"I Hope You're Happy Now, Jacob"--The LOST Season 5 Thread

Some more disjointed thoughts 'cause I re-watched the episode: I think that the crash survivors of 316 (other than the Oceanic 3) are in the present because we see Cesar rifling through what appears to be a long-abandoned Dharma station - the Hydra? - and Dharma is still in operation in the 70s.. I've assumed that they will soon take those two canoes to the larger island and wash up at the beach where the original camp was, which we saw long-abandoned when Sawyer, Juliet and the rest were skipping a few episodes back - an Ajira airlines bottle of water was in one of the canoes. I can't wait to find out how they all get back to the same time period, not to mention find out where Lapidus and Sun (I assume) have run off to. There is a shot of Sun on the beach in the new promo which suggests maybe she won't end up being the woman Frank ran off with (hello, jungle tryst!) but that could also be the first scene of their perspective of the crash.. the previews are always so misleading.

Curious as well that in the last episode, the video camera control room looked a lot like the one in the Hydra that Jack saw Kate and Sawyer getting it on in the cage in, but that's on the smaller island and the action all happened on the "mainland," isn't that a bit of a screw-up? The kid mentioned the polar bears escaping after all.

I wonder if anything will come of Patchy and Locke's odd conversation when we first met him: "Of course I don't know you, Sayid Jarrah. How could I? And you, Kate Austen, are a complete stranger to me. But you, John Locke, you I have much more than a fleeting memory of ... but I must be confused, because the John Locke I knew was --"

that last sentence is interesting but again, there's no way of knowing how much the writers wrote before they set the end-date is actually relevant. i definitely think a lot changed when they decided to go full-steam into time travel (which tbh I only think they went into because of the good response to The Constant and after they started writing again post-writer's strike.)

there's more than one video control room - there's the one on the Hydra, and there's the one where patchy was when Ben showed Juliet her sister.

Also, the Pearl station.

dharma was just an elaborate experiment in voyeurism, obviously.

xp There's also the Pearl. All of these are slightly different from the one we saw last night:

Pearl
http://images1.wikia.nocookie.net/lostpedia/images/c/c5/Pearlstation1.jpg

Hydra
http://images4.wikia.nocookie.net/lostpedia/images/9/9c/HydraObservation.jpg

Flame
http://lostpedia.wikia.com/wiki/Image:TVFlame.jpg

(The Flame one is too big to post, I gather:
http://lostpedia.wikia.com/wiki/Image:TVFlame.jpg)

bunch of paranoid hippies.

some more thoughts on the writing on Lost: that Patchy line up there is a pretty good example of how ambiguous dialogue allows the writers a lot of leeway of how they might fill in the gaps in the story - we used to think it meant that Patchy knew Locke when he was paralyzed but now because of time-travel it could have meant something completely different. like all we knew from the flashforwards in season 4 was that "some very bad things happened to the people left behind", which wouldn't have necessarily referred to death from time-travel sickness. could've been war with the Others, or smokey going on a rampage or something.

i suspect if people hadn't liked all the time-travel stuff in s4, the writers wouldn't have gone through with it this season (cf. cutty's comment upthread where the writers said circa s3 that they weren't going to do anything with Dharma because they didn't think that the audience cared about it as much as they cared about the castaways). but as it turned out, the timejumps turned out to be a very good way to fill in the details of the island's history while still focusing on the central characters.

Agreed, this has been a clever way to answer some questions without bringing out Basil Exposition.

ya and my friend pointed out that by revealing lots of backstory now the last season won't just be a series of elaborate explanations. which is cool

ok so how about this .... young ben is in the dharma camp 1974-77 and sees things happening but doesn't know who jack/kate/sawyer/hurley are or what they're doing. later meets up w/ alpert and they put heads together (locke and sawyer have both now told alpert they're time-travelling). so later on, adult ben makes his list of jack/kate/sawyer/hurley and grabs em to stick em in the polar bear cage to keep them from making it to the point where they time travel back to the 70s.

^^^^ elaborate explanation

My daughter usually calls from school each week after LOST to do a post-mortem as it were, and this week I was just "ugh I don't want to talk about it this week, I need to ponder it for a few days first." But she was all excited because she'd figured out that the guy who plays Horace was some awesome villain in season 1 of the X-Files, awesome enough to have a 2nd episode about him.

Mikhail knew who the Losties were because his job in the post-Dharma others occupation was manning the communications center - we already saw a scene where Ben, with Mikhail's help, gains info about the passengers on the plane immediately after the crash!

As for time travel stuff, I think it's true that "The Constant"'s success gave them the courage to full blast with it this year, but the show's always had some leads of it - even "Flashes Before Your Eyes" was 3x8, one episode before that awful Jack tattoo episode and well before they got the series ending deal which turned everything around for the better. I don't know if they would have restricted it to just Desmond's angle, it seems too juicy not to use when they already had all these Dharma science experiments and radiation and so on, always in the background of the show.

Yeah, I think the Mikhail thing was just typical fun Lost doing more mysterious non-answers to things.

i don't think mikhail is coming back.

yeah i agree time-travel's always been part of the show, but as with Dharma or any supernatural stuff, until now it's never been entirely clear how important all of it is to the central story. not saying time-travel wouldn't have been used if people didn't like it, just maybe not as heavily as we've seen it - prob restricted it to the weird electromagnetic field at the edge of the bubble, or only one timejump landing them straight in the 70s. I just thought it was interesting that all these vague non-answers characters give can be used to pull the story either one way or another, and also change what we thought about previous episodes. xp

Mikhail was bullshitting about being a survivor of the Dharma Initiative, he was just trying to lull them into a false sense of security.

ok so how about this .... young ben is in the dharma camp 1974-77 and sees things happening but doesn't know who jack/kate/sawyer/hurley are or what they're doing. later meets up w/ alpert and they put heads together (locke and sawyer have both now told alpert they're time-travelling). so later on, adult ben makes his list of jack/kate/sawyer/hurley and grabs em to stick em in the polar bear cage to keep them from making it to the point where they time travel back to the 70s.

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― dmr, Friday, March 6, 2009 3:35 AM (7 hours ago) Bookmark

Or gave them drugs to help them surive time traveling ?

Now the whole Polar Bear cage thing makes sense--

Ben, in love with Juliet, knows from his boyhood that Sawyer & Juliet are a Dharma couple--therefore he captures Sawyer and Kate and puts them in cages so that they will fall in love.

the guy who plays Horace was some awesome villain in season 1 of the X-Files, awesome enough to have a 2nd episode about him.

Tooms!

It seems that in 1977 Sawyer and crew are still living undercover--I wonder why they never told Horace that they're from the future. Are they afraid of having tests run on them? I mean they're so friendly with the Dharmanians that they get emotionally invested in whether Amy and her baby survive but they don't trust them enough to tell their story? Maybe they just don't want to break it to them that they're going to be wiped out sooner or later.

I can imagine a scene where someone tells Amy what's going to happen so that she'll leave the island with her baby (and maybe with Charlotte & her mom too) before the purge goes down.

Mikhail knew who the Losties were because his job in the post-Dharma others occupation was manning the communications center - we already saw a scene where Ben, with Mikhail's help, gains info about the passengers on the plane immediately after the crash!

― mikebee (BATTAGS), Friday, March 6, 2009 4:54 AM (10 hours ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink
Oh yeah, I know this - that's why he tells Sayid and Kate they are strangers (creepily uses their full names, but appears not to know them personally) but then he turns to Locke and says he remembers him - I found that line interesting at the time and continue to do so because it really does separate Locke from the others

kate is a moron for continuing to call him sawyer anyway but i guess it's because she fell in love with that jerk part of his character.

i like the idea that when "the sub returns in two weeks" Ben and his Dad are on it but i'd be surprised if they were planning to bring both of those actors back in (esp. as could be Walt-esque irl growth issues with the boy Ben).

true but that NAMASTE WELCOME NEW RECRUITS poster in that screen shot looks familiar from the Ben-as-a-little-kid episode

This'll tell you whether he'll be back or not (SPOILER)

is it possible that locke is horace/amy child? he was adopted, right?

that's why locke wasn't transported back with them in the plane.

oh no locke is too old for that. WOOPS.

plus we saw (with richard) locke being born, and richard doing the leader test on him as a boy

xpost: plus, we saw last season that Locke's birth mom was a wayward teenager, if you recall.

got to be jacob

"got to be jacob"
care to place an imaginary wager on that?

I'll give you 5:1 imaginary odds (You win 5 fakebucks for every 1 fakebuck wagered if the kid is jacob).

I kind of wish that dude with the site that predicted election results within 0.01% would work his magic on TV show plot developments.

I want the kid to be Desmond! Jacob would be nice too though. Or Karl?

http://www.eightonefive.com/

Better now, though still annoying sometimes ? too cool a show for me, Dollhouse rip signing out

waht

Desmond is the only major character that baby could realistically be, but I really doubt it. At first I thought Sawyer for a bit but he would have had early-onset nosebleeds like Charlotte.

But actually, I don't think the identity of the baby is particularly significant, and it's just to show that whatever incident caused the infertility problem occurred after 1977.

^^^^

babby = Frogurt

I think it's Charlie.

I'm guessing this is going to lead back to Ben, since this is Lost, and everyone is motivated somehow by huge guilt, he caused the infertility problem and that's why he's so desperate to fix it around 2001-ish.

Wasn't too satisfied with the brush-off about tampering with past (1974) events - Daniel's "whatever happened, happened" doesn't cut it for me. Would someone else have shot the two hostile guys if they weren't there? Or was this just implying that whatever the Losties did doesn't matter because whatever it was is the thing that will have happened?

I would be quite impressed if the baby was just a baby. However, I'm imagining that the circumstances of his birth (wouldn't have happened if Losties hadn't turned up?? Whole existence depends on Sawyer etc remaining on island?) will mean it's someone who's invested in Sawyer et al.

"Or was this just implying that whatever the Losties did doesn't matter because whatever it was is the thing that will have happened?"

Correct.

i think ben's dad is the third from the right in the 'namaste' new recruits' pic.

I don't think when Dan says "whatever happens happened" he means "someone would have come along & shot those two Others" but "Sawyer & Juliet shot those two Others is 1974 because that's what happened."

And for some reason everyone thinks that baby is Ethan which would be lame.

Yeah, except for Desmond for some reason they're doing with a hard, 12 Monkeys theory of time on this show, basically it DOES matter, because they did shot those guys in 1974, nobody else ever did, it was always them. So of course, we will have to get that eventual scene of crazy Daniel screaming at kid Charlotte not to come back to the island, knowing it is tragic and futile.

and I think that's what he was muttering about in that one scene ("I'm not gonna tell her, I'm not gonna tell her") but of course he won't be able to help himself

Desmond being the baby would be so stupid. "We need him to be safe...let's send him to my crazy distant Scottish relatives..."