LOST: Okay, now I'm kinda Lost myself ...

So wow, it turns out that the secret mastermind behind all of the strange events on Lost is in fact ...


SPOILERS










Drop Dead Fred!

Sweet!

No, no, i kid. But seriously, I am not quite sure what to make of last night's out-there episode. While it was not exactly obvious, I am pretty sure that the point of this episode was not to legitimately make people think that the whole show is just a figment of Hurley's imagination, but instead was intended as kind of a satire of the whole "it's only a dream" cliche. As a satire, it was okay, except it was mostly played straight. In a way, it wasn't even quite a satire but kind of a bone thrown by the writers to the fans as if to say "look, this is DEFINITELY not where we're going with the show, so we'll have some fun with the premise as a kind of "what-if" scenario. So as a one hour piece of entertainment, this WAS undeniably entertaining and captivating. Because any fan of Lost had to see where the hell they were going with it. Would they actually have the balls / stupidity / chutzpah to say that the entire show was just a dream? Of course not, that would be terrible and they'd never live it down. But you had to keep watching, just in case, just in case.

But the problem is, this episode was yet another totally random tangent. And unless everything gets tied together somewhat neatly, it just is emblematic of the lack of direction with this show. For example, the big cliffhanger is that ... LIBBY was ALSO in the same nuthouse as Hurley. Now, it has previously been implied that the flashbacks are NOT tied into the show's main mythology. And therefore any connections between islanders that occur in flashbacks are more fun and incidental than integral to the plot. But now a whole cliffhanger is predicated on us being both shocked and amazed that a.) two of the survivors have an intertwined past, and b.) one of the survivors is not who we thought.

And yet, we have come to EXPECT that both of those will be the case. So what WAS going on here? I think that this episode was all about playing with the audience's expectations. It was about saying "look we know a lot of ppl have speculated that we're going to go with the "it was all a dream" route, but we're NOT going that route ... BUT, we WILL have some fun with the idea before we dismiss it completely."

Because the way the episode was set up, it was obvious that Hurley's friend Dave was imaginary from the moment we saw him. Too obvious. And it was clear that something was off about Libby as well. And that's why I say it was kind of a play on the whole "it was only a dream" sci-fi cliche.

But in a way, it was kind of one giant cluster as well. It opened up a number of new questions, while STILL doing little to answer previous ones. So let's see what we can imply from this episode:

a.) The people on the island are not random, but were either chosen by man, fate, or some other force to be on the plane -- they are all interconnected. This would lead us to believe that the Dharma group or some other organization has played a hand in the fates of all of the survivors, and manipulated events to ensure that specific people would be on that plane.

b.) Multiple people on the island have seen manifestations of people or things close to them that only they would know about. Jack's dad, Kate's horse, and now Hurley's imaginary friend. Also, we have seen ths "smoke monster" or whatever projecting images of people's memories. So we can assume that whoever is controlling the monster, nanobyte construct, whatever it may be, is collecting memories somehow and creating manifestations of those memories. For what purpose we don't know.

c.) When Henry Gale referred to some mysterious "Him" he may have been referring to the same person mainpulating these events and / or controlling the smoke monster.

So here's my theory. Basically, think of the famous Twilight Zone episode where a little boy who happens to be omnipotent creates a virtual island for himself, where his friends and family are helpless to oppose his will for fear that he could simply make them disappear if he so chose.

Okay, so the Dharma Group or whatever was doing all these genetic experiments on this island -- and they in essence created a monster -- someone with the ability to alter reality. So this experiment gone wrong is abandoned on the island. But he soon figures out how to pull people to him and his island. Why is he doing this? Because he is looking for a new host body to imprint his conciousness in, preferably a baby. But he is not yet strong enough to do this. He needs to populate his island with psychic energy, with people who have a hidden or latent or not-so hidden power to manipulate reality. Locke has it (healed his legs). Jack has it (healed his wife). Walt has it. And yes, Hurley has it (can subconciously manipulate numbers to influence probabiblities - ie bad luck) . What about Kate, Sayid, Sawyer, etc? Not sure. Maybe they were just along for the ride. Or maybe they were all on the plane due to some kind of secret involvement with Dharma of which they were unaware they even had (Kate's dad, Sayid's military connections, Sawyer's criminal cohorts, Jin's father-in-law). Perhaps, just as the smoke monster experiment drew people to the island, Dharma was also working to get people to the island to carry out its own agenda.

So that's all I've got for now. I see the show going in some kind of direction that resembles this at least a little bit. But it needs to be consistent and maintain tight continuity in order to make its mythology work and payoff when the time is right.

As of this episode there is not much indication that that will happen. Sure, it was a capticating, enthralling hour of TV, but where is the beef? What does it all mean? Until we get some indication, some solid clues, some well-thought out and developed plotlines that flow and develop, it's hard to give this show ringing approval. I was entertained, yes. But was I satisfied? Not exactly.

My grade: B

Okay, that's it for now.

But soon I have to address the Cartoon Wars, because after last night's South Park business has just picked up. So tune in soon to hear why South Park ain't exactly in a position to critique Family Guy ...