Thanks to Heather for the heads up.
Showing posts with label Eggtown. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Eggtown. Show all posts
Thursday, August 26, 2010
Friday, August 29, 2008
Eggtown - Uncut/Altered Scene
Thanks to Jaz for the heads up on this video courtesy of YouTube user LuBear1. It appears to be the uncut/altered scene from Eggtown that was never aired.
Source: Luanne@Fishbiscuitland
Source: Luanne@Fishbiscuitland
Monday, February 25, 2008
The Lost Fantasy League: Week 4 Update
Update: 10:30 GMT I've fixed the problem with the spreadsheet that showed this weeks points incorrectly, although the total points and ranks was correct. The new spreadsheet can be found here to download.
Another week, another episode of Lost, and another Fantasy Update. It's hard to believe that we're already done with the fourth week of competition. Where does the time go?
This week Kate fans can do their happy dance, but not as jubilantly as Sayid or Hurley fans were able to. While Kate finished out in the triple digits, the episode as a whole only managed 220 points, our lowest overall score for an episode this season. While the points spread may have been a little light, points were dished out during most of "Eggtown"'s big scenes, including the flashforwards, the almost-sex scene and the stunning revelation that closed the episode (stunning for us cool spoiler-free people at least!). :-)
Maybe it was the low score, or maybe I'm finally getting to be an expert at spotting those tricky points scenarios, but there were no important points rulings this week. We did make some adjustments for last week's episode. Between this adjustment and this week's points, we have a new points leader! Be sure to check that, the video and the rest of the info out whilst finding out how "Eggtown" treated your Fantasy roster.
Also, be sure to celebrate, mope, question and merely chat in the comment section. We're also always open for business to help you out with your questions by emailing us at LFLquestions@gmail.com.
“Eggtown” (in 547 words or less)
Locke makes Ben breakfast in cell, using the last of the eggs and a sprinkle of “you shot me three days ago” love but Ben just wants to mindf**k. Good to know that some things never change.
Kate and Claire are living up the cozy porch-front lifestyle with their Mainstays DHARMA coffee mugs, idle chit-chat flirting with the boys next door.
Sun and Jin contemplate where they will live after they get rescued. Evidently, Sun wants to raise her baby (erm, make that their baby) back in the home country she was desperate to flee only three months ago.
Basically the split in the Lostie camp has made everybody insufferably boring. At least for now.
Kate asks John if she can talk to Miles, but the Führer says “Nein!” Power is his shiny new toy and he doesn’t want to share with anyone. Kate promptly tricks Hurley into giving away Miles’ location. Poor Hugo- he needs to defect from both camps and find a nice little DHARMA station of his own. Kate talks to Miles, who wants a minute of time with Ben. He’s either a masochist or into the whole bondage thing because he says that being tied up in New Otherton is exactly where he wants to be.
A lot of other boring stuff happens- Jack can’t make the phone work, Sun questions why Kate stayed with Locke if he’s wrong to hide, and Kate has baby issues.
That night, Kate shows up at Sawyer and Hurley’s place. Sawyer offers her boxed wine (what a guy!) but she wants to use him. No, not in the sex points kind of way- she wants him to help her setup a meeting between Ben and Miles. Sawyer plays along and tricks Locke into running down to the boathouse to check on Miles when Kate is really waiting with the ghostbuster outside the house. They break in; Miles offers to tell his people Ben is dead in exchange for $3.2 million; a nonverbal understanding exists between them; Kate and Miles get caught by a really ticked off Locke.
Kate is banished from New Otherton but gets to spend the night with Sawyer first. She leads him on only to block him when the time is right. Kate, you are officially a tease and as a member of the male population, I curse you and your teasing kind. You wore those sexy panties and didn’t even put them to good use. Damn you Kate (but thank you wardrobe department!).
Daniel can’t remember the three cards in front of him. Charlotte, clearly a Meat Loaf fan, tells him that two out of three ain’t bad. Jack makes them call the emergency number to the freighter. They ask about Sayid and Desmond but they haven’t gotten there yet- after a whole day. Suspicious.
In the flashforwards, Kate is on trial for all the things she did before the crash. Jack is the crappiest character witness ever and Kate’s mom is willing to sabotage the trial in exchange for a meeting with her grandson. Whoa, wait- Kate’s got a kid? Yup! Bigger shock is that it’s not really her kid. It’s Aaron. You know, Claire’s baby that wasn’t supposed to be raised by another? Can you say “huh?” I knew you could!
For what might be the first time in the short history of the Lost Fantasy League, there are no important points rulings this week! "Eggtown" was the easiest episode of Lost I have had to score to date, which was great. Of course, this probably means that the rest of the episodes this season will be insufferably difficult. :-P
While there are no important points rulings for this episode, we do have a pair of points corrections to make for last week's episode, "The Economist." First of all, we are going to give Karl appearance points for "The Economist" even though we initially thought he was not present. Loyal screencapper Dharmageddon managed to find the following two images that prove Karl was in the episode (sort of).
In the picture on the left from 4x02, "Confirmed Dead," you can see exactly what Karl is wearing. Note the shirt, the backpack and the stick he is carrying around with him. While these may seem like trivialities, they are important when it comes to comparing this picture to the next one. In the picture on the right from 4x03, "The Economist," you can see an extra wearing the same shirt and backpack (with the same stick no less) as Karl. Evidently the show runners did not feel it was necessary to have actor Blake Bashoff suit up for this episode and had an extra appear in the background as Karl to help fill out the small band of wanderers following Locke to Jacob's cabin. Maybe they didn't want to pay Blake or maybe they needed to use an extra so to keep his episode count down to retain his "Guest Star" label. Either way, this is proof enough that this is Karl, so we are giving him points for appearing in the episode.
Thanks to Lost-Media.com for taking these screencaps that helped prove Karl's presence in "The Economist." You site helped a few people out! Also, thanks go out to Lost-Media for all the pictures I have been using for Fantasy Updates sine the beginning.
Okay, our second points correction needs no picture to go with it. We all saw Sayid laying ing bed with Elsa, heavily implying a sexual romp. I had mentioned in the video that we gave Sayid sex points but had not actually put that data into our scoring system. This has been corrected and you Sayid fans have an extra 15 point from it. If you also had Karl on you team, you got a 20 point boost for last week's episode.
Group 1-
KATE (+100): Attendance (+5); Episode Centricity (+25); Has a Flashforward (+20); Kisses Sawyer in two separate scenes (2 x 20 = +40); Injures Someone- Slaps Sawyer (-5); Last Line in Episode (+5); Last On Screen (+10)
JACK (+50): Attendance (+5); Appears in Kate's Flashforward (+25); Uses the Numbers- Says 815 while testifying at Kate's trial (+20)
LOCKE (+35): Attendance (+5); First On Screen (+15); Has an Eye Close-Up (+5); First Line in Episode (+10)
SAWYER (+35): Attendance (+5); Kisses Kate in two separate scenes (2 x 20 = +40); Gets Hurt- Kate slaps him (-10)
BEN (+5): Attendance (+5)
Group 2-
HURLEY (+5): Attendance (+5)
JULIET (+5): Attendance (+5)
DESMOND (-5): Absent from Episode (-5)
MICHAEL (-5): Absent from Episode (-5)
SAYID (-5): Absent from Episode (-5)
Group 3-
CLAIRE (+30): Attendance (+5); Visits a DHARMA Location- The Barracks (+5); Kisses Aaron (+20)
JIN (+5): Attendance (+5)
SUN (+5): Attendance (+5)
JACOB (-5): Absent from Episode (-5)
ROUSSEAU (-5): Absent from Episode (-5)
Group 4-
ALEX (-5): Absent from Episode (-5)
BERNARD (-5): Absent from Episode (-5)
KARL (-5): Absent from Episode (-5)
ROSE (-5): Absent from Episode (-5)
WALT (-5): Absent from Episode (-5)
Group 5-
AARON (+65): Attendance (+5); Visits a DHARMA Location- The Barracks (+5); Kissed by Claire (+20); Appears in Kate's Flashforward (+25); Last Person On Screen (+10)
CINDY (-5): Absent from Episode (-5)
MARVIN CANDLE (-5): Absent from Episode (-5)
PENNY (-5): Absent from Episode (-5)
RICHARD (-5): Absent from Episode (-5)
Group 6-
ETHAN (-5): Absent from Episode (-5)
LIBBY (-5): Absent from Episode (-5)
MS. HAWKING (-5): Absent from Episode (-5)
RACHEL (-5): Absent from Episode (-5)
WIDMORE (-5): Absent from Episode (-5)
Group 7-
CHRISTIAN (-5): Absent from Episode (-5)
KELVIN (-5): Absent from Episode (-5)
KEVIN CALISS (-5): Absent from Episode (-5)
MR. PAIK (-5): Absent from Episode (-5)
NADIA (-5): Absent from Episode (-5)
Congratulations to our two Fantasy Geniuses of the Week! Both ended up with 185 points this week. Here they are and their teams:
Dontlistentoanythingisay: Kate, Hurley, Claire, Karl, Aaron, Rachel, Nadia
Erinbow: Kate, Juliet, Claire, Alex, Aaron, Charles Widmore, Christian Shephard
This is Erinbow's second time as Fantasy Genius of the Week this season! She was one of our Week 2 Geniuses. Dontlistentoanythignisay greatly benefited from this points boost, as it shot them to first place overall in the standings! Way to pick your team!
As we now head towards yet another hiatus (albeit a shorter one) that will leave the Lost addicts of the world crying out for more, we are faced with the Week 5 episode entitled "The Constant."
I have no idea what the title refers to, but I think it might have something to do with math. Seeing as it's been five years since my last math class, I don't know how many kinds of constants exist, so I just picked a random image. :-P
From the US trailers, it looks like we'll be seeing a lot of Desmond and Sayid this episode. Since Sayid has already had his moment of glory this year, perhaps it's Desmond's turn to have an episode? No matter how it turns out, it looks like we're going to find out why the helicopter didn't reach the freighter after a whole day had passed. Does it have anything to do with Daniel's little time experiment? Perhaps.
Be sure to check out "The Constant" and be sure to also check out how the episode affected your scores next Monday on the Lost Fantasy Update!
Another week, another episode of Lost, and another Fantasy Update. It's hard to believe that we're already done with the fourth week of competition. Where does the time go?
This week Kate fans can do their happy dance, but not as jubilantly as Sayid or Hurley fans were able to. While Kate finished out in the triple digits, the episode as a whole only managed 220 points, our lowest overall score for an episode this season. While the points spread may have been a little light, points were dished out during most of "Eggtown"'s big scenes, including the flashforwards, the almost-sex scene and the stunning revelation that closed the episode (stunning for us cool spoiler-free people at least!). :-)
Maybe it was the low score, or maybe I'm finally getting to be an expert at spotting those tricky points scenarios, but there were no important points rulings this week. We did make some adjustments for last week's episode. Between this adjustment and this week's points, we have a new points leader! Be sure to check that, the video and the rest of the info out whilst finding out how "Eggtown" treated your Fantasy roster.
Also, be sure to celebrate, mope, question and merely chat in the comment section. We're also always open for business to help you out with your questions by emailing us at LFLquestions@gmail.com.
“Eggtown” (in 547 words or less)
Locke makes Ben breakfast in cell, using the last of the eggs and a sprinkle of “you shot me three days ago” love but Ben just wants to mindf**k. Good to know that some things never change.
Kate and Claire are living up the cozy porch-front lifestyle with their Mainstays DHARMA coffee mugs, idle chit-chat flirting with the boys next door.
Sun and Jin contemplate where they will live after they get rescued. Evidently, Sun wants to raise her baby (erm, make that their baby) back in the home country she was desperate to flee only three months ago.
Basically the split in the Lostie camp has made everybody insufferably boring. At least for now.
Kate asks John if she can talk to Miles, but the Führer says “Nein!” Power is his shiny new toy and he doesn’t want to share with anyone. Kate promptly tricks Hurley into giving away Miles’ location. Poor Hugo- he needs to defect from both camps and find a nice little DHARMA station of his own. Kate talks to Miles, who wants a minute of time with Ben. He’s either a masochist or into the whole bondage thing because he says that being tied up in New Otherton is exactly where he wants to be.
A lot of other boring stuff happens- Jack can’t make the phone work, Sun questions why Kate stayed with Locke if he’s wrong to hide, and Kate has baby issues.
That night, Kate shows up at Sawyer and Hurley’s place. Sawyer offers her boxed wine (what a guy!) but she wants to use him. No, not in the sex points kind of way- she wants him to help her setup a meeting between Ben and Miles. Sawyer plays along and tricks Locke into running down to the boathouse to check on Miles when Kate is really waiting with the ghostbuster outside the house. They break in; Miles offers to tell his people Ben is dead in exchange for $3.2 million; a nonverbal understanding exists between them; Kate and Miles get caught by a really ticked off Locke.
Kate is banished from New Otherton but gets to spend the night with Sawyer first. She leads him on only to block him when the time is right. Kate, you are officially a tease and as a member of the male population, I curse you and your teasing kind. You wore those sexy panties and didn’t even put them to good use. Damn you Kate (but thank you wardrobe department!).
Daniel can’t remember the three cards in front of him. Charlotte, clearly a Meat Loaf fan, tells him that two out of three ain’t bad. Jack makes them call the emergency number to the freighter. They ask about Sayid and Desmond but they haven’t gotten there yet- after a whole day. Suspicious.
In the flashforwards, Kate is on trial for all the things she did before the crash. Jack is the crappiest character witness ever and Kate’s mom is willing to sabotage the trial in exchange for a meeting with her grandson. Whoa, wait- Kate’s got a kid? Yup! Bigger shock is that it’s not really her kid. It’s Aaron. You know, Claire’s baby that wasn’t supposed to be raised by another? Can you say “huh?” I knew you could!
For what might be the first time in the short history of the Lost Fantasy League, there are no important points rulings this week! "Eggtown" was the easiest episode of Lost I have had to score to date, which was great. Of course, this probably means that the rest of the episodes this season will be insufferably difficult. :-P
While there are no important points rulings for this episode, we do have a pair of points corrections to make for last week's episode, "The Economist." First of all, we are going to give Karl appearance points for "The Economist" even though we initially thought he was not present. Loyal screencapper Dharmageddon managed to find the following two images that prove Karl was in the episode (sort of).
In the picture on the left from 4x02, "Confirmed Dead," you can see exactly what Karl is wearing. Note the shirt, the backpack and the stick he is carrying around with him. While these may seem like trivialities, they are important when it comes to comparing this picture to the next one. In the picture on the right from 4x03, "The Economist," you can see an extra wearing the same shirt and backpack (with the same stick no less) as Karl. Evidently the show runners did not feel it was necessary to have actor Blake Bashoff suit up for this episode and had an extra appear in the background as Karl to help fill out the small band of wanderers following Locke to Jacob's cabin. Maybe they didn't want to pay Blake or maybe they needed to use an extra so to keep his episode count down to retain his "Guest Star" label. Either way, this is proof enough that this is Karl, so we are giving him points for appearing in the episode.Thanks to Lost-Media.com for taking these screencaps that helped prove Karl's presence in "The Economist." You site helped a few people out! Also, thanks go out to Lost-Media for all the pictures I have been using for Fantasy Updates sine the beginning.
Okay, our second points correction needs no picture to go with it. We all saw Sayid laying ing bed with Elsa, heavily implying a sexual romp. I had mentioned in the video that we gave Sayid sex points but had not actually put that data into our scoring system. This has been corrected and you Sayid fans have an extra 15 point from it. If you also had Karl on you team, you got a 20 point boost for last week's episode.
Group 1-
KATE (+100): Attendance (+5); Episode Centricity (+25); Has a Flashforward (+20); Kisses Sawyer in two separate scenes (2 x 20 = +40); Injures Someone- Slaps Sawyer (-5); Last Line in Episode (+5); Last On Screen (+10)
JACK (+50): Attendance (+5); Appears in Kate's Flashforward (+25); Uses the Numbers- Says 815 while testifying at Kate's trial (+20)
LOCKE (+35): Attendance (+5); First On Screen (+15); Has an Eye Close-Up (+5); First Line in Episode (+10)
SAWYER (+35): Attendance (+5); Kisses Kate in two separate scenes (2 x 20 = +40); Gets Hurt- Kate slaps him (-10)
BEN (+5): Attendance (+5)
Group 2-
HURLEY (+5): Attendance (+5)
JULIET (+5): Attendance (+5)
DESMOND (-5): Absent from Episode (-5)
MICHAEL (-5): Absent from Episode (-5)
SAYID (-5): Absent from Episode (-5)
Group 3-
CLAIRE (+30): Attendance (+5); Visits a DHARMA Location- The Barracks (+5); Kisses Aaron (+20)
JIN (+5): Attendance (+5)
SUN (+5): Attendance (+5)
JACOB (-5): Absent from Episode (-5)
ROUSSEAU (-5): Absent from Episode (-5)
Group 4-
ALEX (-5): Absent from Episode (-5)
BERNARD (-5): Absent from Episode (-5)
KARL (-5): Absent from Episode (-5)
ROSE (-5): Absent from Episode (-5)
WALT (-5): Absent from Episode (-5)
Group 5-
AARON (+65): Attendance (+5); Visits a DHARMA Location- The Barracks (+5); Kissed by Claire (+20); Appears in Kate's Flashforward (+25); Last Person On Screen (+10)
CINDY (-5): Absent from Episode (-5)
MARVIN CANDLE (-5): Absent from Episode (-5)
PENNY (-5): Absent from Episode (-5)
RICHARD (-5): Absent from Episode (-5)
Group 6-
ETHAN (-5): Absent from Episode (-5)
LIBBY (-5): Absent from Episode (-5)
MS. HAWKING (-5): Absent from Episode (-5)
RACHEL (-5): Absent from Episode (-5)
WIDMORE (-5): Absent from Episode (-5)
Group 7-
CHRISTIAN (-5): Absent from Episode (-5)
KELVIN (-5): Absent from Episode (-5)
KEVIN CALISS (-5): Absent from Episode (-5)
MR. PAIK (-5): Absent from Episode (-5)
NADIA (-5): Absent from Episode (-5)
Congratulations to our two Fantasy Geniuses of the Week! Both ended up with 185 points this week. Here they are and their teams:
Dontlistentoanythingisay: Kate, Hurley, Claire, Karl, Aaron, Rachel, Nadia
Erinbow: Kate, Juliet, Claire, Alex, Aaron, Charles Widmore, Christian Shephard
This is Erinbow's second time as Fantasy Genius of the Week this season! She was one of our Week 2 Geniuses. Dontlistentoanythignisay greatly benefited from this points boost, as it shot them to first place overall in the standings! Way to pick your team!
As we now head towards yet another hiatus (albeit a shorter one) that will leave the Lost addicts of the world crying out for more, we are faced with the Week 5 episode entitled "The Constant."I have no idea what the title refers to, but I think it might have something to do with math. Seeing as it's been five years since my last math class, I don't know how many kinds of constants exist, so I just picked a random image. :-P
From the US trailers, it looks like we'll be seeing a lot of Desmond and Sayid this episode. Since Sayid has already had his moment of glory this year, perhaps it's Desmond's turn to have an episode? No matter how it turns out, it looks like we're going to find out why the helicopter didn't reach the freighter after a whole day had passed. Does it have anything to do with Daniel's little time experiment? Perhaps.
Be sure to check out "The Constant" and be sure to also check out how the episode affected your scores next Monday on the Lost Fantasy Update!
S4Ep4 - "Eggtown": Well We're Living Here in an Eggtown by Erika
Here is this week's recap from Erika Olson (aka "e") from LongLiveLocke.com .
... and it's hard to choke a grenade down. (Just ask Miles.)
There have been two times since Lost premiered when I have gotten chills at the end of an episode. The first was in "Deus Ex Machina," when Locke ran back to the hatch (as Boone was dying) and started banging and crying "WHYYYYY?!?!!?" on the little window, and then all of a sudden the light came on. The second was at the end of "Eggtown," when Kate's "son" was revealed to be Aaron. I did not see that one coming! I'm enjoying my spoiler-free status more and more with each episode (although some of my other spoiler-free friends did call the ending--they're way more clever than I am).
... and it's hard to choke a grenade down. (Just ask Miles.)There have been two times since Lost premiered when I have gotten chills at the end of an episode. The first was in "Deus Ex Machina," when Locke ran back to the hatch (as Boone was dying) and started banging and crying "WHYYYYY?!?!!?" on the little window, and then all of a sudden the light came on. The second was at the end of "Eggtown," when Kate's "son" was revealed to be Aaron. I did not see that one coming! I'm enjoying my spoiler-free status more and more with each episode (although some of my other spoiler-free friends did call the ending--they're way more clever than I am).
From what I can tell on the message boards, this was a love-it-or-hate-it episode, and I am happy to report that I am on the "loved it" side. Which is amazing when you consider that it was mostly about Kate. The Kate Hate Train has therefore not pulled out of its station this season--yet.
I'm going to get the Island events out of the way first this time around, as the majority of things to theorize over happened in the flashbacks. And for those of you who are new to my write-ups, if you roll your mouse over the pictures, you can see their captions.
I BREAK THE YOLKS, MAKE A SMILEY FACE
The episode kicked off with Locke making what looked like a damn good breakfast for Ben. In my opinion, all that was missing was a nicely brewed cup of Earl Grey. But alas, Ben was ungrateful and not only refused to eat, but also scoffed at the book Locke had chosen to bring him to help pass the time. Further, he then got under Locke's skin by saying just the right things to drive The Bald One crazy--picking at his insecurities about being the group's new leader. Talk about déjà vu (which Ben noted as well)... when Locke left Ben and then smashed the tray against the wall in frustration, it was just like when he threw silverware and plates in anger back in the hatch (in "Maternity Leave") when Ben was initially being held prisoner. Don't let him get to you, Locke!
And what should we make of the book that Locke picked to give his prisoner? It was VALIS by Philip K. Dick. You can click the link in the previous sentence if you want more details about its plot, but here's Amazon.com's description: "a fool's search for God, who turns out to be a virus, a joke, and a mental hologram transmitted from an orbiting satellite." I immediately wondered if there were parallels we were supposed to draw with Locke's search for Jacob. The other thing of interest about the book is that there is a child, Sophia, in the story who is supposed to be "the messiah incarnate." Considering that baby Aaron has been thrust back into the spotlight in this episode, I thought that perhaps that was a hint as well. More on Aaron later, though. If nothing else, after reading about Philip K. Dick, I think I would like his books. Score another point for Lost encouraging people to read...
One last comment on this scene... didn't you love Locke's shout-out to all of us rewind/slo mo/freeze-frame-crazy fans: "You might catch something you missed the second time around." Ain't that the truth.
NOW THAT I'M HERE, NOW THAT YOU'RE HERE
Wasn't it hilarious to see all the Losties settling into their new digs in the Barracks? I need one of those Dharma mugs that Kate had on the porch ASAP. When Kate came over to visit Sawyer, I seriously almost peed my pants when Hurley popped in Xanadu, as it is one of my all-time favorite movies. Yes, it is awful, but it is so awful that it is also AWESOME. It just so happens, God's honest truth, that I am going to see Xanadu on Broadway in a few weeks. You can bet that I will write up the experience on According to e afterward. But for now, what you need to know is that Xanadu is about Greek muses who get transported from another time and dimension to southern California, circa 1980, via a "portal" of sorts that exists on a nearby mural (don't ask). One of the muses, Kira (Olivia Newton-John), falls in love with this studly artist dude, Sonny, but their love is not meant to be, as Zeus (her father) wants her back where she belongs. There is also a lot of rollerskating and singing, a random cartoon scene, and Gene Kelly. Yeah, I said it! GENE KELLY.
Just as Cuse and Lindelof drew comparisons between the Island and Narnia, Oz and Wonderland in their 2/18 podcast, I believe Xanadu was meant to be an additional hint about what's going on overall with the Island. Shout-out to one of my readers who speculated that perhaps Ben's secret room contains a portal off the Island, just like the wardrobe transports the children to Narnia in the C.S. Lewis series. Maybe Hurley's choice of Xanadu, with its focus on a portal between worlds, was meant to be similar clue to the real purpose of Ben's secret room. Overall, Xanadu is yet another story specifically mentioned during the show that is connected to the real world, but that also has a supernatural element. Not to mention a rockin' soundtrack--ELO forever, baby! There's even a song called... are you ready? "Suspended in Time." BAM!
Xanadu is also the title of a famous poem about a tropical paradise. But that's not quite as interesting as the movie.
But let's not let my enthusiasm for Xanadu overshadow what was by far the funniest moment of the night, which took place while the theme song from the movie was playing in the background... Sawyer pulling out the Wine In A Box for his lady love. I was dying.
CAUGHT IN THE ACT
Despite Locke's warnings, Kate follows through with her plan to visit Miles. (One quick side note--I'm not so sure that Locke was all bloody because he just killed a chicken. But I don't even want to think about what else the blood could be from.) Kate succeeds in getting precious time alone with Miles... and all she cares about is whether or not the freighter peeps know what she had done back in the real world? That seemed kind of lame to me, but I guess if she was really struggling with the decision to either stay on the Island or leave, she would want to know if Sawyer's prediction (that she would be hauled off to jail upon her return) had any merit.
There were tons of other strange things that went on during the scenes with Miles. For example, why did he say that he was "exactly where he wanted to be"? Some assume that Miles is Ben's mole, and is fine with being held prisoner because he's getting to learn more about Locke, Ben's new nemesis. Others believe that Miles is happy with his situation because he is still in fact trying to capture Ben, and now he's at least closer in proximity to The Sneaky One than he was before. I'm not sure what to make of his comment, personally.
Next was the bizarre Miles/Ben confrontation, during which Miles said he would tell his employer that Ben was dead if Ben gave him $3.2 million. What?
So, do we believe that Miles is just purely in it for the money, and will convince his employer that Benry is six feet under in exchange for the millions? Right now, this is the way I'm leaning, for two reasons: 1) We saw in Miles' flashback how he just wanted to find the drug money during his ghostbusting of the grandson. Money is a major motivator for him, and he's not necessarily the most ethical of people. So I don't think it's a stretch to believe that he will do what's best for himself. If he can convince his employer that Ben is dead, he'll probably still get paid for the Island mission, in addition to getting $3.2 million from Ben. 2) We know that Ben is still around in the future and is still fighting the good fight against "the bad guys," with Sayid's help. So perhaps Miles succeeds in convincing everyone that Ben is dead. That would explain why Elsa's group couldn't figure out who Sayid was working for--they truly believed that Ben had been killed.
Others fans think, as I mentioned earlier, that Miles is Ben's mole, and that the conversation they had was in code. I agree that this is at least a possibility. "$3.2 million" is a pretty weird number, and it could have meant something specific to Ben, who then covered by saying "Why not $3.3 or $3.4?" Never underestimate the trickery of Ben! Miles also then told Kate everything that he knew about her, and that he got the information from files his team pulled together on everyone on the Flight 815 manifest. Who else is known for gathering information on people? Ben. So there is a chance that Miles has been working with Ben all along and that only he knows the information about all the Lostaways, whereas the rest of the freighter crew does not.
Also remember that Ben claimed to know who Miles' employer was, which could either be interpreted to mean that Ben knows Abaddon, or knows the overall organization for which Abaddon works. Or it could've been a complete lie.
The question that still remains, however, is why Miles was chosen for the mission in the first place. Whoever his employer is must know something about the properties of the Island and figured that Miles' special abilities would be needed. But they must not have realized what a sketchball Miles is and how he would throw the mission for his own benefit if he got the chance.
One last thing we can glean from this scene is that Ben is indeed an international man of mystery---yeah, baby! Miles made it clear that, unlike the Lostaways, he knew all about Ben's background, and what Ben "can do." There's no way Miles would be asking for that much money if he didn't think Ben could get his hands on it. And at the end, sure enough, Ben caved and said he would need a week to get the funds in order. I guess that means Ben's pretty sure he can bust out of his cell in the near future...
THERE'S ANOTHER NEW SHERIFF IN TOWN. Y'ALL BEST GET USED TO IT.
I pledged last week that I would stop doubting my man Locke. So I'm not going to... but I can't lie and say it's been easy after this latest installment of madness. While Locke claimed to Kate that he was running something in between a democracy and dictatorship, it sure seems like he's leaning more toward the latter. As always, however, a deep insecurity belies Locke's tough-guy exterior. He let Ben's mocking words get to him at the beginning of the episode, he appeared to be overly concerned with what Sawyer and others thought about his leadership abilities,
and he was completely duped by Sawyer shortly thereafter because at his core, Locke's still pretty naive (it's clear that Locke never caught on to the fact that Sawyer was helping Kate the whole time).
While I don't agree with Locke's "iron fist" mentality and don't like that he banished Kate from Othersville, you can bet good money that I was thrilled when he gave the smack-down to Miles. Even though it was a little too over-the-top for my taste (a live grenade in someone's mouth!?!), at least it happened to Miles, right? He looked pretty freaked out--maybe it will scare the ghostbusting abilities right out of him!
I am not doubting Locke anymore, though. It's pretty clear from all of the flash-forwards to date that everyone who left the Island is either miserable, or is involved in a huge cover-up that is wearing on them. So even if Locke does end up causing something unfortunate to happen in the near future, as I keep dreading, it's only because the others didn't listen to his warnings in the first place.
SUSPICIOUS MINDS
Sun is starting to realize that Locke may be right, too. After a strange scene with Jin where she talks about where to raise her baby (rather than their baby, as Jin points out), she begins to question the intentions of the freighter team. Did you catch that guilty look down at the ground that Daniel had when Jack said, "They can make arrangements to get all of us off this Island." D'oh! Sun follows up with asking why Kate would stay with Locke, if Locke were in fact as crazy as Jack claims him to be.
The fact that the group is getting restless helps motivate Jack and Juliet to push Charlotte to call the emergency number they have for the freighter. It's extremely strange that no one's been answering on the main line, isn't it? (Charlotte specifically said, "Minkowski's not answering.") Charlotte agrees to put the call on speakerphone, and we learn that the helicopter has not arrived at the freighter, even though it left the previous night. Frank said they didn't have much fuel left... so what in the heck is going on? Some think that the helicopter's delay has to do with the time differential that Daniel noticed... and so what should normally be a twenty-minute flight to the freighter may end up being a significantly longer trip.
Others swear that Regina must be lying and that the team has in fact made it back to the freighter. If the crew on the ship is up to no good, they would know that Daniel and Charlotte would understand what is going on, whereas Jack and the others would freak out that they'd either been stranded, or that the helicopter went down and killed Sayid and Desmond. Others think that Frank might be Ben's mole, and has taken Sayid and Desmond to another location where they'll be safe. I would love if that turned out to be the case--Frank is the last person I would've suspected.
SO IF YOU DON'T MIND ME SAYIN', I CAN SEE YOU'RE OUT OF ACES
Speaking of the mysterious helicopter team, what was up with that weird scene between Daniel and Charlotte where he was trying to either guess or remember three playing cards she had turned face down? At first I thought that we had received some insight into Daniel's head case-ness... that he had some sort of bizarre memory issue and that Charlotte was trying to do exercises with him to help him. I figured that he had originally seen the three cards, and then she turned them over and then he had to repeat back what he had just seen. After all, his namesake, the scientist Michael Faraday, had memory issues brought on by a battle with mental illness. And Charlotte looked sympathetic and sad for Daniel when he couldn't get all three right. She tried to cheer him up by saying that he had "made progress."
But upon watching the scene again, Charlotte also clearly says "time," like they were supposed to wait a certain amount of time before Daniel made his guess. Now, that could still fit with my original theory. Maybe he has some sort of memory problem where after a specific period of time elapses, he has recall issues. Or similarly, maybe Charlotte didn't want him to take several minutes to try to remember what he saw.
Other ideas are that he never saw the cards in the first place, and was trying to use some sort of psychic power to guess what the correct cards were. Yet another possibility is that the original cards she turned over actually switched to new cards because of some weird property on the Island. Or maybe the cards switched because Daniel willed them to switch? Remember back in Season One where Hurley commented that Walt ALWAYS rolled sixes when they played backgammon? Perhaps Daniel is also "special" like Walt and can somehow cause the cards to change?
All I know is that even though that scene was a short one, it was important. Finally, did you catch that one of the cards was the Queen of Diamonds? Or, a Red Queen. Like in Alice in Wonderland...
WHY GO HOME? WHY GO HOME?
Back in Othersville, Kate walks in on Sawyer reading The Invention of Morel by Adolfo Bioy Casares, which is about (ironically enough) a fugitive hiding out on a deserted island somewhere in the South Pacific. Kate tells Sawyer that she is definitely not pregnant, and that Locke has banished her from the Barracks. Sawyer's like, "Um, do you honestly think that I can't take Baldy? I'm insulted!" For reasons unknown, Kate still chooses to leave. How many of you fear that we witnessed the last time Kate and Sawyer ever see each other? I do. And I, for the record, never even cared about who Kate "chose," because both Jack and Sawyer are way too good for her, in my opinion. But I still think she's crazy to leave the Island of her own will, now that she knows she won't die from a pregnancy, and that she is still deemed a fugitive to the outside world. I hope and pray that they give us a better reason for her leaving the Island than, "Locke told her to go away."
Some think that there is a possibility that Kate is lying to Sawyer about not being pregnant, and after testing him to see what his reaction would be, she realized that she did need to leave the Island because he didn't want a child. But since she never mentioned having more than one child in the flash-forwards, and since we know that the child she did have in the future was not hers biologically, I don't think she was lying to Sawyer.
OK, that wraps up everything that came to pass on the Island in this episode. Oops, I thought of one last thing...if you were thinking that "Eggtown" referred to the fact that Locke cooked Ben the last two eggs for breakfast (as I did), you may be interested in another interpretation of the episode's title. You can read the full story behind the term here, but in short, it is used to describe "a deal with undesirable outcomes in either case." Fitting, no?
OH WHAT A TANGLED WEB WE WEAVE
Right away in Kate's first flash-forward, we got confirmation that she is indeed one of the Oceanic Six. Many had wondered if, since her meeting with Jack was on the down-low in the Season Three finale, she had escaped the Island but wanted to avoid being captured for her past crimes, so therefore it was not made known that she was one of the famous survivors. Now we know that what actually happened is that she was indeed put on trial, in spite of her new notoriety. The fact that she was charged, however, wasn't what was interesting. The details we learned through seeing her trial were.
The first shocker was that Clean-Shaven Jack was called as a character witness. The second shocker was what he said:
- There were originally eight survivors of the crash (implying that two died)
- Kate took care of everyone while they struggled to survive on an island in the South Pacific.
- He no longer is in love with her.
All of these statements are worth analyzing a bit...
Eight Original Survivors: There is definitely a reason that the Oceanic Six have been told to say that two people who initially had survived the crash ended up dying. Those two people must have been responsible for doing or knowing something that the other six couldn't have done or known on their own--either in order to survive or in order to be rescued. I personally have no idea who the two survivors in question might be.
One theory is that since we now know that Aaron made it off the Island and that Claire seemingly didn't, and that there may be too many witnesses who knew that Kate was not eight months pregnant when she got on Flight 815, maybe they said that Claire died after giving birth to Aaron, and so therefore the rest of the world knows that Aaron is not Kate's biological son. But if that were the case, would Kate's mom still want to see the baby so badly? I would hope that she still would, but others think that it is clear that everyone thinks that Kate is Aaron's birth mother.
An Island in the South Pacific: I think this may just be a writing goof, but since it's my job to report what's been said out there on the message boards, I should point out that some people have noted the inconsistency between the news report about the Flight 815 wreckage that we saw in the season premiere (which said that the plane was found in the Indian Ocean), and Jack's statement (which said that they were in the South Pacific). The theory is that Jack screwed up what he was supposed to say and that someone's going to latch onto it and start unraveling the mystery, leading to the situation that causes Jack to become so distraught in the future. I didn't think twice about this discrepancy, but if you have any other theories, let me know.
Jack No Longer Loves Kate: While he later told her that he didn't mean it when he said "Not anymore," what really is confusing is why the lawyer would ask Jack about his feelings for Kate in the first place. To me, this means that the story that was concocted for the O6 specifically mentioned something about Jack and Kate being romantically involved. Otherwise, why would a lawyer bring that up if she wasn't positive that it had already been substantiated that Jack was at one point in love with Kate? Granted, all of the trial scenes were absolute crap in the sense that they would never happen in real life (ask a lawyer to explain this to you, all of the lawyers on the message boards are upset!), but I'm positive that this line of questioning was there for a purpose.
Some people think that the world at large believes that Aaron is Jack's baby. Seeing as how the kid has blond hair and both Jack and Kate have dark hair, that seems like a stretch. Also, why would Jack be brought as a character witness if he doesn't even display the good character to want to see his own kid? All I know is that the lawyer asked him about his love for Kate for a reason, and it has something to do with the made-up story that the O6 told to the media when they returned home. (But this theory does make me wonder who Kate is claiming the father to be...)
One last comment on this particular trial scene... why did Kate cut Jack off? He was doing a good job making her out to be the hero, and she's never had major issues with bending the truth in the past. Can she perhaps not bear it when it's Jack who's lying for her?
I'M A BITCH, I'M A LOVER, I'M A CHILD, I'M A MOTHER
In another unexpected scene, Kate's sickly mother comes to talk with her, and says that she does not want to testify against her. It is the first time they've spoken or seen each other since Kate visited her mother in the hospital, only to have the policed summoned. But, ah, the power of grandchildren. Kate's mom is desperate to see this latest member of Austin clan, but Kate will not hear of it.
The big question is: WHY? Is Kate still that angry at her mother, especially when her mom was the key to Kate avoiding a jail sentence, or is there a specific reason she doesn't want Mrs. Austin to lay eyes on Aaron?
On another note, many fans are assuming that this sentence from Kate's mom is a clue about the overall timeline: "I've had six months to live for the past four years." I didn't read too much into that statement... I think it was just meant to help us understand her mother's motivations for wanting to finally make peace and move forward. But once again, if you have reason to think otherwise, by all means, clue the rest of us in!
LOVE ME, LOVE MY BAY-BEE
Kate going on and on about her son in this episode reminded me of Claire going on and on about her "bay-bee" all the time in Seasons One, Two and Three. At least the two women have that in common. So much so that Kate will not hang out with Jack in the future unless he comes to visit Aaron. Jack doesn't seem up for that just yet. Chalk up another "Say What?" moment...
Why would Jack want to avoid visiting Aaron? The possible answers hint at why Kate even has Aaron in the first place.
Theories include:
- Claire was killed in the escape from the Island and Jack feels so guilty about it that he can't bring himself to see Aaron.
- Aaron was forcefully taken from Claire and Jack can't bear to reminded of it.
- Claire is either dead or still on the Island, but either way, Aaron reminds Jack of his own time on the Island, which he wants to forget. Kind of like how he was so adamant to Hurley that they would never go back and stormed off once Hurley mentioned it.
- Jack found out that Aaron is his nephew (remember, Christian Shephard was a mack daddy and fathered Claire, too) and seeing him would bring back bad memories of Zombie Dad, and/or intensify any feelings of guilt over whatever happened to Claire.
- Aaron has special powers that freak the hell out of Jack. (On that note, how many of you thought the baby was going to be either an alien or a little wizard or have a strange appearance? I did.)
I also was bracing myself to see a 15-year-old, or something weird like that, because of the possible time differential on the Island. This was when I had been thinking that the baby was obviously Sawyer's. This show makes me love being wrong.
ABSENCE DOES NOT MAKE THE HEART GROW FONDER
There was a lot that drove me crazy (in a good way) in this episode, but one of the things I'm now wondering about the most is what happened to make Jack and Kate go from friendly, out-in-the-open meetings and talks of rendezvousing for coffee to the strained state their relationship was in during the final scene of "Through the Looking Glass?" At that point in time (which many believe to be April 2007, based on the newspaper clip Jack had), Kate had told Jack not to call her anymore, and when he finally did reach her, they had to meet late at night in the middle of nowhere outside the airport. Something must have caused a rift between the time of Kate's trial (which I'll speculate on in a second) and Jack's "WE HAVE TO GO BACK!" plea.
Perhaps shortly after Kate's trial, Jack started being haunted by visions, as Hurley had been? Perhaps others of The Six had been killed after slipping from the agreed-upon story? All that is clear is that Kate didn't want to go back to the Island at either point in time in the future. She agreed, without hesitation, to a 10-year probation where she needed to remain in-state. In her airport scene with Jack last season, she mentioned that "he" was going to wonder where she was. There seems to be some level of agreement among viewers that the "he" is indeed Aaron. Off-Island Kate is the exact opposite of On-Island Kate: she wants to stay put.
GUYS, WHEN ARE WE?
Not only do we now know that Kate's son is none other than Aaron, but we also know that Aaron's old enough to talk and sleep in a bed rather than in a crib. Lostpedia reports that according to the script, Aaron is two years old. I have consulted my baby expert, DY, and she concurs with this assessment. Aaron is believed to have been born on November 1, 2004. We know that right now on the Island, it is around Christmas Day 2004. If Aaron is now 2 years old, that would put the current time of Kate's flash-forward to be around November of 2006. That leaves less than six months for her relationship with Jack to fall apart (not to mention for Jack to descend into drug-addicted madness and grow a huge-ass beard).
Someone commented to me that they had heard that the producers said that the April 2007 date on the newspaper Jack had in "Through the Looking Glass" was a mistake... but I have not seen that anywhere. If someone actually has PROOF that the April 2007 date on the newspaper clipping in the Season Three finale was a production error, please post it. Otherwise, I'm going to continue to assume that that date is correct.
Back to when Kate's trial is... I know that the judicial system is slow and everything, but doesn't it seem strange that her trial wouldn't get underway until nearly two years had past since she returned from the Island? And that she would still be that famous at that point in time? We all know celebrity is fleeting! It makes me think that the Oceanic Six returned home much later than we may have previously assumed. Meaning, if it's near the end of 2004 on the Island right now, they're probably not being taken directly home from the freighter. It's possible that another whole year may pass where the chosen six are re-programmed or something--where they're offered a financial deal and given a story to memorize and whatnot. At the time of Kate's trial, Jack seems to have no problem reciting the lie, whereas Kate says (paraphrasing): "I've heard you tell that story so many times, I'm beginning to think you believe it." She doesn't appear to be comfortable with the front they're putting up.
Another possibility is that, because time on the Island may be passing more slowly than it does elsewhere, the three months the Lostaways have been gone may in fact be much longer. I don't really know how that would affect Aaron's age and growth, and I don't even want to think about it because it's so confusing!
NOW LET ME BLOW YA MIND
So... many... questions... left! But for whatever reason, the multitude of questions raised in "Eggtown" didn't depress me like they did with "The Economist." Yes, it was freaky as hell when Kate said "Aaron," and it's depressing to think that Claire might have kicked the bucket. I was never a big fan of Claire (because of the whole "bay-bee" thing I mentioned earlier), but it's a little too dark for my taste to have the mother of a newborn baby killed on this show. I hope that's not what happened. So until we know for sure what went down, I will try to think positively and will focus my attention on everything else I've already discussed, as well as these remaining issues:
The Aaron Cover-Up Story
If the rest of the world thinks Aaron is Kate's biological son, then one of three things must have happened:
1) Assuming that there's no time difference on the Island and that the age Kate claims Aaron to be (which they haven't officially told us yet) is actually the age he is, there were either no witnesses to the fact that Kate was not eight months pregnant on the flight, or "they" got rid of all the witnesses who would've known this. There were also people who knew that Claire was pregnant on the flight who may have been able to put two and two together, and therefore those witnesses would've had to have been silenced. Because someone should've been able to figure out that if Kate wasn't eight months pregnant on September 22, 2004, there's no way she could have come back from the Island with a newborn.
2) As mentioned above, perhaps time moved more slowly on the Island. The Six would've been clued in that it's much later in time than they thought it was, and therefore Kate could easily pretend that Aaron was hers, as she didn't have to be pregnant (or at least not showing that she was pregnant) during the flight in order to come back home with a baby, if she was gone for significantly longer than nine months.
3) Kate could just be lying about Aaron's age. Like I said above, even though Lostpedia listed the boy as two years old, on the show Kate never mentioned his actual age (and even if she did, we couldn't trust that that is his real age until we are able to more confidently piece together the overall timeline).
Desmond's Vision
The whole reason Charlie accepted his suicide mission was because Desmond said he had a vision of Claire and Aaron getting into a helicopter and leaving the Island. Since Des hasn't given us reason to distrust him, I believe that we will see this scene unfold. Which may mean that whatever causes Kate to end up with Aaron happens after they're off the Island but before they return home. Or Des was lying and we're going to find out that he's a total prick.
Devil Baby Possibilities
One of the trippiest Lost episodes to date was "Raised by Another," in which Claire finds out that some bad stuff would go down if she was not the one to raise her child:
MALKIN (psychic): It is crucial that you, yourself, raise this child.
CLAIRE: You mean with Thomas? Is he..
MALKIN: The father of this child will play no part in it's life, nor yours.
CLAIRE: So what exactly are you saying?
MALKIN: This child parented by anyone else, anyone other than you -- danger surrounds this baby. . .
CLAIRE: Danger?
MALKIN: Your nature, your spirit, your goodness, must be an influence in the development of this child.
CLAIRE: If Thomas and I don't get back together I'm putting this baby up for adoption. I just wanted to find out what would give the baby the happiest life.
MALKIN: There is no happy life -- not for this child, not without you.
CLAIRE: I don't. . .
MALKIN: It can't be another. You mustn't allow another to raise your baby.
CLAIRE: Okay, great. Thanks for taking my 200.
MALKIN: Oh, no look, take it. Ms. Littleton; I am begging you just to consider...
CLAIRE: I can't raise this child by myself.
MALKIN: You have to listen to me.
CLAIRE: Thanks for your time, and my money back.
MALKIN: Ms. Littleton, please. The baby needs your protection. Ms. Littleton, please.
Now we know that, at least for some period of time, if not for the rest of his life, Kate is raising Aaron. I am really scared that this kid is going to unleash some demonic powers on the world at any moment!
Does Aaron count as a member of the Oceanic Six?
They didn't exactly spell it out for us. If there is something weird going on with time and if "the story" is that Kate got pregnant with Aaron and delivered him all while on the Island, then he wouldn't count as a Flight 815 passenger. And even if it was known that he was adopted by Kate after his birth mother died, Aaron still wasn't on the flight manifest and wasn't born at the time of the crash.
We ALL KNOW how cheap the airlines are... do you really think they're going to pay a settlement out to someone who hadn't even purchased a full-fare ticket?
Hee hee, I kid, I kid. There are arguments for both sides of this issue. Many people think it's extremely obvious that Aaron should be counted as one of The Six because, although he wasn't born yet, he was alive in the womb during the crash... and then suffered the hardship of spending his first few months of life on a deserted island. I can see The Powers That Be over at CBS getting all sorts of bad ideas now. Survivor: Newborns vs. Toddlers!
The Rest of The Six
Depending on how Aaron is counted, there are either one or two remaining members of The Six to be revealed. I had always assumed that Sun would get off because of her pregnancy. Now I'm not so sure. There has been absolutely no rhyme nor reason for the first four confirmed members of the group, so I have stuck to my oath made a few weeks ago to not try to figure it out.
I Need a Bushy Eyebrow Fix!
Why the hell haven't they shown Ageless Richard, Cindy, all of the kids and all of the other Others over at the Temple yet? I think we're supposed to forget about them so that when they do show up it will be a big surprise. But who can forget about those ridiculously long eyelashes?
No More Food?
Locke mentioned that he had used up the last two eggs. Then he claimed to have killed a chicken (which would seem foolhardy if there were no more eggs). All of this made me think about the food drop we saw in the past. I believe those food drops were linked to the Countdown Clock O' Doom in the original hatch, which was one of many things Locke blew up. So are they now running out of food? But even more importantly, wouldn't the group who was performing the food drops have realized that something had gone wrong on the Island? Could the organization behind the freighter team have been involved in the food drops before? Or were the drops something that Ben had arranged through some of his contacts off of the Island?
Whew, that's it. See what happens when I like an episode? The length of the write-up increases exponentially.
BEST LINES OF THE EPISODE
Kate: You got blood.
Locke: I just... killed a chicken.
Hurley: No, I moved him to the boat house--[pause]--You just totally Scooby-Dooed me, didn't you?
Kate: Sorry.
[Jack grimaces at another busy signal]
Juliet: Maybe we should try a number other than the boat... like 911?
Sawyer: I know it's in a box, but... pretty damn good wine! I tested it.
Sawyer: She talked to that guy... Bruce Lee from the freighter.
PARTY ALL THE TIME
I hosted a party at my place ("The Hatch") for "Eggtown." If you'd like to see just how crazy I am, click here for the pictures.
Until next week,
- e
I'm going to get the Island events out of the way first this time around, as the majority of things to theorize over happened in the flashbacks. And for those of you who are new to my write-ups, if you roll your mouse over the pictures, you can see their captions.
I BREAK THE YOLKS, MAKE A SMILEY FACE
The episode kicked off with Locke making what looked like a damn good breakfast for Ben. In my opinion, all that was missing was a nicely brewed cup of Earl Grey. But alas, Ben was ungrateful and not only refused to eat, but also scoffed at the book Locke had chosen to bring him to help pass the time. Further, he then got under Locke's skin by saying just the right things to drive The Bald One crazy--picking at his insecurities about being the group's new leader. Talk about déjà vu (which Ben noted as well)... when Locke left Ben and then smashed the tray against the wall in frustration, it was just like when he threw silverware and plates in anger back in the hatch (in "Maternity Leave") when Ben was initially being held prisoner. Don't let him get to you, Locke!
And what should we make of the book that Locke picked to give his prisoner? It was VALIS by Philip K. Dick. You can click the link in the previous sentence if you want more details about its plot, but here's Amazon.com's description: "a fool's search for God, who turns out to be a virus, a joke, and a mental hologram transmitted from an orbiting satellite." I immediately wondered if there were parallels we were supposed to draw with Locke's search for Jacob. The other thing of interest about the book is that there is a child, Sophia, in the story who is supposed to be "the messiah incarnate." Considering that baby Aaron has been thrust back into the spotlight in this episode, I thought that perhaps that was a hint as well. More on Aaron later, though. If nothing else, after reading about Philip K. Dick, I think I would like his books. Score another point for Lost encouraging people to read...One last comment on this scene... didn't you love Locke's shout-out to all of us rewind/slo mo/freeze-frame-crazy fans: "You might catch something you missed the second time around." Ain't that the truth.
NOW THAT I'M HERE, NOW THAT YOU'RE HERE
Wasn't it hilarious to see all the Losties settling into their new digs in the Barracks? I need one of those Dharma mugs that Kate had on the porch ASAP. When Kate came over to visit Sawyer, I seriously almost peed my pants when Hurley popped in Xanadu, as it is one of my all-time favorite movies. Yes, it is awful, but it is so awful that it is also AWESOME. It just so happens, God's honest truth, that I am going to see Xanadu on Broadway in a few weeks. You can bet that I will write up the experience on According to e afterward. But for now, what you need to know is that Xanadu is about Greek muses who get transported from another time and dimension to southern California, circa 1980, via a "portal" of sorts that exists on a nearby mural (don't ask). One of the muses, Kira (Olivia Newton-John), falls in love with this studly artist dude, Sonny, but their love is not meant to be, as Zeus (her father) wants her back where she belongs. There is also a lot of rollerskating and singing, a random cartoon scene, and Gene Kelly. Yeah, I said it! GENE KELLY.Just as Cuse and Lindelof drew comparisons between the Island and Narnia, Oz and Wonderland in their 2/18 podcast, I believe Xanadu was meant to be an additional hint about what's going on overall with the Island. Shout-out to one of my readers who speculated that perhaps Ben's secret room contains a portal off the Island, just like the wardrobe transports the children to Narnia in the C.S. Lewis series. Maybe Hurley's choice of Xanadu, with its focus on a portal between worlds, was meant to be similar clue to the real purpose of Ben's secret room. Overall, Xanadu is yet another story specifically mentioned during the show that is connected to the real world, but that also has a supernatural element. Not to mention a rockin' soundtrack--ELO forever, baby! There's even a song called... are you ready? "Suspended in Time." BAM!
Xanadu is also the title of a famous poem about a tropical paradise. But that's not quite as interesting as the movie.But let's not let my enthusiasm for Xanadu overshadow what was by far the funniest moment of the night, which took place while the theme song from the movie was playing in the background... Sawyer pulling out the Wine In A Box for his lady love. I was dying.
CAUGHT IN THE ACT
Despite Locke's warnings, Kate follows through with her plan to visit Miles. (One quick side note--I'm not so sure that Locke was all bloody because he just killed a chicken. But I don't even want to think about what else the blood could be from.) Kate succeeds in getting precious time alone with Miles... and all she cares about is whether or not the freighter peeps know what she had done back in the real world? That seemed kind of lame to me, but I guess if she was really struggling with the decision to either stay on the Island or leave, she would want to know if Sawyer's prediction (that she would be hauled off to jail upon her return) had any merit.There were tons of other strange things that went on during the scenes with Miles. For example, why did he say that he was "exactly where he wanted to be"? Some assume that Miles is Ben's mole, and is fine with being held prisoner because he's getting to learn more about Locke, Ben's new nemesis. Others believe that Miles is happy with his situation because he is still in fact trying to capture Ben, and now he's at least closer in proximity to The Sneaky One than he was before. I'm not sure what to make of his comment, personally.
Next was the bizarre Miles/Ben confrontation, during which Miles said he would tell his employer that Ben was dead if Ben gave him $3.2 million. What?So, do we believe that Miles is just purely in it for the money, and will convince his employer that Benry is six feet under in exchange for the millions? Right now, this is the way I'm leaning, for two reasons: 1) We saw in Miles' flashback how he just wanted to find the drug money during his ghostbusting of the grandson. Money is a major motivator for him, and he's not necessarily the most ethical of people. So I don't think it's a stretch to believe that he will do what's best for himself. If he can convince his employer that Ben is dead, he'll probably still get paid for the Island mission, in addition to getting $3.2 million from Ben. 2) We know that Ben is still around in the future and is still fighting the good fight against "the bad guys," with Sayid's help. So perhaps Miles succeeds in convincing everyone that Ben is dead. That would explain why Elsa's group couldn't figure out who Sayid was working for--they truly believed that Ben had been killed.
Others fans think, as I mentioned earlier, that Miles is Ben's mole, and that the conversation they had was in code. I agree that this is at least a possibility. "$3.2 million" is a pretty weird number, and it could have meant something specific to Ben, who then covered by saying "Why not $3.3 or $3.4?" Never underestimate the trickery of Ben! Miles also then told Kate everything that he knew about her, and that he got the information from files his team pulled together on everyone on the Flight 815 manifest. Who else is known for gathering information on people? Ben. So there is a chance that Miles has been working with Ben all along and that only he knows the information about all the Lostaways, whereas the rest of the freighter crew does not.
Also remember that Ben claimed to know who Miles' employer was, which could either be interpreted to mean that Ben knows Abaddon, or knows the overall organization for which Abaddon works. Or it could've been a complete lie.
The question that still remains, however, is why Miles was chosen for the mission in the first place. Whoever his employer is must know something about the properties of the Island and figured that Miles' special abilities would be needed. But they must not have realized what a sketchball Miles is and how he would throw the mission for his own benefit if he got the chance.One last thing we can glean from this scene is that Ben is indeed an international man of mystery---yeah, baby! Miles made it clear that, unlike the Lostaways, he knew all about Ben's background, and what Ben "can do." There's no way Miles would be asking for that much money if he didn't think Ben could get his hands on it. And at the end, sure enough, Ben caved and said he would need a week to get the funds in order. I guess that means Ben's pretty sure he can bust out of his cell in the near future...
THERE'S ANOTHER NEW SHERIFF IN TOWN. Y'ALL BEST GET USED TO IT.
I pledged last week that I would stop doubting my man Locke. So I'm not going to... but I can't lie and say it's been easy after this latest installment of madness. While Locke claimed to Kate that he was running something in between a democracy and dictatorship, it sure seems like he's leaning more toward the latter. As always, however, a deep insecurity belies Locke's tough-guy exterior. He let Ben's mocking words get to him at the beginning of the episode, he appeared to be overly concerned with what Sawyer and others thought about his leadership abilities,
and he was completely duped by Sawyer shortly thereafter because at his core, Locke's still pretty naive (it's clear that Locke never caught on to the fact that Sawyer was helping Kate the whole time).While I don't agree with Locke's "iron fist" mentality and don't like that he banished Kate from Othersville, you can bet good money that I was thrilled when he gave the smack-down to Miles. Even though it was a little too over-the-top for my taste (a live grenade in someone's mouth!?!), at least it happened to Miles, right? He looked pretty freaked out--maybe it will scare the ghostbusting abilities right out of him!
I am not doubting Locke anymore, though. It's pretty clear from all of the flash-forwards to date that everyone who left the Island is either miserable, or is involved in a huge cover-up that is wearing on them. So even if Locke does end up causing something unfortunate to happen in the near future, as I keep dreading, it's only because the others didn't listen to his warnings in the first place.
SUSPICIOUS MINDS
Sun is starting to realize that Locke may be right, too. After a strange scene with Jin where she talks about where to raise her baby (rather than their baby, as Jin points out), she begins to question the intentions of the freighter team. Did you catch that guilty look down at the ground that Daniel had when Jack said, "They can make arrangements to get all of us off this Island." D'oh! Sun follows up with asking why Kate would stay with Locke, if Locke were in fact as crazy as Jack claims him to be.The fact that the group is getting restless helps motivate Jack and Juliet to push Charlotte to call the emergency number they have for the freighter. It's extremely strange that no one's been answering on the main line, isn't it? (Charlotte specifically said, "Minkowski's not answering.") Charlotte agrees to put the call on speakerphone, and we learn that the helicopter has not arrived at the freighter, even though it left the previous night. Frank said they didn't have much fuel left... so what in the heck is going on? Some think that the helicopter's delay has to do with the time differential that Daniel noticed... and so what should normally be a twenty-minute flight to the freighter may end up being a significantly longer trip.
Others swear that Regina must be lying and that the team has in fact made it back to the freighter. If the crew on the ship is up to no good, they would know that Daniel and Charlotte would understand what is going on, whereas Jack and the others would freak out that they'd either been stranded, or that the helicopter went down and killed Sayid and Desmond. Others think that Frank might be Ben's mole, and has taken Sayid and Desmond to another location where they'll be safe. I would love if that turned out to be the case--Frank is the last person I would've suspected.
SO IF YOU DON'T MIND ME SAYIN', I CAN SEE YOU'RE OUT OF ACES
Speaking of the mysterious helicopter team, what was up with that weird scene between Daniel and Charlotte where he was trying to either guess or remember three playing cards she had turned face down? At first I thought that we had received some insight into Daniel's head case-ness... that he had some sort of bizarre memory issue and that Charlotte was trying to do exercises with him to help him. I figured that he had originally seen the three cards, and then she turned them over and then he had to repeat back what he had just seen. After all, his namesake, the scientist Michael Faraday, had memory issues brought on by a battle with mental illness. And Charlotte looked sympathetic and sad for Daniel when he couldn't get all three right. She tried to cheer him up by saying that he had "made progress."
But upon watching the scene again, Charlotte also clearly says "time," like they were supposed to wait a certain amount of time before Daniel made his guess. Now, that could still fit with my original theory. Maybe he has some sort of memory problem where after a specific period of time elapses, he has recall issues. Or similarly, maybe Charlotte didn't want him to take several minutes to try to remember what he saw.Other ideas are that he never saw the cards in the first place, and was trying to use some sort of psychic power to guess what the correct cards were. Yet another possibility is that the original cards she turned over actually switched to new cards because of some weird property on the Island. Or maybe the cards switched because Daniel willed them to switch? Remember back in Season One where Hurley commented that Walt ALWAYS rolled sixes when they played backgammon? Perhaps Daniel is also "special" like Walt and can somehow cause the cards to change?
All I know is that even though that scene was a short one, it was important. Finally, did you catch that one of the cards was the Queen of Diamonds? Or, a Red Queen. Like in Alice in Wonderland...
WHY GO HOME? WHY GO HOME?
Back in Othersville, Kate walks in on Sawyer reading The Invention of Morel by Adolfo Bioy Casares, which is about (ironically enough) a fugitive hiding out on a deserted island somewhere in the South Pacific. Kate tells Sawyer that she is definitely not pregnant, and that Locke has banished her from the Barracks. Sawyer's like, "Um, do you honestly think that I can't take Baldy? I'm insulted!" For reasons unknown, Kate still chooses to leave. How many of you fear that we witnessed the last time Kate and Sawyer ever see each other? I do. And I, for the record, never even cared about who Kate "chose," because both Jack and Sawyer are way too good for her, in my opinion. But I still think she's crazy to leave the Island of her own will, now that she knows she won't die from a pregnancy, and that she is still deemed a fugitive to the outside world. I hope and pray that they give us a better reason for her leaving the Island than, "Locke told her to go away."Some think that there is a possibility that Kate is lying to Sawyer about not being pregnant, and after testing him to see what his reaction would be, she realized that she did need to leave the Island because he didn't want a child. But since she never mentioned having more than one child in the flash-forwards, and since we know that the child she did have in the future was not hers biologically, I don't think she was lying to Sawyer.
OK, that wraps up everything that came to pass on the Island in this episode. Oops, I thought of one last thing...if you were thinking that "Eggtown" referred to the fact that Locke cooked Ben the last two eggs for breakfast (as I did), you may be interested in another interpretation of the episode's title. You can read the full story behind the term here, but in short, it is used to describe "a deal with undesirable outcomes in either case." Fitting, no?
OH WHAT A TANGLED WEB WE WEAVE
Right away in Kate's first flash-forward, we got confirmation that she is indeed one of the Oceanic Six. Many had wondered if, since her meeting with Jack was on the down-low in the Season Three finale, she had escaped the Island but wanted to avoid being captured for her past crimes, so therefore it was not made known that she was one of the famous survivors. Now we know that what actually happened is that she was indeed put on trial, in spite of her new notoriety. The fact that she was charged, however, wasn't what was interesting. The details we learned through seeing her trial were.
The first shocker was that Clean-Shaven Jack was called as a character witness. The second shocker was what he said:- There were originally eight survivors of the crash (implying that two died)
- Kate took care of everyone while they struggled to survive on an island in the South Pacific.
- He no longer is in love with her.
All of these statements are worth analyzing a bit...
Eight Original Survivors: There is definitely a reason that the Oceanic Six have been told to say that two people who initially had survived the crash ended up dying. Those two people must have been responsible for doing or knowing something that the other six couldn't have done or known on their own--either in order to survive or in order to be rescued. I personally have no idea who the two survivors in question might be.
One theory is that since we now know that Aaron made it off the Island and that Claire seemingly didn't, and that there may be too many witnesses who knew that Kate was not eight months pregnant when she got on Flight 815, maybe they said that Claire died after giving birth to Aaron, and so therefore the rest of the world knows that Aaron is not Kate's biological son. But if that were the case, would Kate's mom still want to see the baby so badly? I would hope that she still would, but others think that it is clear that everyone thinks that Kate is Aaron's birth mother.
An Island in the South Pacific: I think this may just be a writing goof, but since it's my job to report what's been said out there on the message boards, I should point out that some people have noted the inconsistency between the news report about the Flight 815 wreckage that we saw in the season premiere (which said that the plane was found in the Indian Ocean), and Jack's statement (which said that they were in the South Pacific). The theory is that Jack screwed up what he was supposed to say and that someone's going to latch onto it and start unraveling the mystery, leading to the situation that causes Jack to become so distraught in the future. I didn't think twice about this discrepancy, but if you have any other theories, let me know.
Jack No Longer Loves Kate: While he later told her that he didn't mean it when he said "Not anymore," what really is confusing is why the lawyer would ask Jack about his feelings for Kate in the first place. To me, this means that the story that was concocted for the O6 specifically mentioned something about Jack and Kate being romantically involved. Otherwise, why would a lawyer bring that up if she wasn't positive that it had already been substantiated that Jack was at one point in love with Kate? Granted, all of the trial scenes were absolute crap in the sense that they would never happen in real life (ask a lawyer to explain this to you, all of the lawyers on the message boards are upset!), but I'm positive that this line of questioning was there for a purpose.Some people think that the world at large believes that Aaron is Jack's baby. Seeing as how the kid has blond hair and both Jack and Kate have dark hair, that seems like a stretch. Also, why would Jack be brought as a character witness if he doesn't even display the good character to want to see his own kid? All I know is that the lawyer asked him about his love for Kate for a reason, and it has something to do with the made-up story that the O6 told to the media when they returned home. (But this theory does make me wonder who Kate is claiming the father to be...)
One last comment on this particular trial scene... why did Kate cut Jack off? He was doing a good job making her out to be the hero, and she's never had major issues with bending the truth in the past. Can she perhaps not bear it when it's Jack who's lying for her?
I'M A BITCH, I'M A LOVER, I'M A CHILD, I'M A MOTHER
In another unexpected scene, Kate's sickly mother comes to talk with her, and says that she does not want to testify against her. It is the first time they've spoken or seen each other since Kate visited her mother in the hospital, only to have the policed summoned. But, ah, the power of grandchildren. Kate's mom is desperate to see this latest member of Austin clan, but Kate will not hear of it.The big question is: WHY? Is Kate still that angry at her mother, especially when her mom was the key to Kate avoiding a jail sentence, or is there a specific reason she doesn't want Mrs. Austin to lay eyes on Aaron?
On another note, many fans are assuming that this sentence from Kate's mom is a clue about the overall timeline: "I've had six months to live for the past four years." I didn't read too much into that statement... I think it was just meant to help us understand her mother's motivations for wanting to finally make peace and move forward. But once again, if you have reason to think otherwise, by all means, clue the rest of us in!
LOVE ME, LOVE MY BAY-BEE
Kate going on and on about her son in this episode reminded me of Claire going on and on about her "bay-bee" all the time in Seasons One, Two and Three. At least the two women have that in common. So much so that Kate will not hang out with Jack in the future unless he comes to visit Aaron. Jack doesn't seem up for that just yet. Chalk up another "Say What?" moment...
Why would Jack want to avoid visiting Aaron? The possible answers hint at why Kate even has Aaron in the first place.
Theories include:- Claire was killed in the escape from the Island and Jack feels so guilty about it that he can't bring himself to see Aaron.
- Aaron was forcefully taken from Claire and Jack can't bear to reminded of it.
- Claire is either dead or still on the Island, but either way, Aaron reminds Jack of his own time on the Island, which he wants to forget. Kind of like how he was so adamant to Hurley that they would never go back and stormed off once Hurley mentioned it.
- Jack found out that Aaron is his nephew (remember, Christian Shephard was a mack daddy and fathered Claire, too) and seeing him would bring back bad memories of Zombie Dad, and/or intensify any feelings of guilt over whatever happened to Claire.
- Aaron has special powers that freak the hell out of Jack. (On that note, how many of you thought the baby was going to be either an alien or a little wizard or have a strange appearance? I did.)
I also was bracing myself to see a 15-year-old, or something weird like that, because of the possible time differential on the Island. This was when I had been thinking that the baby was obviously Sawyer's. This show makes me love being wrong.
ABSENCE DOES NOT MAKE THE HEART GROW FONDER
There was a lot that drove me crazy (in a good way) in this episode, but one of the things I'm now wondering about the most is what happened to make Jack and Kate go from friendly, out-in-the-open meetings and talks of rendezvousing for coffee to the strained state their relationship was in during the final scene of "Through the Looking Glass?" At that point in time (which many believe to be April 2007, based on the newspaper clip Jack had), Kate had told Jack not to call her anymore, and when he finally did reach her, they had to meet late at night in the middle of nowhere outside the airport. Something must have caused a rift between the time of Kate's trial (which I'll speculate on in a second) and Jack's "WE HAVE TO GO BACK!" plea.Perhaps shortly after Kate's trial, Jack started being haunted by visions, as Hurley had been? Perhaps others of The Six had been killed after slipping from the agreed-upon story? All that is clear is that Kate didn't want to go back to the Island at either point in time in the future. She agreed, without hesitation, to a 10-year probation where she needed to remain in-state. In her airport scene with Jack last season, she mentioned that "he" was going to wonder where she was. There seems to be some level of agreement among viewers that the "he" is indeed Aaron. Off-Island Kate is the exact opposite of On-Island Kate: she wants to stay put.
GUYS, WHEN ARE WE?
Not only do we now know that Kate's son is none other than Aaron, but we also know that Aaron's old enough to talk and sleep in a bed rather than in a crib. Lostpedia reports that according to the script, Aaron is two years old. I have consulted my baby expert, DY, and she concurs with this assessment. Aaron is believed to have been born on November 1, 2004. We know that right now on the Island, it is around Christmas Day 2004. If Aaron is now 2 years old, that would put the current time of Kate's flash-forward to be around November of 2006. That leaves less than six months for her relationship with Jack to fall apart (not to mention for Jack to descend into drug-addicted madness and grow a huge-ass beard).Someone commented to me that they had heard that the producers said that the April 2007 date on the newspaper Jack had in "Through the Looking Glass" was a mistake... but I have not seen that anywhere. If someone actually has PROOF that the April 2007 date on the newspaper clipping in the Season Three finale was a production error, please post it. Otherwise, I'm going to continue to assume that that date is correct.
Back to when Kate's trial is... I know that the judicial system is slow and everything, but doesn't it seem strange that her trial wouldn't get underway until nearly two years had past since she returned from the Island? And that she would still be that famous at that point in time? We all know celebrity is fleeting! It makes me think that the Oceanic Six returned home much later than we may have previously assumed. Meaning, if it's near the end of 2004 on the Island right now, they're probably not being taken directly home from the freighter. It's possible that another whole year may pass where the chosen six are re-programmed or something--where they're offered a financial deal and given a story to memorize and whatnot. At the time of Kate's trial, Jack seems to have no problem reciting the lie, whereas Kate says (paraphrasing): "I've heard you tell that story so many times, I'm beginning to think you believe it." She doesn't appear to be comfortable with the front they're putting up.Another possibility is that, because time on the Island may be passing more slowly than it does elsewhere, the three months the Lostaways have been gone may in fact be much longer. I don't really know how that would affect Aaron's age and growth, and I don't even want to think about it because it's so confusing!
NOW LET ME BLOW YA MIND
So... many... questions... left! But for whatever reason, the multitude of questions raised in "Eggtown" didn't depress me like they did with "The Economist." Yes, it was freaky as hell when Kate said "Aaron," and it's depressing to think that Claire might have kicked the bucket. I was never a big fan of Claire (because of the whole "bay-bee" thing I mentioned earlier), but it's a little too dark for my taste to have the mother of a newborn baby killed on this show. I hope that's not what happened. So until we know for sure what went down, I will try to think positively and will focus my attention on everything else I've already discussed, as well as these remaining issues:
The Aaron Cover-Up Story
If the rest of the world thinks Aaron is Kate's biological son, then one of three things must have happened:
1) Assuming that there's no time difference on the Island and that the age Kate claims Aaron to be (which they haven't officially told us yet) is actually the age he is, there were either no witnesses to the fact that Kate was not eight months pregnant on the flight, or "they" got rid of all the witnesses who would've known this. There were also people who knew that Claire was pregnant on the flight who may have been able to put two and two together, and therefore those witnesses would've had to have been silenced. Because someone should've been able to figure out that if Kate wasn't eight months pregnant on September 22, 2004, there's no way she could have come back from the Island with a newborn.2) As mentioned above, perhaps time moved more slowly on the Island. The Six would've been clued in that it's much later in time than they thought it was, and therefore Kate could easily pretend that Aaron was hers, as she didn't have to be pregnant (or at least not showing that she was pregnant) during the flight in order to come back home with a baby, if she was gone for significantly longer than nine months.
3) Kate could just be lying about Aaron's age. Like I said above, even though Lostpedia listed the boy as two years old, on the show Kate never mentioned his actual age (and even if she did, we couldn't trust that that is his real age until we are able to more confidently piece together the overall timeline).
Desmond's Vision
The whole reason Charlie accepted his suicide mission was because Desmond said he had a vision of Claire and Aaron getting into a helicopter and leaving the Island. Since Des hasn't given us reason to distrust him, I believe that we will see this scene unfold. Which may mean that whatever causes Kate to end up with Aaron happens after they're off the Island but before they return home. Or Des was lying and we're going to find out that he's a total prick.
Devil Baby Possibilities
One of the trippiest Lost episodes to date was "Raised by Another," in which Claire finds out that some bad stuff would go down if she was not the one to raise her child:
MALKIN (psychic): It is crucial that you, yourself, raise this child.CLAIRE: You mean with Thomas? Is he..
MALKIN: The father of this child will play no part in it's life, nor yours.
CLAIRE: So what exactly are you saying?
MALKIN: This child parented by anyone else, anyone other than you -- danger surrounds this baby. . .
CLAIRE: Danger?
MALKIN: Your nature, your spirit, your goodness, must be an influence in the development of this child.
CLAIRE: If Thomas and I don't get back together I'm putting this baby up for adoption. I just wanted to find out what would give the baby the happiest life.
MALKIN: There is no happy life -- not for this child, not without you.
CLAIRE: I don't. . .
MALKIN: It can't be another. You mustn't allow another to raise your baby.
CLAIRE: Okay, great. Thanks for taking my 200.
MALKIN: Oh, no look, take it. Ms. Littleton; I am begging you just to consider...
CLAIRE: I can't raise this child by myself.
MALKIN: You have to listen to me.
CLAIRE: Thanks for your time, and my money back.
MALKIN: Ms. Littleton, please. The baby needs your protection. Ms. Littleton, please.
Now we know that, at least for some period of time, if not for the rest of his life, Kate is raising Aaron. I am really scared that this kid is going to unleash some demonic powers on the world at any moment!
Does Aaron count as a member of the Oceanic Six?
They didn't exactly spell it out for us. If there is something weird going on with time and if "the story" is that Kate got pregnant with Aaron and delivered him all while on the Island, then he wouldn't count as a Flight 815 passenger. And even if it was known that he was adopted by Kate after his birth mother died, Aaron still wasn't on the flight manifest and wasn't born at the time of the crash.
We ALL KNOW how cheap the airlines are... do you really think they're going to pay a settlement out to someone who hadn't even purchased a full-fare ticket?Hee hee, I kid, I kid. There are arguments for both sides of this issue. Many people think it's extremely obvious that Aaron should be counted as one of The Six because, although he wasn't born yet, he was alive in the womb during the crash... and then suffered the hardship of spending his first few months of life on a deserted island. I can see The Powers That Be over at CBS getting all sorts of bad ideas now. Survivor: Newborns vs. Toddlers!
The Rest of The Six
Depending on how Aaron is counted, there are either one or two remaining members of The Six to be revealed. I had always assumed that Sun would get off because of her pregnancy. Now I'm not so sure. There has been absolutely no rhyme nor reason for the first four confirmed members of the group, so I have stuck to my oath made a few weeks ago to not try to figure it out.
I Need a Bushy Eyebrow Fix!
Why the hell haven't they shown Ageless Richard, Cindy, all of the kids and all of the other Others over at the Temple yet? I think we're supposed to forget about them so that when they do show up it will be a big surprise. But who can forget about those ridiculously long eyelashes?
No More Food?
Locke mentioned that he had used up the last two eggs. Then he claimed to have killed a chicken (which would seem foolhardy if there were no more eggs). All of this made me think about the food drop we saw in the past. I believe those food drops were linked to the Countdown Clock O' Doom in the original hatch, which was one of many things Locke blew up. So are they now running out of food? But even more importantly, wouldn't the group who was performing the food drops have realized that something had gone wrong on the Island? Could the organization behind the freighter team have been involved in the food drops before? Or were the drops something that Ben had arranged through some of his contacts off of the Island?
Whew, that's it. See what happens when I like an episode? The length of the write-up increases exponentially.
BEST LINES OF THE EPISODE
Kate: You got blood.Locke: I just... killed a chicken.
Hurley: No, I moved him to the boat house--[pause]--You just totally Scooby-Dooed me, didn't you?
Kate: Sorry.
[Jack grimaces at another busy signal]
Juliet: Maybe we should try a number other than the boat... like 911?
Sawyer: I know it's in a box, but... pretty damn good wine! I tested it.Sawyer: She talked to that guy... Bruce Lee from the freighter.
PARTY ALL THE TIME
I hosted a party at my place ("The Hatch") for "Eggtown." If you'd like to see just how crazy I am, click here for the pictures.
Until next week,
- e
Sunday, February 24, 2008
Citizen Kate by Luhks
The fourth episode of Lost’s Season Four arrives with one of the most puzzling titles to date in the series, Eggtown. Like almost every Lost episode title, Eggtown refers to a number of different things: the eggs in Ben’s breakfast, the Easter eggs to which Locke alludes, the possibility of Kate’s pregnancy, and even an obscure antiquated term used in bargaining. While the title invokes all of these ideas to varying degrees, the title’s most interesting application is to the classic riddle:
Which came first, the chicken or the egg?
Which of these two things is the cause and which is the effect? If every effect in the universe has a cause, then what was the ultimate cause that came before all of those causes? This paradox of causality has persisted throughout history, for everyone from Aristotle to Stephen Hawking. (If you don’t enjoy these types of riddles, then Locke shows us perhaps the only way to escape this endless puzzle: simply eat all of the eggs and kill the chicken.)
Now that four episodes of this new season have aired, Season Four has developed its own unique style. The secret of this format lies in the old riddle of the chicken and the egg: this episode reveals the image of the eggs, but never shows us the chicken that produced them. In this story, effects precede causes. Each of the four flash-forward episodes presented us with a series of eggs, but the chickens that caused them remain conveniently off-screen. Through the Looking Glass showed Jack’s downward spiral, but failed to reveal the identity of the man whose death triggered it. In Hurley's flashes, he expressed regret for his decision to follow Locke, but he remained unable to speak about the disaster that caused it. Sayid’s episode concluded with the mention of some similar tragedy, one so horrible that it persuaded him to sell his soul to his enemy. Finally, Kate’s tale now includes the startling revelation that she will live off the island as the adoptive mother of Claire’s son Aaron, without leaving much indication as to why. In each case, the audience is free to speculate about what causes could have possibly produced these effects. Examining these eggs, though, does little to help us visualize the chickens that produced them.
One particular scene in Eggtown, which focuses on newcomer Daniel Faraday, offers perhaps an even better metaphor for the new format: memory loss. Daniel can remember the faces of two out of the three playing cards, but he guesses the third card incorrectly. The results of Charlotte’s test now place Daniel’s introductory scenes in a new light: Daniel might know something important about the island, and be unable to remember it. This revelation also explains why Miles needed to remind him about the meaning of Naomi’s last words: he simply forgot. In many ways, Daniel, as a man incapable of remembering the recent past, may become the antithesis of Desmond, the man capable of remembering the near future. The flash-forward scenes of Season Four, by leaving a large span of time concealed, place the viewer in a predicament similar to ones faced by Desmond or Daniel: we have access to two out of the three parts of the story, but we can only guess the third. Expect next week's epsiode, The Constant, to explore this idea in greater depth.
(Antero-grade amnesia, loss of short-term memory, also serves as the focus of the remarkable 2000 feature film, Memento, from director Christopher Nolan. I highly recommend this film to anyone who has not seen it. Not only does it hold plenty of significance for interpreting Lost, but it is also an exceptional work on its own, and my favorite movie of this decade. Memento is another inventive, nonlinear story that explores many of the same motifs as Lost: time, mirroring, revenge, and identity. Essentially, the film presents a series of flashbacks in reverse order, which allows the audience to experience a state of imperfect memory. As Leonard Shelby, the film’s main character, explains: “With my condition, you don’t know anything. You feel angry, guilty, and you don’t know why. You could do something terrible and not have the faintest idea ten minutes later.” Faraday appears to suffer from a narrower or less severe variety of memory loss than Leonard Shelby. Daniel’s memory problems will open up a number of new storytelling possibilities, but Daniel’s story should also take the concept into its own, unique direction.)
In addition to the innovations of Season Four, Eggtown also included a traditional, Season-One-style, Lost story, centering around Kate Austen. The episode brought about a conclusion of sorts to a story arc that was introduced in Lost’s very first character-centric episode, Tabula Rasa. The central theme of Kate’s fugitive storyline has always been the difference between freedom and imprisonment. Since the murder of her father, Kate spent her entire life running away from prisons, both actual and symbolic. Seemingly, the island offered Kate a chance to be free. Even that initial Kate episode, though, suggested that her newfound freedom was merely an illusion.
KATE: In case you hadn't noticed, I did get away.
MARSHAL: You don't look free to me. (Tabula Rasa)
What does it mean to be free? The most basic definition of freedom is the absence of physical constraints: things like handcuffs, prison cells, or threat of physical harm. Sawyer, for instance, regards his current position on the island as a state of freedom. He can do whatever he wants to do, whenever he wants to do it, without many consequences. In Eggtown as well as in The Economist, Sawyer presents Kate with the chance to share in his independent lifestyle. He offers her an escape from the outside threats to her liberty, as well as comfort and security: “If you think there’s anything waiting for you back home other than handcuffs, you really don’t know how the world works. Look around us, Freckles. We’ve got roofs over our heads. Electricity, showers, beds.” Sawyer’s concept of freedom, although not without its merits, can be measured in terms of physical objects. To a lesser extent, Miles, an echo of Sawyer, also voices this same perspective: “If I were you, I would stay right here.”
If you adopt the same concept of freedom as Sawyer and Miles, then Kate’s decision to leave the island seems foolish. Despite what you might hear about Kate from a number of the show's fans, though, she is not stupid. Kate does know how the world works, and she understands that she faces an unpleasant ordeal back home. Even with this knowledge, she still chooses to go back. Freedom remains her objective, but she holds a different definition of the word than the one that Sawyer presented. Paradoxically, how can Kate’s choice to face trial be regarded as an expression of freedom? One possible answer to this question comes from Rousseau – not our Danielle, the noble savage herself, but her namesake, the French philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau. Among other things, Rousseau’s work argued a concept of moral freedom, which is characterized not by physical license, but by obedience to duty.
"Freedom is obedience to the law which one has laid down for oneself." - Jean Jacques Rousseau
In Eggtown, Kate’s interactions with Sawyer play the deciding role in exposing her ultimate concept of freedom. Sawyer treats the prospect of raising a child as the worst thing in the world. In Sawyer’s present view, a child presents an obstacle to freedom, no differently than any other obstacle. He sees parenthood as a prison, one which would hinder his ability to do what he desires. Not long ago, in the episode I Do, Kate expressed that exact same reaction: “I almost had a baby. Me, a baby! I can't do this!” By observing Sawyer’s response to her possible pregnancy, Kate sees a reflection of what she herself used to be. Instead of agreeing with him, Kate finds the source of her disagreement with his worldview. Kate does not see moral duty necessarily as a bad thing.
Even though Kate’s actions often show a dubious morality, she still possesses a strong sense of right and wrong. Kate’s powerful conscience continued to torment her relentlessly. In many ways, Marshal Edward Mars, a recurring character in Kate’s story, served as the representation of that conscience. Obsessed with bringing Kate to justice, the Marshal hunted Kate down all over the globe. Long after his death, Kate’s conscience finished his work for him, and brought her back home to be put on trial. The opening shot of Eggtown’s first flash-forward scene blurs the background intentionally, so that the man out-of-focus (Kate’s lawyer) bears a striking resemblance to the deceased Marshal. The lawyer also vocalizes Kate’s conscience in this scene, as he tells her, “Yes, [there is a back-door], but you’re going through the front door with your head held high.” Kate’s story suggests that she could not find true freedom by running and hiding, but only by standing firm in the face of threats. In order to be free, you need to risk your own liberty. Kate chose to face the responsibility to herself and to her son, the duty to put an end to that chapter of her life.
One of the most persistent criticisms against Kate has always been that she will not hesitate to use any of the other adults in her life to serve her own interests. On the island, she successively manipulates Hurley, Sawyer, Locke, Miles, and Ben in a plot to uncover information useful only to herself. By contrast, the flash-forward scenes stress Kate’s steadfast unwillingness to use her new son Aaron in the same way. First, Kate rejects her attorney’s reasonable advice to use the child to gain the jury’s sympathy. Her lawyer still tries to use her son in a roundabout way, but Kate cuts off the examination right before Jack begins to testify about Aaron. Kate’s mother even offers to sabotage the case, requesting only to see her grandson in return, but Kate refuses to utilize him even in that small way. In her final exchange with Jack, she once again makes her position clear: she values Aaron’s well-being above all else, including her own interests.
Whether or not you respect Kate’s overall morals, one cannot help but admire her newfound maturity in this instance. One of the most frequently discussed questions among Lost fans has always been: whom will Kate choose? The general consensus always seemed to be that she needed to decide between Jack and Sawyer. Few people ever would have expected that eventually Kate would select Baby Aaron as the one guy she loves more than any other. Her story still leaves open the potential for future romantic involvement with both men, but only on the condition that her partner shares those priorities. For different reasons, neither Jack nor Sawyer feels willing to make that kind of commitment to both Kate and the child. At the conclusion of the episode, Kate has found the freedom that eluded her for so long, both in the physical sense, and in Rousseau’s notion of moral freedom: Kate adheres to the moral laws that she has defined for herself.
In addition to Kate’s story, Eggtown includes another curious exploration of the notions of freedom and imprisonment, through the interplay of Locke and Ben. In the opening scene, Ben once again shows that Locke’s physical power over his body pales in comparison to his mental control over Locke’s mind. Ben alludes to his previous imprisonment in the Swan armory (the same man in a different place), but it is also important to note that Ben now resides in the same location in which Locke found Cooper (a different man in the same place). Even though Miles is in chains, he too appears to exercise more freedom than his keeper, as he tells us that he is ‘exactly where he wants to be.’
In one of Locke’s first flashback scenes of the Season One episode Walkabout, Locke stated that “Patience […] is the hallmark of a leader”. If that maxim holds true, then Locke has a long way to evolve before he can become a great leader. Right now, his impatience is his downfall (just as it was with the hatch in Season Two). In this episode, he responds to the constant undercutting of his authority, not by adapting to the psychological game, but by resorting to physical bullying. Locke has not yet reached the point where he will ‘shoot people in the head and continue on with his day,’ but his treatment of Miles suggests that he might not be very far from it. Hurley’s flash-forward scenes created a sense of impending doom about the destiny of John’s new flock, and now Kate’s flash-forward suggests that Claire may be the one to suffer the same fate as Boone.
It seems more possible than ever that Locke’s story will end in tragedy and not triumph: he’s more lost than he’s ever been. For now, though, Kate’s story offers us hope that at least some Lost characters eventually may find what they’ve been seeking.
Which came first, the chicken or the egg?
Which of these two things is the cause and which is the effect? If every effect in the universe has a cause, then what was the ultimate cause that came before all of those causes? This paradox of causality has persisted throughout history, for everyone from Aristotle to Stephen Hawking. (If you don’t enjoy these types of riddles, then Locke shows us perhaps the only way to escape this endless puzzle: simply eat all of the eggs and kill the chicken.)
Now that four episodes of this new season have aired, Season Four has developed its own unique style. The secret of this format lies in the old riddle of the chicken and the egg: this episode reveals the image of the eggs, but never shows us the chicken that produced them. In this story, effects precede causes. Each of the four flash-forward episodes presented us with a series of eggs, but the chickens that caused them remain conveniently off-screen. Through the Looking Glass showed Jack’s downward spiral, but failed to reveal the identity of the man whose death triggered it. In Hurley's flashes, he expressed regret for his decision to follow Locke, but he remained unable to speak about the disaster that caused it. Sayid’s episode concluded with the mention of some similar tragedy, one so horrible that it persuaded him to sell his soul to his enemy. Finally, Kate’s tale now includes the startling revelation that she will live off the island as the adoptive mother of Claire’s son Aaron, without leaving much indication as to why. In each case, the audience is free to speculate about what causes could have possibly produced these effects. Examining these eggs, though, does little to help us visualize the chickens that produced them.
One particular scene in Eggtown, which focuses on newcomer Daniel Faraday, offers perhaps an even better metaphor for the new format: memory loss. Daniel can remember the faces of two out of the three playing cards, but he guesses the third card incorrectly. The results of Charlotte’s test now place Daniel’s introductory scenes in a new light: Daniel might know something important about the island, and be unable to remember it. This revelation also explains why Miles needed to remind him about the meaning of Naomi’s last words: he simply forgot. In many ways, Daniel, as a man incapable of remembering the recent past, may become the antithesis of Desmond, the man capable of remembering the near future. The flash-forward scenes of Season Four, by leaving a large span of time concealed, place the viewer in a predicament similar to ones faced by Desmond or Daniel: we have access to two out of the three parts of the story, but we can only guess the third. Expect next week's epsiode, The Constant, to explore this idea in greater depth.
(Antero-grade amnesia, loss of short-term memory, also serves as the focus of the remarkable 2000 feature film, Memento, from director Christopher Nolan. I highly recommend this film to anyone who has not seen it. Not only does it hold plenty of significance for interpreting Lost, but it is also an exceptional work on its own, and my favorite movie of this decade. Memento is another inventive, nonlinear story that explores many of the same motifs as Lost: time, mirroring, revenge, and identity. Essentially, the film presents a series of flashbacks in reverse order, which allows the audience to experience a state of imperfect memory. As Leonard Shelby, the film’s main character, explains: “With my condition, you don’t know anything. You feel angry, guilty, and you don’t know why. You could do something terrible and not have the faintest idea ten minutes later.” Faraday appears to suffer from a narrower or less severe variety of memory loss than Leonard Shelby. Daniel’s memory problems will open up a number of new storytelling possibilities, but Daniel’s story should also take the concept into its own, unique direction.)
In addition to the innovations of Season Four, Eggtown also included a traditional, Season-One-style, Lost story, centering around Kate Austen. The episode brought about a conclusion of sorts to a story arc that was introduced in Lost’s very first character-centric episode, Tabula Rasa. The central theme of Kate’s fugitive storyline has always been the difference between freedom and imprisonment. Since the murder of her father, Kate spent her entire life running away from prisons, both actual and symbolic. Seemingly, the island offered Kate a chance to be free. Even that initial Kate episode, though, suggested that her newfound freedom was merely an illusion.
KATE: In case you hadn't noticed, I did get away.
MARSHAL: You don't look free to me. (Tabula Rasa)
What does it mean to be free? The most basic definition of freedom is the absence of physical constraints: things like handcuffs, prison cells, or threat of physical harm. Sawyer, for instance, regards his current position on the island as a state of freedom. He can do whatever he wants to do, whenever he wants to do it, without many consequences. In Eggtown as well as in The Economist, Sawyer presents Kate with the chance to share in his independent lifestyle. He offers her an escape from the outside threats to her liberty, as well as comfort and security: “If you think there’s anything waiting for you back home other than handcuffs, you really don’t know how the world works. Look around us, Freckles. We’ve got roofs over our heads. Electricity, showers, beds.” Sawyer’s concept of freedom, although not without its merits, can be measured in terms of physical objects. To a lesser extent, Miles, an echo of Sawyer, also voices this same perspective: “If I were you, I would stay right here.”
If you adopt the same concept of freedom as Sawyer and Miles, then Kate’s decision to leave the island seems foolish. Despite what you might hear about Kate from a number of the show's fans, though, she is not stupid. Kate does know how the world works, and she understands that she faces an unpleasant ordeal back home. Even with this knowledge, she still chooses to go back. Freedom remains her objective, but she holds a different definition of the word than the one that Sawyer presented. Paradoxically, how can Kate’s choice to face trial be regarded as an expression of freedom? One possible answer to this question comes from Rousseau – not our Danielle, the noble savage herself, but her namesake, the French philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau. Among other things, Rousseau’s work argued a concept of moral freedom, which is characterized not by physical license, but by obedience to duty.
"Freedom is obedience to the law which one has laid down for oneself." - Jean Jacques Rousseau
In Eggtown, Kate’s interactions with Sawyer play the deciding role in exposing her ultimate concept of freedom. Sawyer treats the prospect of raising a child as the worst thing in the world. In Sawyer’s present view, a child presents an obstacle to freedom, no differently than any other obstacle. He sees parenthood as a prison, one which would hinder his ability to do what he desires. Not long ago, in the episode I Do, Kate expressed that exact same reaction: “I almost had a baby. Me, a baby! I can't do this!” By observing Sawyer’s response to her possible pregnancy, Kate sees a reflection of what she herself used to be. Instead of agreeing with him, Kate finds the source of her disagreement with his worldview. Kate does not see moral duty necessarily as a bad thing.
Even though Kate’s actions often show a dubious morality, she still possesses a strong sense of right and wrong. Kate’s powerful conscience continued to torment her relentlessly. In many ways, Marshal Edward Mars, a recurring character in Kate’s story, served as the representation of that conscience. Obsessed with bringing Kate to justice, the Marshal hunted Kate down all over the globe. Long after his death, Kate’s conscience finished his work for him, and brought her back home to be put on trial. The opening shot of Eggtown’s first flash-forward scene blurs the background intentionally, so that the man out-of-focus (Kate’s lawyer) bears a striking resemblance to the deceased Marshal. The lawyer also vocalizes Kate’s conscience in this scene, as he tells her, “Yes, [there is a back-door], but you’re going through the front door with your head held high.” Kate’s story suggests that she could not find true freedom by running and hiding, but only by standing firm in the face of threats. In order to be free, you need to risk your own liberty. Kate chose to face the responsibility to herself and to her son, the duty to put an end to that chapter of her life.
One of the most persistent criticisms against Kate has always been that she will not hesitate to use any of the other adults in her life to serve her own interests. On the island, she successively manipulates Hurley, Sawyer, Locke, Miles, and Ben in a plot to uncover information useful only to herself. By contrast, the flash-forward scenes stress Kate’s steadfast unwillingness to use her new son Aaron in the same way. First, Kate rejects her attorney’s reasonable advice to use the child to gain the jury’s sympathy. Her lawyer still tries to use her son in a roundabout way, but Kate cuts off the examination right before Jack begins to testify about Aaron. Kate’s mother even offers to sabotage the case, requesting only to see her grandson in return, but Kate refuses to utilize him even in that small way. In her final exchange with Jack, she once again makes her position clear: she values Aaron’s well-being above all else, including her own interests.
Whether or not you respect Kate’s overall morals, one cannot help but admire her newfound maturity in this instance. One of the most frequently discussed questions among Lost fans has always been: whom will Kate choose? The general consensus always seemed to be that she needed to decide between Jack and Sawyer. Few people ever would have expected that eventually Kate would select Baby Aaron as the one guy she loves more than any other. Her story still leaves open the potential for future romantic involvement with both men, but only on the condition that her partner shares those priorities. For different reasons, neither Jack nor Sawyer feels willing to make that kind of commitment to both Kate and the child. At the conclusion of the episode, Kate has found the freedom that eluded her for so long, both in the physical sense, and in Rousseau’s notion of moral freedom: Kate adheres to the moral laws that she has defined for herself.
In addition to Kate’s story, Eggtown includes another curious exploration of the notions of freedom and imprisonment, through the interplay of Locke and Ben. In the opening scene, Ben once again shows that Locke’s physical power over his body pales in comparison to his mental control over Locke’s mind. Ben alludes to his previous imprisonment in the Swan armory (the same man in a different place), but it is also important to note that Ben now resides in the same location in which Locke found Cooper (a different man in the same place). Even though Miles is in chains, he too appears to exercise more freedom than his keeper, as he tells us that he is ‘exactly where he wants to be.’
In one of Locke’s first flashback scenes of the Season One episode Walkabout, Locke stated that “Patience […] is the hallmark of a leader”. If that maxim holds true, then Locke has a long way to evolve before he can become a great leader. Right now, his impatience is his downfall (just as it was with the hatch in Season Two). In this episode, he responds to the constant undercutting of his authority, not by adapting to the psychological game, but by resorting to physical bullying. Locke has not yet reached the point where he will ‘shoot people in the head and continue on with his day,’ but his treatment of Miles suggests that he might not be very far from it. Hurley’s flash-forward scenes created a sense of impending doom about the destiny of John’s new flock, and now Kate’s flash-forward suggests that Claire may be the one to suffer the same fate as Boone.
It seems more possible than ever that Locke’s story will end in tragedy and not triumph: he’s more lost than he’s ever been. For now, though, Kate’s story offers us hope that at least some Lost characters eventually may find what they’ve been seeking.
Saturday, February 23, 2008
Prognosis: The Empire Never Ended by J.Wood
Courtesy of Powells.com
Here is the latest recap by J.Wood of Eggtown. It's fairly detailed, even by J.Woods standards :)
What if God was a zebra? That's what the protagonist of Philip K. Dick's Valis thinks it is. He has his reasons: The benign power that invades the world is some rational intervention upon an irrational world, and that power allows the protagonist to see it:
Normally it remained camouflaged. Normally when it appeared no one could distinguish it from ground-set to ground, as Fat correctly expressed it. He had a name for it.
Zebra. Because it blended. The name for this is mimesis. Another name is mimicry. Certain insects do this; they mimic other things: sometimes other insects-poisonous ones-or twigs and the like. Certain biologists and naturalists have speculated that higher forms of mimicry might exist, since lower forms-which is to say, forms which fool those intended to be fooled but not us-have been found all over the world. (Valis, 69)
This is one of three texts that are sitting underneath the fourth episode of the fourth season, “Eggtown,” itself supposedly a Depression-era euphemism for a town that doesn't offer a salesperson any good sales (nothing but eggs, which spoil quickly). Locke delivers Ben's copy of Philip K. Dick's Valis to Ben with breakfast, Sawyer is spotted reading Adolfo Bioy Casares' phantastic novella The Invention of Morel (which Jorge Luis Borges described as having a perfect plot), and there is a return to the philosopher John Locke's Second Treatise of Government.
Here is the latest recap by J.Wood of Eggtown. It's fairly detailed, even by J.Woods standards :)
What if God was a zebra? That's what the protagonist of Philip K. Dick's Valis thinks it is. He has his reasons: The benign power that invades the world is some rational intervention upon an irrational world, and that power allows the protagonist to see it:
Normally it remained camouflaged. Normally when it appeared no one could distinguish it from ground-set to ground, as Fat correctly expressed it. He had a name for it.
Zebra. Because it blended. The name for this is mimesis. Another name is mimicry. Certain insects do this; they mimic other things: sometimes other insects-poisonous ones-or twigs and the like. Certain biologists and naturalists have speculated that higher forms of mimicry might exist, since lower forms-which is to say, forms which fool those intended to be fooled but not us-have been found all over the world. (Valis, 69)
This is one of three texts that are sitting underneath the fourth episode of the fourth season, “Eggtown,” itself supposedly a Depression-era euphemism for a town that doesn't offer a salesperson any good sales (nothing but eggs, which spoil quickly). Locke delivers Ben's copy of Philip K. Dick's Valis to Ben with breakfast, Sawyer is spotted reading Adolfo Bioy Casares' phantastic novella The Invention of Morel (which Jorge Luis Borges described as having a perfect plot), and there is a return to the philosopher John Locke's Second Treatise of Government.
The obvious text to start with—and the one with possibly the richest cache of data to mine and gets the most attention here—is Valis, the first book in a trilogy Dick wrote in the 1970's. "Valis" stands for Vast Active Living Intelligence System, and it comes from a film in the book. The novel itself is a strange hybrid fiction that does double-duty as fiction and biography, voicing of PKD's own ideas and experiences thorugh the mouth a literary mirror twin he constructs for the purpose. But a little background: Most people know PKD even if they don't think they do. If you've seen the films Blade Runner, A Scanner Darkly, Total Recall, or Minority Report, you've seen adaptations of his work. (PKD only lived to see the production of Blade Runner; he died from a stroke before the film hit the theaters in 1982.) If you've seen The Matrix, any of its sequels, or any Matrix-like films (precursors like 12 Monkeys—and La Jetée before that, or Donnie Darko, or Abre los Ojos), you've seen a story that's either in the writer's debt or is taking part in the same conversations.
Dick had interests in the fields of philosophy, science fiction, psychology, pharmaceutics, theology, and mysticism, which he worked into his recurrent themes of paranoia, conspiracies, psyches splitting into component parts, and the persistent questioning of the nature of reality. To those who study the intersections of those subjects, PKD is a kind of mad saint. One thing that sets his work apart from something like Los. Bros. Wachowski, though, is how consistent the questioning of reality is in his works. Consider The Matrix: Neo is shown the actual Chicago, "Welcome to the desert of the real" and all that, and goes off with Morpheus to download jujitsu into his noggin. The problem is that Neo doesn't question if the world Morpheus shows him is yet another illusion (after all, if there's one...). PKD's narratives, if not his characters, are not as naïve. Once they come to some breakthrough in their understanding of reality, that understanding is the next thing to get interrogated and questioned. It's a skeptical move made consistently throughout the first volume of Valis, and is something we're getting increasingly used to in Lost.
For a good introduction to the impulse behind Valis, the artist R. Crumb has a short comic called “The Religious Experience of Philip K. Dick” in the 17th issue of Weirdo (1986). It depicts some of the events that lead up to Dick's writing the book. Crumb's economic use of text/image conveys what follows better than I can in words alone, and can be read online. But I'll try, and I'll weave in Dick's biography with what he does with Valis; it's a famous tale among PKD fans.
Much of the material from Valis comes from PKD's experiences between 1974-76. Dick was never fully certain whether he was undergoing some transcendent experience or going mad, or whether there was a difference. The fact that Dick tweaked his brain to the edge with amphetamines didn't help matters, and he was quite aware that he was not in a good position to judge whether what he was going through was paranoid hallucination or actual experience. But the information he amassed about cosmology and cosmogony during that period shaped the rest of his life and work, and he presents that information through the cipher of of his protagonist, Horselover Fat. It's never quite clear which details are PKD's shot trough HLF, and which are elaborations as a way of working out what he experienced. What's more, a science fiction writer named Phil appears in his own book and is the narrator who talks with HLF. Phil is eventually confronted about how he and HLF are the same person: Philip > philo: Greek for love; Philip > hippos: Greek for horse; Dick > means fat in German. Philip becomes a contraction for the Greek terms, yielding horselover, and Fat is just a play on Dick's last name. Dick effectively creates his own mirror twin and as the two interact in the novel. One could go through PKD's "exegesis" to piece apart the biography from the fiction. The exegesis are notes he took about his ideas, but there's some 8,000 pages of them, some are absurd and show an unbalanced mind, some are incredibly insightful, but who's to say how much of that is biography and how much is fiction... HLF has a similar exegesis.
In 1974 PKD had an impacted wisdom tooth removed, and was administered sodium pentothal for the procedure (the truth drug, also used as an anesthetic). He wasn't given anything for the post-op pain, and after some mind-numbing suffering, he called the pharmacy for some painkillers. When the delivery woman arrived at his home with the painkillers, he opened the door and was struck; she wore a gold vesica piscis pendant, a Jesus fish, and the light bounced off it in a strange pink hue and struck him in the head (more on this symbol in a moment; it's hardly just a fish). He was transfixed, and then his world started to fall apart; the scene outside his door disappeared, and instead looking out on a southern California town, he was looking out at the early Christian world, when Christians were still persecuted; people spoke Greek and they wore the piscis as a secret symbol to each other. It's all a bit like Desmond's flashes. Horselover Fat goes through the same experience in Valis, and starts hearing language in koine Greek; HLF did not know Greek, but the words he transcribes turn out to be accurate Greek phrases.
Dick/Fat explained this wasn't a hallucination; he called it a kind of anamnesis, the loss of forgetfulness, and he experienced it time and again in the following year. (Speaking of loss of forgetfulness, this is essentially what Faraday was working on when he was trying to recall which playing cards Charlotte laid out.) PKD felt his mind had been invaded by some greater intelligence, and he was remembering through this intelligence experiences he shared with that intelligence, but didn't know about. Over the next two years while this intelligence remained, PKD got his life together like never before. He came to understand that this other intelligence was an early Christian, from 2,000 years before. But this other person—he called him Thomas (twin)—had been also other people. Furthermore, these past times weren't really past; they were occurring right then and there:
"Thomas," Fat told me, "is smarter than I am, and he knows more than I do. Of the two of us Thomas is the master personality." He considered that good; woe unto someone who has an evil or stupid other-personality in his head!
I said, "You mean once you were Thomas. You're a reincarnation of him and you remembered him and his--"
"No, he's living now. Living in ancient Rome now. And he is not me. Reincarnation has nothing to do with it."
"But your body," I said.
Fat stared at me, nodding. "Right. It means my body is either in two space-time continua simultaneously, or else my body is nowhere at all." (109)
Sound familiar? In entry #35 of his own exegesis, HLF parses the Richard Wagner's opera Parsifal, when Gurnemanz explains to Parsifal that in the forest maze, time turns into space. Read on for a familiar theme and name:
(The whole landscape becomes indistinct. A forest ebbs out and a wall of rough rock ebbs in, through which can be seen a gateway. The two men pass through the gateway. What happened to the forest? The two men did not really move; they did not really go anywhere, and yet they are not now where they originally were. Here time turns into space. Wagner began Parsifal in 1845. He died in 1873, long before Hermann Minkowski postulated four-dimensional space-time (1908). The source-basis for Parsifal consisted of Celtic legends, and Wagner's research into Buddhism for his never-written opera about the Buddha to be called "The Victors" (Die Sieger). Where did Richard Wagner get the notion that time could turn into space?)
And if time can turn into space, can space turn into time? (40-41)
PKD/HLF came to believe that Thomas was also Elijah, John the Baptist, Dionysos, the Buddha, and many others, all at once. They were, according the HLF, homoplasmates—living human embodiments of the Logos, the Logos being not simply the word of God through Christ, but living information, which was also a secret to transcend time. HLF called the Logos plasmate, and believed this secret was a technology for eternal life that the early Christians understood, as well as the Rosicrucian Order, the Renaissance alchemists, Apollonius of Tyana, Elijah, Dionysos, the Dogon of western Sudan, the Gnostics as recorded in the Nag Hammadi library, and others. The fish symbol, as well as being a representation of the age of Pisces, was a geometrical symbol of two circles with the same radius that each have their centers intersecting with the other circle's circumference. The center of that intersection is the fish symbol. Take just that central intersection image and twist it, and you get the double helix of DNA.
vesica piscis vesica twisted double helix
While spending time in a mental institution, HLF tells his doctor that the Logos, or plasmate, was living information that once in a person, would travel up the optic nerve and then over to the pineal gland—which some identify as the proverbial third eye. The Romans, HLF explains, hunted down all the people who were homoplasmates, because they were intent on freeing humanity from the grip of the empire. But the plasmate went dormant within the gnostic texts of the Nag Hammadi library. When the texts were discovered in 1945, the plasmate was set free. (It may be worth paying attention to what kind of conversations Hurley ends up having in his flashes at the mental institution.)
(Quick word on the pineal gland: This may be one of the more enigmatic parts of the brain. It helps regulate sleep and dreams, and according to psychiatrist Dr. Richard Strassman, it may also produce the chemical dimethyltryptamine, or DMT, a naturally-occurring chemical found both in the human body and some plants that causes consciousness to fully transcend known reality, like in dreams. Dr. Strassman conducted the first clinical research on DMT, which he published in his 2001 book DMT: The Spirit Molecule. Odd how this seems to rhyme with Horselover Fat's description of plasmate, or living information.)
So how did Horselover Fat (or Philip K. Dick) become a homoplasmate channel, a conduit for living information? HLF's friend Kevin suggests it was the intense pain he experienced with the wisdom tooth that brought it on. Many cultures use intense pain as a way to ritually transcend the human dimension and access whatever it is that is beyond our normal experience. Kevin talks about the Australian Aborigines accessing the Dream Time, which is another way of saying they access living information, or the Logos. If you saw A Man Called Horse, you saw the Sioux Sun Dance ritual, a particularly grueling version of a ritual common to many of the U.S. Plains Indians. In this version, a man has his chest pierced by bones attached to ropes, which are in turn attached to a pole. The man is in effect nearly suspended by the bones through his flesh. The ritual consists of dancing and prayer to the Great Spirit, and at a designated time, the man has to run backwards until the bones tear through his flesh. The ritual can take days, and it puts the person into a transcendent state in which he can commune with the Great Spirit. Such rituals go back thousands of years, and are common around the world. Kevin believes that the combination of the intense pain HLF experiences and the vision of the vesica piscis put HLF past this world into some larger communication, which HLF understands as the plasmate, or Logos.
For Horselover Fat, the gnostic texts are the hook, particularly Valentinus, an early Gnostic Christian theologian from Rome who lived in the second century CE. Valentinus had a monistic rather than dualistic world view, and after his death much of his work was wiped out by the church. But one of the Valentinian texts, The Gospel of Truth, was discovered in the Nag Hammadi library. The gnostic texts describe a variety of transcendent beings who, much like in Hinduism, seem to symbolically represent aspects of human psyche, emotions, and consciousness. The Gospel of Truth is a creation myth describing how the fall of Sophia (wisdom) gave rise to evil and error. When wisdom falls/fails, ignorance reigns; ignorance is fertile ground for fear, and fear and anguish grew into a fog that blinds people and leads to error.
HLF explains to his doctor that the creator of this world isn't the entity whom we consider to be God—that's an error. The creator of this world was a demiurge that was created when Sophia fell; it's name is Yaldabaoth, and it is deranged. Yaldabaoth is blind, HLF explains, and believes it is the only deity. Because it is deranged, the world it created—our world—is full of error and misinformation; the result is that the divine within all people is trapped in materiality. This trap of materiality is what HLF calls the black iron prison, and is what the Roman empire maintained; HLF further realizes that the prison is all around us, and that the empire never ended. Yaldabaoth, the manifestation of error, either doesn't realize it has trapped the divine in people within materiality or may have malevolent intentions, so the greater demiurge—what HLF calls Zebra—sent down Jesus to "enlighten" people, thereby freeing them. This angers error (presumably Yaldabaoth—the Valentinus text doesn't give the name, just calls it error), who then has Jesus nailed to a tree. Horselover Fat believes the secret knowledge possessed by the Gnostics, the alchemists, the Greek mystics and pre-Socratics, etc. was just that living information, or plasmate, and accessing that technology would lift the veil of error, dismantle the black iron prison, and result in eternal life. His evidence is the presence of the intelligence that invaded his mind, an intelligence that accessed the plasmate to become homoplasmate and eternal.
By the way, Yaldabaoth is depicted as having a serpent body and a monstrous, lion-like head; considering that Yaldabaoth is said to have introduced a kind of fog of fear that leads to error, and that it's depicted as serpent-like, Yaldabaoth may have an echo in our smoke monster. That's not to say the smoke monster is Yaldabaoth, just that there are some interesting rhymes. yaldabaoth
Valis is dense and rewarding, but isn't necessarily easy. This entire discussion could but shouldn't revolve just around Valis, so a couple points of closure: In entry #32 of his exegesis, HLF notes that what we experience as the world is the unfolding of a narrative about a woman who died long ago. He's talking about Sophia, the gnostic personification of wisdom, which is part of the divine syzygy comprised of wisdom and logos, Sophia and Christ. That's a great word, syzygy, and in this case it means she was part of a set of divine twins who together made a transcendent unified whole, rather like yin and yang. If I understand this correctly (and I'm leaving a lot out), the Sophia briefly left the logos and the divine syzygy and fell to our world. That's when things went a bit haywire; when she crashed into the material world, the result was the birth of Yaldabaoth and all that other stuff mentioned above. So syzygy is a kind of twin, but it also has another meaning; in astronomical terms, it's the alignment of three celestial bodies found in the same gravitation plane in a straight line. The sun, moon and earth would constitute the three bodies, and a eclipse would be a celestial syzygy. Coincidentally, on February 20th, the night before "Eggtown" aired, a total lunar eclipse—a syzygy—was visible in the Americas and parts of Europe and Africa.
Lastly, there is a section of Valis that takes on a very Lost-like mirror twin structure, when HLF sees a kind of psychedelic sci-fi film called Valis that depicts nearly everything he has experienced since the toothache, from the strange light that kicked off the invasion of the greater intelligence to the fish symbol and many parts between. The Vast Active Living Intelligence System of the film is controlled by a satellite that is never directly shown in the film, but upon further viewings, pops up in a calendar picture, in elements of montages, as a toy, in a flash cut, and elsewhere. Kevin tells HLF that they all have to see the film again because "ninety percent of the details are designed to go by you the first time-actually only go by your conscious mind; they register in your unconscious. I'd like to study the film frame by frame," (146). That could be the narrative model of Lost itself, which requires a similar kind of active scrutiny. Like Locke says to Ben when he gives him the copy of Valis, "You might catch something you missed the second time around" (like the name of HLF/PKD's group, the Siddhartha Society).
Valis wasn't the only book in "Eggtown"; in an HD moment, Sawyer is reading something while Hurley puts on Olivia Newton John's "Xanadu." The shot is just the blurred image of the top of the book (most likely sharper in high def), and the book is the Argentinian writer Adolfo Bioy Casares' The Invention of Morel (1940). This slim psychological novella is told from the point of view of an escaped fugitive who finds his way out to what he believes is a deserted island. After some time, though, he discovers he's not alone on the island, but what he believes are a group of well-off vacationers (he calls them intruders) turn out to be something quite different. The narrative is conveyed in an impressionistic fashion, not unlike Marlow in Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, and it deals with some themes in common with both Valis and Lost; deceptions, immortality, messing with time and space, and meta-narrative questioning of narrative authority, all with a near magical-realist sci-fi aspect underpinning the narrative machinery. (The book was also the inspiration for Alain Reanais' 1961 film Last Year at Marienbad.)
Casares often worked with Jorge Luis Borges, who wrote the prologue for the book. They would have made a great writing team for Lost; they sometimes ghost-wrote for each other, and even collaborated on projects they ascribed to non-existent authors, or talked about non-existent authors as if they were just unknown, and then created some work by that author to prove his existence. These diversions were in their way alternate reality games, where they wove apocryphal texts of their own invention into some larger canon of their own construction. For all we know, Borges may have had a hand in writing The Invention of Morel; he states outright in the prologue that he discussed the details of the plot in depth the Casares. The footnotes that accompany the text provide a meta-commentary that question the fugitive's facts and assumptions, and it's not clear if those are by Casares or not.
The unnamed fugitive protagonist first carefully watches the vacationers he discovers from afar, and finds himself entranced by a woman, Faustine, who frequents a beach. He eventually discovers their hotel, but it takes him some time before he can bring himself to make any contact. As the fugitive continues his explorations, he overhears discussion of some disease on the island, and wonders why he's the only one who notices there are now two suns in the sky. How the fugitive sees the intruders isn't a far cry from how Horselover Fat perceives his flashes of the ancient world superimposed over California; they're ghostly images, like a secondary cell of film superimposed over a primary cell of film. The fugitive, unwilling to really approach anyone else on the island, is faced with the "nightmare of thinking" that the intruders, the ghostly images, the multiple suns, and the rest is a trap to capture him and send him back to prison. Of course he's operating with limited information, living in a fog of fear and error.
One of the intruders, Dr. Morel, has invented something that he wants to introduce to the others. It's a device similar to a film camera, but rather than just capturing a two-dimensional image, it can capture and replay a scene in its entirety, complete with texture and depth. "Imagine a stage on which our life during these seven days is acted out, complete in every detail. We are the actors. All our actions have been recorded," (66). Morel's idea is to record a scene of life that one would hope to live again in full, and with his machine, a person could relive that moment again and again, in perpetuity. Morel himself wants to relive a certain set of days with the vacationers/intruders and recorded them.
To say more would give up too much of the plot, so no more should be said at this point. But for those who are interested, a key scene occurs in the engine room that powers Morel's invention. Much like how the DHARMA Initiative chose the Lost island for its anomalous electromagnetic properties, Morel chose his island because of certain tidal currents that can be used to generate enough power for his invention. When the fugitive finds the engine room, he also learns something about mistaking illusion for reality (a very gnostic idea and Lost-like theme).
The fugitive and Horselover Fat aren't the only ones working through a fog of fear and error. Locke has seen better days. He earned what might be called political capital when he became the de facto leader of the Lostaways on the beach in the third season, but he uses his authority to frighten a faction of the group into following him to Otherville, and then admits to Kate that he's not running a dictatorship, but neither is it a democracy. What's interesting here is the premise of the split: Locke convinced some of the people that the unknown quantity just off their shores (the freighter folk) were a danger to be avoided at all costs. Jack and the rest chose to engage that threat and understand it, while Locke used it to sow fear and establish greater authority.
In his Second Treatise of Government, the philosopher John Locke discusses his version of the social contract, in which people give up some of their natural rights in exchange for protection, property, and protection of property. Locke's ideas were a strong influence on Thomas Jefferson and the Declaration of Independence, but Locke was not as averse to a monarchy as Jefferson; if the community determined a king best served their common social goals, then a monarchy was as preferable as a democracy; it's not a democracy, it's not a dictatorship, and the people remain the ultimate sovereign. When the leadership no longer reflects the will of the people, they've shifted out of the social contract and back to the state of nature, and the people have the right to rebel. A key point of the Lockean social contract is that punishments should fit the crime; if a leader's punishment exceeds the crime, that leader is abusing authority and shifting pack to a state of nature. Is shoving a live grenade in Miles' big mouth an appropriate punishment for his violation of Island Locke's law? And if not, are we seeing Locke sow the seeds of his own overthrow? He may have spent all the political capital he had.
Last thing: Recently Carlton Cuse and Damon Lindelof cleared up some questions about what they can do post-strike, and what that break provided them. They noted that had there not been a strike, they would have been working on the finale now, but now have an opportunity to react and adjust to audience response. That's great; the narrative remains a two-way street, and we can be sure that many of the theories floating around out there right now will be either confirmed or quickly quashed. Take Naomi's bracelet: They acknowledged that the bracelets only looked similar, but meant nothing more. Sayid's scene on the golf course did not take place after the Elsa scenes: "If we're going to jump time, we're not going to jump narrative order within the time jumps, too." So that clears that up. They stated they are PRO-spacetime-bending, but ANTI-paradox. I hope to come back to that, because it was a major point of David Lewis's possible worlds theory. Maybe one of the most interesting things Cuselof said, though, is that the future chronologies are in relationship with each other, but they're leaving it to the audience to create that larger chronology and identify those relationships. So keep your eyes peeled, kids: Jack said in court that only eight survived the crash; is Abaddon looking for the other 30-some survivors? What empires in Lost never ended?
(And with the Sayid confirmation, you know the writers are checking out what the audience has to say; we're not just passive data, we're participants.)
Dick had interests in the fields of philosophy, science fiction, psychology, pharmaceutics, theology, and mysticism, which he worked into his recurrent themes of paranoia, conspiracies, psyches splitting into component parts, and the persistent questioning of the nature of reality. To those who study the intersections of those subjects, PKD is a kind of mad saint. One thing that sets his work apart from something like Los. Bros. Wachowski, though, is how consistent the questioning of reality is in his works. Consider The Matrix: Neo is shown the actual Chicago, "Welcome to the desert of the real" and all that, and goes off with Morpheus to download jujitsu into his noggin. The problem is that Neo doesn't question if the world Morpheus shows him is yet another illusion (after all, if there's one...). PKD's narratives, if not his characters, are not as naïve. Once they come to some breakthrough in their understanding of reality, that understanding is the next thing to get interrogated and questioned. It's a skeptical move made consistently throughout the first volume of Valis, and is something we're getting increasingly used to in Lost.
For a good introduction to the impulse behind Valis, the artist R. Crumb has a short comic called “The Religious Experience of Philip K. Dick” in the 17th issue of Weirdo (1986). It depicts some of the events that lead up to Dick's writing the book. Crumb's economic use of text/image conveys what follows better than I can in words alone, and can be read online. But I'll try, and I'll weave in Dick's biography with what he does with Valis; it's a famous tale among PKD fans.
Much of the material from Valis comes from PKD's experiences between 1974-76. Dick was never fully certain whether he was undergoing some transcendent experience or going mad, or whether there was a difference. The fact that Dick tweaked his brain to the edge with amphetamines didn't help matters, and he was quite aware that he was not in a good position to judge whether what he was going through was paranoid hallucination or actual experience. But the information he amassed about cosmology and cosmogony during that period shaped the rest of his life and work, and he presents that information through the cipher of of his protagonist, Horselover Fat. It's never quite clear which details are PKD's shot trough HLF, and which are elaborations as a way of working out what he experienced. What's more, a science fiction writer named Phil appears in his own book and is the narrator who talks with HLF. Phil is eventually confronted about how he and HLF are the same person: Philip > philo: Greek for love; Philip > hippos: Greek for horse; Dick > means fat in German. Philip becomes a contraction for the Greek terms, yielding horselover, and Fat is just a play on Dick's last name. Dick effectively creates his own mirror twin and as the two interact in the novel. One could go through PKD's "exegesis" to piece apart the biography from the fiction. The exegesis are notes he took about his ideas, but there's some 8,000 pages of them, some are absurd and show an unbalanced mind, some are incredibly insightful, but who's to say how much of that is biography and how much is fiction... HLF has a similar exegesis.
In 1974 PKD had an impacted wisdom tooth removed, and was administered sodium pentothal for the procedure (the truth drug, also used as an anesthetic). He wasn't given anything for the post-op pain, and after some mind-numbing suffering, he called the pharmacy for some painkillers. When the delivery woman arrived at his home with the painkillers, he opened the door and was struck; she wore a gold vesica piscis pendant, a Jesus fish, and the light bounced off it in a strange pink hue and struck him in the head (more on this symbol in a moment; it's hardly just a fish). He was transfixed, and then his world started to fall apart; the scene outside his door disappeared, and instead looking out on a southern California town, he was looking out at the early Christian world, when Christians were still persecuted; people spoke Greek and they wore the piscis as a secret symbol to each other. It's all a bit like Desmond's flashes. Horselover Fat goes through the same experience in Valis, and starts hearing language in koine Greek; HLF did not know Greek, but the words he transcribes turn out to be accurate Greek phrases.
Dick/Fat explained this wasn't a hallucination; he called it a kind of anamnesis, the loss of forgetfulness, and he experienced it time and again in the following year. (Speaking of loss of forgetfulness, this is essentially what Faraday was working on when he was trying to recall which playing cards Charlotte laid out.) PKD felt his mind had been invaded by some greater intelligence, and he was remembering through this intelligence experiences he shared with that intelligence, but didn't know about. Over the next two years while this intelligence remained, PKD got his life together like never before. He came to understand that this other intelligence was an early Christian, from 2,000 years before. But this other person—he called him Thomas (twin)—had been also other people. Furthermore, these past times weren't really past; they were occurring right then and there:
"Thomas," Fat told me, "is smarter than I am, and he knows more than I do. Of the two of us Thomas is the master personality." He considered that good; woe unto someone who has an evil or stupid other-personality in his head!
I said, "You mean once you were Thomas. You're a reincarnation of him and you remembered him and his--"
"No, he's living now. Living in ancient Rome now. And he is not me. Reincarnation has nothing to do with it."
"But your body," I said.
Fat stared at me, nodding. "Right. It means my body is either in two space-time continua simultaneously, or else my body is nowhere at all." (109)
Sound familiar? In entry #35 of his own exegesis, HLF parses the Richard Wagner's opera Parsifal, when Gurnemanz explains to Parsifal that in the forest maze, time turns into space. Read on for a familiar theme and name:
(The whole landscape becomes indistinct. A forest ebbs out and a wall of rough rock ebbs in, through which can be seen a gateway. The two men pass through the gateway. What happened to the forest? The two men did not really move; they did not really go anywhere, and yet they are not now where they originally were. Here time turns into space. Wagner began Parsifal in 1845. He died in 1873, long before Hermann Minkowski postulated four-dimensional space-time (1908). The source-basis for Parsifal consisted of Celtic legends, and Wagner's research into Buddhism for his never-written opera about the Buddha to be called "The Victors" (Die Sieger). Where did Richard Wagner get the notion that time could turn into space?)
And if time can turn into space, can space turn into time? (40-41)
PKD/HLF came to believe that Thomas was also Elijah, John the Baptist, Dionysos, the Buddha, and many others, all at once. They were, according the HLF, homoplasmates—living human embodiments of the Logos, the Logos being not simply the word of God through Christ, but living information, which was also a secret to transcend time. HLF called the Logos plasmate, and believed this secret was a technology for eternal life that the early Christians understood, as well as the Rosicrucian Order, the Renaissance alchemists, Apollonius of Tyana, Elijah, Dionysos, the Dogon of western Sudan, the Gnostics as recorded in the Nag Hammadi library, and others. The fish symbol, as well as being a representation of the age of Pisces, was a geometrical symbol of two circles with the same radius that each have their centers intersecting with the other circle's circumference. The center of that intersection is the fish symbol. Take just that central intersection image and twist it, and you get the double helix of DNA.
vesica piscis vesica twisted double helix
While spending time in a mental institution, HLF tells his doctor that the Logos, or plasmate, was living information that once in a person, would travel up the optic nerve and then over to the pineal gland—which some identify as the proverbial third eye. The Romans, HLF explains, hunted down all the people who were homoplasmates, because they were intent on freeing humanity from the grip of the empire. But the plasmate went dormant within the gnostic texts of the Nag Hammadi library. When the texts were discovered in 1945, the plasmate was set free. (It may be worth paying attention to what kind of conversations Hurley ends up having in his flashes at the mental institution.)
(Quick word on the pineal gland: This may be one of the more enigmatic parts of the brain. It helps regulate sleep and dreams, and according to psychiatrist Dr. Richard Strassman, it may also produce the chemical dimethyltryptamine, or DMT, a naturally-occurring chemical found both in the human body and some plants that causes consciousness to fully transcend known reality, like in dreams. Dr. Strassman conducted the first clinical research on DMT, which he published in his 2001 book DMT: The Spirit Molecule. Odd how this seems to rhyme with Horselover Fat's description of plasmate, or living information.)
So how did Horselover Fat (or Philip K. Dick) become a homoplasmate channel, a conduit for living information? HLF's friend Kevin suggests it was the intense pain he experienced with the wisdom tooth that brought it on. Many cultures use intense pain as a way to ritually transcend the human dimension and access whatever it is that is beyond our normal experience. Kevin talks about the Australian Aborigines accessing the Dream Time, which is another way of saying they access living information, or the Logos. If you saw A Man Called Horse, you saw the Sioux Sun Dance ritual, a particularly grueling version of a ritual common to many of the U.S. Plains Indians. In this version, a man has his chest pierced by bones attached to ropes, which are in turn attached to a pole. The man is in effect nearly suspended by the bones through his flesh. The ritual consists of dancing and prayer to the Great Spirit, and at a designated time, the man has to run backwards until the bones tear through his flesh. The ritual can take days, and it puts the person into a transcendent state in which he can commune with the Great Spirit. Such rituals go back thousands of years, and are common around the world. Kevin believes that the combination of the intense pain HLF experiences and the vision of the vesica piscis put HLF past this world into some larger communication, which HLF understands as the plasmate, or Logos.
For Horselover Fat, the gnostic texts are the hook, particularly Valentinus, an early Gnostic Christian theologian from Rome who lived in the second century CE. Valentinus had a monistic rather than dualistic world view, and after his death much of his work was wiped out by the church. But one of the Valentinian texts, The Gospel of Truth, was discovered in the Nag Hammadi library. The gnostic texts describe a variety of transcendent beings who, much like in Hinduism, seem to symbolically represent aspects of human psyche, emotions, and consciousness. The Gospel of Truth is a creation myth describing how the fall of Sophia (wisdom) gave rise to evil and error. When wisdom falls/fails, ignorance reigns; ignorance is fertile ground for fear, and fear and anguish grew into a fog that blinds people and leads to error.
HLF explains to his doctor that the creator of this world isn't the entity whom we consider to be God—that's an error. The creator of this world was a demiurge that was created when Sophia fell; it's name is Yaldabaoth, and it is deranged. Yaldabaoth is blind, HLF explains, and believes it is the only deity. Because it is deranged, the world it created—our world—is full of error and misinformation; the result is that the divine within all people is trapped in materiality. This trap of materiality is what HLF calls the black iron prison, and is what the Roman empire maintained; HLF further realizes that the prison is all around us, and that the empire never ended. Yaldabaoth, the manifestation of error, either doesn't realize it has trapped the divine in people within materiality or may have malevolent intentions, so the greater demiurge—what HLF calls Zebra—sent down Jesus to "enlighten" people, thereby freeing them. This angers error (presumably Yaldabaoth—the Valentinus text doesn't give the name, just calls it error), who then has Jesus nailed to a tree. Horselover Fat believes the secret knowledge possessed by the Gnostics, the alchemists, the Greek mystics and pre-Socratics, etc. was just that living information, or plasmate, and accessing that technology would lift the veil of error, dismantle the black iron prison, and result in eternal life. His evidence is the presence of the intelligence that invaded his mind, an intelligence that accessed the plasmate to become homoplasmate and eternal.
By the way, Yaldabaoth is depicted as having a serpent body and a monstrous, lion-like head; considering that Yaldabaoth is said to have introduced a kind of fog of fear that leads to error, and that it's depicted as serpent-like, Yaldabaoth may have an echo in our smoke monster. That's not to say the smoke monster is Yaldabaoth, just that there are some interesting rhymes. yaldabaoth
Valis is dense and rewarding, but isn't necessarily easy. This entire discussion could but shouldn't revolve just around Valis, so a couple points of closure: In entry #32 of his exegesis, HLF notes that what we experience as the world is the unfolding of a narrative about a woman who died long ago. He's talking about Sophia, the gnostic personification of wisdom, which is part of the divine syzygy comprised of wisdom and logos, Sophia and Christ. That's a great word, syzygy, and in this case it means she was part of a set of divine twins who together made a transcendent unified whole, rather like yin and yang. If I understand this correctly (and I'm leaving a lot out), the Sophia briefly left the logos and the divine syzygy and fell to our world. That's when things went a bit haywire; when she crashed into the material world, the result was the birth of Yaldabaoth and all that other stuff mentioned above. So syzygy is a kind of twin, but it also has another meaning; in astronomical terms, it's the alignment of three celestial bodies found in the same gravitation plane in a straight line. The sun, moon and earth would constitute the three bodies, and a eclipse would be a celestial syzygy. Coincidentally, on February 20th, the night before "Eggtown" aired, a total lunar eclipse—a syzygy—was visible in the Americas and parts of Europe and Africa.
Lastly, there is a section of Valis that takes on a very Lost-like mirror twin structure, when HLF sees a kind of psychedelic sci-fi film called Valis that depicts nearly everything he has experienced since the toothache, from the strange light that kicked off the invasion of the greater intelligence to the fish symbol and many parts between. The Vast Active Living Intelligence System of the film is controlled by a satellite that is never directly shown in the film, but upon further viewings, pops up in a calendar picture, in elements of montages, as a toy, in a flash cut, and elsewhere. Kevin tells HLF that they all have to see the film again because "ninety percent of the details are designed to go by you the first time-actually only go by your conscious mind; they register in your unconscious. I'd like to study the film frame by frame," (146). That could be the narrative model of Lost itself, which requires a similar kind of active scrutiny. Like Locke says to Ben when he gives him the copy of Valis, "You might catch something you missed the second time around" (like the name of HLF/PKD's group, the Siddhartha Society).
Valis wasn't the only book in "Eggtown"; in an HD moment, Sawyer is reading something while Hurley puts on Olivia Newton John's "Xanadu." The shot is just the blurred image of the top of the book (most likely sharper in high def), and the book is the Argentinian writer Adolfo Bioy Casares' The Invention of Morel (1940). This slim psychological novella is told from the point of view of an escaped fugitive who finds his way out to what he believes is a deserted island. After some time, though, he discovers he's not alone on the island, but what he believes are a group of well-off vacationers (he calls them intruders) turn out to be something quite different. The narrative is conveyed in an impressionistic fashion, not unlike Marlow in Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, and it deals with some themes in common with both Valis and Lost; deceptions, immortality, messing with time and space, and meta-narrative questioning of narrative authority, all with a near magical-realist sci-fi aspect underpinning the narrative machinery. (The book was also the inspiration for Alain Reanais' 1961 film Last Year at Marienbad.)
Casares often worked with Jorge Luis Borges, who wrote the prologue for the book. They would have made a great writing team for Lost; they sometimes ghost-wrote for each other, and even collaborated on projects they ascribed to non-existent authors, or talked about non-existent authors as if they were just unknown, and then created some work by that author to prove his existence. These diversions were in their way alternate reality games, where they wove apocryphal texts of their own invention into some larger canon of their own construction. For all we know, Borges may have had a hand in writing The Invention of Morel; he states outright in the prologue that he discussed the details of the plot in depth the Casares. The footnotes that accompany the text provide a meta-commentary that question the fugitive's facts and assumptions, and it's not clear if those are by Casares or not.
The unnamed fugitive protagonist first carefully watches the vacationers he discovers from afar, and finds himself entranced by a woman, Faustine, who frequents a beach. He eventually discovers their hotel, but it takes him some time before he can bring himself to make any contact. As the fugitive continues his explorations, he overhears discussion of some disease on the island, and wonders why he's the only one who notices there are now two suns in the sky. How the fugitive sees the intruders isn't a far cry from how Horselover Fat perceives his flashes of the ancient world superimposed over California; they're ghostly images, like a secondary cell of film superimposed over a primary cell of film. The fugitive, unwilling to really approach anyone else on the island, is faced with the "nightmare of thinking" that the intruders, the ghostly images, the multiple suns, and the rest is a trap to capture him and send him back to prison. Of course he's operating with limited information, living in a fog of fear and error.
One of the intruders, Dr. Morel, has invented something that he wants to introduce to the others. It's a device similar to a film camera, but rather than just capturing a two-dimensional image, it can capture and replay a scene in its entirety, complete with texture and depth. "Imagine a stage on which our life during these seven days is acted out, complete in every detail. We are the actors. All our actions have been recorded," (66). Morel's idea is to record a scene of life that one would hope to live again in full, and with his machine, a person could relive that moment again and again, in perpetuity. Morel himself wants to relive a certain set of days with the vacationers/intruders and recorded them.
To say more would give up too much of the plot, so no more should be said at this point. But for those who are interested, a key scene occurs in the engine room that powers Morel's invention. Much like how the DHARMA Initiative chose the Lost island for its anomalous electromagnetic properties, Morel chose his island because of certain tidal currents that can be used to generate enough power for his invention. When the fugitive finds the engine room, he also learns something about mistaking illusion for reality (a very gnostic idea and Lost-like theme).
The fugitive and Horselover Fat aren't the only ones working through a fog of fear and error. Locke has seen better days. He earned what might be called political capital when he became the de facto leader of the Lostaways on the beach in the third season, but he uses his authority to frighten a faction of the group into following him to Otherville, and then admits to Kate that he's not running a dictatorship, but neither is it a democracy. What's interesting here is the premise of the split: Locke convinced some of the people that the unknown quantity just off their shores (the freighter folk) were a danger to be avoided at all costs. Jack and the rest chose to engage that threat and understand it, while Locke used it to sow fear and establish greater authority.
In his Second Treatise of Government, the philosopher John Locke discusses his version of the social contract, in which people give up some of their natural rights in exchange for protection, property, and protection of property. Locke's ideas were a strong influence on Thomas Jefferson and the Declaration of Independence, but Locke was not as averse to a monarchy as Jefferson; if the community determined a king best served their common social goals, then a monarchy was as preferable as a democracy; it's not a democracy, it's not a dictatorship, and the people remain the ultimate sovereign. When the leadership no longer reflects the will of the people, they've shifted out of the social contract and back to the state of nature, and the people have the right to rebel. A key point of the Lockean social contract is that punishments should fit the crime; if a leader's punishment exceeds the crime, that leader is abusing authority and shifting pack to a state of nature. Is shoving a live grenade in Miles' big mouth an appropriate punishment for his violation of Island Locke's law? And if not, are we seeing Locke sow the seeds of his own overthrow? He may have spent all the political capital he had.
Last thing: Recently Carlton Cuse and Damon Lindelof cleared up some questions about what they can do post-strike, and what that break provided them. They noted that had there not been a strike, they would have been working on the finale now, but now have an opportunity to react and adjust to audience response. That's great; the narrative remains a two-way street, and we can be sure that many of the theories floating around out there right now will be either confirmed or quickly quashed. Take Naomi's bracelet: They acknowledged that the bracelets only looked similar, but meant nothing more. Sayid's scene on the golf course did not take place after the Elsa scenes: "If we're going to jump time, we're not going to jump narrative order within the time jumps, too." So that clears that up. They stated they are PRO-spacetime-bending, but ANTI-paradox. I hope to come back to that, because it was a major point of David Lewis's possible worlds theory. Maybe one of the most interesting things Cuselof said, though, is that the future chronologies are in relationship with each other, but they're leaving it to the audience to create that larger chronology and identify those relationships. So keep your eyes peeled, kids: Jack said in court that only eight survived the crash; is Abaddon looking for the other 30-some survivors? What empires in Lost never ended?
(And with the Sayid confirmation, you know the writers are checking out what the audience has to say; we're not just passive data, we're participants.)
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