Legion World Forums LEGION COMPANION The Anywhere Machine Lost Season Five (Spoilers Aplenty!)

Then again, the fact that the inside of the barracks buildings were still the same in 2007 as when the Others occupied them (e.g., everything inside Ben's house was still there, including the board game Locke, Hurley, and Sawyer were playing when the mercenaries invaded in 2005) suggests that this version of 2007 was part of the "original" timeline.

I'm guessing that the Dharma initiative signs on the buildings were just bloopers, due to the fact that film crew was using the set contemporaneously to film the scenes set in Dharmaville in 1977.

I've really enjoyed Lost so far -- it definitely ranks up there with my favorite TV shows.

More than most shows, however, Lost really rewards loyalty and a serious investment in its mythology -- and at the same time punishes the casual viewer. I'd made the decision to buy seasons 1 through 5 as a special offer from Amazon before Christmas, and so I felt kind of compelled to watch every episode -- if just to get my money's worth. I didn't really get into it until toward the end of season 1, and then from that point I was utterly hooked. If anything, it was kind of a double-edged sword to have all the episodes available to watch at once, because it was often hard to turn off the TV at the end of an episode -- I wanted to plug right along into the next one so that I could get immediate gratification on the episode-to-episode cliffhangers! There were definitely a few times where I ended up staying up WAY too late on a weeknight because I just couldn't put the remote down.

I think Lost is a very difficult show to get fully invested in if you don't watch from the very beginning, and make a concerted effort to not only see every single episode, but in the correct order. When the series first started, I didn't get onboard on day one for some reason, and by the time I tried to start watching later on, I just couldn't get into it. I think the first episode I watched in its entirety during the original broadcast run was the first episode of season 2 -- which made no sense whatsoever to me. I watched one more episode, then gave up on the show because there just seemed to be too many references to things that had been done and said in the previous season. Even though I got the general gist of what was going on, I couldn't really grasp the nuances of the characters' motivations and relationships with each other, and felt disconnected from the continuity.

The most shocking things to me were the deaths of Shannon, Ana Lucia, and Libby in season 2. I actually thought Shannon was merely injured, and not dead, for several episodes -- and wondered why no one was tending to her wound but instead just letting her lie there on the ground! I was also stunned at these deaths because the episodes in which they occurred were ones that focused on the characters (with the exception of Libby), and in each case humanized each character and made her more sympathetic. This was true to some degree with Mr. Ecko as well, in the early part of season 3.

This convention backfired somewhat though, because I started expecting that any episode that heavily featured a hitherto low-profile character and made him/her likable would end in the character's death. This is why I was kind of shocked that Miles wasn't killed at the end of his flashback episode, and not surprised at all when Daniel died at the end of "The Variable."

In fact, I found the show's ostensible attempt to create random and "surprising" connections between seemingly unconnected characters to ironically foster a certain predictability. For example, it was immediately obvious that Claire was Jack's half-sister, because Jack's father visited a blonde woman in Australia and asked about his daughter -- and there were no other blonde Australians on the show. Similarly, Locke's father was shown to be an older con man, and Sawyer was looking for the older con man who caused his parents' murder-suicide -- so clearly "Anthony Cooper" was the original "Tom Sawyer." (Maybe these connections were also patently obvious to the majority of the viewing audience during the show's original run, but the fact that I watched the show by myself in a "vacuum," as it were (without reading anyone else's contemporaneous musings or speculations on message boards or articles) at least made me feel -- rightly or wrongly -- that I came to them without the benefit of being influenced by anyone else's theorizing.)

In retrospect, however, I do wish I'd watched the show from the beginning -- if only so I could have had the opportunity to dissect each episode along with other viewers!

Was the flashforward obvious to you?

As for the individual seasons, I thought seasons 3 and 5 were the strongest, although both had their weak spots. Both started out with one or two utterly compelling episodes, then seriously sagged through the middle of the season, before cranking it up again and ending with a slew of extremely powerful episodes to end on a bang. I was really bored about a third of the way through season 5, because I thought the show was dragging its feet getting the Oceanic Six back on the island -- and the shifts between life on the island and back in the "real world" were too jarring for me.

Season 2 was the weakest overall -- there just seemed to be too much filler in the middle of the season. The flashbacks were great, because the main characters really started getting fleshed out, but there just wasn't a whole lot going on on the island. Remember when Sawyer spent half an episode just chasing around an annoyingly loud frog? Yeah.

I've liked Sawyer from day one. I really like how his character has realistically developed over the course of five seasons, and his maturation over the (unseen) three years that he spent in Dharmaville really rang true to me. I really hated Juliet until season 5, when she just sort of turned a corner and clicked with me. Her relationship with Sawyer felt organic and believable.

In contrast, I've never really liked Jack, and I thought both he and Kate became less and less likable over the course of the show. To me, they both just started acting more and more irrationally, reacting to situations with stubbornness-for-the-sake-of-stubbornness and generally acting like spoiled children.

Oddly enough, I've always liked Locke, even when he was behaving illogically. Maybe I just sympathized because Peg Bundy rejected his marriage proposal!

I thought the character of Michael was a real wasted opportunity. He spent most of seasons 1 and 2 seemingly screaming "Walt!" and some variation of "Where's my son!" and "He's my son, dammit!" He then disappeared, and reappeared a season-and-a-half later in a redemption arc that neither redeemed the character himself nor the show's treatment of him.

I've always found the show's treatment of Jin-Sun and Bernard-Rose's eternal-love-against-all-odds to be a bit heavy-handed. The suggestion that Daniel and Charlotte were destined to be tragic soulmates, despite never having any overtly romantic interaction, was more believably compelling and felt more real to me.

Similarly, Desmond was another of my favorite characters -- up until he was reunited with Penny. Then he just seemed boring. I guess domesticity always pales next to the unresolved tension of sexual and romantic deprivation!

I remembered thinking that it was a flashforward early on in the episode, because Jack was doing things and interacting with unseen characters in a way that didn't ring true with the scenes that we saw in his earlier flashbacks.

That is, I got the sense that we'd already seen everything there was to see about Jack's past -- namely, his tempestuous interactions with his father and his failed marriage to Claire Dunphy. All those flashbacks fit together coherently, and you got the sense they were happening around the same time.

In contrast, in the flashforward, Jack was suddenly a bearded alcoholic/drug addict, and was doing all sorts of mysterious things -- like calling someone about someone else who had died, trying to commit suicide for no apparent reason, and visiting the unknown person's coffin. It didn't feel realistic that there all these other, additional events had occurred in Jack's life before he got on Oceanic flight 815, and it just didn't seem likely that the show -- going into its fourth season -- would devote significant additional time into resolving yet MORE mysteries from Jack's past when it had already pretty well fleshed out who he was before and why it made him the person he was on the island.

However, I WAS surprised by the Jin-Sun combination flashback and flashforward. I was expecting both to be occurring at the same time, and was thrown for a loop when it was revealed that Jin's visit to the hospital was in his past, whereas Sun's visit to the hospital was in her future.

I was certainly confused by the inconsistencies in Jack's FF, and I wondered how it fit into what we'd seen. It just didn't occur to me at all until that "Holy shit!" moment when Kate walked out of that car. Total blindside! A moment that rocketed the show up to a whole new level. I don't think any of the show's other cliffhangers can compare, IMO.

However, Jin/Sun didn't fool me for a second. For whatever reason, I expected that ending from the moment I saw a split in the storytelling. Dunno, maybe it was M. Night Shyamalon, or more likely getting burned by the Jack FF, that warmed me up for that one.

The only question I truly want answered is --

How did Bonnie and Greta pass the time when the two of them were stuck in the Looking Glass hatch by themselves all those long, lonely years?

Were they... [raises eyebrow] lovers?

I've already written reams of salacious Gronnie fanfic, and would be more than happy to share. An excerpt:

"What's for lunch today, Bonnie? I'm famished," said Greta, moistening her lips.

"Clams, just the way you like 'em... raw and briny," Bonnie uttered breathlessly.

*ulp*

OK, so I just spent a while reading through all the posts in this thread...

Which produced a peculiar feeling of deja vu, because I read the posts having already experienced the entirety of season 5 and knowing how the season would unfold, whereas the posts were made when the original posters were experiencing the season play out episode by episode over the course of several months...

However, I was also experiencing the discussion in this thread for the first time, post by post in the present day, whereas for the original posters, those discussions had already been made and forgotten over a year in the past...

And now all the posters have passed me by, having experienced the entirety of season 6 while I'm still stuck four months in the past...

Waiting for another two months to pass, so I can finally catch up to what I should have experienced two weeks ago.

This must be what time travel feels like...

You're kind of like Legion World's and Lost fandom's Desmond right now! You'll need a constant. (Homecoming Queen?)

I also wasn't all that surprised by the fast-forward revelation for whatever reason. My brother & I guessed it midway through.

There were a few times I was really surprised though. The double-murder of Ana Lucia & Libby was a huge shocker to me, just because I was surprised they killed two people in one episode. Likewise, the deaths of Carl and Danielle--which I didn't like--was really shocking and then Keamy's brutal execution of Alex was perhaps the most shocking moment of the whole show to me. Sayid shooting young Ben wasn't quite 'make you jump' shocking but it was heart-breaking to see his character do that and I knew right then that he was destined to die on the show.

Episode 4, where the final moments reveal Locke was in a wheelchair and could walk, was probably the single biggest surprise of the entire series and is actually likely my single favorite moment of the entire show. It changed everything. It still gives me goose-bumps.

The finale to Season Five probably felt like the biggest game-changer of them all to me because of the intro of Jacob & the MiB. It felt like "at last, we'll understand".

Also, you mentioned Nikki and Paulo earlier in the thread. I didn't hate them like others and I liked their premise (background characters becoming more involved), but what I loved most about them was actually their deaths! I thought that was an awesome episode and they might have had the best deaths on the entire show.

I not only SO didn't guess that it was a flash-forward in the Season 3 finale, until Jack said 'We have to go back Kate' I spent the entirety of that scene thinking 'What?!? Jack and Kate knew each other before they went to the Island?!?'

I was very sorry and surprised to see Danielle die but less so when Carl and later Alex bought it. Never really cared about those two.

Count me in as another Nikki/Paulo fan though. They were never super-faves but I certainly liked them a lot more than others seemed to. I was sorry when they killed off, not because the show was going to be emptier without them but because it was so clearly obvious that the writers were just doing it to appease the more vocal fans. (I wondered the same thing about Ana-Lucia's death actually.) And that really worried me. There's nothing worse than when the fans start dictating how a writer should let his/her story unfold IMO. Just look at Heroes!

Supposedly Ana-Lucia was always intended to die at the end of the second season, but when she became unpopular, they added Libby's death to make the scene more powerful!

In retrospect...

The Jin-Sun flashforward/flashback seems cheap and gimmicky. It was sort of a GOTCHA! solely for the sake of being a GOTCHA! -- the Jin portions really didn't reveal anything about him, other than showing yet another instance of how angry and violent he could get prior to coming to the Island. The show could have revealed the fact that Jin did not make it off the island simply through Sun's scenes, and still save that reveal until the end of the episode by simply implying (as the flashbacks did anyway) that Jin was just busy at work and thus unable to make it to the hospital in time for Ji-Yeon's birth.

In contrast, Jack's flashforward at the end of season 3, while being a huge GOTCHA!, at least advanced the story and showed scenes that were both relevant to the overall plot and further developed Jack's character.

A couple of minor questions I'd like answered in season 6 (in addition to the major ones, such as the nature of Jacob/Man in Black, where Claire has been, etc.):

- Why did the Others let Radzinsky, Kelvin, and, later, Desmond occupy the Swan, when they killed apparently all of the other Dharma-affiliated people? Did the Others realize what would happen if the numbers were not entered, and thus left people in the hatch so that this function could be continue to be fulfilled? If so, wouldn't they have felt more assured if one of their own was doing it, rather than other people who could potentially give up on the task or fail for some other reason?

- Is the Dharma Initiative still active off-island? Who's making the airdrops of food and supplies? Don't they realize that there are essentially no more Dharma operations left on the island?

- Did Ben deliberately allow himself to be captured by Rousseau back in season 2? If so, wasn't that a risky move, considering the possibility that one of the Losties might have killed him? If not, why was he wandering around the jungle by himself?

- When Ethan infiltrated the Losties at the beach, did he remember Locke from when he encountered a time-traveling Locke at the wrecked Beechcraft?

- How did Ethan go from being the child of Dharma parents to being an Other?

- Was that really Walt who was communicating with Michael via the Dharma computers? How did Walt get the chance to access a computer? And how was Walt able to type so quickly, in coherent, complete, and perfectly spelled sentences? (This suggests that it was really someone else posing as "Walt," or it could just be a blooper.)

- How is Walt special, other than being able to attract birds?

- Whatever happened to the Others' "sheriff," Isabel? It seemed like she was going to be some kind of important character -- then she was never seen again.

- Whatever happened to Ben's childhood friend, Annie?

- Will the meaning/origin of the rest of Jack's tattoo ever be explained? "Stranger in a Strange Land" only showed the origin of one part of Jack's main tattoo.

- Did anyone ever realize that there were eight too many bodies in the fake Oceanic flight 815 at the bottom of the Sunda Trench?

- How did Mikhail/the Others compile information on the Losties that, realistically, no one could have known? For example, the fact that Sawyer had shot and killed someone in Sydney that he had erroneously assumed to be the original "Sawyer."

- Ben seemed surprised when he found out that Sayid, Sun, and Jin had traveled to the fake Others camp using a sailboat. How was it that Ben and the Others were unaware, for over three years, that a sailboat had been openly moored on the island?

- How did Michael and Walt travel, on a tiny boat, from the Island all the way back to New York City, then grow estranged from each other -- all in the span of two months or so? Wouldn't the journey itself, on such a small boat, have taken weeks, if not months? (Would the boat even have enough fuel -- or Michael and Walt enough food and water -- to make it?) How did they make it from wherever they landed to NYC without passports (or a similar form of identification) and money?

- Was the real Henry Gale just an unfortunate balloonist who got lost, or was he working for Widmore?

Wasn't it revealed that Ben or somebody was posing as Walt and contacting Michael from the ? station? I thought that was in the Nikki/Paulo episode.

Ohhhhhhh boy..... :rolleyes:

I don't recall seeing this, although Ben and Juliet do visit the ? station in the Nikki/Paulo episode.

They briefly observe Jack on the monitors, walking around the Swan station. Juliet remarks that "Jack's cute," or words to that effect.

Hehe! I do realize that many of the "smaller" mysteries never get resolved. For example -- as much as I was trying to avoid spoilers after the series finale aired, I overheard two people in an elevator complaining that the show never explained why pregnant women started dying on the Island, when that apparently wasn't a problem as late as 1977.

Which reminds me of this amusing interchange from Scott Meyer's comic strip, Basic Instructions:

Person 1: Did you see "Lost"'s season finale?

Person 2: Shut up shut up shut up SHUT UP!

Person 1: Don't worry, I won't spoil it for you.

Person 2: I don't watch "Lost," I just want you to shut up.

^ Ha! That is funny!

P.S. Don't hold your breath waiting for many of those minor questions to be answered in Season 6. At least not explicitly. You'll just be disappointed.

But the answers can be found if you're prepared to look for/think about them.

Analysing Lost kinda reminds me of my Law school study group sessions -

'So if Jacob was doing this, then that must mean the Dhama Initiative was doing that - therefore the Others did this. A-ha! I understand that concept now!'

Unanswered questions like
Who is Henry Gale, the explanation i use is he was a guy that somehow by accident ended up crashing his balloon on the island and was killed by ben or were killed in the crash(him and his wife) and ben and his people buried them and ben used the ruse of being henry gale as a means for infiltration.

Saw the Lost Epilogue, downloaded it
I enjoyed it