Lost: The Incident Closes Season 5 with 2 Hours of Weirdness and More Questions than Answers

Posted by ScuzzBuster

May 15, 2009

jacobandfriend While it wouldn’t be fair to say that I didn’t actually get at least as much if not more guilty enjoyment from the Lost finale more than I did from the season 4 conclusion it leaves the show teetering on the edge of insanity and one push the wrong way could send things about 4 feet to the right of too crazy to enjoy. The real question is that with only a handful more than a dozen hours left in this 6 year saga are ever we going to have more questions answered than raised from week to week? But then again, that’s what the fun is all about.

greysawful I don’t want to be too hard on the logic of the show especially with this annoying buzzing around my head caused by my wife watching the female drama queen ego trip that is the Grey’s Anatomy finale. I’m cynical enough that I should say that I’m glad that all the characters in that show seem to be on the verge of death or unhappiness except that it will just serve to reinforce the theme of that program that it’s an ongoing search for middle-aged women who continually make shitty choices to continue to feel sorry for themselves.

115643_049 Alright, I’ll leave that show alone to go back to my little nags with where we are with Lost. Most importantly, any patience that we’ve had with Jack over the years is just about a gone. I’m still a bit perplexed at how he’s arrived at his current logic that a high-risk long shot mass murder suicide solution seems like the best option. If he was still active in his drug/alcohol addiction I might be more understanding of his insanity, but that’s not the case. The final straw in my complete loss of patience and credibility with Jack is his final admission that he basically wants to take this desperate chance to blow the nuke simply because he can’t deal with the pain of losing Kate. I had to rewind the DVR back to the beginning again to make sure that I was watching Lost and that Matthew Fox wasn’t now mysteriously a member of the medical staff on Grey’s Anatomy which seems like a much more logical place for a group of droopy sad self-absorbed doctors trying to elicit sympathy for the bad life choices they’ve made.

I just don’t buy into the Kate/Jack relationship at all. Yes, when you’re caught up in the midst of island weirdness with little or no hope of a return to a normal life a match made in hell may make some sort of sense like this, but it doesn’t change the fact that she’s a low rent, trailer hick con-woman that also happens to be a murderer. Kate and Sawyer may be logical soul mates, but I just could never completely buy into Jack being all the torn up over her especially after he pretty much turned his nose up at Kate in favor of Juliette through much of season 4.

Jacks’s big “reset” plan based on Faraday’s theory pretty much only benefits him. Beyond Jack almost none of the surviving castaways get any benefit from eradicating the crash from their original time line. Kate ends up in jail or worse. Sawyer heads back to LA to continue his crappy con-man life now with the added guilt of the cold-blooded murder of a completely innocent man to weigh on his conscience. Jin is back playing two-bit mob hit man for Sun’s father while Sun is probably still trying to plot an escape from the marriage. Sayid, hell, who knows, but other than a bullet in his gut, did he really have any prospect of a better future before stepping on that plane? Hurley may be a wash since he’s a psycho anyway. And who knows what Locke would be doing, but most likely he’d still be scooting around his miserable life at the box company in his wheelchair. Of course, now there’s the little question about whether he’s really dead.

lockeagain Let’s move on to that revelation. So it appears that John Locke quite possibly has not risen from the dead after all. It’s a very curious little puzzle and one of the two most important questions that now have been blown open in the stretch run into the finale. The other big question is who the hell the other “Others” are now? Who are these people that were on Frank’s plane? Initially, there didn’t seem to be any connection between them, but apparently now they deliberately headed to the island as well. They certainly seem to have a game plan. Again the program has this unending knack of waiting to until we seem to have all the mysteries at least within hand to ponder when they suddenly decide to bring another group of outsiders with shady motives into the party. My best stabs in the dark of where these pieces fall into place:

•Jack: In my eyes right now, Jack is bordering on villainy with all of his motives being blatantly self-serving. At this point, next to Ben Linus he’s probably the person to trust the least heading into the closing season.

•John Locke: Still dead. Whoever talked Ben into killing Jacob is obviously using John Locke’s face to manipulate people. So whoever the guy in the flashback was, apparently this was all part of some scheme. At least, that’s what we’re led to believe.

bmanuel-11 •Richard Alpert: Will be unmasked finally as the incognito superhero BatManuel from The Tick and will move off the island to finally shack up with Captain Liberty once and for all.

•Jacob: Who the hell knows? Dead? Maybe. But there’s certainly a helleva lot of ‘splainin left to do here.

•Sun and Jin: Along for the ride. My guess is that if anyone comes out of the finale unscathed and back together it may be them. While they’ve toyed with them on and off over season 5, they never seem to come to the forefront of the story, so heavy involvement in the final season having very little built this year seems unlikely to me.

•Sawyer: As I’ve noted in previous reviews this season they’ve built James Ford from being the most despicable hillbilly on the island to being about the only person left that we can actually trust at this point. Sure, his motives are generally in his best interest still, but at least his motives are pure and we’re given little reason to doubt his sincerity.

•Ben Linus: my toss up prediction is that Ben Linus ends up ends up saving them all by the end of season six either in a noble act of self sacrifice or by chance finding an act of selfishness that happens to coincide with the best interests of everyone else. The more you hate him, the more it leads me to believe that he will never get his just desserts by the end of this. It almost becomes too obvious of an end to his story to think he’s going to meet a terrible end.

•Faraday: Dead and will only return of there is a substantial change to the timeline of events as we’ve come to know them, which I think would be a tragic mistake for the program.

lostjuliet •Juliet: Either dead or we get a big cop out in the first episode of season 6 since the intention was to make us believe she nudged a nuke in the final fade to white this week. As George Lucas proved last year, the only chance of surviving a nuclear blast is to crawl into a lead-lined refrigerator before it goes off.

•Hurley: He’s nuts despite what Jacob says, but what’s with the guitar? My final prediction is that he get’s co-story credit on Empire Strikes Back.

npb •Desmond and Penny: While we finally got to see Ben Linus take the licking he deserved on the dock by what turned out in reality to be a craft that IS PENNY’S BOAT, they were conspicuously absent from the finale. There’s obviously more to this story than has been told. My gut feeling is still that their entire purpose ends up being the reveal that not only did they name their kid Charlie, but their kid ends up in 1977 and is indeed Charlie.

•Charlie: Still dead or an infant, and ended up biting the big one AGAIN in the Wolverine flick. Poor Dominic Monaghan can’t cut a break.

•Christian Shephard: Dead. Whoever the poser is that looks like him I believe to be the same gentleman that is now wearing Lock’s face.

•Claire: Will reappear late season six to do a stunning one-off topless scene that will be the talk of network television censors for years.

diejacob For anyone that’s pulled my Lost articles back to the first one this past year, they know that as a latecomer to the Island that this is the first time that I will have to wait the full gap between seasons to get resolution to a finale. Since I pounded out the first four seasons over a couple of month period pulling in the season 4 finale toward the end of last year. Unlike my younger days when I was happy to spend the better part of 3 years speculating whether Darth Vader really was Luke’s father in Hurley’s amended version of Empire, I imagine that I will not be able to maintain a consistent level of enthusiasm for the program until we head nearer to 2010.

This is also a bittersweet final weekly television review for the time being for me since Lost is now the last show I’ve been covering to end it’s 2009 run. Galactica is gone forever, Heroes took a bit of an upswing after limping mercilessly through it’s third season, Doctor Who remains on hiatus until 2010 with a special or two every few months. House wraps up even though I haven’t typed a word about it this season.

Who’s up for weekly reviews of reruns of All in the Family? Bah, I’ll still put out a new release cinema review once a week and I have a few other things to moan about that I’ve put on the back burner during the TV season.

So as my final comment having anything to do with Lost, I put forth a small bit of cinema trivia that I challenge you to answer correctly without the help of Google. Which popular film from the 70s featured a running gag with the following bit of dialog or permutations of it: