Category Archives: Television

Hurley and Miles – Space time dialogs…

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In the episode “Whatever Happened, Happened” Miles and Hurley have a couple of key discussions about the nature of spacetime as it relates to being stuck in 1977.  I’m postulating that Miles’ summary will also prove to be correct if the Bomb changes everything #BCE

First part is when Sawyer sends Miles back to the barracks to sit on Jack, Kate and Hurley, since things are spiraling out of control.

[Miles is loading his rifle.]

JACK: You’re telling us we’re under house arrest?

MILES: No, you’re all free to leave whenever you want…but I’ll shoot you in the leg.

JACK: [Sighs] And whose idea was this?

MILES: Who do you think?

KATE: Sawyer’s just doing his job, Jack.

[Miles looks at Jack and points at Kate, emphasizing her point. Miles walks over to the table where Hurley is inspecting his hand.]

MILES: What the hell are you doing, Tubby?

HURLEY: Checking to see if I’m disappearing.

MILES: What?

HURLEY: "Back to the Future," man. We came back in time to the island and changed stuff. So if little Ben dies, he’ll never grow up to be big Ben, who’s the one who made us come back here in the first place. Which means we can’t be here. And therefore, dude? We don’t exist.

MILES: You’re an idiot. [Takes a seat at the table]

HURLEY: Am I?

MILES: Yeah. It doesn’t work like that. You can’t change anything. You’re maniac Iraqi buddy shot Linus. That is what always happened. It’s just…we never experienced how it all turns out.

[Hurley looks at Jack, confused.]

HURLEY: This is really confusing.

MILES: Yeah, well, get used to it. But the good news is that Linus didn’t die, so that means the kid can’t either. He’ll be fine.

KATE: Didn’t look like he was gonna be fine. What if you’re wrong?

MILES: Well, if I’m wrong, then I guess we all stop existing, and none of it matters anyway then, does it?

Next miles and Hurley are sitting in the barracks (Kate has left after getting mad at Jack for not DOing SOMETHING!!!) and are still on the space time talk.

[Hurley is seated in the house, questioning Miles.]

HURLEY: Let me get this straight.

[Miles is pacing.]

HURLEY: All this already happened.

MILES: Yes.

HURLEY: So this conversation we’re having right now…we already had it.

MILES: [Claps his hands] Yes!

HURLEY: Then what am I gonna say next?

MILES: I don’t know. [Shakes his head.]

HURLEY: Ha’! Then your theory is wrong!

MILES: For the thousandth time, you dingbat, the conversation already happened, but not for you and me. For you and me, it’s happening right now.

HURLEY: Okay, answer me this. If all this already happened to me, then…why don’t I remember any of it?

MILES: Because once Ben turned that wheel, time isn’t a straight line for us anymore. Our experiences in the past and the future occurred before these experiences right now.

[Hurley’s face tightens in confusion as he thinks, Miles stares at him.]

HURLEY: Say that again.

MILES: [Pauses in exasperation and pulls out his gun and holds it out for Hurley to take.] Shoot me. Please. Please!

HURLEY: Aha! I can’t shoot you. Because if you die in 1977, then you’ll never come back to the island on the freighter 30 years from now.

MILES: I can die because I’ve already come to the island on the freighter. Any of us can die because this is our present.

HURLEY: But you said Ben couldn’t die because he still has to grow up and become the leader of the Others.

MILES: Because this is his past.

HURLEY: But when we first captured Ben, and Sayid, like, tortured him, then why wouldn’t he remember getting shot by that same guy when he was a kid?

[Miles blinks and looks around. Hurley raises his eyebrow.]

MILES: Huh. I hadn’t thought of that.

HURLEY: Huh. [Crossing his arms.]

 

We learn later in the episode that Ben’s memory of getting shot are changed from being healed by Richard in the temple.  How that happened specifically is still a mystery.  This scene was cut between Kate, Roger and Juliet working on little Ben in the infirmary. So it was cut into the episode with a purpose, I think it explains to us how the time travel thing works in Lost’s universe.  So read on and read me BCmE theory again.

Bomb Changes (most) Everything.

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Call it my #BCE post.  Since I started re-watching LOST I’ve been considering two options that I’d been thinking were mutually exclusive:

  • Whatever Happened Happened (#WHH) – Can’t change the past, whatever happened happened, one continuous timeline, and even though Daniel, Sawyer, Miles, Juliet, Hurley, Jin, Kate and Jack are in 1977, they still have memories of time that happened after that (before they jumped back in time in 2004 or 2007)
  • Bomb Changes Everything (#BCE) – This comes from Daniel’s revelation about focusing on the Variables, and that their actions can change the past, that if he can negate the magnetic anomaly then that changes the future.

But, what if I’m wrong?  What if they’re not mutually exclusive.  What if we can do both, whatever happened, happen while negating the magnetic anomaly and changing the need for button pressing to keep the massive magnetic field at bay, and the resultant accident that caused Oceanic 815 to crash on the island?

First we need to backtrack a bit, along these time-jumping soaked theories.  We were first introduced to the concept of time travel from the effects that turning the failsafe key had on Desmond.  He’d become a bit detached from time, his consciousness returning to the key moment where he’d tossed his ring in the river, and left Penny and joined the army, setting down a path where he’d enter the sailboat race to win Penny’s heart (or at least give him the assurance that he deserved Penny) which brought him to the island.  In that same story (Flashes Before Your Eyes) we were introduced to Eloise Hawking, who told Desmond that the Universe had a way of course correcting, she could have saved “red shoes” life that day, but he’d only die the next.  Trace that down the line and we get Daniel’s assertion that whatever happened, happened.

Desmond experimented with this line of thinking, setting his goal to save Charlie’s life, and if he could continue to do that, by his thinking, then we could change his future and end up with Penny and live happily ever after.  In The Constant we saw the culmination of this story, when we saw Desmond make a call from the freighter and reconnect with Penny (his Constant) and sets down the path to being saved from the island with the Oceanic 6 and going into hiding with Penny on their sailboat.

Desmond is special. I think Desmond IS the constant, by turning the failsafe key (at some point in the future) his being/consciousness is a constant which we can glean a nugget of proof from when Daniel made contact with him while hopping through time at the beginning of Season 5.  Daniel was able to get a message to ‘present day’ Desmond to seek out his mother (Elosie Hawking).  Odd cross-timeline communication.

Break for a second, and consider a scene from Fringe.  In the scene, Olivia was investigating the Observer August, and some lab flunky was explaining time, and poured water through a tube, to demonstrate how we usually experience time, one-way, first-in-first-out.  He then stopped up the tube, and filled it with water, then stopped up the other end, and said, I think these people experience time like this, all at once.

Okay, end break, and consider an explanation from time from LOST University, where spacetime is considered a landscape of events.  If we laid out all the events that are possible on a sheet of paper called space time, we could arrive at different places on that landscape by drawing a line (time) to travel between events.  Consider that time travel is ‘cheating’ by bending space time (the paper) and moving between two events not in a line (time) along space time, but through a space (from one side of the paper to the other) backdoor.

In that sense, and as I’m trying to understand it, everything happens at once, the concept of time is how we travel through space time.  But we only experience time as we move through it.  So as far as we’re concerned whatever happened, happened, along the line we’re traveling.

There have been hints of this that we’ve observed in Season 5.  Sawyer witnessing the birth of Aaron, just as we saw it in Season 1.  Locke telling Richard to tell past Locke that he’d have to die in order to bring the others back.  Sawyer remembering that his parents died while he was stuck in 1977.  This dual presence might even explain Christian Shepherd wondering around the island like he owns the place.

Consider the Variables (my team name for Sawyer, Juliet, Kate, Jack, Miles, Hurley and Jin) explode the bomb like Daniel (is he team Variable, or is he dead, because he was always meant to go back and get shot by his mom) told them to, thus creating (or really shifting to) a new timeline where the Incident never happened, no emergency sarcophagus for the magnetic anomaly at the Swan Station, no need for a failsafe, and no need for button pushing.  BUT, all those things have already happened, and they have always happened.  But our people have shifted lines at the point of the incident from the one where all the safety procedures were necessary to one where they are not needed.

So, what changes?  Sawyer is still an orphan (that already happened) and he’s now synced with his future self along that time line, but can recall the memories (as if a dream) of the past timeline only it’s 2004 and he’s back on Oceanic flight 815, maybe having lived out all the things that he did the first time.  Same with all the characters on that flight.

Who is on the island in 1977 (for real, not a Variable) that could have changed thing for people on the mainland?  I can’t think of anyone.  Remember the popular theory is that the Swan hatch with Radinzsky, Kelvin Inman and later Desmond was unknown to the hostiles (Widmore, Eloise, Benjamin) even up to the purge. Danielle’s research team didn’t come to the island because of the magnetic anomaly, so they’d still land to investigate the signal and be attacked by Smokie just as we saw in Jin’s journey through time.  Ben would still be a part of the purge, then make Widmore an outcast.

Some of my own pushback.  Eloise is pregnant with Daniel, perhaps, so Daniel is yet to be born, and this is a paradox, he’ll be born on a timeline where the magnetic anomaly has already been negated, and his life would be totally different, maybe a concert pianist.  But if he did that, then how did the Variables ever get the idea to explode the bomb.  Well two Daniels, just as there are two Lockes, two Christian’s…

I’ll need to ponder this more, but wanted to share it with the scads of people that want to read this! 😉

It’s Ess Tee Ewe Eee Vee Eee

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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.

steuve

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.

LOST Game Changers – The 23rd Psalm

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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.

LOST – Game Changers – Orientation

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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.

What about Rose and Bernard?

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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?

LOST Game Changers – Man of Science Man of Faith

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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!

a Family of Gleeks

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I was reminded yesterday that my whole family LOVES the show Glee.  We’re kinda going through minor withdrawl symptoms since the finale last week, but that should subside slightly with the onset of AI 2010, where my girls, all three of them (@sweetbippy, @Funfizzer and @TotalRenji13) will be rooting for their favorite singer in the batch while we wait for Glee’s return.

At least this year, LOST is on Tuesday nights, and won’t interfere with the American Idol results party we host every Wednesday after choir practice.

We all enjoy the songs on Glee and sing them compulsively over the next few days after an episode airs, a trend that will continue after @TotalRenji’s birthday coup of a copy of the Glee 2 soundtrack album.  This is what happens when you have a family that just loves music, like all the gleeks do in that show.

Beyond the music I also love the humor, from Sue’s biting disdain for anything that isn’t her cheerios, to Brittany’s awesome non-sequiturs.  I also love that the show doesn’t take itself too seriously.  One of the moments that gets lost in every other moment of awesome in this show is the behind closed doors Judges meeting at Sectionals.  The recurring theme of the show has been Mr. Shuester’s constant gaming of his selections by finding out and explaining what the judges will like in the performances of the show choirs.  It’s hilariously funny to find out that none of the judges have any real business judging a choir competition, nor any other singing competition.

I also think they poke fun at themselves for after all the build up of the sectionals competition, we don’t get to see an over the top awards presentation ala the ending of Sister Act.  I’m sure it’s to keep their powder dry for the Finals, but in the end the Sectionals should always have been won by the wonderful Gleeks of Wiliam McKinley High.

LOST Game Changers … continued – Walkabout

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Okay, so I made a nice little list of episodes that I thought were game changers, ranked them in order, so I could to a top ten count down like build up thing.  Then I LOST the list.  Oh Irony, smite me now!

So change of plans, I’ll just blather on about the game changers that matter to me, no more rankings, and y’all can self-rank, agree, disagree or just point and laugh in mirth in the comments.

So…

Walkabout

This was the fourth hour of the LOST universe, and while the Pilot and Tabula Rasa were both wonderfully done, and had all the nice twisty turns we’ve come to love and expect from LOST, Walkabout is the one that dug the fish hook into the flesh of my cheek and hooked me into fandom.

We’d gotten some hints that Locke’s character was a bit dualistic by this point.  He’d been forming a friendship with Walt, gave an impressive little solioquy about the game of backgammon, and  of course the orange rind smile both entertained and creepied me out.

The opening scene of the crash and the yellow-threaded toe wriggle should have cued us in that the writer’s were going to pull one over on us.  The setup set in our brain, we go back to present island time and backing Vincent, and a fuselage full of boars (not Sawyer… Jack).  The scene had me leaning to an exposition of the monster, or whatever it was, but it just became a mundane normal creature, that John Locke would now become the hunter/provider of the survivors.

The secondary story of gathering kindling and firewood to torch the fuselage, while peeking at Sayid’s triangulation plan to locate the 16 year old signal.  The episode had a more relaxed feel, with the ending montage of the the survivors as the fuselage burns was touching with Michael Giacchino’s soaring score.

The flash of a hunting knife, contrasted with Locke’s exposition on the details and habits of a razorback boar, had be totally bought into flashback’s tickler that Locke was a military man, but we soon realized that Colonel Locke was his name only in a fantasy role playing game he played at lunch, while getting humiliated by his boss Randy.  The haunting sound of Locke’s adding machine, echoes the now telltale sign of the imminent appearance smoke monster.

The meandering stories this episode sets up so many themes that carry through the rest of the season, some even carry on into season six: caring for and memorializing the dead, figuring out more about the transmission, the hunt for food and provisions, thy mystery of the monster, destiny, “don’t tell me what I can’t do”, Nadia,  Helen, the relationships between Rose and Jack, Michael and Sun, Charlie and Hurley,  even Charlie and Shannon are all entertwined in a story of a boar hunt gone wrong.  The ending hooks of finding out that Locke was going on a walkabout while wheelchair bound, Jack running after the guy in the blue suit to find a blood covered John Locke hauling in the corpse of the boar.

They hid a lot of things in plain sight in this episode, but within it I saw into the heart of the series, and what I saw was … beautiful.