the awesome/terrifying freedom

written by: elizabeth sarnoff and drew goddard. looks like damon and carlton, having exercised major quality control over the bulk of the season, are now willing to hand the reigns over, and on an incredibly important episode.

directed by: bobby roth, who has been around forever, another lost debut.

it's tough to write a response to this week's episode because ryan stole so much of my thunder with his shattering theory about how "the story of “lost”, it turns out, might just be the story of locke turning into jacob." i'm happy my prediction about seeing roger and the van was correct, though i didn't expect roger 'work man' would be ben's father.

seriously, read ryan's recap this week. he does an excellent job of laying the whole thing out.

i also recommend listening to this week's official lost podcast - damon and carlton are punchy from having just watched the first cut of the season finale, and at one point can't stop laughing at their own joke about how it will be revealed that the dharma shark, dubbed 'ezra james sharkington' got his dharma tattoo from bai ling. there's also some nice acknowledgement from both of them that jack's tattoo episode sucked ass.

the big questions:

1. is locke dead/will he die?
2. wtf is jacob?
3. does alpert age? do any of his camp age?
4. who is part of alpert's camp and who was 'brought' to the island?
5. what happened between ben and alpert during the years between their meeting and the purge? what about annie?
   
6. who else survived the purge?
7. don't forget the rest of em!
   

1.) locke is not dead, and locke will not die, not yet anyway. though, seeing as how locke's entire backstory has been neatly tied up this season, it's quite possible that 'locke as we know him' is dead. will he supplant ben as leader of the others? locke and jack are more than just characters - they represent the opposing viewpoints at play: man of science, man of faith. will the season 1 tensions between locke and jack escalate to a series finale battle between their two camps? science vs. faith on a grand scale?

2.) it seems pretty obvious to me that it is terry o'quinn wearing a wig in the jacob screencap.


as far as speculation, right now, jacob is 'the hatch.' and trying to predict what he might be at this point is like trying to extrapolate the entire dharma storyline from season 1, episode 11, the hatch's first appearance. what could jacob be? that damned four-toed statue is the only bone we've been thrown regarding the island's older history - so every time there's a new mystery, i try to tie it to the statue. so, my only real guess at this point is that jacob is an energy, or spirit, or something originating from the four-toed people. that's all i got so far.


i do think that the island's dormant volcano will have something important to do with jacob. ben's class, taught by samantha mathis, reminds us that there is, in fact, a volcano, and then there is the mysterious ash (volcanic?) encircling jacob's house.. foreshadowing?

3.) on the blogs and comments people have been wondering if it was just a bad makeup job on alpert, failing to make him look younger. uh, these people are stupid. ben meets alpert as a boy, and now ben is older than alpert. if they wanted to 'make up' alpert to look younger, they would have cast a kid in the part. the real question is whether this non-aging trait is specific to alpert, or if it applies to all of his camp.


when alpert recruited juliet, he showed her an xray of a 70 year old womb in the body of a 26 year old woman - so it looks like alpert is referring to the woman's apparent age, and not her literal age.. and perhaps it is this localized womb degeneration that gives the others problems. did the dharma have pregnancy problems? they were there for a long time, surely it would have come up as an issue much much sooner.. was ben lying to juliet? is it only those in alpert's camp who actually have the pregnancy/death risk? is sun going to be fine after all?

4.) which takes us to the next issue - what exactly is the composition of the others? how many parts dharma, hostiles, recruits, and captures? ben seemed to infer that there were some other few dharma people who had escaped the purge. was he referring to desmond and inman? and why have they brought certain people, like mikhail over? where did the younger others, who could not have been born there, come from? we know alex was kidnapped from rousseau. i'm lookin at you, aldo and matthew. were they also stolen from unfortunates who crashed there?

5.) this is hinted at in the podcast as being a 'major missing story beat' in ben's background. also, we do not know what became of his friend annie. was she also gassed? what happened? we've been promised that we will find out.

6.) i'm wondering what exactly ben's knowledge of the swan station was at the time of the purge. did he not learn of the station's existence until after the first earthquake? i'm not sure how the writers are going to explain that one - though i can see that as a 'work man,' ben wouldn't really ever have full knowledge of what dharma was up to - and perhaps the pearl station explains why he never bothered to purge inman and desmond from the swan: dharma double blinded the importance of their task by making it appear to be meaningless.

7.) ben and locke's story was so engaging that it's easy to forget that back on the camp, a whole bunch of shit is about to go down. i just love that juliet. i alternate between cheering her on and wanting to smack her. her 'turn the tape over' moment was inspired, and the impending dread of the attack was, i think, even more palpable than the similar threat introduced at the same point in season 1! also - how much deep shit is sun going to find herself in? her face, as the tape played - first shock that juliet was betraying her and the camp, then total fear - because it's only a matter of time before jin puts all the pieces together and confronts her about the truth of his pre-island sterility. she still might be able to get away with keeping the affair secret, though.

next week - will charlie die? if so, how on earth will they execute it in a way that is both inevitable and surprising?

minor gripe of the week: ben's birth - we're tricked into thinking that the birth we're witnessing is on the island, because of the jungle setting. and if you hadn't put it together already, you might even think that we're watching one of the others give birth, giving the scene the dread of the mother's impending death, knowing what we know about what happens to preggies. but it's revealed that no, we're not on the island at all - this is way back when, and it's 32 miles outside of portland. very cool. but the problem is that 'today' on the island it's ben's birthday, and 'today' it's december 22. no way is december 22 just outside of portland going to look like a tropical summer on the island. i guess they had to make a choice: drop the birthday angle, or drop the false island tease, and in the end they decided to go ahead with both and hope no one noticed. annoying, but still not nearly as bad as that mrs. hawking photo.