LOST --- Season 5 - Page 96

Probably been pointed out before, but from Lostpedia:

The biblical Aaron is a descendant of Jacob

Biblical Aaron is also a descendant of Benjamin, the twelfth son of Jacob.

You realize at this point that they pick these names for the associations, not because they MEAN anything, right? They want you to run to Wikipedia and read up on this stuff, but it has no actual bearing on the show or the characters.

They did ... kind of. And then decided they didn't want to go that way at all. I still think the fact that all the stuff that happened at the cabin -- we even saw quick visions of a long-haired man! -- has been retconned is bullshit.

I agree with you, but I don't see how they can explain only her dying satisfactorily. Either Jack's plan worked or they're all vaporized.

Right. And mostly it's done to throw us off, i'm sure. But it's interesting food for thought.

They already explained it via Faraday. The magnetic magic energy contains the blast in the well.

No, it's what Kirby was just complaining about. A lot of LOST watchers probably will score better at biblical questions in Trivial Pursuit now, but what is added to the story? Or the characters?

It is the bullshit of all bullshits that they killed Juliet off. She was the breast, I mean, best and most interesting character left on the show. Way to go, Lost. And I'm sure she's capital-D dead. Outside of the fact she's signed up for another show next season, there's no remotely logical way to have her survive those injuries even in the weirdo logic of the show.

I've been relatively entertained by this season, and the finale helped a lot in improving my attitude, but at this point I'm in the same hatch as Devin and Kirby. I just don't care what happens to any of these people or why. I'll watch to the end to see if they can even come close to explaining everything but the emotional investment isn't there anymore. It's pretty much the same reason I stuck with Prison Break to the bitter end.

Oh, and I should probably watch the end again to be sure, but did anyone else hear the "moving the island" sound effect as the screen faded to white, right before the traditional sound effect of the title screen?

You didn't have a problem with 'magic' when Battlestar Galactica used it to end their show.

I will give you this- more often i'm finding myself waiting to see what happens next versus caring what happens to the characters. I DO care what happens to the characters, but these mysteries that keep coming up intrigue me more.

This show started as pure character development with a tease of the supernatural/mystery. But now it's actually the complete opposite- we get tons of unanswered questions and I really feel like the character development has gotten lost. That's not to say this isn't still my favorite show, or that I don't still feel a connection to some of the characters.

But even my love for the show won't make me ignore that, for this season at least, character development was toned down for "what is that statue?" or "how do they get back to the island?". Which makes for great tv, obviously, but did we get a "The Constant" caliber episode? Not really.

They went out of their way to specifically and repeatedly show Jacob touching every one of the survivors, with the exception of Juliet and Miles. Couple that with Jacob's "They're coming" line and I'm expecting the answer to be that Jacob somehow pulled them through time at the moment of detonation. I mean, considering that four of the seven castaways were the names on Jacob's List, he obviously has some sort of plan at work here.

And I don't really care if other people are no longer digging the show--you're all fucking insane, but whatever, who cares--but I'm honestly baffled by people who complain how much the characters have changed in the last five years. Isn't that kind of the point of good television? Because the alternative is the Simpsons (or Marvel Comics) approach, where situations are constantly retconned and ignored to make sure your favorite characters never grow or change. No thanks.

For Devin & those who agree w/him that the "Jacob/Esau" god-dynamic is turning them off:

Many of these themes were telegraphed from very early on in the show (fate vs. free will, light vs. dark, etc.); Locke's backgammon speech is in the pilot! My question(s) for you (I'm not trying to bait, just genuinely curious);

What situation would you have preferred this finale set up for S6? What themes/plots besides "duelling entities" would have warmed you more for the upcoming season?

The issue folks have is blind change for the sake of change. I can see where Devin is coming from. I never understood why it was a good idea to blow up the nuke, ever. I was even less convinced when the other characters fell morally one by one into the responsibility of possibly killing everyone.

Great that characters change, but this isn't Special Olympics. I don't give a medal for effort. The changes tend to be not that interesting or variations on a theme. The show's love triangle - this shitty, all-consuming singularity at the heart of it all - keeps these characters from changing in interesting ways.

And not everybody has changed. How has Sayid changed? Hurley? Only Jack and Sawyer have changed.

Jack has changed, but only in the sense that he now embraces destiny as opposed to fighting it. Of course, embracing it because of the girl that got away is, as Devin said, pretty ridiculous.

And I gave FANTASTIC FOUR a better score than BATMAN BEGINS

Did you like the direction Twin Peaks eventually took?

I'll probably re-watch the finale this weekend but can someone please explain (again) how the time traveling benefited either Jacob or MiB? How did it move their chess pieces into place? I still don't see it, aside from the fact that the time traveling Losties helped Richard believe in John.

I'm also interested to see if Terry O'Quinn will be playing MiB in the final season. Will he stay in Locke's body or move on? I think O'Quinn has been the best part of this show and as much as I loved Locke's death, it would be a shame to see him go.

The time traveling created the Incident which brought the Losties to the island and it cemented Locke as leader of the Others.

The idea is time travel forced the completely average Locke into a position of power with the Others, he used this leadership to get to Jacob where he was able to get Ben to kill Jacob.

I think... Did he not know where Jacob was? I don't understand why the plan had to be so damn elaborate.

EDIT: What he said.

Honestly, this is a show where a man looking at another woman is enough to cause that man's girlfriend to be willing to die in nuclear fire. That's what passes for character work here.

I'm sure this will provoke a huffy response, but I'm actually curious about the answer. There's no reason why something that works for one show has to work for another, but I'm in the opposite camp. Maybe it's because I don't think Lost has ever reached the heights Galactica did at its peak, or maybe because Lost tipped its hand with this kind of stuff fairly early on, while I got the distinct feeling that BSG didn't decide just how much MAGIC was at work until they ran out of time in the finale.

Anyway, Devin, what's the difference in your mind between how the two shows handled the supernatural?

Ah, love. So mysterious.

Thanks for the clarification on the time traveling.

The question of God hung over BATTLESTAR from the miniseries. The idea of dueling super entities wasn't a part of where LOST started. You can point to the black and white backgammon pieces, but the introduction of a hackneyed, vague thematic element just isn't the same.

The difference is that while neither show 'knew' where they were going from the start, BSG did serious work planting the major elements of the finale at the beginning.

Also, Ron Moore never went on the record saying the show wasn't about God. The creators of LOST did go on the record and say this wasn't a show about the supernatural.

I winced when we saw the loom because of the Wanted connection but did they read the tapestry to discern a prophecy? Nope. Until they do it's just a guy who probably spends a great deal of time alone doing something meditative.

No longer invested but you will still watch? Jeez, that will make for some insufferable articles next season.

Too bad Juliet had to leave. I really hope they don't bring back the love triangle with her out of the picture. That shit is weak. Besides, Jack has so many other issues to deal with beyond his love for Kate, his reply to Sawyer stood out as being off the mark.

Which characters got serviced? This show has devolved into soap opera characterization. Juliet's double switcheroo was embarrassingly bad.

The characters service the plot now.

I'm not going to go back and search for it, but I made this same comment early in the season when people were still mesmerized by the time travel. I lost the emotional investment in the characters a long time ago. Still, I find the show entertaining enough to see it through and am intrigued by how the show will tie all the threads together. Devin's theory that its all "magic" might be right, but I sincerely hope that the writers can execute things better than that.

I'd also like to point out that there's nothing going on yet that can't be explained within the Sci-Fi context of the show. It doesn't need to resort to "They're Gods at war in paradise!" and it hasn't yet. For all we know, Jacob and MiB are regular men who discovered the island far in the past and received great benefit from what ever bizarre scientific anomalies exist on the island. The fact that they use people as pieces in some kind of elaborate board game doesn't mean they're gods, it just means that they're people that have become so detached from humanity that they see no problem with interfering in people's lives in order to use them as pawns.

I would argue that this kind of stuff has been even more prevalent in Lost than it ever was in BSG. And I'm not trying to impugn BSG, I love that show.

In Lost, we've had people on an island that has, in the very first episodes, restored a paraplegics ability to walk, had a monster running around eating people, bodies disappearing and showing up as ghosts, strange whispers in the woods, etc, etc, etc.

Meanwhile BSG threw the words "God" and "Gods" around a whole bunch. But that could have easily turned out to have been so much talk. Every President in recent memory has invoked God in speeches. It's on our money. Hell, people invoke God at pancake breakfasts, but nobody really expects God to leap down and yell "winner!" in a war/back our debts/or work the griddle when people show up.

This season needed more episodes like "Some Like it Hoth". Character centric, and also a chance to slow down, give us some more character insight, and play with the Dharma people more. Juliet, with the big part she ended up playing, deserved her own episode this season.

It's ironic: back in season three I was all "pick up the place, how can you play ping pong at a time like this?" and was ecstatic to learn that they were cutting down the number of episodes. But this season in particular...it just needed more room to breath.

I do have a question though. Why did the MIB guy have to go to all this trouble to get Locke into position to convince Ben to kill jacob when he could have killed anyone, let's say Eko, and impersonate him and go convince someone that he needs to kill Jacob?

Aaron is a descendant of the tribe of Levi, not Benjamin. All Kohanim (high priests) are from Levi.

And BSG throws out "it was magic" and offers absolutely no explanation beyond that. Lost even HINTS at the supernatural, and despite having an ENTIRE season to go, Devin knows it's alllllll supernatural, even though the shows history shows evidence it's probably another long con.

But Devin says the only answer to anything in the show is time travel...oh yeah and now magic. Never mind that the time travel was self contained in the fifth season.

BSG's characters turned on a dime, but no problem there! You literally can't watch a season WITHOUT reading the producers notes about every extra scene they were forced to edit out. The final episodes were retcon after retcon. The finale is great if you missed a couple seasons of random character arcs, because none of them meant anything in the end.

The very things he criticizes Lost for, BSG is much more guilty of.

Ben's a hard core believer. After witnessing fauxLocke tell Richard to interact with real Locke who had jumped in time near the beechcraft, Ben was ready to believe that Locke had some divine power that he did not possess. Also, Ben had motivation. He spent his whole life doing what he thought was in the service of Jacob, only to have Jacob "turn" on him. As Locke pointed out, he got cancer, his daughter died, he was banished from the island... and when Ben asked Jacob why, he got a very unsatisfying answer.

I thought this was an entertaining finale which was far more thrilling than most of the episodes of this lacklustre season.

As soon as Lapidus looked into that cargo box, I knew it was Locke, but that was still a pretty interesting little twist to throw at us. Poor old John Locke.

I have invested so much time into this show that I will stick by it until the end, just to see how it all comes together (or fails to). As for the characters, I honestly don't care that much.

Juliet and Sawyer actually had a halfway decent season in terms of character-development, but others, especially Jack, just seem like random ciphers.

I wrote the following near the beginning of this season:

Turns out I was wrong - they're backgammon pieces.

Having said aaalll of the above, the revelation of the MiB was actually interesting enough for me to sit up and take notice - let's see how it all pays off.

The plot is more elaborate than that. It involves setting up Ben, building his relationship with another person (Locke), manipulating that person to, a)start receiving the things that Ben has always wanted (the explosion in the cabin was presumably MiB making himself known to Locke in order to make Ben jealous that "Jacob" had spoken to Locke and not him) and b) getting this other person worked up through the ranks in order to be marched directly to Jacob and get through any safeguards there might be.

The plot really has just as much to do with Ben and Richard as it does with Locke. It probably also has a lot to do with trying to throw Jacob off the scent, though we don't know whether he was able to do that successfully or not.

It seems to me that it has to do with the rules/the loophole thing. If I had to guess at this point, I'd lean towards something like he needed Locke to become the leader, which needed fooling Alpert, because otherwise Alpert wouldn't follow Locke's orders and take him to the statue nor allow Ben inside and since Ben killing a father figure seems to be integral to his character as well, which makes me guess that he had to be the one to kill Jacob.

It's not like any prediction made now would be 100% accurate, but I guess being the leader of the Others gives you the "power" to kill Jacob, so to speak, which could explain why when the leader goes out he never comes back. Or, it could simply be that Ben was chosen as a child, because of his father, knowing that he'd probably grow to kill him if nudged in the right direction. Or, its the very fact that "Smokey" saved Ben as a kid that allows him to kill Jacob. Maybe a mixture of the answers.

In regards to Eko, knowing it was Adewale's choice and blah blah, I guess the official version is that Eko's lack of repentance and his fundamental disagreement with Locke over whether they were destined to be him disqualified him as an appropriate "pawn" and was killed for it, while Locke was so into the idea of believing he had a purpose that he was the appropriate pawn.

A thing that's great is how, for all the religious connotations and Jacob's seeming fate in what everyone will choose, if Locke ends up dead the way he is now, he died because of blind faith, which adds an interesting layer to the whole good vs evil when compared to all the religions that seem to be somewhat mirrored in this story. Assuming, of course, that's where they are going.

Still curious what Lapidus is a candidate for. Any thoughts?

Nooooo.

Alpert told Locke that... because Smoke-Locke told him to.

Locke told Christian about this after he fell down the well, and Christian seemed truly surprised by it (I think he even said as much). Why would he be surprised if it was part of his plan?

Wow, that's an incredibly silly and poorly-thought out response. Jacob and Smokey don't do anything particularly magical, unless Jacob's magic power is dying. The survivors do everything of note in the entire finale.

My thoughts exactly. Except in that case, the criticism actually fit.

It's probably our fault for saying his name three times.

On a more interesting note, I'm wondering if Alpert has been unknowingly serving Smokey the entire time. The murders and kidnappings The Others have committed over the years don't seem like the hands-off free-will approach we saw from Jacob in the finale. Those actions seem decidedly more like Smokey's nature. When Smoke-Locke tells Alpert that all the plane survivors will have to die, Alpert seems only mildly concerned. Even appointing a leader and dictating orders to him doesn't match Jacob's behavior. When Alpert heals little Ben, he appears to take him into Smokey's lair. Alpert also appears to be totally unaware that there are two distinct entities on the island, as his misgivings about Locke never turn to serious doubts.

The "shadow of the statue" people seem to be an army of sorts. Jacob seems to have a long history with them, considering his dialogue with Ilana in the hospital. Maybe they're looking for new recruits?

The conversation seemed more important than just replenishing the ranks, and more specific to Lapidus himself.

I'm not even sure if Silas is trying to throw Jacob off the scent. It seems to be that Jacob is fully aware that Silas wants to kill him and is actively trying to do so, but I guess its more that the disagreement they have makes Jacob think than, even despite this gargantuan plot, Silas won't succeed, that Ben won't kill him. Or that's how I interpret it with the information we have thus far.

Lapidus, after all, was supposed to be the pilot on Oceanic 815. And Smokey did kill the original pilot. Could be a mini Eko/Locke. Lapidus could have had some use or purpose, while the original pilot was a fluke in the tapestry.

But why LOCKE? The opening showed us that he's been trying to kill him for hundreds of years (at least, probably thousands). And we know that the losties weren't the first people on the island. Why couldn't MIB kill Ellie 50 years ago, then impersonate her and get Richard to take him to Jacob and convince Widmore to kill Jacob? I mean, i understand that the story we are presented with is about the Losties. I'm just saying it makes no sense.

Dueling super entities, no. But from the backgammon thing on, it's been a constant parade of warring factions and dualities. Now, I can understand thinking that taking so far as to have Locke actually be a Bad Twin oversimplifies and diminishes the philosophical messiness that made earlier seasons interesting. It's how I felt about BSG's ending. But this has been set up extensively over the last few years.

It's unfair to say it didn't plan for the finale well enough when we're still 17 episodes away from it. And I don't think BSG really did this well at all. The Opera House thing was far less weighty than it was built up to be. Starbuck's resolution felt like an afterthought, and the Head stuff that had been built up from the miniseries was explained in a way that was totally pat and diminished what made it interesting previously. All in my opinion, of course. But I really don't see how you can make this comparison favorable to Battlestar. Lost is pretty much unparalleled in planting and developing not just minor details, but motifs, storylines, and and themes.

Fair enough. But I'm not ready to say that's what the show is completely about just yet. If they have the balls to keep Locke dead, then his story will say some pretty harsh things about God, at least.