LOST --season 6 episode 5

LOST – week 6 “Sundown”

The title may be borrowed from a Gordon Lightfoot song. “Sundown, you better take care if I find you been creeping round my back stair/Sometimes I think it’s a sin when you feel like your winning when you’re losing again”

Okay, there’s no connection, I just wanted to force you to remember that bad songs existed in 1974, not just all the cool ones your Dad plays on his iTunes.

Why is it in TV shows do all the bad guys (or good guys since we really don’t know who’s on what side yet) continually show a desire to lecture or tell stories to the people they want to kill instead of just killing them. That’s why I love Sayid. When he wants to kill someone BAM they’re dead. No discussions, no second thoughts, just death!

Tonight’s show starts with Sayid back in BIZZARO ’04, where his ex-soulmate is now married to his brother, Omar. Sayid apparently is a glorified baby sitter (isn’t that the plot of an old sit-com? Ex war torturer becomes a nanny? “Charles In Charge” maybe?) who has brought gifts for his niece and nephew from Sydney.

Quickly we find out Omar is in debt with loan sharks for the cash he borrowed to expand his dry cleaning empire. He wants Sayid to get all “murdery” and kill the sharks for him.
Sayid reminds Omar that killing people isn’t something that’s done lightly, at least not until later in the show.

Back at the temple – Sayid confronts Dogen about the poison pill he wanted Sayid to swallow. Dogen responds with an ass whipping in which Sayid cheats death when Dogen sees his game used Babe Ruth autographed baseball roll off the counter, diminishing its e-bay value. This causes him to banish Sayid from the temple instead of killing him with a baseball bat.

Sayid is on the way out when Savage Claire stumbles in and announces that Mocke (fake Locke) wants an audience with Dogen or Mr. Miyagi, whichever comes first. Since Miyagi is a fictional character, Dogen sends Sayid instead, with instructions to stab Mocke with an overly ornate knife. Everything else in Camp Temple is austere, except for the cutlery.

Back in BIZARRO ’04, Sayid’s brother gets his ass kicked to within an inch of his life, and his wife Nadia finds out that Sayid had her marry his brother, because he could never give her the secure life she deserved. He never mentions that she died in his arms in another life. She then tells him not to open up a can of whoop ass on the Omar’s perps. Sayid gives her a look that says “you have no idea what the script says is coming in the last fifteen minutes, do you?”




BACK AT THE TEMPLE, Sayid confronts Mocke and stabs him immediately. Mocke mocks him (pun intended) by saying “what’d ya wanna go and do that for?” He pulls the knife out and hands it back to him and asks why he is so easily led to murder, except when the hot chick from “American Pie” asks him to. He then, without a hint of irony, asks Sayid to do him a favor and kill. Why? Because Mocke promises to bring back the only thing Sayid ever wanted “who died in my arms.” Whoa! Two people died in Sayid’s arms: the aforementioned Nadia and Shannon, who he used to bang in the tent. Who does he mean?

Kate, who along with Miles, has been wandering around the set aimlessly, goes and visits Savage Claire, who is being held in a hole by the Temple folks (The same hole from “Silence of the Lambs” it turns out). She tells Claire that she has her son back in LA, Claire glares at her as the LOST music tone rings out to emphasize it. At the point, the Temple people shoo her away.

Sayid then enters the Temple compound and announces that the Temple folk have two choices: leave with Mocke off the island or get killed at Sundown (Ya better take care, see?) Apparently the Temple people aren’t so loyal, and flee en masse. They heard of the Jim Jones thing and were in no mood to wait for the Kool Aid.

BIZARRO ’04: Sayid is approached by thugs who threaten Nadia’s kids if he doesn’t go with them. They take him to a kitchen in the back of restaurant, where the mercenary who killed Ben’s kid is making eggs and explaining loan shark principles when Sayid jumps the thugs and kills them. The loan shark attempts a conversation to stall his death but as I mentioned earlier, Sayid don’t play that. BLAM! On his way out, he hears muffled screams from the cooler: It’s JIN!!!! No stunner if you think about it, since Jin has mob ties through his father in law. Don’t all mobsters hang out together? I saw “Goodfellas”.

TEMPLE: Sayid meets with Dogen, who tells him a long story about his son, Jacob, baseball, drunk driving and a weird deal where Jacob says he’ll save his son, if Dogen comes to run the Temple and never see his family again. WTF? I think Dogen thought Sayid would be moved by the tale, but instead it enrages him and he drowns Dogen.

The smoke monster then comes and lays down justice on the Temple hangers on. Kate goes to rescue Savage Claire, who in turn saves Kate by pulling her down in the hole as the Smoke Monster flies overhead telling them to “put the fucking lotion in the basket” as he flies by.

The survivors of the second crash, Lapidus, Sun and Ben are rescued by the female friend of Jacob, Ilana, who wisks them I into a secret room that ol’ Smokey can’t get to by pushing on a block inscribed with a Shen ring, which means something in Egyptian but I don’t feel like going to Wikipedia right now, so you’re on your own on that one.

And since you’re doing home work, here’s what Tracie from Jezebel said about last night’s ep:

I'm wondering if the fact that Sayid's sideways story is more like a nightmare
than a dream indicates that he never became "enlightened" in the original timeline. It sort of supports my theory that the Losties (in the original timeline) are experiencing the death cycles of Bardo before being reincarnated into the sideways story. I think that this could perhaps be a clue that Sayid never really "saw the light" in the original timeline, and instead turned to darkness. So maybe zombie Sayid is bad. It's all about karma, which is kinda like a boomerang, you know, like the one that broke Nadia's vase.

As destructive as Dark Locke has been, Jacob may not totally be off the hook as some innocent “good half” either. Which one of them ordered the Dharma massacre? Was it Jacob though Richard, was it Man In Black pulling a stunt, or was it Richard and the Others acting on their own without divine inspiration? It’d be cool if the theme of the show ends up being “All gods murder you.”

On the sidelines this week: Sawyer (strained oblique), Richard (sprained MCL), Desmond (out indefinitely), and Hurley (healthy scratch)

Most of the islanders who’ve appeared in new positions in the alternate 2004 have been nice — Ethan the regular doctor, Ben the teacher, Dogen the supportive parent — but Keamy was still a jerk. Maybe in the old reality, he did not make good eggs.

And finally this from Tracie:

You should read up on Horus—the god of war and protection, born by immaculate conception and often compared to Jesus Christ—who is often depicted with the Shen ring. Horus' battle with Set was so homoerotic. I'm not even kidding. It literally involves battling with their semen. For real. Additionally, the goddess Nekhbet is also usually associated with the Shen ring. The most interesting thing about her? She was a white vulture, which the Egyptians believed to be an all-female species, reproducing via parthenogenesis. Also, she was big into adoption.

I can’t wait! Who’s the lucky homoerotic couple? Jack and Locke? Jin and Sayid? Stay tuned.

LOST cast done up 'Simpsons' style.

LOST quiz

Test your acumen on last week's episode here.

LOST recap for 2/23 episode

I am busy preparing for our annual radiothon for the Johns Hopkins Childrens Center, so I'll turn the analysis over to the ever thinking Tracie at jezebel.com, who will go deeper than you ever thought possible, and throws in a clip from the movie "Ghost World" for good measure. Enjoy.

P.S. -- How hot is "Savage Clair"? Smokin' hot.

LOST through the eyes of someone who never watched it until this season

This is entertaining if only for the fact that I've watched the show since day one and I feel the same way they do about a lot of things. Read it here.

Pop Candy's top 10 LOST comments

An always interesting take on the show: Pop Candy's LOST comments.

Entertainment Weekly article on LOST's final season

There are a few minor spoilers in there, but nothing hard core fans wouldn't already be on to. Go to the article here.

LOST, final season, episode 3

The Pop Culture blog "Throwing Things" has said that the awesomeness of an episode of LOST is directly proportional to how much Terry O'Quinn or Josh Holloway is in an episode. While I don't completely subscribe to that theory, I will say that when those two go head to head, a lot gets accomplished, at least in terms of the writers digging themselves out of the hole they've dug.

Mythology and philosophy have long been the cornerstones of LOST, and last night, we got some great references to both, and no matter what the writers say, I'm back on the island as purgatory theory. The obvious reference to "Jacob's ladder", the biblical link between heaven and earth leads me back down that path. (Yes, but the producers have said it’s not purgatory! You yell. Right. They also said it didn’t involve time travel, and clearly that didn’t pan out.)

Who was the boy that Mocke (fake Locke) and Sawyer could see, but Mascara Man couldn’t? Aaron? Jacob as a youth? What is it with us LOST geeks that we can’t just have a character be introduced without trying to figure out who he is? If Modern Family introduces a character, do we overanalyze who they are in relation to the rest of the cast? No, we let it play out. Let it play out. I’ll bet it’s none of the above.

In the cave, the numbers of the cast that Jacob has numbered are as follows:
4 Locke
8 Reyes (Hurley
15 Ford (Sawyer)
16 Jarrah (Sayid)
23 Shephard
42 Kwon (Jin or Sun?)

There were a ton of other names—crossed out—in the cave, some of which were familiar:
Goodspeed (Ethan or Horace?)
Straume (Miles)
Lewis (Charlotte or her dad?)
Mattingly
Cunningham

I have a theory about why Kate's name wasn't seen on the wall (other than that Jacob, like me, finds her annoying), and this theory also corresponds to why I think that Kwon refers to Jin, Littleton refers to Aaron, and Lewis refers to Charlotte's dad: Patriarchy—and I'm not just saying that because I'm a feminist! It actually has to do with Jacob's Ladder.

Lost fans know by now how prevalent religious symbolism, scripture, and mythology are to whatever the hell is going on with the Island. In the Book of Genesis, Jacob (Esau's twin) had a dream about this ladder that leads to heaven, with angels climbing up and down it. Some philosophers have interpreted the angels as representative of souls ascending from and descending to bodies (reincarnation!), while the Torah has this commentary:

Only the fourth angel, which represented the final exile of Rome/Edom (whose guardian angel was Esau himself), kept climbing higher and higher into the clouds. Jacob feared that his children would never be free of Esau's domination, but God assured him that at the End of Days, Edom too would come falling down.
So MIB/Smokey is totally Esau, right? Also, who is the fourth angel? Could it be Locke, who was assigned the #4? Additionally, in Christianity, Jacob's Ladder has apocalyptic ties as the narrative was used shortly after the Destruction of the Temple, and interprets the experience of…Patriarchs! Essentially, Jacob's Ladder is a bridge between heaven and earth, aka purgatory. I know that the producers said early on that the Island was not purgatory, but they also said that time travel wasn't involved either. Hang in there, Sawyer.

Added to that, Jacob (from the Island, not the bible) is connected in some way, to the notion of fertility (what with all his ankhs and shit) and could possibly have some sort of idea about how women have their own power with their ability to give life, so let's leave them out of the candidacy. And that's soooo sexist. But he's from another time, I guess. So, yeah, no girls allowed. Anyway, did you notice how Locke, in the alternate reality, was teaching biology (man of science now?), and particularly, the human reproductive system, which, honestly, should not be material left for a temp to cover. Notice on the board behind him it says "The Beginning of the Life Cycle."

At this point, Tracie from the website jezebel.com takes it up a notch:

Obviously, black (MIB) and white (Jacob) are supposed to be evening things out, leaving us with a whole lot of gray area. But the scale, which is in Jacob's cave, might be a reference to some Buddhist mythology, specifically Yama, the dharmapala, judge of the dead. Dharmapala is a type of "wrathful deity," which translates in Sanskrit to "Dharma-defender" and protector of laws. (Book of Laws, anyone?) So anyway, this particular myth involves the afterlife, karma, and most importantly, Bardo, or "transitional state." There are six Tibetan Bardos, the last three of which could actually be described as "death cycles," in which a person dies, experiences a paradise realm (and if they are not "enlightened," they won't even understand or recognize what they're experiencing), and finally gets reborn.

According to the myth, during the second Bardo—the paradise one— the deceased will experience judgment and punishment. The death judge deity will hold a scale on which black pebbles (evil deeds) and white pebbles (good deeds) are placed and weighed. Also, a Karma Mirror is held up for the deceased life to be reflected. The fate of the deceased (if they will remain in purgatory or go on to paradise in some form, possibly a human body) is decided from there. The thing is, that none of it—the scale, the mirror, the deity—are real. They're just thought forms while in this Bardo. That could be what Mocke was referring to when he told Sawyer that there is no reason for anyone to stay on the Island, as it's not even real. Although, he totally left out the part that they'll probably have to commit suicide in order to be reborn.

HOLY HELL!!!! My brain is starting to hurt (again)!!!

Thank God for the levity of the scenes from bizarre Los Angeles circa 2004. O’Quinn uncorks some beautiful scenes showing the frustration of daily life in a wheelchair. The lawn scene and his little smile as the sprinklers came on was priceless. In bizarro LA, Helen is still with him, Hurley owns everything and Ben is a hot tempered history teacher. (Oh, and I think Ben would be a horrible history teacher! He'd be one of those sneering, bitter ones who somehow missed out on a tenure-track college position and thinks he's too good to teach school kids.)

Strangely, Locke’s boss is still a douche and fires him for his fake walkabout. Thank God Hurley owns the school system and has bizarro Rose get him a job as a teacher, which you may have noticed is a step down from being a construction foreman.

Throwing Things has also tossed this idea out:

The end-of-series clarity we've started to get on the mythology has demythologized the mythology. (When Dorothy finds out that the Wizard is just a guy behind a curtain -- well, that kind of takes some of the wind out of the Wizard's sails, no?) Nothing to be done about it, and I'm not complaining, but it does make the cave drawings somewhat less of an OMG reveal than an oh, this is how they're finessing this issue.

I’m exhausted now, what say you about this week’s ep?

Video comparasion of pilot v. season 6 premiere

Season 6 started with a bizarro world recreation of the Oceanic flight following the bomb explosion...Here is the scene compared with the first episode from 2004: