Excellent episode. But rather than try to entice you to read on, I'll just give you next week's schedule:
This Sunday night at 9:00 p.m. Eastern, I will post (but not participate in) a liveblog diary for Eastern/Central Time viewers.
This Sunday night (a new day, DKos-wise), time TBD by the poll, I will post a diary for Pacific Time viewing. (Dare we try a West Coast liveblog? Or is it too likely to be spoiled? Take the poll!)
Next Friday evening, May 28th, the final diary in this series goes up at its normal slightly uncertain time.
This Intro bloc links to the three other discussions that I follow on Lost: the great one at the Onion's "AV Club", the effusive Entertainment Weekly site, and Chadwick Matlin and his lessers at Slate.
If you walk past where your old associate buried your daughter -- and your new associate hears her -- do remember that there are
SPOILERS BELOW
I will start out by saying this: I won't say that all is forgiven, but much is. I'll say more, but not before posting a warning that there are
SPOILERS BELOW
I believe that last week I said something along the lines that the long-awaited and widely panned episode Across the Sea had told us all we were likely to learn about the Island's mysteries. As you will no doubt note, this week's episode has proven me entirely -- look, shiny object, right over there! ... Ahem, where was I? No matter. Oh yeah -- Across the Sea has been improved, retrospectively, by this episode.
OK, so we did get a few other mysteries solved, many of them in a scene where the remaining candidates -- and amazingly enough, the cliché aspect of this actually made it better -- gathered with the ghost of Jacob around a campfire to talk about important things. It was an unexpectedly affecting scene, with Jacob admitting that long ago -- like so many other of the castaways (including Desmond, who we may remember once failed to push a button on time) -- he made a bad mistake. He -- like the producers of the show? -- "created a monster." And if you can imagine living with Smokey for 2500 years, you can imagine why Jacob, among other things, has needed a hobby or two, like Egyptology.
Before getting too deeply into the episode, I want to spend a little time parsing. (It's what I do.)
Parse the first: Jacob said that when the fire with his ashes burned out, they would never see him again. Well, that doesn't mean he won't be around and won't make his presence felt. It just means that they won't see him again. He may be invisible -- or they may all be dead.
Parse two: many of us, me included, remembered Mother Eve's admonition to her foster (i.e. kidnapped, like Alex) children that "she had made it so that they could not kill each other." I saw a clip recently, and what she actually said is that she had "made it so that they could not harm each other." Why is the difference significant? Because it's obviously wrong: Jacob could harm MiB -- and did. This suggests, along the lines of them better part of my column last week, that "no one knows nothing." MiB, perhaps, didn't have to find a loophole; he could have killed Jacob at any time. What a cosmic joke that is!
We saw this week at least two examples of what we thought were the rules being broken. First, Smokey, who many thought could not kill Richard, seems to have killed Richard, although to be fair we have not yet seen the corpse. (Is this why Miles is still around? I tell you, the Island and the series still need him! It's not like Lapidus, no longer needed to fly the plane!) Second, Ben, who many thought based on the wonderful scene of his encounter with Widmore was not allowed by the Rules to kill Widmore, apparently did kill Widmore. (As with Richard, he could still be alive thanks to a Kevlar vest or some such, but still.) All sorts of things that we thought were Rules may not be. Does Smokey really know what happens when the candidates are killed and his "fail-safe" Desmond is deployed? Does he really get to leave the Island?
OK, a few random thoughts before I settle down and focus on the best aspect of the episode:
So, Widmore turned out to be Scatman Crothers in The Shining, delivering his cargo (Desmond) and then getting killed?
Who helped Desmond out of the well? (Who could have?) Or was he -- as may have been foreshadowed in his underwater scene with Charlie -- holding his breath beneath the murky water until Smokey left?
Why, with what we now know, did Jacob tell Smokey "they're coming" with his dying breath if he was the one who called Widmore in? Why warn him? Or was it a taunt? Or was Widmore lying about his purpose?
Oh, I see by the fading of the embers that it's time for Line of the Week! There's sentiment out there at the AV Club for Sawyer's crack about Jack's "God complex" (and for Kate's shutting him up), as well as for Jacob's pleasantly demystifying "it's just a line of chalk" (showing that all of the Rules we thought applied to candidates, and all the seriousness about the Numbers leaving out #51, may not really have mattered much after all.) All of these are reasonable choices. For me, though, it has to be Ben's "He doesn’t get to save his daughter." Oh, yes, Ben!
And that brings me to the highlight of the show: Ben, and Michael Emerson's return to form. If you'll pardon the allusion to the last big fictional cultural mystery we had to wait to be solved, Ben is Snape.
Like Snape, we have been trying to figure out which way Ben would ultimately go. Ben -- the ultimate survivor (so far) -- looks like he has survived again by ingratiating himself with Smokey. But what has he actually done? Yes, he gave away Widmore -- knowing that Smokey could get the information out of him with a scan anyway -- and killed Widmore. But that scene is open to interpretation.
Ben was trying to silence Widmore, wasn't he? He played it otherwise, of course. Such a quick thinker, such a convincing liar. He killed Widmore because he knew that Widmore was dead either way, and he had hoped to save his secret. But why would Widmore have wanted to keep Desmond's being a "fail-safe" from Ben? Staying three steps ahead of Sawyer is one thing, but three steps ahead of Ben? That's not easy even for a Smoke Monster, at least once Ben understands the game he's playing.
Which way does Snape Ben go? I think that for a satisfactory ending, there's only one solution: Ben, like Snape, turns out to be mostly, in his own way, good. Smokey may suspect the long con from him, but at some point Smokey may have to trust him -- and thus makes a fatal (probably mutually fatal, if Ben is to get the send-off he deserves) error? And, let's face it, bringing the Ben-UnLocke team back to where they started the season, but this time with Ben being a bit wiser, is a pretty nice way to tie the bow on the series.
I'll leave you with what are probably some mutually contradictory predictions.
Prediction 1: Jack doesn't kill Smokey. They all, each playing their parts, kill Smokey -- Ben and/or Sawyer dying as well. For some reason, I think that Claire dies too. (Does Sideways Aaron get born?)
Prediction 2: The Sideways contingent somehow intervenes to save the day, maybe with group meditation beaming their happy energy over to the Island universe.
Prediction 3: Smokey sinks the Island -- but it doesn't free him, it kills him, because he doesn't understand things better than anyone else.
Prediction 4: If Juliet doesn't appear and tell us what she meant by "going Dutch," my TV is a goner.
See you Sunday night -- in one of the two parallel diary universes!
PREVIOUSLY ON LOST FRIDAY NIGHT DISCUSSION
Episodes #1, #2, #3, #4, #5, #6, #7, #8, #9, #10, #11, #12, #13, and #14!