WFTB – S1E4 – Walkabout – tweecap
Walkabout is the fourth hour of LOST’s opening season. For myself and many this episode was the hook that caught us up in the unfolding mystery of the island (or trapped us in Jacob’s net). The plot focuses on John Locke both on an island quest for wild boar (need to keep Hurley fed) and his pre-island life and what led up to him being on Oceanic flight 815.
We started the Live Tweet a little late, but it was well attended and had some great conversations.
In attendance: @LOST_WFTB @batchout @ASHATL @justinkeyes @Model_Melissa @Molly_Faraday @DieCer @ccollinsmith
I’m going to break this up by scenes, as I started watching the show at the beginning. Some people watched it first then joined the live tweet, so I’ll try and combine the threads into a true twee-cap along with the context of the show. Click more to continue.
LOST Watch From The Beginning
This is reprinted with permission from my post at LOSTblog.com
I feel a bit like I’m building an airplane while flying it, I just hope I’m more like Frank Lapidus than Seth Norris.
Shortly after the season five finale of LOST I made the decision to watch all the episodes from LOST again from start to finish. I shared that desire on Twitter and found a number of people also wanted to do the same thing. In a quest for the shared experience, I charged forward enthusiastically.
Then I did the math. *gulp*
LOST has 101 episodes. With an expected start time for Season 6 around the first part of January, that give us roughly 260 days to finish our quest. Divide 260 by 100 and thats an average of 2.6 days per episode.
Okay, that’s do able, but we’d better get started. So this past weeked some of us started watching and got through the pilot at roughly the same time. Then yesterday we had our first live tweet of episode 3 (Tabula Rasa) which was great fun. The experience of re-watching and re-sharing thoughts and theories of with like-minded fans is exciting. Though the format of twitter is made for this instant sharing, it has a drawback in coherence.
So I thought I’d start a blog to summarize the experience. Thanks to TheLOSTBlog an opportunity was made available.
So here we go, here is your opportunity to share in the experience and burn off the 7 long months til we get to the other side of the WhiteFlash.
What you need: A source to watch the episodes. Order the DVDs from Amazon, but them from Walmart, get them from Netflix, record re-airing off SciFi, or whatever alternative source you might be able to access.
What will help: Get a twitter account and follow @LOST_WFTB and @TheLostBlog; or search for the hashtag #WFTB (stands for Watch From The Beginning – really, be glad I don’t screenwrite.) And join the conversation.
What’s the schedule: We’re going to give ourselves 48 hours to watch an episode. Sunday is a day of rest (or catchup if your schedule gets interrupted). Live tweets for an episode will occur in the 48 hour period. So roughly Monday, Wednesday, Friday there will be some event (might go on Thursday night for you people with a real life). If you can’t make a live tweet, feel free to add a twee-cap (recap in twitterese) just include the #LOST and #WFTB hash tags. I’ll post any schedule updates from the LOST_WFTB account as we go along. (Flexibility is key, tell me if something needs to change.)
Who all is playing: me (@jstueve) and a few others. I’ll add them as they give me permission to announce them on this blog.
Okay, so cool, what else?: Well to add some coherence, I’m going to edit/condense/collate the live tweets and twee-caps into a blog post. Whether that is a 3 times a week or a weekly summary is left to be seen. But I think its important to give some chronology to the effort.
What do we get out of it: This should be self-explanatory. 🙂 You get to relive all 101 awesome episodes of the best show ever. AND share it with people (the best part in my opinion). So really I don’t see a downside.
So, read, signup for twitter, wait for more blog posts and get involved.
I look forward to completing this airplane real fast so we can fly it right.
Next up: Season 1 – Episode 4 Walkabout on Wednesday – Live Tweet 10PM CST – hashtag #LOST #WFTB
The Statue
Taweret or Sobek or combination of many? (I vote many/composite)
UPDATE: Aha! moment.
(disclaimer: probably too much analysis of this easter egg.)
Okay so what IF the statue is Taweret. I can live with that, with her linkage to fertility and the current lack thereof on the Island (and her current state of being… well she’s only a foot now)
What is Jacob embodies Sobek? From the wiki:
On occasion, later, rather than having a crocodile back, she was seen as having a separate, small crocodile resting on her back, which was thus interpreted as Sobek, the crocodile-god, and said to be her consort.
Why the quibble? Well because I really like this description of Sobek, vis-a-vis my pet theories of Jacob and his qualities (which admittedly could be all wrong).
Sobek’s ambiguous nature led some Egyptians to believe that he was a repairer of evil that had been done, rather than a force for good in itself, for example, going to Duat to restore damage done to the dead as a result of their form of death. He was also said to call on suitable gods and goddesses required for protecting people in situation, effectively having a more distant role, nudging things along, rather than taking an active part
bolding mine?
UPDATE teh second:
So presuming Taweret as statue and Jacob as Sobek analog, where does that put our friend black shirt. If he is the embodiment of Smokey (perhaps black shirt was actually a manifestation of Smokey, hmmm…) then where does his fit in this egyptian mythical love triangle. Back to the wiki entry for Taweret we read:
When paired with another deity, she became the demon-wife of Apep, the original god of evil. Since Apep was viewed as residing below the horizon, and only present at night, evil during the day then was envisaged as being a result of Taweret’s malfeasance
…
As the hippopotamus was associated with the Nile, these more positive ideas of Taweret allowed her to be seen as a goddess of the annual flooding of the Nile and the bountiful harvest that it brought. Ultimately, although only a household deity, since she was still considered the consort of Apep, Taweret was seen as one who protected against evil by restraining it.
Okay, so who is Apep?
In Egyptian mythology, Apep (also spelled Apepi, and Aapep, or Apophis in Greek) was an evil demon, the deification of darkness and chaos (isfet in Egyptian), and thus opponent of light and Ma’at (order/truth), whose existence was believed from the Middle Kingdom onwards.
…
As the personification of all that was evil, Apep was seen as a giant snake, crocodile, serpent, or in later years, in a few cases, as a dragon, leading to titles such as Serpent from the Nile, and Evil lizard.
As they say in the blogs, read the whole thing… So White/Jacob/Sobek vs. Black/Smokey/Apep vying for the affections of The Island/Taweret.
So what do you think, a grand unification theory of LOSTiness proportions or epic FAIL?
LOST – Watching from the Beginning
Okay, the final installment of season 5 Lost was awesome. I LOVED the opening scene with the dialog between Jacob and HeWhoShallNotBeNamed (Esau/Smokey/Blackshirt/Man #2).
I loved the final words between Ben and Jacob:
Ben, “What about me?”
Jacob, “What about you?”
The white flash can mean anything (like every other season finale we know nothing)
So instead of troubling myself on predictions and such. I’m going to review the whole series.
I did the math, 101 episodes roughly 260 days before season six kicks off. That’s an episode about every other day.
If you’ve been following me (@jstueve) on twitter, like @ccollinsmith, @ASHATL and others, this is old news. But if you’re just picking this up, or want to pitch in, I’ll keep this place as a holder.
We’ve loosely decided to to watch an episode every 48 hours. That might change as we go, but it does allow for wriggle room along the way. So for now here is the initial few episodes to watch.
This past weekend watch the pilot (S1E01-E02) not too late to catch up, its just two hours long, and still a wonderful two hours of television.
The schedule for the next couple of episodes are as follows:
- Today: S1E03 – Tabula Rasa
- Wednesday (May 29th) – Walkabout
I’ll post more blog posts about the schedule as we go along. Feel free to register and follow along, post theories, thoughts observations. Join us on Twitter with the hashtag #WFTB.
UPDATE: I hear that SciFi channel is re-airing season 1 episodes this week in the evening (@Yelwrose) so that might be a good place to get some episodes re-DVRd. Grab the box sets, or other alternative ways of getting the episodes and watch with us.
Lost – Crackpot Theories
We’re in la-la land in lost theorizing here. I think its important to separate two entities: Jacob and Island. Similar to the hieroglyph when Ben was being judged, there was a figure (Jacob) and the Smoke Monster (Island) always intertwined with each other.
The Island == Smokey boils down to this, the island can manifest itself as a projection after initial scan by cerebus/smokey. Locke was scanned, as was Eko and Ben. Eko’s projection was his brother Yemi, and Ben’s was his daughter Alex. Locke’s projection has been hidden from the viewers, but could be Christian. Weak point in this theory is Christian has been projected to other people besides Jack/Locke (also Sun and Frank). But I think the idea that Cerebus/Smokey is tied to an ancient manifestation of ‘The Island’ holds up through all episodes.
Jacob seems to be separate entity from the Island, and in my mind boils down to three possiblities: Jack, Locke, or no one.
Jacob::Jack – similar names, an interesting destiny if Jack ends up being at the bottom of all the time manipulation. If Jacob/Island have some mystical ties, then a manifestation of Christian makes a bit of sense, its Jacob using his significant person (i.e. Yemi, Alex) to project to important people to keep them on the past. Loopy, but not off the map with regards to Lost. At some point we need to be Jack back far enough in time to fill this role. The upcoming incident could toss Jack back far enough in time to be there to influence Richard in 1954. If the incident happens (and we know something happens pre-1980) tossing someone backwards could be the equal/opposite reaction to get people back in they’re correct time. Also those around Jacob are also those close to Jack: Christian and Claire. Could Rose and Bernard also be collected and protected by Jacob? (okay putting on the breaks here)
Jacob::Locke – The age long mystical connection of Locke with the Island has always been because Locke is Jacob. The moving of the pieces last episode could end up putting Locke in the same location as Jack’s emergent Hydrogen bomb, and the effects of the Incident could just as well pull Locke back in time distant enough to become Jacob in the past. This would be so Lostian to have present day Locke confronting himself in this seasons finale, and mirroring the foreshadowing of Locke uncloaking next to the fire. It’s a cliché for certain, so it might be one big writer head fake to go down this rabbit hole.
Jacob::No one – This one is emergent in my mind after last night’s episode and the collusion between Richard and Ben. Remember Richard was Ben’s first connection to the Others/Hostiles. Also Richard played the ‘Jacob’ card with Charles Widmore more than once in the past. So this requires Richard to be back far enough in time (Black Rock Sailor) to tap into the island’s healing power and survive long enough to always have an influence over various power brokers on the island over time. Which I could foresee as a couple of Richard-centric episodes that track this manipulation with Ben coming alongside Richard and playing ‘the Man Behind the Curtain’ (an old Ben centric episode that just BEGS to be rewatched now).
I find that its important to match theories against how the writers/producers have told the story up til now, the time-shifting has always been a part of the storytelling, so to have it cease at the end of this season would be uncharacteristic. So I think we’ll get even more intertwined into the time shifting story, and maybe this finale will break off some of the characters that are chaff to the main storyline. I don’t think the ‘plane landing safely in Los Angeles’ angle is going to play out.
LOST – The Variable preview
Big 100th LOST episode tonight (if the big O doesn’t talk to much, and give the other talking heads time to repeat the words he utters and gush about what a great Pres we’s gots – so put a DVR buffer at the end of the hour, just incase)
The Variable will be a Daniel Faraday centric episode, which falls on the heels of the Miles centric Some Like it Hoth episode of two weeks ago. Nice to see some love for the Freight-ies in the story telling, anything to not reincarnate Nikki and Paulo.
We’ve got some threads to tie up in these last few episodes of this season before we go into hibernation until January. (srsly, January?!) Some of the things to remember going into tonight and then building to the finale called The Incident (anyone that digested the Hatch Map in the swan station during Lockdown will recall the importance of that phrase:
- Danny’s been absent from the disco-era group since Jack et al made it back.
- Danny had an out of time sequence feature in the opening scene for this season after Pierre Chang told the one worker not to dig any further near the Frozen Donkey Wheel. Where does that fit into the timeline as we know it? Already happened? Yet to come?
- The Lockdown map has the time of the Incident as 1985 (will we have another time jump to get from ‘77 to ‘85.
- CORRECTION: The Swan orientation was copyrighted 1980 and referred to the incident and need to press the button, so there was indeed an incident in this time frame the blastdoor map is referring to another incident in 85.
- Faraday and time loops generally go together, some are hinting at some resolution between Faraday and his mother Eloise.
- We still don’t know what prompted Hurley to get to the Ajira plane on time (that should be played out in the finale, unless we’ll be treated to a Hurley centric episode)
- The ‘what lies beneath the shadow of the statue’ group’s identity needs to be firmed up, who are Illana and Bram aligned with? Not Ben or Widmore, who else are players in the game?
Wretched man… continued.
Last November I wrote a post titled "Sifting” then pretty much just stopped blogging. What a horrible and empty place to leave off. Yesterday, I was blessed to hear a great sermon from my pastor on Romans 8, along with a challenge to memorize that chapter in the next six weeks. It was a little twinge to hear him remind everyone that the chapter numbers aren’t inspired, that where chapter 7 leaves off, chapter 8 continues, and provides a solution to our fleshy dilemma. I skipped over that part in that last post, so lets start back in chapter seven and flesh some stuff out.
21So I find this law at work: When I want to do good, evil is right there with me. 22For in my inner being I delight in God’s law; 23but I see another law at work in the members of my body, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin at work within my members. 24What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death? 25Thanks be to God—through Jesus Christ our Lord!
So then, I myself in my mind am a slave to God’s law, but in the sinful nature a slave to the law of sin.Romans 7:21-25 NIV
This passage shows that the struggle for a Christian is much different than someone that hasn’t accepted Christ. A Christian seems to be having a dual nature, one that delights in God’s law, and a parasitic flesh that rebels against the law. This duality would seem horrible trap should we end the passage right there, a constant struggle between sin and obedience. We desperately need to get to the next sentence:
1Therefore, there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus, 2because through Christ Jesus the law of the Spirit of life set me free from the law of sin and death. 3For what the law was powerless to do in that it was weakened by the sinful nature, God did by sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful man to be a sin offering. And so he condemned sin in sinful man, 4in order that the righteous requirements of the law might be fully met in us, who do not live according to the sinful nature but according to the Spirit.
Romans 8:1-4 NIV
No condemnation for this struggle? Is that what it says? Why do we struggle with such guilt when we fall? Is that another part of the flesh? the willingness to flay ourselves for less than perfect obedience? We need to remind ourselves, constantly, that we are free. We need to remind ourselves, constantly, we are dead to the fleshy way of life. We need to remember that the spirit is there to help us in our struggle. We live, not according to the flesh, our sinful nature, but according to the Spirit, His perfect love for us.
This is grace: ‘For what the law was powerless to do in that it was weakened by the sinful nature, God did by sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful man to be a sin offering.’ God’s requirements, met by God, freeing us from the penalty that we’d otherwise be doomed to pay. It is already paid in full.
Left Behind Pizza
Around 10 years ago, probably closer to 9 and a half, I started posting on a message board for fans of the Left Behind series of books.
Well before the worlds of tweets, facebooks status updates, and blog trackbacks, message boards were how I interacted with the masses of people that shared a common interest.
This community shared an interest in christian themes, but had a bit of disfunction running through it. A group of us split off and thanks to the husband of one of our members, started our own message board. Heady times before the onslaught of social media, to have an almost instant community of friends.
The message board still exists. Sometimes I even, post there. But largely the community has moved on. I moved on to blogging, and that has had it’s ebbs and flows. I still keep track of a few of my friends from The Pizza Parlor, as we called it. Some are now facebook friends or twitter followers. Many are just faded Yahoo! Messenger nicknames, always hidden because life moves on.
I look back now, fondly, at those sometimes unhealthy times of Internet absorbtion. Who I am today, was formed in the crucible of yesterday. I experienced 9/11 with the people on that bored, formed many opinions based on those interactions. Learned that while I could ‘turn off’ the computer, these people still lived and cared ( well maybe not Melissa, and I sometimes wonder about Wilbo 🙂 ) about me.
Social networking is weird sometimes, I met my wife on a pre-Internet social network. We wrote letters back and forth using emoticons in 1993, while I was on deployment. Social networking is part of who I am.
Bleeding Dodger Blue with MLB At Bat 2009
When I was a kid growing up, I was a big Dodger fan. I remember listening to Vin Skully in grade school, watching the Dodgers in the World Series against the A’s was an early sports memory. Crying when the Giants kept them out of the playoffs more than once. I remember various players, Davey Lopes, Steve Garvey, Billy Russel, Ron Cey is still be dream infield. I used to fall asleep listening to the broadcast in high school. I remember reveling when Gibson hit his home run.
Then adulthood, and moving has distanced me from my favorite team. Until now. The MLB At Bat iPhone app is WONDERFUL. I can tune in and listen to the broadcasters, with Vin Skully, Charlie Steiner and Rick Monday. I can track the stats, and see the pitches, see replays of big plays in jaggy (but good enough) video.
I’d like to think the Dodgers’ hot start this season is because they have their biggest fan back to listening and following them (but that’d be too prideful). I’m loving baseball again. Screen shots of the app below the fold (tonight game in progress) Continue reading