LOST! Ep. 11: "Happily Ever After"
WOW! What an incredible episode. It fills me with hope for the rest of the season and the direction they could take it from here. If the writer’s mean to show that this alternate reality is not just the paths the characters might have taken without the island but is, instead, some sort of manipulation, rife with all sort of… incorrectness… well then wow. I am seriously hopeful for the remaining episodes. And if those manipulations are, in some way, being observed or even planned by Eloise… well then fuck! FUCK!
Also, I totally called Desmond drinking Widmore’s scotch.
Comments
I guess nothing worth having ever comes easy.
I think, John, that they’ve been telegraphing that the alternative world is an aberration from the very start. From the first moment Jack tilted his head quizzically in the Oceanic Air bathroom, it’s been heavily implied that everything about this cheerful other world has been deeply, perversely off-kilter. We’ve been shown an endless series of characters pausing to reflect in mirrors with a deeply nervous curiosity and anxiety. There seem to be inconsistencies and errors floating in this other world, the sort of stuff a 7-year old production team wouldn’t accidentally let slip on this sort of show. That the separation between these two realities is stretched so thin, like a cheap band-aid slapped over a festering and ugly wound, isn’t entirely surprising. It’s starting to bleed through. This thing has seemed like a jittery, uncertain fugue state from the start of the season.
What does our Dr. Manhattan Desmond see that settles his heart? My guess is he saw this other world where things have come easy, where Widmore embraces him and offers scotch, where money and women are always on tap, where apologies and mistakes are easily accepted, where various social nets ensure his safety, and realized that his life really wouldn’t mean much without all the obstacles he’d been thrashing against for so many years. What’s the point of sailing easily, painlessly through life if he didn’t have to fight for HER?
In last season’s finale, I was confused when they flashed to a little Juliet sobbing over her parents’ divorce. Now I see that when she smashed the atom that everything divorced everywhere, twinning everything in the show out into infinity and separating choice and consequence into separate airtight places.
I’ve liked that this alternative structure was introduced so late in the game. After we’ve spent years getting to know and empathize with the characters, does anyone watching actually prefer tossing away all the grueling progression for this happier, airless world of dinner parties and piano recitals and letters of recommendation and love? I doubt it… happy endings don’t mean anything if they aren’t earned.
Justin’s posts on almost any subject make want to never type anything out on the internet, ever again. But the Lost posts are pretty much the height of that.
Alternate Charles Widmore had a painting of a balance (with black/white stones) in his office! And didn’t that MRI sound like the clock with the egyptian symbols on it?
Every single little connection from one world to the alternate isn’t just for the blogging fans anymore. The story itself has finally acknowledged that the connections we are making (maybe even subconsciously) are there purposefully (something we’ve always suspected).
Hutch, interesting what you said about Eloise sort of running the whole show right now. This episode brings me back to the old seasons when the biggest question was about who the major players were.
At the end of the episode, Desmond seemed just as mindless as Sayid has been, but in an almost opposite sort of way.
Whatever grand event happens to close out the series, we know now that the Losties first life may not have been so bad. Despite all the hardships, it was a life worth living, just like Justin is saying. Maybe this was a lesson they could only learn after going through with the time travel, and the atom bomb, and all the killing.
I wonder if this lesson is the goal of Jacob, or Eloise, or both. And further, how are these two major players connected?
Looks like there’s quite a bit of traveling done when characters are unconscious. However the season ends, Jack will be knocked unconscious (or maybe killed) and wake up supine in the jungle with a camera hanging over his open eye.
Not killed. The replacement. He’s totally going to be the one to replace Jacob because it makes the most sense for his whole character arc from disbelief into belief.
John said:Not killed. The replacement. He’s totally going to be the one to replace Jacob because it makes the most sense for his whole character arc from disbelief into belief.
upvote. Jack is 90%, Hurley is at 10%
I don’t think we’ll see any new Jacobs. At least not any that stick around longer than it takes to finally tilt the game towards some sort of end. I’ve noticed a lot of sneering towards the idea of those Hobson’s choices (that aren’t ever really choices) from characters who have died. Come to think of it, Desmond was ferried about and pushed forward by three characters who have already paid the ultimate price and can’t really have any effect on the Island’s reality anymore.
I wonder if there’s any similarity between Widmore and Jacob imprisoning Desmond and the Man in Black upon the Island, respectively.
Thematically, I keep thinking about the movie “The Last Temptation of Christ,” and how Jesus (dying on the cross) has a vision of an alternate world where he avoids sacrifice and lives a quiet, long, easy life with a wife and child. Eventually, the world he knows is ground into ruin and his own disciples spit on him for his selfishness and cowardice while he lies on his deathbed. He snaps back to reality, realizes Satan is tempting him, and dies on the cross. I don’t necessarily think that the alternate world is some grand illusion crafted by the Man in Black… but this reference keeps itching in my brain because of all the Christian metaphors they’ve been pulling out lately.
I loved the three-prong reference of the bunny rabbit: Angstrom is a measurement of electromagnetic energy, the surname of John Updike’s Rabbit character, and the same sort of animal that Ben liked experimenting with on Hydra Island himself.