Is This Enough Reason To Take This Job?












Why on earth would Juliet agree to work for a company after her ex-husband was hit by a bus after she told the recruiter that's what it would take to "free" her? What's more they visit her at the morgue. And they know her sister is pregnant. And she can't bring her sister with her because they have what she needs to do her "cutting edge science," but not to treat cancer? It must be the lure of the eyliner.













Re-watching Not in Portland I also wondered how the heck can Jack ever trust Juliet when she so easily ordered Sawyer and Kate's deaths just because Ben's been keeping her on the Island? He must somehow know intuitively that she's the type of woman who'll allow her ex-husband to keep her as his emergency contact.













That's something Jack seems to value.

Have a fun New Year's Eve and Day! I'll be back the 2nd.

What Is The Deal With This Intercom?













Juliet tells Jack that the intercom hasn't worked in a very long time, but that's clearly false. Jack hears his father (hallucination? probably), but then he hears Sawyer, shouting Others, and finally Alex. Did Juliet not know that the intercom did indeed work? Was Jack supposed to hear all those things?

What Happened To "We're Next?"













Eko tells Locke "we're next" after Smokey has smashed him a breath from his death. So what happened to that? I guess you could make an argument that Smokey did get Nikki and Paolo. He appeared to be around at the time at least. Should Sayid be worried? Locke?

Why Do The Others Need To Be Good Conmen?













Ben tells Sawyer,

We did all this because the only way to gain a con man's respect is to con him. And you're pretty good...Sawyer. We're a lot better.

What is the Others mission and why does it require seabilly costumes, canvas tents, pacemaker cons, women that look like your ex-wife? This question drives me nuts. If you're engaged in some sort of scientific mission or spiritual mission why all the deception? Deception muddies both of those fields of inquiry. What is up Ben?

Merry Christmas!



This is a year old, but still good. I hope you are all enjoying a wonderful Christmas. And don't forget it's only a little over a month until I get what I want for Christmas (and my birthday, and the new year, and my wedding anniversary) --

NEW LOST!!!!!!

Who's Coercing You Now John?













In one of my least favorite LOST episodes ever, young cop Eddie tells Locke that he was targeted to take down the pot farm because Locke would be "amenable for coercion." I'm still wondering if this is why the Island/Jacob has chosen Locke as well. Is Locke going to turn out to be the mere puppet as he feared in "?" or will he ever be the master of his fate, the captain of his soul?

Similarly, is this why Jacob/Ben should not have chosen Walt? Mobisode 6 shows Walt isn't very amenable at least to the Others' methods.

Finally, would a guy who lived on a pot farm be on your "good" list if you were Jacob? I guess the answer is yes if good means amenable for coercion. Was young Ben similarly amenable? How about Rose who was also healed?

Does Ben Even Know The Truth Anymore?













What is with this "I've lived on this island all my life" crap Ben peddles over and over in Season 3? I think Ben may have lost his grip on the truth. He plays so many games with so many people, he's doesn't know what is and isn't true anymore. Seriously Ben, you show Jack the World Series and say :

That's home, Jack. Right there, on the other side of that glass. And if you listen to me, if you trust me, if you do what I tell you when the time comes, I'll take you there. I will take you home.

Yes, you can argue that home is where Ben's house is, but this is more truthiness* than truth. I guess Ben watches the Colbert Report as well as baseball.

* Truthiness - The quality of stating concepts one wishes or believes to be true, rather than the facts.

Where's The Elizabeth Now?













I guess it could show up in S4, or it may just disappear.

And while we're on the subject of questions from The Glass Ballerina, do you think Jin will ever find out about Sun and Jae. I hope not for his sake.

And were the Others really building a runway? That's what Pickett says in a S3 deleted scene. Why a runway? Aliens? Doubt it. So is there a plane on the Hydra Island or will one land? Or will this go the way of Vincent on the dock in Season 2's DVD extras?

Were The Dossiers on the LOSTies
Compiled by













This Guy?
















Seems to me that the information the Others seem to have about those on Flight 815 is more than you can get just by surfing the internet. Did they hire a private investigator to help them get Christian Shephard's autopsy report, or are they just that good?

Why Didn't The Island Shake Before
Desmond Turned the Key?













So if this is what happened when Desmond failed to enter the numbers and Flight 815 crashed, why didn't this happen at the end of Season 2? Or did it, but in the absence of people acting like they were in an earthquake drill it was hard to tell?

Season 3 Didn't Answer A Lot of
Season 2 Finale Questions













As full as Season 3 was, it left a lot of questions raised in the Season 2 finale unanswered. For example:

1. What's up with the 4-toed statue?
2. Where does heading 325 from the Pala pier go?
3. How did Penny know to look for electromagnetic anomolies?
4. Why couldn't Desmond leave the Island's sphere and is that still the case post-key turning?
5. And most of all for me -- what the heck did Ben mean when he said to Michael that they are "the good guys?"

There are other things too, but these stand out to me. Hopefully the first 8 episodes of Season 4 will start to provide some of these answers.

Lost in The Waste Lands -- Final Thoughts

There are lots of other things in The Waste Lands that evoke LOST as well. I'll run some of them down for you in no particular order.

Eddie Dean, a character much like Charlie Pace thinks to himself, "Beating heroine was child's play compared to beating your childhood." What LOSTie couldn't say that as well? Later Roland tells Eddie, "What we don't need is a man who can't let go of the useless baggage of his memories." No wallowing in your flashbacks, please.

Literary references include Oz, Lord of the Flies, Catch-22, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, and Watership Down

The book explores the concept of ka-tets. Ka is a word that sort of means fate. But despite the existence of ka there is still free will. A ka-tet is "a group of people with the same interests and goals." It's also "the place where many lives are joined by fate." These characters, Roland, Eddie, Susannah, Jake and Oy form a ka-tet. "Each member of a ka-tet is like a piece in a puzzle. Taken by itself, each piece is a mystery, but when they are put together, they make a picture . . . or a part of a picture. It may take a great many ka-tets to finish one picture. You mustn't be surprised to discover your lives have been touching in ways you haven't seen until now." And in fact, Eddie and Jake discover they did "cross" back in the 70s.

There's a bear with a cave and a Tonka truck.

Time and distance are both messed up. According to Blaine, the temporal synapses are breaking down. Jake's watch measures odd times like "62 minutes past 40 on a Wednesday, Thursday and Saturday in both December and March." Roland claims that distance grows with each passing day so that what was 5 miles away is now farther away. What's more there's magnetism and other forces at work. "Physics in the nuthouse," one character remarks.

Roland makes a compass much like the one Sayid made in Season 1.

Parent issues and father issues in particular exist. Jake, like Jack, despite doing everything his father wants him to do still can't please him. Jake's own strengths and interests are of no interest to his father. What's more, when acting as a gunslinger each character must remember his father's face. This is true even if that literal father was a bad or even absent father. This memory of ancestory is what allows the gunslinger to focus and act with certainty and accuracy. Perhaps the LOSTies need to remember their fathers' faces.

Dreams are powerful and important in guiding the characters' paths.

There are portals between our world and Roland's and between Roland's and the path to the Tower. There are also crossovers between the worlds like music, literary references and even airplanes like a 1930s Nazi plane that appears outside Lud. There's speculation that the Bermuda Triangle might be such a portal that is more or less always open while other portals need keys to be opened such as the way Jake enters Mid-World in this story.

The Grays have an underground room with a watertight hatchway with a big valve wheel and an intercom inside and outside it.

Blaine gasses the remaining inhabitants of Lud like the Hostile's gassed the Dharma Initiative. Did Smokey come up with that idea? It helps my theory in the last post.

So there you have it. I'll keep reading the Dark Tower and post when I find something interesting. It may take me until 2010, but hey, it looks like we've got the time. Season 3 centric posts will be coming up next, well after one last Season 2 post.

Lost in The Waste Lands -- Part 2

Certainly there had been an intelligence left in the ancient computers below the city, a single living organism which had long ago ceased to exist sanely under conditions that, within its merciless dipolar circuits, could only be absolute reality. It had held its increasingly alien logic within its banks of memory for eight hundred years and might have held them so for eight hundred more, if not for the arrival of Roland and his friends; yet this mens non corpus had brooded and grown ever more insane with each passing year; even in its increasing periods of sleep it could be said to dream, and these dreams grew steadily more abnormal as the world moved on. Now, although the unthinkable machinery which maintained the Beams had weakened, this insane and inhuman intelligence had awakened in the rooms of ruin and had begun once more, although as bodiless as any ghost, to stumble through the halls of the dead.
-----The Waste Lands by Stephen King

In the second half of The Waste Lands our travelers, Roland, Eddie, Susannah and Jake along with Jake's billy bumbler Oy arrive at the decaying city of Lud. It looks physically much like New York City of our present day, but with even a few more modern touches such as a sound-barrier breaking monorail running into and out of the city. The city has been decaying for approximately 800 years due to some cataclysmic event that wiped out most of its inhabitants. It's current population is made up of the Grays and the Pubes. Both groups barely subsist in the city's decaying infrastructure and the Pubes regularly "worship" and make sacrifices to the ghosts that run the machinery of the city.

That "ghost" is the computer Blaine which runs all the mechanical aspects of Lud. He speaks to the group of travelers and they note, "[t]hat voice belonged to a machine, an incredibly smart machine, a playful machine, but there was something very wrong with it, all the same."

Blaine himself describes to Roland and his group what's been happening in Lud.

[I suffer from] a degenerative disease which humans call going insane. . . . Repeated diagnostic checks have failed to reveal the source of the problem. I can only conclude that this is a spiritual malaise beyond my ability to repair.

I have felt my mind growing steadily stranger over the years. Serving the people of Mid-World became pointless centuries ago. Serving those few people of Lud who wished to venture abroad became equally silly not long after. Yet I carried on until the arrival of David Quick, a short while ago. I don’t remember exactly when that was. Do you believe, Roland of Gilead, that machines may grow senile?

At some point they [the people of Lud and Mid-World] forgot that the voice of the mono was also the voice of the computer. Not long after that they forgot I was a servant and they began believing I was a god. Since I was built to serve, I fulfilled their requirements and became what they wanted—a god dispensing both favor and punishment according to whim . . . or random-access memory, if you prefer.

What's more, Blaine reads people. He can see them through cameras around the city and he analyzes their voices to understand them and their motivations. Sound familiar?

So my new Smokey theory is that Smokey is a computer created by a now-defunct Island civilization that was more advanced or differently advanced than ours. Out of boredom, he uses his powers to dispense favor and punishment on whim. For example, he kills Eko because Eko won't play his game by confessing. He kills the pilot just because he's mad. I think Smokey is suffering from spiritual malaise that he cannot fix, and like Blaine, he should be avoided if at all possible.

But wait, there's more. Before Eddie and Susannah wake up Blaine, or I should say Big Blaine, they hear a small voice, Little Blaine, who warns them not to wake Big Blaine. The Whisperers?

Tomorrow -- more odds and ends.

Lost in The Waste Lands, Part 1



I want to go back and that is the truth.
I have to go back and that is the truth.
I'll go crazy if I don't go back and that is the truth.
-----Essay by Jake Chambers in The Waste Lands by Stephen King

So after two months I finally finished part 3 of Stephen King's Dark Tower Series, The Waste Lands, and this next series of posts will reveal how it answers every question on LOST. Just kidding, but there are some interesting items to dicuss. Spoilers for The Waste Lands as well as The Gunslinger and The Drawing of the Three will follow. Spoilers for Season 4 of LOST are not included because I don't know any and would like to keep it that way.

In book one of the Dark Tower series, The Gunslinger, Roland, the title character meets a boy, Jake, who has appeared in Roland's world from our world. Jake was killed in New York City in the 1970s by being pushed in front of a car and arrived in Roland's world. Roland and Jake travel for a time together, but by the end of Book 1, they are no longer together.

In book two, The Drawing of the Three Roland enters our world by going through three magic doors which he finds on the shore of a sea in his world. The third door takes him into New York in the 1970s into the head of the man who is going to push Jake in front of the car BEFORE he has actually pushes him. While Roland is inhabiting his body, he causes the man to be killed. Roland then goes back to his world.

As The Waste Lands opens, Roland is going insane. The reason for this insanity is that his mind knows that there are two competing truths in his memory. In the first truth, as played out in The Gunslinger he meets Jake in his world. In the second truth, he didn't meet Jake in his world because Jake never died because the man who was going to kill Jake died before he could kill him. In other words, Roland travelled in time and changed his past. But his brain still remembers the unchanged past.

Similarly, Jake knows something is wrong. In fact he lives the moments leading up to his death knowing that it is coming. He "remembers forward" each step in this trek before it occurs. But then it doesn't happen because the pusher is no longer there. This causes Jake to feel as if he has split and become two boys.

So how does this relate to LOST? When I was first reading this it made me think of despondent Future Jack on the bridge and later with Kate desperate to get back to the Island. In some sense the way our LOSTies got to the Island, to this alternate world of the Island, is that they died. As far as the rest of the world is concerned, everyone on Flight 815 is dead. This is similar to Jake arriving in Roland's world. He died in ours and arrived in Roland's. In fact I was expecting Jake to try to kill himself to return to Roland's world, since that was his portal the first time, and I thought perhaps that was what Jack was trying to accomplish on the bridge as well. But a portal that works one time won't necessarily work again as Jack's flying over the Pacific repeatedly should have demonstrated to him by now.

I think when Jack leaves the Island, by whatever means, he's going to find that his mind has split and he will be unable to reconcile the one past with the other. From that last scene with Kate it sounds like Jack's been lying about what happened to the two of them when they were missing, so at a minimum there's the reality of what did occur and the reality of what he has said occurred. Like in Roland and Jake's case, this is literally tearing Future Jack to pieces. I'm also guessing it is going to take Jack's second removal from our world and return to the Island world to mend that spilt.

In fact Jack needs to reach an internal place like the one Eddie and Susannah reach in The Waste Lands. They too have come from our world to Roland's, but they reach the place where they no longer want to go back to their world. Instead they want to move forward, even through this crazy, dangerous world. Jack, and arguably the rest of our LOSTies, all seem to need to reach a similar conclusion that they are ready to go forward with their lives, even if that means staying on the Island, rather than going back to where they came from metaphorically, if not physically.

Tomorrow--I know what Smokey is.

Why Were There Whispers Before
The Others Sprung Their Trap?













This is the most unusual occurrence of the whispers. They are loud and words are clearly audible just before the Others loose their spasm-causing darts. If they are aligned with the Others aren't they blowing the element of surprise? And if they aren't, couldn't they have warned the group back in the jungle when they had a better chance of escape?

Happy LOST S3 DVD Day! And be sure to check out Missing Moment #6. It answers some Walt questions.

Kelvin Questions













Why did Kelvin paint the map without the aid of the blacklight? I guess so Desmond couldn't see it and want to leave the Swan even more. But that doesn't really make sense either. Why would he paint on it at all in those circumstances? Does anyone know if painting with liquid detergent would should up under black light?

And here's the bigger question in regards to Kelvin -- are you him?













Why didn't anyone come to the Swan after Kelvin arrived? I assume it was because they couldn't find the Island. Is that because Ben's group did something after Kelvin's arrival to mask the Island or because the only person who knew how to get there defected or died or was killed? Hopefully we'll find this one out soon.

On a personal note, I think I'd have turned that key long before reaching Kelvin's level of crazy.

Was David Really Dead?













I'll concede this is a serious conspiracy theorist post. But I wonder if perhaps someone promised to heal a sick David for Libby if she delivered a boat to Desmond. In other words the same deal Ben promised Juliet with respect to Rachel and her alleged cancer recurrence. Just something to think about.

Why Haven't The Others Been Able To Turn Walt?













Walt breaks away from Pickett and pleads with Michael Dad, don't leave us. Help me, please! Don't leave me! This stands in stark contrast to the behavior of Cindy and the Tailie kids, Emma and Zack who seem to have no interest in leaving the Others. So what's the difference?

Is This













The Reason Desmond Flashes Only On Charlie?

Desmond spent three years vaccinating himself with Dharma's shot gun. Charlie tested it on his own leg. They are the only two we know for certain were injected with this substance from the Swan. Is this the reason Desmond only had flashes about Charlie?

More on Michael's Deal

1. Why Hurley? If you need Jack it makes sense to bring Kate because she would go looking for him in the first place. It makes sense to bring Sawyer because she would talk Sawyer into coming with her or he'd follow her later. But why Hurley? Because he's easily scared? Why not Sayid? Isn't he just as likely as Kate to form a rescue party? I guess Locke and Eko aren't on the list because the Island is distracting them with the issue of the Swan.

2. Who came up with this plan to free Ben? Did one of the remaining Others talk to Jacob? If Ethan could infiltrate the camp, why couldn't they send someone in to get Ben, not that freeing him from the Swan would have been easy?

3. This has nothing to do with the deal, but it's bothering me. If you're Ben and you need Jack to do surgery on you, why do you spend half a week lying to him about your identity and then another three days antagonizing him with your hunger strike and silence not to mention attack on Ana Lucia? I think it would have taken longer than 2 weeks to get Jack to want to operate on Ben.

Ben's Long Con?

















In Three Minutes Tom, Pickett and Alex pick up Michael a few hours from the Swan. They're dressed in their seabilly rags and they take Michael to a place where they can engage in their stage craft--trick shooting and magic torches. The reason for the stagecraft is explained by Alex. He's just delivering a message. He has to scare your friends to do it.

Until this most recent viewing of this episode I thought the point of all this was that the Others needed Michael because something had come up with Walt. In fact I've posted on this blog and other places that leaving Michael for dead with the raft was a mistake by the Others since it turned out they needed him and his blood after all.

But I was wrong. They didn't need Michael to help with Walt. They needed Michael to bring Jack, Kate and Sawyer to Ben. Ben tells us this in Expose.

Juliet: So, what, we just grab all 3 of them...Ford and Austen too.
Ben: No, they need to come to us.
Juliet: And how do we make that happen?
Ben: Michael of course.

All this stagecraft from mysterious instant messaging in the Swan to the seabilly rags to Yurt Village to wearing Michael down for a week in Yurt Village and allowing him to see Walt was all done only to get Jack to Ben. Ben getting caught threw a monkey wrench in the plan, but still, they managed to work around it. Questioning Michael about Walt was a total red herring. They didn't need Michael's blood. They didn't need answers only Walt's father would have. They only needed an out of his mind father freeing the Other to anger Jack enough to come after him.

Is this even why they took Walt in the first place? That doesn't seem quite right because how was Jack supposed to know he should trek across the Island to rescue Walt? It still seems to me they left Michael, Sawyer and Jin for dead. But maybe it was part of the con. Maybe that's why what Walt evidenced in his testing was more than they had bargained for since they were only bargaining for surgery? Bilocation and Island communion -- they were just a bonus.