Lost Again (Babble)

I’ve had some time now to contemplate the ending to the show Lost, and since I don’t have anyone here to discuss it with, you lucky people get to read my musings on it.  (Or not.  I have complete sympathy for people who are not interested.  It’d be like trying to have a discussion with me about sports.  I don’t care.  You can’t make me care.)  This post is also a mess of spoilers, so for those who may still watch it all, don’t read this.  (I’m talking to you, Kraco5.  Go read this old post again if you need something to pass the time.)  If you never plan to see it, read and enjoy how nonsensical I can sound!  I know that at this point even people who care might not care because it comes on the heels of a lot of more timely analysis, but remember, I don’t have a husband around to talk to, and I just want to get some thoughts out of my head.  Indulge me and share some of your own theories.

Okay, my thoughts on Lost for anyone who cares to read them are these:  The finale, on an emotional level, was satisfying.  You couldn’t ask for a more perfect set of last few images than Jack stumbling past his father’s weathered tennis shoe and lying down in the bamboo to die.  To watch the plane fly away was hopeful, and I was a wreck when Vincent the dog showed up to lie down with him so he wouldn’t die alone.  The eye shutting to that last little note of music was perfect.  The symmetry of all of that was beautiful.  The episode, like the series in general, left us with a lot to think about.  That’s the fun of it.


I’ve been reading too many reactions online of people who seem to have confused the explanation of the sideways timeline with the island timeline.  The sideways timeline may have been a kind of purgatory, but I think they made it pretty clear the island was not.  I don’t think we need a perfect explanation for anything that happened in sideways land because it was a fiction they were creating for themselves.  Our core characters wanted to move on together to whatever comes next, and there is no way to know how long the sideways timeline played out until that happened.  For all we know Hurley and Ben ran the island for a thousand years before they died.  I like that idea, because that would mean after a millennium of penance Ben was still working things out before he could move on.  (Which seems appropriate for someone who killed so many.)  I think the moment Rose told Jack he could ‘let go now’ on the plane at the beginning of the season was the moment Jack died on the island.  That would mean even though as viewers it looked as if the sideways timeline was in the past, it was a form of the future we were catching up to, which has a very Lost type twist to it.  Despite arguable problems with the sideways stories, the awakenings and reunions in that timeline were also satisfying.  I loved Sawyer and Juliet by the vending machine and getting an explanation for what she was saying when she died in his arms at the beginning of the season.

Great stories don’t typically answer every question.  If they did there would be nothing left to discuss.  I know at the last book club meeting with Aden and her friends we talked about our theories of how the grandmother in the story The Witches lost her thumb.  Roald Dahl never tells you, and it’s far more interesting and mysterious that way.  If we had a simple explanation it would have killed the discussion because what would be the point of talking about it?  Mysteries where you get to fill in every blank become disposable, like a finished crossword puzzle.  Lost decided to leave us with many things to puzzle out, and in general I don’t have a problem with that.

BUT!  As much as I’m willing to let certain answers go, here are the ones I’m annoyed I didn’t get:  I seriously needed the backstories for Widmore, Hawking, and Libby.  I also wanted to know if Desmond’s interference in the regular timeline that was sparking course corrections was also responsible for retroactive changes as well (which would help explain away inconsistencies, like how Charlie couldn’t swim originally and was a champion swimmer later, or why that image he saw of Claire escaping with the baby on a helicopter never happened).

There is this hilarious bit about unanswered questions here, but some of these do have answers already (for instance, that image of Ben’s mom had to be the smoke monster, and ‘The Economist’ was Widmore).  The main one in this list that bugs me too is why The Others were in disguises ever.  What was that about?  And in my opinion the fertility issues on the island were the biggest thing that really should have been explained.  That was central to so many stories over and over I think that was unfair to offer us nothing on that topic.  And the reason Chrisitan Shephard could appear in so many places the smoke monster couldn’t?  I think it really was the ghost of Christian Shepard.  When Jack saw him standing in the water in White Rabbit?  And later in the flash forward?  I think he really saw his dad.  Not sure why he would appear to Michael on the freighter, but I suppose once one accepts dead people injected into a storyline, one should not get too picky about why they do what they do.  I think when the smoke monster in Locke form told Jack he was posing as his father, he was (gasp!) lying.

Here are my other guesses on a lot of things.  As much as I know many people disliked Across the Sea, I think it answered a lot of questions.  And I don’t mean the obvious ones, I mean that because we know the backstory for Jacob and his brother it explains a lot.  Jacob had important powers and responsibilities (although I couldn’t help thinking while he was at his loom about that quote from the Holy Grail where the knights are standing around watching the Mighty Tim make flames pop up from the ground and they say to him, “I can see you’re a busy man….”)–but the thing about Jacob is that he was really just a guy, and one with a messed up history at that.  How did he choose the people he picked to come to the island?  Well, how would you?  It could be for any random reason that seemed good the day he thought of it.  If a god is picking out people you expect certain standards, but a lonely guy with mommy issues?  I’m impressed he picked as well as he did.  Same goes for the smoke monster’s motivations.  Why did he kill the people he killed?  Again, a clever vengeful devil should do something evil with meaningful impact, but a lonely dead twin made of smoke with mommy issues?  Maybe he left people alone who were interesting to watch and killed others when he got bored.  I can see that.

In any case, I have a sense that the combination of Jacob’s powers and his general flaws helped create a lot of things that don’t make sense.  Maybe all those goofy costumes The Others were wearing were made for them by Jacob on his loom.  What else did he have to do most days?  (It doesn’t explain the bad fake beards, but there are weirder choices people make in reality, so whatever.)   Heck, the island looked uneventful enough most centuries he could have built that giant statue of Tawaret himself.  Also, our only clue on the fertility issues is the death of Jacob’s birth mom and his complicated feelings for his adoptive mother.  Maybe someone with Jacob’s powers doesn’t have complete conscious control of them.  Maybe any time he spent brooding over his mommy issues bled over onto all of the island in such a way that they became part of the fabric of existence there.  Maybe under Hurley’s reign the fertility issues ended and a new statue was built to honor ranch dressing.  Could happen.

Or maybe it had nothing to do with Jacob, and the glowy warm light with its warming glowy glow was causing interference for anyone else also trying to create life so close by.  I can see that, too.  But it would have been nice to have the writers of the show at least point us toward some kind of answer instead of leaving it so open.  I can let go of questions about the polar bears because that was probably some Dharma thing that a scientist with grant money thought was a good idea.  I can also explain away the mysterious Dharma food drops as related to the goofy time problems on the island.  For all we know the food drops happened in the 70’s and thanks to temporal anomalies didn’t hit the ground for 30 years.  Why not?

Widmore is still a puzzle.  I think he was working for Jacob, or trying to help Jacob in his own way, but wasn’t necessarily carrying out specific orders.  I don’t think Jacob, for instance, told Widmore to fake the plane crash at the bottom of the sea, but Widmore saw an opportunity to ‘help’ and went ahead with it.  In terms of his being inconsistent on things like letting Ben keep the baby, well, it just speaks to someone winging it.  If he was trying to help Jacob and not getting any decent direction, then he’d have to just go with his own judgment, and I’m sure ordering someone to kill a baby in a way that feels abstract is different from the baby showing up in front of you and then making a decision about whether it lives or dies.  That just seems human, and putting a fickle human spin on many of Lost’s mysteries may explain many of them.  The only big Widmore plan I do think Jacob was involved in was priming Desmond to be able to uncork the island.  I think the quarantine stuff was simply to keep him in the hatch where pushing that button for so many years immunized him against its electromagnetic effects.  Or maybe there really was some kind of ‘infection’ that was related to the smoke monster.  But that whole thing makes my head hurt, because I didn’t get the sense that the children stolen off the beach were getting injections, so why was Ethan intent on injecting Claire and her baby?  Ugh.

Here’s a LIbby theory I have that I haven’t read anywhere yet:  I think her dead husband was the same dead David that Hurley was talking to.  I think both Libby and Hurley could speak to the dead and that’s why they were both in the mental institution, and when David tries to trick Hurley into jumping off the cliff on the island it’s motivated by jealousy over Libby.  Somehow Libby must be tied to Widmore so that she could get the boat to Desmond, but I guess how or why we’ll never know.  That we wasted any time learning about Jack’s tattoos when we could have had a Libby backstory is a bit maddening.  (Or even an Ilana backstory.  Heck, I’d have even preferred a director’s cut of an episode of Expose.)

Zombie Sayid needed some kind of explanation.  That wasn’t fair to have him rise from the dead and not let us know what was up with that.  And why did Claire leave her baby?  I thought she was dead for a long time, killed in the explosion in Dharmaville that took out all those redshirts, but in the end she flies home, so I guess not.  Zombie Claire made more sense.  (You know something has not been sufficiently explained when a walking dead theory seems the most reasonable.)

Anyway, it was a good ride.  I loved being surprised and hated waiting so long between episodes and the whole thing was a good use of the medium of TV.  I can’t believe it stretched out for Mona’s entire lifetime, but it was worth watching.  (I nursed her all through season 1 and a bit into season 2!)  I’m tempted to buy the over-priced definitive box set when it comes out, but it’s still all free on Hulu, so I may start watching it all again from the beginning.  Knowing what I know now it will be extra enjoyable and frustrating this time.  I have a few more months before Ian gets home to get through it all.  It’s hard to sleep without him, so I tend to watch programs on my computer at night until I can’t stay awake anymore.  Lost reruns could serve that purpose well.

Anyone have any other theories about any of the big unanswered Lost questions?  I’d love to read them.

So Many Roads (Babble)

Whew.  I did a lot of driving this past weekend and I’m still feeling a little dazed.
My cousin and his wife are expecting a baby in June and they had a shower for the occasion in Ohio on Saturday.  I love my cousin and I’m very excited for them and thought to myself how hard could driving out there for a quick visit be?  Ha.  The only real problem with the timing was that the series finale of Lost was on Sunday and I had planned to watch it with my mom.  She’s in Michigan.  So I added a trip up to Detroit to the itinerary, checked a couple of DVDs out of the library for the kids to watch in the car, packed a bag and an air mattress and we hit the road.

I pulled the kids out of school on Friday and did the all day drive with many potty stops and a meal at Denny’s in about ten hours (I think–I lost track with the time zone change).  We were planning to stay with a relative when we got to Columbus, but halfway there we found out she was about to bury her adorable but ancient dog Smokey Joe who had died a couple of nights before.  I didn’t want to burden her with house guests while she was so sad, so we called a friend who we trust really means it when she says, “Come stay with us anytime!”  Short notice indeed for a minivan full of freeloaders to just arrive and stay two nights, but my friend couldn’t be nicer, and she really didn’t seem to mind.  (She even seemed a little sad we couldn’t stay longer, which means she’s also a little crazy, which means I love her even more now.)


I think it worked out for the better that we ended up at my friend’s home.  My kids are comfortable there and toys are abundant.  But the nice thing for me was that I was able to leave my kids playing happily for a couple of hours while I visited my grandma in a nearby nursing home.  She’s been moved to a higher level of care since I last saw her, and it was good to be able to spend a little time with her quietly, without my kids along as a distraction.

Seeing my grandma anymore is surreal.  She’s fading away.  She seems to live in a dreamlike state, and I hope with all my heart that it’s pleasant for her.  But in certain surprising moments she’s still my grandma, and during those moments I realize just how much I miss her.  She asked me several times (each time as if it were the first) when Ian is coming home.  I would catch her up on how he’s doing, but all that talk of a beloved husband returning to Milwaukee from a war kept morphing into grandpa in her mind.  It’s hard to know when she makes a comment what she’s actually commenting on.  We could carry on a conversation, but I have no way of knowing if we were sharing the same one.  I told her how Ian asked if we could please go to the cottage in Michigan for a little vacation when he gets back from Iraq and she looked delighted.  My grandma loved her cottage, and after a few moments of thinking about it she started talking to me as if we were there.  I suppose if you can live in a nursing home but in your mind live in your favorite place from any moment in time, that would be the silver lining of what’s happened to my grandma, but it still makes me sad. 

I miss her so much, and it’s confusing to miss her most when I’m holding her hand in my own.  It usually upsets her when I tell her I’m leaving, so now when I go I just tell her the next thing I’m doing in lieu of goodbye.  I told her Saturday when I took her to the dining area for lunch at the end of our visit that I was going to check on my kids.  I don’t know if she waited for me to return, or if she even remembered I was ever there a few moments after I was gone.  I just don’t know much about my grandma anymore.  But I’m certain she still loves me, and for that I’m humbled and grateful.

(My gram and me.  We’ve both looked better but it will have to do.)

The rest of that day I spent out with the kids at the baby shower.  The jumble of emotions at that event was bizarre.  I was still reflecting on my visit with grandma which was bittersweet, I was thrilled for my cousin and his wife, sad about the dog that had died, proud of my kids for behaving well, anxious about being shy around all the people I didn’t know, happy to see relatives I’ve missed, and depressed that Ian wasn’t there.  It was a wonderful party and well worth all the driving, but I was emotionally wiped out by the end of it.  If I were to write the experience down as fiction people would complain that juxtaposing large themes of birth and death and love and loss into such a condensed setting would be unrealistic.  But life is really like that more often than we care to admit.

That night my kids got to bed way too late because I’d tried to read the new kids’ book club selection to Aden (The Witches by Roald Dahl) and it made her so scared she cried.  I was up telling amusing stories about our old pet rabbits for a good hour so the kids would go to sleep happy instead of upset.  Poor Aden.  Part of me appreciates that she’s so tenderhearted, and part of me thinks I need to toughen her up fast or the real world will destroy her.

The next morning we hit the road again and made it to my parents’ house by mid afternoon.  I do have to say that my kids are troopers in the car.  It’s hard driving for such long stretches, but it would be infinitely worse if my kids weren’t so nice to travel with.  They watched movies in the backseat and laughed and sang and slept while leaning on each other, and I couldn’t have asked for them to be better.  I was never that good so I don’t know where they get it from.  Must be their dad.

Anyway, when I arrived at my parents’ house and mentioned something about looking forward to watching the last episode of Lost on the big TV, my mom said, “Oh, no, we only use that one for DVDs because it needs a converter box.  We’re going to watch on the little TV in the kitchen.”  I let out a small scream and said I did not wait six years and drive all those miles to watch my one show wrap up on a small kitchen TV.  No no no.  I don’t ask for much (my husband is reading this on another part of the globe thinking “Except for a newer bigger house….”) but Lost has been my one little entertainment luxury that I cling to desperately, and even though it was rude I said we needed to find a better place to watch.  My mom, being awesome, called a neighbor who was out of town to get permission to use her TV.  This turned out to have the added bonus that I got to watch without my kids in the same house, so it was a really nice break.  (There was also the amusing element of a friend of my mom’s watching with us who hadn’t seen the show in years and asked me to get him “caught up.”  I told him there was no catching up on Lost.  You either invest yourself in it or there’s no point to it.  It’s just not a casual show.  I found myself doing some impolite shushing during the program that I’m embarrassed by, but you just can’t jump in at the finale and ask me what’s happening because I barely know myself and need to pay attention.)

So getting to watch Lost with my mom was fun, and my kids got to draw with my dad which they loved, and then first thing Monday morning we were back on the highway.   The things I was reminded of during this leg of the journey was how amazing it is that there can be nothing appealing on so many radio stations across much of the midwest, and that there is no good time to drive through Chicago when the sun is up.  We got home in time for a late dinner and even later baths.  The nice thing was I had hired some friends to install a few sorely needed outlets in different rooms in my house while we were gone, and coming back to little improvements was like getting gifts from unseen elves.  (Electrician elves are among the best kind.)

That was my weekend.  I’m glad we did it, and I’m glad it’s over.  (And it got me fantasizing again about how marvelous a transporter a la Star Trek would be for certain trips.  Someone is working on that for real, right?  Please?)

(RIP Smokey Joe.  We loved you.)

Totally Lost (Babble)

I am one of those crazy people completely devoted to the show ‘Lost.’  There are programs here or there that I enjoy but I watch them all on my computer.  Lost is the only TV show I must watch in real time.  Lost is both ridiculous and great.

For those of you who haven’t seen it, you should see it.  But not this season.  You have to go back and start from the first season and watch everything from the beginning.  I purposely got my mom addicted to Lost because I had to have somebody in my family to talk about it with, and neither of my brothers even owns a TV.  I watched the first season with my husband, but both he and a friend I used to work with decided they preferred my summary and analysis the next day better than actually watching the show.  That’s sort of flattering, but not very satisfying.  Ian would patiently read in bed during the show and then ask me to tell him the episode I’d just seen after it was over.  Now he’s completely out of touch with it, so he listens to me spout off about random things that make no sense.

Which isn’t saying much because very little of Lost makes sense, but it’s a whole lot of fun.  It’s the ultimate TV watching experience for nerds like me who like keeping track of tiny details and drawing from a broad base of liberal arts knowledge.  Any scraps of information you know about philosophy or mythology or the bible or Star Wars or The Wizard of Oz or Alice in Wonderland all pay off.  It’s nice to feel in on a reference that isn’t spelled out for you.  It’s nice to be treated like an intelligent viewer.


But the most fun for me is that nearly every week I am surprised.  I am so seldom surprised by stories told in movies or TV or even many novels that it’s a treat to gasp and then call my mom on the phone and ask, “Did you see that coming?!”  And we never see it coming, because it’s insane while still seeming smart.  The cliffhanger from the last season was the biggest cliffhanger I’ve ever watched on anything.  I couldn’t even begin to guess what would be happening this season.  Then the new season started and I still don’t know what’s going on.  It’s fascinating.

And it’s a fabulous distraction.  For one hour a week I don’t think about if my husband is in danger in Iraq or if there are bills to pay or how I’m not exercising like I should be or all the things I could have done better with my children or at work.  Lost throws too much at me in an average hour.  It’s extremely diverting.  As deeply as you want to look into anything there is a payoff.  If there is a TV on in the background on that show, it’s usually showing a connection to someone else you know about.  Numbers pop up that seem meaningful.  Names on signs are anagrams that provide clues to some plot point.  The central themes are all about faith and science, destiny and the connections between people, evil and light and our sense of purpose.  There are polar bears and hieroglyphs and a frozen donkey wheel and a submarine and enough other absurd sounding things that you sound like you’re just making stuff up if you try to explain any of it to the uninitiated and uninterested.  But if you are into it, it’s both thoughtful and exciting.  The body count is unbelievable.  So while you are contemplating the differences between the philosophies of Locke and Hume to gain insight on a certain character’s motivation, someone onscreen is being strangled or shot with flaming arrows or knifed in the back unexpectedly.  Six years in and I still don’t know who the good guys are for sure.  I love it.

The kids have been pretty accommodating about my request for my one show.  They know when we get back from choir practice that they must go straight to the bathroom to brush teeth and then go to bed.  For the girls it’s what they would do anyway, but they know to be more efficient about the whole bedtime routine when the clock is running down for the start of Lost.  Quinn doesn’t want to go to bed that early, but he agrees to it on the condition that I promise to come get him if there is a ‘kid part.’  I always tuck him in and assure him the second a kid part happens I will open the door and let him know.  (There are no kid parts–did I mention the body count?  And as cheesy as I find the Smoke Monster it would scare my kids silly.)  So I get an hour to myself.  (Well, myself and the biggest cast of characters I’ve ever tried to follow on one show, plus my mom on the phone saying, “What does it mean?”)

There are only a handful of episodes left before the program wraps up.  I’m hoping after this many years of investing in one crazy storyline I’m not disappointed (still grumbling under my breath about the finale of Battlestar Galactica), but it’s been a fun ride regardless.  I’ve got my kids so well trained on Tuesday nights I’m tempted to let them think the show is still running past May.  Maybe I can use that hour to read or write or just sit in silence without anyone asking me for anything.  It’s a Lost hour I don’t want to lose.