesn’t happen before death for Christian and Jack, the way such myths require.

If they’d resolved things, then there really would never have been any need for this whole big story. That’s the part that’s coming up around this final bend. If we know nothing else, I think we all can feel safe in predicting that the final showdown between Christian and Jack will be a moment to remember in the final moments of Lost.

Jack having the biggest bestest daddy issue marked him once again as the central hero of the tale. But just to make it a little clearer, in case any of us hadn’t yet noticed that the uber-jackiness of Lost was going to be a permanent feature, the hero performed his first miracle.

Ethan had had it with being tracked, and he had no use for the dirty blonde hobbit, so he dispensed with the metaphorical killing and just strung him up by the neck. When Jack and Kate found Charlie hanging from the tree, there was great suspense while they cut him down and Jack tried desperately to revive him. Would this be the first important death on Lost? It certainly seemed like it. Jack’s efforts seemed to be in vain, but he pounded and pounded and pounded and pounded (and somehow didn’t splinter every rib in Charlie’s tiny chest)….

until just when all hope seemed lost, one massive punch finally hit the sweet spot and Lazarus came back to the land of the living!

Resurrection would become a theme of Lost. In fact, Richard Malkin, the same mystic who steered Claire on to Flight 815, showed up in a later episode, in one of those fascinating pre-crash connections between otherwise unrelated characters.

Eko came to visit Malkin in Australia after hearing that his daughter had been resurrected from a day she had spent being dead. To keep us on our toes, the writers had Malkin claim to be a fraud in this encounter. But later, the daughter would pull Eko aside and not only confirm that she had been returned from the dead, but that she had brought him a message from his dead brother, Yemi. We don’t know yet what it means that life and death ride such a fine line together on Lost , but I have a very good feeling that we’re about to find out.

For now, Charlie’s return was just a joyful moment, almost like a Nativity scene for the little trio. And Jack got to cry some happy tears for once, which was a pleasant change for him.

The fun of this mid portion of Season One is watching them build and craft the mythological maze that we all find ourselves still trapped in. We can see some of the dead ends in the labyrinthe now. We have eliminated some of the wild goose chases and are starting to hone in on the goal. Watching these early episodes, seeing how densely they had populated their mythology, it begins to feel even more exciting to think that we are finally about to have this whole mystery revealed to us.

For the Full Audio of the Panel, Click here to Visit ‘The Transmission’

I’m working on a highlights post right now.

Thanks to sl-lost for the heads up on this clip from Youtube.