Thursday, May 14, 2009

Lost Season Finale “The Incident” A Good vs. Evil Saga?

Photo from ABC


I was going to do a full recap on the season finale for Lost (ABC) “The Incident, Part 1 and 2” but gave up after about 20 minutes and an oncoming migraine (triggered by the show, I am sure). There was just too much to try to keep up on the little details. But don't despair, here are the high points. written in my original “stream of consciousness” mode. It’s hard to write a short sentence describing what happens on this show because everything is so interconnected. Here goes:



The show opens with a man talking with Jacob (Mark Pellegrino) who is frying a fish he just caught on a rock. Jacob is wearing white and the other man is wearing black. A sailing ship approaches the Island and the man in black says it always ends the same – they come, fight, destroy and corrupt. Jacob says it only ends once, anything else that happens before that is just progress. The man in black asks Jacob if he knows how badly he wants to kill him, and Jacob says yes. Man in black says one of these days, sooner or later, says he will find a loophole, and Jacob says when he finds it, he will be waiting her on the Island.

Kate (Evangeline Lilly) convinces Juliet (Elizabeth Mitchell) to get off the sub and stop Jack (Matthew Fox) from blowing up the Island with the hydrogen bomb, Sawyer (Josh Holloway) doesn’t want to go but Juliet forces the issue when she disables someone on the sub and takes his gun and then Sawyer and Kate and Juliet ask to get off the sub so they can go back. Later, after Sawyer beats Jack to a pulp, Juliet announces she has changed her mind and Jack is right, he has to blow up the Island to put things back where they were supposed to be, and oh by the way women can change their minds.

Jacob has been on the Island a long time but has also directly touched many of the Islander lives in the past: Kate’s, while she was shoplifting as a child; Hurley (Jorge Garcia), while getting out of jail; reviving or resurrecting Locke (Terry O’Quinn) after he falls from a building; being at Sun (Yunjin Kim) and Jin’s (Daniel Day Kim) wedding; asking Sayid (Naveen Andrews) for directions as Sayid’s wife is hit and killed by a car; and Sawyer, when he was at the funeral for his parents. Jacob is on the island but also not on the Island, but when on the Island but did not live in the cabin like Ben thought but it is living in the foot of the four-toed statue that remains from the giant statute.

Locke is alive and yet he is dead (more on this later), but the “alive” Locke tells Ben (Michael Emerson) to kill Jacob because Jacob never ever saw Ben and Jacob would always pass messages to Ben through Richard, never in person, and Ben should be angry about that. Ben gets mad and stabs Jacob.

Richard still keeps his youthful looks but does not seem to have traveled through time to stay this way. He looks like he has been wearing the same "guyliner" for years on his eyes.

Rose and Bernard are still alive and having fun living on the Island under the radar and stealing Dharma food.

Miles’ (Ken Leung) father wants to stop drilling by the Swan location but Radzinsky (Eric Lange) wants to go ahead and he opens up the energy field and everything metal starts getting sucked into the hole. Yet bullets continue to fly and don’t seem to be affected by this phenomenon. Juliet falls into the hole and Sawyer tries to save her but she loves him enough to let him go and she seems to be doomed to die as she seemingly detonates the hydrogen bomb that Jack obtained from “Jughead” just like Faraday told him to and which Sayid rigged before he was shot and started bleeding to death.



Whew! (You know, I actually laughed when I re-read what I wrote above but I swear all of that was really in the show.)

What does it all mean? There are so many theories out there that it could make one dizzy. I for one still have the feeling that someone is making things up as they go along. But seriously, I think the most important scene was the very first segment with Jacob and the man in black. It seems like they are both outlining the classic good vs. evil story, Jacob in white being good, man in black being evil. Everything else that happened on the show seems to indicate that everyone else on the Island are just part of the ongoing battle between good and evil, angels and demons, God and the Devil. Still, I found the 2 hour finale overly confusing and maybe even a little bloated. It was certainly not as tight and elegant, or as surprising, as the season finale for Fringe, one of J.J. Abrams other shows. There was nothing that really took me by surprise during this finale, not even Locke’s dead body dropping out of the container. As soon as they showed an airplane container big enough to hold a body, I knew he was in there. Still, it does beg the question – how can Locke be dead and yet alive and taunting Ben to kill Jacob? Is the “alive” Locke really Locke at all? Does this have anything to do with the “loophole” that the man in black mentioned at the very start of the show? If Juliet really did detonate the hydrogen bomb by hitting it with a rock, where will all the “Lost” people be at the beginning of what is being billed as the final season? Back where they started before the flight, or on the flight, headed to their original destinations? One thing is for sure, despite the fact that this show gives me a headache and makes my head spin, I will be back next season to hopefully get all the answers.

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