"Happy Lostoween"

I didn't make this beautiful image of course, I think that I snagged this LOTR-Lost pic from the Blackrock website.

"If Don Draper Was Lost"

It seems as if I've temporarily OD'd on fretting about Lost mysteries like others in our blog-o-sphere. So here goes another one of my thoughts crossing Lost ideas with another TV show or movie.

It's a darn shame that TPTB of Lost did not get Jon Hamm who plays Don Draper on A&E's Mad Men first, for a position on Lost. He is just such an incredible actor. To paraphrase a comment from one of the Mad Men blogs, that actor can say more by scrunching up the space between his eyebrows, than any actor on TV right now! As well as how he can look completely composed while at the same time like he's losing his mind. He can coolly tear down any smarmy opponent's nerves by using a rumpled brow and a smirk, like a mental bazooka. While at the same time, you know that his brain is about to explode because life as he knows it is about to crash and burn. Jack-Face indeed, humph! Not that I'm knocking the acting skills of anyone on Lost, I think that they are all terrific, first-rate, and I love them all. But Hamm has a fascinating ability to emote a fierce or complicated presence without speaking. The life of the Draper character also runs an interesting parallel with Ben's...rough childhoods, rotten/dead dads, new beginnings, strong but questionable choices in maintaining the status quo. Are they bad/good guys or good/bad guys?

If the Losties had Don Draper on their side after the crash, there would be no pussy-footing around with survival problems. Whenever they need a strong leader, self-made man Don could take over. If Jack and Sawyer start thumping their chests with each other, he'd pull out a club and chase those apes back to the caves. When Jin and Michael started fighting, I can see Draper handcuffing them together like Tony Curtis and Sidney Poitier. And Ben? Fuggeddaboutitt! Draper would send Sayid into that closet to tie up Fenry's little booboo arm like a pretzel to get him to talk. And then afterwards he would slick back his hair, put his cuff-links and suit jacket back on, and pour himself a glass of MacCutcheon. Now this is not to say that Draper is an honorable character, he's not, and might be getting his comeuppances next season. But he is strong as heck when he needs to be.

Of course, if Hamm went to Lost, we wouldn't get to watch him completely own the Draper role, which would be a loss for that show. He's perfect in the part. I still like Desmond much better though, because his missteps in trying to make a better life for himself are not remotely as questionable as Draper's, which could be a fascinating comparison itself. But the Draper character is an incredibly complex one and Hamm's portrayal is one of the best on TV right now. The bad thing, is that Mad Men is going to give every drama on TV a tough time in the Emmy's next year. Lost has a hard enough time getting recognized as it is, I hate to see Mad Men give the Emmy snobs, er...judges, another reason to overlook Lost on purpose!

"Lost Magazine Reading is Fun-damental"

During the hiatus I have actually been reading the Lost magazine instead of just buying it and thumbing through to look for pictures to draw (no luck yet), and then chucking it into the "Lost magazine collection that will surely be worth a few cents more in ten years than it is now" pile. It doesn't seem like many Lost fans like it very much. For the first year the fanzine was nothing to really get excited about, as the images were almost 100% re-repeated stock PR photos (reversed, collaged, shrunken, enlarged, etc., to try to make them look different), and the articles were very limited as to the actual story content. It also looks like a carbon copy of a couple other TV series mags. But the editors have started to hit a better stride and produce a more interesting publication this year. Not that I'm a magazine publishing expert, I just buy a lot of "zines" and know what I like.

What piques my interest now is the increase of articles on the special effects, prop building, and set pictures that are included more every issue. I enjoy learning how things are made and the creative possesses behind the production, and they are beginning to deliver pretty well in that area. Like the fact that some of the "five o'clock shadows" on the guys are actually put on via an electrostatic flocking process which I find fascinating. No need to use the "Official Miami Vice Sonny Crockett Stubble Shaver" on this show! They also showed the making of the polar bear costumes and scenes Ms.FYSB, if you ever read this! :-) But the character images are still mostly the promo photos, which are beyond familiar at this point. There are so many incredible screen caps from the series, I find it odd that they don't utilize them more for the magazine.

I've also found that while the magazine of course doesn't reveal answers to any of the more nagging larger mysteries, it does unveil minor answers in the course of interviews and conversations that help fill in the blanks and free our minds to ponder the larger missing pieces of the story. You know, like some of the vague things that have been played out that we are still arguing about and making bets on. For instance, in Damon's "Pearl's of Wisdom" feature, someone asked if Desmond ("in a conscious, physical, or in whatever way") really travelled back in time to 1996, and he answered, "I'm going to give you a wonderfully simple answer -- Yes!!!" Unfortunately, the guy's question was vague as to the physicality of how he travelled back, so some unknowns remain there, dangitt. Also in the zine various contributors have stated repeatedly that Smokey killed Eko, for those who still doubt that. This month, Nestor Carbonell says in an interview that his group was definitely the indigenous people of the island, and that he "had taken part in the murder of Juliet's ex-husband," for those of us who still wonder if perhaps she did it in a "Carrie-like" fashion. I do think though that whatever is said in the magazine, TPTB could at any time zig-zag away from what has been said and go another way altogether! So unless it comes from Cuselof's mouth, I take it with many grains of salt.

Evangeline Lily gets philosophical about the Skater-Jater-Schmater triangle in a way that I found interesting as well. She says in issue #10, "I'm starting to see very clearly, that the difference between her love for Jack and for Sawyer is: she loves Jack even though he can't seem to love her for who she is. She loves who Jack is, and she loves Sawyer because he loves her for who she is...but Kate doesn't actually love who Sawyer is. She is hoping and wishing that Sawyer will be something else - to be more noble, but he never expects that from her. It's really beautiful and tragic, because Kate loves the wrong guy. She loves the guy who doesn't really love her..." So, is she saying that Kate's problem is the typical scenario where the girl picks the bad-boy over the nice-guy just because she thinks that she can change him? I truly hope not. Anyway, it's all good reading for this hiatus-challenged Lost fan.

"A Tale Of Two Bunnies"

Last week I was reading Hawking's "A Brief History of Time" while waiting in the ER after my car got got rear-ended (I figured that it would be a very long wait so I brought the big guns with me) and as I got to chapter 10 (chapter 7 is the one that the kid was reading on the steps of the Room23 bunker) things in the Orchid film started to come together. Please note that I was reading the new copy that is profusely illustrated, making it a sort of "A Brief History of Time For Dummies". But when reading about the wormholes and the Casimir effect, the whole thing kind of began to penetrate my thick skull and make some sense. Bigmouth explained it to us in his great blog "Eye M Sick", but it didn't really sink in until I saw the illustrations in the book. See: http://eyemsick.blogspot.com/ , for a much better scientific explanation than mine that follows.

Since Desmond's little trip, part of what we've been guessing about his possible wormhole time travel has been bugging me. Wormhole travel is supposed to happen with a warping of space (so that you can take a shortcut between points A and B) that brings time points together like two places on a folded piece of paper, as illustrated above. But I've wondered how did the Dharmas create this necessary bending? Well it seems that this is where the Casimir Effect might come in handy. That negative space between the plates caused by the smaller particles in there, that we've been reading and talking about since ComicCon, seems to create the curved space necessary for the wormhole. Supposedly a negative space curvature is needed for time travel, and this Casimir state can help with that.

Another possible clue regarding the Orchid film is in this chapter also. Apparently, a traveler could ride a wormhole that is stationary to earth, to a future point. And if he comes back to his present on a moving wormhole, then he could come back to a place in time before where he took off the first time. So, maybe that's what happened to Bunny15. They planned to send him to the future and maybe return him to the present, but he somehow came back on a different wormhole and surprised them in the lab by returning before he left. Thus, there ended up being two bunnies there at the same time. If they had some kind of specific transport platform or chamber where Bunny15 was supposed to disappear and reappear, they would have expected to keep the experiment contained. But what if he (as Bunny15-b) came back on a different wormhole, and into the room at a place that he had been sitting before, on the shelf...which just happened to be where Dr.Candle was holding him (as Bunny15-a) in the lab in the film. This theory is a bit different than Bigmouth's, but here is how it looks applied to the illustration in Hawking's book:

How they would manage to accidentally cross two wormholes is beyond me, so Bigmouth's theory is better than mine, and surely TPTB will follow the K.I.S.S. principle to make it easier for them and us! Hopefully the answers to that will also reveal if Dr.Candle lost his arm when the two anti-bunnies leaped together, and touched, and blew off his arm. And also, how a big clunky Island could have natural finely tuned laboratory-grade Casimir properties, that could be used to create a wormhole. To that I chant the Lost viewers' usual mantra, "I hope that we find out soon!" It will be fun to watch how TPTB will be able to write this in an entertaining way without a visit to the island from Mr. Hawking himself.

"The Devil's Triangle"

The relationship preferences that a lot of Lost fans seem to be so passionate about don't seem to interest me for some reason. Lost relationships have caused a lot of contention in online wars between the Jaters and the Skaters (and now Juliet is thrown into the mix!), but I don't care so much. I admit that I was happy for Hurley when he and Libby were getting together, because it's always great when the nice guy gets a break in a story. I also prefer to see married people like Sun and Jin stay together, and for new families to begin like with Charlie, Claire, and Aaron. Of course the depth of interaction, conflict or otherwise, between the characters in any story are very important. But so far I haven't emotionally invested any preference of whether Kate chooses to be with Smokey or anyone else on the island.

At this point, Kate and Sawyer have physically and emotionally gone light years beyond where Kate and Jack are, for the obvious reasons. And Jack seemed to have been resigned to leaving them to be together after he "accidentally" viewed their sleepover in the cage. But then Moses goes and tells Kate that he loves her on their flight through the wilderness in the finale! That's nice Jack, but it may be too little too late.

Personally, I don't think that Jack knows what love really is. It appears that Jack mistakes love for whatever surge of emotion that he feels for the "needy damsel du jour", which viewers have discussed in detail since seeing his FBs. Though like I've said before, Jack could possibly lift Kate up from where she holds herself down, but does Jack really know Kate anymore than Kevin? Accept for the fact that he learned she was a fugitive, he knows nothing about her life. Sawyer knows her better, even just from playing that "I Never" game with her. But Sawyer drags around his own baggage of moral and personal issues too.

Even if Juliet does not inevitably draw Jack away from Kate, I think that Kate should try to stick it out with Sawyer, since she made the choice to get physical and bond with him (repeatedly!). We would hate to see Sawyer find yet another reason to crawl back into his pitiful crusty shell. Who knows, maybe by the end of the show it might just be very important to the story who Kate ends up with. But however TPTB write it up is OK with me. I'm sure that they will make it a compelling component to the story whichever direction that Kate turns.

"Is Locke Just Jacob's Puppet?"

When Locke chided Ben for having a fridge with chicken in it (that John didn't hesitate to chow down we remember) was it really Locke talking? Sometimes I wonder if Jacob has been talking through Locke, especially to Ben. Ben told Locke that Jacob didn't like technology. And we know that Locke did not really have a problem with using technology to his advantage all along his Lost story, up until the conversation in Ben's kitchen. So at the moment that he said that it struck me as a very odd thing for Locke to say. Odd even for inconsistent Locke. But it doesn't seem an odd thing for Jacob to say to Ben at this point. Ben has been living a life of dictatorial ease since the DI purge. Has he not been obeying everything that Jacob has ordered him to do and that's why Ben can tell people that Jacob's not a forgiving man? Ben might know first hand of Jacob's anger, if he's been slowly casting off his own puppet strings, to disobey Jacob on occasion. So a thought has been nagging me since, that Jacob is using Locke like his brand new ventriloquist dummy making him do and say things to put Ben (his old dummy) in his place, as well as to protect the island.

We know that Locke is very pliable, his Otherville dossier apparently even stated as much. So was it Jacob who mentally convinced Locke to not push the Swan button, after leading him to the Pearl to make him lose his faith (as fans have posed on their blogs as well)? Could it have been Jacob throwing the knife when John killed Naomi? He could not even kill the father that he hated all his life, to buy his ticket into the Tribe of Jacob which he wanted more than anything. How could John have so easily thwacked Naomi in the back like that with no hesitation?

If this is true, I think that Locke will finally have the breakdown that he has been verging on for years, at the moment that Ben says to him, "Do you really think that you're so special to this island? Do you think that Jacob healed you because he liked you? He was using you like everyone else in your life John, and you didn't even know it! You're nothing more than a puppet to him! (pan in for close-up of Ben's most evil sneering smirk ever) Ha-ha-ha!" Then switch camera view to Locke's quivering lower lip and tears streaming down his face. If Jacob is actually using and speaking through Locke sometimes, I wish that TPTB would make it easier for us to see, maybe like when the devil talked through Linda Blair in the Exorcist.

"Is Hurley A Threat To Jacob?"

Lately I've been wondering a lot about Hurley in terms of his affect on the island or more specifically, on what Jacob's plans might be. Sometimes Hurley seems like the fly in the ointment, or the sand in the gears, of what we are told by Ben and Locke is "supposed to happen" on the island. Because there were so many events that might have deterred Hurley from getting on Flight 815 in the first place, it makes me wonder if his being on the island is a good or bad thing for Jacob, Ben, and Locke. Hurley's clock fails that morning so he's late for the flight, and then all the other series of stumbling blocks happened that stalled but did not stop him. And didn't the gate attendant tell him that he was not even supposed to be on that flight? But his determination gets him a place on the plane after all.

On the island, although Hurley still thinks that he is cursed, his persistence there seems to defy his "bad luck". He manages via his optimistic influence on his fellow castaways to enhance their morale and existence on the island, he helps to make better plans for their survival, and he does his share of saving the day when the other "leaders" don't feel that he can be counted on as shown in the finale of Season 3 most of all. He does all these things as a sort of behind-the-scenes silent leader of the group. So Hurley is a very positive influence on the island for the castaways as the unofficial "project manager" of the their post-crash survival.

But what kind of influence is he having on the survival of the island itself? Hurley's actions could be systematically undoing or hindering what Jacob and Ben have been trying to repair since the crash. Have Jacob and Ben not even really noticed that Hurley is such a force, because he is such a mild-mannered leader who is also a sort of "man behind the curtain" in his own humble way? After all, they had him in captivity on the dock and they let him go! Perhaps they don't notice Hurley as a force to be reckoned with because he's not a chest thumper like Jack, Sawyer, or Locke. Could it be that Jacob can't read everyone? Or is it because Hurley hasn't had a mind reading encounter with Smokey yet that keeps Jacob from getting a bead on Hurley's character and his moral fortitude? If some people were indeed meant to crash on the island, maybe Hurley was not one of them and his positive actions are also helping to slowly chip a hole in the dyke that is going to explode open in Season 4!