Wednesday, February 17, 2010

Lost Season 6, Episode 4: The Substitute

My review of Lost for Smartpop is up. Here is a sample - click it to read more. Total Spoilers.

John Locke episodes are always the best ones, and this was no exception. This was the episode where I really started to feel like Lost is serious about answering some questions, and this episode featured all the human emotional anchoring I was looking for in LAX. (To be fair, it may have been in LAX, I just did not appreciate it because of the 8 months I had to wait to watch it). And our final story arc was advanced and clarified. I may be overstating it because it JUST ended, but I feel like this may be one of my favorite Lost episodes ever. Not top 5 but top 10.

Extra stuff:
-Because we still don't know the Man in Black's name, that means the name itself must be a spoiler. Interesting.
-Did anyone else think, a spit second before the revealed the wall of names, that Evil Locke was going to reveal some fantastic technology?
-You may know that my wife Sara has a tumblr blog called "Monsters with Sandwiches" which features drawing of exactly what it says. Here is the one she put up today:

smoke monster takes a Dharma sammich break

6 comments:

neilshyminsky said...

"Sara says, when Evil Locke says, 'Don’t tell me what I can’t do,' 'when take over someone’s body you also get their catch phrase'"

Here's my feeling on this one - "Locke" is both Locke and The Adversary. My guess is that the list of candidates are for both Jacob and The Adversary, and that the latter has taken Locke. Whether by accident or by design, though, Locke has not actually 'replaced' him and they've been merged in some way - the 'loophole' from the season finale has to do with The Adversary taking over the candidate, rather than allowing the candidate to take over the job. And this has something to do with why Ilana tells us that The Adversary can't change forms anymore. Jacob can appear as himself or as a kid, and presumably as other things, but once a replacement is found that power will similarly be lost.

No idea where Sayid's coming back form the dead fits in here, though. One would think that if The Adversary is trying to get rid of candidates so that Jacob can't come back - a fair guess, i think, since he's trying to convince Sawyer to leave - they would want to keep Sayid around.

And the kid? He looked remarkably like Jacob, so I'm guessing it was Jacob's ghost. But the real question, for me, is who the 'him' in 'you can't kill him' is. Jacob? Probably Sawyer, right? I dunno.

Joe Gualtieri said...

Geoff, I'm not so sure we should trust anything Cerberus/Man in Black/Smoke Monster says. I suspect that the information he gave Sawyer is a mixture of truth (he wants off the Island) and lies (the options, that Cerberus used to be a man, maybe).

Chris said...

I got the feeling that the child is something connected directly to the island, and taken along with the information that Jacob is simply a "caretaker" of the island, it made things a lot more interesting.
It implies that Jacob and bad-locke are also bound by the power of the island ("you know the rules") rather than the source of its power.
For me, the whole Jacob arc and potential good vs evil (brushing all the science-esque mysteries from earlier series away with a bait and switch) seemed to be a step in the wrong direction.
If we find that Jacob and Locke are equally at the mercy of a greater power (the island), that leaves a lot of things open.

Shlomo said...

I also like the idea that jacob and anti-jacob are "gods" that are at the mercy of "the island". It fits more with locke's original pantheistic perspective, if "the place" is not "embodied" in the form of a human character. I'm still hoping it shakes out this way. Feels more right to me for this show.

brad said...

Aliens.

jennifer said...

ooh, love shlomo's throw-out to "locke's original pantheistic perspective".
the pantheism of locke versus the monotheism of ecko theme, that was tragically cut short, was one of mine & geoff's favorite.
i would love to see the writers return to a variation of it.