Lost Season 6 - RE: LA X

Or in other words, Island politics >>>>> Island 'mythology'

Come back Nikki & Paolo, all is forgiven

Erm....what the island is or why it's magical is totally something they need to explain. I would say it's only a tiny minority of viewers who disagree. And there are probably 100 unanswered questions we could come up with in about 10 mins. There are so many little events that they'll never explain, basically cos they got addicted to wowing the audience with weird coincidences or happenings. Most of these prob never had a purpose...

I'm not really expecting any further explanation of the numbers--they were degrees on a wheel Jacob used to spy on candidates--and he'd narrowed it down to 5.

I mean seriously..."nobody wants to know what this time jumping island that the entire show is about actually is, more widmore"

I know what Matt DC means, though, and I think LOTS of people here agree with the sentiment that as the show has gotten really involved in the incredibly complex machinations of the chess match-ery, it's sacrificed most of the tension & stakes (and, yes, character-stuff, for those of us who actually *liked* Desmond longing for Penny and Sawyer flirting with Frackles and all that). I mean, if it would have meant more ambiguity in exchange for not having to wonder if Smokey can only inhabit the bodies of people who have died off the island and been brought back but as long as they're not in water or whatever... then give me more birds saying Hurley's name.

But I was one of those people who didn't feel the least bit cheated at the end of the Sopranos...

Question: how about some Lost scoop in return? —Antonio
Ausiello: Thanks for keeping me plugged-in, Antonio. Here’s your Lost scoop: If you’re expecting the Sawyer/Kate/Jack triangle to move front and center during these final 10 episodes, it may be time to start managing those expectations. “We’re moving into the endgame of the show and the stakes have moved beyond, ‘Who’s Kate going to pick?’ and into, ‘Is anyone going to be left alive?,’ says executive producer Damon Lindelof. “I hope viewers are going to be satisfied with what we’re doing, but we’re not writing a romance novel here. I understand in seasons past how that was much more relevant. We’re not neglecting it, but there’s a lot of fish to fry. The elements of the love triangle — Kate’s relationship with Jack, her relationship with Sawyer, Sawyer’s relationship with Juliet, who’s dead — are a huge part of the season. All that stuff is in play.”

best news ive heard all week

I mean seriously..."nobody wants to know what this time jumping island that the entire show is about actually is, more widmore"

That's not really what I mean, I'd have settled with "the island was sitting on a rare pocket of energy that made insane things happen and here's this big war over who possesses it". I'd rather they were pawns in a political game then pawns in some pre-destined chess game between two immortal spirits who inhabit a magic prison island. I'm still holding out hope that we get a psuedo-scientific explanation rather than a magical explanation but that hope is diminishing. It feels a bit like bringing in aliens at the last minute.

Also surely there's no way they'll go through the final Hurley episode without revisiting the numbers?

totally agree.

stuff like "jacob tells hurley to get jack to go to the tower, to wait for someone who jacob knows is coming" is stuff we could do without. i do want to know, i suppose, why jacob chose these particular people. but i've a slight feeling it's on some "final five" level of randomness.

xpost

So where the hell did Christian's corpse go, anyway?

that's not important right now

polar bear ate it

and yeah I want sci fi not mythology

Oh I sort of want to know who ordered Ben to gas all the Dharma people as well. I'm guessing he's basically been Smokey's bitch the whole time, given that Jacob seemed so unbothered when they came face to face.

it seems like ben may not have been aware that smokey and Jacob were at odds with each other.

could have just thought that smokey was a force that worked for jacob, and not an entity that hated him

hence, in the temple, getting judged, and taking guidance as tho it were from higher up the food chain

yeah here's the thing: when was the last time any of these characters did anything of their own volition? once upon a time, everyone had an agenda, and at times those agendas would conflict. been a long time since that happens.

guess what's disappointing is that this makes the stakes not higher but lower. "big stakes" like saving the universe are fundamentally less interesting than "small stakes" like gaining or losing your heart's desire (RIP Juliet).

I really don't think Ben knew much at all, was faking talking to Jacob, and was living off of context clues from Alpert.

I don't really understand why Smokey was allowed to rampage round the Island killing people for ages.

you guys seriously want MORE explanation of the numbers than what we've gotten the last few episodes!? what else can they say, besides something like "everyone's number represents the age they lost their virginity," etc.

so why were they pushing those numbers into the dharma computer in the hatch? ;)

I mean, the numbers are basically gonna end up as shorthand for 'this is how Jacob's manipulated your life Hurley' but 'each number corresponds to one of the chosen ones' isn't really a great explanation.

we are like top chefs in whole foods

all these posts are about top chefs in whole foods holy shit

I'm totally cool with them not doing a Q&A of every single aspect of the show (well actually no, I'd quite like that - island press conference chaired by Walt or something) but to specifically say it's going to be what the characters are interested in, when the biggest criticism of the show so far is that they aren't interested in anything but themselves, is kind of rich.
I really want a Widmore episode, close the chapter on him and Ben.

Just remembered I had a freaky Lost dream last night, all the main Lost guys (Kate etc) were dead corpses hanging in this underground pit and when you saw them from the correct angle they made up the show's promo picture. Also Jacob totally saved the day and stopped my dad getting dismembered.

Widmore is def. going to be back.

Will he be Claire's adoption flaker's husband who ran off and left her for Libby in alt-timeline?

I mean, the numbers are basically gonna end up as shorthand for 'this is how Jacob's manipulated your life Hurley' but 'each number corresponds to one of the chosen ones' isn't really a great explanation.

I was kinda thrown by this initially too, but thinking about it more I like how vague it is. The numbers are just the thumbprint on reality left by Jacob's meddling with destiny, which is woo-woo and magical, but hey, a lot of stuff in the show is going to end up being magical in explanation - smoke monster, time travel, exotic matter, etc etc. I can get behind the numbers just being a cosmic 'JACOB IS IN UR REALITIES MESSING WITCHU' rather than something that 'means' something.

I think this line of explanation for things - 'it's magic, dude' is not going to fly for a lot of people, and we're going to see more and more of it as the show wraps up - but we are watching a show about a timeshifting island where the dead walk.

i hope they show Jacob working at the company that makes the lottery tickets, just so people can rest easier at night understanding how Hurley won

That sounds like something that would be a cellphone episode if they still made those!

I guess the dropped ball that bugs me the most is Walt. If we can't wrap up Walt's specific case in a satisfying way, at least give us something to deal with the whole child-kidnapping thing the others were into - beyond the fertility research, which I thought was explained by Ben's childhood.

he uses locke for a reason - I've been re-watching the show recently & I'm thinking that Locke was at least partially inhabited by Smokey from the very beginning. The Locke/Smokey ratio was prob skewed toward Locke to such an extent that he was not aware of Smokey's presence within him, but this could explain why his legs worked all of a sudden & how he seemed, straight away, to have such an intuitive grasp of "the island." Perhaps this is why Smokey (if it was Smokey & not Jacob who ordered it up..) demanded the return of Locke's body to the island & not any other random corpse. Certain folks (also Christian prob) are just, for whatever reason, the preferred conduits & it can only be through them that these forces become fully manifest.

A lot has been mentioned here & elsewhere about The Stand, which I don't know much about. One thing that seems to have been overlooked in recent Lost dialog, though, is how profoundly the creators were influenced by Twin Peaks. It seems pretty clear to me, at this point, that Smokey = BOB, Locke = Leland Palmer & the island is some sort of Black Lodge pocket of time-space inhabited by coexisting polarized good/evil forces, even down to the black/white motif of the Lodge floor tiling.

the odd thing about Walt is, they pretty much had to know from the beginning that they wouldn't be able to keep Walt in the show year after year as he grew way faster than the timeline of the show allowed for, and obviously used the season 1 finale as a way to start working around that, but it seems like they never had an exit strategy to resolve all the stuff they'd already set in motion involving him by that point.

xpost

Did they ever figure out what the real life numbers that the LOST numbers are based on were for?

re: walt, didn't he and matthew fox film some super secret scenes years in advance that made the producers make them swear extra hard not to tell for fear of spoiling the finale?

wasn't that just some completely made up theory?

yes.

if that theory was true i would gain some respect for the Lost braintrust, honestly it gets exhausting watching them go back and reshoot scenes over and over and insert new details when a little foresight would've made it so easy to just have that stuff ready and not worry about inconsistent haircuts/camera angles/etc.

http://lostpedia.wikia.com/wiki/Valenzetti_Equation

not made up

the odd thing about Walt is, they pretty much had to know from the beginning that they wouldn't be able to keep Walt in the show year after year

There was a time around season 4 and 5 when D&C announced in interviews that they indeed had a plan for Walt's aging and had figured out how to reintroduce him in the show. I took them to mean that Walt would be around for the series finale, but now I think at the time 'reintroduce' meant his quick appearances with Hurley and Locke in the 'three years later' off-island scenes, unfortunately.

During the Season 6 press blitz D&C said that they most likely wouldn't be able to work Walt in due to his aging.

so there's at least a few components to the LOST numbers that were cobbled together from actual strange number trivia, but the part about strange numbers being repeated on shortwave radio is definitely true, and the last I heard, people thought it was some WWII code or something.

They might have been referencing numbers stations: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Conet_Project

at this point I"m pretty certain that LOST will have a long life as a franchise after the show is over in novels and comic books.

and I would, like, totally read these

I think it would be best if it was a board game that you win first, then later play to see how you did it.

... How hard could a 'future older Walt shows up' storyline be in a show about time travel?

I'm actually looking forward to their excellent CG artists doing a benjamin button on walt.

i know anything sci fi-ish gets a billion spinoffs these days, and Cuse & Lindelof have said they have no control over what ABC does with the franchise and wouldn't be surprised to see it take all sorts of other forms in the future, but i'm having a hard time picturing what that would be. Jacob/MIB prequel stories? Crisis of Infinite Flash-Sidewayses? Tales of the Black Freighter Rock?

seems like there could still be tons of lost island mythology to mine. I mean, so far we really only know what happened on the island starting somewhere in the 1950s (I know there's the Black Rock, but we don't really know anything about it yet)

if they start spinning this off in comic books, it's pretty much inevitable there's going to be at least one story about how the nazis try to find/take over the island.

Locke's adventures as a tough guy philosopher poet wheelchair bound substitute middle school teacher. Aaron could be a student or something.