Lost Thoughts…

Note:  I wrote this whole thing before watching Episode 6, even though it’s already aired.  I still haven’t watched it.  Don’t tell me what happens!  And if some of my theories turn out to be particularly right or wrong, don’t tell me that, either.  I’ll write more theories after I watch Episode 6!!

So, I’ve decided to become as boring as everyone else and start blogging about Lost.  First of all, I love Lost!  But second, it seems like not a lot of people are watching the sixth season, so I have no one to give all my theories and feedback to.  I keep trying, unsuccessfully, to make Nick watch it.  (Nick hates watching it because the only times he’s seen it has been when we’ve watched together and I’ve already seen the episodes and so I spend the whole time we’re watching it giving him background information on what’s going on.)

So, we’re already about a quarter of the way through the final season, depending on how you count, which is so sad!  But I have all sorts of random thoughts on episodes 1-4.  So I figured I’d post them.  Then, if any of my theories turn out to be right, I can very much do an “I told you so” to anyone who will listen.  Oh, also, if you don’t want to know what’s going on in Season 6, you probably shouldn’t read this.  Duh.

Episodes 1 and 2:  LA X

Thoughts:

• In the sideways timeline, I got a kick out of all the old characters coming back on the plane, and all the current characters acting a bit more like their old selves.
• When the new John Locke (I don’t know what to call him – online people are calling him Man-in-Black, Esau, FLocke, Nemesis, Lockeness Monster, etc. – maybe I’ll go with “Nemesis” – it’s simplest) says “Sorry you had to see me like that” to Ben, that so became one of my favorite Lost lines.  It also confirmed to me that I far prefer the new inhabitant of John Locke’s form to the old one.  Everyone knows I thought old John Locke was whiney and annoying; I was never a fan.  New John Locke is funny and awesome, even if he’s a bad guy!
• When Kate can’t hear anything and everyone wonders if their TVs are broken, it makes me wonder if that’s what everything sounds like to Daddy and his plugged up ears all the time.
• Ugh, I am a much bigger fan of Sawyer-and-Kate than Sawyer-and-Juliet.  (Sawyer and Kate are like two of my most favorite people ever!)  I’m hoping that now that Juliet (finally) died it’s going to eventually clear the way for Sawyer-and-Kate to reunite.
• However, things were not looking good for a Sawyer-and-Kate match when Sawyer tells Kate to “hold back” when he goes off to bury Juliet – especially because you can tell that she was about to run after him and comfort him.  Then, he passive-aggressively tells Miles to come with him instead, which he totally knows will get to Kate.  (It turned out he had a good reason for taking Miles, but still!)
• I’d still like to know why, precisely, the old flight attendant Cindy and the two kids joined up with the others so early on.
• Why doesn’t anyone try to take Juliet to the Temple?  Especially since she seems to be, like, less dead than Sayid for a little while?

Theories:

• Okay, when Juliet was down in the hole being all like “help help!” before she died, and we couldn’t see her, I did not have a good feeling about how things were going to turn out for Sawyer and Co.  I was having major flashbacks to Montand being sucked under the Temple by the Monster in Season 5, and him seemingly calling out to the rest of the French team “help help!”  Jin and Rousseau were all like “that is totally a trap” but the rest of the French team crawled down to try and help – and then next thing we knew, they were all killed by Rousseau because she was convinced they were crazy (which they probably were, since her husband did try to shoot her after she put her gun down).  It appeared that it really was quite possible that the Monster had “infected” the rest of the team while they were underground in the Temple.  Which is totally what I thought was going to happen when Sawyer and Co. dug “Juliet” out – I was sure it was going to be the Monster doing a Juliet impression.  I was doubly convinced when the digging-out was juxtaposed next to a scene where Jack and Co. found armless-Montand’s skeleton under the Temple – I was like, they’re giving us hints!  That’s going to be Sawyer next!  But then, when they finally dug out Juliet, it did truly appear to be Juliet and everyone was very emotional when she died.  So I guess maybe it wasn’t the Monster after all.  But I think it would have been a cooler resolve if, say, dying-Juliet was really the Monster, infecting Sawyer.  Oh well.

Episode 3:  What Kate Does

Thoughts:

• Yay, it’s a Kate episode!  She’s my favorite.
• Sawyer runs away and Kate chases him – go get him Kate!  They bond a bit, too, before he runs away, which is promising.
• I like the whole Jack-Kate dynamic when she goes to run after Sawyer – he (Jack) is totally more into her than she is into him, it’s funny.  She scoots away when she thinks he might try to kiss her.  This bodes well for Sawyer-and-Kate, too.
• I really liked when one of the others who went with Jin and Kate when they chased Sawyer was like “She better not slow us down” and Kate was like, to herself, “You better not slow me down.”  First of all, because she was totally going to be faster than the rest of them, and second of all, because that’s a pretty sucky comeback and thus something I could totally relate to.  If anyone said that to me that’s probably about the best I’d be able to come up with.  Excellent.  And then Kate throws him into one of Rousseau’s/Claire’s traps later on.
• Sawyer and Kate bond on the dock, which is good, but then he totally sends her off on her own and keeps sulking.  Also, some people online were complaining that Sawyer threw his engagement ring in the water, just like Desmond did a long time ago:  “Why can’t the writers be more creative?  And why does everyone keep being almost-dead and then coming back to life?”  This sort of whining totally misses the point – there are supposed to be major parallels.  At this point you might as well ask “Why do the writers keep using the same numbers over and over?  Why can’t they come up with any new ones?  There are infinitely many numbers!”
• I totally don’t blame sideways-Clare getting back in the car with sideways-carjacking Kate.  Anything beats having to deal with buses.

Theories:

• Well, my biggest theory regarding the Claire/Rousseau parallels only really fully developed in Episode 4, so scroll down for that one.

Episode 4:  The Substitute

Thoughts:

• Okay, I soo like Monster-version-of-Locke way more than normal-version-of-Locke.  Sawyer seems to, too – I’m on board with that, Sawyer.
• Ha, Ben in the teacher’s lounge is so annoying.  Which is just about right.
• I appreciate Frank’s presence on the island – he’s funny.
• Richard seems like he’s going kind of crazy.
• When Sawyer’s ladder snapped off the cliff, just watching that made my rotator cuffs wince.  In real life, his shoulders would have exploded into a million pieces and then he would have fallen into the sea and been eaten by a Dharma shark.  But I guess I can’t start “real-lifing” this too much.
• Where is Kate on the cave ceiling?!?!  I am on Team Kate.
• But honestly if the teams are lining up with a Team Jacob-Jack-Hurley and a Team Nemesis-Sawyer, I’m probably on board with Nemesis-Sawyer, particularly because Nemesis is so much less annoying than Locke.

Theories:

• Okay, you know how Ilana thinks that the Monster has made the Locke-face so long that he’s now stuck like that?  Well, all the commentary I’ve read online has taken that statement of hers at face value – everyone’s discussion why he’s stuck like that.  But I think Ilana may be totally wrong.  She didn’t say where she was getting her intel from, but I’m worried that she may have derived her “he’s stuck like that” theory from Ben’s sneaky little statement to her that he [Nemesis] killed Jacob, glossing over the fact that Ben was responsible for the mechanics of that deal.  Has no one ever read stories/books/fairytales where someone can’t do some crucial act themselves without dire consequences, so they need to trick someone else into doing it for them?  My theory is that, had Nemesis actually killed Jacob in the form of Locke’s body, he would have been stuck as Locke.  Instead, Nemesis discovered a “loophole” where, if he got someone else (Ben) to do it for him, he’s not stuck.  But because Ilana doesn’t have all the beta, she’s under the impression that Nemesis is stuck.  And I suspect that the outcome of this misconception will probably not go well for her.
• Backing up that theory is the fact that we saw POV Monster at the beginning of the episode.  I didn’t see anything happen to Nemesis since that point that would have been transformative enough to get him stuck in Locke’s body – certainly nothing that Ilana would have been aware of.  I think the point of sticking would have been when he killed Jacob, but because Ben was the killer, the Nemesis isn’t as stuck as Ilana thinks.  This is going to end in tears…

Episode 5:  Lighthouse

Thoughts:

• Jack has a kid!  When I first saw the dynamics between Jack and David, I thought for a second that they might have somehow inherited the Michael/Walt plot in this version of the world.  Maybe David’s mom has just died and this is Jack’s first interaction with him.  But it appears that that’s not the case.
• Jacob is so much more annoying than Nemesis.  He’s sort of like a Locke with an “I think I know it all” look – although his might be somewhat more justified than the ones Locke sometimes got.
• I enjoy the Jack-Kate dynamics when she tries to shoot him at the river; she is so not into him which makes things kind of awkward for him.  Hurley’s not helping.
• Okay, I was sort of remembering the Lamppost Dharma station out in California under the church, and for some reason my brain was confused and thinking that this Lighthouse they were going to had the same name as that and must be related, especially since they both appeared to have to do with bringing people to the island.  But it turns out that I was just misremembering and they both just happen to be compound words beginning with L that have to do with luminescence.  Now maybe they’re related after all, but I was disappointed when I realized my brain made a false connection when I was convinced that they were like linked stations somehow.
• Oh man, Jin is totally messing things up for Kate with Claire.  By the time Kate finds her, Jin is totally going to have accidentally convinced her [Claire] to kill her [Kate].  Whoopsies.
• Just like I like the new Nemesised version of Locke, I like the new Rousseaued version of Claire.  She’s still sort of baby-obsessed, but now she’s way more nutty.  Improvement!

Theories:

• Alright, so I’ve got several theories with this episode.  The first sort of goes back to a lot of commentary that originally showed up asking why the Losties were the ones who crashed on the island in the first place.  Several people theorized that the people who crashed on the island on the original Oceanic 813 were all people who didn’t seem to have close connections in the real world.  Some wanted to go back anyways, others didn’t.  But they all didn’t have close people (spouses or children) to go back to.  When there were spouses, they crashed together (Bernard and Rose; Jin and Sun), and same with children (Claire and Aaron (still attached!) and Michael and Walt).  There were no parents who crashed on the island without their children.  But now I’m noticing that in the new off-island world, the characters do have connections to people not on the plane.  Now Locke has Helen and Jack has David.  Perhaps, even, Kate has her mom; apparently, a Lost extra video was aired over the summer implying that in this world, Kate didn’t blow up her dad but instead accidentally blew up one of his employees instead – so presumably her mom wouldn’t be quite so mad at her.  I haven’t seen anyone commenting on this – which is strange, because it seems to me to be the biggest difference between the original crash timeline and the reset non-crash timeline.  Maybe somehow, the off-plane connections the passengers had managed to keep this version of the plane from crashing?
• Another big theory of mine:  Okay, this theory developed out of all the “Sayid is possessed” theories.  People all seem to think Sayid might be possessed by Jacob since they both sort of died around the same time.  Which is why Dogan seems to think that Sayid is infected.  (He called Claire infected, too….)  And Claire certainly seems to be channeling Rousseau – but I haven’t seen anyone explicitly explain this mechanism.  But here’s my thoughts:  If an infection/possession somehow happens when people die in close chronological proximity to each other, then it turns out it makes total sense that Claire is channeling Rousseau.  I looked up when Rousseau died – it turns out that she died right before Claire’s house gets blown up in Season 4.  Now, when Claire’s house got blown up back during that episode and it went straight to commercial, I totally thought that that was it for Claire.  It was flattened.  And yet she came out of it more-or-less totally fine with just a few scrapes – but just a little bit dazed.  And then she went whacko, moved into Jacob’s cabin with Christian, and disappeared for a whole season.  It seems to me that maybe Claire wasn’t as alive as we thought after that house explosion.  And if she died, it was in awful close chronological proximity to Rousseau, who she now seems to be channeling…hmm.
• Speaking of Jacob’s cabin, everyone seemed to be assuming that it ended up being inherited by someone bad (Nemesis/the Monster?) who was held in by the line of ash.  When Ilana discovered it was broken, commentators seemed to assume that whatever was holding it had escaped.  But I always assumed that the ash was to protect someone inside of it (like when Bram attempted to save himself from the Monster when it was going after him), and the broken line meant that someone had got to whoever was being protected.  So I’m not sure who’s right on that front, me or everyone else.
• Okay, so according to various screenshots and lists, it looks like there was some overlap between the names/numbers on the cave ceiling and those on the lighthouse wheel.  (Jacob loves making lists; I respect that.)  However, they’re not identical.  (Happily, Kate appears at a non-significant number on the lighthouse wheel – uncrossed out.  Which is good.)  Some people think that one list is Jacob’s and the other is an imperfect copy by the Nemesis; whether it’s intentionally imperfect or not is up for debate.  But I think that it’s possible that both lists are Jacob’s at different times.  As people go around making lists, they sometimes update and make changes.  And if they’re not all synced in the cloud, some of them might reflect more accurately what Jacob is thinking than others.  Just something to think about.

So those are my most updated Lost thoughts!  Gotta go to bed soon; Rumney tomorrow!