Lost in Purgatory

Are the people in Lost actually in the afterlife instead of being on an island? They dropped a couple of strong hints that this is the case. Locke's father said that his car was rear-ended and he was put in an ambulance. The next thing he knew he was on the island. Plus, the survivor of the helicopter crash said that flight 815 had been found at the bottom of the ocean. Remote cameras showed that everyone was on board when it went down.

This is a red herring. Ben's people caused the car wreck, drugged Locke's father, and brought him to the island under anesthesia. They did the same thing with Juliet. The difference was that she knew she was taking sleeping pills and they allowed her to wake up as the sub landed. We don't know why they went to so much trouble for Locke, but they did.

As for the plane wreck - it's pretty convenient that it was found in a location so inaccessible that nothing could be recovered from the plane. Any other crash and investigators would pull every scrap of metal out of the ocean and reassemble it. And, of course, rescuers would keep searching for a long time unless the plane was found. So Ben's people faked finding the plane. That shows that they are high-placed and powerful.

One other observation - this episode's flashbacks were just days earlier. It gave the show an almost continuous narrative. Contrast this with most episodes where the "A" plot is either the flashback broken up by current time or current time broken up by flashbacks. The flashbacks and the current plotline seldom work together to form a tight narrative like we saw this week.

I've been saying most of this season that the flashbacks were a good device the first season but they get in the way more often than anything else now.

Rumor is that five people will die in May. That's one down. This is their chance to kill of the characters whose backgrounds have been plumbed too deeply. That would be Jack, Sawyer, Kate, Charlie, Sun, and Jin. We haven't learned anything new about these characters in over a year. Any future flashbacks would be a waste of time.

Of course the producers think that Jack, Sawyer, and Kate are a lot more interesting than I do. They devoted half the season to them to the exclusion of the rest of the cast.

So what's coming? The first season was about building the raft and they burned it at the end. The second season was about the hatch and they imploded it at the end. The third season has been about the Others so Ben had better look out.

Lost Visions

[note - for some reason this post didn't take the first time so I am posting it after the Feb. 21 episode instead of just before.]

It's almost time for a new Lost and I haven' said anything about the last one, yet.

First the reruns. ABC has been saying that they will never shw a rerun of Lost ever again. Instead they scheduled Lost "encores". At 9:00 they show the episode from the prior week.

Huh? How is this not a rerun?

As long as they are showing "encores" it would be nice to show an older one. The Feb 14 episode was all about Desmond. It would ave been nice if they had repeated the season 2 cliffhanger instead of the Feb 7 show. The much of the Feb 14 episode referred to the cliffhanger which we only saw once, eight months ago. Instead they repeated the only episode we have seen this year.

Anyway...

All three survivors of the hatch explosion have had visions that seemed to involve direct communication with the island through some sort of spirit guide. Locke induced a vision through his sweat lodge. His spirit guide, Boone, gave him a symbolic view of everything going on in the island.

Eko's vision was induced through his delirium with his brother as spirit guide/judge.

In the middle of a temporal fugue, a spitit guide in the form of a jewelry dealer stopped to explain the workings of the universe to Desmond.

I feel a little better about the season after realizing this.

Things that worry me about the season:

The rules of the universe as explained to Desmond sound a lot like Final Encounter - a set of B-grade horror movies.

The show was always about the relationships between characters with each episode changing the mix. None of that has happened this season. Most of the episodes have either been about Kate/Sawyer and Jack/Ben/Juliet. The exceptions have been single character episodes. The backstories in the episodes featuring Locke, Eko, and Desmond crowded out the current story. I want to see more time on the island and less time in flashbacks.

Ratings have suffered. At its peak the show had 20+ million viewers. It was down to 14.5 million on Feb. 7 and 12 million on Feb 14. At this rate, the producers will not have time to tie things up before the show is canceled.

Updates on the Feb 21 episode:
They promised to answer major questions. I'm not impressed. What did we learn?

• The others live on the main island and work on the Hydro-base island. This was obvious.
• The kidnapped passengers are ok. They said this several times. Now we know for sure.
• Jack's tattoo says, "“He walks amongst us, but he is not one of us.” This was very low on my list of mysteries. In fact, the show could have ended without revealing this and I never would have noticed.

A few new questions that probably will never be answered:

• Since when is tattooing a near-religious rite in Thailand?
• Why does someone who is "reading" and "marking" people in a near mystical rite dress like a hooker?