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Friday, February 20, 2009

TV Watch: Lost, 316

This was a weird episode. I can't really say it was bad, it was good, but I did enjoy it. Not as much as last week, but it was fun.

It was, however, an odd combination of explaining things and obviously not explaining thing. Hawkings gave us a brilliant backstory into DHARMA, even dropping the interesting clue that DHARMA had to find the island themselves. I had made the assumption that DHARMA was created by islanders who had left the island and returned, but apparently not. Also, we know more about how the island is hard to find, that it keeps moving, etc.

Course, what remains to be seen is if any of the backstory into how Sayid or Hurley got on the plane, or what happened to Ben or (more importantly) what happened to Aaron will get told. My guess is yes, and they'll comprise the other section of "off island" stories for the season, especially since I don't see how they could possibly leave the fate of our Little Prince in question.

So if we focus purely on this episode, it did a few things I've always asked from Lost. It explained things, it kept the plot well focused and it didn't jump back and forth between meaningless plotlines. It still didn't make much sense, mind you, and opens a long list of follow up questions - but we have to just let Lost be Lost sometimes.

So kind of a bridge episode, but possibly the best bridge episode.

2 comments:

sterno said...

I had a lot of logical consistency issues with this episode. Yes, I know, like this is something new, but a few points bugged me.

First of all, the island's always moving, but then:

1) How did the military get there to set us up the bomb?
2) How did that ship that came to the island manage to stay with the island?

Second, if this is how one can so easily find the next island location:

1) Why hasn't whitmore gone and taken over this place. He seems to be borderline omnipotent so why isn't he there figuring this out. I mean clearly he knows about Faraday's mom, so why wouldn't he go take it over.

2) If you know where the island is going to be, why do you have to take a freaking commercial plane and recreate the entire scenario? Why not just sail there or charter your own plane? If that ship could get to the island, why can't you just go there?

3) If they had to "precisely" recreate the conditions, why isn't it a problem that a bunch of the people who were on the original flight weren't on the followup flight?

I like the show, but every so often they give me the sense that they are making this up as they go. I'm worried this is going to turn into X-files and we'll eventually find out that all the conspiracies had no particular logic to them.

Josh said...

Yeah, the Widmore question is a pretty huge one. Just how Lamppost gets protected in general, in fact.

I'm guessing there's a yet unveiled fact about the island's movements. It shifts in time and place, it's an old FTL drive from a spaceship, something like that. Which might not "explain" all of the odd things about how things get on, stay or leave the island, but might help.

The whole "shoe" issue, why they have to recreate certain things, but not others, seems to dovetail right into the concept of faith in the show, which gosh darn I hope they explain better.