Because We Left (and Lied)

LOSTaways-

I feel whole again. LOST is back. A Robby divided against itself cannot stand, and I've been incomplete since May 29th of last year when last we saw the greatest show ever made by humans. I think it is safe to say that this week's triumphant return was a ringing success. Because You Left and The Lie were about as good an opening to a season as one could hope. We got to see Locke murdering people again, Hurley gorging his sweaty face, creepy Ben stares and Kate attempting to bolt like the girl we knew pre-island crash. Desmond and Faraday reunite, Constant-style. (Those two should really get an ABC sit-come spin off called "Two Guys, A Hatch, and a Polar Bear".)

It had it all.

I'll break down some of the story-lines from each episode and then give a few thoughts/theories as usual.

I'm just so glad it's back...


"Because You Left"- These words are the answer Ben gives to Jack when our favorite now-you-see-him-bearded-now-you-don't spinal surgeon asks the pertinent and appropriate question "How did we get here? How did this happen?"

But we open the season in the Othersville home of one Dr. Pierre Chang (aka Edgar Halliwax, aka Marvin Candle, aka Mark Wickmund), sometime presumably in the 1970's. Dr. Chang we've seen in multiple Orientation films since season two, but this was the first time we've seen him off-the-cuff and in-person. He's got a wife and a baby (who, being Asian, might end up being either Jin, Sun, or Miles). He's making a video for The Arrow station when he's called to The Orchid due to a problem. Here we see the first time Dharma people found the wheel-of-fortune (and time) that Ben turned last season to "move the island". Obviously Dr. Chang knew what they were looking/drilling for down there and had them design the Orchid upstairs as a misdirection from what was actually underground.

This got me thinking about Chang and some of the higher-up's in the Dharma gang. These people had to have found the island some way. I know they are at war with the hostiles, and are eventually "purged" out of existence, but how did Dharma find this place to begin with? It had to have been someone on the island going to the real world and telling people about it. Maybe this is where Widmore comes in? Maybe Widmore is (or knew) Alvar Hanso, of the Hanso Foundation, that we were told founded/funded Dharma? More on this later

But most important to note from the opening scene was obviously that hardhat-clad Daniel Faraday is putting a shift in for the Dharma tunnel-diggers union some 20-30 years before we've ever seen him on the island. Not to get too far ahead, but I think when we see Faraday it is further down the road of island-skipping time and the skips in time get further and further apart and in one of those skips back Faraday goes to try and learn what the source of the island's time-traveling power is. Hence, he's the same age as we've always seen him, and was down in the belly of The Orchid looking very investigative.

In present island time, as the white light subsides from the sky, Locke finds himself alone a second after being surrounded by his newly appointed Others minions. On the beach, those left behind find that their camp and food and shelter has disappeared. The theory that the island had moved in time came to fruition and the non-Oceanic Six survivors find themselves on the day that Yemi's plane crashed and Desmond was still pushing buttons in the Hatch. Locke goes to see what's what with the plane and ends up shot in the leg by Ethan. The people on the beach, led by Faraday who starts to reveal that he knows basically what is happening, head to find a "landmark" or "constant", preferably one man-made. They head to the hatch and along the way, and just as Ethan's about to shoot an injured John Locke in his bald head, the island skips again.

One thing about the time of day/night when the island skips time...One of the biggest themes of the show since the pilot episode has been light/dark, faith/science, ying/yang, etc., etc. Well, I thought it was interesting and perhaps intentionally symbolic that the future was always during the night and the past was always during the day. Now obviously part of that is for the audience's sake so we have some bearing at where we are in the story. But it also fits into the mold of the light/dark theme of the show. The past is illuminated because it is known and can be "trusted". There are "rules" about the past, according to Faraday's string-cheese theory. But the future, well the future is a different ball of wax. It is dark and mysterious and unknown.

Maybe I'm stretching that one too far, but since I literally can't stretch most parts of my body before running, I indulge on the rhetorical front.

The long and short of it is that the island, Faraday says, should be thought of like a record skipping. It has been dislodged (thanks to Ben's wheel turning escapades). There is a distinct theme of record players since Season Two in the hatch. Dr Chang is listening to one that skips at the beginning of this very episode in fact. The song he is playing is "Shotgun Willie" by Willie Nelson. The lyrics have some correlation to the song Desmond was playing on a Dharma record player in the hatch, "Make Your Own Kind of Music" by Mama Cass. I won't over-analyze things again here, but take a look at the words and post a comment if you see anything worthy of note.

When the island skips ahead, Locke is found by Richard Alpert who knew precisely where Locke would be and what he needed to be told. This Alpert guy is some kind of something, no? Locke is told that because the Oceanic Six left, things are going to be catastrophic for everyone if he (Locke) doesn't go back and bring the Six home again from the real world. To do that, Alpert says ominously, Locke will have to die. We knew he was dead, but to learn that he was foretold to die in order to get the Oceanic Six back is weird, wild stuff. So however it happened, Locke died in the future off the island and knew he had to in order to save things. Score one for The Man of Faith. Alpert also said that he and the Others hadn't disappeared, but that Locke did. More on this later in my thoughts/theories section.

When the island skips back to the past (the writers of the show say it is supposed to be circa 1999 when Yemi's plane crashed), Faraday goes to find Desmond in the hatch. In Faraday's magical book of time/space, he had written "Desmond Hume is my constant." They had met in 1996 which we saw in last year's episode The Constant when Dez went back to give a pony-tailed Faraday the right numbers for his mouse-trap game. It does seem strange and confusing how neither of them would remember that when they first meet on the island, but maybe Faraday does and was downplaying things. He is shy and bizarre. Faraday tells Dez that he is special, that the rules don't apply to him and that he is the only one who can save all of them. Before the light flashes again, he yells for Dez to go back to Oxford for him and find his mother. We don't get her name, but I think I know who it is: Ms Hawking. The old lady who told Desmond not to marry Penny in Season Three, and who we see again at the end of last night's second episode.

To wrap up Because You Left, in the future off the island, Ben begins his attempts at recruiting all of the Oceanic Six to come back to the island. Jack is completely on board and even seems comforted to learn that he will never come back once he returns to the island. He shaves, puts on his suit, and with the help of Ben, flushes the pills (and hopefully some of the pain) of the past three years.

Kate tries to run cause some lawyers come and try to take blood samples in order to prove that Kate either is or isn't Aaron's real mummy (as Claire would obnoxiously say). She doesn't get far and ends up getting an "unknown" call from Sun who she goes to visit in a hotel. Sun says she doesn't blame Kate for what happened. But earlier in the episode, Sun is given a stern talking-to by Charles Widmore at the airport. I think maybe Sun is up to something more devious and had a bigger reason for asking Kate to come by. Maybe Widmore had her do that so that he could have his people watching and tailing Kate (and oh what a tail!).

Hurley and Sayid run into some trouble at the "safe house" that is about as safe as I am liberal. Their story runs into the second episode so I'll talk more about that in a second.

The first episode ends with Dez telling Penny (on yes, her boat) that they're to haul-up anchor and set a course for Oxford, England.

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The Lie- We get a larger-than-life-and-necessary serving of Hurley in this second installment of the season opener. To cut through the boring saga of Hurley's emotions issues, he takes knocked-out Sayid back to his parent's house, has his dad take Sayid to Jack, and cries like a woman in front of his mother. His guilt from having to lie for so long gets the best of him. Maybe a ride in a Dharma VW bus will lift his weighty worries?

It is an interesting scene when the Oceanic Six are on Penny's boat discussing what to do about all the lying. Not so much because of their discussion, but that Penny makes it clear that she is not with her dad (so far as we can tell), and that her dad is obsessed with all this island-finding business and will not cease-and-desist no matter what. He is Ben's rival for a reason.

Back on the beach, it is now in the future and as Miles returns with a boar he "found" in the jungle the encampment is bombarded with flaming arrows that kill a few of the survivors. Who is doing the shooting, and if it is the future, why are they pulling a Robin Hood with the arrows? When Juliet and Sawyer are captured by a few of them, the one guy has a Dharma-looking jumpsuit on with the name "Jones" on it and demands to know who they are. The jumpsuit looks like an old Dharma one though. Maybe he and the arrow-brigade are also being shot back and forth in time and are from Dharma circa 1970/80's (opening of the first episode)? Maybe they are Rousseau's crew that she ended up killing? Either way, Locke Rambo's his way to victory and "ends" all three of the people who are about to cut off Juliet's paw. Vintage Locke. Vintage Locke's pants.

Oh, one actually interesting part of Hurley's tale was the bump-in, pull-over visit from Anna Lucia (Libby says hi). Hurley seems to be the most in-tune with the island of all the Oceanic Six. Whether its the island or Jacob or whoever, they know Hurley is the easiest to manipulate and they push the poor guy to his breaking point. Anna Lucia's ghost tells Hurley he's gonna have to step up his game if he is to avoid getting captured "at all costs." Funny, cause the second he has the chance to avoid the cops, with Ben's help, he runs out and turns himself in. Maybe Hurley is wising up and sick of listening to the voices in his head? Or maybe he just ruined everything and should have gone with Ben?

Speaking of the bug-eyed bugger, Ben takes Locke's body to a butcher shop for safe keeping. He obviously has more of "his people" off the island and they are hatching something big. After losing Hugo to the po-po, Ben heads to a church where in the basement our mysterious Ms. Hawking is using retro computer equipment and hanging pieces of chalk (the device is called a Focault Pendulum) over a map to locate where the island has been moving to each time it skips in time. There is a logo on the computer (which looks eerily similar to the ones in the hatches on the island), and the logo appears to be Dharma itself. Perhaps it is from the yet-to-be-discovered Dharma station that is on the map on the blast doors that Locke got his legs (and pants) stuck in during season two. Ms Hawking tells a worried-looking Ben that he has only 70 hours to get everyone together for their journey back to the island.

And so the pieces are in motion for an all-out attempt by Ben and Jack (and whoever else is helping Ben) to get the Oceanic Six together for a reunion tour to the island.


Thoughts/Theories:

-Last time I said that Charlotte might be Ben's daughter, or the daughter of his child-hood sweetheart Annie. But maybe she is Widmore's daughter and Penny's sister...and when Ben told Widmore that he would kill his daughter to settle the score for Alex's untimely demise, maybe Ben meant Charlotte. Interesting twist?

-Faraday fascinates me. We first see him parachuting out of the sky on a rainy night on the island last season. But his brief back-story shows him in Essex, MA watching the news when the fake wreckage of Oceanic 815 is being shown on the news. There is some woman we can't see in the background and she asks Faraday why he is crying at the sight of the wreckage. Maybe it's cause in his mind he knew he'd be headed there and that he couldn't avoid it. It could be a subconscious thing where because of his previous meeting with Desmond in 1996 he knew sort of what was going to happen but couldn't quite remember all of it yet. Regardless, he tells Desmond in last night's episode that his black book contains all the info he's gathered on Dharma and the island up to that point. But he had never been to the island so far as we know. The opening scene with him in the bowels of the Orchid, like I said earlier, is probably a skip-in-time and at that point he's really still in the future (sort of). I don't think Faraday had been to the island before he parachuted on to it in season four. So how does he know all that stuff about Dharma? He doesn't just say "I know a ton about time/space stuff", he says he knows a lot about Dharma. And Miles makes the comment that "It took Widmore 20 years to find this island last time." How do they know this? They were hired by Naomi who was hired by Abbadon who allegedly works for Widmore. Not sure what to make of all that, but we've more to learn about what went on before and during the hiring process of Lapidus, Charlotte, Miles, and Faraday for their journey on the freighter.

-Ms. Hawking is Faraday's mother. But how does she know Ben? Was she on the island? Were the two of them and Widmore previously all chums and now there has been a falling out and she's helping Ben to defeat Widmore? I think she is more of a guard, or as the writers have said in their podcasts, a "policewoman" who is a guardian of the timeline of history. Obviously there is a lot to digest there and a lot of ambiguity. Basically, I don't think she's "on Ben's side", but is likely more neutral and just wants to keep time/history going.

-Ben's staging a lot of the drama here and his real purpose is just to get himself back to the island. I think they island doesn't want him back so has been sending mixed signals to the Oceanic Six. Claire-ghost tells Kate not to come back. Charlie-ghost tells Hurley to come back. Etc. But then again, the island needs to be "corrected" and Jacob still wants to be "helped" by Locke. There's a lot of mixed messaging going on here (on purpose, obviously).

-There has been a lot of talk about "rules". Ben says there are rules to killing Charles Widmore, and also rules that Widmore broke by killing Alex. Faraday explains some rules for time-travel, using the analogy of a String. Jack is someone who likes to play by the rules. Locke is someone who is okay with breaking some if it's for the "greater good" (however he defines it). I appreciate that about this show: they tackle interesting moral questions like this. How far do we go to follow rules? Should we always follow them? Is it ever okay to break the rules? How far do we go in that direction, even if its for a good cause? Underlying this is the reality that all our decisions have consequences. Sorry for the philosophical tangent.


Alright comrades. That's all I got. Thanks for tuning in, and please, as always, post some comments/questions below.



Love,
JL's Pants