Lost: Follow the Leader - Season’s Best is Saved for Second to Last as We Prepare to Nuke the Island.

Posted by ScuzzBuster

May 6, 2009

coollostcastbigger While it wouldn’t be fair to Lost to say that I haven’t enjoyed the hell out of season 5 so far, I’d be first to admit that the story arc seemed to drag, get distracted and lapse into some odd silliness here and there. I didn’t care for the early season dwelling on the children issues or the whole voodoo ritual that brought Locke back from the dead and got the 5/6ths of the Oceanic Six back to the island. However, It would be incredibly unfair to not admit that Follow the Leader is probably the most entertaining episode of the season if not in the best in several seasons.

It’s evil pleasure in a way to see the entire methodology of Lost character direction has been basically spit on and about-faced 180 degrees from where any fan worth his or her salt would have guessed in the first couple of seasons of the show. Normally, overtly flipping characters around like this would send me running for the horrific superlatives that I generally only reserve for Seasons 2 and 3 of the debacle that used the be the program Heroes.

stupidjack The real difference with Lost is that when we see someone like Jack change from rational realistic leader and voice of reason to a desperate, lost figure eager to follow Sawyer and/or subject to throwing his fate and the fate of the others around him to long shot whim is that we’ve watched Jack slowly make this turn through seasons 3, 4, and 5, and where he is now, makes perfect sense with how the writers have developed him. And I have to give credit to the writers for having the gonads to take the sex symbol hero of the first season’s success and turn him into a complete and total mess the last two seasons.

When we see Sawyer being a rational and responsible leader there’s actually a very good path that he’s taken that has lead us here. Likewise, even though we don’t trust Ben Linus any more than we can spit a bowling ball, we have to wonder in the back of our minds if maybe he had good reason to off John Locke when he thought he had the chance.

lederlost In addition to this, while I don’t trust Locke much farther than I trust Ben Linus or Faraday’s mama, there is a certain satisfaction in seeing his turn into an overly confident leader that knows exactly what he’s doing knocking both Linus and Richard Alpert down a few notches.

And to throw other assumptions out the window, I had an unquestioned understanding the “The Island” and the “What the Island Wants” were synonymous with the mysterious “Jacob.” Now apparently completely loyal to the Island itself, John Locke lays the bombshell on us that maybe Jacob, whoever or whatever he is, is not the voice of the island at all but a force that is in direct opposition to it. So who was it that told Ben Linus that he was to follow Locke without question and follow his orders? Apparently it wasn’t Jacob.

By this point I had already given in to the entire far-fetched time travel paradox story line, so I couldn’t help but laugh audibly at the crossing of John Locke with his former self using an unwilling and perplexed Richard Alpert as a proxy to help get a bullet out of his leg. Had you told me at the end of season one that this is where the program would take us to after all this time, I probably would have toyed with turning it off in spite of my guilty pleasure of liking ripping sci-fi yarns about time travel.

This is the world that J.J. Abrams has turned loose on us now. However, it took until Follow the Leader for me to completely accept the show could possibly be as good in season 5 chasing angels, demons, time travel and rewrites of Empire Strikes Back as it was in season one when it was week after week of phenomenally compelling yet very grounded character drama mixed with just a smidgeon of mystery and hocus pocus. Finally, all these seemingly random tidbits and issues that have been thrown at the wall for the past dozen weeks or so are finally coming together to paint a complete picture. Yep, heading into the finale next week, I’m one fairly satisfied Lost fan this week.

Oh, and by the way, had Jack stopped to think that if the plan to blow the atom bomb goes off as theorized that the 1977 contemporary Richard Alpert and Faraday’s Mama end up dead for good? After all, that’s THEIR present. Not to mention, no Daniel Faraday is ever born to hatch the plan that doesn’t need to be hatched in the first place, so even if mommy is willing to sacrifice her life for here son Daniel, he’ll never exist in the first place if she perishes in the nuke. To misquote Guns N Roses, take me down to the Paradox City…

namastebig1