Tuesday, May 30, 2006

>: 47 LIVE TOGETHER, DIE ALONE

(written upon second viewing on the early morning of may 25th, distributed at 4:23 AM)

hyperbole fails me.

open with pandemonium, the raft's arrived. the three hosses swim out.
'maybe it's a trap,' says hurley off-camera. the camera's on
michael.desmond's listening to opera, bombed. hilarious opening,
desmond breaks down laughing when he sees jack, realizes where, of
course, he's drifted.

(in a sailboat named libby)

in torchlight, desmond tells jack this is all that's left. ('we're
stuck in a bloody snow-globe' is a direct reference to the series
finale of st elsewhere, in which the entire show turns out to be the
brilliant imaginative construct of an autistic patient in a different
hospital who, in the final scene of the final episode, is considering
a snow-globe the camera pans out of at the end, the stage for the
entire drama. lindelof has explicitly stated that LOST will not
resolve with a similar manuever, coining the 'snow-globe' phrase at
the time)

seeing clancy brown in the credits is better than great news.

desmond:'you still pushing it?'
jack:'yeah, we're still pushing it.'

and widmore picks desmond up. charles, not arthur, presumably the
magnate behind the corporation of the same name (sign in london, sun's
pregnancy test, logo on henry gale's balloon, family in BADTWIN)
desmond is in love with penny widmore. which appears to be the biggest
deal of all.

sayid wants to make more black smoke, it's finale time again. ominous.

eko's so happy to see john. now it's don't push the button. and eko
replies with the locke catchphrase do not tell me what to do and worst
of all LOCKE DOESN'T CATCH IT, obvious beatdown ensues, grim tidings
this is happening right now, how the hell did we already get here?

and michael sets off with the listed four.jack gives him a look, a
tradition he upholds all episode. quite a bit before the title.

was so shocked to see libby, hard to pick up
her: it's just four bucks
him: don't suppose you have forty-two thousand more of those, do you?
so she gives it to him 'i thank you, elizabeth, and i shall win this
race for love.'

(libby continues to be very interesting, wife of david, are they going
to keep integrating her or was that it?)

the backend of 'caught in a net' was good.

bird? what was up with that? upon review, it does sound like the bird
says hurley, but you have to have the suggestion to hear it. one
wonders about crapped gold off-screen. michael's not really pulling
off the poker face with the unloaded clip there.

locke, crying like a bitch. it has to be said. bad thinking
throughout, wasted potential.

choice desmond interaction with aaron and claire.

can't believe they went and tucked something behind the first
flashback of the season, our old friend the tour de stade. i guess
this might be the most important exchange of the episode, as it turns
out:

desmond:how'd you find me?
pen widmore:i have a lot of money, desmond. enough money and
determination, you can find anyone.

she asks him about his cherished dickens our mutual friend(which,
incidentally, appears to closely resemble the plot threads of BADTWIN
and brothah hume's pickle with the widmore clan, inheritances and
betrayal and romance etc, except it's dickens's last, the lines are
blurred, the good guys aren't so pure and the villains are
sympathetic) (and also typed that into amazon and notlying the fourth
hit was an excerpt from page 108 of the correct text, weird stuff, i
say) but he hasn't even read the note, has to win the race.

you have to laugh at 'ah have to get mah honor back' followed by
desmond chugging a bottle of dharma wine in the torchlight. only
response to john locke saying 'let's see what happens if the button
doesn't get pushed.' is not printable.

gathering firewood with michael, jack quotes himself from his big
speech from the pilot, big episode title. i might've gone with 'failsafe'.

sayid's 'i don't know what is more disquieting, the fact that the rest
of the statue is missing or the fact that it only has four toes.' with
accompanying image is just one of the greatest things ever. i was
thinking of those statues from lord of the rings but then applying the
numbers...

they start messing with eko with 101 minutes left. fools. so, desmond
is hotwiring lockdowns. already, we're thinking about the map. locke
saying he's more sure about this than anything in his entire life is
obviously the kiss of death on the whole fiasco and man eko what are
you doing there? i did not want things to go this way, by any stretch
of the imagination. waited forever for desmond and now it's him and
locke vs. eko, awful.

and clancy brown returns! with the same question, are you him? what
desmond asks locke later, is him the great man? argh. unbelieveable
that he turns out to be kelvin. brother justin in a DI uniform is not
easy for me to take. so, rezinsky, kelvin's old partner, made the
orientation tape edits (and squirreled them away in other hatches?)
the whole vaccine question is killing me, fake or not? what did you
think about the button?

sawyer's DI as aliens theory, goodtimes.

tense times with michael, though. was sure hurley was going to just
turn him red or sawyer was going to cap him.

nice how the big elizabeth ambush plan falls apart as simple as kate
spotting a tail and firing miles away from sayid and the fake village
trap. and then all i care about for most of the back half of the
episode is not that huge potential conflict but the battle for the
swan, eko bringing back the dynamite (catherine and i drank blackstone
red wine in honor of the pirate ship from the last finale).

the sight of kelvin feeling out that invisible map...so his partner is
the principal force behind the map? how deep the rabbit hole goes.
here's to a rezinsky flashback in season six.

if you weren't already feeling a luthor vs. superman vibe between eko
and locke (i was), eko pulling that trick with charlie's belt and the
electromagnetism sealed the deal. actually, it was more batman, but
why split hairs? it is good vs. evil, though, and we have no doubt
that eko is on the side of good.

'open the door and i will forgive you'

so kelvin has a failsafe. that's more than a new wrinkle. to me, at
this point, engaging the failsafe means alerting the hanso
foundation/dharma initiative and deactivating the entire swan
situation. the incident was an electromagnetic leak and the
button-pushing tells the reactor how to dispense the charge for the
next 70stech duration, a measly 108 minutes. that's one answer for the
numbers. certainly not the only one.

if locke doesn't call eko a friend, i don't know how i can call him one.

i can't take the levels of this. locke, locked up with desmond,
preaching about what a fool he was how he killed boone because boone
was foolish enough to believe locke knew what he was talking about.
yes, let's not push the button. and we finally get the return pulse
from locke banging on the hatch door and getting that light at the end
of deus ex machina. i remember at the time, i hoped he'd brokered a
deal with the aliens, just after the episode ended.

fake village, fake hatch. few can match sayid for one-man scene tension.

and the hunting party finds all the pneumatic tubes, all but
guaranteeing that the pearl orienatation tape is as bogus it claims
the swan's is. (but 'of the utmost importance' was a cruel trick,
marvin)

at the 21-minute mark, desmond gets the first glimmer that locke's an idiot.

nice sand dunes, desmond and kelvin. island's got everything. for
being a spook, kelvin went down real easy. and that was apparently
sept 22 04. desmond crashed the plane. i have to say here that i
called buttoncrash the moment jack crept into the buckminster geodesic
dome in episode 3 this season. it must drive lindelof bananas that 04
had to be a leap year. it sure bothers me.

you know, best flashback ever, desmond's system failure into his
gleaning 922044:16 off the log locke printed up from the pearl. 'i
think i crashed your plane.' wonderful.

how are eko and charlie? i wonder. it's been a while now, two
commercial breaks, even. lots of fire.

so, the people on the dock with the gagged four seem to be basically
the crew that waltknapped us about this time last year. i definitely
recognize the older chick who threw the dynamite on the raft,
everybody thought she was alex at the time. so zeke is really tom. and
miss clue, sounds like tom says 'thanks for telling her my first name,
P' but it's hard to tell, thought it was B live.

and fake henry showed up and definitely appeared to be the leader of
this faction. (can't decide now if he was speaking of himself in the
third person, about the Great Man) or at least the highest up we've
seen. henry bowed to jack, little implied namaste with his hello
again.

oh, here's charlie, well he's going deaf from the explosion, or at
least damaged. finding eko right as the timer hits the four-minute
mark and brings back our old friend, the buzzer.

with 3:11 left, locke smashes the computer and ends the debate between
himself and desmond. his opponent responds with 'you killed us, you
killed us all.' this concludes with the crumpling of the
much-cheriched timer and locke admitting that he was wrong to the holy
man.

eko saved charlie. nothing ambiguous about that.

desmond turning that dharma key in the failsafe. man, i have to
confess i thought it was over here, kids. they were really just going
to drop the matrix fake reality, this isn't an island trick right
here, now see where you are for the next four seasons! but no. even
better, that would've been an established trick.

bernard seeing the hatch door swirling down and saving claire is a
direct parallel to jack doing same with her and hurley and the turbine
scant minutes into this mindsuck. that quaratine door. eko. locke and
desmond. i can't even bear to speculate.

the leader (henry gale) saying 'we got more than we bargained for when
walt joined us, so i suppose this is what's best' is the other
most-ominous line in this darkest of nights.

and then the last looks. jack to michael, walt unable to stop turning
around, kate with the one-blink to jack, noted by sawyer, can't
believe we're about to go with the others through the love triangle's
POV.

and then claire and charlie's romance somehow survives the season and
we cut to some italian guys (?) in some (ant)arctic waste. they missed
the oceanic 815 anamoly but they call penny widmore over the result of
this battle between eko and locke. she's found desmond.

i love that we're going to get to see the inner workings of the others
via the triangle while at the same time that as the Big Question has
been pre-empted by What's going on with these Widmores and Hansos and
Degroots?

i'm horrified about eko and locke. i guess i shouldn't eulogize
anybody before we've seen the body but the displaced quarantine door
is quite a bad sign, i think it's supposed to be a 45-minute walk from
the beach. if those two went down in that one swoop and the show's
just going to keep barreling forward, well, i guess i'll still keep
saying it's the best show. but it hurts more.

goodnight, sweet island faithful.

8/15 rewatch update: caught two things at the tail end this time, with the dudes monitoring in the blizzard station.

1) they're playing chess then the alarm goes off and they say O hell we missed it again. the screen displays ELECTROMAGNETIC ANOMALY 7418880. well, sure there're a 4 and three 8s in there, but what else? factor it, boys and girls. i'll give you a hint, start with 4....

(so, yeah, they're monitoring the EM pulses the swan was controlling)(or not controlling)

2) they're listening to some instrumental music, almost musak really. i had to crank it up to place it but it's.....mama cass! desmond's favorite from the first two minutes of the season. brilliant closure and arcing and looping back and all those things, i tell you between

-bernard saving claire from the falling quarantine hatchdoor, the other side of which drove america mad in season 1 --> jack saving same and hurley from the turbine in the series premiere

-the return of the black smoke and walt getting back on the boat that took him away in the 1st season finale, along with the return of a giant bird attacking hurley, just like it did in the same episode, along with the disastrous return of the black rock's dynamite.

-cass's 'make your own kind of musak' at the tail end --> to desmond's workout montage in the 2nd season premiere, along with the crucial desmond/pen meeting embedded right before jack's tour de stade

if plotstreams were coordinate-points in fractal art this would be the most beautiful shape i've ever seen. just the construction of it. i've never encountered a work of art that did a better job of rewarding scrutiny. i mean, i watched ep29 this wkend, when jin and eko see the others' feet and the soscary teddy bear? fourth person that walks by, i recognize his brown pants, chinos i wanna call em, freaking (not) henry gale. walking by. nine episodes before we meet him. i tell you, this thing if poetry of the highest order.

but i could go on all night.

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