Uncharted Island

I haven’t yet read anything about what Sun and Jin’s daughter’s name might mean in Korean. I was wondering if it had anything to do with honor. In the Wheel of Time world, ji means “honor.” I don’t know if Robert Jordan chose out that word because it already meant honor in a real world language or not.

Even though I’ve run out of things to say about LOST during this long hiatus, thankfully, not everyone has. ChipperHalf on thisisby.us posted a series of questions entitled Lost: The Final Seasons - What Answers Do We Need The Most?

Take a look and get anxious again for the release of the LOST Season 3 DVD collection.

I work at home, and my mother-in-law has been taking my son two days a week so I can just sit and get stuff done, uninterrupted. But it gets awfully quiet and lonely without my active toddler boy, so I’ve taken to watching DVDs to keep me company.

I got the season one DVDs of LOST for Christmas, and I hadn’t actually even unwrapped the plastic from them yet. So I did that on Monday. I’m up to disc four now.

It’s so weird watching the earliest episodes. I remember having nightmares during the first season, but it’s just not affecting me that way this time around. I guess it takes the terror away when you know who Ethan is and what he did to Claire, you know about the smoke monster even though you don’t quite understand it, you know Danielle’s crazy but doesn’t kill any of the castaways.

And Sawyer looked awful until disc three. You know I’m a Sawyer fangirl. But his hair in the first few episodes was hideous. Once it grew out, he looked far more attractive. That’s the Sawyer I know and love.

Way back in the “Pilot” episode, Kate ends up on top of Charlie, and I wondered if Evangeline and Dominic had started to fall for each other way back then. Or if it started in that horrible scene when they cut Charlie down and Jack was beating on his chest and Kate was crying and screaming for him to stop… That was so emotional. Or if it didn’t come until much later.

There’s so much I’d forgotten. I didn’t remember any of Jack’s childhood flashbacks. I’d forgotten why Charlie said he didn’t swim, since people brought it up when he told Jack he was a swim champion so he could volunteer for the suicide mission. And Charlie has almost died so many times already, before we ever met Desmond, or even knew about the hatch!

Ah, memories.

Damon and Carlton have been messing with viewers for quite a while about the issue of time. And this apparent “flash forward” only complicates matters even worse.

If all of those scenes with ugly-bearded Jack are supposed to take place after he gets off the island, we’re left with a few important questions. For one thing, who was in that coffin? But I’m going to have a separate blog entry on that. Also, what happened to Jack after the on-island events we’ve seen to turn him into a pill-popping bridge jumper? That’s another blog entry as well. For another thing, why does Jack talk about his father like his father is still alive?

The Christian Shepard issue has been long debated. Some fans want to believe that Christian is still alive because his coffin was empty when Jack found it in the jungle. I don’t think that. But even so, could Jack’s father be alive in this future scenario? I very much want to believe that time travel is not an issue here. But perhaps there is some alternate timeline in which Christian survived. It’s a possibility I don’t necessarily like, but I won’t write it off just yet.

More than likely, Jack talks about Christian as if he’s alive because he’s hopped up on pain pills and booze. His reaction when the pharmacist picked up the phone to call his father’s office was consistent with knowing he’d be caught in the lie. It’s possible that Jack is messed up enough to truly believe his father is alive at times, and other times just lie about it.

But another wrench in the works is the golden pass that allows Jack and Kate to fly free for life. After Flight 815 crashed, Oceanic Airlines ceased operations. But as we saw in the first flash forward, Jack was flying first class on an Oceanic flight. This again begs the question concerning alternate timelines. Could Desmond really have changed things in the past so that Oceanic never went out of business? So that Christian was still alive?

This may be the thing that we all obsess the most over as we wait impatiently for season four to start in 2008.

Charlie’s dying act was to warn Desmond that Naomi’s boat was not Penny’s boat. If Penny Widmore did not send Naomi to look for Desmond, then who did?

The popular thought, as there really isn’t evidence enough for anything to be considered a theory at this point, is that Naomi is working for Penny’s father, Charles Widmore. Charles wanted to keep Desmond away from his daughter at all costs. He must know that Penny’s been looking for him all this time. It makes sense that he wanted to beat her to it. Chances are, he had a pretty good idea where to look for him. And maybe Ben was right about this - calling Naomi’s boat wasn’t going to bring the happy rescue they’re all hoping for. If Widmore finds them, he may want to kill Desmond so there’s no chance of him reuniting with Penny - and he may not care about taking out the Flight 815 survivors as collateral damage.

Who are some other likely candidates? Alvar Hanso. Mr. Paik. They would have the means, but that wouldn’t explain why Naomi had the picture of Desmond and Penny. No, I think that I’m going to put my money on Charles Widmore for this one.

I knew I forgot something last night.

The underwater hatch that everyone had speculated about for ages - it exists, it explains the cable Sayid found on the beach, and it’s called the Looking Glass. As in Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll. Last week, we watched little Ben follow the white rabbit out of the Dharma compound. We had an episode entitled “White Rabbit.” What else might be find from Wonderland?

My husband raised a good question that I don’t have a good answer for yet. Did Alex give Locke the gun because she knew he would need to defend himself? Or did she know that Ben would grab it and use it on Locke, hence the “Happy birthday, Dad?”

I got really excited when I first saw the newest LOST Season 3 promo on ABC about a week ago.  Now I’ve seen it a few times, and I have to wonder about this Asian woman who comes in and pounces on Jack in his bed.

I’m going to assume this is a flashback, since Jack’s trip from Ben’s operating room to Sawyer’s old polar bear cage is likely to be a quick one.  I’m also going to assume that the scene takes place in Phuket, since Jack mentioned his trip to Phuket during the “put your mangoes where your mouth is” poker game back on the beach in season two.

She asks about Jack’s tattoos. I wonder if we’ll get an explanation for what Jack’s tattoos mean to him, since Matthew Fox has said in interviews that his tattoos are very personal to him, but that his character Jack probably has very different reason for getting his tattoos.

Do you think this woman is important? Or is she just going to serve the role of some attractive exposition?

Before the second half of the third season begins, I wanted to sum up the things we’ve learned from the first half of the third season.  It’s been jam-packed with revelations big and small.  Here are some of the reveals that stuck in my mind:

The Others have their own little village in the middle of the jungle, several miles from where the surivivors of Flight 815 landed - fuselage and tail sections.  They have electricity, relatively modern appliances, fresh food, as well as American music and reading material.  Oh, and they do have some contact with the outside world, since they knew about the 2004 Presidential election and the Boston Red Sox winning the World Series. 

Sun Kwon is a badass liar. She had no qualms about lying as a child, even when it cost an innocent maid her job. She lied about not being able to speak English. She lied about never being with another man - although that may be a Bill Clinton-like lie.  Clinton did not have sexual relations with that woman, even though she performed a sexual act on him.  Sun has never been with another man, although she was lying naked in bed with one when her father burst into the room.  And perhaps she lied by not confessing to Jae Lee’s murder.  The circumstances surrounding his death were quite suspcious.  It could’ve been suicide, but it could’ve been murder.  And it could’ve been Sun, for a number of reasons.

“Henry Gale’s” name is really Benjamin Linus.  He, not our bearded buddy Tom - aka Mr. Friendly, aka Zeke - is the leader of the Others.  And he has a life-threatening tumor on his spine that most surgeons would consider inoperable.

Sawyer served time in prison for at least one of his cons, and got out for being a snitch.  He has a daughter named Clementine that he cares for very much, enough to anonymously send a sizeable amount of money to her, but will never let on in fear that someone would harm his daughter to get to him. 

The Others have a submarine, which helps to explain how they can move so quickly - undetected - around the island.

Desmond has some sort of precognition.  Did he always have it, or was this talent bestowed upon him when the hatch imploded?

The Hydra station and polar bear cages where Jack, Kate, and Sawyer are being held captive are not located on the same island where the plane crashed.  They are on a smaller island, similar in size to Alcatraz, which is one of several islands off the coast noted on Danielle’s homemade map that Sayid and Shannon were analyzing last season.  The Hydra station is not underwater.  We saw Jack paraded out of the big metal building behind the bear cages with the alarms blazing so he couldn’t hear Kate and Sawyer shouting out to him.

Smokey really is a big mad monster. It either takes on the form of people or things familiar to its target, slightly like a boggart, or it causes its target to have hallucinations of those people or things. We’ve most likely seen Smokey before when we thought we saw Christian, Dave, one or more polar bears, Kate’s black horse, and Yemi.  And don’t forget that, in addition to this amazing talent, Smokey is also tangible, and can throw beat grown men like Mr. Eko and the pilot to death.

Kate used to be married - to a cop. Did anyone see that coming? I still don’t know if that marriage would be considered legal, since she took her vows under an assumed name. It was during this time in her life that she took the [Widmore] pregnancy test she told Sun about.

Theories were debunked: the crash of Flight 815 was not faked or staged; we saw it break apart in mid-air. Kate is definitely not an Other.  Jack is definitely not an Other. Sawyer is definitely not an Other.  The button actually did something.

Have I missed anything major?

Catch the latest LOST Moment?

Basically, Tom tells Jack (in the operating room) that the only reason he’s still alive is because they need him to do the surgery.  Ahd he wants to know if it’s true that Juliet really told him to kill Ben.

Since we already saw a Moment with Jack in a cage, we know they don’t kill him straight away. This implies that Ben does survive the surgery.  Maybe he’s the one who decides that Jack should live, but in the cage.  I wonder what this will mean for Juliet.