lost: the variable s05e14

Faraday Flashback for the 100th Episode! We learn that his mom's a bitch-- in many directions and at many different times in his life and her's. This one is all over the timeline, so bear with me.

Baby!Daniel is a piano virtuoso, as well as adorable, but mother says he needs to focus on science because his brain is too good to waste on piano. It's a distraction. Completely ignoring that piano is good for the brain that deals with math, and that it's what he wants to do.

Now!Daniel is leading the Losties around blabbing stuff all over-- that Miles is Chang's son, that they need to talk to the Hostiles, that his mom is one of them, that there's a bomb that can kill the EMP that the Hatch was built to keep track of, that Charlotte needs to never come back, that Chang has to evacuate everyone... It's refreshing. He thinks everything can be changed, whereas everyone else is always 'what's done is done' and that has been frustrating me, because, as I said in my last post, innevitability is boring, and even with all this cool shit going down and things starting to finally make sense, all of it is pre-ordained. They just didn't know the story yet. I really wanted Ben to die as a kid, and I really want them to be able to change things anyway. Jack's all onboard, being all Jack about it, but I'm kind of with Sawyer on this one: let it be. They all had craptacular lives before the crash, and they can just start over somewhere else on the island. What's another weird faction? And there's still, like, an entire coastline where we've never been.

Back to the story.

We see Daniel's life: his mom's a bitch at him when he graduates Oxford with bad Oxford hair and the youngest phD the place has ever given; he's all broken post-accident that turned his girlfriend into a vegetable who can't keep track of her own timeframe, and it's damaged his memory, made him simple and incapable of the math that got him that far in his life, made him emotionally fragile, and left him weepy and terrible in a delicate way that makes me want to hug him, rather than making me want to kick him, as when similar things happen to John or Jack; Widmore tells him he needs him to go to the island; his mom looks in on Penny and Desmond and we learn who Daniel's dad is (E totally called it), and that dear old mother might be yet another opposing faction; we see the context of Daniel down in the place where the Frozen Donkey Wheel is, but he doesn't do anything, and that disappointed me a little, because it seemed like he was working there before, and that would have been sweet; Widmore wants him to go to the island to further his research, but the plane crash footage is upsetting him and he says no-- until his mom is a manipulative bitch and tells him to go.

So he goes, and he runs around on his own mission, as he always has, and gets himself in trouble. He talks jack and Kate into getting him to the Hostiles to talk to his mom, gets Richard instead, and gets shot. And I almost burst into tears, because he was one of my favorites, and one of the few that I still cared about by this point. That just leaves Miles. 

I wonder if we'll get Mr Hawking's backstory, and why she's so awful? The story shows that she needed certain things to happen, but not why she was so terrible about it along the way. And she finally doesn't know what's going to happen, so maybe she'll be less awful now? 

And there's six hours until the Incident that Daniel was trying to stop / would have wound up the maker of, and three episodes left, and there's not been any Locke for a while, and there's only one season left after this. So! Onward!

lost: s05 e06 - 316

I seem to have missed one or, like, two... or three... I watched them, but they aren't posted here. Go fig.

Anyway, FINALLY an interesting mainland ep. After all that It has to be all of you crap, Daniel's mom makes do with Jack, Sun, Desmond and Ben. Des is all 'fuck this jazz' and leaves, and the rest set about getting on a plane that will recreate the crash so they can go back. Can you only reach the island through disasters?

Ben goes to fulfill and old promise and gets really roughed up. Jack goes to take care of his grandpa and gets something of his dad to give to Locke so he can stand in for Christian Shepherd's dead body, and when he comes home for some more binge drinking before The Land Without Alcohol, he finds Kate crying her new mascara all over his bed, and they have sad sex that was totally unhot. I hope they were attempting to show disfunction and mysery, and not two people who love each other, because I totally got squicked by the afore mentioned dysfunction and misery. Anyway, Aaron's gone and we're never to mention it again. I think she ate him.

Next morning, we get to the plane, and they reenact getting onto the original plane; Jack's having trouble with the coffin-baggage, Sun's lurking in the background, Kate shows up anyway, even after three episodes of her screaming that they're all crazy and she wants no part of it. Hurley's there, semi-inexplicably, and he's bought up all the free seats on the plane so no one else has to die, which is very sweet. And Sayid's there, all handcuffed and with a marshall, being Kate for this reenactment. There's one other dude, who had, like, one line. New Losties! Just what we need!

So plane plane plane. Turbulence, and Jack looks relieved and Hurley doesnt' even take is eyemask off. More turbulence, and the stewardess gets tossed across the cabin (I'd so never be a stewardess on TV-- you always die), there's a flash of light, and then Jack's waking up in the bamboo, Kate's unconscious on the rocks and Hurley's in the water, drowning. Jack goes all hero and saves them, but where's everyone else? And how did they not crash? Is the plane still there, going merrily on it's way without anyone on it?

A Dharma VW pulls up and we all go 'Oh no! They're in the 70s!' and then Jin climbs out and both sites are confused. So yay, it's a friend! But they might still be in the 70s, and if they all die when stupid young!Ben kills Dharma, I'll be pissed. If they join the Others instead, and then we learn that they were there all along and young gets to meet old, that could be really neat. Maybe Christian Shepherd the Ghost is actually Old!Jack stuck in the past and torturing himself now that he's had 30-odd years to figure it out.

Other things:

- Dharma has at least one mainland hatch, too, and that means there are probably more. And tehy never really updated their computers at all. I'm wondering if they're going to work that into the plot, or if it's just supposed to show that other people are always moving into the old Dharma places after they're gone? Or is Dharma still active on the mainland? She said there were other weird places like the Island and that they're all connected, so has Dharma set up secret hatches all over the world?

- There was a note from Locke to Jack that we really wanted to be important, but it was lame and told-you-so-ish.

- The capitain was Frank Lepidus, all cleaned up and looking weird-- I like him better rough-- and he was sharp enough to know what they were doing, and steady enough to pilot them through it anyway. Reminding us that he was supposed to be the capitain of the original flight anyway.

- They're back on the Island already?? What's the rest of the season going to be about??

- What's up with the rest of the people? Why didn't they all land in the same place? Are they scattered across time now? That'd be weird.

Next week, we get to see the other half of the ep, how Ben got roughed up, how Hurley got out, what happened to Kate and Aaron, and how Sayid got caught and for what and why the hell were they flying him to Guam?

lost: s05 e03 - jughead

So everyone's still bouncing around time, but not so much as before. Locke finds the rest of them, then goes to finish his convo with Richard. Sawyer has no idea what's going on. Juliet doesn't have much to do but be calm and reasonable. Daniel knows way more than he's letting on, and is possibly jumping around more than other people, or at least did so in the past. Also, Daniel is in love with Charlotte, and she's got the brain-asplody. Richard, looking the same again, is in charge of the british soldiers, who turn out to be the proto-Others, based on the secret code called Speaking Latin, which anyone with a degree in medicine, science or philosophy can break. They've landed in the 50s, two years before Locke is born, and he's insisting to the Richard who hasn't met him yet that he's the new leader of the Others, even though these are the old Others, who seem to be rather trigger-happy over something involving someone having come to their Island to do experiments and attacking them... even though this is, like, 20 years before Dharma is supposed to have existed. Meanwhile, Daniel is taken to defuse a bomb which looks like it's been caught-- it's haging from a scaffold only a few feet above the ground, but it's got a cracked casing, and he's trying to convince them to let him burry it because it's too dangerous to try to open it up with the seal busted. It'll be okay, because 50 years from now, it's okay. See?

Meanwhile, Miles is getting no love except from some dead ghosties, and is otherwise pretty much ignored, which he points out. And Charlotte keeps getting dizzier and sicker, and Daniel "won't let anything happen to" her, which is a sure sign of impending doom whenever it's said. She goes all bleeding and twitchy at the end.

And Desmond is trying to find Daniel's mother, and instead finds a girl who went loony and was trapped jumping back and forth through her own timeline-- Desmond knows what it is, but the people who care for her apparently think that Daniel just made her crazy somehow, and then ran away and left her. And all the funding came from Charles Widmore. So he confronts Widmore and gets the addy for Daniel's mom, and Penny wants to leave it at that, but knows that Desmond won't give it up if he can help his friends, so off they go to LA to find the lady.

Oh, and one of the soldiers is a very young Widmore, and he was a jerk then, too.

So, more crazy, more superdense plotting. It's everything we love about Lost. I especially liked that we got to spend so much time with the Freighter People, who have been pretty marginalized since the cast split up. And I liked when Daniel tried to get tough in his twitchy, slightly crazy way.

We're back to the main crew next week. I'm really not handling this waiting-between-episodes all that well...

lost: s05 e01 and e02

Okay, I'm pretty confused, but with everythign happening at once and big new plot devices moving into place, I'm thinking it's okay. Like when the show was new and shiny. I'm excited for the confusion because it means new things are happening and we're actually getting somewhere, which is great.

Here are my fav parts:

- Desmond is still sliding back and forth through time (even though I thought he was past that? didn't they save him before his brain melted and stop the disjoint?) and it's maybe caused by the fact that Daniel is apparently also darting around time and now the whole island is. Which is just brilliant. 

- Not only is the Island skipping all over time and space (that computer looks like it's tracking it everywhere), it's picking up all the anachronisms that they've already found-- so far the plane with Mr Echo's brother, and if that's happening, then maybe we'll get to see the bear and the Black Rock and whatever else. Which is very exciting. I love that it's physically going to where these things are, rather than being all Bermuda triangle-ish and dragging things to it. Nice turn-around!

- Sweety-faced old lady from Desmond's crazy is now all over Ben, who's trying to be a goodguy... in so much as he's the same as he was, but now the Losties are finding themselves on his side.

- Hurley continues seeing dead people-- and I'm rooting for him to start seeing dead people that he never knew, like those English soldiers that Locke just killed, which would mean that he's not crazy and he actually is somehow tied into the mind of the Island. That's probably not going to happen, but a girl can still dream. Also, I love that his mom believes him. And I love that the dead people know things that he doesn't know.

- Jack is in with Ben, who seems to be trying to get him clean, and that's great. Sayid is against Ben because he thinks Ben was manipulating him (and probably was), but he's such a cool assassin, this is fine. It makes a new devide.

- And what the hell is up with Sun? She's got a little daughter, but she's globe-trotting, talking to Widmore, out to get people, being all cold and hard... It's like she became what Jin was before the Island out of the trauma of seeing him asploded. But what's she doing? Everythign she says sounds like doubletalk.

- And who's out to get Kate? And why is she now seeing Claire, who looks pretty much the same as she did before? Is she getting Hurley's power, or something Hurley-adjacent? Did Claire learn to astral-project after she went all spacy with a ghost?

This is going to be a fun season, I can tell. I'm just sad it won't last the full 24 eps.