“LA X” [recap by Noel Murray] | The A.V. Club: 1315 'discussions' occuring

-holland oates: Why are the Others still walking around in rags? Didn't we see through their little island savages charade a long time ago, namely when they took Jack & Kate & Sawyer prisoner?
-Those weren't rags. They were the clothes of people who lived in a jungle. Big difference; check out any shot of Others from s2 and compare to a shot of them tonight.
-holland oates: I'll keep a closer eye on the Others' outfits on a rewatch, but most of the outfits seemed pretty raggy to me. Not the Japanese guy and Deadwood guy, though. But everyone was wearing pretty normal clothes in s3 & it's not been that long since they left the old Dharma camp for the temple.
-holland oates: Wait, scratch that. It's been three years, right? ah right 2007. a lot of time-jumping happened in little time after s3, but then three years did pass: Jack & Kate & Hurley & Sun & Sayid back in world. Sawyer & Juliet & Jin & Miles in Dharma, OK, conceded. Maybe. hee.
-kunta: Yeah, living in the jungle wasn't a charade. Living in the Dharma barracks was the charade, and Locke called Ben on it. ~that Ben had altered the Others for the worse by living in Dharmaville etc (? only vague recall of Locke 'calling' Ben on the charade)
-holland oates: @kunta Yeah, but they did live in the barracks, with normal clothes. The Others had to don disguises when dealing with the Losties why?! — even if the disguises were depicting something closer to what they should have been doing. ie being island savages? living in the jungle, not in play suburbia?

this is a hang-up for me, sth I'd like addressed: the Others.
what else am I hung-up on, wanting 'answer' to? the psychic in Claire's first flashback (& later in Eko's): what was his connection to the island? why did he talk about "good people" and want Claire w Aaron on flight 815? that's the raised-by-single-episode bit I haen't let go. and maybe we will get a bit of an answer, at least as regards aaron having some kind of destined role on the island.
but I suppose we probably will not get much explanation of the Others' behavior back in s2 & s3. I wish we would. why the disguises? why take Walt? why the experiments & mindgames? Ben needed Jack to do surgery on him, ok, so that goes a little way twd explaining capturing him and also Sawyer & Kate for leverage ~ but even if imagine kidnapping made sense, why cages & cruelty? I'd like to be given some information about the purpose of the Others (serving Jacob? why would Jacob have needed them to toy with the Losties?) that makes sense out of this, but I doubt we will be. I guess it seems like that was all just making these other people on the island weird spooky, and was not really worked into the master plan.

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-Speaking of the mark, I was sure that they were going to try to take Juliet to The Temple, and that she'd be denied entry because of the mark.
-Dowd: Juliet couldn't be saved by the Temple. She already was. You have to die in the Spring to become one of the Others. But you don't get to do it twice.
-i and 1: Yeah, Dowd, I know. Good point. huh so this is known? the Others have all died & been reborn in the spring? I know Ben was healed by the spring & thus forgot evth (?) prior & became an Other. but, Juliet hadn't forgotten her prior life.

and hmm, this is an idea haven't seen elsewhere. unlikely but noting here in case:
-Sayid, in my opinion, is going to wake up with a memory as if he had just been pulled to the island, three years after the flight to LA. well but then shouldn't he have said, "Who are you?" or "where am I?" rather than "What happened?" This is the side effect that was mentioned. wrt Ben? However, he is going to reveal that there are small subtle differences between the things he remembers and what the others remember, leading them to try to understand what is going on, and leading them to the parallel dimension theory.
the idea that is all over is that Jacob is not inhabiting Sayid's body. I guess I'm hoping not.
-forget_it: I don't know that I get behind the theory that Sayid is now Jacob, if only because a Sayid vs Locke polarity feels off . Those two characters really never had much to do with each other huh they didn't did they? must hae had some noteworthy interactions, right? but none come to mind, and having them embody these nemeses seems less compelling than, say, Jack vs Locke or Sayid vs Sawyer. It just doesn't resonate. y well said.

in response to complaints about Juliet being alive only to have "another" dying goodbye with Sawyer:
-simo: You're all forgetting that Juliet didn't actually die when she fell down the well. I'm glad that she was still alive in 2007. There was no reason for the rest of the Losties to not be killed along with Juliet if Jughead was going to kill her. good point. The only way that would make sense for her to be dead if she was transported into 2007 into solid rock.
-loneaudience: We didn't see Juliet die in The Incident; it made sense that she still had to die.
-autobot: We needed Juliet to die a "second time" so that she could share that important bit of information that detonating the bomb "worked."
-holland oates: We could have gotten that info via Miles talking to a dead Juliet, though. I found the repeated death scene to be a bit of an eye-roller.
-occono: They established that corpses wouldn't come along with the time skips back when Charlotte died, so they needed her alive at first. ooh. good obseration. if Juliet had already died, her body would not have arrived in 2007 with them for Miles to talk to.

-I hope that her conversation from another time and "it worked" will all come into play. Esply since there's a pretty good theory that she's the new Desmond time-traveling consciousness (or, she could just be haing the time traveling sickness wh looked similar but), since she was in exactly the same spot as Desmond's mishap that jarred him loose from time seemed to happen. hmm int. ie right by the explosion, Juliet of the bomb (~nuclear; but right near a magnetic energy 'pocket'?), Desmond of the hatch (~magnetic; but he was turning the fail safe key wh was a last resort to blow up the hatch, did it detonate a bomb?).
-Juliet definitely flashed to the alternate timeline self due to her proximity to the explosion. We will see her in Universe B, with something involving asking someone to get coffee sometime, and whatever else she was saying when she was crazybabbling re going dutch. Like what they did with Charlotte. I would bet enough money to pay off my student loans on this.
-She knew who James was and was buying coffee. They meet in the 'real world' in the future is my bet.

-They've done flashbacks, flashforwards, flashelsewheres ah good name for s5 jumps; think were called flashsideways (since btw simultaneous action at diff places) wh is confusing bcs it's also wh producers are calling the current flashes (btw parallel worlds, but at diff moments: 2007 / 2004) , so I guess this is now flashparallels. good.

-It looked like the Island exploded postJughead. Something tells me Jughead didn't sink the Island, but something else all together.
-Darlton mentions in that EW interview that we can't be sure the island sunk because of the bomb (since we see things in the CGI shot that weren't built until after the bomb would have gone off) and they say that is a very important part of this new season. Of course, they're liars.

-I thought the underwater island tracking shot was pretty cool [the score for that got me excited], so perhaps I'm in the complete minority here. One thing I think we can all agree upon is that the scene between Not Locke and Ben was awesome. Terry O'Quinn and Bryan Cranston [Breaking Bad] are two of the best actors working in television today. agreed. I'd add Michael Emerson.
-Fake Locke is the best villain ever. Terry O'Quinn's chilling performance puts Ben whoa and every other villain on the show to shame, both on its own merits and because they've made it all the more piercing by contrasting him to John Locke's puppy dog naivete. well no I found villainous Ben more fascinating. both superbly acted, I suppose; but's Ben character more int.
-I gotta second all the praise for Terry O'Quinn's acting last night. I think he is set to just dominate this season the way Michael Emerson has with some seasons in the past.
-I love the confidence O'Quinn is bringing to this new version of his character. Whenever he and Michael Emmerson are together it's great.
-This show was at its best when Locke was a boar hunting bad ass with all that mystery around him. true that was cool. If smokey is the bad guy, and his success depends on killing all the rest of the 815er's, I'll still root for him as long as we get this confident Locke looking guy back.
-I was hoping Ben would just come out of the statue and say: "Hey. Just killed Jacob." nonchalantly. y. his confidence sure seems broken. and he had seemed so unbreakable. rewatched 3.4 where he says to Saywer: The only way to get a con-man's respect is to con him. You're good. We're much better." I love his delivery, how sure he always was.
-When Terry O'Quinn plays a character without inner turmoil or self doubt, he is by far the most charismatic actor working in televison in my humble opinion. Even Locke in the airport was a joy.

-Not only O'Quinn, but the lighting, the way he leaned forward into the light when he talked about how Locke understood how sad his life was, and how there was dignity to him, and right back into the shadows when he talked about his death. That was some great directing right there.

-chum joely: I'm still not totally convinced that the Esau dude has actually taken Locke's or taken over his form, etc. We have a time travel storyline with parallel universes going on here, so the fact that we can see "UnLocke" more or less right next to the corpse of "Locke" doesn't necessarily mean that they aren't the same person. Maybe "UnLocke" is actually just Locke after he's been around the time loop a couple hundred times and has LEARNED to be a Time Lord, possibly directly from Esau. well. wld be cool for it to turn out to be Locke himself. but I think Darlton saying Locke is dead means unlikely. The whole universe of LOST is just so mind-bending and weird to think about that I have trouble ruling out any particular story on what's going on. So I'll go with the theories that are most aesthetically pleasing to me.


-DSig80: In S3 I thought they were setting up something like this alternate reality plot for S4 (although I can't complain, the flash forwards were a ton of fun.) Season 3 seemed to have a number of moments where things we found out contradicted things we knew already. *{For example, Season 1 Charlie couldn't swim but Season 3 Charlie was a champion swimmer. Season 1 Sayid couldn't speak French and Season 3 Sayid had lived and worked in Paris.}* would be cool if those changes were intentional. I always thought that perhaps Desmond's time shifting was causing changes and I was excited to look for little intentional inconsistencies; so I was elated watching the show and picking those out tonight! I can't wait to see what is ahead!


-foghs: We've already had to incorporate the actual presences of Jacob and Black-Shirt as the largest functional players. That's a lot to ask of us, actually, because while their story may be of interest from a purely structural & thematic perspective, or for curiosity's sake, there's no reason to empathize with them, and, dramatically, their meta-narrative deprives the people we should & do care about of agency (or "weight" to use Noel's more-appropriate term). I'm not saying Jacob ruined the show or anything. I'm just saying that's a big, tricky bit of business to work with already.

-lone audience: The Jensen article cites Liebniz's "best of all possible worlds" argument. I found this appropriate because the argument arose from the idea that there exists an interventionary God and that this being cannot do wrong. Lost has been since its first season an analysis and, in some ways, an excoriation of the notion of an interventionary God. It has always been about Jacob and Esau; it has always been about being robbed of agency. If you don't like that theme, you probably won't like the rest of Lost.