SO ARE YOU, LIKE, AN ANDROID? VAMPIRE? Apparently there was something wrong with my satellite dish, because tonight I sat down to watch Lost, but it kept switching to the sledgehammery serious parts of Glee.
Look, I haven't complained at all about the flash-sidewayses. But now I'm going to start. Whether the show is giving us alternative stories of redemption or failure, the show lets us calculate their vectors only by reference to the doings on the island. And I'm beginning to wonder, do those moments in the alternative 2004 even count if the characters don't know that they're righting wrongs or betraying trusts? The flash-sidewayses are starting to feel hermetically sealed from all of the hard decisions, the loyalties forged and broken, the opportunities squandered on the island, and without something to span both sets of stories, the mainland tales feel like they're shrinking. Tonight's Lost was not a tale of two Bens -- it was about Ben on the island and some unrelated small man with a comparatively small dilemma on the mainland.
Meanwhile, I admire the virtuoso stupidity of Jack's interrogation technique.
I'll probably be back with more later, but I have to say that for the first time in a long time, I really enjoyed Jack last night. I can't really put it into words, but something about him taking charge without seeming like a d-bag was fun to watch.
ReplyDeleteHere's a line I didn't hear last night: "No, asshole, you're going to write Alex's recommendation letter, *then* you're going to resign. You're not really going to allow this scandal to be exposed just to prevent a talented student from getting into Yale -- which, after all, only helps you look better as well."
ReplyDeleteVirtuous Stupidity would be a great name for a band.
ReplyDeleteOf course it would help if I could spell "virtuoso"... need coffee.
ReplyDeleteInteresting the divides on this one--Sepinwall and Mo Ryan both lurved it, and Isaac and Ana Marie Cox didn't.
ReplyDeleteTeam Sepinwall/Ryan. But yes, I had the same thought as Adam did.
ReplyDeleteAlso, William Fricking Atherton!
I actually like it the way you wrote it.
ReplyDeleteI suspect that how you feel about this episode has a lot to do with whether you'd watch an entire television program where Michael Emerson plays an ineffectual prison counselor.
ReplyDeleteRandom assorted thoughts worthy of discussion by others:
1. When Linus said "we're the good guys," current conventional wisdom says that he was right.
2. When Rousseau said that Smokey was a securitysystem, current conventional wisdom says that she's wrong.
3. If, as whatshername says, there are six candidates left, that makes Jack, Hurley, Sawyer, and at least one of Jin/Sun. Only one Kwon was on the cave ceiling, so it's not clear whether you should count them both. Kate wasn't on the list, and who knows whether Sayid is still on the list.
4. Jack is sure that there's a plan for him, and that the plan is not for him to get blown up (or, under Richard's rules, at least not to blow himself up). So does he get to be even more reckless (more reckless, that is, than carrying a nuclear warhead around in a backpack), because he's presently indestructable?
5. Is this now all just one game of Survivor, where we peel away candidates until one stays on the island and the rest go home?
6. I'm a sucker for these Lord-of-the-Rings style coalition-building moments, where people who previously had little in common become allies. Ben imprisoned Jack and harassed Jack and Hurley's group for months or years. Miles and Lapidas came on the freighter to capture, kill, or blackmail Ben. Ben killed Whatshername's father/god figure and Richard's boss. Whatshername almost killed Ben for killing Jacob, and more or less put Lapidas and Sun on a forced death march. Sun is in some kind of partnership with Widmore, Ben's nemesis. But now they're there on the beach, gearing up to fight dead locke.
7. Richard Alpert -- was he the captain of the Black Rock, a crewman, or one among the chained-up cargo?
8. We now know that blowing up the hatch did something seriously messed up, because it had to change the events in the alternative timeline going back even before the explosion. I.e., blowing up the hatch caused a divergence in timelines starting at a point earlier than the explosion itself. Ben and his dad still went to the island, but they also left, presumably before Sayid shot Ben almost to death (otherwise, the conversation about whether it was a good idea to leave the island probably wouldn't have gone that way). This does not make sense to me.
It was Real Genius night on Lost! Laszlo and Professor Hathaway! All we needed was Val Kilmer. Love me some Real Genius.
ReplyDeleteSigh...
ReplyDeleteRichard: "I'll tell you later...explain everything I promise...but first I'm going to kill myself with your help." But hey, at least he's not stalling.
Anybody want to give odds on the genuineness of Ben's joining the (presumed) good guys? Has all the mendacity and manipulativeness been washed out of him, or is it still lurking for a last minute change of sides?
The biggest problem I have with this season aside from the continual refusal of any character to provide or insist on information is the flashes. For the first time last night we got confirmation that Dharma still existed in the alterverse (but we will not speak of this again). But we till don't know why or if any of the stuff we're seeing matters because we don't know if or how it's real compared to the lives of the people we care about. Sepinwall may be right that it will play better in hindsight, but it just isn't working now.
And plus about 30 to Adam's observation above regarding the truck sized hole in the blackmail plot.
As noted below, I had the same thought. The problem is, the obvious response that you suggest doesn't fit the redemptive theme the writers were giving Ben. He had to give up his quest for power in both storylines, and the writers crafted a situation in which he was doing it because of Alex in both lines. As satisfying as it would be to see William Atherton's trademarked officious prick role neutered yet again, it didn't serve Ben's arc here.
ReplyDelete(I realize I'm assuming something about Ben's arc here; we'll see how it plays out over the rest of the season.)
A wild-assed theory I'm taking out for a test drive: Clearly, the bomb must have had some impact on the timeline divergence. But what if Ben's killing of Jacob (which, although it was occurring in a different time than Jughead-Go-BOOM, was presented more or less simultaneously in the storytelling) had an even stronger impact? What if Jacob's death somehow had an effect on the lives of those he touched, PRE-touching? This might help explain the conundrum Isaac presents in point 8.
ReplyDeleteRe: #7: I seem to remember NotLocke saying to Richard that the last time he saw Richard, Richard was in chains. Pretty sure he was a slave on the ship.
ReplyDeleteThere was also the moment last night in the Black Rock when RA picked up said chains and paused as if in reflection.
ReplyDeleteThe color of Richard's skin would suggest that he was a prisoner, not a slave. I don't know enough about ships to know whether a boat sailing to, say, Australia with a bunch of convicts on it would have looked like that. I suspect not.
ReplyDelete<span>Re: #4, wouldn't Richard's theory (connecting his seeming immortality to Jacob's touch) mean that Jack has been similarly indestructible, at least to acts of his own doing? Likewise Sawyer, Kate, Hugo, etc. Was this why Michael could never manage to kill himself? Why Jack was interrupted in his own attempt to jump off the bridge back in LA? Would Locke's suicide attempt have failed if Ben hadn't been there to stop him, then kill him?</span>
ReplyDeleteI hadn't even thought of the Michael thing, but it totally makes sense- I wonder if his is one of the crossed off names?
ReplyDeleteWhen Richard was talking about not being able to kill himself, I thought about Michael's failed attempts. Didn't someone tell Michael that after he went back to the island and took care of the ship, etc. that he could finally die? Maybe I'm remembering wrong. Adam C, I think you're right about Locke's suicide attempt.
ReplyDeleteSeeing Widmore made me wish that we could see Desmond, Penny, and little Charlie.
I'm 90% sure that at some point someone told Lapidas that he was a candidate, so that's 5 (since according to whatshername it appears that one one Kwon is worth protecting).
ReplyDeleteThe Black Rock question is interesting, since it is clearly a ship from the last 300 years, and we've been given the impression that Alpert is much older than that. [Also, per a book I recently finished, Commonwealth of Thieves, prisoners being transported to Australia sailed around the Cape of Good Hope, so wouldn't have been anywhere near the flight path of Oceanic 815.]
Emily, I think it was the ghost of Christian Shepherd who told Michael that he could die now. Which is weird, b/c I'd been operating under the assumption that Ghost Christian was really the MIB (Claire's "friend", etc.), and I'm not sure that makes sense given what Michael was doing on the boat.
ReplyDeleteAccording to the auction of its discovered journal (via Lostpedia), "The Black Rock set sail from Portsmouth, England on March 22, 1845, purportedly on a trading mission to the Kingdom of Siam (now known as Thailand). The ship was believed to have been lost at sea."
ReplyDeleteOf course Ghost Christian also was the one who told Locke that he had to turn the wheel himself (and chastized him for having Ben do it previously). Maybe Ghost Christian/MIB needed the six to get off the island so that they could bring Locke back so that MIB could be resurected in the body of Locke, etc? Maybe Michael was blessed by MIB vs. Jacob? I don't know, my brain hurts.
ReplyDeleteNot really a theory or speculation, more of a low-level wonder. In the alt-timeline, Alt-Locke has so far interacted with Jack, Hurley, Ben (and Arzt). Might there be a connection similar to Jacob going around touching people?
ReplyDeleteNew to the recapping game--GQ's Council of Nerds, worth it just for "Alpert might as well have been Deandre Cole's third guest on WHAT'S UP WITH THAT for all the information he got to impart."
ReplyDeleteI agree. And, given that this is Lost, I was impressed that Jack actually thought to ask questions at all, even if in a sort of dumb way.
ReplyDeleteI just watched, and I actually thought this might have been the best episode of the season. I share Isaac's frustration with the alt-timeline, given that we don't know what it all means, but I thought the ep did a good job of telling a character-based story while putting the pieces in place for the endgame (this is Isaac's Fellowship point). Also, though it's too bad that we lost Faraday along the way (I'd trade Ilana for Daniel), we go into that endgame with a pretty compelling "Fellowship of the Good Guys."
ReplyDeleteWell, of course I miss Faraday, and I miss Desmond more, and I think Rousseau would have been interesting to have around at this point.
ReplyDeleteIt's a little baffling to me why people are so forgiving of this particular alternate-timeline story. It was so clunky. I care about education, in contrast to the bureaucrat who cares only for budgets (of course, Scrubs's last two seasons put the lie to this one)! I will marshal all my powers of manipulation -- powers that have been described, in another universe, as evil incarnate -- to coerce said administrator into writing a recommendation! When the stakes for Ben Linus are a college recommendation or a role running a public high school, you're just humiliating the character.
But maybe part of the point is that, in the alt-verse, Ben didn't develop into the conniving manipulator we know from our timeline, and was more at peace being Dr. Linus, history teacher and idol to the small handful of students in the history club? I don't know, and I'm not going to put on a heated defense, but I guess I saw a Ben who was just much more at peace, notwithstanding his brief flirtation with power. (At bottom, I agree that these debates are kind of silly because the creators have -- mistakenly, I think -- failed to clue us in on what the alt-verse really means.)
ReplyDeleteIs there anyone in Hollywood as good at playing douchebags-in-power as William Atherton? Is there? Because I don't think there is.
ReplyDeleteI loved how Ben went from killing his dad with gas canisters in the original timeline to saving his dad with oxygen tanks in the sideways flash.
I found the blackmail plotline to be clunky, mostly because today's schools don't elevate teachers to principals in the way depicted here; principals need extra certifications, etc.--it's more something you train for and aspire to, rather than an off-the-cuff decision.
Fun fact: Ben's dad and the douchebag principal were in Real Genius together in the 1980s.
Having watched again last night with my wife, I think Russ has it right here. Note that in all likelihood Alt-Ben wouldn't have done anything at all in response to Principal Reynolds's prickiness, had not Alt-Locke (the Substitute) provided the impetus ("Maybe you should be the principal." and "I'm listening.") Which perhaps should have us questioning the similarity of Alt-Locke's and Smoke-Locke's techniques of persuasion.
ReplyDeleteOK, alt-Ben is at peace and wouldn't have done anything wrong. People who are at peace and do nothing wrong make for horrible biopics. You would not watch a show about alt-Ben, unless he were training a rag-tag band of misfit singers and occasionally embarrassingly trying to New Jack Swing.
ReplyDeleteIsaac, that may be true of biopics in general (though the makers of Gandhi might beg to differ). But I view the LA X timeline -- at least to this point -- as less of a storyline for story's sake, and more of a piece of a metastory.
ReplyDeleteI concede that it's easy to become frustrated because we don't know how we are meant to view LA X events. But a similar type of uncertainty didn't stop me from enjoying Memento.
ph&d: "...the douchebag principal..."
ReplyDeleteHis name is Peck.
Also, it's just half an episode, right? I agree that I probably wouldn't watch a movie or a series about alt-Ben, but I'm fine watching 23 minutes of it.
ReplyDelete