Uncharted Island

“N. I’ll always be with you. R. G.” That’s the inscription on the inside of Naomi’s bracelet.

Is Sayid getting off the island now? That seems too easy.

Sayid plays golf, and is good enough to be a betting man about it. And apparently it’s not too easy. Sayid really does get off the island. And this golfing guy - whoa! Sayid just shot him! As Hurley would say…. DUDE!

Sayid’s picking up chicks in Berlin. With a disposable cell phone. My husband thinks he’s a bounty hunter.

Sawyer seems to have picked up Sayid’s penchant for torture. Blowing Ben’s toes off.

And Jacob’s cabin is gone. Perhaps Jacob no longer wants to deal with Ben or Locke. I think the cabin may actually be where Hurley last saw it… or at least somewhere where Hurley goes and is not followed by Ben or Locke. That’s my “theory.”

Miles is so classy. Naomi was hot and he liked her accent.

I do not like Sayid’s hair all long and icky.

What payload was Regina supposed to be shooting over to Dan? He didn’t seem concerned about being harmed. Whatever it was, it didn’t make it. More mysterious island properties.

“What’s with the swingset? These people have daycare?” LOL.

Poor Hurley, bound and gagged in New Otherton. Well, that would explain why he would tell Jack he was sorry he went with Locke. I’m losing hope about Sawyer making it off the island to be with Kate. (No!)

“Oh, awesome. The ship’s got its own Sawyer.” LOL, Hurley re: Miles.

Payload made it. It just… took a little longer. THAT’S IT! Time moves faster off the island than it does on the island! Sweet! Although the timing of that cut off any reply from Frank when Jack mentions he’s been on the island for 100 days.

Oh look, Ben’s got a secret passage behind his bookcase. He’s like the island’s very own Bond villain. Except he doesn’t reveal his evil plan. But look at all that foreign currency and the passports. Wait, did one of them have his last name as Moriarty? Okay, Sherlock Holmes villain. (Thanks for helping me with the reference, hon.)

Oh no. Hurley was bait. Say it ain’t so, Hurley!

And there’s Ben.

There’s Sawyer with that sexy wit of his. “So am I your prisoner?” “If that’s what turns you on.” Aww man, he doesn’t want to leave the island. Double aww… he wants to live in New Otherton with Kate.

Sayid, you dog, you. Creative bed sheet coverage there for her breasts. Sayid’s job has some perks, I guess. And Sayid has a list. And… Elsa shot him. And he killed her. Omigod. He closed her eyes the way he closed Naomi’s at the start of the episode. And it would appear that she wears the same kind of bracelet. Who is Elsa’s boss? He’s not an economist. Matthew Abaddon?

Sayid and Desmond are both getting off the island. Now. And they didn’t say goodbye to anyone. Not a single person.

OH.
MY.
FREAKING.
GOD.

Sayid works for BEN. When he went to get the bullet wound tended to, I said, “That voice sounds familiar.” And that’s why. It was husky Ben voice. That’s why Sayid has a list. Because Ben is big on lists. He’s having Sayid kill people in order to protect Sayid’s friends. Why? I have a feeling we’ll learn more about this in the eighth episode cliffhanger.

SQUEE.

Oceanic 6? Only 6 people get off the island? Flash forward!

I had a feeling it was a flash forward, but you never quite know with a LOST season premier. It still doesn’t beat last year’s season opener, but it was pretty good. Mangoes!

Ana-Lucia’s partner - I guess I’m going to have to update my chart!

Oh man, Hurley actually wants to go back to the nuthouse? I guess he really shouldn’t have left the island… He has always gotten really upset when people said he was crazy.

We really don’t need a Baywatch cam on Hurley running on the beach… Good for him, though, with the cannon ball.

Naomi’s body is missing. Does she have nine lives like Mikhail does?

Oh dear… Is Hurley at Jacob’s house? It doesn’t seem like it was that close to the beach when Ben took Locke there. But would there really be another spooky whispers house on the island? I’m sure I’m only a commercial break away.

So Naomi isn’t who she says she was, but she lied about being the target of Locke’s throwing knife, and she died without accusing the LOSTies of killing her. Hmm. And she loves her sister.

And… Jacob’s house… moves? Jacob’s little shack is like the Eye of the World. (Wheel of Time fans know what I’m talking about.) It moves to find those with the greatest need… or something like that. Hurley saw Jacob sitting in the chair. And I thought that Mikhail was the other man in the house, but it was silly of me not to realize it was Locke.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but Locke wasn’t at the beach when they heard that Charlie died… right? How did he know about that? And what Charlie had written on his hand?

Hurley sees dead people. Or at least, Hurley sees dead Charlies. What is he supposed to do? And is he really having crazy hallucinations, or is Charlie like the island’s manifestations of dead people that our Losties have been seeing all along?

Wow. Jack really was going to shoot Locke. And Locke was never going to shoot Jack. Because the gun wasn’t loaded. Jack has come quite a long way to be at the point where he would kill someone. And not just anyone, not like Ben - but John Locke.

The Locke-inator. Come with me if you want to live.

Weird with a beard. Definitely, Jack. Listen to him.

This is going to be an interesting season. Half-season. Whatever.

I finished watching the Season 3 DVD set today. (Aww, Charlie!) I had a realization about Jack.

Jack tells Kate, in the flash forward, that they weren’t supposed to get off the island, that they have to go back. Kate disagreed, and she drove away.

Jack was wrong.

Kate was supposed to get off the island. She’s not supposed to go back. She found her salvation off the island. She has someone to go home to. She’s stopped running.

Jack, on the other hand - the island was his salvation. That’s why he has to go back.

I’ve been thinking about it since the third season ended, and now that we’re less than a month away from the start of season four, I still don’t have any real notion.

Jack is completely obsessed with getting back to the island in the flash forward. Considering how badly he’s wanted to get off the island, so much that he went along with Ben’s wishes, it’s hard to understand why he wants so badly to go back.

My first thought was that he wants to go back for the people who got left behind when he got off the island. He was poring over maps enough to try and triangulate a position for a rescue mission. But his conversation with Kate negates that line of thinking. He was flying Oceanic flights every weekend, hoping to crash land again. He wasn’t trying to rescue anyone; he wanted to go back and stay there.

Even guilt about anything he’s done the island so far - or anything he will be doing in upcoming episodes before he leaves - doesn’t seem to be a good enough reason to want to go back to the island. He’s already punishing himself.

What would returning to the island do for him? Did he lose a part of himself when he left? Is the island like the Hotel California, where you can check out but never leave? Does Jack finally become a spiritual man, only when he discovered that his purpose was back on the island he left?

It should be interesting to follow Jack’s personal journey through the last three seasons.

It drove me crazy that we never got to know who was in that coffin. We never got a really clear shot of the obituary that Jack ripped out of the newspaper. Well, that’s not entirely true. Some clever folks with TiVo and hi-def grabbed some screencaps to try and make sense of it all. But the props and editing folks were on the ball, and made it difficult to draw any real conclusions.

Facts revealed to the casual LOST viewer:

• No one showed up to the funeral except for Jack, who said he was neither friend nor family.
• The coffin looked small.

From the first part, we know it cannot be Claire or Christian in the coffin. (I know, Christian is supposed to be dead. But there are those who think he’s not.) Because Jack talks to Kate after the funeral, we know it’s not her either. From the second part, it’s not likely to be Hurley. We’re looking at the coffin’s occupant being either a child, someone really short, or someone who ends up as an amputee. Because of the [remote] possibility of an amputation, this really doesn’t rule anyone out.

We get a little bit more information dangled in front of us from an insider who leaked the text of the obituary, which admittedly may be a hoax.

What did we learn from this, the devout fans who scour the internet for this type of thing? (Assuming this information is legitimate, of course.)

• John Lantham, the alias of the dead guy, is from New York.
• He is survived by a teenage son.
• He appeared to have hung himself.
• He is a man.

The only concrete evidence this gives us is that the coffin is not occupied by a woman. A lot of people jumped to the conclusion that it’s most likely Ben, because he’s short and would be an obvious choice for having no friends to attend his funeral. Who would be his teenage son, though? I find it unlikely that he’d let Karl masquerade as his son if they both ended up off the island.

Other people think it may be Sawyer, but I think Sawyer is the “he” that Kate has to get back to.

I think the dead guy in the coffin is Michael. Assuming he and Walt didn’t perish in the open sea, he probably wouldn’t want to use his real name and draw attention to the fact that he was supposed to be dead in a plane crash. There would be far too many questions that he just doesn’t have the answer for. Let’s not forget that he murdered a few people in cold blood. It would be far harder for any of his fellow survivors to identify him if they should ever get rescued. Although it wouldn’t appear that any of them would want to attach themselves to the plane crash anyway, and certainly not to anything that happened on the island. They’ve all done things they’re not proud of.

Michael wouldn’t have many friends from the island because of his killings and because he betrayed them to the Others in order to leave with Walt. He has a teenage son that wouldn’t have to be contrived. And he’d likely have a lot of issues that could drive him to suicide - perhaps guilty feelings, perhaps estrangement from his son.

If I were a betting woman, my money would be on Michael. That’s my story, and I’m sticking to it.

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.

One hour down, and seven Redshirt Others are dead. I don’t think they count in the “five people die” TV Guide spoiler. So five more people are going to bite the dust. Better not include Sawyer. There are five people down in the Looking Glass station right now… But I don’t know if they’d really kill off Charlie and Desmond.

Flashback to Jack popping his last pill in front of a coffin that looks far too small for no one to have showed up to the viewing. Why won’t they just tell us who died? Jack said he wasn’t friend or family. The fact that they won’t tell us who it is leads me to believe it’s a familiar face. But I can’t even begin to imagine who it might be.

I was wrong about Mikhail. He did follow orders. Good thing that Desmond found that spear gun. Sorry, Bonnie. Sorry, Greta. Can Mikhail cheat death one more time? Do the island’s healing powers extend underwater?

Oh my God. I don’t want to believe it. I will not believe that Sayid, Jin, and Bernard are dead until I see them for myself. Maybe we didn’t hear what we thought we heard over the radio. Please no. I don’t think Ben’s dead either, just beaten bloody unconscious.

Finally! Alex knows that Danielle is her mother. And Danielle kinda ruins the moment by making her first words to her daughter, “Will you help me tie him up?” Well, she’s been kinda out of the social graces loop for a while.

Ha! I knew it! I knew they didn’t kill them.

Wow! Hurley with the Dharma van. Sweet rescue! Look at all of these exclamation points!

I said that Tom probably wouldn’t survive the episode, since he’s the most loyal to Ben, about two seconds before Sawyer shot him. Sawyer’s taken quite a dark turn. My husband just agreed with me, saying, “Yeah, he’s in kind of a bad place right now.”

I can’t believe there’s only half an hour left of new LOST until next year. That totally sucks.

Take that, Ben! Even more of your people have turned against you.

Charlie turned off the yellow flashing light. I wonder what’s with the incoming transmission. Penny?

Oh Charlie… What a terrible way to die. But he died a hero, and he alerted Desmond to Naomi’s lie. For once, Ben wasn’t lying about something. Charlie’s death scene reminded me of both the scene in Armageddon right before the explosives go off and the scene in The X-Files where the Lone Gunmen seal themselves off to stop the biological agent.

*time passes as I can’t tear my eyes away from the TV*

So wait. If this was a flash forward instead of a flashback… Why does Jack say something about getting his father down to see if he’s drunker than he is? Was he just confused because of the drinking and the pills? And… I’m sorry, but what? I’m so confused right now. And I’m sure everyone else is, too. Time to go hit the fan boards to see what the hell everyone else thinks is going on.

I’ll be breaking this entry into two parts, one for the first hour, one for the second.

Jack looks terrible in a beard. I want to know what was in that newspaper clipping that he read before climbing up onto the ledge to jump off the bridge. Do we know any of the people involved in that car crash that stopped him from committing suicide?

Jin spoke English to Sun. *melts*

And Rose made Bernard tell her he’s a dentist, not Rambo. That was great.

So the flashback was a lot more recent than I thought it would’ve been. Sarah and Jack are already divorced, and Sarah is very pregnant.

Charlie. What a ladies man. I wonder if they’re just messing with him about the code. There might not be a code at all. They can say whatever they want, since he’s tied to a chair and being beaten up. It must be a bit unnerving to them to find out he’s prepared to die to stop the jamming signal. That means that beating him senseless will do very little good.

Oh Bernard, no! Rose is there, you’re sending Ben after Rose. Just shut up. He could’ve said they were headed to the caves. Anything but the truth. He started spilling everything to save Jin, and he could be responsible for killing his own wife, and everyone else.

What is Ben going to do to Alex? He now knows that he was betrayed, not only by Juliet, but by the girl he’s called daughter for 16 years. He’s going to let her go with him? And he admitted he knows she told Karl about their change in plans. I’m worried about Alex.

I can’t imagine what Rose and Sun are going through, not knowing what happened back on the beach when only two of the tents exploded.

I was trying to figure out why Sawyer was being so weird with Kate. I mean, they already had the “relationship” conversation. Then I remembered that she has no clue about what happened with Locke and Cooper at the Black Rock. That had to have truly messed him up.

One Hatchmonkey shooting at another. Mikhail was trying to take out Desmond, but Desmond must’ve had a flash of the Mythbusters episode that proved that diving underwater can save your life even when being shot at by a high-powered rifle. I wonder what went through his mind when he tasted fresh air and saw Charlie was still alive.

Two actors from NBC’s Las Vegas in one episode of LOST. Interesting. Hi, Mike and Nessa.

Jack and Juliet kiss. How sweet. Kate, you really don’t have any right to look jealous.

Those were some good questions that Charlie posed to Mikhail… who has a really nasty scar over his usually-patched eye. At least we can’t see an empty socket.

Mikhail had a lovely little chat with Ben over the radio. When Ben called him a loyalist, it reminded me of Emp I don’t think he’s going to follow Ben’s orders anymore. I don’t think he’s going to kill Charlie, Greta, or Bonnie. I don’t know if Ben will be alive or dead by 11:00pm, but I don’t think he’ll be in charge of the Others anymore.

I knew that Locke wasn’t dead. But Walt stepping in before he shot himself after realizing he couldn’t move his legs? Didn’t see that coming.

This has been a decent first hour… but I have greater expectations for the second hour. See you on the flip side!