Ain't That a Kick in the Jughead

LOSTaways-

Ahoy (not Chips)! Well, actually, maybe Chips Ahoy...but only if you were wondering what I just ate for a snack. For the rest of you, just Ahoy!

We’re 3 episodes deep and the story has taken us wide (world-wide, that is). The latest installment of LOST was entitled Jughead and I'd like to start off by throwing some information out at you regarding the name of the episode.

Most of you will recognize "Jughead" as a character in the Archie comics series. What you might not know is that that same character Jughead had his own spin off storyline from Archie called Jughead's Time Police in which our hero traveled in time to "correct disturbances" in the timeline of his friends/family. Hmmm. Not sure what that would have to do with this television show. Probably just a mistake. I heard that these writers of LOST just make stuff up as they go along anyway. At least that is what this loser from the Daily Herald told me in his asinine review of the first three episodes of Season Five.

Oh, by the way, the fullname of Jughead's character is Jughead Jones. Think about which character we met this week had the name "Jones" on his or her uniform...

Jughead was also the name given to the hydrogen bomb that the United States military allegedly placed on the island, presumably in an attempt to destroy it. Our government really did test nukes on island in the South Pacific, and really did name a nuclear device "Jughead" in Operation Castle.

(Do more browsing on Lostpedia or here at Entertainment Weekly's review if the name thing interests you beyond this.)


But on to the review of the episode and some thoughts/theories regarding it....

Let me stick with the Desmond/Penny/Baby storyline to begin with. We find the love-birds on their boat in the Phillipine Islands, with Penny in labor. Dez finds a local doctor (Efren Salonga) who comes to their yacht and delivers Charlie Hume. This apparently was to have taken place soon after the time when the Oceanic Six were found. So when we see Baby Charlie helping his dad steer their ship into the harbor in London, it has been roughly 3 years since that opening scene in the Phillipines.

Desmond sets out to find Faraday's mom at Oxford, but all records of the eccentric physicist has been erased for the school's records. We learn that this desire to white-wash the past stemmed from Faraday's testing not only on rats, but on humans. Specifically, a girl named named Theresa Spencer, has had her mind zapped into oblivion. Desmond tracks her and her sister down in London and discovers that Faraday messed up Theresa's mind and bolted for America. Also, Charles Widmore had been funding Faraday's work for a decade and then picked up the tab of Theresa's medical expenses. I love how the show throw things in like this apparent soft-spot Widmore has to keep us guessing as to who the "real bad guy" is between the two formidable adversaries of Widmore and Ben.

Desmond confronts Widmore in his office to get the last known residence of Faraday's mom, presumably the infamous Ms. Hawking from the end of last week's episode. Widmore gives the info to Dez and seems to genuinely ask him to take his daughter Penny back to wherever it was they were hiding and stay there. This of course is a call-back to the threat Ben levied against Widmore in his darkened apartment last season that Ben was going to kill his daughter to settle the score for Alex's death on the island. Widmore tells Dez that Faraday's mom does not like to be bothered, and that he should deliver his message and then stay out of things. "This has been going on for a very long time," are his exact words to Desmond. How long that exactly is remains to be seen.

And this brings us to the island time-jumpers still stuck on our favorite mystical land-mass....welcome to the 1950's. Eisenhower was president, men wore suits to baseball games, and the best show on TV was whatever your rabbit ears could pick up on one of the three channels in existence.

Faraday, Miles, and CS Lewis are captured by Others, who Juliet identifies as such elsewhere in the jungle by the fact that they can speak Latin (the "language of the enlightened). The three Freighter Folk are led to the Others camp and meet an unchanged Richard Alpert. There has been some skirmishes between the US Military and our favorite creepy island dwellers. The year is 1954 and our government sent teams of special forces (and a nuclear hydrogen bomb) to the island for what seems to be a mission of annihilation. Of course Alpert and the Others (also the name of my yet-to-be-created garage band) killed these highly trained soldiers with bow-and-arrows.

I think that the guns and army fatigues they are wearing all belonged to the soldiers they ended, and that they previously used only things like bow-and-arrows. Maybe this was the first time they had gotten a hold of serious weapons. Maybe that's because they don't otherwise need anything more than what Robin Hood and his Merry Men did to survive in an enchanted woodland of their own.


At any rate, and to make a long story short, Faraday keeps up the facade that they are from the US Army so that he can go and disarm the bomb. Led at gun-point by the British hottie Ellie, he takes a gander at old Jughead and decides that the best course of action is to bury the sucker. This is what will eventually be buried in the original Hatch that we found in season one and explored (and blew up) in season two. If you recall, Sayid and Jack explore under the hatch (called The Swan) and find that concrete and steel have been used to seal something behind a wall. That something I believe is Jughead. Faraday pointed out that if you bury the bomb, things are still alive and partly well 50 years in the future. Now this does open up some questions regarding the Hatch's implosion at the end of season two, but trust me, Jughead was buried there.

The big bombshell (pun intended) of the episode obviously was the revelation that Charles Widmore was in fact an Other at one point. Not to brag (much), but I did call this more than a season ago. As soon as Widmore came in to the picture as someone involved (like in the episode from season three where Ben shows Locke a video with Widmore kidnapping one of the Others back in the real-world), I theorized that the aging corporate Dick Cheney look-alike (always the bad guy, of course) had been an Other and then in season four I suggested he might have been the leader before Ben. Widmore young and old has a real attitude problem. He is very keen on being in charge and, like he said to Sun in the airport last week, he demands to "be respected." He's got all the makings of a wonderful bad guy...but if he is the bad guy, then who is Ben? Maybe they're both bad. Who knows?

We end the episode with one final time-skip for the island, and a bloody-nosed Charlotte passing out in a forlorn Faraday's arms. She is suffering from the same affliction that others on the Freighter died as a result of in The Constant last season. This implies maybe that she will need to find her constant...maybe that mother she forgot the maiden name of.

Let us move now to the thoughts/theories portion of your blog:

-Interesting choice of name for Penny and Desmond's firstborn. Charles, or Charlie, is both the name of a friend who brought the two together by sacrificing his life in the underwater Looking Glass station at the end of season three...and is also the name of the man who drove the lovers apart by messing with Desmond's head and sending him on his harrowing journey to the island via a "race around the world."

-Following that line of thinking...and hear me out here...what if Charlie the baby boy we saw this week is actually Charlie the Hero that one day sings in Driveshaft and crashes on a mystical island, on which he is saved a few times by his father (Dez) from death and then eventually sacrifices his own life in order to bring his mom and dad together. "Not Penny's Boat" might have read "Not Mom's Boat" had he known what I suggest. Now for this to be possible, some time-travel is going to have to take place. And the Charlie we know will have to somehow be separated, abandoned or orphaned by his parents. Maybe placed in the home we saw snippets of in his backstories by a guardian of the whole time-traveling saga, like Ms. Hawking or Charles Widmore himself possibly. If my theory that Adam and Eve from the caves in season one are Desmond and Penny, then Charlie being moved (for his protection) to another family until he was called to the island via Flight 815 would be feasible. Think about it.

-Adding more on to this...when Desmond walks away from Penny in the bedroom of their boat she says "Promise me you won't go back to that island" and after Dez reassures her that he would never do such a thing, he looks back just before walking out. That's a "tell". Trust me.

-I was wondering why it is exactly that the people stuck time-jumping on the island bring some of the things with them when time skips....like the Zodiac boat, but not their shelter on the beach...and the best I can come up with is simply that whoever is moving them in time (or whatever force is) wants them to have what they have with them for a purpose. Maybe the little dingy boat will play a role here soon, but the island or Jacob or whoever is pulling the strings wants them to have what they have, be where they be, for a purpose and specific reason. Sort of like the explanation Matthew Abbadon gives to Naomi when she asks why Faraday, CS Lewis, Miles, and Lapidus are picked for the trip to the island on the Freighter in the first place.

-I've recently spent some time re-reading the CS Lewis (the real one) Space Trilogy, and in particular, Out of the Silent Planet. I could not recommend these three books more. But as I'm always trying to piece together popular culture and litertary references from the clues this show leaves behind, I thought I'd share a few thoughts on the comparisons in the storylines of LOST and Out of the Silent Planet.

Lewis's book is about a single man who seeks some adventure to his life and decides to go on what is tantamount to a "walk about" in the English countryside (some Locke connections here). Through a series of bizzare events he is abducted by two men and taken on a journey to another planet (which ends up being Mars) where the two nefarious characters hope to trade him for riches and glory to some of the aliens who live on that planet. The main character, Ransom, escapes his captors on the island and spends weeks on the run getting to know the land and meeting some of the different creatures that live there. He becomes a great hunter. He becomes a leader in many ways. Eventually he is brought to the leader/king of the planet, a spirit-like, nearly invisible entity called Oyarsa that isn't the supreme God of the universe, but something like an angel with great powers to give people what they want or take things away from those who are evil. Think: Jacob. This was all fresh on my mind and figured you guys might find it interesting and if I can prompt you to want to read a CS Lewis book, my work here is done. Read it.

-The fact that the US Military knows about the island could be big. I mean it also might just be a random coincidence that the Army picked that specific island to test out a nuclear bomb and didn't know what they were getting themselves in to with the Others they found. But like all things LOST, there likely is a deeper reason and story behind the military's incursion on to the island. I haven't decided what exactly I think about this, so if you have any good theories, lay 'em on me.

-The sassy (and very cute) Brit chick named Ellie that leads Faraday to the bomb intrigues me. Obviously when Faraday says she reminds him of someone he is referencing the girl Theresa whose brain he fried back at Oxford. But maybe she is someone else....maybe she is Ms. Hawking. I know I said last time that Ms. Hawking is likely Faraday's mom, and the fact that Widmore (in the future) gives Dez an address in Los Angeles to find Daniel's mommy (the same place we saw Ms. Hawking in the basement of a church tracking the course of the island and talking to Ben) points to her in fact being Faraday's mom (and therefore he would likely recognize her, even in the past)....but if LOST is setting us up for a surprise and Ms. Hawking isn't Faraday's mom, then maybe that Ellie broad is Ms. Hawking in the past. She had an attitude of distrust in the 1950's and in the future Widmore says that Hawking is a "very private person" who "won't be happy to see you."

-I thought all the Juliet-related stuff in this episode was great. The way she identified the retro-Others from the Vulgar Latin they spoke was great. The "language of the enlightened" she called it. This speaks to the theme from earlier seasons that the Others were there for more than just sneaking around the jungle. They had "Others 101" training in language and probably many other areas of study. They needed leaders, and this presupposes that a group of people are headed somewhere or have a mission/goal in mind. Also, I did find it interesting that just as Locke was about to tell Sawyer that Ethan shot him in the leg, she interrupted. Maybe there is still more to Juliet than meets the eye. Perhaps her last betrayal of the Oceanic survivors is yet to come. Maybe Ben still has her working for him.

-Best line/moment of the show other than the Widmore revelation was when young Widmore says to Richard that he has no need to worry about being tracked because it was just some "soddin' old man" following him and asks "Do you reall think he knows the island better than me?" Cut to Locke walking out of the jungle. Answer: Yes, I think he does.

Alright folks, that's all I got for now. If I forgot to touch on something you are wondering about, post a comment or feel free to email me and as soon as my Sweat Lodge gets too warm I'll re-emerge and respond to your query.

God's speed,

John Locke's Pants