Lost Makes Good on Missing Episodes
Time may move wonky for those on the Island, but for those simply watching it, it'll march on as expected. And as contractually obligated.
ABC has confirmed that, before Lost moves on to that big hatch in the sky in 2010, the network will make good on the three episodes missed due to the writers' strike.
Prior to the start of this season, producers and the network hammered out an endgame, agreeing that Lost would continue for 48 episodes, or three seasons of 16 episodes each.
Even with the recently added second hour to this year's May 29 season finale, however, producers were still two eps shy. Not anymore.
"[Coproducer] Carlton [Cuse] and I did an interview yesterday, and they asked what about the two episodes that didn't get done this year, and we reiterated as we have in many interviews we will probably do 17 next year and 17 the following year," show overlord Damon Lindelof tells Online's Watch With Kristin TV blog.
"Poststrike we always said we would make up the ones that got dropped," Cuse added.
That settles that. If only those other numbers were as easy to decipher.
Lost: Twelve classic Ben Linus moments
Michael Emerson owns season four of Lost. Many of the season’s best scenes have featured Ben Linus. From screwing with Locke to obsessing over Juliet, Ben has become one of the show’s standout characters. Emerson took the complex role to an entirely new level in last week’s episode, “The Shape of Things to Come.” I’ll be shocked (and furious) if he doesn’t get an Emmy nomination this year.
Let’s take a look at some of Ben’s most unforgettable moments using the mastermind’s own words. If we’re lucky, Ben will give us a few more to add to the list by the season’s end. Spoiler alert: If you’re not caught up with Lost, stop reading now.
“I never entered the numbers. I never pressed the button.” (”Dave”) - Ben’s manipulation of Locke began almost as soon as he became the 815ers’ prisoner. He exploited the conflict between Jack and Locke, and tried to undermine Locke’s faith. John questioned the purpose of the Swan station after Ben claimed that he didn’t touch the button in the computer room. This ultimately led to one of the biggest moments of the season two finale, the hatch implosion. The electromagnetic event also got the attention of Penny’s men at the Antarctic listening station, another significant revelation.
“We’re the good guys, Michael.” (”Live Together, Die Alone”) - The Others kidnapped Walt and arranged for Michael to liberate Ben from the Swan station, which led to the deaths of Ana Lucia and Libby. They also abducted Hurley, Sawyer, Jack, and Kate. This scene marked the first time we saw Ben as the Others’ leader, and the things he said revealed a lot about his mindset. Ben has an unwavering trust in his own wisdom and believes that all of his actions are for the greater good. He can justify anything: murder, abduction, even brainwashing.
“Hippity-hop. Hippity-hop. Hippity-hop.” (”Every Man For Himself”) - Poor bunny number eight. Ben gave us one of the show’s most disturbing moments when he deliberately frightened a rabbit and made its heart explode. The scene, in which Ben rattled the rabbit’s cage and shouted at it, seemed to go on forever. It was one of the few times that I’ve wanted to look away while watching Lost. Fortunately, it was all a con to prevent Sawyer from escaping from the Hydra station. Ben produced the rabbit, alive and well, before telling Sawyer that he was on a completely different island from his fellow castaways. Don’t mess with a man who terrorizes innocent bunnies.
“Picture a box.” (”The Man From Tallahassee”) - In season three, Ben introduced the notion of the “magic box,” a metaphor for the island’s ability to bring you what you want. He used this capability to bring to the island the one person Locke most feared: Anthony Cooper, his father. Ben used Cooper’s presence as a test. If John killed his father, he could remain with the Others and learn more about the island. Locke wasn’t able to kill Cooper, but found someone who could. Fans had been waiting for a confrontation between island Sawyer and the original Sawyer, and they finally got it. Locke took credit for the murder, forcing Ben to reveal another major secret.
“That was Jacob.” (”The Man Behind the Curtain”) - We still don’t know who or what Jacob is. Ben led Locke to an eerie cabin in the jungle to introduce John to the Others’ mysterious leader. Locke didn’t see Jacob, but he heard him whisper the words “Help me.” Jealous of John’s ability to hear Jacob, Ben lured Locke to the DHARMA grave and shot him. I’m worried for Hurley’s safety now that Ben knows about Hurley’s cabin sighting. Jacob’s supernatural role on the island is still in play this season. Hurley, Ben, and Locke set off to visit Jacob in last week’s episode. What will they find when they arrive?
“Because I have a man on their boat.” (”Confirmed Dead”) - Every so often Ben reminds everyone that he is always several steps ahead of them. When the freighties reached the island, he took another opportunity to show off his superior intellect. He knew exactly who the freighties were and what they wanted–him. We’re usually lucky to get one big revelation per episode, but Ben’s confession gave us an additional surprise. This statement also paved the way for Michael’s return as Ben’s spy.
“Good.” (”The Economist”) - Slightly more exciting than Sayid’s future career as an assassin is the identity of his employer. Sayid despised Ben before the Oceanic Six were rescued; he equated trusting Ben with selling his soul in the exact same episode. The idea of them joining forces was confusing, but fascinating at the same time. We learned that revenge brought the men together in “The Shape of Things to Come.” Ben was avenging Alex’s death and Sayid was avenging Nadia’s murder by a Widmore employee. I can’t wait to see who they target next.
“How can you not possibly understand that you’re mine? Take as much time as you need.” (”The Other Woman”) Ben and Juliet have a complicated history. Juliet’s recent flashback revealed a jealous, possessive side to Ben Linus that we’d never seen before. Some men send flowers to get a woman’s attention. He showed Juliet the rotting corpse of her lover, Goodwin. He responded to Juliet’s grief with the tirade of an undermedicated stalker. In a few seconds, Ben went from a jealous rage to his usual creepy, calm demeanor. The transition was priceless.
“See you guys at dinner.” (”The Other Woman”) - You wouldn’t expect Locke to trust Ben after he shot him last season, but Ben always finds away to get his attention. He’s gotten out of several tough situations with the strategic disclosure of information. In this case, Ben won his freedom by telling Locke about Charles Widmore and the spy on the freighter. No prison can hold him if he can size up his captors quickly enough. At the end of “The Other Woman,” Ben walked out of his basement cell and casually greeted Hurley and Sawyer. The look on his face, as though everything was going according to plan, gave us another reason to love Michael Emerson.
“So you do speak English.” (”The Shape of Things to Come”) - We’ve caught glimpses of Ben’s violent actions: shooting Locke, killing his father and the DHARMA community, strangling Ana Lucia, etc. Last week’s episode gave us a better idea of how deadly Mr. Linus can be. He took out two armed men in the Sahara desert with the kind of precision normally displayed by Sayid. Their shared action hero skills make them ideal partners in Ben’s new revenge campaign.
“He changed the rules.” (”The Shape of Things to Come”) - Alex’s death scene put me in the strange position of feeling sorry for Ben, a manipulator and murderer. I was already shocked that one of Ben’s plans–sending Alex, Danielle, and Karl to safety–didn’t work out. Things almost always work out for Ben. When Keamy shot Alex, Ben’s grief was mixed with genuine surprise. The devastated father suddenly became more human and, for the first time, worthy of sympathy. This was Michael Emerson’s Emmy moment.
“Sleep tight, Charles.” (”The Shape of Things to Come”) - Neither Ben Linus nor Charles Widmore appeared in Season One. Now all of the 815 survivors are stuck in the middle of a war between the two ruthless men. I thought that the writers would keep these characters apart for as long as possible, but Ben’s first flash-forward brought him face-to-face with his daughter’s killer. Ben rarely lets his friends or enemies know his true intentions. He made an exception for Widmore, however. He told Charles flat-out that he would avenge Alex by killing Widmore’s daughter, Penny. I hope that this vow leads to a showdown between my two favorite Lost characters, Ben and Desmond.
Which moments would you add to the list?
ABC News anchor seriously injured in Iraq
border="1" />Co-anchor of World News Tonight Bob Woodruff and cameraman Doug Vogt were injured when the
vehicle they were riding in hit a roadside bomb early Sunday morning. The two apparently were standing up in a hatch,
filming a story in the vehicle as it drove along.
The two are listed in stable but critical condition, after
being flown to the "green zone" where military doctors operated on them. ABC is providing continuous updates
on their conditions here.
Concidentally, today’s
features an article about Woodruff and his co-anchor, Elizabeth Vargas. In the article, Woodruff says his goal is
"to be the best damn foreign correspondent I could be."
Lost: Live Together, Die Alone (finale)
(S02E23) Two hour season finale. Usually that means a slow-paced episode with tons of teaser bits to keep you stringing along with a few hard-hitters near the end to keep you excited for next season. The creators of Lost must have realized that a lot of the fans of the show were feeling like we weren’t getting enough answers out of the story line, so they made a jam-packed finale. It was a great episode, and I’m somewhat at a loss where to begin in writing this review.
The episode begins where last week’s episode ended: all the castaways on the beach attending the funeral for Ana Lucia and Libby notice a sailboat in the distance off the beach. Sawyer, Jack, and Sayid swim out to the boat to recover the vessel and see what’s going on. Once they are aboard, they are greated by gunshots being fired from below deck. They dodge the bullets, then flip up the hatch only to discover a drunken Desmond below deck, recognizing Jack, saying “You,” just before we go to the title screen.
Read more including plenty of spoilers after the break…This episodes flashbacks surround Desmond (whose last name is Hume), suprisingly, and the first of them deals with him exiting Scottish military prison and his dishonorable discharge from that system. He’s picked up by the father of the woman whom he loves, who reveals to him that he kept his daughter from seeing any of Desmond’s letters in her incarceration. There’s a lot of heavy play here on Desmond being a coward, and he’s immediately cast in the star-crossed lovers’ plight, where the father doesn’t want him involved with the daughter. This raises our sympathy and identification with him as a character, but it also plays in to some nice twists in the episode and underscores the threaded idea that it is fate rather than some mere chance and circumstance which has brought everyone to the island.
When Desmond first reappears on the island, he’s drunk and disoriented and ranting that he tried to escape on his sailboat, but that the whole island and the ocean around it are part of some large snowglobe where they are all trapped. The episode gives us the tale of Desmond recapturing his faith in the island and the need to push the button, and intertwines that story line with Eko’s new blind faith in the numbers and Locke’s newfound complete denial of meaning in the numbers.
Early on Locke and Eko have a confrontation where Locke tells Eko not to push the button and Eko responds, “Why wouldn’t I push the button?” Locke answers, “Because you don’t want to be a slave.” Both Locke and Eko’s stances on this issue prove to be too extreme, as Eko injures himself and Charlie later in the episode, while trying to blow the door off of the computer chamber with some dynamite to get at where Desmond and Locke are letting the timer run down. Likewise, Locke–despite Desmond’s realization that the last time he failed to put in the numbers caused a magnetic distortion on September 22nd which led to Locke’s plane crashing on the island–stubbornly smashed the computer on the floor, preventing Desmond from entering the numbers once he realized that it was important.
Ultimately, Desmond takes a failsafe key that he received from Kelvin (who turns out to be the American soldier who trained Sayid in torture and who Desmond accidentally kills when he discovers that Kelvin was attempting to escape the island with Desmond’s repaired sailboat). Before turning it, he repeats the words from his love that he found in a letter she hid in his copy of Dicken’s Our Mutual Friend. As he does this Eko walks in on Locke standing up as the entire hatch is shaking and Locke says quite simply, “I was wrong.” When the key is turned, we see shots from around the island with people clasping their ears and an odd humming sound as the sky vibrates with light.
At the very end of the episode, two men in some arctic region inside a station where it is snowing outside pick up the electromagnetic field, pick up a phone, and on the other end is Desmond’s love; they tell her that they found him and that’s how the episode ends.
This is one crazy plot, but it’s mixed in with so many other details and bits. Too many to cover in detail in this one post. I’ll touch on them in brief here, as they all underscore the power of fate on the island. Desmond meets Libby in one of his flashbacks, and he tells her he plans to race around the world to defeat his love’s father and win back her heart. Libby has recently lost her husband to some sort of sickness and volunteers her sailboat, the Elizabeth, named after her, for the cause. This seemed much too tenuous as the exchange was made over a simple meeting and cup of coffee. But then again, she does end up in an insane asylum.
Michael and the people Ms. Klugh requested he bring along go traipsing through the jungle. Along the way a strange large green bird dives at them. Was it the eagle from a dollar bill? I have no idea. Kate realizes they are being followed at one point and they end up shooting one of the Others dead. Everyone discovers what Michael did and he confesses and says he was sorry. Jack assures everyone that he has a plan.
Later they pass by a pile of the little containers that the Pearl station was sending through the tube system. A really big pile, which proves that the notes were going nowhere and that the Pearl observation experiment was another reversed observation experiment as Desmond tells Locke when he realizes that he was the cause of the plane crashing on the island. As they look at it, Sayid’s signal fire appears from the beach where he, Sun, and Jin have found an abandonned camp with a hatch that is just a facade on top of rocks. Jack realizes that Michael isn’t leading them to the beach camp where he said he was and all of a sudden whispers start up, darts start shooting out of the woods, and they are all captured.
They’re brought to a pier where Henry Gale, who is aparantly the leader of the others shows up and gives Michael a boat and returns Walt to him, saying, “We’re the good guys.” He tells him to stick to one specific course and they will be rescued. They send Hugo back to the camp to tell the others they must never come to this part of the island, and Kate, Sawyer, and Jack who Gale says are “coming home with us” are covered with hoods after Jack and Kate exchange glances and Sawyer looks on jealously.
There’s so much more in this episode. It was two hours of crazy information. The 108 minute pushing the button cycle released electromagnetic build up. Who knew? I’m stil a bit flabbergasted.
Oh yeah. And what’s with the big statue of a foot in sandals with only four toes that Sayid, Sun, and Jin spotted from the boat?