LOST 5.15

Lost's The Variable. I have to admit that this episode did not really grab me fully until the end. As I began to envision a season finale that would get our guys out of the 70s and into the present with John and Ben, I began to feel like the whole 70s thing was just one big diversion, a chance for the writers to indulge in the kind of "and that is the origin of that" game that pissed Patton Oswalt off so much in the Star Wars prequels.

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You like the numbers on the hatch? Well here is the guys putting them on. You like Ethan Rom? Well now you get to see him as a little baby. You know that journal Daniel has? Well now you get to see where he got it from, and so on.

Daniel's speech about people being the variables that can change things was a but cheesy for me too -- I thought for sure he was going to say that the time travelers are the variables -- that would have been better I think. The reveal about Widmore as Daniels father -- I think most of us saw that coming. Also Daniel seems properly dead now, which is odd -- are we not going to find out what happened in those missing three years to make him change into the man who will tell Charlotte not to come back or to think variables are possible now? I am also not super clear about all the sadness about Sawyer and Juliet loosing their little life, since they knew it was doomed from the beginning what with the "incident" and the "purge" and whatnot. Though I suppose we all tell ourselves little lies. I also did not need Daniel recapping that they can die because it is the present for them.

But by the end I was totally back. The horror of sending your kid back to the island where you know he will be killed was some powerful stuff and shocked the hell out of me. And I love that the plan is to use the bomb to change the past so the plan never crashes in the first place. I have heard that idea tossed around by fans as the end of the SERIES. The fact that LOST is going to use it only as a SEASON finale is ballsy in the best way. It is so much less predictable at this point in the narrative. I am also just so happy that we can see what the season endgame is going to look like -- I would have liked to have a sense of it earlier, but mostly I am just happy it looks like a good one.

And without putting spoilers for future episodes here on the blog, Wikipedias Lost episode by episode listing for season 5 has a detail -- one word -- in its 20 word description of next weeks episode that has me more excited about LOST than I can remember being in forever. Click here if you want to see what it is. The word starts with an R.