Scrambled Eggtown

Lostaways-

Locke makes Ben breakfast, Sawyer's shacking up with Hurley, and Jin wants to move to Albuquerque.....and those weren't even the good parts of this week's LOST??? Hmm, must have been a good one.


First matter of business, the meaning of the episode's title: "Eggtown...Egg-town is a pejorative term that refers to the days of bartering, during the Great Depression. A traveling salesman would have to barter his candy or tobacco or shoelaces for different commodities. A poor exchange would be for eggs, a relatively common item that is also highly perishable. Nobody wants to trade for eggs from a traveling salesman because they have their own, so the salesman who accepted an egg in exchange was forced to accept a bad deal. Salesmen would use the term like "If I were you I would stay away from Bogart. That's an egg-town." Of course, the lack of trust among salesman was also high, and it was likely that one salesman would lie to another about the quality of a town's customers to keep them for himself. Invariably, the second salesman ventures into Bogart only to find it is truly an egg-town. He is either persuaded to not visit a town that has good customers or is tricked into visiting a town that can only offer eggs. The term "egg-town" represents a deal with undesirable outcomes in either case."

That, of course, is from Lostpedia's posting about this episode. I love all the new allusions to economics and trade theory this show has implemented. Locke is struggling to make deals with his own people, let alone Ben and Miles. Kate is making deals with Sawyer (then ditching him), Miles, and the District Attorney and her own mother when she gets off the island. Miles has a side deal brewing with Ben for a seemingly arbitrary dollar amount. (Or is it?)

Taking this economic line of thinking further than it needs to go, one of the key ingredients to a free market is voluntary participation, but something that economists like Adam Smith and John Locke (the real one) believed was also critical to the system of economy would be moral individuals who, despite working in their self-interest, were following a "standard" or commonly accepted "set of rules". Locke, in this episode, eventually even makes the comment that no one is following the rules voluntarily, so he'll put limits on how "free" this island market can get.

Is this the island or Oliver Stone's 1987 classic Wall Street starring Michael Douglas and Charlie Sheen?

This Kate-centric opens with my boy Locke preparing the "last two eggs in town" for the man who corners the market on "creepy", Benry Gale-Linus. I found it ironic that Locke slept in Ben's house, in his bed, etc. (since both men have had their issues with each other, and with walking, since Flight 815 crashed). Locke has reversed the literal roles since being in Othersville last (when he was locked up in the same basement for blowing up the submarine...allegedly), but still has no real good grasp on what to do. Also noteworthy is the fact that Locke has Ben locked up in the same room where Ben was keeping "the man from Tallahassee" (Anthony Cooper, Locke's dad). It seems that Ben has replaced Locke's dad as the "father who doesn't want/love me, has tried to kill me, and mocks me for my weaknesses that he (Ben and/or Cooper) helped to create" role in Locke's life. Just what he needed, right? Ben comments to John that he is "more LOST than ever" which is just the kind of thing that would potentially cause Locke to do something like, uh, I dont know, through a plate with eggs and honeydew melon against a brick wall maybe?

Ben seems to always be in control, even when locked up in his own basement. Locke does seem LOST, having not been able to find Jacob or his cabin (something even Hurley could do). The entire episode Locke seems desperate and angry and cranky. This is a common theme on the show during the past 3-plus seasons. Locke gets motivated/excited when things go well (i.e. he can walk after three years in a wheel chair, the light shines out of the hatch when Boone is dying and Locke is asking for a sign, his faith is restored in the hatch when it is too late at the end of season two when he looks at Eko and says "I was wrong"), but then becomes irritable and desperate any time things go wrong. For a "man of faith", he certainly loses his (and his temper) very quickly. One would almost say he's human.

One other quick note about Locke.....last season after he got back from rescuing Eko from the polar bear, he was motivated and in high spirits. He told the beach dwellers that he would do what he could to get their friends (Jack, KAte, Sawyer) back from the Others. He led a group to the Pearl station to hopefully find clues as to how they could find the Others' camp and when Nikki said to him "Jack would never let us come with", Locke responds "This is a democracy and I dont run things like Jack". Then in tonight's episode, Locke says almost the exact opposite. Locke is obsessed with comparing himself to Jack and part of his own tragic flaw is the inability to feel confident in, and good about, himself. To be fair to my favorite character, he had a pretty "tough" life leading up to the crash.

But the big news (sorry I'm jumping around in the story here, but thoughts come to me and I'm a slave to them, like the Britney Spears song, when she had a little talent before getting "Federline-ed").....Aaron is being raised by Kate in the future with no Claire in sight. Kate obviously did not want her mom seeing her "son", and told her lawyer not to use her "son" on the witness stand, because she doesnt want anyone to find out the truth: something happened to Claire, and she, Jack, Hurley, Sayid, and probably whoever else is part of the Oceanic Six are lying about what went on on the island. Claire, I'll graciously wager, either got left behind or will end up being killed.

Thinking back to season one, the psychic who told Claire originally to go, Richard Malkin, said that only Claire should raise her baby because evil would surround him (Aaron). There is a deleted scene from Season Two that I wrote about last year when those dvd's came out where in the episode when Eko goes to investigate the girl who drowned and came back to life, we discover that the girl's father is Richard Malkin, the psychic. In this deleted scene I'm talking about, he tells Mr Eko that someone gave him $16,000 to make a pregnant girl get on a plane to L.A. So the psychic who originally told her not to give the baby away because evil surrounded it (something I believe he really meant) sold her out and sent her to LA with $6000 of that $16000. I use to think that the psychic was a part of the same group of time-traveling "guides" who have been directing many of the people on the island to the island in their past lives (i.e. the old woman who told Desmond he couldnt marry Penny), but now I think he was simply used by whoever those people are (Others, or the Boat People and Matthew Abbadon) to get Claire to get on the plane. So this would mean that his original prediction that Aaron was special, but needed to be raised by his mom or else evil would surround him, is going to help explain what it is that went so wrong on the island before the Oceanic Six got off it (and why Claire is not there raising her boy).


Speaking of the "boy", Aaron: Jack was not wanting anything to do with coming to see him with Kate and her house at the end of the episode. Perhaps just the sight of the boy is too painful because it reminds him of the island and whatever it is that went wrong (i.e. Jack had to make a tough decision to leave people behind). Or perhaps Jack thinks its Sawyer's kid and can't look at Aaron for that reason. But more likely than not, Jack doesn't want to see Aaron because whatever it is that went wrong and caused the Oceanic Six to lie about how many survived and all that must have involved Jack finally finding out that Claire is his sister, and when things went bad and Claire either got killed or left behind, Jack cannot forgive himself for it, nor look at his own flesh and blood, his nephew, Aaron Littleton. This might be a key to unlocking the mystery of why Jack wants to go back so bad. He left Claire, his own sister, and for someone like Jack who has to "fix" everything, the idea of abandoning his sister and separating her from her son, is too much to bear. (see: bearded Jack listening to Nirvana songs while boozing in the AM)

Jack, the honest doctor, is forced to lie not only about the happenings on the island, but about his true love for Kate. He said that eight survived, but only six got off, to the jury. Kate later said that she has heard Jack tell that same story (of how she saved everyone; a probably concocted as a means to help Kate when she got back get sympathy from the legal system who were waiting for her) that she thinks he's almost started to believe it. Why would they have to lie so bad? Did the people who helped them get off make them lie, or did the Oceanic Six decide to do this on their own? Can we extrapolate from Sayid's hunting down of what probably is the Boat People's bosses (or boss, the "he" Miles references when talking with Ben later) that the Boat People don't actually help the Oceanic Six get off, but that there is some other means by which they escape (like a submarine that someone didnt actually blow up last season)???


Back to Ben and Miles's conversation that Kate arranged: Miles said "Don't treat me like one of 'them'...Don't act like I dont know who you are and what you can do!" Miles also said that "He" has been looking for Ben for a long time. The "He" might just be Matthew Abbadon, but it also might be someone higher up who knows all about Ben and the island. Someone from the past, someone with possible DHARMA connections. Someone like Alvar Hanso, financier of the original DHARMA Initiative. Just a thought. Miles extorts Ben for money, and I am guessing that the way Ben gets cash (and enough of it that Miles and the people he works for know about it) is time travel. He can go back in time or to any country (hence, the money and various suits and clothes he has) and steal cash or possibly go back in time and invest money in the right stocks, business deals, etc. The front company that hired Juliet was called Mittelos Bioscience. Or, LOST Time Bioscience. So however it is the Others travel back and forth to the "real world", whether by submarine or by time travel, Ben needs a week to get "that kind of money" together for Miles. I'm not sure why Ben would trust Miles that he would never tell his "boss" where BEn was even after getting the cash, but something tells me Ben has more surprises in store for our Asian ghost-busting friend.



Random thoughts and theories:


-Hurley is watching the movie Xanadu (the name of a famed Mongolian city that was supposed to be Eden-like) at one point, which is a movie where people cross over from other dimensions into our world, but what I found that was more interesting regarding this pop-culture reference was this: Xanadu is the home of a famous comic book character, Mandrake the Magician, who "was an illusionist whose work was based on an impossibly fast hypnotic technique. As the narrator informed us: "Mandrake gestured hypnotically" and the subject or subjects of this hypnosis would suddenly see the illusions he wanted. Mandrake fought criminals and other villains in his spare time. This would include common gangsters, mad scientists, and aliens from outer space or other dimensions." Sounds island-esque, doesnt it?


- Hurley also asks Kate if she "Scooby-dooed" him. Besides being my favorite cartoon character to have on my underwear growing up, Scooby doo is a show about mysterious spirits and ghosts who generally end up being a "man behind the curtain" (think:Ben/Jacob). Scooby is also easily fooled by the most modest of tricks and mind games. (think: Hurley)


-CS Lewis (Charolette's namesake) and his Chronicles of Narnia are said by the co-creators of the show to be huge influences on the writing team on LOST. Last week, it came to my attention, that when I briefly mentioned the Narnia series I might have misrepresented the EXACT circumstances in which the children travel to the world of Narnia. I said they were "called", but in the first book "Lion,Witch,Wardrobe" the youngest girl Lucy finds it in the wardrobe. But, going forward in the series of books, like the very next one Prince Caspian, a horn is sounded in Narnia that the children hear while sitting on a train station platform and they are brought back to Narnia to help fight an evil tyrant. Throughout the series of books, not everyone who wants to come to Narnia is allowed, and we discover that the ones who are brought there are each brought there for a purpose. So, in short, these themes I alluded to last week are correct, but just were not fully explained. If you really want to know more, and are one of the 15 people on the planet who haven't read these books, go take care of that ASAP.


-I am feeling more time travel in the very near future by Desmond. If you caught it last night, in the preview for next week, he goes in one shot from being bearded with longer hair to being beard-less with a buzzed haircut. He is yelling at Daniel Faraday in some room, and Faraday appeared to have much longer hair/beard than he did when we saw him guessing at cards with Charolette on the beach.



Anyway, thats just my two cents...have a great week and please post any thoughts or theories of your own on the "Comments" section below.


Good day to you,

Sawyer's Feminine Reading Glasses