Room 23
A gathering place for those who love the ABC TV show Lost. This blog was started by a group of Fans who kept the Season 3 finale talkback at Ain't It Cool.com going all the way until the première of the 4th season as a way to share images, news, spoilers, artwork, fan fiction and much more. Please come back often and become part of our community.
Thursday, April 30, 2009
EW: Doc Jensen: 'Lost' Recap: A Twist of Fate
Faraday's return has extreme consequences for everyone, especially him
MAD SCIENTIST Faraday's brilliant but sometimes faulty mind latched on to a new theory for salvation that might not work out so well for him
By Jeff Jensen
Jeff Jensen, an EW senior writer, has been despondent since the cancellation of ''Twin Peaks''We need to talk about Daniel Faraday getting gunned down by his mom. (He's dead, I think — but not for long.) We need to talk about the frazzled physicist's plan to reboot history by nuking the Island with our long-lost leaky H-bomb friend, Jughead. (Might I suggest he start looking for it somewhere in the shadow of the statue?) And yes, we need to talk about the revelation that Charles Widmore is Danny-boy's father. (Brits for parents? So how come Faraday speaks Americanese?) But first, I want to talk about the Wired magazine cameo. We saw it on Faraday's couch, just as Widmore took a seat and offered his noodle-cooked son passage to Brain Healing Island aboard his Black Freighter of Keamy Death. It was the August 2003 issue of Wired — ''The Super-Powers Issue'' — devoted to the plausible science behind far-fetched stuff like invisibility, X-ray vision, and yes, time travel. The cover featured an archetypal superhero blasting white light out of his Cyclops-visored eyes and breaking a link of chain with his Man of Steel bare hands. The headline: ''The Impossible Gets Real!''
Now, it's probably not a coincidence that an old issue of Wired made an appearance in an episode of Lost airing the same month that the current issue of Wired features one JJ Abrams as its guest editor. But why did Lost choose this particular back issue for its latest rewind, pause, and squint Easter-egg clue? Well, there's the time travel article, which spotlights the two theories favored by most Lostologists, Throne Plates and Kerr Rings. There's also this cover-touted article, ''The End of Cancer As We Know It,'' which can be found on...Page 108. Cancer, of course, has haunted Lost since season 1; and 108 is the sum total of all Lost's numbers (4, 8, 15, 16, 23, 42) and integral to the mystery of the Hatch. (''Every 108 minutes, a button must be pushed...'') But for me, it's all about ''The Impossible Gets Real!'' Two weeks ago, I wondered if the ominous ebony uniforms of Dharma's Black Swan team could be a nod to a book called The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable. Now, with Wired, we have two consecutive episodes that feature a coy clue foreshadowing the imminent arrival of an extremely unlikely, yet not-at-all implausible, game-changing event.
This is all to say, I totally believe in Faraday's new theory that the time-traveling castaways can alter the past — that whatever happened can...well, un-happen. And I believe before the end of the season, someone will. But not Faraday; and certainly not by anyone following through on his crazy Let's turn the Swan site into a radioactive bird bath! scheme. (Someone's been watching a little too much Beneath The Planet of The Apes.) (Besides me, that is.) No, it's going to be another one of Faraday's designated super-special variables that will heroically break the chain of causality that has turned the lives of the castaways into a never-ending Twilight Zone episode. But which one? And how will they do it? Welcome to Lost's version of a ''Who shot JR?'' season finale, writ geeky and cosmic: ''Who changed time?''
THE VARIABLE:
MOTHER, JUGHEAD, AND SPEED IT UP!
The 100th episode of Lost — the fifth's season antepenultimate installment (that's a fancy way of saying ''third to last'') — was all about momma issues, mad scientist schemes, and the official start of a season-ending, ticking-clock plot in which our heroes must race against time to save themselves from electromagnetic calamity. (Unless Faraday wasn't being truthful about that — and I think it's possible he wasn't.) The episode had been billed as a dark corollary to ''The Constant,'' the season 4 classic in which Desmond went back in time to set up a future phone date with Penelope. But allow me to suggest a connection to another Lost episode.
For weeks, I've been insisting that season 5 parallels season 2, and deliberately so: the series is doubling back on itself, creating an ouroboros-shaped saga (a snake that chases and eats its own tail; see: Ms. Hawking's brooch, Season 3) whereby the castaways are helping to forge the very history that forged them. In the final episodes of season 2, MIA Michael returned to the castaway fold and manipulated them into actions that had long-tail ramifications. Here, at the close of season 5, it appears to me that Prodigal Dan has come back to do something very similar. Specifically to ''The Variable,'' we have a title that is thematically identical to season 2's antepenultimate outing, known as ''?''. Both episodes were about the same thing: a philosophical role reversal. In ''?'', John Locke changed his mind about the Hatch and decided (erroneously) that the Button was a mind-game that had no meaning. The fateful mistake would have massive consequences, none bigger than turning Desmond Hume into a time traveler and doomsday Cassandra. In ''The Variable,'' Faraday returned with a new perspective on the mutability of the time-space continuum and a Big Plan to put that thinking into action. If his gambit works, the consequences could be massive, especially for Desmond, whose entire Island narrative was defined by being stuck in the very structure that Faraday now wants to erase from existence. No one would be more affected by paradox than Faraday's half-sister's husband. ''The Variable'' was loaded with lines filled with double-meanings, like this one by Desmond: ''I promised you, Penny...I promised you I'd never leave you again.'' Famous last words, friend-o. Be very afraid, all you DesPen shippers: I fear their happily-ever-after life is about to unravel in the continuity reboot to come. Put another way: See you in another life, bruthuh.
DANIEL: But I can make time.
ELOISE: If only you could.
Why did she do it? Why did Eloise Hawking put her son on a road to predestined ruin — by her own hand, no less? I'm haunted by the question. In Faraday's first flashback scene (the year wasn't specified), we saw Mama Other interrupt Adolescent Dan's piano practice and break the news to her budding Glenn Gould that Carnegie Hall wasn't in the cards for him. She was distraught; she knew what she was about to set into motion. But she composed herself to carefully made her pitch, like Obi-Wan gingerly selling young Luke Skywalker on the whole Jedi Knight thing. Eloise said that Daniel had a destiny, and it was her job to help him pursue it, to put him and keep him on ''his path.'' She told him he had a proverbial quantum computer for a brain resting within his crystal alien skull, and that he had to learn to harness its magnificent energies to lead his people back to their planet. Okay, what she actually said was that he had ''a special gift...your mind,'' but I clearly got the vibe that his metronome-tracking mental superiority was akin to a Miles-like super-power. So, was Dan also an Island baby, too? FUN FACT! In the aforementioned Wired issue, one of eight abilities profiled in an article on plausible super-powers is total recall — rather ironic in light of Faraday's memory issues in the episode. Also featured: teleportation (see: Jack and co. getting beamed off the plane), regeneration (see: John Locke's legs; the Island's quick-healing powers), weather manipulation (see: meteorology was one of Dharma's fields of study); force fields (see: the sonic fence); underwater breathing (see: Charlie swimming toward the Looking-Glass); super-strength (see: Desmond, battling back a worse-than-it-appeared gunshot wound to beat the bloody snot out of Ben). As for the eighth power, x-ray vision: Smokey?
Daniel's youth was a big pile of no-fun. Eloise pushed him hard — like Gypsy-mom hard, like Carrie-mom hard, like Texas Cheerleader Mom hard — to become a grant-scoring, youngest-Oxford-doc-ever, time travel machine-inventing genius, even at the expense of a conventional mother-child relationship. Learn your Maxwell equations, or no more hugs! And I don't care if you think they look like Kerr rings, get your Slurpee cup off my hardbound limited edition 'A Brief History of Time!' That's no way to treat your Uncle Stevie's manuscript! Now: rub my corns, please. Behold the incarnation of conditional parental love — of maternal nurturing that was very much a variable, not a constant, in Dan's life. And she was rude to his girlfriends, too! Wouldn't even let poor soon-to-be-brain-scrambled Theresa come to graduation lunch! Bitch.
We could think the worst of Ms. Hawking. With time loop theory, we could paint her as a real monster. In this scenario, she would be someone so spooked by death that she'd be willing to shoot and maybe even kill her son over and over and over and over again, forever and ever, amen, just to cheat the grim reaper. But I'm going to bet this week's offering money that such a deliciously dark possibility is, alas, not the case. My interpretation of Eloise's motivations — most suggested by the scene in which she tenderly behooved brain-damaged Adult Dan to take the freighter gig — was that she wanted Dan to go to the Island to get healed and use his ''gift'' to find some way to buck the odds of physics and change time, especially the whole I shot my son thing. (Remember how in ''Dead Is Dead'' Smokey judged Ben for his daughter's death? Maybe that's why Eloise fled the Island — to escape the Monster's judgment.)
I invoked time loop theory in the previous paragraph, but ''The Variable'' left me feeling that maybe time loops aren't valid to Lost, after all. Notice I said maybe; I'm not ready to throw it out yet. I'm just saying I'm skeptical. Anyway, on Lost, there are other ways to know the future. The example of Desmond established that it's possible in this world to have the gift/curse of precognition — the ability to see into the future. The season 3 episode ''Flashes Before Your Eyes'' established that Eloise has long possessed knowledge of future events, although last night, we learned that she is no longer the seer that she used to be. ''For the first time in a long time I don't know what's going to happen next,'' she told Penelope. FUN FACT! The Dead Zone, the 1979 novel by Lost inspiration Stephen King, is set against the backdrop of 1970s events, about a guy who can see into the future by touching stuff.
Among the many lingering questions I have about the provocative though maddeningly incomplete joint Faraday-Hawking flashbacks, there is this: At one point did Shotgun Ellie, Queen of the Others, realize that the Charles Manson-looking interloper that wandered into her camp recklessly brandishing a gun was in fact her son all grown up? The most likely possibility is that next week, Jack and Kate will emerge from their hiding place and start yelling, ''You stupid dingbat! You just shot your kid!'' They'll probably prove it by making her read his notebook. She'll notice the inscription written in her handwriting and maybe even read a tell-tale entry (November, 1994: Mom made me break up with another girlfriend today. Just for that, I'm going to name my lab rat after her and scramble its brain with my time travel ray. Take that, ELOISE HAWKING WHO IS MY MOTHER!) and she'll suddenly realize: ''Oops. Blimey!''
Still, I find myself going back to that first flashback scene and mulling the possibility that moments before Eloise entered the piano parlor in tears, something happened. And I wonder if that something could have been discovering, for the first time, the true identity of the man she shot in the jungle. How? Maybe a phone call from all-knowing Widmore. Maybe an extended flash of Dan's bendy-shaped future. Or maybe (yes!) a Back to the Future 2 scenario: a letter from time traveling Faraday himself, written during his Ann Arbor but not delivered, per his instructions, until this flashback's point in time, several years later. Dear Mom: Yep, that was me you shot in 1977 — the kid currently playing the piano in the other room, all grown up. But listen: I don't hate you. In fact, it's actually now vitally important that you keep me on my path. I think I've found a way to beat this destiny thing, but to do so, you gotta send me to the Island. And you have to make sure you do one thing, because in stories like this, it always boiled down to that — that one, important thing. And it's this: I need you to give me a notebook after I graduate from Oxford. Make sure you tell me you always loved me in the inscription, because that's thematically important, especially after last week's episode, which dealt with the cost of broken parental bonds and love that goes unexpressed. I don't totally understand it myself, but I'm telling you: it's key. Anyway: gotta catch the sub. See you in another life, mum! XOXO—DF
Of course, I'm also fond of the idea that Eloise got her devastating 411 via a sudden superluminal download of revised personal history due to changes to the past wrought by the time-traveling castaways made possible by their interconnected quantum entanglement...oh, another time.
A few additional thoughts about Widmore and Faraday...
The Widmore/Faraday sequence extended Daniel's mysterious flashback beat from the season 4 episode ''Confirmed Dead'' and expanded on what he learned about him earlier this year in ''Jughead.'' Not only did he use research assistant/gal pal Theresa in his consciousness transfer time travel experiments, but as many of you predicted, Faraday used himself, as well, rendering him all mumbles and pained expressions. His brain had become a sieve (cue the Thomas Dolby song, if you will); apparently, his memory bank, like Jughead, had become all leaky and incapable of retaining much memory. He was fired from Oxford, fled to the States, lived with a woman who took care of him, relationship unknown. Many of you believe that the reason he was experiencing such déjà vu while watching news coverage of the fake Oceanic 815's discovery was because he had mentally visited this moment during one of his self-administered time ray zaps. I am inclined to agree with you.
Widmore visited. Took responsibility for the fake Oceanic 815 thing. (So much for my theory last week that Ben was actually to culprit.) Offered him the Freighter gig. Promised him healing. And he so heavily foreshadowed the revelation about being Dan's dad, that when we got confirmation in the later Widmore/Hawking scene (''He's my son, too''/SLAP!), it felt like something of a non-shocker. Speaking of the SLAP, why did you think Eloise slapped him? My wife is convinced that Widmore isn't Daniel's biological father — which may make sense if his claim to Dan that he had never met him is true — and that the real DNA daddy is... Richard Alpert.
About Desmond and Penelope...
The Desmond stuff was curious. I didn't realize that gunshot wound was so bad — especially after Des recovered quickly enough to beat the tar out of Ben and dump him in the marina. (What? The carton of milk wasn't bulletproof?) I guess he got one of those mama-goes-Hulk-to-save-her-kids-from-an-overturned-car surges of strength things. Regardless, Desmond was rushed to the hospital, attendants barking panicky phrases like ''He's coding!'' But he survived, and left us to wonder if he was the latest in a string of ex-Islanders who can't die back in the real world because their fates remain entangled with the Island.
But back to the (allegedly) buggy continuity. For many weeks now, many of you have been asking me to comment about the season's penchant for returning to previous scenes, particularly the fateful marina summit of the Oceanic 6, but shown from different perspectives and featuring slightly altered details. For example, in one episode, Sayid told Ben and Jack, ''I don't want any part of this. And if I see you, or him again, it will be extremely unpleasant for all of us.'' But in the Sayid-centric ''He's Our You,'' we saw the scene again, but this time Sayid spoke solely to Ben: ''And if I see you again, it'll be extremely unpleasant for us both.'' Another example: Young Ben's roaming bullet hole. When Sayid shot him in ''He's Our You,'' the hole was on the one side of his chest. But in the next episode, ''Whatever Happened, Happened,'' it was on the other. And so we must decide: is Lost getting sloppy with the continuity, or do these discrepancies mean something? There has been speculation that these blips are evidence of a changing timeline. There has also been speculation that these blips are evidence of the observer effect at work in Lost, the quantum physics idea that individual perception shapes reality. And there has also been speculation that these blips — or more specifically, the repeated practice of calling back to shared moments — have something to do with ''frame dragging,'' a phenomenon associated with black holes and other reality-distorting anomalies. Me? I'm willing to shrug these things off as meaningless anachronisms, if you will. Except... FUN FACT! The word ''anachronism,'' according to wikipedia, means ''an error in chronology.'' In 1888, HG Wells wrote a short story called The Chronic Argonauts — a precursor to his more famous book, The Time Machine — about two time travelers who take shelter in an a dilapidated shack abandoned by its deceased owners. One of these quantum leapers is described as ''the Anachronic Man,'' a genius desperate to find an era to call home. One word: Jacob?
Any-hoo...
There was that damn funny moment when Ms. Hawking actually laid the blame for Desmond's shooting at Faraday's feet. ''Your son is Benjamin Linus?'' ''Oh, good lord, no,'' says Hawking, sounding revolted by the prospect that such a warty toad could have ever squirted out of her womb. Hawking's logic is interesting. In her view, Faraday's decision to send a message to 2007 Desmond via Hatch-era Desmond set in motion a chain of events that led Ben to their boat, gun blazing. Hawking seemed to evidence regret for her son's actions. Combined with her subsequent statement to Penelope that she had no idea what's was going to happen anymore, it made me think: Faraday — or someone — has successfully changed the past, but it may not have exactly produced the new present that Hawking had wanted.
BLACK SWANS AND IMPOSSIBLE DREAMS: FARADAY'S LEAP OF FAITH
''But still try, for who knows what it is possible.''
The above quote wasn't part of the script, but it was there, in the subtext of ''The Variable,'' nurturing Daniel Faraday's mad, maybe-futile, fate-defying Island quest to create history-nullifying paradox, and maybe more importantly, rouse the castaways out of their complacency and fatalism and incite them to re-take control over their lives, despite the odds. The quote — so fitting for this ''The Impossible Gets Real!'' episode of Lost — comes from Faraday's namesake, the 19th century egghead Michael Faraday, one of the founding fathers of electromagnetic science. It speaks to one of themes of the episode: How then do we live when destiny has us by the nuts?
Faraday's stated mission in returning to the Island after a couple years ''doing research'' at Dharma HQ in Ann Arbor (man, I hope we still get that backstory, dead Dan or no dead Dan) was to find Jughead and use the bomb to ''negate'' the wellspring of electromagnetic energy underneath the Swan construction site, which Faraday claimed was only hours away from exploding into catastrophe due to Dharma's drilling. Jack and Kate looked ready to roll their eyes at Faraday — but it seemed to me that his description of the Hatch, and especially the bit of business about cement being slathered over the EM spill à la Chernobyl, swayed them. Indeed, Jack had heard Sayid make the same exact Chernobyl comparison about the Swan when they went exploring its basement in season 2.
Faraday's change of mind about changing time was rooted in the almost religious certainty that his fellow time travelers' innate free will was more powerful than mathematics and physics. They were free radicals; they were variables; they were human monkey wrenches in the mechanics of reality. I found Faraday's sermon on the mount to be really corny — and really depressing if it wasn't true. Either way, I did find it hard to believe that this bright young man, no matter how troubled, couldn't have come up with that piece of common sense, however dubious, sooner. Regardless: I'm rolling with it, because I believe in the theme it represents: we must live proactively, ''but still try, for who knows what it possible.''
Faraday believed that if he could essentially eliminate the need for the Hatch, Oceanic 815 wouldn't crash, the freighter wouldn't come to the Island, nobody would go quantum leaping because of erroneously turned donkey wheels — known history would be ''erased,'' to use a Kate term, and a new history would be take its place. ''This entire chain of events, it's going to start happening this afternoon,'' he explained. ''But we can change it.'' Faraday's logic would seem to be sound. Elementary cause and effect, right? Push this domino, the rest fall. Pull that thread, the whole fabric unravels. Fire these two photon torpedoes into this tiny shaft, the Death Star explodes. Right? Well, not quite, says quantum physics and Black Swan probability theory. Both schools of thought would say, quite basically, that the odds of successfully manufacturing a single, game-changing event of this magnitude are beyond microscopically small. Not impossible — just unlikely.
Which makes me wonder if Faraday came to the Island with a back-up plan. And in fact, I think most of his Island adventure was about putting that back-up plan in motion. Call it Operation: Create Total Chaos. From the second he stepped off that sub, Faraday was kinetic energy incarnate, hellbent on colliding with his old friends and setting them in motion like a wild photon-firing electron or hyperactive cue ball. He threw cold water on Jack Shephard's ''man of faith'' conversion by crapping on his mother's destiny talk. (''''And how did she convince you? Did she tell you it was your destiny? Well, I got some bad news for you, Jack. You don't belong here at all!'' For me, the line seemed less like it was about Faraday debunking his mother but more about blowing Jack out of his watch-and-wait inertia.) He staked out the Orchid, waited for Dr. Chang to arrive (''Right on time,'' he said), then filled his ears with hysteria about evacuating the Island because of impending disaster and spilled the beans about Miles Straume actually being his son. (This sequence, an expanded version of the season's opening scene, turned ''The Variable'' into an elaborate variant edition of the season premiere itself.) He got the whole castaway crew moving: Sawyer, Juliet, Hurley and Miles to the beach; Jack and Kate with him to the Others' Tent City. And he all but baited Radzinsky and the Black Swan team into a firefight by flashing a gun and talking provocative. If Faraday is correct, and the time travelers are loose canon variables capable of changing history, then I think that we saw Faraday trying to light the fuse on each of them in hopes that one of them will somehow, someway fire that one shot, whatever it is, that will change everything. Faraday's approach to heroism is a bit like my approach to Lost theorizing: throw a lot of stuff at the wall, hope something sticks.
Faraday's actions seemed to be guided by the contents of his notebook, as if it held a "This Day In Dharma History!" schedule of events. 10 AM: Dr. Chang will arrive at the Orchid. 10:10 AM Dr. Chang will leave the Orchid. 12:30 Mom will be hanging with the Hostiles; jungle location TBD. 4:00 PM: ''The Incident.'' Run/swim like hell. 9:00 PM: Smores. Faraday clearly returned to the Island with more information about it than when he left — including the 411 on his mother's membership in the Hostiles. Which made me even more curious about what exactly he was doing over there in Ann Arbor with Dharma's head honchos. Last summer at Comic-Con, the Lost producers showed attendees a teaser video of the season that strongly suggested that Dharma had the means to send messages to people in the future, à la the movie Frequency. One wonders if Faraday was working the quantum radio and getting info from someone in the present....
Whether it was his primary plan or secondary plan or the only plan he had, Faraday's gambit reached a temporary or permanent stall in The Others' tent city. I watched the episode with about a dozen people, and more than half of us felt there was something a little contrived about the way Faraday bumbled into the Hostiles' territory. Recklessly brandishing and then discharging his gun, near-raving as he demanded to see Ellie, and then forcing a crisis by petulantly giving Alpert to the count of three to give him instant satisfaction — I mean, Faraday was practically asking to get shot. What if he was? Was he genuinely gripped by sickening shock at the awareness that his mother had set him up to be shot (''You knew...you always knew this was going to happen...and you sent me here anyway...'') or was he just playing out the part? I don't think he had any fear of being killed. On the contrary, even though he told Jack that they could die in the past, it stands to reason that depending on the scope and reach of the negating paradox, a rebooted timeline would effectively bring select dead folks back to life. Perhaps Faraday's plan to save the castaways and change history actually required that he follow through on getting shot — even killed. Because in Faraday's plan, it's what happens next that's most crucial.
What might that ''something next'' be? I'm not altogether convinced that the history-negating paradox will be wrought by Faraday. And I'm also pretty sure such change won't be facilitated by the detonation of Jughead or the destruction of the Hatch. This feels like classic Lost misdirection to me — the magician's slight of hand; the grifter's long con — designed to keep our eyes trained on the big brassy possibility, setting us up for the smaller, more subtle, more humane and emotional play that will surprise and move us. Today, my money's on Miles, getting the gumption to move past his fear and father issues and coming clean with Dr. Chang. Yep, Freaky Faraday was right. I am your kid. And there's something more you need to know. Something about our future. About what's going to happen here... And from there, consequences will flow.
And one of them, I'm betting, will be a world where Daniel Faraday was never shot — and maybe killed — by his own mother...
Of course, the fallacy in Faraday's time-changing gambit is his assumption that the new history he doesn't know will be better than the crap history that he hates. I think he's also envisioning a sweeping, epic reboot. I bet it won't work like that. I bet some characters get tweaked, a couple scenarios get dramatically revised, but otherwise everything stays the same. The differences will be different enough to feed a whole new season of story — but too many differences might not be a good idea. My prediction for the season finale, now two weeks away, is this. Paradox will be produced; we'll get 10 seconds of in-jokey, Sopranos-esque black; and then we'll suddenly pop up on Jack's eyeball blinking awake. We will see him push through the bushes and branches and get to the beach, where he'll find his castaway friends scattered on the beach, regaining consciousness. We won't know when we are, or what exactly has happened, and neither will they. But as they get their bearings, they will realize that there's a huge freakin' statue looming above them, and they're lying in the shadow of it. And as they get to their feet and try to wrap their minds around what they're seeing, they will hear a voice from behind them.
''Guys... where are we?''
And they'll turn and look...
And it will be Charlie Pace.
QUICK HITS:
MORE ON DAN'S PLAN: Pressed by Miles to explain his disclosures to Dr. Chang, Dan replied, ''Just making sure your father does what he's supposed to do. You'll see.'' Dan's plan seemed to involve making sure some people do what they've always done, and making sure the Variables do something radically different. Or was Dan manipulating Chang with some reverse psychology? Is the thing that Dan wants Chang to do not the thing he told him to do? You tracking with me?
SAWYER CALLING KATE ''FRECKLES.''/JULIET'S REACTION. One word: Oops.
DAN'S CHAT WITH CHARLOTTE: Did you get the sense there was more to that conversation at the end than we were allowed to hear?
''FONZIE TIMES'': Great laugh.
ELOISE: ''CASUALITIES IN A CONFLICT THAT'S BIGGER THAN ALL OF US.''/WIDMORE: ''MY RELATIONSHIP WITH PENELOPE IS ONE OF THE THINGS I HAD TO SACRIFICE LONG AGO.'' Your theories, please, on what these lines mean. JeffJensenEW@aol.com
http://www.ew.com/ew/article/0,,1550612_20245769_20275722,00.html
MAD SCIENTIST Faraday's brilliant but sometimes faulty mind latched on to a new theory for salvation that might not work out so well for him
By Jeff Jensen
Jeff Jensen, an EW senior writer, has been despondent since the cancellation of ''Twin Peaks''We need to talk about Daniel Faraday getting gunned down by his mom. (He's dead, I think — but not for long.) We need to talk about the frazzled physicist's plan to reboot history by nuking the Island with our long-lost leaky H-bomb friend, Jughead. (Might I suggest he start looking for it somewhere in the shadow of the statue?) And yes, we need to talk about the revelation that Charles Widmore is Danny-boy's father. (Brits for parents? So how come Faraday speaks Americanese?) But first, I want to talk about the Wired magazine cameo. We saw it on Faraday's couch, just as Widmore took a seat and offered his noodle-cooked son passage to Brain Healing Island aboard his Black Freighter of Keamy Death. It was the August 2003 issue of Wired — ''The Super-Powers Issue'' — devoted to the plausible science behind far-fetched stuff like invisibility, X-ray vision, and yes, time travel. The cover featured an archetypal superhero blasting white light out of his Cyclops-visored eyes and breaking a link of chain with his Man of Steel bare hands. The headline: ''The Impossible Gets Real!''
Now, it's probably not a coincidence that an old issue of Wired made an appearance in an episode of Lost airing the same month that the current issue of Wired features one JJ Abrams as its guest editor. But why did Lost choose this particular back issue for its latest rewind, pause, and squint Easter-egg clue? Well, there's the time travel article, which spotlights the two theories favored by most Lostologists, Throne Plates and Kerr Rings. There's also this cover-touted article, ''The End of Cancer As We Know It,'' which can be found on...Page 108. Cancer, of course, has haunted Lost since season 1; and 108 is the sum total of all Lost's numbers (4, 8, 15, 16, 23, 42) and integral to the mystery of the Hatch. (''Every 108 minutes, a button must be pushed...'') But for me, it's all about ''The Impossible Gets Real!'' Two weeks ago, I wondered if the ominous ebony uniforms of Dharma's Black Swan team could be a nod to a book called The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable. Now, with Wired, we have two consecutive episodes that feature a coy clue foreshadowing the imminent arrival of an extremely unlikely, yet not-at-all implausible, game-changing event.
This is all to say, I totally believe in Faraday's new theory that the time-traveling castaways can alter the past — that whatever happened can...well, un-happen. And I believe before the end of the season, someone will. But not Faraday; and certainly not by anyone following through on his crazy Let's turn the Swan site into a radioactive bird bath! scheme. (Someone's been watching a little too much Beneath The Planet of The Apes.) (Besides me, that is.) No, it's going to be another one of Faraday's designated super-special variables that will heroically break the chain of causality that has turned the lives of the castaways into a never-ending Twilight Zone episode. But which one? And how will they do it? Welcome to Lost's version of a ''Who shot JR?'' season finale, writ geeky and cosmic: ''Who changed time?''
THE VARIABLE:
MOTHER, JUGHEAD, AND SPEED IT UP!
The 100th episode of Lost — the fifth's season antepenultimate installment (that's a fancy way of saying ''third to last'') — was all about momma issues, mad scientist schemes, and the official start of a season-ending, ticking-clock plot in which our heroes must race against time to save themselves from electromagnetic calamity. (Unless Faraday wasn't being truthful about that — and I think it's possible he wasn't.) The episode had been billed as a dark corollary to ''The Constant,'' the season 4 classic in which Desmond went back in time to set up a future phone date with Penelope. But allow me to suggest a connection to another Lost episode.
For weeks, I've been insisting that season 5 parallels season 2, and deliberately so: the series is doubling back on itself, creating an ouroboros-shaped saga (a snake that chases and eats its own tail; see: Ms. Hawking's brooch, Season 3) whereby the castaways are helping to forge the very history that forged them. In the final episodes of season 2, MIA Michael returned to the castaway fold and manipulated them into actions that had long-tail ramifications. Here, at the close of season 5, it appears to me that Prodigal Dan has come back to do something very similar. Specifically to ''The Variable,'' we have a title that is thematically identical to season 2's antepenultimate outing, known as ''?''. Both episodes were about the same thing: a philosophical role reversal. In ''?'', John Locke changed his mind about the Hatch and decided (erroneously) that the Button was a mind-game that had no meaning. The fateful mistake would have massive consequences, none bigger than turning Desmond Hume into a time traveler and doomsday Cassandra. In ''The Variable,'' Faraday returned with a new perspective on the mutability of the time-space continuum and a Big Plan to put that thinking into action. If his gambit works, the consequences could be massive, especially for Desmond, whose entire Island narrative was defined by being stuck in the very structure that Faraday now wants to erase from existence. No one would be more affected by paradox than Faraday's half-sister's husband. ''The Variable'' was loaded with lines filled with double-meanings, like this one by Desmond: ''I promised you, Penny...I promised you I'd never leave you again.'' Famous last words, friend-o. Be very afraid, all you DesPen shippers: I fear their happily-ever-after life is about to unravel in the continuity reboot to come. Put another way: See you in another life, bruthuh.
DANIEL: But I can make time.
ELOISE: If only you could.
Why did she do it? Why did Eloise Hawking put her son on a road to predestined ruin — by her own hand, no less? I'm haunted by the question. In Faraday's first flashback scene (the year wasn't specified), we saw Mama Other interrupt Adolescent Dan's piano practice and break the news to her budding Glenn Gould that Carnegie Hall wasn't in the cards for him. She was distraught; she knew what she was about to set into motion. But she composed herself to carefully made her pitch, like Obi-Wan gingerly selling young Luke Skywalker on the whole Jedi Knight thing. Eloise said that Daniel had a destiny, and it was her job to help him pursue it, to put him and keep him on ''his path.'' She told him he had a proverbial quantum computer for a brain resting within his crystal alien skull, and that he had to learn to harness its magnificent energies to lead his people back to their planet. Okay, what she actually said was that he had ''a special gift...your mind,'' but I clearly got the vibe that his metronome-tracking mental superiority was akin to a Miles-like super-power. So, was Dan also an Island baby, too? FUN FACT! In the aforementioned Wired issue, one of eight abilities profiled in an article on plausible super-powers is total recall — rather ironic in light of Faraday's memory issues in the episode. Also featured: teleportation (see: Jack and co. getting beamed off the plane), regeneration (see: John Locke's legs; the Island's quick-healing powers), weather manipulation (see: meteorology was one of Dharma's fields of study); force fields (see: the sonic fence); underwater breathing (see: Charlie swimming toward the Looking-Glass); super-strength (see: Desmond, battling back a worse-than-it-appeared gunshot wound to beat the bloody snot out of Ben). As for the eighth power, x-ray vision: Smokey?
Daniel's youth was a big pile of no-fun. Eloise pushed him hard — like Gypsy-mom hard, like Carrie-mom hard, like Texas Cheerleader Mom hard — to become a grant-scoring, youngest-Oxford-doc-ever, time travel machine-inventing genius, even at the expense of a conventional mother-child relationship. Learn your Maxwell equations, or no more hugs! And I don't care if you think they look like Kerr rings, get your Slurpee cup off my hardbound limited edition 'A Brief History of Time!' That's no way to treat your Uncle Stevie's manuscript! Now: rub my corns, please. Behold the incarnation of conditional parental love — of maternal nurturing that was very much a variable, not a constant, in Dan's life. And she was rude to his girlfriends, too! Wouldn't even let poor soon-to-be-brain-scrambled Theresa come to graduation lunch! Bitch.
We could think the worst of Ms. Hawking. With time loop theory, we could paint her as a real monster. In this scenario, she would be someone so spooked by death that she'd be willing to shoot and maybe even kill her son over and over and over and over again, forever and ever, amen, just to cheat the grim reaper. But I'm going to bet this week's offering money that such a deliciously dark possibility is, alas, not the case. My interpretation of Eloise's motivations — most suggested by the scene in which she tenderly behooved brain-damaged Adult Dan to take the freighter gig — was that she wanted Dan to go to the Island to get healed and use his ''gift'' to find some way to buck the odds of physics and change time, especially the whole I shot my son thing. (Remember how in ''Dead Is Dead'' Smokey judged Ben for his daughter's death? Maybe that's why Eloise fled the Island — to escape the Monster's judgment.)
I invoked time loop theory in the previous paragraph, but ''The Variable'' left me feeling that maybe time loops aren't valid to Lost, after all. Notice I said maybe; I'm not ready to throw it out yet. I'm just saying I'm skeptical. Anyway, on Lost, there are other ways to know the future. The example of Desmond established that it's possible in this world to have the gift/curse of precognition — the ability to see into the future. The season 3 episode ''Flashes Before Your Eyes'' established that Eloise has long possessed knowledge of future events, although last night, we learned that she is no longer the seer that she used to be. ''For the first time in a long time I don't know what's going to happen next,'' she told Penelope. FUN FACT! The Dead Zone, the 1979 novel by Lost inspiration Stephen King, is set against the backdrop of 1970s events, about a guy who can see into the future by touching stuff.
Among the many lingering questions I have about the provocative though maddeningly incomplete joint Faraday-Hawking flashbacks, there is this: At one point did Shotgun Ellie, Queen of the Others, realize that the Charles Manson-looking interloper that wandered into her camp recklessly brandishing a gun was in fact her son all grown up? The most likely possibility is that next week, Jack and Kate will emerge from their hiding place and start yelling, ''You stupid dingbat! You just shot your kid!'' They'll probably prove it by making her read his notebook. She'll notice the inscription written in her handwriting and maybe even read a tell-tale entry (November, 1994: Mom made me break up with another girlfriend today. Just for that, I'm going to name my lab rat after her and scramble its brain with my time travel ray. Take that, ELOISE HAWKING WHO IS MY MOTHER!) and she'll suddenly realize: ''Oops. Blimey!''
Still, I find myself going back to that first flashback scene and mulling the possibility that moments before Eloise entered the piano parlor in tears, something happened. And I wonder if that something could have been discovering, for the first time, the true identity of the man she shot in the jungle. How? Maybe a phone call from all-knowing Widmore. Maybe an extended flash of Dan's bendy-shaped future. Or maybe (yes!) a Back to the Future 2 scenario: a letter from time traveling Faraday himself, written during his Ann Arbor but not delivered, per his instructions, until this flashback's point in time, several years later. Dear Mom: Yep, that was me you shot in 1977 — the kid currently playing the piano in the other room, all grown up. But listen: I don't hate you. In fact, it's actually now vitally important that you keep me on my path. I think I've found a way to beat this destiny thing, but to do so, you gotta send me to the Island. And you have to make sure you do one thing, because in stories like this, it always boiled down to that — that one, important thing. And it's this: I need you to give me a notebook after I graduate from Oxford. Make sure you tell me you always loved me in the inscription, because that's thematically important, especially after last week's episode, which dealt with the cost of broken parental bonds and love that goes unexpressed. I don't totally understand it myself, but I'm telling you: it's key. Anyway: gotta catch the sub. See you in another life, mum! XOXO—DF
Of course, I'm also fond of the idea that Eloise got her devastating 411 via a sudden superluminal download of revised personal history due to changes to the past wrought by the time-traveling castaways made possible by their interconnected quantum entanglement...oh, another time.
A few additional thoughts about Widmore and Faraday...
The Widmore/Faraday sequence extended Daniel's mysterious flashback beat from the season 4 episode ''Confirmed Dead'' and expanded on what he learned about him earlier this year in ''Jughead.'' Not only did he use research assistant/gal pal Theresa in his consciousness transfer time travel experiments, but as many of you predicted, Faraday used himself, as well, rendering him all mumbles and pained expressions. His brain had become a sieve (cue the Thomas Dolby song, if you will); apparently, his memory bank, like Jughead, had become all leaky and incapable of retaining much memory. He was fired from Oxford, fled to the States, lived with a woman who took care of him, relationship unknown. Many of you believe that the reason he was experiencing such déjà vu while watching news coverage of the fake Oceanic 815's discovery was because he had mentally visited this moment during one of his self-administered time ray zaps. I am inclined to agree with you.
Widmore visited. Took responsibility for the fake Oceanic 815 thing. (So much for my theory last week that Ben was actually to culprit.) Offered him the Freighter gig. Promised him healing. And he so heavily foreshadowed the revelation about being Dan's dad, that when we got confirmation in the later Widmore/Hawking scene (''He's my son, too''/SLAP!), it felt like something of a non-shocker. Speaking of the SLAP, why did you think Eloise slapped him? My wife is convinced that Widmore isn't Daniel's biological father — which may make sense if his claim to Dan that he had never met him is true — and that the real DNA daddy is... Richard Alpert.
About Desmond and Penelope...
The Desmond stuff was curious. I didn't realize that gunshot wound was so bad — especially after Des recovered quickly enough to beat the tar out of Ben and dump him in the marina. (What? The carton of milk wasn't bulletproof?) I guess he got one of those mama-goes-Hulk-to-save-her-kids-from-an-overturned-car surges of strength things. Regardless, Desmond was rushed to the hospital, attendants barking panicky phrases like ''He's coding!'' But he survived, and left us to wonder if he was the latest in a string of ex-Islanders who can't die back in the real world because their fates remain entangled with the Island.
But back to the (allegedly) buggy continuity. For many weeks now, many of you have been asking me to comment about the season's penchant for returning to previous scenes, particularly the fateful marina summit of the Oceanic 6, but shown from different perspectives and featuring slightly altered details. For example, in one episode, Sayid told Ben and Jack, ''I don't want any part of this. And if I see you, or him again, it will be extremely unpleasant for all of us.'' But in the Sayid-centric ''He's Our You,'' we saw the scene again, but this time Sayid spoke solely to Ben: ''And if I see you again, it'll be extremely unpleasant for us both.'' Another example: Young Ben's roaming bullet hole. When Sayid shot him in ''He's Our You,'' the hole was on the one side of his chest. But in the next episode, ''Whatever Happened, Happened,'' it was on the other. And so we must decide: is Lost getting sloppy with the continuity, or do these discrepancies mean something? There has been speculation that these blips are evidence of a changing timeline. There has also been speculation that these blips are evidence of the observer effect at work in Lost, the quantum physics idea that individual perception shapes reality. And there has also been speculation that these blips — or more specifically, the repeated practice of calling back to shared moments — have something to do with ''frame dragging,'' a phenomenon associated with black holes and other reality-distorting anomalies. Me? I'm willing to shrug these things off as meaningless anachronisms, if you will. Except... FUN FACT! The word ''anachronism,'' according to wikipedia, means ''an error in chronology.'' In 1888, HG Wells wrote a short story called The Chronic Argonauts — a precursor to his more famous book, The Time Machine — about two time travelers who take shelter in an a dilapidated shack abandoned by its deceased owners. One of these quantum leapers is described as ''the Anachronic Man,'' a genius desperate to find an era to call home. One word: Jacob?
Any-hoo...
There was that damn funny moment when Ms. Hawking actually laid the blame for Desmond's shooting at Faraday's feet. ''Your son is Benjamin Linus?'' ''Oh, good lord, no,'' says Hawking, sounding revolted by the prospect that such a warty toad could have ever squirted out of her womb. Hawking's logic is interesting. In her view, Faraday's decision to send a message to 2007 Desmond via Hatch-era Desmond set in motion a chain of events that led Ben to their boat, gun blazing. Hawking seemed to evidence regret for her son's actions. Combined with her subsequent statement to Penelope that she had no idea what's was going to happen anymore, it made me think: Faraday — or someone — has successfully changed the past, but it may not have exactly produced the new present that Hawking had wanted.
BLACK SWANS AND IMPOSSIBLE DREAMS: FARADAY'S LEAP OF FAITH
''But still try, for who knows what it is possible.''
The above quote wasn't part of the script, but it was there, in the subtext of ''The Variable,'' nurturing Daniel Faraday's mad, maybe-futile, fate-defying Island quest to create history-nullifying paradox, and maybe more importantly, rouse the castaways out of their complacency and fatalism and incite them to re-take control over their lives, despite the odds. The quote — so fitting for this ''The Impossible Gets Real!'' episode of Lost — comes from Faraday's namesake, the 19th century egghead Michael Faraday, one of the founding fathers of electromagnetic science. It speaks to one of themes of the episode: How then do we live when destiny has us by the nuts?
Faraday's stated mission in returning to the Island after a couple years ''doing research'' at Dharma HQ in Ann Arbor (man, I hope we still get that backstory, dead Dan or no dead Dan) was to find Jughead and use the bomb to ''negate'' the wellspring of electromagnetic energy underneath the Swan construction site, which Faraday claimed was only hours away from exploding into catastrophe due to Dharma's drilling. Jack and Kate looked ready to roll their eyes at Faraday — but it seemed to me that his description of the Hatch, and especially the bit of business about cement being slathered over the EM spill à la Chernobyl, swayed them. Indeed, Jack had heard Sayid make the same exact Chernobyl comparison about the Swan when they went exploring its basement in season 2.
Faraday's change of mind about changing time was rooted in the almost religious certainty that his fellow time travelers' innate free will was more powerful than mathematics and physics. They were free radicals; they were variables; they were human monkey wrenches in the mechanics of reality. I found Faraday's sermon on the mount to be really corny — and really depressing if it wasn't true. Either way, I did find it hard to believe that this bright young man, no matter how troubled, couldn't have come up with that piece of common sense, however dubious, sooner. Regardless: I'm rolling with it, because I believe in the theme it represents: we must live proactively, ''but still try, for who knows what it possible.''
Faraday believed that if he could essentially eliminate the need for the Hatch, Oceanic 815 wouldn't crash, the freighter wouldn't come to the Island, nobody would go quantum leaping because of erroneously turned donkey wheels — known history would be ''erased,'' to use a Kate term, and a new history would be take its place. ''This entire chain of events, it's going to start happening this afternoon,'' he explained. ''But we can change it.'' Faraday's logic would seem to be sound. Elementary cause and effect, right? Push this domino, the rest fall. Pull that thread, the whole fabric unravels. Fire these two photon torpedoes into this tiny shaft, the Death Star explodes. Right? Well, not quite, says quantum physics and Black Swan probability theory. Both schools of thought would say, quite basically, that the odds of successfully manufacturing a single, game-changing event of this magnitude are beyond microscopically small. Not impossible — just unlikely.
Which makes me wonder if Faraday came to the Island with a back-up plan. And in fact, I think most of his Island adventure was about putting that back-up plan in motion. Call it Operation: Create Total Chaos. From the second he stepped off that sub, Faraday was kinetic energy incarnate, hellbent on colliding with his old friends and setting them in motion like a wild photon-firing electron or hyperactive cue ball. He threw cold water on Jack Shephard's ''man of faith'' conversion by crapping on his mother's destiny talk. (''''And how did she convince you? Did she tell you it was your destiny? Well, I got some bad news for you, Jack. You don't belong here at all!'' For me, the line seemed less like it was about Faraday debunking his mother but more about blowing Jack out of his watch-and-wait inertia.) He staked out the Orchid, waited for Dr. Chang to arrive (''Right on time,'' he said), then filled his ears with hysteria about evacuating the Island because of impending disaster and spilled the beans about Miles Straume actually being his son. (This sequence, an expanded version of the season's opening scene, turned ''The Variable'' into an elaborate variant edition of the season premiere itself.) He got the whole castaway crew moving: Sawyer, Juliet, Hurley and Miles to the beach; Jack and Kate with him to the Others' Tent City. And he all but baited Radzinsky and the Black Swan team into a firefight by flashing a gun and talking provocative. If Faraday is correct, and the time travelers are loose canon variables capable of changing history, then I think that we saw Faraday trying to light the fuse on each of them in hopes that one of them will somehow, someway fire that one shot, whatever it is, that will change everything. Faraday's approach to heroism is a bit like my approach to Lost theorizing: throw a lot of stuff at the wall, hope something sticks.
Faraday's actions seemed to be guided by the contents of his notebook, as if it held a "This Day In Dharma History!" schedule of events. 10 AM: Dr. Chang will arrive at the Orchid. 10:10 AM Dr. Chang will leave the Orchid. 12:30 Mom will be hanging with the Hostiles; jungle location TBD. 4:00 PM: ''The Incident.'' Run/swim like hell. 9:00 PM: Smores. Faraday clearly returned to the Island with more information about it than when he left — including the 411 on his mother's membership in the Hostiles. Which made me even more curious about what exactly he was doing over there in Ann Arbor with Dharma's head honchos. Last summer at Comic-Con, the Lost producers showed attendees a teaser video of the season that strongly suggested that Dharma had the means to send messages to people in the future, à la the movie Frequency. One wonders if Faraday was working the quantum radio and getting info from someone in the present....
Whether it was his primary plan or secondary plan or the only plan he had, Faraday's gambit reached a temporary or permanent stall in The Others' tent city. I watched the episode with about a dozen people, and more than half of us felt there was something a little contrived about the way Faraday bumbled into the Hostiles' territory. Recklessly brandishing and then discharging his gun, near-raving as he demanded to see Ellie, and then forcing a crisis by petulantly giving Alpert to the count of three to give him instant satisfaction — I mean, Faraday was practically asking to get shot. What if he was? Was he genuinely gripped by sickening shock at the awareness that his mother had set him up to be shot (''You knew...you always knew this was going to happen...and you sent me here anyway...'') or was he just playing out the part? I don't think he had any fear of being killed. On the contrary, even though he told Jack that they could die in the past, it stands to reason that depending on the scope and reach of the negating paradox, a rebooted timeline would effectively bring select dead folks back to life. Perhaps Faraday's plan to save the castaways and change history actually required that he follow through on getting shot — even killed. Because in Faraday's plan, it's what happens next that's most crucial.
What might that ''something next'' be? I'm not altogether convinced that the history-negating paradox will be wrought by Faraday. And I'm also pretty sure such change won't be facilitated by the detonation of Jughead or the destruction of the Hatch. This feels like classic Lost misdirection to me — the magician's slight of hand; the grifter's long con — designed to keep our eyes trained on the big brassy possibility, setting us up for the smaller, more subtle, more humane and emotional play that will surprise and move us. Today, my money's on Miles, getting the gumption to move past his fear and father issues and coming clean with Dr. Chang. Yep, Freaky Faraday was right. I am your kid. And there's something more you need to know. Something about our future. About what's going to happen here... And from there, consequences will flow.
And one of them, I'm betting, will be a world where Daniel Faraday was never shot — and maybe killed — by his own mother...
Of course, the fallacy in Faraday's time-changing gambit is his assumption that the new history he doesn't know will be better than the crap history that he hates. I think he's also envisioning a sweeping, epic reboot. I bet it won't work like that. I bet some characters get tweaked, a couple scenarios get dramatically revised, but otherwise everything stays the same. The differences will be different enough to feed a whole new season of story — but too many differences might not be a good idea. My prediction for the season finale, now two weeks away, is this. Paradox will be produced; we'll get 10 seconds of in-jokey, Sopranos-esque black; and then we'll suddenly pop up on Jack's eyeball blinking awake. We will see him push through the bushes and branches and get to the beach, where he'll find his castaway friends scattered on the beach, regaining consciousness. We won't know when we are, or what exactly has happened, and neither will they. But as they get their bearings, they will realize that there's a huge freakin' statue looming above them, and they're lying in the shadow of it. And as they get to their feet and try to wrap their minds around what they're seeing, they will hear a voice from behind them.
''Guys... where are we?''
And they'll turn and look...
And it will be Charlie Pace.
QUICK HITS:
MORE ON DAN'S PLAN: Pressed by Miles to explain his disclosures to Dr. Chang, Dan replied, ''Just making sure your father does what he's supposed to do. You'll see.'' Dan's plan seemed to involve making sure some people do what they've always done, and making sure the Variables do something radically different. Or was Dan manipulating Chang with some reverse psychology? Is the thing that Dan wants Chang to do not the thing he told him to do? You tracking with me?
SAWYER CALLING KATE ''FRECKLES.''/JULIET'S REACTION. One word: Oops.
DAN'S CHAT WITH CHARLOTTE: Did you get the sense there was more to that conversation at the end than we were allowed to hear?
''FONZIE TIMES'': Great laugh.
ELOISE: ''CASUALITIES IN A CONFLICT THAT'S BIGGER THAN ALL OF US.''/WIDMORE: ''MY RELATIONSHIP WITH PENELOPE IS ONE OF THE THINGS I HAD TO SACRIFICE LONG AGO.'' Your theories, please, on what these lines mean. JeffJensenEW@aol.com
http://www.ew.com/ew/article/0,,1550612_20245769_20275722,00.html
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Wednesday, April 29, 2009
EW Doc Jensen: 'Lost': King Faraday
'Lost': King Faraday
Doc Jensen on ''The Variable,'' which puts Daniel in full effect, in both foreground and back story. Plus: Revisiting the Orientation Film from season 2, a couple of clarifications and corrections, and a little TOE tapping
IT'S ALL TOO MUCH? Sure, it may seem confusing at times, but pull yourself together -- the Doc's Geeky Preamble will surely inspire
By Jeff Jensen
Welcome to the Planet Fiction that is Lost. My name is Doc Jensen, archaeologist of impossible possibilities, currently on temporary work release from the Santa Rosa Mental Health — err, I mean, Mental CRACKPOT GENIUS Institute. Please note the placard on the door of my office:
''To be a scientist is to commit to a life of confusion punctuated by rare moments of clarity. When I leave the office at night, the confusion comes with me. Ruminating over these equations, seeking patterns, looking for hidden relationships, trying to make contact with hidden data — it's all uncertainty and possibility engaged in an endless chaotic dance. Every so often the blur resolves, but the respite is short lived; the next puzzle demands focus. This, really, is the joy of being a scientist. Established truths are comforting, but it is the mysteries that make the soul ache and render a life of exploration worth living.'' —Brian Greene, author of The Elegant Universe, from the new issue of Wired, guest-edited by Lost co-creator and Star Trek director J.J. Abrams.
The ''endless chaotic dance'' of (seemingly) infinite possibilities — that's what I love about investigating the mystery matrix of Lost. Or, for those who speak High Geek: Think of this column as a trading ship traversing the channels that exist among countless alternative potentialities that glitter within Lost like a monolithic theoretical snowflake floating in 196,833 dimensional space, whose captain is fond of stopping on the most unlikely and obscure of many possible worlds. [A No Prize if you know the reference: JeffJensenEW@aol.com is where you should send your submissions.] I promise you no answers in this column — just the crazy joy of Sherlocking through this deep and shifty show. Emphasis on crazy. Yeah, I know: It's not like we're trying to find the underlying order of the universe, or locate the sub-atomic super-strings that stitch together the fabric of the cosmos, or plant flags in the secret dimensions coiled in the folds of the observable universe. No, excavating the secret archaeology of Lost isn't like that at all.
It's wayyyyyyyy cooler!
'Lost': King Faraday
Doc Jensen on ''The Variable,'' which puts Daniel in full effect, in both foreground and back story. Plus: Revisiting the Orientation Film from season 2, a couple of clarifications and corrections, and a little TOE tapping
Buzz up!More
IT'S ALL TOO MUCH? Sure, it may seem confusing at times, but pull yourself together -- the Doc's Geeky Preamble will surely inspire
ABC
All About
Lost
By Jeff Jensen Jeff Jensen
Jeff Jensen, an EW senior writer, has been despondent since the cancellation of ''Twin Peaks''PREAMBLE: A GEEKY RAMBLE
Welcome to the Planet Fiction that is Lost. My name is Doc Jensen, archaeologist of impossible possibilities, currently on temporary work release from the Santa Rosa Mental Health — err, I mean, Mental CRACKPOT GENIUS Institute. Please note the placard on the door of my office:
''To be a scientist is to commit to a life of confusion punctuated by rare moments of clarity. When I leave the office at night, the confusion comes with me. Ruminating over these equations, seeking patterns, looking for hidden relationships, trying to make contact with hidden data — it's all uncertainty and possibility engaged in an endless chaotic dance. Every so often the blur resolves, but the respite is short lived; the next puzzle demands focus. This, really, is the joy of being a scientist. Established truths are comforting, but it is the mysteries that make the soul ache and render a life of exploration worth living.'' —Brian Greene, author of The Elegant Universe, from the new issue of Wired, guest-edited by Lost co-creator and Star Trek director J.J. Abrams.
The ''endless chaotic dance'' of (seemingly) infinite possibilities — that's what I love about investigating the mystery matrix of Lost. Or, for those who speak High Geek: Think of this column as a trading ship traversing the channels that exist among countless alternative potentialities that glitter within Lost like a monolithic theoretical snowflake floating in 196,833 dimensional space, whose captain is fond of stopping on the most unlikely and obscure of many possible worlds. [A No Prize if you know the reference: JeffJensenEW@aol.com is where you should send your submissions.] I promise you no answers in this column — just the crazy joy of Sherlocking through this deep and shifty show. Emphasis on crazy. Yeah, I know: It's not like we're trying to find the underlying order of the universe, or locate the sub-atomic super-strings that stitch together the fabric of the cosmos, or plant flags in the secret dimensions coiled in the folds of the observable universe. No, excavating the secret archaeology of Lost isn't like that at all.
It's wayyyyyyyy cooler!
'Lost': King Faraday
Doc Jensen on ''The Variable,'' which puts Daniel in full effect, in both foreground and back story. Plus: Revisiting the Orientation Film from season 2, a couple of clarifications and corrections, and a little TOE tapping
Buzz up!More
IT'S ALL TOO MUCH? Sure, it may seem confusing at times, but pull yourself together -- the Doc's Geeky Preamble will surely inspire
ABC
All About
Lost
By Jeff Jensen Jeff Jensen
Jeff Jensen, an EW senior writer, has been despondent since the cancellation of ''Twin Peaks''PREAMBLE: A GEEKY RAMBLE
Welcome to the Planet Fiction that is Lost. My name is Doc Jensen, archaeologist of impossible possibilities, currently on temporary work release from the Santa Rosa Mental Health — err, I mean, Mental CRACKPOT GENIUS Institute. Please note the placard on the door of my office:
''To be a scientist is to commit to a life of confusion punctuated by rare moments of clarity. When I leave the office at night, the confusion comes with me. Ruminating over these equations, seeking patterns, looking for hidden relationships, trying to make contact with hidden data — it's all uncertainty and possibility engaged in an endless chaotic dance. Every so often the blur resolves, but the respite is short lived; the next puzzle demands focus. This, really, is the joy of being a scientist. Established truths are comforting, but it is the mysteries that make the soul ache and render a life of exploration worth living.'' —Brian Greene, author of The Elegant Universe, from the new issue of Wired, guest-edited by Lost co-creator and Star Trek director J.J. Abrams.
The ''endless chaotic dance'' of (seemingly) infinite possibilities — that's what I love about investigating the mystery matrix of Lost. Or, for those who speak High Geek: Think of this column as a trading ship traversing the channels that exist among countless alternative potentialities that glitter within Lost like a monolithic theoretical snowflake floating in 196,833 dimensional space, whose captain is fond of stopping on the most unlikely and obscure of many possible worlds. [A No Prize if you know the reference: JeffJensenEW@aol.com is where you should send your submissions.] I promise you no answers in this column — just the crazy joy of Sherlocking through this deep and shifty show. Emphasis on crazy. Yeah, I know: It's not like we're trying to find the underlying order of the universe, or locate the sub-atomic super-strings that stitch together the fabric of the cosmos, or plant flags in the secret dimensions coiled in the folds of the observable universe. No, excavating the secret archaeology of Lost isn't like that at all.
It's wayyyyyyyy cooler!
PREVIEW: ''THE VARIABLE''
Are you up on Michael Faraday, one of the founding fathers of electromagnetic science? Could you recognize an allegorical Faraday Cage if you saw one? How about a Faraday Effect? On tonight's Lost, one Mr. Daniel Faraday — named after the famed 19th century Michael Faraday — will be in full effect, in both foreground and back story. We saw the fuzzy-frazzled physicist return to the Island two weeks ago, looking refreshed from his off-Island sabbatical in Ann Arbor, but also sporting the ominous colors of the Dharma Initiative's secret Black Swan Team. As Hurley reminded us, these negatively attired stormtroopers are currently building Lost's version of the Death Star, the Hatch, whose button-regulated tractor beam yanked the castaways out of the sky like a powerful magnet pulling metal thingies out of...something. If Faraday is one of these Men in Black in charge of Dharma's technological terror, does that make him — what? — Grand Moff Tarkin? Or perhaps (gulp) this faithless Imperial stooge...
I like the washed-out black and white sheen that's been given to that classic Star Wars moment — it gives it a certain old and damaged Orientation Film feel, specifically the one that the castaways found in the Hatch back in the third episode of season 2. As your (quack) doctor in Lostology, allow me to give you a piece of advice: Watch it again, as at least some of it has direct bearing on what is currently happening back in Dharma 1979 on Lost. (Note: This version does not include a short snippet of missing footage that was later found by Mr. Eko, which instructs Swan occupants to refrain from using the computer to communicate with the outside world.)
Note the following:
1. Dr. Candle's left arm does not move during the entire film.
2. Dharma's founders were a pair of University of Michigan scientists, Gerald and Karen DeGroot. An industrialist named Alvar Hanso funded their work.
3. Remember — nay, MEMORIZE — this line as if it were scripture: ''Not long after the experiments began, however, there was...an 'incident'...and since that time, the following protocol has been observed...''
4. The copyright date on the film: 1980.
5. The year that The Empire Strikes Back was released: 1980.
Point No. 5 probably has nothing to do with anything.
Some thoughts on each of these points, but in reverse order:
4. THE CRYPTIC COPYRIGHT The time-traveling castaways are currently parked in December 1977. So we're still a couple years away from...well, whatever this copyright truly signifies. My interpretation has long been that Dr. Pierre Chang, in his Marvin Candle guise, rolled film in the Year of Empire. But perhaps the copyright date represents the year that the Hanso Foundation took steps to legally lock down all of Dharma's material in order to control it and prevent it from falling into the wrong hands or being publicly distributed.
3. HAS ''THE INCIDENT'' BEEN FORESHADOWED? Two weeks ago, in my recap of ''Some Like It Hoth,'' I speculated that Hurley might try to rally his fellow time-travelers to mount an attack on the Swan in order to prevent its creation, thus changing history. Perhaps the Incident represents their (failed) attempt at doing so. SPOILER ALERT! This past week, ABC released the official title for the two-hour season finale airing on May 13. Guess what it is? Yep: ''The Incident.''
2. THE ROOTS OF DEGROOT: KAREN EDITION Greg Egan's acclaimed 1995 sci-fi novel Distress is a book that teems with semi-plausible Lost connections (South Pacific island setting, mysterious diseases, invading mercenaries, and the opening line is very Miles: ''All right. He's dead. Go ahead and talk to him.''), but what really blew my mind was stumbling across a character named Karin De Groot. She's the assistant to a physicist who is on the verge of discovering the one true Theory of Everything, a real scientific term, known by its acronym, TOE. A number of radical religious groups, known as ''Ignorance Cults,'' are seeking to stop De Groot's boss from finishing the TOE, lest it trigger an ''Aleph Moment'' that would transform the world by uniting all people under a single, accurate understanding of the nature of reality. Indeed, through the wonky science-magic of quantum mechanics, broadcasting this TOE would actually retroactively create the world. (See: John Archibald Wheeler's feedback loop/''participatory universe'' theories, discussed in an earlier edition of Doc Jensen.) Might these ''What lies in the shadow of the statue?'' people currently running around Lost be the show's version of a mystery-preserving Ignorance Cult? And in the context of Lost, would these be good guys (because mystery is good) or bad guys (because the truth of the Island should be shared with the world)? And is there a connection between TOE and the Island's Four-Toed Statue? AGAIN WITH EGAN! After I first mentioned Greg Egan's work in last week's column, reader Valerie Naas hit me back with the suggestion that the Australian author's entire catalog rings with Lost resonance. She suggests checking his short stories ''Lost Continent,'' ''In Numbers,'' ''Demon's Passage,'' and (get this) the Hugo award-winning ''Oceanic,'' all of which can be found in the collection Dark Integers and Other Stories.
2b. THE ROOTS OF DE GROOT: GERRY AND ALVAR There are echoes of the De Groot/Hanso relationship in the real-life link between psychologist Ian Stevenson and a very wealthy inventor whose work most likely affected the lives of every single person reading this column.
Like the fictitious Gerald and Karen De Groot, Ian Stevenson — not to be confused with the English cartoonist whose work includes the postcard book Lost Heroes — was deeply interested in parapsychology, a fringe science that encompasses all sorts of mind-over-matter weirdness evidenced by Lost characters such as Walt and Miles. Stevenson was influenced by Theosophy, a freaky fusion of classical mythology, mysticism, cutting-edge science, and exposure to the more respectable Eastern religions of Hinduism and Buddhism. He experimented with LSD, which he was inspired to do after meeting Lost-referenced author Aldous Huxley (Brave New World, Island, Doors of Perception), whose coterie also includes a man who lent his name to Lost's ageless enigma, Richard Alpert. FUN FACT! Huxley — whose life and work interfaces with Lost in so many ways he deserves a Doc Jensen column unto himself — died on the same day as another major Lost-cited author, C.S. Lewis. (You know who also died on the same day? JFK. Weird, huh? Now, check this out.)
But Stevenson is most famous for his fixation on reincarnation. During the 1960s and 1970s, Stevenson traveled the world and interviewed scores of people, hoping to find evidence of past-life experiences. He was funded by The Parapsychology Foundation, as well as Chester Carlson, the inventor of xerography and the founding father of...photocopying. Carlson — whose second wife claimed to have extrasensory powers and inspired her husband to fund research into paranormal possibilities — bequeathed bunches of money to Stevenson's employer, the University of Virginia, to fund his research. (For more info, check out this autobiographical essay written by Stevenson.
There are so many nifty parallels with Lost here. We know Dharma — created by academics with fringe science interests; funded by a rich industrialist — was very interested in parapsychology and was influenced by Hinduism and Buddhism. And given the resurrection powers of the Island and the season's many references to Egyptian history and iconography, we're left considering the very real possibility that Dharma was keenly interested in concepts like life after death and reincarnation. So were the ancient Egyptians, from whom we get the idea of ''transmigration of the soul'' or ''metempsychosis,'' to use a really big word cited frequently in James Joyce's Ulysses, this Lost season's biggest literary reference (to date). As for Chester ''Call me Mr. Xerox'' Carlson, my mind wants to link beyond Alvar Hanso to Pierre Chang, making copies of Bunny 15 down there in the Orchid, not to mention making copies himself via all those different orientation films. Speaking of Chang:
1. WHASSUP WITH DR. CHANG/CANDLE'S IMMOBILE ARM? Many Lost theorists believe that the Dharma Dude of Many Names lost it during the Incident. Me? I think he...chopped it off himself! EWWWWWWW! Why would I think that?! Because...
EVERYTHING IS FAKE. (KINDA.)The Good Father Theory of Island History, or: I'd Give My Left Arm to Save My Son!
A couple weeks ago, I put forth the hypothesis that the Purge never happened, that it was part of a scam engineered by Ben to unseat Charles Widmore as leader of the Others. Most of you thought I was as loony as Connect Four-playing Lenny. After all, we did see Ben honest-to-god kill his abusive father in a Dharma bus with a canister of gas, right? Moreover, as Sarah Kittel noted: ''Your Ben-tricked-Widmore theory doesn't make any sense. What about all of the bodies in the open-air grave seen in 'The Man Behind The Curtain' and 'Cabin Fever'!?''
Good point — one that I was totally expecting. The Dharma mass grave — the final resting place for all 40 victims of the Purge — would seem to be conclusive proof that the gassing of Dharmaville really occurred. Then again, we're dealing with a show in which someone (Charles Widmore, if you believe Mr. Friendly from ''Meet Kevin Johnson'') dug up a whole cemetery in Thailand, strapped the exhumed corpses into an old Oceanic Airlines plane, and planted the whole thing at the bottom of the ocean to fool the planet into thinking that the 815ers were all dead. (And you think my fake Purge idea is crazy?!?!) Maybe Benjamin Linus did something similar. Maybe he got his hands on several dozen moldy corpses and dumped them in a pit in order to sell John Locke (and by extension, the castaways) on the lie of the Purge...
Okay, okay, I must admit: I am not 100-percent sold on my own line of reasoning. That's why I called it a hypothesis, not a theory. But I am convinced that there is some kind of Big Twist about the Purge. There could be many possibilities, but the one I want to focus on today brings us back to Dr. Chang's dismembered arm.
My contention is that at some point very soon, someone is going to sit Dr. Chang down and spill the beans on everything that's going to happen in the future. The Incident. The Purge. Oceanic 815. The fact that Miles Straume is his infant son, all grown up. Everything. (My prediction for loose-lipped future revealer: Miles himself, as part of an effort to bond with — and save — his doomed dad.) Moreover, I think Pierre Chang is going to find all of this out right about the time that the quantum-leaping castaways figure out how to leave 1979 and get back to the present. Dr. Chang will then find himself in a very, very, very tricky position: Should he try to change history, no matter how impossible (yeah, yeah, ''whatever happened, happened'') — or should he try to preserve it? Actually, this is a no-brainer. He's going to choose the latter. Why? Because he's a father who will do anything he can to protect his son. Chang is going to realize that in order to save Miles, he has to ensure that future Island history comes to pass. He must chase his wife and son off the Island; he must make sure the Swan gets built and that it brings down Oceanic 815; he must make sure that Miles comes back to the Dharma past, so he can make sure Miles can go back to the future in 1979. Got that?
And that's why Dr. Chang is going to take a chainsaw to his left arm...or at least, shoot a film in which he pretends that his left arm can't move. Because he has to. That's just the way it happened in the future. That orientation film, with all of its conspicuous details, is just one more thing that must exist in the future, in order to preserve a history that will assure Miles' safety. Ditto the Purge. I think Ben and the Others have their own reasons for preserving established history. And because they, too, are aware of future events, they executed mass murder simply because the script of history demanded it. That makes them sound rather heartless, so here's a scenario that lets them off the hook just a teensy bit: Perhaps something happened to Chang, and his Dharma colleagues reversed course on his history-preservation gambit, and the Others had to take drastic measures to stop them. And, as an added bonus, Ben got to kill his crappy father, too.
All of these possibilities appeal to me. They seem reasonable, as they conform to the logic of the Predestination and Ontological paradoxes of time-travel theory. Plus, they're all very prisoners-of-fate dark and ironic and tragic, and I loves me the dark and ironic and tragic.
Except Twilight. Don't ever talk to me about Twilight.
And speaking of sucktastic vampire stories...
DR. ACULA IS NOT AN ANAGRAM!Corrections, clarifications, and other crap
The name Daniel Fierman may be familiar to longtime EW readers. For many years, he was an ace writer and editor at the magazine, and I have great memories of collaborating with him on our Star Wars and coverage, among other things. In fact, Dan edited my first big Lost TOE — the Evil Aaron Theory, circa season 2 — and actually helped finish it after my brain melted down on deadline day. This column owes him another debt, for it was Mr. Fierman who coined ''Doc Jensen.'' Dan is now an editor at GQ, and last week he sent me the following note about my ''Shark vs. Bear''/Dr. Acula theory: ''I feel compelled to point this out: Who would win a fight between a bear and a shark is a long, long noted bar fight. It's kinda the animal kingdom version of Maris v. Mantle.'' This is what I get for doing all my drinking in my office instead of the local tavern. (See: the last episode of Totally Lost.'') Dan: Thank you.
Meanwhile, Christopher Lastrapes emailed me to bust me on my erroneous use of the word ''anagram.'' ''While you're right about Rainier-Canton [being an anagram for reincarnation], Dr. Acula is not an anagram, for the letters are not rearranged. It's simply strategic placing of a period inside of a word. In fact, if spelled out, it should be Doctor Acula, which encompasses more letters than Dracula. So if you wanted to make Doctor Acula an anagram, you could use Octo Dracula, the vampire that had octuplets.'' Is that a Nadya Suleman slam?! Wow. Bunches of you — including Jeffrey Israel, and Will from Hawaii — want to know why I haven't yet written a theory arguing that Bram (part of the ''What lies in the shadow of the statue?'' cult) isn't a link to Dracula author Bram Stoker. My answer: Because I'm still investigating Stoker's involvement with the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, which probably has something to do with...something.
On non-vampiric fronts: Donna Weaver busted me on screwing up on ''quantum supposition'' — I should have used the term ''quantum superposition.'' (My spellcheck clearly hasn't been updated with quantum mechanics jargon.) Maria, a.k.a. ''Butterscotch,'' would really like me to investigate the possibility that Lost has something to do with ''Project Camelot,'' whose website is filled with all sorts of stuff that keeps Art Bell up at night. (Literally.) And finally, Roni Pekins read my theory positing a connection between Lost and Norse mythology from a couple weeks back and demanded an apology. (Wink, wink.) ''An insult to Norwegians,'' Roni wrote. ''Love your columns, but please, Vikings did NOT wear horned helmets! Watch your research. Wikipedia is not the ultimate resource. Otherwise, thanks for all of the wonderful insights on Lost (and for making me laugh).'' My pleasure...but what do you mean Wikipedia is unreliable?! Impossible!
WHAT'S IN YOUR BIG TOE? Theories of Everything and Lost
You might find this rather hard to believe, but in my four years of searching for a ''theory of everything'' that explains Lost, I had never heard of the term ''Theory of Everything'' or its acronym, TOE, until I stumbled across Greg Egan's Distress. Of course, my mind immediately linked to the Four-Toed Statue, and I was struck by some new possibilities, none more so than this: The Four-Toed Statue is a pretty perfect symbol for the current Theory of Everything in the real world.
A Theory of Everything is a search for a scientific foundation for reality — a search for footing, if you will. Why four toes? Maybe it's because the closest thing we currently have to a TOE in science — the Standard Model of Particle Physics — states that there are four fundamental forces in the universe. But physicists will tell you that the Standard Model is unsatisfactory, for any number of reasons, including the fact that many eggheads suspect that there's a fifth force out there — the missing fifth toe, if you will. At present, brilliant minds like the aforementioned Brian Greene are obsessed with building a TOE that blends classical physics, general relativity, and quantum mechanics. No one has nailed it yet. And so, like the Four-Toed Statue, the current state of the TOE is incomplete. (That said, I'd encourage you to investigate Greene's 2005 work The Fabric of the Cosmos: Space, Time, and the Texture of Reality, a layman-friendly survey of essential TOE ideas that includes a great, Lost-appropriate chapter on time travel.)
So what does this mean for Lost, if anything? Well, I'm taken with the idea that the Statue is a symbolic object — something out of the Jungian subconscious, made manifest — representing the current state of meaning about our world. In the castaway present of 2004, the Statue tells us that our TOE is in a state if flux, open to interpretation, a riddle to be solved, or, if you're Sayid, something profoundly troubling. ''I don't know what is more disquieting,'' said Sayid as he beheld Four-Toed in the season 2 finale, ''the fact that the rest of the statue is missing, or that it has four toes.'' FUN FACT PART ONE! ''Disquiet'' is another word for ''distress'' — as in Egan's book Distress. FUN FACT PART TWO! ''The Disquieting Muses'' is a famous painting by Giorgio de Chirico, a master of the Italian metaphysical school whose surreal works are filled with eerie dream objects not unlike the Four-Toed Statue.
Regardless, for me, the Four-Toed Statue speaks to characters puzzling through the mysteries of themselves and their world — and to Lostologists devoted to finding the missing big TOE of the show. Of course, what will happen to us when Lost finally reveals the answers to all those riddles to us? Funny: The very end of Distress addresses the issue of life after the TOE gets exposed: ''Other people lamented the end of mystery. As if nothing would remain to be discovered, once we understood what lay beneath our feet. And it's true that there are no deep surprises — there's nothing left to learn about the reasons for the TOE, or the reasons for our own existence. But there'll be no end to discovering what the universe can contain; there'll always be new stories written in the TOE — new systems, new structures, explained into being. There might even be new minds on other worlds, co-creators whose nature we can't even imagine yet...''
Or, put another way:
What lies in the shadow of the statue?
Ourselves.
And hopefully, more shows like Lost.
But no need to get distressed yet! We have three more episodes of Lost this season — and a new episode of Totally Lost today! In our newest adventure, Dan and I are given a challenge by our arch-nemesis, Pig E. Keep your eyes peeled (and your cursor on the pause button) for another fleeting glimpse of teasers — and today, they're pretty damn meaty. For even more, click over to EW.com's brand-new episode of Must List Live! to see Dalton Ross and Jessica Shaw discuss Lost's all-time best episodes.
Be seeing you — tomorrow, at the recap.
Doc Jensen
http://link.brightcove.com/services/player/bcpid21354146001?bclid=21368471001&bctid=21353511001
http://www.ew.com/ew/article/0,,1550612_20250233_20275333,00.html
Doc Jensen on ''The Variable,'' which puts Daniel in full effect, in both foreground and back story. Plus: Revisiting the Orientation Film from season 2, a couple of clarifications and corrections, and a little TOE tapping
IT'S ALL TOO MUCH? Sure, it may seem confusing at times, but pull yourself together -- the Doc's Geeky Preamble will surely inspire
By Jeff Jensen
Welcome to the Planet Fiction that is Lost. My name is Doc Jensen, archaeologist of impossible possibilities, currently on temporary work release from the Santa Rosa Mental Health — err, I mean, Mental CRACKPOT GENIUS Institute. Please note the placard on the door of my office:
''To be a scientist is to commit to a life of confusion punctuated by rare moments of clarity. When I leave the office at night, the confusion comes with me. Ruminating over these equations, seeking patterns, looking for hidden relationships, trying to make contact with hidden data — it's all uncertainty and possibility engaged in an endless chaotic dance. Every so often the blur resolves, but the respite is short lived; the next puzzle demands focus. This, really, is the joy of being a scientist. Established truths are comforting, but it is the mysteries that make the soul ache and render a life of exploration worth living.'' —Brian Greene, author of The Elegant Universe, from the new issue of Wired, guest-edited by Lost co-creator and Star Trek director J.J. Abrams.
The ''endless chaotic dance'' of (seemingly) infinite possibilities — that's what I love about investigating the mystery matrix of Lost. Or, for those who speak High Geek: Think of this column as a trading ship traversing the channels that exist among countless alternative potentialities that glitter within Lost like a monolithic theoretical snowflake floating in 196,833 dimensional space, whose captain is fond of stopping on the most unlikely and obscure of many possible worlds. [A No Prize if you know the reference: JeffJensenEW@aol.com is where you should send your submissions.] I promise you no answers in this column — just the crazy joy of Sherlocking through this deep and shifty show. Emphasis on crazy. Yeah, I know: It's not like we're trying to find the underlying order of the universe, or locate the sub-atomic super-strings that stitch together the fabric of the cosmos, or plant flags in the secret dimensions coiled in the folds of the observable universe. No, excavating the secret archaeology of Lost isn't like that at all.
It's wayyyyyyyy cooler!
'Lost': King Faraday
Doc Jensen on ''The Variable,'' which puts Daniel in full effect, in both foreground and back story. Plus: Revisiting the Orientation Film from season 2, a couple of clarifications and corrections, and a little TOE tapping
Buzz up!More
IT'S ALL TOO MUCH? Sure, it may seem confusing at times, but pull yourself together -- the Doc's Geeky Preamble will surely inspire
ABC
All About
Lost
By Jeff Jensen Jeff Jensen
Jeff Jensen, an EW senior writer, has been despondent since the cancellation of ''Twin Peaks''PREAMBLE: A GEEKY RAMBLE
Welcome to the Planet Fiction that is Lost. My name is Doc Jensen, archaeologist of impossible possibilities, currently on temporary work release from the Santa Rosa Mental Health — err, I mean, Mental CRACKPOT GENIUS Institute. Please note the placard on the door of my office:
''To be a scientist is to commit to a life of confusion punctuated by rare moments of clarity. When I leave the office at night, the confusion comes with me. Ruminating over these equations, seeking patterns, looking for hidden relationships, trying to make contact with hidden data — it's all uncertainty and possibility engaged in an endless chaotic dance. Every so often the blur resolves, but the respite is short lived; the next puzzle demands focus. This, really, is the joy of being a scientist. Established truths are comforting, but it is the mysteries that make the soul ache and render a life of exploration worth living.'' —Brian Greene, author of The Elegant Universe, from the new issue of Wired, guest-edited by Lost co-creator and Star Trek director J.J. Abrams.
The ''endless chaotic dance'' of (seemingly) infinite possibilities — that's what I love about investigating the mystery matrix of Lost. Or, for those who speak High Geek: Think of this column as a trading ship traversing the channels that exist among countless alternative potentialities that glitter within Lost like a monolithic theoretical snowflake floating in 196,833 dimensional space, whose captain is fond of stopping on the most unlikely and obscure of many possible worlds. [A No Prize if you know the reference: JeffJensenEW@aol.com is where you should send your submissions.] I promise you no answers in this column — just the crazy joy of Sherlocking through this deep and shifty show. Emphasis on crazy. Yeah, I know: It's not like we're trying to find the underlying order of the universe, or locate the sub-atomic super-strings that stitch together the fabric of the cosmos, or plant flags in the secret dimensions coiled in the folds of the observable universe. No, excavating the secret archaeology of Lost isn't like that at all.
It's wayyyyyyyy cooler!
'Lost': King Faraday
Doc Jensen on ''The Variable,'' which puts Daniel in full effect, in both foreground and back story. Plus: Revisiting the Orientation Film from season 2, a couple of clarifications and corrections, and a little TOE tapping
Buzz up!More
IT'S ALL TOO MUCH? Sure, it may seem confusing at times, but pull yourself together -- the Doc's Geeky Preamble will surely inspire
ABC
All About
Lost
By Jeff Jensen Jeff Jensen
Jeff Jensen, an EW senior writer, has been despondent since the cancellation of ''Twin Peaks''PREAMBLE: A GEEKY RAMBLE
Welcome to the Planet Fiction that is Lost. My name is Doc Jensen, archaeologist of impossible possibilities, currently on temporary work release from the Santa Rosa Mental Health — err, I mean, Mental CRACKPOT GENIUS Institute. Please note the placard on the door of my office:
''To be a scientist is to commit to a life of confusion punctuated by rare moments of clarity. When I leave the office at night, the confusion comes with me. Ruminating over these equations, seeking patterns, looking for hidden relationships, trying to make contact with hidden data — it's all uncertainty and possibility engaged in an endless chaotic dance. Every so often the blur resolves, but the respite is short lived; the next puzzle demands focus. This, really, is the joy of being a scientist. Established truths are comforting, but it is the mysteries that make the soul ache and render a life of exploration worth living.'' —Brian Greene, author of The Elegant Universe, from the new issue of Wired, guest-edited by Lost co-creator and Star Trek director J.J. Abrams.
The ''endless chaotic dance'' of (seemingly) infinite possibilities — that's what I love about investigating the mystery matrix of Lost. Or, for those who speak High Geek: Think of this column as a trading ship traversing the channels that exist among countless alternative potentialities that glitter within Lost like a monolithic theoretical snowflake floating in 196,833 dimensional space, whose captain is fond of stopping on the most unlikely and obscure of many possible worlds. [A No Prize if you know the reference: JeffJensenEW@aol.com is where you should send your submissions.] I promise you no answers in this column — just the crazy joy of Sherlocking through this deep and shifty show. Emphasis on crazy. Yeah, I know: It's not like we're trying to find the underlying order of the universe, or locate the sub-atomic super-strings that stitch together the fabric of the cosmos, or plant flags in the secret dimensions coiled in the folds of the observable universe. No, excavating the secret archaeology of Lost isn't like that at all.
It's wayyyyyyyy cooler!
PREVIEW: ''THE VARIABLE''
Are you up on Michael Faraday, one of the founding fathers of electromagnetic science? Could you recognize an allegorical Faraday Cage if you saw one? How about a Faraday Effect? On tonight's Lost, one Mr. Daniel Faraday — named after the famed 19th century Michael Faraday — will be in full effect, in both foreground and back story. We saw the fuzzy-frazzled physicist return to the Island two weeks ago, looking refreshed from his off-Island sabbatical in Ann Arbor, but also sporting the ominous colors of the Dharma Initiative's secret Black Swan Team. As Hurley reminded us, these negatively attired stormtroopers are currently building Lost's version of the Death Star, the Hatch, whose button-regulated tractor beam yanked the castaways out of the sky like a powerful magnet pulling metal thingies out of...something. If Faraday is one of these Men in Black in charge of Dharma's technological terror, does that make him — what? — Grand Moff Tarkin? Or perhaps (gulp) this faithless Imperial stooge...
I like the washed-out black and white sheen that's been given to that classic Star Wars moment — it gives it a certain old and damaged Orientation Film feel, specifically the one that the castaways found in the Hatch back in the third episode of season 2. As your (quack) doctor in Lostology, allow me to give you a piece of advice: Watch it again, as at least some of it has direct bearing on what is currently happening back in Dharma 1979 on Lost. (Note: This version does not include a short snippet of missing footage that was later found by Mr. Eko, which instructs Swan occupants to refrain from using the computer to communicate with the outside world.)
Note the following:
1. Dr. Candle's left arm does not move during the entire film.
2. Dharma's founders were a pair of University of Michigan scientists, Gerald and Karen DeGroot. An industrialist named Alvar Hanso funded their work.
3. Remember — nay, MEMORIZE — this line as if it were scripture: ''Not long after the experiments began, however, there was...an 'incident'...and since that time, the following protocol has been observed...''
4. The copyright date on the film: 1980.
5. The year that The Empire Strikes Back was released: 1980.
Point No. 5 probably has nothing to do with anything.
Some thoughts on each of these points, but in reverse order:
4. THE CRYPTIC COPYRIGHT The time-traveling castaways are currently parked in December 1977. So we're still a couple years away from...well, whatever this copyright truly signifies. My interpretation has long been that Dr. Pierre Chang, in his Marvin Candle guise, rolled film in the Year of Empire. But perhaps the copyright date represents the year that the Hanso Foundation took steps to legally lock down all of Dharma's material in order to control it and prevent it from falling into the wrong hands or being publicly distributed.
3. HAS ''THE INCIDENT'' BEEN FORESHADOWED? Two weeks ago, in my recap of ''Some Like It Hoth,'' I speculated that Hurley might try to rally his fellow time-travelers to mount an attack on the Swan in order to prevent its creation, thus changing history. Perhaps the Incident represents their (failed) attempt at doing so. SPOILER ALERT! This past week, ABC released the official title for the two-hour season finale airing on May 13. Guess what it is? Yep: ''The Incident.''
2. THE ROOTS OF DEGROOT: KAREN EDITION Greg Egan's acclaimed 1995 sci-fi novel Distress is a book that teems with semi-plausible Lost connections (South Pacific island setting, mysterious diseases, invading mercenaries, and the opening line is very Miles: ''All right. He's dead. Go ahead and talk to him.''), but what really blew my mind was stumbling across a character named Karin De Groot. She's the assistant to a physicist who is on the verge of discovering the one true Theory of Everything, a real scientific term, known by its acronym, TOE. A number of radical religious groups, known as ''Ignorance Cults,'' are seeking to stop De Groot's boss from finishing the TOE, lest it trigger an ''Aleph Moment'' that would transform the world by uniting all people under a single, accurate understanding of the nature of reality. Indeed, through the wonky science-magic of quantum mechanics, broadcasting this TOE would actually retroactively create the world. (See: John Archibald Wheeler's feedback loop/''participatory universe'' theories, discussed in an earlier edition of Doc Jensen.) Might these ''What lies in the shadow of the statue?'' people currently running around Lost be the show's version of a mystery-preserving Ignorance Cult? And in the context of Lost, would these be good guys (because mystery is good) or bad guys (because the truth of the Island should be shared with the world)? And is there a connection between TOE and the Island's Four-Toed Statue? AGAIN WITH EGAN! After I first mentioned Greg Egan's work in last week's column, reader Valerie Naas hit me back with the suggestion that the Australian author's entire catalog rings with Lost resonance. She suggests checking his short stories ''Lost Continent,'' ''In Numbers,'' ''Demon's Passage,'' and (get this) the Hugo award-winning ''Oceanic,'' all of which can be found in the collection Dark Integers and Other Stories.
2b. THE ROOTS OF DE GROOT: GERRY AND ALVAR There are echoes of the De Groot/Hanso relationship in the real-life link between psychologist Ian Stevenson and a very wealthy inventor whose work most likely affected the lives of every single person reading this column.
Like the fictitious Gerald and Karen De Groot, Ian Stevenson — not to be confused with the English cartoonist whose work includes the postcard book Lost Heroes — was deeply interested in parapsychology, a fringe science that encompasses all sorts of mind-over-matter weirdness evidenced by Lost characters such as Walt and Miles. Stevenson was influenced by Theosophy, a freaky fusion of classical mythology, mysticism, cutting-edge science, and exposure to the more respectable Eastern religions of Hinduism and Buddhism. He experimented with LSD, which he was inspired to do after meeting Lost-referenced author Aldous Huxley (Brave New World, Island, Doors of Perception), whose coterie also includes a man who lent his name to Lost's ageless enigma, Richard Alpert. FUN FACT! Huxley — whose life and work interfaces with Lost in so many ways he deserves a Doc Jensen column unto himself — died on the same day as another major Lost-cited author, C.S. Lewis. (You know who also died on the same day? JFK. Weird, huh? Now, check this out.)
But Stevenson is most famous for his fixation on reincarnation. During the 1960s and 1970s, Stevenson traveled the world and interviewed scores of people, hoping to find evidence of past-life experiences. He was funded by The Parapsychology Foundation, as well as Chester Carlson, the inventor of xerography and the founding father of...photocopying. Carlson — whose second wife claimed to have extrasensory powers and inspired her husband to fund research into paranormal possibilities — bequeathed bunches of money to Stevenson's employer, the University of Virginia, to fund his research. (For more info, check out this autobiographical essay written by Stevenson.
There are so many nifty parallels with Lost here. We know Dharma — created by academics with fringe science interests; funded by a rich industrialist — was very interested in parapsychology and was influenced by Hinduism and Buddhism. And given the resurrection powers of the Island and the season's many references to Egyptian history and iconography, we're left considering the very real possibility that Dharma was keenly interested in concepts like life after death and reincarnation. So were the ancient Egyptians, from whom we get the idea of ''transmigration of the soul'' or ''metempsychosis,'' to use a really big word cited frequently in James Joyce's Ulysses, this Lost season's biggest literary reference (to date). As for Chester ''Call me Mr. Xerox'' Carlson, my mind wants to link beyond Alvar Hanso to Pierre Chang, making copies of Bunny 15 down there in the Orchid, not to mention making copies himself via all those different orientation films. Speaking of Chang:
1. WHASSUP WITH DR. CHANG/CANDLE'S IMMOBILE ARM? Many Lost theorists believe that the Dharma Dude of Many Names lost it during the Incident. Me? I think he...chopped it off himself! EWWWWWWW! Why would I think that?! Because...
EVERYTHING IS FAKE. (KINDA.)The Good Father Theory of Island History, or: I'd Give My Left Arm to Save My Son!
A couple weeks ago, I put forth the hypothesis that the Purge never happened, that it was part of a scam engineered by Ben to unseat Charles Widmore as leader of the Others. Most of you thought I was as loony as Connect Four-playing Lenny. After all, we did see Ben honest-to-god kill his abusive father in a Dharma bus with a canister of gas, right? Moreover, as Sarah Kittel noted: ''Your Ben-tricked-Widmore theory doesn't make any sense. What about all of the bodies in the open-air grave seen in 'The Man Behind The Curtain' and 'Cabin Fever'!?''
Good point — one that I was totally expecting. The Dharma mass grave — the final resting place for all 40 victims of the Purge — would seem to be conclusive proof that the gassing of Dharmaville really occurred. Then again, we're dealing with a show in which someone (Charles Widmore, if you believe Mr. Friendly from ''Meet Kevin Johnson'') dug up a whole cemetery in Thailand, strapped the exhumed corpses into an old Oceanic Airlines plane, and planted the whole thing at the bottom of the ocean to fool the planet into thinking that the 815ers were all dead. (And you think my fake Purge idea is crazy?!?!) Maybe Benjamin Linus did something similar. Maybe he got his hands on several dozen moldy corpses and dumped them in a pit in order to sell John Locke (and by extension, the castaways) on the lie of the Purge...
Okay, okay, I must admit: I am not 100-percent sold on my own line of reasoning. That's why I called it a hypothesis, not a theory. But I am convinced that there is some kind of Big Twist about the Purge. There could be many possibilities, but the one I want to focus on today brings us back to Dr. Chang's dismembered arm.
My contention is that at some point very soon, someone is going to sit Dr. Chang down and spill the beans on everything that's going to happen in the future. The Incident. The Purge. Oceanic 815. The fact that Miles Straume is his infant son, all grown up. Everything. (My prediction for loose-lipped future revealer: Miles himself, as part of an effort to bond with — and save — his doomed dad.) Moreover, I think Pierre Chang is going to find all of this out right about the time that the quantum-leaping castaways figure out how to leave 1979 and get back to the present. Dr. Chang will then find himself in a very, very, very tricky position: Should he try to change history, no matter how impossible (yeah, yeah, ''whatever happened, happened'') — or should he try to preserve it? Actually, this is a no-brainer. He's going to choose the latter. Why? Because he's a father who will do anything he can to protect his son. Chang is going to realize that in order to save Miles, he has to ensure that future Island history comes to pass. He must chase his wife and son off the Island; he must make sure the Swan gets built and that it brings down Oceanic 815; he must make sure that Miles comes back to the Dharma past, so he can make sure Miles can go back to the future in 1979. Got that?
And that's why Dr. Chang is going to take a chainsaw to his left arm...or at least, shoot a film in which he pretends that his left arm can't move. Because he has to. That's just the way it happened in the future. That orientation film, with all of its conspicuous details, is just one more thing that must exist in the future, in order to preserve a history that will assure Miles' safety. Ditto the Purge. I think Ben and the Others have their own reasons for preserving established history. And because they, too, are aware of future events, they executed mass murder simply because the script of history demanded it. That makes them sound rather heartless, so here's a scenario that lets them off the hook just a teensy bit: Perhaps something happened to Chang, and his Dharma colleagues reversed course on his history-preservation gambit, and the Others had to take drastic measures to stop them. And, as an added bonus, Ben got to kill his crappy father, too.
All of these possibilities appeal to me. They seem reasonable, as they conform to the logic of the Predestination and Ontological paradoxes of time-travel theory. Plus, they're all very prisoners-of-fate dark and ironic and tragic, and I loves me the dark and ironic and tragic.
Except Twilight. Don't ever talk to me about Twilight.
And speaking of sucktastic vampire stories...
DR. ACULA IS NOT AN ANAGRAM!Corrections, clarifications, and other crap
The name Daniel Fierman may be familiar to longtime EW readers. For many years, he was an ace writer and editor at the magazine, and I have great memories of collaborating with him on our Star Wars and coverage, among other things. In fact, Dan edited my first big Lost TOE — the Evil Aaron Theory, circa season 2 — and actually helped finish it after my brain melted down on deadline day. This column owes him another debt, for it was Mr. Fierman who coined ''Doc Jensen.'' Dan is now an editor at GQ, and last week he sent me the following note about my ''Shark vs. Bear''/Dr. Acula theory: ''I feel compelled to point this out: Who would win a fight between a bear and a shark is a long, long noted bar fight. It's kinda the animal kingdom version of Maris v. Mantle.'' This is what I get for doing all my drinking in my office instead of the local tavern. (See: the last episode of Totally Lost.'') Dan: Thank you.
Meanwhile, Christopher Lastrapes emailed me to bust me on my erroneous use of the word ''anagram.'' ''While you're right about Rainier-Canton [being an anagram for reincarnation], Dr. Acula is not an anagram, for the letters are not rearranged. It's simply strategic placing of a period inside of a word. In fact, if spelled out, it should be Doctor Acula, which encompasses more letters than Dracula. So if you wanted to make Doctor Acula an anagram, you could use Octo Dracula, the vampire that had octuplets.'' Is that a Nadya Suleman slam?! Wow. Bunches of you — including Jeffrey Israel, and Will from Hawaii — want to know why I haven't yet written a theory arguing that Bram (part of the ''What lies in the shadow of the statue?'' cult) isn't a link to Dracula author Bram Stoker. My answer: Because I'm still investigating Stoker's involvement with the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, which probably has something to do with...something.
On non-vampiric fronts: Donna Weaver busted me on screwing up on ''quantum supposition'' — I should have used the term ''quantum superposition.'' (My spellcheck clearly hasn't been updated with quantum mechanics jargon.) Maria, a.k.a. ''Butterscotch,'' would really like me to investigate the possibility that Lost has something to do with ''Project Camelot,'' whose website is filled with all sorts of stuff that keeps Art Bell up at night. (Literally.) And finally, Roni Pekins read my theory positing a connection between Lost and Norse mythology from a couple weeks back and demanded an apology. (Wink, wink.) ''An insult to Norwegians,'' Roni wrote. ''Love your columns, but please, Vikings did NOT wear horned helmets! Watch your research. Wikipedia is not the ultimate resource. Otherwise, thanks for all of the wonderful insights on Lost (and for making me laugh).'' My pleasure...but what do you mean Wikipedia is unreliable?! Impossible!
WHAT'S IN YOUR BIG TOE? Theories of Everything and Lost
You might find this rather hard to believe, but in my four years of searching for a ''theory of everything'' that explains Lost, I had never heard of the term ''Theory of Everything'' or its acronym, TOE, until I stumbled across Greg Egan's Distress. Of course, my mind immediately linked to the Four-Toed Statue, and I was struck by some new possibilities, none more so than this: The Four-Toed Statue is a pretty perfect symbol for the current Theory of Everything in the real world.
A Theory of Everything is a search for a scientific foundation for reality — a search for footing, if you will. Why four toes? Maybe it's because the closest thing we currently have to a TOE in science — the Standard Model of Particle Physics — states that there are four fundamental forces in the universe. But physicists will tell you that the Standard Model is unsatisfactory, for any number of reasons, including the fact that many eggheads suspect that there's a fifth force out there — the missing fifth toe, if you will. At present, brilliant minds like the aforementioned Brian Greene are obsessed with building a TOE that blends classical physics, general relativity, and quantum mechanics. No one has nailed it yet. And so, like the Four-Toed Statue, the current state of the TOE is incomplete. (That said, I'd encourage you to investigate Greene's 2005 work The Fabric of the Cosmos: Space, Time, and the Texture of Reality, a layman-friendly survey of essential TOE ideas that includes a great, Lost-appropriate chapter on time travel.)
So what does this mean for Lost, if anything? Well, I'm taken with the idea that the Statue is a symbolic object — something out of the Jungian subconscious, made manifest — representing the current state of meaning about our world. In the castaway present of 2004, the Statue tells us that our TOE is in a state if flux, open to interpretation, a riddle to be solved, or, if you're Sayid, something profoundly troubling. ''I don't know what is more disquieting,'' said Sayid as he beheld Four-Toed in the season 2 finale, ''the fact that the rest of the statue is missing, or that it has four toes.'' FUN FACT PART ONE! ''Disquiet'' is another word for ''distress'' — as in Egan's book Distress. FUN FACT PART TWO! ''The Disquieting Muses'' is a famous painting by Giorgio de Chirico, a master of the Italian metaphysical school whose surreal works are filled with eerie dream objects not unlike the Four-Toed Statue.
Regardless, for me, the Four-Toed Statue speaks to characters puzzling through the mysteries of themselves and their world — and to Lostologists devoted to finding the missing big TOE of the show. Of course, what will happen to us when Lost finally reveals the answers to all those riddles to us? Funny: The very end of Distress addresses the issue of life after the TOE gets exposed: ''Other people lamented the end of mystery. As if nothing would remain to be discovered, once we understood what lay beneath our feet. And it's true that there are no deep surprises — there's nothing left to learn about the reasons for the TOE, or the reasons for our own existence. But there'll be no end to discovering what the universe can contain; there'll always be new stories written in the TOE — new systems, new structures, explained into being. There might even be new minds on other worlds, co-creators whose nature we can't even imagine yet...''
Or, put another way:
What lies in the shadow of the statue?
Ourselves.
And hopefully, more shows like Lost.
But no need to get distressed yet! We have three more episodes of Lost this season — and a new episode of Totally Lost today! In our newest adventure, Dan and I are given a challenge by our arch-nemesis, Pig E. Keep your eyes peeled (and your cursor on the pause button) for another fleeting glimpse of teasers — and today, they're pretty damn meaty. For even more, click over to EW.com's brand-new episode of Must List Live! to see Dalton Ross and Jessica Shaw discuss Lost's all-time best episodes.
Be seeing you — tomorrow, at the recap.
Doc Jensen
http://link.brightcove.com/services/player/bcpid21354146001?bclid=21368471001&bctid=21353511001
http://www.ew.com/ew/article/0,,1550612_20250233_20275333,00.html
Hollywood Reporter: 'Lost' 100th Episode
By Todd Longwell
April 28, 2009, 09:00 PM ET
'Lost' Moments
09.22.04: "Lost" premieres on ABC to 18.65 million viewers, telling its story in present day as well as in flashback.
10.13.04: In the "Walkabout" episode, it's revealed that John Locke (Terry O'Quinn) was a paraplegic before crashing on the island.
03.02.05: Hurley (Jorge Garcia) treks into the jungle to find Danielle Rousseau (Mira Furlan) and determine the source of the numbers -- 4, 8, 15, 16, 23, 42 -- that have been haunting him for years.
03.30.05: The light in the hatch comes on, leaving fans wondering who -- or what -- is inside.
04.06.05: "Lost" kills off its first major character when Boone (Ian Somerhalder) dies. Meanwhile, Claire's (Emilie de Ravin) son, Aaron, is born.
05.25.05: The mysterious hatch is blown open, which will lead to the castaways' investigation into the Dharma Initiative.
09.18.05: "Lost" takes the outstanding drama trophy and co-creator J.J. Abrams wins a directing nod for the series' pilot episode at the 57th Emmy Awards.
09.21.05: Season 2 kicks off with "Man of Science, Man of Faith" and draws 23.47 million viewers and an 8.4 rating, which remains the series' peak for both.
01.16.06: "Lost" earns a best drama series Golden Globe.
02.15.06: Benjamin Linus (masquerading as "Henry Gale"), played by Michael Emerson, is introduced.
03.29.06: The episode "Lockdown" reveals a hidden map of the island, visible only under blacklight, that hints at the extent of the island's mythology and provided tons of fodder for online speculation.
10.04.06: The Barracks, the "town" where the Others live on the island, is revealed.
11.08.06: Jack (Matthew Fox) performs surgery to save Ben's life and uses the moment to leverage an escape for Kate (Evangeline Lilly) and Sawyer (Josh Holloway) from Hydra Island.
05.23.07: The series inverts its own formula by beginning to flash forward to a point in time after some of the castaways return home.
May 07: At the end of its third season, "Lost" sets an end date for 2010, three seasons later.
Oct. 07: Sci Fi Channel and G4 pact with Disney-ABC Domestic Television for syndication rights.
Nov. 07: "Missing Pieces," a 13-part webisode series sponsored by Verizon Wireless, begins releasing episodes online. The story bridges the third and fourth
seasons of the show.
02.28.08: Desmond (Henry Ian Cusick) becomes unstuck in time but manages to right himself by reconnecting with his long-lost love, Penny (Sonya Walger).
05.29.08: With their helicopter low on fuel, Sawyer volunteers to stay behind on the island so that Jack, Kate and the rest of the Oceanic Six can make it to rescue.
02.18.09: The adult members of the Oceanic Six return to the island, but there's a catch: Some of them crash 30 years in the past.
04.01.09: "Lost" earns a Peabody Award for excellence for "breezily mixing metaphysics, quantum mechanics, romance and cliffhanger action."
04.08.09: A flashback reveals how Ben Linus oversaw the exile from the island of Charles Widmore, setting up the rivalry that would fuel the series' entire arc.
-- Daniel Carlson
It was four and a half years ago that Oceanic Flight 815 went off course over the South Pacific and came crashing down on a seemingly deserted beach.
Forty-eight people (and a dog) stumbled from the smoking wreckage to discover an otherworldly tropical isle inhabited by polar bears, smoke monsters and a mysterious band of human natives known as the "Others." The ever-evolving mystery made ABC's "Lost" the water cooler show of the 2004-05 television season, helped revive the flagging fortunes of its parent network, and turned its cast -- all of whom were virtual unknowns, save for Matthew Fox (previously star of Fox's "Party of Five") and Dominic Monaghan (Merry in "The Lord of the Rings" trilogy) -- into internationally recognizable figures.
One-hundred episodes in, the survivors still haven't figured out exactly where they are and why, but executive producer Carlton Cuse has a theory as to how they got there, creatively speaking.
"The fact that no one believed 'Lost' was going to be successful in the beginning was enormously liberating," Cuse says. "So we set out to make 12 episodes of what we thought was the coolest TV show we could come up with and in so doing we violated a lot of the traditional rules of television narrative. We had characters who were murderers and had done very bad things. We had incredibly complex serialized storytelling. We had lots of intentional ambiguity, leaving the audience lots of room for interpretation and those things that sort of violated the rules of television were the very things that the audience ended up responding to."
But nothing lasts forever. In May 2007, it was announced that "Lost" would wrap in May 2010 at the end of Season 6. The reason was not the ratings, which have declined over the years as show has shifted time slots five times and taken long midseason hiatuses like the three-week break between Episodes 6 and 7 in Season 3.
It wasn't the high price tag of $4 million per episode. The decision was purely creative.
"We're fairly certain that, had we not been given an end date, the show might have been canceled by now, because we would've had to continue spinning our wheels and stalling," executive producer/ co-creator Damon Lindelof says. "It's a finite idea. Once Carlton and I had gotten through the first 30 or 40 hours of it, it became very clear to us that we were ready to take the show out of question/mystery mode and into resolution mode. And we couldn't do that until we knew when the show was going to end."
The show's beginnings can be traced to January 2004, when then-ABC president Lloyd Braun commissioned a script from Spelling Television that he envisioned as a narrative take on the unscripted hit "Survivor." Jeffrey Lieber wrote the initial drafts of the pilot, titled "Nowhere." Braun felt it wasn't working, so he brought in "Alias" creator J.J. Abrams, who had a preexisting deal with Touchstone Television (now ABC Studios), and teamed him with Lindelof, a writer-producer on ABC's "Crossing Jordan."
Abrams and Lindelof met on a Monday. By Friday, they had written a 20-page outline, adding a supernatural angle. On Saturday, the pilot got a greenlight. Having started late in the 2004 season's development, they had less than 12 weeks to write the pilot and prep it for production. It would have been a daunting task under any circumstances, but this script had 14 major speaking parts, a downed jet and a remote South Pacific island setting. Abrams and Lindelof compounded the logistical challenges by revising the characters and story lines during the casting process, leaving the complex puzzle of its mystery with more than a few rough, unfinished pieces.
"We didn't know that it was going to be successful, and when the ratings started coming out and it was doing well, we realized, 'Oh, my God, we're going to have to keep doing this,' " says Cuse, who stepped forward to run the show with Lindelof after Abrams departed to concentrate on other projects. "That's really when we really started working out the mythology."
From the beginning, the mysterious possibilities of "Lost" were a boon to ABC's marketing department, co-headed by executive vps Michael Benson and Marla Provencio.
"The pilot had a theatrical feel to it, so we felt we had to go out with it in a very big way," Provencio says. "But we also wanted to go more underground and do things that would intrigue the audience and make them want more."
The network started the buzz building by world-premiering the show's two-hour pilot at Comic-Con International in San Diego on July 24, 2004. Over the Labor Day weekend preceding the show's TV debut, bottles containing cryptic messages were scattered across several beaches on the East and West Coasts. Although cleanup crews were prescheduled to remove any undiscovered bottles, the network still managed to get tagged with several littering tickets. It also aired "pirate radio" spots on stations nationwide.
"All of a sudden it would sound like people were cutting into the radio saying, 'Help! We're survivors of Oceanic Flight 815,' then it would crackle out," Benson says. "We actually got in a little trouble over that, too, because people thought it was really happening."
In the years since, the "Lost" team has made regular appearances at Comic-Con, including a panel discussion featuring Lindelof and Cuse last year that attracted about 6,000 fans. The network has also commissioned spinoff novels, an official "Lost" magazine, an alternative reality game ("The Lost Experience") and various tie-in Web sites, including the Emmy-nominated Find815.com, as well as a line of action figures.
The ABC marketing department has further taken on the difficult task of making the show's complex mythology more comprehensible to first-time or casual viewers with weekly four-minute video recaps posted on ABC.com that use action figures and character cut-outs fashioned from screen caps to re-enact key scenes from the latest episode.
"It's a challenging show," admits ABC president of entertainment Stephen McPherson, who greenlit "Lost" as a series after taking over for Braun in April 2004. "It's not just a cookie-cutter procedural with a new case each week. There's a real depth to it. But I also know people who watch only occasionally and really enjoy it when they do."
There's no question that the show's labyrinthine plot twists have been too much for some. Viewership has declined from an average of 15.69 million people a week in Season 1 to 11.37 million a week at the beginning of this season, according to Nielsen. But Cuse believes that has as much to do with changing viewing habits of the show's tech-savvy fans as anything else.
"People are still watching our show, they're just watching it in different ways," he says. "They're DVR-ing it, they're watching it on ABC.com, they're looking at it on DVDs. And when you sort of aggregate all the ancillary platforms on which 'Lost' is available," including cell phones and other PDAs, "and also weekend syndication, in fact the Nielsen number is only a fractional part of the audience now."
The complexity that makes it daunting for casual viewers is precisely what makes it so appealing to its hardcore fans, dubbed Losties or Lostaways, who follow the show with the intensity of Trekkers. They have a strong presence on the Web via such sites as TheTailSection.com and LostHatch.com, and strong opinions about where the plot should go. Cuse says he's aware of the chatter, but he does his best to ignore it.
"The problem is if someone says something that's critical of the show, it can kind of stick in my brain the wrong way and infect my creative process," Cuse says. "There's a guy named Greg Nations who's our script coordinator and keeps sort of records and history of the show. He follows all the boards and sort of gives us a Reader's Digest exegesis of what the fan sites say the day after the show airs, and that's a lot more palatable. He's very well-equipped to say, 'Here's a question that's percolating up to the surface a lot. You guys should take a look at this or think about this.' That indirectness is important for us maintaining the sanctity of our own creative process."
For Lindelof, the risks of responding to fan chatter are exemplified by Nikki and Paulo, a pair of characters introduced in Season 3 played by Kiele Sanchez and Rodrigo Santoro, respectively.
"The boards were all atwitter with, 'What about these other people on the show, these background people who are walking around?' " Lindelof says. "We had introduced one of them, Dr. Arzt (Daniel Roebuck), in the finale of Season 1 just as a gag to blow the guy up, but the question never went away. So we thought, clearly, there is a desire for us to give these people names and stories, and we tried it and it was a disaster."
Before the season was out, Nikki and Paulo were dead. They're not the only characters that have been sacrificed to feed the drama. During the past five seasons, several of the core group of original survivors have been killed off, including Michael (Harold Perrineau) and Charlie (Monaghan).
"That has been a specter hanging over all of us since Season 1," says Daniel Dae Kim, who plays Jin, a Korean businessman stranded along with his wife Sun (Yunjin Kim). "It's always difficult to lose a cast member, because we all uprooted ourselves and in many cases moved our families to Oahu," the Hawaiian island where the show is shot. "It's not like shooting a show in L.A. When one of us leaves, they leave the island, and it's not as if we can still have dinner with them even if we're not working on the same job."
Kim says he has given up speculating about the fate of his character or the answers to show's larger mysteries.
"Every time I thought I had a conclusion, the writers proved much more clever than I," Kim says. "Now I just look at it as a great amusement park ride and enjoy the thrill of it."
Lindelof says that when the show itself goes to the great hereafter next May, he and Cuse will be taking a ride out of town.
"We're taking a page out of the David Chase playbook," Lindelof says. "Instead of clarifying things, we want to let it simmer and percolate. So we're searching out some undisclosed locations, some of them on the planet Earth, others might involve getting on a Russian spacecraft."
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/hr/content_display/film/news/e3i9c779034c7476d10cb8e85433ab7c88b
April 28, 2009, 09:00 PM ET
'Lost' Moments
09.22.04: "Lost" premieres on ABC to 18.65 million viewers, telling its story in present day as well as in flashback.
10.13.04: In the "Walkabout" episode, it's revealed that John Locke (Terry O'Quinn) was a paraplegic before crashing on the island.
03.02.05: Hurley (Jorge Garcia) treks into the jungle to find Danielle Rousseau (Mira Furlan) and determine the source of the numbers -- 4, 8, 15, 16, 23, 42 -- that have been haunting him for years.
03.30.05: The light in the hatch comes on, leaving fans wondering who -- or what -- is inside.
04.06.05: "Lost" kills off its first major character when Boone (Ian Somerhalder) dies. Meanwhile, Claire's (Emilie de Ravin) son, Aaron, is born.
05.25.05: The mysterious hatch is blown open, which will lead to the castaways' investigation into the Dharma Initiative.
09.18.05: "Lost" takes the outstanding drama trophy and co-creator J.J. Abrams wins a directing nod for the series' pilot episode at the 57th Emmy Awards.
09.21.05: Season 2 kicks off with "Man of Science, Man of Faith" and draws 23.47 million viewers and an 8.4 rating, which remains the series' peak for both.
01.16.06: "Lost" earns a best drama series Golden Globe.
02.15.06: Benjamin Linus (masquerading as "Henry Gale"), played by Michael Emerson, is introduced.
03.29.06: The episode "Lockdown" reveals a hidden map of the island, visible only under blacklight, that hints at the extent of the island's mythology and provided tons of fodder for online speculation.
10.04.06: The Barracks, the "town" where the Others live on the island, is revealed.
11.08.06: Jack (Matthew Fox) performs surgery to save Ben's life and uses the moment to leverage an escape for Kate (Evangeline Lilly) and Sawyer (Josh Holloway) from Hydra Island.
05.23.07: The series inverts its own formula by beginning to flash forward to a point in time after some of the castaways return home.
May 07: At the end of its third season, "Lost" sets an end date for 2010, three seasons later.
Oct. 07: Sci Fi Channel and G4 pact with Disney-ABC Domestic Television for syndication rights.
Nov. 07: "Missing Pieces," a 13-part webisode series sponsored by Verizon Wireless, begins releasing episodes online. The story bridges the third and fourth
seasons of the show.
02.28.08: Desmond (Henry Ian Cusick) becomes unstuck in time but manages to right himself by reconnecting with his long-lost love, Penny (Sonya Walger).
05.29.08: With their helicopter low on fuel, Sawyer volunteers to stay behind on the island so that Jack, Kate and the rest of the Oceanic Six can make it to rescue.
02.18.09: The adult members of the Oceanic Six return to the island, but there's a catch: Some of them crash 30 years in the past.
04.01.09: "Lost" earns a Peabody Award for excellence for "breezily mixing metaphysics, quantum mechanics, romance and cliffhanger action."
04.08.09: A flashback reveals how Ben Linus oversaw the exile from the island of Charles Widmore, setting up the rivalry that would fuel the series' entire arc.
-- Daniel Carlson
It was four and a half years ago that Oceanic Flight 815 went off course over the South Pacific and came crashing down on a seemingly deserted beach.
Forty-eight people (and a dog) stumbled from the smoking wreckage to discover an otherworldly tropical isle inhabited by polar bears, smoke monsters and a mysterious band of human natives known as the "Others." The ever-evolving mystery made ABC's "Lost" the water cooler show of the 2004-05 television season, helped revive the flagging fortunes of its parent network, and turned its cast -- all of whom were virtual unknowns, save for Matthew Fox (previously star of Fox's "Party of Five") and Dominic Monaghan (Merry in "The Lord of the Rings" trilogy) -- into internationally recognizable figures.
One-hundred episodes in, the survivors still haven't figured out exactly where they are and why, but executive producer Carlton Cuse has a theory as to how they got there, creatively speaking.
"The fact that no one believed 'Lost' was going to be successful in the beginning was enormously liberating," Cuse says. "So we set out to make 12 episodes of what we thought was the coolest TV show we could come up with and in so doing we violated a lot of the traditional rules of television narrative. We had characters who were murderers and had done very bad things. We had incredibly complex serialized storytelling. We had lots of intentional ambiguity, leaving the audience lots of room for interpretation and those things that sort of violated the rules of television were the very things that the audience ended up responding to."
But nothing lasts forever. In May 2007, it was announced that "Lost" would wrap in May 2010 at the end of Season 6. The reason was not the ratings, which have declined over the years as show has shifted time slots five times and taken long midseason hiatuses like the three-week break between Episodes 6 and 7 in Season 3.
It wasn't the high price tag of $4 million per episode. The decision was purely creative.
"We're fairly certain that, had we not been given an end date, the show might have been canceled by now, because we would've had to continue spinning our wheels and stalling," executive producer/ co-creator Damon Lindelof says. "It's a finite idea. Once Carlton and I had gotten through the first 30 or 40 hours of it, it became very clear to us that we were ready to take the show out of question/mystery mode and into resolution mode. And we couldn't do that until we knew when the show was going to end."
The show's beginnings can be traced to January 2004, when then-ABC president Lloyd Braun commissioned a script from Spelling Television that he envisioned as a narrative take on the unscripted hit "Survivor." Jeffrey Lieber wrote the initial drafts of the pilot, titled "Nowhere." Braun felt it wasn't working, so he brought in "Alias" creator J.J. Abrams, who had a preexisting deal with Touchstone Television (now ABC Studios), and teamed him with Lindelof, a writer-producer on ABC's "Crossing Jordan."
Abrams and Lindelof met on a Monday. By Friday, they had written a 20-page outline, adding a supernatural angle. On Saturday, the pilot got a greenlight. Having started late in the 2004 season's development, they had less than 12 weeks to write the pilot and prep it for production. It would have been a daunting task under any circumstances, but this script had 14 major speaking parts, a downed jet and a remote South Pacific island setting. Abrams and Lindelof compounded the logistical challenges by revising the characters and story lines during the casting process, leaving the complex puzzle of its mystery with more than a few rough, unfinished pieces.
"We didn't know that it was going to be successful, and when the ratings started coming out and it was doing well, we realized, 'Oh, my God, we're going to have to keep doing this,' " says Cuse, who stepped forward to run the show with Lindelof after Abrams departed to concentrate on other projects. "That's really when we really started working out the mythology."
From the beginning, the mysterious possibilities of "Lost" were a boon to ABC's marketing department, co-headed by executive vps Michael Benson and Marla Provencio.
"The pilot had a theatrical feel to it, so we felt we had to go out with it in a very big way," Provencio says. "But we also wanted to go more underground and do things that would intrigue the audience and make them want more."
The network started the buzz building by world-premiering the show's two-hour pilot at Comic-Con International in San Diego on July 24, 2004. Over the Labor Day weekend preceding the show's TV debut, bottles containing cryptic messages were scattered across several beaches on the East and West Coasts. Although cleanup crews were prescheduled to remove any undiscovered bottles, the network still managed to get tagged with several littering tickets. It also aired "pirate radio" spots on stations nationwide.
"All of a sudden it would sound like people were cutting into the radio saying, 'Help! We're survivors of Oceanic Flight 815,' then it would crackle out," Benson says. "We actually got in a little trouble over that, too, because people thought it was really happening."
In the years since, the "Lost" team has made regular appearances at Comic-Con, including a panel discussion featuring Lindelof and Cuse last year that attracted about 6,000 fans. The network has also commissioned spinoff novels, an official "Lost" magazine, an alternative reality game ("The Lost Experience") and various tie-in Web sites, including the Emmy-nominated Find815.com, as well as a line of action figures.
The ABC marketing department has further taken on the difficult task of making the show's complex mythology more comprehensible to first-time or casual viewers with weekly four-minute video recaps posted on ABC.com that use action figures and character cut-outs fashioned from screen caps to re-enact key scenes from the latest episode.
"It's a challenging show," admits ABC president of entertainment Stephen McPherson, who greenlit "Lost" as a series after taking over for Braun in April 2004. "It's not just a cookie-cutter procedural with a new case each week. There's a real depth to it. But I also know people who watch only occasionally and really enjoy it when they do."
There's no question that the show's labyrinthine plot twists have been too much for some. Viewership has declined from an average of 15.69 million people a week in Season 1 to 11.37 million a week at the beginning of this season, according to Nielsen. But Cuse believes that has as much to do with changing viewing habits of the show's tech-savvy fans as anything else.
"People are still watching our show, they're just watching it in different ways," he says. "They're DVR-ing it, they're watching it on ABC.com, they're looking at it on DVDs. And when you sort of aggregate all the ancillary platforms on which 'Lost' is available," including cell phones and other PDAs, "and also weekend syndication, in fact the Nielsen number is only a fractional part of the audience now."
The complexity that makes it daunting for casual viewers is precisely what makes it so appealing to its hardcore fans, dubbed Losties or Lostaways, who follow the show with the intensity of Trekkers. They have a strong presence on the Web via such sites as TheTailSection.com and LostHatch.com, and strong opinions about where the plot should go. Cuse says he's aware of the chatter, but he does his best to ignore it.
"The problem is if someone says something that's critical of the show, it can kind of stick in my brain the wrong way and infect my creative process," Cuse says. "There's a guy named Greg Nations who's our script coordinator and keeps sort of records and history of the show. He follows all the boards and sort of gives us a Reader's Digest exegesis of what the fan sites say the day after the show airs, and that's a lot more palatable. He's very well-equipped to say, 'Here's a question that's percolating up to the surface a lot. You guys should take a look at this or think about this.' That indirectness is important for us maintaining the sanctity of our own creative process."
For Lindelof, the risks of responding to fan chatter are exemplified by Nikki and Paulo, a pair of characters introduced in Season 3 played by Kiele Sanchez and Rodrigo Santoro, respectively.
"The boards were all atwitter with, 'What about these other people on the show, these background people who are walking around?' " Lindelof says. "We had introduced one of them, Dr. Arzt (Daniel Roebuck), in the finale of Season 1 just as a gag to blow the guy up, but the question never went away. So we thought, clearly, there is a desire for us to give these people names and stories, and we tried it and it was a disaster."
Before the season was out, Nikki and Paulo were dead. They're not the only characters that have been sacrificed to feed the drama. During the past five seasons, several of the core group of original survivors have been killed off, including Michael (Harold Perrineau) and Charlie (Monaghan).
"That has been a specter hanging over all of us since Season 1," says Daniel Dae Kim, who plays Jin, a Korean businessman stranded along with his wife Sun (Yunjin Kim). "It's always difficult to lose a cast member, because we all uprooted ourselves and in many cases moved our families to Oahu," the Hawaiian island where the show is shot. "It's not like shooting a show in L.A. When one of us leaves, they leave the island, and it's not as if we can still have dinner with them even if we're not working on the same job."
Kim says he has given up speculating about the fate of his character or the answers to show's larger mysteries.
"Every time I thought I had a conclusion, the writers proved much more clever than I," Kim says. "Now I just look at it as a great amusement park ride and enjoy the thrill of it."
Lindelof says that when the show itself goes to the great hereafter next May, he and Cuse will be taking a ride out of town.
"We're taking a page out of the David Chase playbook," Lindelof says. "Instead of clarifying things, we want to let it simmer and percolate. So we're searching out some undisclosed locations, some of them on the planet Earth, others might involve getting on a Russian spacecraft."
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/hr/content_display/film/news/e3i9c779034c7476d10cb8e85433ab7c88b
Lost: The Complete Fifth Season Dharma Initiation Kit
Looks like besides the regular DVD & BLU-RAY versions of season 5 there will also be special Dharma versions. No word yet on what they will contain.
http://www.amazon.com/Lost-Complete-Season-Dharma-Initiation/dp/B0027CSPOC/ref=sr_1_5?ie=UTF8&s=dvd&qid=1241029689&sr=1-5
Three weeks ago, Walt Disney Studios Home Entertainment officially announced the December 8th release of Lost - The Complete 5th Season on both standard DVD and high-definition Blu-ray Disc. Now, however, we've learned that these aren't going to be the only two releases of the 5th Season episodes!
The above two links are to the Amazon pre-order listings for the previously announced sets...listings which have been up since January, when the fifth season debuted. Overnight, however, Amazon has added two more pre-order listings, also scheduled for release on December 8th. The picture above, taken from this season's history-revealing ninth episode ("Namaste"), shows several new recruits being welcomed into the Dharma Initiative (don't worry, here at TVShowsOnDVD we'll try not to spoil the identities of those recruits, in case you're waiting for the home videos to view these episodes for the first time).
The Lost - The Complete 5th Season: Dharma Initiation Kit will be available in both DVD and Blu-ray Disc editions. These limited edition releases are apparently going to be specially packaged versions of the sets, possibly filled with Dharma-related goodies. No details are available on this yet, however...we've only got the info at Amazon so far.
According to Amazon, the DVD "initiation kit" set will have a list price of $119.99 SRP (compared to $59.99 SRP for the regular edition), and the Blu-ray version of the "initiation kit" will cost $134.00 SRP (compared to $79.99 SRP for the regular version of the high-def edition). In practical dollars, though, based on Amazon's discounted prices as of this writing (subject to change at their discretion, without notice), for DVD buyers it's $45 more for the Dharma Initiation Kit and for Blu-ray buyers it's $50 more.
These are obviously aimed at more serious collectors and fans of the show...which you can count us among! We're keeping a sharp eye out for any further details about what you'll get with these high-end releases, so stay tuned and we'll update you as soon as we can find out more!
Source: TVShowOnDVD
http://www.amazon.com/Lost-Complete-Season-Dharma-Initiation/dp/B0027CSPOC/ref=sr_1_5?ie=UTF8&s=dvd&qid=1241029689&sr=1-5
Three weeks ago, Walt Disney Studios Home Entertainment officially announced the December 8th release of Lost - The Complete 5th Season on both standard DVD and high-definition Blu-ray Disc. Now, however, we've learned that these aren't going to be the only two releases of the 5th Season episodes!
The above two links are to the Amazon pre-order listings for the previously announced sets...listings which have been up since January, when the fifth season debuted. Overnight, however, Amazon has added two more pre-order listings, also scheduled for release on December 8th. The picture above, taken from this season's history-revealing ninth episode ("Namaste"), shows several new recruits being welcomed into the Dharma Initiative (don't worry, here at TVShowsOnDVD we'll try not to spoil the identities of those recruits, in case you're waiting for the home videos to view these episodes for the first time).
The Lost - The Complete 5th Season: Dharma Initiation Kit will be available in both DVD and Blu-ray Disc editions. These limited edition releases are apparently going to be specially packaged versions of the sets, possibly filled with Dharma-related goodies. No details are available on this yet, however...we've only got the info at Amazon so far.
According to Amazon, the DVD "initiation kit" set will have a list price of $119.99 SRP (compared to $59.99 SRP for the regular edition), and the Blu-ray version of the "initiation kit" will cost $134.00 SRP (compared to $79.99 SRP for the regular version of the high-def edition). In practical dollars, though, based on Amazon's discounted prices as of this writing (subject to change at their discretion, without notice), for DVD buyers it's $45 more for the Dharma Initiation Kit and for Blu-ray buyers it's $50 more.
These are obviously aimed at more serious collectors and fans of the show...which you can count us among! We're keeping a sharp eye out for any further details about what you'll get with these high-end releases, so stay tuned and we'll update you as soon as we can find out more!
Source: TVShowOnDVD
Sawyer is large and in charge as 'Lost' hits 100
Back in season one of ABC's Wednesday castaway drama ``Lost,'' James Sawyer, played by Josh Holloway with a stubbly dimple and a wink, was a charming Southern rogue, an avaricious con man with a store of goodies up for barter, a quick wit and an inexplicable fondness for U.K. writer Richard Adams' heroic fantasy ``Watership Down.''
He was also a constant irritant to the show's most apparently noble character, Dr. Jack Shepard (Matthew Fox), the self-appointed leader of present-day plane-crash survivors stranded on a very freaky island. Sawyer both cramped Jack's style and moved in on his girl, castaway Kate (Evangeline Lilly).
To one degree or another, that has been Sawyer's story.
But as ``Lost'' approaches its 100th episode on April 29 -- marked on the sets in Hawaii with a party and an island-shaped confection from Baltimore's Charm City Cakes -- Sawyer's fortunes have changed.
Like Hazel, a small rabbit in Adams' novel who only wanted to survive and wound up a king by his own hand, er, paw, Sawyer in season five has become a leader of men (yeah, it's under the less-than-heroic alias of Jim LaFleur, but even so ...).
And no one is more surprised by that than Holloway.
``I was a bit reluctant when hearing it,'' he says. ``I knew they would figure out a way to make it cool, but I never thought of Sawyer in that kind of a position, or James or whatever his damn name is these days.
``I didn't want him to become this softy who lost his edge and all that sort of thing. That won't be near as fun. But it has been fun. It's the evolution of a character, and I'm really honored that they've actually made him so interesting and complex instead of just a simple redneck.''
Also, during Sawyer's current sojourn way back to the 1970s as part of the enigmatic Dharma Initiative on the mysterious island, he has set aside his feelings for Kate and taken up with a fellow time-travel refugee, physician Juliet (Elizabeth Mitchell), another of Jack's ex-squeezes.
As to why Sawyer seems to pick up all of Jack's throwaways, Holloway says, ``Hey, man, I ain't so picky. There's not that many women on the island. Come on, women or boars -- what would you pick?
``He's always been kind of wham-bam, crazy-sex guy, and to explore an actual relationship where it's not that, it's actually a mature, loving relationship, is something that's totally new to him.''
Among those crafting this new direction is producer Elizabeth Sarnoff (``Deadwood,'' ``Crossing Jordan''), who says, ``Sawyer's great because he's come so far. This season, we're getting to do something unexpected with him. He's emerging as a leader.
``He's a good leader, unlike every other leader we've had. He's awesome. The relationship with Juliet is something that we weren't 100 percent sure how the audience was going to take it.''
Of course, what has made all this possible is a season's worth of mind-bending time travel, with castaways like Sawyer and Dharma apostates like Juliet flipping back and forth in time as the island undergoes spatial and temporal displacement that nearly defies the laws of science.
But in the 100th episode, ``The Variable,'' physicist and fellow island time traveler Daniel Faraday, played by Jeremy Davies, might finally spill all that he knows -- and it wouldn't come a moment too soon for the writing team.
``Time travel has given us migraines all year,'' Sarnoff says. ``No one is more delighted to see it end than us. But it's given us an opportunity to tell all these great island stories that we could not have told, that would have had to be handled with exposition or in ways that were not as interesting as actually seeing the Dharma Initiative in action.''
As for what Sawyer's up to in ``The Variable,'' Holloway says, ``I do remember what I was doing. Um, ah, I was frustrated -- I can tell you that much. Things are heating up and unraveling.
``That episode, I'm definitely running around a little frustrated, but it was good. I can't really tell you anything else.''
Sarnoff says, ``It's special for this season in the sense that it is going to encapsulate everything we've been saying all along, having to deal with time travel in general. It's going to be a great launch place for the end of the season.''
That episode, ``The Incident,'' is currently set to air May 13. It sets the stage for season six, which culminates in the planned series finale in May 2010.
``The end of the season is huge,'' Sarnoff says. ``It's the beginning of the end. We do this minicamp every year where we talk about the new season, dig deep. I find myself amazed every day, because I'm on a show that's planning its ending.
``That's a very rare experience.''
Source: Reading Eagle
He was also a constant irritant to the show's most apparently noble character, Dr. Jack Shepard (Matthew Fox), the self-appointed leader of present-day plane-crash survivors stranded on a very freaky island. Sawyer both cramped Jack's style and moved in on his girl, castaway Kate (Evangeline Lilly).
To one degree or another, that has been Sawyer's story.
But as ``Lost'' approaches its 100th episode on April 29 -- marked on the sets in Hawaii with a party and an island-shaped confection from Baltimore's Charm City Cakes -- Sawyer's fortunes have changed.
Like Hazel, a small rabbit in Adams' novel who only wanted to survive and wound up a king by his own hand, er, paw, Sawyer in season five has become a leader of men (yeah, it's under the less-than-heroic alias of Jim LaFleur, but even so ...).
And no one is more surprised by that than Holloway.
``I was a bit reluctant when hearing it,'' he says. ``I knew they would figure out a way to make it cool, but I never thought of Sawyer in that kind of a position, or James or whatever his damn name is these days.
``I didn't want him to become this softy who lost his edge and all that sort of thing. That won't be near as fun. But it has been fun. It's the evolution of a character, and I'm really honored that they've actually made him so interesting and complex instead of just a simple redneck.''
Also, during Sawyer's current sojourn way back to the 1970s as part of the enigmatic Dharma Initiative on the mysterious island, he has set aside his feelings for Kate and taken up with a fellow time-travel refugee, physician Juliet (Elizabeth Mitchell), another of Jack's ex-squeezes.
As to why Sawyer seems to pick up all of Jack's throwaways, Holloway says, ``Hey, man, I ain't so picky. There's not that many women on the island. Come on, women or boars -- what would you pick?
``He's always been kind of wham-bam, crazy-sex guy, and to explore an actual relationship where it's not that, it's actually a mature, loving relationship, is something that's totally new to him.''
Among those crafting this new direction is producer Elizabeth Sarnoff (``Deadwood,'' ``Crossing Jordan''), who says, ``Sawyer's great because he's come so far. This season, we're getting to do something unexpected with him. He's emerging as a leader.
``He's a good leader, unlike every other leader we've had. He's awesome. The relationship with Juliet is something that we weren't 100 percent sure how the audience was going to take it.''
Of course, what has made all this possible is a season's worth of mind-bending time travel, with castaways like Sawyer and Dharma apostates like Juliet flipping back and forth in time as the island undergoes spatial and temporal displacement that nearly defies the laws of science.
But in the 100th episode, ``The Variable,'' physicist and fellow island time traveler Daniel Faraday, played by Jeremy Davies, might finally spill all that he knows -- and it wouldn't come a moment too soon for the writing team.
``Time travel has given us migraines all year,'' Sarnoff says. ``No one is more delighted to see it end than us. But it's given us an opportunity to tell all these great island stories that we could not have told, that would have had to be handled with exposition or in ways that were not as interesting as actually seeing the Dharma Initiative in action.''
As for what Sawyer's up to in ``The Variable,'' Holloway says, ``I do remember what I was doing. Um, ah, I was frustrated -- I can tell you that much. Things are heating up and unraveling.
``That episode, I'm definitely running around a little frustrated, but it was good. I can't really tell you anything else.''
Sarnoff says, ``It's special for this season in the sense that it is going to encapsulate everything we've been saying all along, having to deal with time travel in general. It's going to be a great launch place for the end of the season.''
That episode, ``The Incident,'' is currently set to air May 13. It sets the stage for season six, which culminates in the planned series finale in May 2010.
``The end of the season is huge,'' Sarnoff says. ``It's the beginning of the end. We do this minicamp every year where we talk about the new season, dig deep. I find myself amazed every day, because I'm on a show that's planning its ending.
``That's a very rare experience.''
Source: Reading Eagle
Labels:
Daniel,
Jack,
Jeremy Davies,
Josh Holloway,
Kate,
Lost,
Sawyer,
The Variable
ABC's 'Lost' marks 100th episode this week
By Lynn Elber
The Associated Press
Updated: 04/28/2009 01:56:39 PM MDT
Executive producer Damon Lindelof, one of the series' creators, recalled meeting with ABC executives four years ago to pitch the idea of plane crash survivors stranded on an island of mystery and danger.
They were asked where the "Lost" saga would stand at, say, episode No. 74.
"I said, 'We're probably not going to get past episode 13. Let's all be honest about that upfront," Lindelof recalled, adding, "If I traveled back in time to tell myself after that meeting that we were going to make it to 100 and still have a season beyond that, I would have laughed in my face."
Fans will appreciate the notion of time-skipping, since the current season has reveled in just that. "Lost" has flung major characters across decades, leaving them -- and the audience -- feverishly attempting to keep events straight and the end game in sight.
"It was always part of the master plan that the time-travel elements in the show would become more overt," said executive producer Carlton Cuse. He recalled an early episode in which Sayid (Naveen Andrews) is fiddling with a radio and hears 1940s music.
"That was a signpost we were planting early ... that this island was not in the same place and space time as the real world. We knew that in season five we were going to deploy
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
this and the show would become more overtly a genre show, and we were OK with that," Cuse said.
"We've always felt we had to make bold choices," he said, and the audience has responded.
In Wednesday's episode, titled "The Variable" and airing at 8 p.m. in Utah, viewers will get a few more pieces of the puzzle.
"We're not promising any big whiz-bang flash pyrotechnics," said Lindelof. But it does serve as what he calls "a companion piece" to another memorable episode, last season's "The Constant," in which Desmond (Henry Ian Cusick) endured vicious, turbulence-caused side effects.
"This season has really been about the rules of time travel as explained by Daniel Faraday," Lindelof said, referring to the brainiac played by Jeremy Davies. "We've never done a flashback story for Faraday, so he's very mysterious. Some of those mysteries will be answered in this episode."
Viewers also check in on Desmond, wounded in the April 8 episode as he defended his beloved Penny (Sonya Walger) from vengeful, gun-toting Ben (Michael Emerson).
"We find out whether it's fatal," said Cusick, his tone carefully neutral. The "Lost" cast is trained to avoid disclosures, but he concedes the show's penchant for killing off characters does take a toll.
"Every season it's, 'Am I here, or not? Do I pack?'" Cusick said. "Ever since Penny and I were reunited, I feel like Desmond's story could easily be done. ... He found what he wanted."
But then Cusick suggests there may be more to come. Desmond has yet to confront the guilt of leaving others behind on the island, Cusick said, and perhaps he's among those who must journey back as part of a grand reckoning.
Or not. The actor isn't 'fessing up.
Neither are Lindelof and Cuse, as the two-hour May 13 season finale draws near. But there will be answers someday, they promise.
"Lost" is set to wrap after one more season, a decision the producers made to allow for a carefully plotted finale. According to Lindelof, it will be a "very cool ending, and enormously satisfying."
On the Net:
http://www.abc.go.com
http://www.sltrib.com/tv/ci_12246373
The Associated Press
Updated: 04/28/2009 01:56:39 PM MDT
Executive producer Damon Lindelof, one of the series' creators, recalled meeting with ABC executives four years ago to pitch the idea of plane crash survivors stranded on an island of mystery and danger.
They were asked where the "Lost" saga would stand at, say, episode No. 74.
"I said, 'We're probably not going to get past episode 13. Let's all be honest about that upfront," Lindelof recalled, adding, "If I traveled back in time to tell myself after that meeting that we were going to make it to 100 and still have a season beyond that, I would have laughed in my face."
Fans will appreciate the notion of time-skipping, since the current season has reveled in just that. "Lost" has flung major characters across decades, leaving them -- and the audience -- feverishly attempting to keep events straight and the end game in sight.
"It was always part of the master plan that the time-travel elements in the show would become more overt," said executive producer Carlton Cuse. He recalled an early episode in which Sayid (Naveen Andrews) is fiddling with a radio and hears 1940s music.
"That was a signpost we were planting early ... that this island was not in the same place and space time as the real world. We knew that in season five we were going to deploy
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Advertisement
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
this and the show would become more overtly a genre show, and we were OK with that," Cuse said.
"We've always felt we had to make bold choices," he said, and the audience has responded.
In Wednesday's episode, titled "The Variable" and airing at 8 p.m. in Utah, viewers will get a few more pieces of the puzzle.
"We're not promising any big whiz-bang flash pyrotechnics," said Lindelof. But it does serve as what he calls "a companion piece" to another memorable episode, last season's "The Constant," in which Desmond (Henry Ian Cusick) endured vicious, turbulence-caused side effects.
"This season has really been about the rules of time travel as explained by Daniel Faraday," Lindelof said, referring to the brainiac played by Jeremy Davies. "We've never done a flashback story for Faraday, so he's very mysterious. Some of those mysteries will be answered in this episode."
Viewers also check in on Desmond, wounded in the April 8 episode as he defended his beloved Penny (Sonya Walger) from vengeful, gun-toting Ben (Michael Emerson).
"We find out whether it's fatal," said Cusick, his tone carefully neutral. The "Lost" cast is trained to avoid disclosures, but he concedes the show's penchant for killing off characters does take a toll.
"Every season it's, 'Am I here, or not? Do I pack?'" Cusick said. "Ever since Penny and I were reunited, I feel like Desmond's story could easily be done. ... He found what he wanted."
But then Cusick suggests there may be more to come. Desmond has yet to confront the guilt of leaving others behind on the island, Cusick said, and perhaps he's among those who must journey back as part of a grand reckoning.
Or not. The actor isn't 'fessing up.
Neither are Lindelof and Cuse, as the two-hour May 13 season finale draws near. But there will be answers someday, they promise.
"Lost" is set to wrap after one more season, a decision the producers made to allow for a carefully plotted finale. According to Lindelof, it will be a "very cool ending, and enormously satisfying."
On the Net:
http://www.abc.go.com
http://www.sltrib.com/tv/ci_12246373
MSN Picks 100 Best Moments from LOST!
The 100 Best Moments From 'Lost'
As the series celebrates its 100th episode, we look at 100 of our favorite moments By Kate Mulcrone and Raoul Mowatt
Special to MSN TV
On April 29, "Lost" celebrates its 100th episode. Sure, there were a few stinkers and clip shows needed to get to that milestone. There was some frustration about secrets kept too long, characters left undeveloped (or overexposed) and plot points forgotten. But all in all, the show's offered one heck of a ride for those patient enough with it. In honor of the 100th episode, we thought we would take a look at 100 of the show's best moments. In no particular order, they are:
Related: "Lost" Turns 100
1. The pilot gets eaten by the Smoke Monster (aka Old Smokey, the Monster, Lostzilla).
2. 4 8 15 16 23 42
3. Locke pulls out his creepy knife collection.
4. Jack's dead daddy shows up on the island ... for the first time.
5. Jin gets handcuffed to the plane.
6. "You all ... everybody!" (RIP, Charlie.)
7. Locke becomes Charlie's drug counselor.
8. Locke gets Boone juiced on some kind of weird island plant (so much for just saying no).
9. Danielle captures Sayid.
10. Sawyer shoots a polar bear. And he shoots the marshal.
11. All that mysterious jungle whispering.
12. "There were no survivors of Oceanic 815."
13. The light goes on in the first hatch!
14. Rose and Bernard meet and redefine cute.
15. Kate plans a bank heist ... for a toy airplane.
16. "Tricia Tanaka is dead!"
17. Locke blows up the first hatch.
18. And the submarine!
19. Sawyer's long con gets the better of him.
20. Desmond in the Royal Scots Regiment. Yummy!
21. Same goes for Goth Claire.
22. The Pearl turns out to be Dharma's version of the NSA.
23. Ana-Lucia gets Jack's daddy drunk. Or was it the other way around?
24. We learn that Jack and Claire are half-siblings.
25. "We're the survivors of Oceanic Flight 815."
26. Hurley beats Sawyer at table tennis and makes him abandon nicknames.
27. Mr. Eko doesn't speak for 40 days. (RIP, Mr. Eko.)
28. Then we find out he was a hardcore drug smuggler.
29. Arzt gets blown up by dynamite (and later, when Hurley goes, "You have some ... Arzt ... on you.")
30. Locke plays one crazy game of chess.
31. Desmond turns the sky purple (and there were people running everywhere).
32. Oceanic 815 falls out of the sky and totally ruins book club.
33. The first 20 minutes of the pilot. It had us from "hello."
34. Hurley and the boys get the Dharmamobile up and running again, on the road to Shambala.
35. Locke wakes up and one of his kidneys is gone!
36. Locke's daddy throws him out of a window.
37. Sawyer jumps out of the helicopter.
38. The Island goes bloop! / Ben wakes up with a hell of a hangover in the Sahara Desert.
39. Kate and Sawyer get it on in Otherville, thrilling Skate fans and annoying Jate fans.
40. We meet Roger, Workman.
41. We meet Jacob...kinda.
42. Desmond drinks Widmore's whiskey when Charlie and Hurley are trying to get him to confess his ability to see into the future.
43. Juliet's ex-husband gets hit by a bus!
44. Kate blows her daddy up.
45. "Mr. Friendly" congratulates Sawyer on his fish biscuit and notes that the bears figured the puzzle out faster.
46. Ben shoots Locke and leaves him for "dead."
47. Ben saves then strangles Locke and leaves him for "dead."
48. Hurley's badass car chase!
49. Charlie's ghost is the supercool version of Charlie.
50. Desmond makes a long, long distance call to Penny.
51. Miles is revealed to be Dr. Chang's son. Yeah, we saw it coming but it was still cool.
52. Charlie lists his five favorite things.
53. Locke flashes Walt his orange-peel smile.
54. Jack learns that the Red Sox really won the World Series.
55. Ben cons Sawyer into thinking that his heart will explode if he gets too excited.
56. Jin, Sawyer and Michael get captured by the "Tailies."
57. Desmond becomes unstuck in time (and uses Penny as his constant).
58. Mr. Eko makes Lostzilla retreat.
59. "We were brought here for a purpose, for a reason, all of us."
60. Paulo and Nikki are buried alive, buried alive, buried alive.
61. "Waaaaaaaaaalt!"
62. Sawyer and Juliet are getting it on in Dharmaville. All right!
63. We meet Hurley's imaginary friend Dave.
64. Take your pick of the Dharma Initiative orientation videos. They were all awesome.
65. Mikhail takes out a grenade and smiles before pulling the pin / "Not Penny's boat."
66. Ethan strings up Charlie and leaves him for dead.
67. "Light 'em up!" / "This is not your island. This is our island and the only reason that you're living on it is because we let you live on it."
68. "Dude, you look like you steamrolled Harry Potter."
69. The birth of ol' Turniphead, Aaron.
70. Ben turns Sayid into his assassin.
71. Sayid turns young Ben into his target.
72. Locke meets Richard Alpert and Charles Widmore while traveling in time.
73. The Others capture Walt off of the raft.
74. Three words: Frozen donkey wheel.
75. Another three words: Four-toed statue.
76. Sawyer and Ana-Lucia have a hate-sex rumble in the jungle.
77. Sun clocks Ben with that oar.
78. Penny and Des are reunited (and it feels so good!).
79. The crazy hypno-chamber (Room 23!) where Alex's boyfriend was being held.
80. Michael shoots Ana-Lucia and Libby.
81. Taller. Ghost. Walt.
82. "We have to get back!"
83. Locke sacrifices Boone, God's friggin' gift to humanity, to the Island.
84. Sawyer reads the letter he wrote revealing why he's in search of the real Sawyer.
85. The Lostaways design a golf course.
86. Hurley comes to the rescue of Jin, Sayid and Bernard using the repaired Dharmamobile.
87. Sayid interrogates Henry Gale and reveals how he knows Ben's a lying liar who lies.
88. Sawyer kills the real Real Sawyer, who happens to be Locke's dad.
89. Locke knifes Naomi in the back.
90. Juliet tries to arrange for Jack to let Ben die on the operating table.
91. Ben explains about how a box can bring things to the Island, and shows it by summoning Locke's daddy.
92. The show-within-a-show, "Expose," gives Billy Dee Williams a reason to guest-star.
93. Ben is unable to talk his way out of a mercenary shooting his adopted daughter, Alex.
94. Charlie imagines peanut butter for Claire.
95. Hurley and Miles talk time travel theories.
96. Ben kills the entire Dharma Initiative.
97. "We're not going to Guam, are we?" / Ajira Flight 316 crashes.
98. Look out: Craphole Island has an H-bomb!
99. Charlie asks if Mr. Eko is going to beat him with his Jesus stick, and then wants to know what kind of priest he is.
100. "If we can't live together, then we're gonna die alone."
The 100th episode of "Lost" airs Wednesday at 9 p.m. ET/PT on ABC.
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