Lost: THE REMAINS
Napoleon Park
Chapter Seventeen.
“American History 101”
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It's been an interesting trip. We met a woman named Naomi who helped us get in touch with the freighter. Then that crazy psycho John Locke put a knife in her back. Jack pulled a gun on him and pulled the trigger. Click. Locke warned against trusting the freighter people and took off and eight or nine people went with him including Hurley and Steve and a couple women I didn't know - I think one of them was Steve's tent-mate Tracy - and the girl with the baby. Then some scientists from the ship showed up. So this is it, it's real. We're actually going to get off this island just like Jack promised us. That's one heck of a Christmas present.
So where was I...?
Then there were the islands doers and shakers, the people who got things done, the self-appointed leaders and what Arzt called The Clique.
The big romantic triangle everyone gossiped about - Doctor Jack and Kate and the hillbilly Sawyer. That eccentric coot Locke. The Korean couple, the Iraqi torturer, the rock star and his pregnant girlfriend. Michael and his son and their dog. I guess you'd include Ana Lucia and Mr. Eko from the tail section in that group. The US Marshal who died. Maybe even Rose and Bernard had their place in the island hierarchy. Oh, and that woman Juliet that Jack brought back from his time with the Others. Those are the stars of the story. Someone will probably write a book about them, maybe even make a movie about them when they get home. Hell, if I'd been taking better notes maybe it could have been me. Instead I decided to focus on the rest - the remaining section of the group that no one gossiped about or talked about except on the slowest of news days.
I decided to focus on the people who just hunkered down and found a way to get on with their lives without running around in the jungle shooting guns and blowing up hatches and pushing buttons and making enemies of the people who were here before us. But who am I to judge - that kind of sounds like American History 101. But those movers and shakers will have to find some other writer - maybe a team of writers - to tell their stories. I'm going to write my book on the rest of the survivors. The Remains.
There are still some people I want to interview about their island experiences. Hopefully I'll have a chance to talk to them on the ship on the ride home.
Oops - gotta go. Sayid showed up with a raft and that scientist Faraday is ferrying people back to the freighter in groups of six. Will write more later --
[Manuscript ends here]
1 comment:
Lost: The Remains postscript.
That's the end. That's how it ends... on a season ender cliffhanger, just like the show.
We were told Lost would be about 48 plane crash survivors, then they cherry picked about a dozen main characters to focus on and dismissed the rest as 'background, followers, redshirts and extras'. They told us that sometimes these obscure characters would step forward into prominence. but they few times that happened, as with Arzt or Nikki and Paolo, all the Jack Kate Sawyer 'shippers whined and the minor characters were blown up or buried alive.
So these are the Remains. The minor character, the redshirts, the cannon fodder. We're told they're expendable, their lives don't matter. I've tried to shime a dim light on them, give them some diverse, if flawed, personalities. to make them live and breathe if only for a moment.
So how does it end? You know that already. They're promised they'll get off the island, they're told to go to the freighter, and they follow like sheep. Then they're ordered "abandon ship!" and they leap into the ocean - some with rafts and life preservers and vests, some without. They the ship explodes.
And then? Do any of them make it to the island? Or to a shipping lane? Do they drown? Starve? Dehydrate? Do the sharks come? Do they live or die? Do you care?
I tried to make you care.
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