Tonight I care–and yet I don’t. It may be that my salad didn’t have enough dressing, my fancy new drugs kept making me doze off or the writers are still yanking my chain. I’m not sure.
By all reckoning this was a well-written episode which strayed only briefly into the Kate/Jack/Sawyer Love Yawnangle. (Seriously, three of the most selfish characters in modern literature cannot sustain an interesting love triangle for very long.) Bits of good mystery were dangled before us. A polar bear! In the desert! In the same place in the Desert where they filmed Star Wars! Geek overload!!!!
However, by the end of the episode I just felt frustrated. More questions–why do the boat people care about Ben? Don’t they know how annoying Ben truly is? Does no one really know what the Smoke Monster is? Remember when Jeff Fahey was in Silverado?
The religious allegory was spread fairly thin. The new characters continue to have obliquely mystical surnames. (”Lapidus” means ‘candle’; “Straume” means ‘dream’; “Lewis” is an obvious homage to Carroll and C.S.) Perhaps the most intriguing surname is “Faraday”. I can only assume Twitchy Dan is named after the natural philosopher Michael Faraday. He’s best known for his work in the fields of electricity as it interacts with time.
Aha! The kernel of the nut of the Lost Mystery Island and the Lost Mystery Box!
Big fans of the Island’s Mystery Box (remember last week’s connection to Abaddon?) will be interested in the concept of the Faraday Cage. An oversimplification of the Faraday Cage concept is that it is a box built to shelter something from the electronic energy existing outside the box. Is it possible that the entire island is a type of Faraday cage?
Aha! And work with me here, but do you remember last season’s focus on the Matroyshka (nested Russian) dolls? Perhaps the island is actually a series of nested Faraday Cages, thus allowing things on the island to be protected from the forces of electromagnetism outside the island. (In Faraday’s philosophy, electromagnetism also had an effect on the time-space continuum.)
I continue to have fun hypothesising on the esoterica of Lost Philosophy simply because I get better answers by going far afield from the show, I think. At least I get more satisfying answers. Granted, tonight’s episode wasn’t as excruciating as the weeks of Jack In The Aquarium, but I still wanted at least one answer beyond “we came for Ben.”
You wanted at least one answer and you watched Lost anyway???? Talk about a triumph of hope over experience.
Patience, dear padawan (I don’t think I spelled that right). Answers will come. And with them even more frustrating questions. It is the way of The Lost….
(you can’t see me, but I’m rolling my eyes at my own inanity.)
Seriously, I think the boat-people are Dharma people, or at least employed by Dharma now if they haven’t always been, and represent Dharma… and they want their island back. They want Ben because he was the one who orchestrated the demise of Dharma (from the inside anyway) and is seen by them as the leader of the “natives.” Take out the leader and the resistence will fall apart. It would also explain how he has “a man” onboard the boat.
And it sounds like they (Dharma) were planning to use Oceanic 815 to get back to the island initially, or at least look for it, but that plan got foiled when a different pilot (than the helo pilot) took over the flight for some reason.
Is it possible that Dharma then also planted the story of the “discovered” sunken plane in order to keep searchers away from where they knew their island had to be, but couldn’t find because of the Looking Glass jamming…?
I really like your idea of the island being a Faraday cage, but I don’t know enough about it to speak intelligently. So I’ll have to get back to you on that.
Anyway, I thought it was a very good episode. I even like the Sawyer parts. But the island can eat Jack and Kate as far as I’m concerned.
What Lu said about Dharma.