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

hahhahaha

the polar bear and the horse are brothers. their mother is annie.

how's annie?

She's doing well, thanks.

write it in u dairy

dudes, the writers are totally going to steal those theories from this thread

oh har har har

It must be terrible for these thespians to have to lower themselves to perform such material in order to pay the bills.

I don't think that's the attitude any of the actors have! That's kind of a weird leap. Are they all supposed to be nerd fanboys themselves? Of the big cast members, I think only Hurley is a total geek for all the plot twists.

Yeah, they're just not as nerdy as the audience of the show - nothing inherently wrong with that. I'd bet that's the case more often than it isn't when it comes to sci-fi/fantasy actors. Actors saying they don't watch their own show (at all, let alone religiously) is pretty common across the aboard, though you do hear about them catching it on Tivo or DVD occasionally.

One of the great things about Lost is that the actors seem to have almost no power. Also the fandom seems more focused on the show runners and writers than the actors...

Definitely agreed on this one, though this has probably become true of virtually every heavy continuity/plot-driven TV show of the last few years, building up cults around the showrunner/creator as much as the actors (i.e. BSG, The Wire, Deadwood, everything Joss Whedon, even How I Met Your Mother). It's a major shift in general for TV, not considering procedurals.

yeah i don't blame the actors for not watching the show or not following it properly - i imagine the way they shoot (with all the timelines and flashbacks, re-shooting scenes from different POVs etc) means they can't really read the scripts the way we see them on-screen and it's also pretty normal for actors to not watch themselves beyond the dailies.

i prob know way too much about this but matthew fox is surprisingly the biggest geek of them all, followed by jeremy davies who apparently loves quantum physics almost as much as his character does. naveen andrews doesn't watch the show at all and evangeline lilly hates the sci-fi/time-travel stuff. so ya know.. different levels of nerdery among the actors, as there prob are among lost fans in general.

Surely the reason Ben won't remember any of this is because he's been shot in the chest and is barely conscious?

Next episode is the Ben flashback right?

i think they were trying to explain why Ben doesn't remember Sayid when Sayid tortured him in the Swan in season 2. he might forget everything directly after he was shot but surely he would remember the man who shot him right after he busted said man out of dharma-jail?

and yeah, i think next week is a ben episode.

i guess you could argue that season 2 ben was playing the long game even then (after observing the castaways in the Swan via the Pearl) but it does seem weird that he cared less about sayid at that point, preferring to manipulate locke, jack, kate and sawyer instead. even if it was just because he needed a spinal surgeon then, you'd think ben would be more than just vaguely interested in the man who shot him as a child.

it's a cheap explanation but we're prob meant to take what Alpert said literally - at the very least, ben isn't going to remember sayid or kate or being taken to the temple to be healed.

I don't see him forgetting the non-Oceanic 6 castaways though, so we'll see how they deal with that.

i think ben rejoins the dharma folk

also, maybe ben tries to reproduce the temple experience with karl's drum&bass room.

For some damn reason I was thinking Aaron could be Sawyer when they zoomed up on him during this episode

Also, Miles & Hurley conversation (A+) leaves the whole time travel thing ambiguous, like the whole little Ben has to lose his memory spiel. I like that this is ambiguous because I would like to think that their future could change completely with what they do in the past...

:D

Widmore riding Sawyer!

The bit with Ben and the smoke monster was so shitty.

i was really afraid ben was gonna die

ya me too

i really enjoyed the episode except for that part which looked like it was in one of those 90s tarzan or stargate shows

lol@ Ben and Widmore's hair

Ben telling Ethan to hush reminded me of Corky St. Clair performing Johnny Savage's part.

What lies in the shadow of the statue?

Yeah, I was totally let down by the cheapo homemade special fx that were inside Smokey. Why would it have to look inside like it does outside? I wanted swirling lights and something not so obvious. Boo dat.

Good ep overall, though.

http://lostpedia.wikia.com/wiki/Dead_Is_Dead/Theories#What_lies_in_the_shadow_of_the_statue.3F

(ilx=back!) the special smokey effects were terrible, but otherwise it was a classic Lost episode!
I SO loved Locke being an all knowing Locke, and Ben being scared as hell through this whole episode. WTF moment at Penny *not* being murdered, and WTF again at Ben pulling the drain, what the hell was that all about?

It wasn't even the special effects that bothered me, it was the Defending Your Life-esque slideshow of Ben life events.

Yea, that was really terrible, in a Mission to Mars kinda way

ya we had seen all that stuff already this episode - so unnecessary!

they actually looked like temporary special fx

Also, the slideshow was all Alex stuff, but when Alex showed up, it seemed like she/the island didn't care about that stuff at all, and only cared that Ben had killed Locke. So why wasn't his killing of Locke (or the other time when he attempted to kill Locke) in the slideshow?

ya that kind of makes sense tho - deluging him with alex guilt so that he does what she says

Is Alex Catholic? So far all the super-ghosts have been Catholic, I think.

Worse "special effect" - swirling memory quilt or ben's wig?

Also: lol @ Charles Widmore 14 years later. Dude did not age too well.

the slideshow isn't a show for ben, it's the island extracting memories from him, then it uses the information against him

Wish we could've gotten some newer footage or pre-Alex backstory for Ben, and yes the Smokey effects were a little bad. But that said I loved this episodes just for the Ben/Locke interactions- the role reversals this season (like Sawyer/Jack) are just awesome. Flashbacks were pretty cool, too, though the Widmore timeline is still really weird and probably mistake-ridden (I thought he was exiled 20 years ago? But Alex was 5-ish during the dock scene, and this was post-Purge so it was closer to 10? Also no explanation on his kids).

Also you've got to give it to Emerson, he was great as always, especially during that final scene with the bad FX, he sold the hell out of it.

"What lies in the shadow of the statue?" was one of those great Lost setups, did they all get possessed, why are they using bizarre code phrases ("What did the snowman say to the other snowman?")...

Yeah, apart from my jibing on the special effects & wigs (flashes of Butthead: "these special effects aren't very special") I generally thought this episode was fantastic, for mostly the same ^^ reasons. Ben's expressions when Locke continually got the upper hand on him were priceless, and there were some classic Ben double dealing/reverse psychology sequences: the thing with Caesar & did he/didn't he know Locke would come back to life upon returning to the island.

pretty disappointed - had high hopes for this ep but every important scene (alex abduction, widmore exile, smokemonster appearance) was just really anticlimactic and shit. script felt pretty dumb too.

alex never looked hotter tho

Smokey is a neat freak. That is why someone has to flush his toilet before he can come out and interact w/Islanders. I don't have a screencap but there is an can of air freshener adjacent to the watery handle.

xxpost yeah i wish the show would be a little less.. neat and tidy in every episode. like "this episode is about ben and alex" and then rushes through the major plot points of that, which we've either seen or sort of know already anyway. i know that a lot of it is probably for the benefit of people who maybe aren't that geeky about the show but it still feels like lazy writing.

i enjoyed this episode though but then i really, really like the ben vs locke dynamic - those guys bring their A game every time, shit script or not. and glad that neither Penny or Desmond is dead.

btw ben doesn't remember the 815-ers in the Dharma Initiative but he remembered his dad. so i guess smokey can erase memories too?

Smokey is pretty much the "a wizard did it" for Lost, indecipherable powers to do everything, I mean it even invaded Boone's dream sequence during season 1 during his peyote trip, despite him never having actually seen it. Frankly it's pretty lame in this case, like painting over huge cracks in the continuity wall.

The wigs/makeup thing is surprising - I think this show has generally done very well with making people look ten years younger, it was kind of half-assed here, but then again I wonder how they could have really drop Ben and Widmore by 20 years without recasting. (At least they DID bother to recast for Charles for '77)

Yeah, I'm super happy he didn't ice Penny, that fight scene was almost too short but really really intense. And how about that shocking Caesar blast-out? I wonder if that's it for him.

alex never looked hotter tho

yessir

lol i forgot about locke and his home-made LSD. we need more of that.

yeah i guess smokey can erase memories and upload new ones (like how Locke suddenly knows things) and you can apparently only talk to him if you flush his toilet.

haha i think the only time they've ever been convincing with aging people backwards or forwards was goth claire - LOST is all about the bad wigs and hairpieces. '77 charles was massive lols too, he looked like he should be on the cover of a harlequin romance.

Des col' knocked the bejeezus out of Ben.

I was smitten by his pure animal rage.

but he did kind of look like old charles, the same way very young charles looked like him (it was all the eyes), and ellie was a good young/old combination. but I don't think 77 charles was old enough.

'90s Jack I thought (with the weird Billy Ray Cyrus cut) as well as '90s Locke I thought were generally pretty good, seriously! All the Sun and Jin flashbacks too, and Desmond. Most of the rest I don't think they went back more than a few years. I mean, granted, a lot of it was acting. '58 Charles was definitely better casting than '77, and I agree about Ellie.

this ep was obviously better than last week's but i feel like they are wasting a lot of time. like explaining the island reveals how ridiculous the whole thing is and they're not even attempting to try to make it not ridiculous.

my favorite parts were ben's, "i assume you're referring the to the fact that i killed you?" and locke being a sarcastic badass.

ok next episode's title is lolz - "Some Like It Hoth". 1977, Dharma-ites watch Star Wars for the first time.