already & not yet

I loved the Star Wars reference in the title. For the uninitiated, Hoth was the location of the secret rebel base at the beginning of “The Empire Strikes Back”. This particular installment in the original Lucas trilogy plums the father / son relationship between Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker. “Hoth” explores Miles’ feelings about his father who supposedly abandoned him when he was young. Is Miles’ mother telling the truth about his father? Did Chang really kick them out? Because he seemed pretty attached to baby Miles at the end of the episode. I’m suspecting a ruse here.

Sidebar: Am I the only one who made the connection between both Luke and Vader losing their hands in “Empire” and “Jedi” and the fact that in later Dharma videos, Chang is fitted with what appears to be a prosthetic limb? Could we perhaps see a future episode wherein Miles severs off the hand of his estranged father, Skywalker-style? I’m just sayin’…

Miles is summoned to retrieve a body from sector 344, which we’re told is in Hostile territory. It seems the Island’s electromagnetic properties caused his filling to blow through his brain. I think we’re supposed to connect sector 344 with The Swan, the Dharma station we know as The Hatch from the first two seasons. Hurley witnesses the branding of the hatch door with the infamous numbers. Why did Dharma build The Swan? Hmmm…

How about Jack stepping up to Roger when he got suspicious of Kate? Methinks that’ll come back to bite the good doc. But it was nice to see Jack’s re-emergent backbone. Foreshadowing of what we’ll see from Jack in the next few episodes? I hope so. (Interesting bit of trivia: the blackboard lesson Jack was erasing in this scene was about ancient Egypt and hieroglyphics. Hmmm…)

We also got another appearance of Bram, Ilana’s silver crate shotgun-totin’ buddy. This time, we see him off Island, kidnapping Miles in a big black van. It would’ve been cool if said black van had been driven by B.A. Baracus. But I digress. I don’t like this Bram guy. Smarmy is the word that comes to mind. But it looks like he plays for a team other than Widmore. A team that he says will win this war. (More hmmm….)

Big reveal at the end of the episode: Farraday’s back! I have a feeling that our MIA physicist will have changed his mind about how much of the past / future can be changed. And I’m also willing to bet that the DeGroots might also be on that sub. Time will tell.

The producers have said that last night’s episode was intended to inject some humor into the series. Given the trippy time-travel themes of this season and the supposedly intense mind-bending direction of the next few episodes, I’d say this episode came along at just the right time. Hurley and Miles are like a modern day Laurel and Hardy or Kramden and Norton. I’ll leave it to you to figure out who’s who.

Some great lines from last night’s show:

• “The ditch had a gun?”
• “Why don’t we carpool? It’ll help with global warming…which hasn’t happened yet…so maybe we can prevent it.”
• “You’re just jealous my power is better than yours.”
• “How do you feel about polar bear feces?”
• “Maybe he’ll let you hold baby you or you can change your own diaper.”

Among my questions at this point:
Where are Rose and Bernard? I will keep asking this until we see them again.
What lies in the shadow of the statue? And how does knowledge of said item make you ready to go to the Island (as Bram preached to Miles)?
When will we see this “war” we’ve been hearing about?
How is Sawyer going to con his way out of the trouble he’s in? I really hate to see anything happen to him and Juliet.

Those of you who are expecting my weekly LOST post…it’s coming. But last night, something happened to the audio about halfway through the episode. I still had video but no sound. I watched it anyway, trying to figure out what was happening. Lots of Miles & Hurley dialogue. Jack goes to Juliet and Sawyer’s for some reason (to drink half a cup of coffee, perhaps?). And Farraday pops out of a sub. That’s all I got.

So….all that to say I’m going to hold off on my recap until later today after I’ve had the chance to go online and watch the episode in full. So check back later today, fellow Losties.

Until then…

Namaste.

Ben-centric episodes are always stellar. “Dead is Dead” automatically joins “Walkabout”, “The Man From Tallahassee”, “The Shape of Things to Come”, and (of course) the pilot in the pantheon of great LOST episodes for me. Definitely the best of the season so far. A densely packed episode that gave us some critical information about the Island’s mythology.

By 1977, it seems the Island has already begun its rejection of Widmore as leader. We know Rousseau crashed on the Island in ’88; shortly thereafter she gives birth to Alex, whom Ben takes, much to Widmore’s chagrin. Perhaps Widmore’s leadership is questioned when it is revealed that he’s been giving orders (as in Ben’s order to kill Rousseau and her baby) that aren’t necessarily coming from Jacob or the Island or whom/whatever. Of course, it’s still a few years later (3-4 years I’m guessing, judging by Alex’s age on the swingset) when Widmore is ultimately “banished”. This would mean that when Widmore says to Ben that he’s spent nearly 20 years searching for the Island, it’s really more like 16 years. I guess Charles is just speaking in generalities that can only be uttered when talking on the phone to your arch-nemesis.

At any rate, the best scene of dialogue was Ben’s conversation with Widmore on the dock. It seems that Widmore was abdicated for his indiscretions (leaving the Island, having a daughter with an outsider, breaking the rules). His parting shot (“You cannot fight the inevitable.”) parallels our time-travel mantra, “whatever happened, happened”. I suppose there’s a certain fatalism that we’re going to deal with from this point forward.

Leave it to these writers to make Ben something of a sympathetic character. Just when you love to hate a guy. First of all, we discover that Ben’s decision to take Alex and spare Rousseau’s life was an act of grace and an outright defiance of Widmore’s orders. Furthermore, Ben’s plans to murder Penny are thwarted when young Charlie playfully bounds into the scene. In the end, Ben is unable to follow through on his promise to kill Widmore’s daughter before being bludgeoned to a pulp by Desmond. I have to admit: I really felt sorry for the guy.

But don’t worry: our episode showed us that Ben’s anything but a softy. Ceasar: we hardly knew ye. And per Ghost Alex, Ben was already plotting how to kill off Locke a second time. So which reaction is legitimate? Ben’s “I-believed-but-now-I-see!” response when he awakes to see Locke? Or his “I’m-just-as-surprised-as-you” speech he gives Sun? Personally, I’m pretty sure Ben knew what he was doing when he killed Baldy and boarded him on Ajira 316 (as a proxy for Christian Shepherd). But it’s a credit to Michael Emerson’s acting (and the show’s writers) that either interpretation is plausible. Ben’s lied so much over the years, it’s just impossible to know with him.

But the real key to this episode was the judgment scene. The hieroglyphics in the Temple look Egyptian (which isn’t the first time we’ve seen markings like this) and they also hearken back to the back of the statue we glimpsed earlier this season. Jeff Jensen at EW makes an interesting point: the Egyptian sun god’s name was “Ra”; Richard Alpert, our eye-liner wearing Other who happens to look part Egyptian…his initials are “R.A.”. Coincidence? You decide.

Anyway, Ben’s judgment scene was riveting. It seems Smokey judges you for your past through calling to awareness a series of critical moments from your past. In a way, the whole scene brought clarity to the show’s premise of flashbacks and flashforwards, each of which help us make our own “judgments” of these characters. Ben’s fate, it seems, is intextricably tied to Locke’s and the journey they will share together. That’s an adventure I’m really excited about.

Other thoughts:

• Is it just me, or is Island-Resurrection Locke different? Like, in a good way. I’m not sure how he has this innate knowledge of the Island now. But I believe he’s going to be the key here to getting the Oceanic Sixers back to the right time. With Ben as his #2, of course.
• Who knew summoning Smokey was as easy as sticking your hand in an Others-style cave commode? Weird.
• I knew I didn’t like that Ilana. What say she’s an agent of Chuck Widmore’s? Maybe this is all prelude to the “war” that Charles Widmore spoke of to Locke earlier in the season.
• “What lies in the shadow of the statue?” I have a feeling this question will be with us for the next several episodes.
• Next week’s episode is entitled, “Some Like It Hoth”. I love it.

So this is my first American Idol post of the season (I think). While I’m following this season as closely as any other, I have to admit, I have zero emotional connection with any of the contestants. I guess I like Danny Gokey all right and the rest sound OK, but after watching Adam Lambert’s performance last night (had to go online to see it, since the show ran so long that my DVR didn’t even catch a single note of his performance! Somebody make these judges edit themselves!), it’s obvious that the kid is head and shoulders ahead of the pack. While he’s not my favorite contestant, Adam has that same David Cook “wow factor” thing going for him; each week, I find myself wondering what he’s going to do and each week he delivers a unique, star-worthy performance. Even his screeching sitar-drenched interpretation of Johnny Cash’s “Ring of Fire”, though not my kind of thing, was exactly the kind of unique effort that will ensure that Lambert will be crowned the Season 8 champ. The dude just delivers. Maybe Gokey or Kris will really turn up the heat these last few weeks and give him a run for his money, but I kinda doubt it.

It’s Adam Lambert’s world. We’re all just livin’ in it.

As promised, the producers have returned (at least temporarily) to more character-centric storytelling. Last night’s installment, “Whatever Happened Happened” focused on Kate, our erstwhile fugitive-turned-heroine-turned-Mommy and her reasons for returning to Chez Island. We were also given an answer to one of last year’s season finale questions: What did Sawyer whisper to Kate just before he jumped out of the freighter-bound chopper?

As most of us suspected, Sawyer tasked Kate to check in on his daughter, Clementine. Of course, Clementine’s mother, Cassidy, has already been revealed as a Kate gal pal in Season 3’s “Left Behind”. Although it was nice to see Kate have an opportunity to have a “real” friendship with someone, I thought that opening scene with Kate and Cassidy was a bit forced. Kate’s around this woman for 5 minutes and suddenly she’s spilling the beans about the whole O6 lie? And she admits she’s not Aaron’s mother to a near stranger simply because Cassidy suspects that Sawyer dumped Kate, too? I don’t know. All of that just didn’t work for me.

But the rest of the episode really clicked well in my opinion. It was good to see Kate’s tipping point of guilt with regard to Aaron and her decision to go back to the Island and find Claire. But then what? Will she try and bring Claire back? Why not take Aaron with you? Is the decision to leave Aaron behind one of the reasons the O6 ended up in the 1970s? Weren’t the conditions supposed to be as exact as possible? Weren’t they all supposed to go back? At any rate, Evangeline Lilly really found the emotional center of this episode. Her tearful goodbye to Aaron was one of the season’s better moments in my opinion.

Here’s the part of the episode that fascinates me: Jack’s refusal to operate on young Ben. I’ll admit, I did a little Tiger Woods fist pump when Jack refused to perform the operation. I mean, after all the havoc our bug-eyed villain has brought upon Jack and his castaways, I don’t blame the good doc. In fact, I’m convinced he thought he was doing the future a favor by letting little Ben die. No Ben, no purge, no turning the donkey wheel, etc. Besides, like Jack said, he’d already saved his life once. But here’s the tricky part: Jack’s decision to not save Ben’s life leads Kate and Sawyer to take Ben to Richard, which ultimately puts Ben on the path to becoming the Island mastermind we’ve come to know and loathe. Whatever Richard is about to do to Ben in that Temple, I’m pretty confident it’s going to greatly contribute to making Ben who we eventually know him to be. If Jack had simply performed the surgery, what would the implications be for Ben and the future timeline?

Others may not agree, but I loved the Hurley / Miles interaction where they discussed the potential of time travel paradoxes. (Hurley’s “Back to the Future” reference cracked me up.) Miles seems to subscribe to the Farraday school of “whatever happened, happened”; there’s no way you can change the future; we’re just living out what already happened in the past. It makes me think Farraday at least spent some time with Miles, Sawyer, and Juliet in Dharmaville. We know he eventually ends up down in the Orchid station during its construction (as we saw in this season’s premeire). But this one is still up in the air, in my opinion. As several of my friends have said, if you can’t change the past / future, then what’s the point of this whole season? I still think something will happen that will lead to an alternate timeline or something. Maybe this is where the Desmond story will pick back up. Remember all of that about the rules not applying to him?

Some of my questions / observations:

• Where’s Sayid?
• Where’s Farraday?
• While we’re at it, where are Bernard and Rose? It’s been 3 years (and about 10 episodes) since we saw them last. And where’s Claire?
• When will we see the inside of that Temple?
• Are Ellie and Widmore still on the Island, leading the Others? Based on Richard’s comment last night, it would seem so. But he certainly has no regard for what they think about his decision to save Ben. Interesting.
• When will “new Jack” realize his Island purpose? And doesn’t he sound a whole lot like Locke right now?
• Speaking of Locke, I’m glad we’re finally getting back to the present timeline. I’m intrigued by what “resurrection Locke” is able to do or not do. And will he have another encounter with Christian?