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WFTB Tweetcap S5E10 He’s Our You

Tweetcap – S05E09 – Namaste

thanks @batchoutlost for the capture and tweet-herding.# ydm.

Looking at my Google Analytics blogging stats. Some observations:

• I get more traffic blog-baiting DocJensen than starting a LOST Disney petition.
• Hardly any of the blogs/articles about the petition, have driven traffic to this blog.
• Twitter is a good way to bring people in to read your blog, but not necessarily to comment.
• It’s probably because my followers just tweet me back. which I LOVE.
• it does look like the ‘lost disney petition’ might finally overwhelm such favorite google searches as:
  • compare time warner cable to verizon fios
  • navy drill commands

And finally, it appears that the person that most reads my blog, is … probably me *facepalm*

And it’s pronounced, as my Dad once wore on his church league basketball jersey: Stew-Vee

If you haven’t come here from Jeff “Doc” Jensen’s column, then let me post a picture of what I woke up to this morning.

All’s forgiven Jeff, my name’s been misspelled all my life, my favorite is “Stlieve” Ell-Eye? Really?

Once when I was at Naval Postgraduate School, I won a prize and the navy wife pronounced it like the Swedish Chef was trying to say my name. So I’m used to it.

If you’re here for the first time, I run the twitter rewatch, titled Watch From the Beginning (#WFTB) using my special twitter account LOST_WFTB. We’re currently re-watching the beginning of Season 5, with the next twitter re-watch happening on We3dnesday for Season 5 Episode 5. Tune into Twitter and re-watch with us. (And urge Doc Jensen to show up for once… Just one night…)

Peace, out.

This is rough, I’m having issues with my text editor to get this coded correctly, hopefully I can knock this out before tonight’s tweetup. Until then here are the tweets, line by line. Enjoy.

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This is a classic episode, that it ends with Mr. Eko quoting the 23rd Psalm while fire engulfs the plane wreckage that became his brother’s tomb, isn’t the game changer… It’s just the capper of a very revealing episode, that twists in things from the first season, swirls it around with what we know of the second season, and sets up a chess piece for upcoming seasons.

The backstory of Mr. Eko is telling, he’s not afraid to do what is right to protect the people he loves, but he’s also all about getting the business done, the right way, even if it means bending the laws, rules, killing people. The way the story tell of Eko’s Nigerian gangster past is somewhat surprising that we know he was wearing a priest’s collar, and has a habit for etching bible verses in tree branches. How that story is told, while winding around the Heroin infused statues of Mary, then loading them on the yellow plane that Locke found, that had lead to Boone’s death just is classic twisty LOST story telling.

The game changer was the approach of the smoke monster, to Charlie’s sound of alarm to the face to face meeting of Smokie and Eko. The slow plan through the smoke as it takes it’s measure of Mr. Eko, with flashes of faces and times that we’d never encountered, made it another screen capture/pause/wedbetterwatchthatagain moment.

Season 2 of LOST has so many good episodes and the third episode (after the vamping Adrift, second episode where much of the first episode was replayed from a different POV) has a few good head turners as the drama in the hatch is unveiled. After Kate, Jack and Locke make all nice with Desmond, well… okay, they didn’t make nice as so much distract Desmond by shooting the computer, and reducing poor Desmond to a freaked out electronics repairman. In order to save time, he tell Locke to check out the Orientation film in the library, while he tries to repair the computer with the bullet hole in it. I’m not sure if you can repair an Apple II computer with just a some solder and a spare resistor, but Dessie is just the man to try. As Kate runs to get electronic wizard and soon to be super spy Sayid to assist in the Nerd Herd emergency. Jack and Locke settle down the lounge with a Super 8 projector and we get our first look at the Dharma Initiative, and Dr. Marvin Candle (played wonderfully by Dr. Pierre Chang) and his odd artificial arm, explain to us about the Swan hatch and the protocol for saving the world.

As the film flips through the last frames, the camera focuses in on Locke and he says:

We’re gonna have to see that again…

And quite a few of us have, over and over and over again. That little bit of film started a craze of Dharma Initiative fandom that hasn’t stopped to this day. That we spend much of Season 5 encamped with the DI was wonderful to how well that was envisioned and portrayed by the writer’s and the production staff.

The other shocker was that there was at least one more survivor of Flight 815, her name was Ana Lucia, but she appears to be in cahoots with that shady bunch of ‘Others’ that captured and imprisoned Sawyer, Michael and Jin. The word ‘Other’ was used a few times in the first season, and it’s a tribute, I think, to the story that it can be used for so many groups of people on LOST, the natives were others, the tailies were others, the DI was others, in reality, all of us are others to people that don’t know us.

That’s why I liked Orientation, and why I think it changed the way I percieved the show LOST. Certainly a game changer.

Here is the transcript from last night’s WFTB (Watch From The Beginning) tweetup. Click more to see all the tweets. Enjoyed getting this final season underway. h/t to @batchout for collecting all the tweets.
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I got asked this question:

Do you think Rose & Bernnie’s actions in “The Incident” have anything to do with Jacob’s theory that “there is only one end, everything else is just progress?”

If there is anyone who gets a raw deal from a Reset, it’s Rose and Bernard, but before I continue with my answer, I think we need to put Jacob’s comments in the proper context, the below is from Lostpedia:

BLOND MAN: I take it you’re here ’cause of the ship.

GRAY-HAIRED MAN: I am. How did they find the Island?

BLOND MAN: You’ll have to ask ‘em when they get here.

GRAY-HAIRED MAN: I don’t have to ask. You brought them here. Still trying to prove me wrong, aren’t you?

BLOND MAN: You are wrong.

GRAY-HAIRED MAN: Am I? They come. They fight. They destroy. They corrupt. It always ends the same.

BLOND MAN: It only ends once. Anything that happens before that is just progress.

I think within that conversation lies the key to LOST, or at least the battle between Jacob (blond man) and MiB (Grey-haired man).  The MiB has a rather nihilistic view of the world, where the players that get brought to the island always devolve into a struggle, that ends up destructive.  I think Jacob takes a longer view, and that while they struggle and fight, in the end there is something worth all the pain.  I think the picture we are treated to with Rose and Bernard in the incident show two people that have given up struggling and end up living peacefully.  I think it’s somewhat relevant that Vincent (that some see as a sort of avatar for Jacob) settled in with R&B while the Dharma people and the natives continue struggling against each other.

In Rose and Bernard we see two people that have finally found peace in their circumstances.  They may have their own little squabbles over the day to day activities, but they’re not raging against the machine, or Mib or Jacob, or fate.  They’re happy.

Then the bomb goes BOOM and they get put back on that plane and Rose’s cancer returns.  A reset would be totally unfair.  Though they did get to live three years of bliss on the island before getting reset.  I can see why many people see Rose and Bernard as perhaps the Adam and Eve skeletons, where Jack grabs the black and white rock from, and I think is still in his possession.  If anyone has a chance at a ‘only ends once, everything else is just progress’ I suppose the glimpse we have of Rose and Bernard could be the archetype of what ‘progress’ looks like instead of the constant warring that goes on around them.

Did I answer the question?

The rest of Season 1 of LOST was made of excellent, but the arc moved fairly predictably as I learned more about each character.  There were some surprises, like the discovery of the mysterious hatch, the sabotaging of the raft, the mystery man Ethan Rom, the appearance of Danielle Rousseau, which kept the story moving, but nothing that stands out to me now as head turning, and game changing.  The pace of Season 1 was relaxed as I was introduced to each character via their backstories, we found out some surprises, Locke was a dupe, Kate a fugitive, Boone and Shannon were secret lovers, but nothing game changing.

Then in the season finale all sorts of things happened, the raft launched, then a boat full of others kidnapped Walt (aka Waaaaaaalt) Danielle tried to kidnap Aaron, and Jack, Kate, Hurley and Locke blew up the door of the hatch.  (Oh yeah, Doc Artz blew up too, that was all kinds of amazing)

Which leads to the first classic LOST mind blowing season opener.  Man of Science Man of Faith, the title didn’t give much away, other than stress the building confrontation between Jack and John. The opening scene lured me into thinking, here’s another flashback, but the curiousness of the modern washer and dryer along with an old record player, then a really old exercise bike, and suddenly I’m captivated, this isn’t a flashback, this is someone new… Why does he enter Hurley’s number’s into that old computer? Why is he giving himself an injection?  What was that on his coveralls.  A *BOOM*, dust settling out of the ceiling from the unexpected explosion, an amory full of guns, a fancy mirror system that leads us down a dim hall, then up a shaft, then suddenly staring at the faces of Jack and John peering down out of the torch illuminated darkness.

Oh LOST how much I missed you…

This also setup the tradition of taking a few episodes to wind down from the previous seasons finale, at the end of the episode we didn’t learn anything about what happened on the raft, or to Michael, Jin and Sawyer.  This was all about Jack, who we all knew as the Man of Science, and his healing of a pretty young lady that he saved from being in a car crash (the other victim, the driver, was Shannon’s father… oh LOST! you and your 6 degrees of separation)  His late night run in the stadium with a mysterious Scotsman, that encourages him to hope, to have faith (Maybe Jack is also the Man of Faith?) in his abilities, then goes back to running the stadium tour with a hearty, “See you in another Life, brutha!”

The episode flew by so quickly, that I almost felt cheated… Until the final reveal of the man inhabiting the hatch, was… The man from the stadium tour!  Um, guys… Where ARE we?  And why do I have to wait another week to find out more!