zengonzo
4201
So what experimentation? Why? Can sharks time travel? What keeps them from swimming into the negazone? Was time travel less significant to the story when someone thought it would be cool and interesting to have a tattooed shark cut-away? And, anyway, we’ll figure out why later?
I do hope they come up with motivations for the experiments.
Wouldn’t that be enough for experiments though? If the island really is so isolated that it’s incredibly difficult to come and go, it stands to reason that the surrounding wild life has kind of been on it’s own evolutionary ladder separate from everything else.
If science finds it valuable to send various plants and whatnot into space to see how they act in minimal gravity then it doesn’t surprise me that some scientists might be interested in how plants and animals respond in any area that is governed by different laws of space and time. The show has plenty of things left to explain more important than this stuff.
Jazar
4203
Dharma was trying to see if frikkin’ “laser” beams could be attached to the shark’s heads. (On contract for a private investor)
Let me say that I’m happy that the show has some clear direction now that they’ve embedded themselves in the time travel thing, but it seems at the cost of abandoning a bunch of the phenomenon from earlier, which are now reduced to novelty sideshows.
Whether or not such fancy can be reasonably explained away or brushed aside, those items were what attracted me to the show in the first place, and I’d like to see them play out a bit more.
This is more an issue of interest than continuity.
The sharks were part of the zoology efforts of the Dharma Initiative, which was dedicated to dicking around with the six coefficients of the Valenzetti Equation, which predicted the End of Man ™ at a certain point in the future. The hope of the Dharma Initiative was to change those coefficient values and somehow defray the destruction of all humans. Or something. The entire plot area was explored through an ARG. This season, the Dharma Initiative doesn’t seem to matter so much, except for the scene in the debut where Dr. Chang is drilling to get to the Frozen Donkey Wheel. The way the plot is going, it looks like you’re simply not going to find out precisely what specific experiments they were doing exactly on all those animals. We just know that somehow zoology was in some way supposed to impact one of those numbers and maybe let them change it.
Yeah, I’d even forgotten all about the Equation … That’s the stuff I want more of. More whacky Dharma junk science. Less cat-herding.
Maybe it’s just me but this season seems MUCH more predictable. I’m not sure if the show has always been this bad or if it’s a new thing but I’ve been able to predict every “surprise” yet.
The formula just seems obvious to me. The answer to everything is either “Sawyer was in the bushes all along!” or “It’s his/her father/mother.”
Scenes like Sawyer witnessing Aaron’s birth or Jin witnessing Danielle freak out don’t strike me as clever or particularly entertaining… instead it’s the writers of the show dancing around breaking continuity COMPLETELY for the amusement of a STUPID audience. You HAVE to be stupid to be entertained by this stuff because there’s no logical rules underlying any of it. Which is fine I guess… I can turn off my brain… but there was a time when I felt I didn’t have to.
Some amount of predictability is inevitable now that they’ve only got a season and a half to go and have to wrap up all the “random new mystery of the week” things they introduced previously. I can see your point, but I much prefer a bit of predictability to random new reveals of information that never go anywhere and at this point I don’t see how they could avoid being somewhat predictable short of just doing things the old way and then just ending the series with a bunch of random mystery questions that don’t quite fit together and are never answered.
Let’s give this theory a whirl.
Q: What do the numbers mean?
A: It’s Hurley’s father!
Hmmmmm. That one didn’t seem to work. Let’s try another.
Q: Who built the four-toed statue?
A: Sawyer was in the bushes!
I think this theory needs some revision.
I think it’s always kind of been that way. People were predicting that Locke’s dad was the real Sawyer, that Claire was Jack’s sister, etc long before they were revealed on the show.
“We’re not going to Guam, are we?”
Lapidus is awesome.
Oh yeah, that was awesome. What a trippy episode.
— Alan
Funkman
4213
For whatever reason, I like the idea that Hurley was reading Y: The Last Man, while Ben was reading Ulysses.
“How can you read?”
“My mother taught me.”
I always miss those little details.
Random stuff: So who/what convinced Hurley to get on the plan? ChipCharlie? And it’s kinda funny that no one asked Ben how he got beaten up.
And did it look to anyone else like Sayid was in police custody at the airport? Who’s the woman with him?
And Jin seems to be enjoying life in his Dharma getup and his rockin’ VW bus. :)
Oh, one other thing: Ben’s mother didn’t teach him to read. She died in childbirth.
I would think it would have to be Charlie, ie the guitar case, although that may be another red-herring original trip memento. Probably Ms. Hawking.
It would seem like they want you to think Ben got what he wanted or at least was in no hurry to leave the marina. :(
Sayid looked exactly like he was in custody, which fit the motif of making things as close to the original trip as possible, vis a vis Kate’s Marshal. I don’t know who the character is but the woman is Zuleikha Robinson, one of the hot^H^H^H sexiest women on the planet (at least to me), whom I last saw as Gaia in the HBO series Rome. Yowza.
Oh come on she isn’t that hot. And frankly she looked positively un-hot in tonight’s episode.
— Alan
She IS hot. Let’s hope she survived the crash. Sayid deserves some lovin’ after what happened to Shannon.
bloo
4218
No. Jeff Fahey is awesome!
Hmm. I’m beginning to think the ‘Adam’ and ‘Eve’ skeletons might be Sun and Jin.
Aw, I was liking the sans-flashback episodes but it looks to be bringing them back with the Jin/Kate/Hurley/Sawyer/Ben holes.
Depending on how much the writers want to screw with us, the make it as close to the original trip as possible would suggest one of the female characters is pregnant.
Feeling a bit nauseous, Kate?
