Lost LA X recap: What's Your Worldview? - by Doc Jensen | EW.com ..p2

The Island story line was two-thirds Dantesque, with the castaways moving out from the Inferno-ish pit of the hellish Swan crater to the surreal limbo of the Temple. I can't resist the Paradiso. Dante's vision of heaven is comprised of nine spheres. After moving beyond the ninth sphere, which is the home to angels (City of Angels), Dante finally gets to the Empyrean, where all living souls become interconnected (cue Charlie: ''You All Everybody'') to form a giant cosmic rose. But before becoming part of the rose, Dante meets face to face with the man behind the curtain. And you know what God gives Dante? Answers. Answers to the biggest questions of human existence. Some answers make sense; some are so beyond Dante's comprehension that they defy explanation. Dante's journey has ended, and there is the happily ever after in the company of the ''You All Everybody'' of countless souls across infinite worlds.
Welcome to the heaven of Season 6. Welcome to the promise of answers. Welcome to the promise of something better than answers: a mind-blowing, emotionally galvanizing story. I'll be your Virgil. I promise you epic digressions, forced pop culture references.. Come for the potential of clarity; stay for the entertaining incoherency. really does deliver epic follow through on references & possible meanings. and actually, v coherent: these write-ups always impress me as artfully structured. arranged. a poem.
I love you all echo? ah reminding me of: "I know you all, and will awhile uphold. The unyoked humour of your idleness. Yet herein will I imitate the sun, who doth permit.." spoken by Hal (or, Henry V) in Henry IV Part 1, and am grateful for your indulgence and readership, and I am already grieving the reality of letting go. But for now, let us heed the words of the prophet, the little prince himself: Let's Go Crazy. song by Prince, nice.


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One wonders if the entire season 6 sideways story line will model the general themes of the castaway story, but with different incidents and events: a gritty, more down-to-earth version of the mythic, larger-than-life Island epic, like how Dorothy's adventure in Oz was a fantastical extrapolation of her life in Kansas.
Lost also loves its Alice in Wonderland references, and so we recall that Lewis Carroll's sequel to Alice's Adventures In Wonderland was entitled Through The Looking Glass, which begins with Alice gazing into a mirror and wondering if it could be portal into a topsy-turvy Otherworld. The book itself is a cracked mirror reflection of the previous book — the same story in essence, sharing similar if not identical themes, just rendered with different incident and detail.
Jack looked at himself in the mirror and detected a mysterious cut on his neck. .. The Nick In Time'' a sci-fi novel in which the hero traverses parallel realities to correct time travel chaos.
Jack returned to his seat and saw Desmond "The Man Who Wasn't There (On The Plane The First Time Around)'" Hume. Desmond Hume reads the darndest books. When we first met him in season 2, the moony marooner ran off into the jungle carrying a copy of The Third Policeman by Flann O'Brien, a perversely playful work with a plot that mirrors the most despairing of Lost theories: that our fallen castaways are stuck in an eternal cycle of damnation. A deleted deleted? passage from The Third Policeman: "Joe had been explaining things in the meantime. He said it was again the beginning of the unfinished, the re-discovery of the familiar, the re-experience of the already suffered, the fresh-forgetting of the unremembered. Hell goes round and round. In shape it is circular and by nature it is interminable, repetitive and very nearly unbearable." In LA X, Desmond was reading Rushdie's Haroun And The Sea of Stories. Like Policeman, Haroun functions as commentary and critique on storytelling, but otherwise couldn't be more different. The plot concerns a boy who all but curses his father in a moment of despair by saying, cynically, "What's the use of stories that aren't even true?" As a consequence, the father becomes heartbroken.. Haroun then embarks on a fantastic adventure to save an enchanted place, and he restores his father's life and power by giving him the tale of his own adventure. I'm thinking of Jack and his relationship to his father. ah right a father-son story. and son like father has adventure in an enchanted place. I'm fascinated by Desmond's progression from the surreal cynicism of Policeman to the redemptive fable of Haroun. I've certainly seen a lot of Policeman in Lost. In season 6, perhaps we'll see more Haroun.


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thought the Island World story in ''LA X'' was, on its face, even weirder than the Sideways stuff. I can't imagine anyone who stopped watching after season 1 or 2 coming back to the series with this episode and not thinking, ''Temples? Magic springs? Circles of ash that keep smokey demons at bay? What the hell happened to this show?!'' (Answer: It got even more awesomer! hee Now go away, drop-out, this party ain't for you.)

We opened up on an iconic Lost motif: the eye. It was Kate, and we found her literally up a tree. (Other notable tree entries: Bernard's Island arrival in season 2 and Charlotte's Island arrival in season 4.)
I did briefly wonder if perhaps they were truly dead. But yes, yes, let's say they're all still living in the conventional sense of the term.

Everything about this section of the story just felt big, including Dogen's oversized hourglass and Jacob's laughably large wooden ankh hidden inside Hurley's guitar case. (Mystery solved!) Why did it have to be that big? It needed to be put through a mythic talisman bit shortener. bit? oh a url shortener. FUN FACT! Stephen King & Peter Straub's 1984 novel The Talisman is about a boy who can traverse between parallel worlds. His name? Jack Sawyer. !


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The Island: the original and purest expression of the God idea, of God power. These ruins? The remains of those zealots who've attempted to claim, name, and tame this place over the centuries — those people the Man In Black spoke of last year: ''They come. They fight. They destroy. They corrupt. It always ends the same.''