And my favorite part of THAT is that even the flight attendants don’t ask. “Sure, passenger who is late and covered in blood—welcome aboard!”
I thought in general it was a terrible episode, for exactly the same reasons asspennies cited. I’ve been on board for all the show’s silliness all along, but some stuff last night for whatever reason really bugged me.
However, I also loved the exchange between Jack and Ben on the plane:
Jack: “What about all the other people on the plane?”
Ben: “Who cares?”
which was a great joke about the redshirts.
I think the killing of Ben’s daughter made Ben officially go off script, as it were. Ben was a true believer in destiny up to that point, but now I believe he is willfully fighting against what he perceives is his destiny.
The funniest thing about his line about his Mom teaching him to read is that it’s a total lie. For no reason. I think Ben is so used to lying he doesn’t even know when he’s doing it anymore.
I’m really bothered by the mystical transportation off the plane and onto the island. I’ve been trying to wrap my mind around it, and what happened to the plane. Sure, I suppose they could simply use the cop out that only our heroes “zapped” to the island, and the plane recovered itself after passing through the island’s radius. But remember, they made a point to talk about the Ajira Air stuff Sawyer/Juliette found in the canoe, and if the heroes got zapped then Lapidus should have been zapped as well since he had contact with the island previously. Plus, remember that Lapidus was supposed to the be pilot of the original Oceanic flight but got replaced at the last moment.
So my working theory is that the plane DID crash. The people on it who were not Losties are still in the future, having had no connection to the island previously thus not effected by the “time wave” effect. The Losties, and likely Lapidus as well, have all been zapped back to the past by the time wave, which might explain how they arrived in a particular spot on the island sans wreckage (no Ajira plane in 1978 or whenever it is for them currently). This would then fit the idea that the survivors of the Ajira plane were the people who trashed the Losties camp (drinking all Sawyer’s beer) and shot at them in the canoe when Sawyer/Juliette/Locke were in the future, post-crash.
Oh, and I predict Hurley’s guitar case will be filled with super-useful survival items, not snacks. Snacks is the obvious easy cop out, and Hurley seems to have thought this return to the island thing through pretty well, even going so far as to buy all the remaining seats on the plane to minimize casualties.
It’s a SMAW, to take out that chainy smoke shit.
That’d be hard to get through the metal detectors.
zengonzo
4246
Can you actually take a guitar case into the cabin these days?
Hell, I guess if you bought it a seat or seventy-five …
Lots of Kate and Jack = terrible episode. It’s really the only metric you need.
Ehhh…I didn’t really hate the episode, though it had more exposition than I really would have liked and the intentional gaps were fairly obvious and I’d like to smack Vaughn one for pimping his comic (even though I love the comic, that’s bad form fella). The thing that annoyed me most is knowing that next week will be interchangeable with this one - they basically flipped a coin to decide whether they should air this first or The Life and Death of Jeremy Bentham. I’m also a little disappointed that the writers didn’t see fit to drag Walt back to The Island, which now leaves me thinking that it’s a lot less likely that we’ll find out what The Others were doing with him in the first place and why he was so important.
Hanacker
4249
The episode was kinda boring. You knew what was going to happen, and nothing really interesting happens in between. But they couldn’t just say “they get back to the island” without an episode like this so maybe it was necessary. But they could have made it a bit more exciting.
Was it? I’ve actually heard of the comic, but I wasn’t sure that’s what the big Y meant (I thought “The Last Man” would be a little more prominent if it was). If you’ve never heard of it, I doubt a one-second clip of Hurley reading it will make you want to check it out. Just seemed like they wanted a shot of Hurley reading a comic book and why not pick that one than a fake one or one written by someone else?
My theory on the plane is that it definitely didn’t crash. When it passed over the island there was a time skip. Everything that was supposed to be on the island (the Oceanic 6) was moved with the island. The plane kept on going in it’s proper time, just like all the structures on the island. Remember the whole point of going back to the island was to fix the skipping.
zengonzo
4251
I dunno’, man, there sure was a lot of ‘they show up at the airport’ to go around.
The comic in the show was in Spanish language to parallel the comic Walt found after the first flight crashed. That was the cover of the first trade, and “El Hombre Penultimo” or whatever text was in large font (Seiler clearly does not speak Spanish) was presumably Spanish for The Last Man. I agree that it’s probably not effective marketing, but it’s snide little in-jokes like that (see also Hodgeman the Brain Surgeon) that take me out of a show. I laughed at it, which maybe means it succeeded or maybe means it didn’t, but I just find something so deliciously ironic about a guy who barely writes comics any more pimping his own book to be sort of the television equivalent of a party foul. Not a big deal, certainly - just a tiny annoyance (which ties into how I’m pissed off at Vaughn for giving up writing for television production in the first place - not really something he would have wanted to remind me of).
I’m also kind of surprised that Lindelof wouldn’t have kicked Brian off to the side and put his own damn book in the shot, too. I’d like to hear a commentary from them on how that happened.
For what it’s worth, the first comic was for real, too.
As mentioned previously, the left-behinds have seen some evidence of survivors of a new plane crash while they were time skipping, so I think the theory Slainte posted is pretty solid – they crashed, but in the present (which I think is supposed to be the future for the left behinds, because I think they didn’t have the 3 year real-world gap the people who left did), while the previous survivors jumped to the past during the crash.
There is no evidence of this, but Ben did vow to kill Penny and that would be a perfect ‘loose end’ for him to have to tie up suddenly right after realizing Desmond was in town. Also, he called Jack from what appeared to be a Marina, which strongly suggests Desmond (thus Penny) as they’ve been sailing around everywhere. They (probably very intentionally) didn’t really show or explain what actually happened, though.
Ben kept wanting them to meet at a marina, though. I don’t know why, though.
How come Ben’s crew, the Dharma people, and the Freighter people could apparently leave and return to the island whenever they felt like it, but the Lost people need to be on a commercial flight (and why couldn’t they charter their own plane and fly there from Guam / Hawaii? Ben seems to have money.) and fly over the island at a certain time?
Because the Island wasn’t flicking through time for the Dharma/Others/Freighters. That only happens when somebody spins the big wheel.
But the lady said the Dharma initiative built the pendulum because the island was flicking through time and space and they needed to track it down. Afaik that would have been before anyone spun the wheel (and before the wheel existed?).
And where does the US military figure into this?
mystery
4258
The wheel predates Dharma – it looks like it might be the wheel off the Black Rock.
There’s definitely something wrong with the way the island is moving through space/time at this point in the narrative, or otherwise the world wouldn’t be in such trouble.
It was a great episode. But it was bound to happen. “WE WANT ANSWERS! STOP FUCKING AROUND!” answers come “THIS IS STUPID.”
Who built the pendulum?, What device did the Dharma Initiative use to find the island?, and what is the kooky method they have to use to get back to the island? weren’t on my list of questions before this episode. What else did they answer?
