Wednesday, April 07, 2010

Lost, Season 6, Episode 10: Happily Ever After

My review of the most recent LOST episode is up at Smartpop. Here is a sample; click to read the wholet thing.

Just like The Constant, Happily Every After anchors an insane science fiction story in some pretty basic and cheesy ideas about love. Like the Constant it got to have its cake and eat it too, using all the cliches of love but using the sci-fi to reinvigorate them. Love is beyond time and the only thing that can save our lives — literally true in The Constant. Love happens at first sight — because you knew that person in an alternate universe. Love is so powerful you will faint with joy — because it is time for your mind to return to the machine that propelled you into another world. Love inspires musicians — to write quantum mathematics. The mother of the woman you love will stand in your way — because she has some mystical sense that the universe cannot allow Penny and Desmond to meet.

You have to be impressed with a great LOST episode that manages to be great in spite of a total lack of Terry O'Quinn and Michael Emerson.

5 comments:

neilshyminsky said...

Like I suggested on my own blog, I don't think the two realities are colliding, Geoff. Rather, I think I had their relationship backward. I think it goes something like this:

1) Juliet hits bomb and sets it off.
2) Island implodes/explodes, but does so with enough time for Chang and Widmore, at the very least, to escape.
3) MiB is freed in 1977.
3) The Losties get what they want from MiB. This is an important difference from my earlier supposition, which was that they get a happy ending. Jack gets to be a good dad, and this is happy; Desmond is Widmore's right hand man and has his approval, which is a bit less obviously happy because he doesn't have Penny; but it also looks like people who are carrying a lot of guilt - Sayid, Kate, Sawyer - are being allowed to punish themselves.
4) Desmond will convince the Losties that what they want isn't as important as what needs to be done. They'll restore the previous timeline, somehow.
5) Everyone wakes back up where they were in 2007, when the season premiere began.

So they're nominally overlapping, through Desmond, but I think that the 2007 mainstream timeline is definitely meant to be happening AFTER the flashsideways timeline.

Andy said...

Geoff, do think the case can be made that Desmond is the true protagonist of LOST?

Telosandcontext said...

@neilshyminsky - that sounds about right.

@andy - it's still pretty obvious that Jack is the show's main protagonist. Desmond is just the unbelievably awesome deus ex machina that will allow Jack to make his heroic push to the end

James said...

Is the last shot going to be Jack closing his eye to sleep the sleep of the just?

Geoff Klock said...

Andy -- I think maybe you could, but I really want to embrace the whole short story collection angle and say one of the strengths is that there is no protagonist. Another way of looking at it is that the whole show is geared toward FINDING a protagonist -- The Candidate.