Lost 4.04 - The Economist

[pocket1_pita]

I was on the flight from SF to DC on Thursday night on my way to a Ladies Weekend so when I got home from Shabbat dinner on Friday night I curled up with my laptop at midnight and watched the Economist. Lost just keeps getting faster and denser and I really can’t believe how much they packed into this single episode. 

 

 

 It turns out that Sayid gets off the Island and becomes an international assassin working for none other than Ben himself. And Ben is not the leader of a rag-tag band of Island hermits with an invisible pirate for a boss. It seems that he is actually the leader of some kind of international conspiracy to protect the Island.

 

First and foremost, let’s talk about how hot Sayid is. Be still my beating heart, but Naveen Andrews cleans up well. I appreciate how gorgeous he is in a tank top with curls, but he is absolutely delicious in a tuxedo with a blowout. On the Island, Sayid notices that Naomi is wearing a bracelet inscribed on the inside with “N, I’ll always be with you. RC”. He negotiates a trip to the freighter for himself and Des in exchange for the release for Charlotte. Because Jack is too emotional to deal with Locke without it blowing up, Sayid, Miles and Kate head off to Othersville. There they have some strange adventures. They get conned by Hurley of all people. Sayid finds a secret room hidden behind Ben’s bookcase containing passports of all kinds, currency from all over, suits and suitcases. Then he trades Miles for Charlotte and we see him and Des leaving the Island in the helicopter with Frank. Daniel tells Frank to follow the bearing exactly. I wonder what happens when you don't follow the bearing exactly. I guess in a boat you just go around in a snowglobe, but in a helicopter.....what?

 

Some strange things happen with the Freighties. They seem to have heard of Penny. I have a sad suspicion that Des might not be who he thinks he is. Or that, like Locke, he might be a tool with no idea who is wielding him. I mean, when you get right down to it, Des made the Island visible, he rescued Naomi from the tree when Mikhail would have found her and he turned off the signal blocker hiding the Island. There are a lot of fishy things about his background that he doesn’t understand himself. Maybe it is fate when a random woman you meet in a café gives you her dead husband’s boat. But maybe you are being used.

 

According to the pop-up-video version of Confirmed Dead, the woman that we see in Daniel’s first scene is not his wife, she is his caretaker. So I think that he is somewhere on the autism spectrum. Frank and Charlotte both seem sort of tender towards him, and he asks Frank’s permission to run his experiment. Frank tells him that he can only talk to Regina and has to hang up right away if Minkowski comes on the phone. Frank also refers to Naomi as Senior Management and Miles confirms that he met Charlotte on the boat. So now we’re starting to see some of the real dynamic between the Freighties. Naomi works for Abbadon, and they recruited this team of a psychic, an anthropologist and an autistic physicist to be led by Naomi on and off the Island. So on the Island we have 1) ghosts 2) really old shit 3) electromagnetic shit. Now we also know exactly the time discrepancy on and off the Island. It's 31 minutes. Not that big a discrepancy, but what could cause such a thing? I really think that the DHARMA Initiative made a time machine using the natural wormholes and the Casimir effect and that there were disasterous consequences.

 

Poor Kate. Jack may have feelings for her, but he just doesn’t get her. She flirts with him, and he either brushes her off or says the wrong thing. She seems like she is starting to have an agenda of her own, instead of just reacting to Jack’s agenda. She is seeing his clay feet very clearly now. Sawyer asks the questions I’ve been asking all along – what is Kate so eager to go back to? Now that they are in Othersville, which really looks quite comfortable, why not just stay and play house with Sawyer? That did make me swoon.

 

Off the Island, Sayid seduces the assistant of his mark to get close to her and ends up falling for her. Then it turns out she has seduced him to try and get information about his employer. Ah, the beautiful double-cross. After he shoots her, he sees her bracelet, the same one that Naomi was wearing. Whoever the Economist is, Naomi worked for him too or for his organization. Elsa was wearing that bracelet when they went to the opera, so he didn’t just see it then. He knew it all along.

 

One of the things that makes Lost such an amazing show is the way in which it taps our fear in a very modern way. The Others used terrorism against the Losties, Sayid was in the Republican Guard, he worked for the CIA to infiltrate a radical Islamist group, and now he is an international assassin. Is he good or is he bad? How do we even tell? I think that almost all of them end up converted to Ben’s mission whatever that may be. So I think that whatever Ben’s mission is, we will root for it too. I don’t think that Sayid works for Ben against his will. I think getting Sayid off the Island was part of a plan and that Ben is the one who makes the arrangements. In fact, Ben has always been able to get them off the Island. He just couldn’t take the risk before now. This is bigger than someone’s grudge against Ben, and it’s bigger than a bunch of people stranded on an Island. I think that the O6 all are part of a larger conspiracy to protect the Island and whatever is on it. They are all living with a terrible secret and they are very afraid.

Comments

[pocket1.livejournal.com]

1. I love the Ben as Vader idea and TPTB have referred to Jacob as the Emperor more than once. What do you think of the idea that there were in fact dangerous people on flight 815? I would love it if Scott/Steve and the guy with diarrhea that Goodwin killed did turn out to be secret baddies out to end the world.

2. Jeff Jensen of EW has a great interview with TPTB today where they get pretty specific about time travel and how they will use it on the show. I know some people don't like to know, but I am not one of those people. I don't want to know what happens in an episode before I watch it, but I love to know what the creaters of Lost are thinking about their own work. Also, I love to gloat over people who think that there are alternate universes and time loops. Check it out.

http://www.ew.com/ew/article/0,,20179125,00.html

3. You are probably right about Desmond. It's a pretty compelling story to just throw away like that. And he is a great character.

[(Anonymous)]

Oh and I hadn't heard that idea about there having been bad guys on the actual flight. Tell us more...

[pocket1.livejournal.com]

Oh that is just a little pet theory of mine. I think that the Others greeted the Lostaways as a threat because they WERE a threat. There were people on the plane who were planted there by the Baddies and they were actually a threat to the Island. I think we will see that the Others actually are the good guys and we will end up very sympathetic to their cause. So if Ethan and Goodwin were good guys, we will find out that the two random deaths they caused were bad people.

[(Anonymous)]

I've come to the same conclusion re: the Others. They're good guys who have been placed at the mercy of Ben because Jacob has demanded it. The only one we've seen to be TRULY bad is Ben (though as discussed, this seems to be a matter of nurture more than nature, and he might still change course before the end). I'm not sure about the notion that there were bad guys on the flight unless they just happened to be there--not that they somehow intended to crash on the island. The reason the plane crashed was because Desmond didn't get the numbers entered in time, which created a magnetic pulse that brought the plane down as it was flying over. Of course, the plane was already hundreds of miles off course when that happened according to the pilot, so it is possible that there was some sort of sinister plot that brought the plane over the island in the first place...?

[pocket1.livejournal.com]

We have already seen that at least two people (Des and Mrs. Hawking the Antique lady) on this show can see the future in flashes. If someone knew that the plane would crash on the Island, they could put someone on the plane. Furthermore, the person who was responsible for the plane crashing, Desmond, was specifically influenced by another person with future-seeing, Mrs. Hawking, to get his ass to the Island.

[(Anonymous)]

All of this is true, but also seems to contradict the creators' comments to EW about it being impossible to alter the timestream. Whatever is happening in the flash-forwards WILL happen, no matter what. They can't change the past, which means that they can't put someone on the plane who wasn't ALWAYS on the plane, just because they are able to predict that it will crash. I guess everything starts to fall apart under that kind of scrutiny though.

[pocket1.livejournal.com]

we know that some things can't be changed. if redshoesguy is going to die, he will die. you can push out of the path of a load of bricks, but he will slip in the shower and die the next day. You can put up a lightning rod, but charlie will still be pierced in the neck by an arrow, or die in the looking glass. you can't stop some events from happening. But clearly that doesn't apply to all events or it wouldn't be possible to change any of these things. so the implication is that some things can't be changed, but some things can be changed.

[(Anonymous)]

And that's a bit of a problem, really. If the rules are going to be that fluid, then nothing is cast in stone and the creators can do whatever they need to do to tell the story they want to tell. I'm a big fan of establishing narrative rules and sticking to them. I always use the example of the Terminator movies. The first movie says you can't change the past. The robot comes back to kill Sarah Connor before she can give birth to the savior of humanity. He is pursued by a human solider. Human soldier ends up fathering the savior and the defeated robot ends up becoming the first building blocks of the evil computers that will ultimately destroy humanity. Time is a closed loop, nothing can be changed--in effect, everything that will ever happen has already happened. Then all of a sudden Terminator 2 comes out and by the end of the movie, they've rewritten history, stopped Judgment Day and prevented the future from happening. So the rules so clearly established in the first movie are totally invalidated in the second.

I would hate to see that happen with Lost. If they don't do a VERY good job of tying everything together in one cohesive and credible Grand Unified Solution, the show will ever after be plagued by nitpickers who will point out every inconsistency, broken or contradictory rule, etc. There are so many balls in the air at this point, it's ridiculous: psychic Walt, polar bears on tropical islands, smoke monsters, Desmond's visions, lucky/unlucky lottery numbers, a million bizarrely coincidental relationships, Eko's brother's plane, the pirate ship, Jack's dad, Kate's horse, Dharma food airlifts, four-toed statue feet, etc etc etc. If they are able to tie it all together in a way that makes narrative sense, I will be TRULY amazed.