16 May 2009

I have only questions.



[COLETTA FACTOR: LOST-CURRENT]
Jacob is a real person, but he's also some kind of deity, a God of Light who guides people along their destinies. Jacob has a nemesis with John Locke's face; the nemesis seems to be Jacob's opposite number, a God of Darkness. Question: Did Smokey Dead Alex know that John Locke was not himself, or was Smokey fooled as easily as Richard and Ben? Perhaps the impersonation is so complete that only Locke's body can be proof? Widmore said there is a war coming. Who are the bad guys? It seems like everyone is a good guy. Jacob can count among his allies Bram, Ilana, Richard, the Others, and, probably, Eloise and Widmore. (Widmore now seems to have been a red herring. Not to say he's not important, but he is certainly not the Big Bad Guy.) Ben is probably going to stick with the Nemesis, if he survives after Ilana finds out what he has done. (I wouldn't want to get on her bad side!) Who else? If the 1977 castaways come back to the future, will they all come down on the same side? Remember, Jack was pretty close to Ben this season, while Hurley and Sayid hated him. Sawyer is going to be a mess now that he's lost Juliet, but he may be the only character who has truly redeemed himself and become a better person on the Island. This would put him in league with Jacob, and if Jack is with Ben and the Nemesis, what will Kate do? It would be great to see the ongoing Jack-Kate-Sawyer-triangle-that-used-to-be-a-quadrangle finally have some relevance to the story.
Time travel? No more, please. Let's just take it as given that the Incident was always Jughead blowing up at the Swan Site. There's an idea out there that Ajira 316 was the universe's course correction to put the survivors on the Island after the erasing of 815 from history, but that would suck. If the first 4 seasons never happened, why did we watch it? If Lost has a point, it is this: Everything has consequences. We are the way we are because of the people in our lives and the choices we have made. I'm reminded of a great TNG episode called "Tapestry," in which Jean-Luc Picard is given the chance to relive an incident from his past, only to find out that he needed to make a stupid, near-fatal mistake in order to become the man that he is. "There are many parts of my youth that I'm not proud of... there were loose threads... untidy parts of me that I would like to remove. But when I pulled on one of those threads... it had unraveled the tapestry of my life." Didn't we see Jacob weaving a tapestry in the opening scene of "The Incident"? (The Lost folks are Trekkies; "The Constant" was based, in a very real way, on TNG's series finale, "All Good Things.") If 815 never crashes, it negates the story; it's the equivalent of "...and it had all been a dream."
The showdown at the Swan site was fantastic, epic in scope and import; the shoot-outs and the awesome fight between Jack and Sawyer were exciting, and the final scene, man! Juliet was never my favorite, but that will be one of the most memorable scenes of the show 10, 20, 30 years from now. Right up there with Locke pounding on the Hatch, Shannon screaming amid the 815 wreckage, and Daniel crying at the news of 815's (fake) discovery.
Juliet really got a raw deal. She thought she would have an awesome 6 month job on a tropical island, and ended up on an Island, with a bug-eyed megalomaniac who was obsessed with her. Things were going well for her and Jack, until he left the Island without her and shacked up with Kate. She was happy for a while, until Jack and Kate came back and destroyed the life she and Sawyer had built. It's just haunting, the sight of her, hundreds of feet underground, bloodied, banging on a nuke with a rock. And that fade!!! Is it another flash, sending everyone back to the future? Is Sayid gonna die? I bet Jacob or the Nemesis can heal him.
Rose and Bernard!! Vincent!!!! They're retired! But is Vincent really ready for retirement? Isn't he just waiting for Walt to come back? I'm gonna be really pissed if Walt doesn't come back to the Island next year.

13 May 2009

No more time travel, please: pre-finale predictions post


[COLETTA FACTOR: LOST-CURRENT]

First things first: let me plug a couple of my fellow bloggers. Jorge Garcia, aka Hurley, keeps a blog; it's called Dispatches From The Island, and it's good fun. Jorge seems like a regular guy, despite his international fame. Next up is Linda's Lost Blog, which is exactly what it sounds like. Linda is like me: she just wants to write down her ideas and hopes to start people thinking. Last, but not least, is themisfitishere. This guy, in his own words, is the world's greatest living or dead Lostigator and spoilergator. It's pretty indescribable, and pretty awesome; here's a sample: "J.A.C.O.B. = Just Another Chair Of Bens!!"


Anyway, enough of the time travel. It hurts my head. There are two ways a time travel story can happen: 1) Time travelers change something in the past and everything is different in the future or 2) Time travelers change nothing, because their actions are already part of history, despite their not having done it yet, relative to their own perceptions. The first, I feel, is pretty nihilistic; Donnie Darko, Yesterday's Enterprise, and The Butterfly Effect come to mind. These stories are characterized by chaos, and the time travelers don't usually fare well in the end. The second is far more interesting; we see the time travelers fulfilling their roles in history, exercising their free will all the way to the preordained outcome. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban comes to mind. At its best, this kind of time travel story comes together in the end like a jigsaw puzzle coming together piece by piece, which brings us to Jack Shepherd. Jack's got the wrong idea. He's like Locke in the season 2 finale: he's convinced it's his fate to change the future by changing the past, but he doesn't understand that fate never meant anything on the Island other than "what has already happened," and he can't change that anymore than Locke could deny that the Button must be pushed. I love that the Swan will be the focal point of the end of this season. I once had a theory that the Swan's implosion, when Desmond turned the key, was a singularity that sent ripples in time in both directions. I don't think it's that simple, but I think it's a safe bet that tomorrow night we'll see our characters, the ones who don't die, (Juliet, I'm looking at you,) sent forward in time to the point in 2008 where we've seen Locke, Sun, Ben, Frank, and those creepy shadow of the statue people. It will probably be some combination of the electromagnetic energy at the Swan and the radiation from Jughead. Will Jughead explode, or will it be buried under all that concrete? If it gets buried, does it blow up when Desmond turns the key? If it gets buried, you have the survivors of Flight 815 causing their plane to crash 30 years before it happens. Maybe one or two of them stay in 1977. Maybe they spend the next 30 years steering all the right people to Flight 815. I figure Jughead is about twice as likely to explode as not. The most likely death, given the state of the love quadrangle, is Juliet. Runner-up is Sayid, who's going to have a very hard time, in life or death, atoning for all the murders he committed for Ben Linus, the liar who lies.

What's up with those shadow of the statue people, anyway? What's in their crate? When is Frank gonna have something to do other than fly and get hit on the head with a wrench? And what about Jacob? Locke says he wants to kill Jacob. Will we see Jacob's face? Is he a man, or a spirit, or what? If he's a man, is he Horace Goodspeed, Walt, Christian, a 30 years older Jack?

Richard. Don't forget about Richard. He knows more than any other character, even Ben or Widmore, and he's always known. He's gotta know about 815 when it crashes, and he's gotta recognize Juliet when he recruits her to the Island via Mittelos. (Mittelos is an anagram for lost time.) Why would Richard leave the Island just to recruit a fertility specialist? I believe the only other time he was off the Island was when he was visiting John Locke.


Random predictions:

1. Marvin Candle will lose his arm.

2. Kate will kiss Sawyer first, probably right after Juliet dies, than Jack will get all pouty 'cause he still wants her.

3. Radzinsky will die and be replaced by an impostor, or else the Others and Dharma form some pact to keep the Swan running, the pact including telling Radzinsky there's a sickness and he can't leave.


Ok that's enough. I gotta go to bed.

05 May 2009

Trekkies....


Trekkies Bash New Star Trek Film As 'Fun, Watchable'

Apparently this new film contains some time-travel device which sort of resets the clock at the early years of the Enterprise, enabling JJ Abrams to make a whole slew of new films without having to adhere to established canon. There are a lot of fans upset about this one, as if the whole Trek universe will come crashing down on Friday. I disagree. I remember when TNG was announced. It was spring, 1987, and I had fallen in love with Trek the Christmas before after seeing the 4th film, "The Voyage Home," which enjoyed probably the most crossover success of any of the films, and is known to non-Trekkies as "The One With The Whales." I watched as many episodes as I could of TOS, I read books, fan magazines, and comics. I covered my walls with pictures of the USS Enterprise, and started the long process of accumulating an encyclopedic knowledge of every trivial detail of the show: episode names, character histories, timelines, alien races and cultures, etc. There were rumors of a new series being announced, set to take place nearly 100 years after the adventures of Kirk and Spock. It was to feature a boy genius, an android, a Klingon, and a blind pilot. I was so upset, I actually cried. No joke. That summer, I went to a convention and saw Majel Barrett Roddenberry give a presentation on the new show, complete with cast photos and images of the new ship. It looked pretty cool, but I wasn't really convinced. Of course, I wouldn't have missed it for anything, because it was still Trek, and I wanted to give it a chance. It premiered on 4 October 1987, 2 days after my 12th birthday. "Encounter At Farpoint" was cheesy, the costumes were terrible and the situations improbable, but the characters were fascinating, the ship looked awesome, and the story hit right to the heart of the hope and optimism that has been at the heart of Trek for over 40 years now. In a very real way, those TNG characters were my best childhood friends, and made me realize that the Universe is big enough to tell a lot of stories, and it's the stories and the people in them that matter, not the details. Trek is, at its core, about discovery, about the journey. When we turn away from what is new because it's different and might not fit into our understanding of the world, that's the opposite of discovery, the opposite of what the Great Bird Of The Galaxy intended when he gave us this gift all those years ago.

I'm ready for this new film, can't wait to see what Trek and Bad Robot can do...

P.S. I won a contest! The Grand Prize! I get a Trek t-shirt, a COMMUNICATOR!!, the graphic novel of the movie, and tickets to the sneak preview on Thursday night, so I'll see it a day before you. Don't worry, I won't post anything with plot details until Friday night, at which point it is fair game for discussion according to my strict Coletta Factor/spoiler guidelines.