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My best mate pointed out that the Jackforwards in this episode had the 'flashback roar' at the end of the flashforward, not the beginning. Alhough I'm conscious that not every flashback in the show has featured the 'roar', and maybe some of them had it at the end as well, so maybe that doesn't mean so much. Hey, blame him if the above's a load of horse pucky, I didn't notice it at all.
Loved this finale. Everything that Lost does better than any other show, distilled into one cracking ninety minute nailbiter. And after nearly two seasons of wishing Charlie would head to that great reunion gig in the sky, two episodes have me loving him again. I don't care how contrived or not it was that he closed the door on Desmond, or that he could have waited to enter the code until they had the scuba gear on, or any of that. You can call it plot holes, or explain it by saying that at that point Charlie genuinely thought that Desmond's interference had once again beaten his personal reaper, and that he'd cheated death again... until he saw Mikhail's face at the porthole, and realised that he was still meant to die. I prefer the latter... either way, I was made to care again about a character I'd written off as useless. And that's another thing Lost does better than any other show.
Entering into the murky world of speculation... I'm confused about how some of you can be so sure about who's in the coffin, dodgy netgeek photofu not withstanding (remember the hoax Dharma shark? I fully believe that the producers on many levels quite like fucking with that obsessive natured kind of viewer). Narrative sense, Cameron? The show's halfway through. There's no accurate way in which anyone right now can say what makes perfect narrative sense, especially for a show that loves fucking with narrative causality to the extent that Lost does. To the extent that the current narrative means anything, it makes more sense for Ben to have stayed on the island, or been buried there. It's a massive leap to suggest that it has to be Ben in the coffin because he's the only one that no one gives a toss about but that Jack might have gone to see. In the next three years, that could be anyone. It could be Locke, it could be Sawyer, it could even be Walt!
The idea I came up with - bearing in mind, again, that we're now half way through the run - is that maybe all of the 'flashbacks' in the next three seasons will be flashforwards instead. Maybe the next forty-eight episodes will be a process of getting us to the points we see in the flashforwards. And since Desmond's arc seems predicated on being able to see flashes of the future, maybe the characters on the island will also be privy to them, much as certain flashbacks have been disclosed to other characters as past history (Sawyer telling Jack he met his Dad in Oz, Kate and Sawyer admitting to each other that they're both murderers, etc). And if that's the case, then maybe they can change them.
There's no guarantee that Naomi's alleged freighter will be getting them off the island, obviously, and even if it exists and it does, maybe not at all soon. I like - no, love - the idea that Ben's telling the truth for once in his misbegotten life, that there really were good reasons for lying to everyone, and lying to his own about the Looking Glass, and the jamming signal. That there are good reasons for keeping certain people off the island, and keeping the Losties on the island. That that particular mission is what the Others have been keeping alive all this time, keeping the island safe from certain interested parties. That, all along, the Others have really been the good guys. That would rock my world.
And it's a little odd for me to think that, if Jack's flashforward is genuinely set in 2007, he was just too fucked in the head to remember his dad had been dead three years. Twice in that episode they were at pains to have Jack refer to his father as being alive, and it's odd that the pharmacy nurse would have tried to call the chief of surgery who's been dead for three years. As far as the narrative to date goes, that requires us to fill in a logical blank - that the nurse is too new and didn't know the name of the chief of surgery who was run out of the hospital, or hadn't heard the office scuttlebutt about the hero doctor's deadbeat dad, whose corpse he was bringing back from Sydney when the plane disappeared - or that the other doctor wouldn't try to correct him when he exploded in rage about his father being drunk. In other words, if Jack being headfucked by pills and booze is the explanation, then that's a fairly major error in the narrative of that episode, because for the sake of a slight red herring it requires us to fill in logical gaps. Given Lost's structure of revelation and mystery to date, often centering on new information being provided in flashbacks that sheds new light on events on the island, it makes just as much sense to consider that maybe Christian isn't dead in this flashforward at all.
What if you can't die on the island - or just can't stay dead? Locke's not only had his spine fixed after the crash, but has walked about easily enough after a fairly horrible impaling/crushing leg injury in the last third of season two, not to mention just climbing out of a pit and walking across half the island after being shot in the torso. Ben had spinal surgery only a couple of weeks ago, and now he's ok with several long jungle treks in a few days. Naomi punctured a lung and barely survived hackwork field surgery, and she's also up for a day-long hike through the jungle only a few days later. Mikhail survived the sonic fence and a harpoon to the chest (although possibly not the grenade, we'll see). Richard doesn't appear to have aged significantly in forty years. We still have no idea what happened after the hatch im/exploded at the end of season two. Locke and Des (at the epicentre of the event) claim they don't remember properly, and Charlie (on the periphery) seem to stagger clear and then never even mention it again. Eko never gave a clear account after he died, either. Everyone in the main cast who died so far has been buried fairly swiftly. And Jack's Dad's body was never actually recovered...
Remember Richard's key question to Young Ben - did his mother die on the island or off? He seemed more impressed that Ben saw her when he was told she'd died twelve years or so ago in mainland America, and in terms of the narrative of that episode, this conversation leads directly (well, thirty years later) to them accepting Ben not only as one of them, but as their leader. Because (my theory) he'd seen and communicated with Jacob, not his mother. Jacob, who has a habit of manifesting as people long dead, or missing. Or horses, I guess. Had Ben's mother died on the island (again, my theory), Richard might well have thought that the island had just healed her, or even brought her back entirely, and so thought less of Ben's story. That's all supposition, obviously, but it makes a certain amount of sense to me. At least, right now. All theories subject to change as and when season four fucks with my brainpan once again... |
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