"Two players. Two sides. One is light … one is dark"

Here's an idea with real resonance for considering the show's endgame, from commenter boycurry here.

Nobody has talked about the role Backgammon plays in the promo for next week. This is the key. The island is a metaphysical game of Backgammon and the numbers of the candidates refer either to positions on the board, or roles of the dice/moves to get Jack into position 23, the last position on the board that white can block the color players pieces from leaving the board/island. There are more clues about the island, candidates and their numbers and the dual realities within the rules of the game if anyone wants to look them up.

That.is.awesome. Jacob is the sort of defensive backgammon player who never moves his gamepieces from his opponents home quadrant. In backgammon though, one gamepiece in position 23 is not enough to keep your opponent from leaving the board, for if he lands on you, you're vulnerable and will have to move from the gameboard to the bar. The Candidate plus the wildcard (that is, Jack + Desmond) are necessary to stop the MiB's escape. The gamepieces that have been lost through attrition during the course of play must be moved to the bar, a sort of purgatory for those who, as Michael says, 'can't move on'.

PREDICTION: A player must roll doubles to free his gamepieces from the bar and return them to the gameboard. Jack, as the candidate, will find that he must free those dead souls trapped on the Island as part of his effort to counter Flocke.

The doubling cube in backgammon allows one player to raise the stakes by powers of two: 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64. Should the other player refuse to play with raised stakes, they lose the game. Jacob and MiB's conflict seems to have been escalating for a long time now--and neither has refused the raised stakes.

Anyone else comment on backgammon and the show? boycurry mentions a link between the sideways and the game...but I'm not bright enough to see it.

A remembrance of Seasons Past: The crash

Lists! Whenever something ends: a year, a century, a pizza...people love to formalize and rank the most treasured moments of times gone by. Lost is ending. Lost is, in fact, ending very soon. And I can think of many Lost lists that call out to be made. How about...

1. Top 10 Sawyer nick-names.

2. Top 3 most unnecessary instances of Kate telling either Sawyer or Jack, when they are working out a legitimate and heavy emotional issue, to 'stop...that's enough'.

3. Top 3 times when Sayid knows what the score is before anyone else.

4. Best Hurley headphone closing montage of Season 1.

...off the top of my head. One blogger, doubtless not the only one, decided to rank the seasons. I'm inspired by his effort to recollect the moments of Seasons past, but stumped when it comes to a ranking. I can say only what my favorite season has been, but it's a first among equals sort of thing.

So, here comes the first of a five part series of really short reflections on seasons gone by. I kind of free-associated what I remember to be the emblematic sounds, images, characters and scenes of the season in question. But they could never be the only ones, and you're most welcome to comment on your own selections.

We herewith begin...

Season 1: Things that struck me on a recent Season 1 rewatch: Jack.is.intense. Compared to the ‘working things out’ Jack of Season 5, he is just so damn volatile. The men on his good side—Michael, Jin, Charlie, Hurley—are kept at a polite yet brusque arm’s length, while those on his shit list—Sawyer, and more slowly, but much more potently, Locke—are given no quarter in an unpredictable, violent, and totally reactive Jackian way. I read something recently quoting Josh Holloway as being excited about the return of a more salty Sawyer in Season 6, but I’d be equally as excited to see the return of a more intense Jack, as we glimpsed in the Black Rock scene with Richard in 'Dr. Linus'.

Also: I wasn’t sorry to see Boone go—too often his character reminded me I was watching a network drama, rather than the incredible pop-culture mindmaze and mythic drama that ‘Lost’ actually is.

And: I miss Charlie. Dominic Monaghan is a great actor. He lent an energy that the ensemble needed to counter the self-seriousness of a Locke or, later, an Ilana.

Furthermore: Life-lesson Locke—John had a couple of great little scenes where he’d impart wisdom to a conflicted character in a very non-didactic zen koanish sort of way. There’s a dark reflection of such scenes in Season 6, as Flocke deploys his ‘but what if you could’ visions of fulfillment to his recruits.

And as far as episodes: ‘Walkabout’, ‘The Greater Good’, ‘Whatever the Case’, ‘The Moth’, and of course, the Pilot stand out to me, but moreso than other seasons, I can conjure up wonderful little character moments than I can blockbuster episodes from this first outing. The fizz has inevitably lessened from some once truly surprising moments, i.e., Sun speaks English? And Sawyer doesn’t even have the inhalers? But, the patient introduction of such well-drawn, complex characters that the writers accomplished this season should be admired as a challenge just as difficult as threading the complex intertime plotlines of Seasons 4 and 5…and to our great benefit, they *rocked* it.

The Sound:

lost smokey sound bite

The roar of Smokey. 'nuff said.

The image:
John Locke, amid the wreckage, pulling his shoes on and arising to answer Jack's calls for aid.

The Character:
Jack. It’s a big ensemble, but Kate’s right when she says “Without you Jack…” and trails off into a silent mixture of gratitude and empathy.

The scene:


The raft launching. Along with the phone call that closes ‘The Constant’ it is the never fail, make me weep uncontrollably moment of this amazing show.

'Lost' and Thomas Covenant, Part II

Enter a mysterious world of unspoiled richness and spiritual purity: The Land. Our hero is a physically ravaged and broken, yet enormously stubborn man of the everyday 'real' world. He finds himself, through circumstances he does not understand, transported to this magical and verdant place. A sickness that had previously defined his existence and isolated him from any modicum of happiness is, in this new land, completely healed. He is awed by the lore and wisdom of the land's inhabitants, yet that awe is dwarfed by discomfort, as the land's people are convinced that our hero is a prophesied savior upon whom the fate of the land depends, a notion he finds ridiculous. The land is troubled by a sort of 'dark lord' who thrives upon the defilement of the land's spirit. The corrupt servants of the dark lord were not always so, but succumbed to his will by means of arrogance and temptation. The dark lord's highest wish? To escape the land.

Now class, can anyone who has watched 'Lost' for these 5 13/18 seasons note a parallel between the above story and the narratives of 'Lost'? The foregoing was a brutal and brief summation of the Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, Unbeliever.

Covenant, in our world, is a leper. His disease has robbed him of any sense of touch, and thus pain, forcing him to constantly repeat a fixed regimen of 'VSE'--visual surveillance of extremities--to ensure he does not mortally injure his already corrupted body in the course of everyday life. He loses consciousness in our world and wakes up--healed of leprosy--in a place simply called 'the Land'. The land is peopled by a collection of races (giants, goblins, etc) familiar to readers of Tolkien-influenced literature. The humans of the land are a pre-scientific society whose lives are immersed in a sort of nature-religion absent any particular deity, and to a greater or lesser degree all wield an earth-derived magic. Repeated magic ritual constitutes daily life, and performing mundane daily tasks using machinery or overly complex tools instead of magic is seen as abomination.

The inherent magic of the Land seduces Covenant into (in someone else's words) believing it to be 'not just an island!' while simultaneously goading his skepticism and bitterness regarding the truth of such a sensual place. After all, he has survived his adult life only by rigorously denying and mistrusting feeling. Covenant oscillates between 'Jack-like' and 'Locke-like' poles of belief and unbelief.

Arrayed against the land, wishing only to desecrate its nature and people, is ghoulish Lord Foul, the Despiser. Covenant is not only healed by the Land, but hailed by its people as a prophesied savior, possessor of unique powers that will be the key to defeating Lord Foul. Foul's contention though, is that through manipulation and intimidation, he will force Covenant to use his Land-bestowed power to sicken rather than save. The psychological drama of the series draws from Covenant's attempts to escape the clutches of either a benevolent (assuming the role of the Land's savior) or fiendish (succumbing to Foul's manipulations)destiny and find a way to retain his autonomy without denying the land's reality for the benefit of Foul.

The prime enemy of both Covenant sequences, Foul is also the entity responsible for bringing Covenant to the Land. Though he is a demigod-like being, he cannot achieve his final goal--***escape*** from the bounds of the land--until he utterly corrupts (claims?) Covenant. Foul works by humiliating the prideful, turning hope to spite, and manipulating the naive into desecrating what they'd formerly thought holy. The portrayal of 'evil' in such emotionally familiar terms, rather than black capes and dark castles elevate the Covenant sequence above cosmetically similar fantasies content with only costume metaphysics.

There are other books more apt for complementing the time-travel, multiple dimension aspect of 'Lost', but the Covenant sequence is a fantastic read for those touched by the heroism, foolishness, tragedy,and redemption all embodied in John Locke, surely the most original creation of the 'Lost' writers, regardless of how (un)fulfilling the finale turns out to be.

Discussing the end of the Chronicles in an attempt to reason out the possible conclusion of 'Lost' just isn't possible without spoiling the 'Chronicles', something I just can't do.

Man No. 2

It is sentimental to consider the Man in Black as a ‘bad guy’. There are perfectly reasonable and moral stances by which one of our characters may choose to consider Jacob as less than a ‘good guy’.

I want to start this entry—on questions concerning the Man in Black—with an explicit statement of these two postulates. I have seen nothing to convince me otherwise at this point (the off-week in between ‘The Last Recruit’ and ‘The Candidate’). I understand that the story of ‘Lost’ is not my story—it is the writers’—and thus, it’s possible that I may have to revoke my opening statements by the end of the series. If I must though, it will be the fault of writers with no compunctions for tromping through their own story, oblivious to the size of the footprints they leave behind. And that, for me, would not be a happy ending for ‘Lost’.

The Man in Black is the newest ‘main’ character in the Lost-o-verse. He is also the most bizarre, in terms of narrative construction, of any character ever on the show. Having ‘questions’ about him is a bit redundant, as the character himself is either a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma or the most notorious MacGuffin yet on ‘Lost’.

Side note: Is there a difference between these two possibilities?

Double Side note: ‘Lost’ may be read as meta-narrative in which MacGuffins transcend their own meaningless origins by threatening to remove themselves, and thus the element of fate, from stories of redemption. Or something.

As I’ve mentioned before, I’m concerned about the ill effect of rewriting Season’s 1-5.9 as simply the deterministic outcome of the hidden hands of Jacob and his nemesis. The great issue with such rewriting is that due to the obligation to maintain dramatic tension, the true origin and goals of Jacob and his nemesis will not be revealed until the penultimate episode, or the finale of ‘Lost’. When writers find themselves with such a small amount of time to reveal such crucial character and plot beats, they are greatly tempted to succumb to the invocation of mealy-mouthed and trite ‘archetypes’ to substitute for original ideas. I’ll now briefly mention some details from the finale of the reimagined Battlestar Galactica series to buttress this argument, so…

[MASSIVE BSG PLOT SPOILERS AHEAD!!! BE WARNED]

The new BSG series was, for the most part, well written. It had fantastic potential, and that potential was comprehensively squandered by "the worst ending in the history of on-screen science fiction”. In brief, a drama full of conflicted, mature characters harboring complex and fluid motivations that were developed with care and honesty for the better part of the series was reduced to the after-effects of a ‘Big Bad’ introduced in the waning moments of the last act. Though the Big Bad had been seen before in the series, he was a relatively minor character whose true nature was never *shown* to the viewers in the course of storytelling, as it was for the half-dozen or so major characters of the show. Thus, upon the revelation of the Big Bad’s identity, the writers had no other choice than to *tell* us, in a brief scene or two of exposition what motivated the character who was now presented as the prime mover of the series long story arc. And what was this essential motivation? It consisted of one thing: the resentment of a machine towards its human creators. In one form or another, this ‘angry Pinocchio’ motivation has been around for more than 100 years. See Frankenstein, 2001, and Terminator for various twists. What the writers forgot is that the dramatic DNA of their show was the considered, ambiguous exploration of the conflicts that arise between men and sentient machines coexisting. Their lazy appropriation of a story that is, within s-f, an old and boring cliché, in order to tie up their loose plot ends ruined everything of originality and interest they had built before. But what could they to do pacify a broad audience? They’d left themselves no time.

[END MASSIVE BSG PLOT SPOILERS]

There you go. But, I’m guardedly optimistic about upcoming revelations of Man in Black, as a character and guiding force on the show. I feel like the writers have done a good job, so far, at distilling equal parts sympathy and suspense into the character. It’s clear that he has a long memory, and a firm conviction of what he deserves. There are no Jack-like ‘do I wanna be on the Island or don’t I?’ or Kate-esque ‘Jack’s such a good man, but Sawyer makes me horny’ dilemmas for this man. Whether we will agree with the Man in Black’s judgment of what he’s accorded when we know the whole story is besides the point. We know he won’t change his mind.

It’s also clear that, in his opinion, he was tricked into his current predicament. If there’s one thing ‘Lost’ viewers have sympathy for, it’s the resentment and powerlessness felt by victims of a manipulator with an agenda—let’s take a short break to pour a little drink on my man John Locke’s grave and salute him.

Let’s end this here with a listing of…

THE MAN IN BLACK DOSSIER: QUESTIONS:

1. Does Jacob’s ‘evil, malevolent, dark wine’ directly signify the MiB? Or is the ‘hell’ the island acts to contain something else, something independent of Jacob and the MiB? And MiB’s ‘trapped’ state a necessary corollary to the containment of ‘hell’?

2. What was the long-ago event between MiB and Jacob that MiB describes to Richard as ‘The devil betrayed me. He took my body. My humanity.’?

3. How is the story of Jacob and MiB connected to MiB’s mother (!), who was a ‘very disturbed woman’?

4. One assumes that when Flocke tells Sawyer that he’s ‘experience[ed] betrayal’, he’s referring to the same event I just mentioned in #2. But to what is he alluding to when he says he knows ‘what it’s like to lose someone you love.’?

5. Is the explanation simply that MiB is totally insane and has conflated the life experiences of those he ‘scans’ while in smoke form with his own long-forgotten past?

6. Is the MiB alluding to his own experience when he tells James, regarding Jacob: ‘He came to you, he manipulated you, pulled your strings like you were a puppet. And as a result, choices you thought were made, were never really choices at all.’

7. When MiB is in Smokey form, are Smokey’s actions entirely the will of MiB? Or does some other force, i.e. Jacob, influence or guide the behavior of Smokey.

8. Were any of the Lost characters (i.e. Hawking, Widmore, Ben) ever consciously in league with MiB?

9. Where is MiB’s home that he wants so badly to go to?

10. Does the MiB have any connection to the Sideways reality?

11. MiB has admitted that he benefitted greatly from Locke dying off the Island, and by Locke’s body returning upon Ajira 316, but did he benefit/have a stake in the H-Bomb/Swan site ‘Incident’.

12. Is the MiB connected to the strange EM activity of the Island?

13. Lots could be put in this question, but…Is there a ‘real agenda’ of the MiB’s that he hasn’t admitted to us yet?

Minor Miscellaneous Mysteries, Part I

Understanding that five hours remain in which any mystery can be solved, I here present several minor league mysteries. I can live without a response to these, but I say that only because time is scarce and I highly recommend more time being devoted to the marquis mysteries.

For my own part, I would put the 'who are the skeletons in the caves?' question in the 'minor' category as well. If the answer is a side note or a minor consequence of a much wider, greater mythological reveal then I am happy to applaud it. But if not, I think that part of the notoriety attached to this question has simply to do with the length of time they've paid the question forward. After 'the numbers' were addressed, I think the skeletons are the one remaining question, major or minor remaining from Season 1. I just want to be on record that time spent addressing, for instance, the Widmore:Hawking overall goals and revealing what they actually knew, and kept from the audience and other characters, throughout the show is a much better use of time than coming up with a subplot for the sole purpose of explaining the skeletons.

MINOR MYSTERY DOSSIER: QUESTIONS:

1. Season 5: In the hotel room where Jack shaves his beard and Ben flushes his [Jack's] pills down the toilet, Ben makes a point of hiding, and then removing, a box in the ceiling duct. What was in there?

2. Season 5: After 316 lands on Hydra Island, Cesar is rifling through the file cabinets in Ben's old office. One of the documents he finds is clearly a page from Faraday's journal. How and why did the Other's obtain it?

3. Seasons 5 and 6: Why is Ilana in the hospital? What happened to her?

4. Season 5: How did Charlotte know about the well?

5. Seasons 2 and 3: Did Kelvin Inman begin his Swan hatch duties before or after the purge? Was the 'sickness' he warns Des about real?

6. Season 2 (I think): What was the source of the DI food drops?

7. Seasons 4, 5, and 6: Did Jack ever tell Kate (or has she ever discovered through another source) that Claire is his half-sister?

8. Seasons 4-6: How did Miles acquire his 'talents'?