"Natural Born Kiddo - 5.10"

This episode was very uncomfortable viewing, to me. I don't enjoy the violent storylines in the show and prefer Lost with philosophical and adventurous tones, without killings every ten minutes. That's just me. So this episode left me feeling like how the kid in the picture looks.

Little Bennie has formed a fascination with the Hostiles since we last saw him. This time we see (by how helpful he is with the sandwiches!) that he really could have been a help to his dad being useful and worthy of love if he was only given a chance -- something that Sayid obviously didn't intuit at the end of show when he had to go and KILL HIM!!! Sheesh. But by the time we see Bennie here, the seeds of self-loathing and shame have taken their toll on his psyche and he's becoming the master schemer that he'll be as an adult. Or...was Bennie a congenital killer like little Sayid is supposed to be?

The conversation between Ben and Sayid at the construction site reminded me of Kill Bill 2, where Bill tells Beatrix that she's a natural born killer herself, and that she can't have a normal life no matter how hard she tries. Earlier, Sayid seemed to think that Ben had used him as his own personal killing machine, but as Ben points out to Sayid he was very eager to hop onto the killing train on his own, and now it's over. So Ben more or less tells him to go get a life, if he has one, while Ben pretends to giddily traipse back to the lovely life that he doesn't have either. The Pot calling the Kettle black? I think so.

You have to feel sorry for Horace this week, he was in a very bad spot. It's like in those cartoons when the character has a devil (Radzinsky) on one shoulder, and an angel (James) on the other, each trying to sway the decision-making process of the poor confused soul. Horace sticks with procedure though and takes Sayid for some psychedelic discipline and the funniest scenes of the episode. Sayid must have been cracking up for how scary Oldham's torturous practices weren't..."ooooh, yer gonna make me trip my brains out for answers, wow!" Heheh. I guess that we're supposed to assume that Oldham would bring out the tongue-pliers if the drugs didn't work.

And I'm going to place a small bet right now that Radzinsky actually died after he nagged Kelvin past his one last good nerve, some particularly lonely night in the Swan. Perhaps Kelvin didn't pull the trigger, but I can imagine him egging Radz on very strongly in order to put them both out of Mr.Poopiepants' misery. There's always a hot-headed Widmore and a naggy Radzinsky in very bunch.

Not much to say about Kate and Juliet yet, until we see how the new prisoner situation might unravel their cover story. If the con gets crazy, James and Juliet might not have much time to play house anyway. But Kate can't say that Sawyer didn't ask her to play house first, back when he was still Sawyer. See ya, wouldn't wanna be ya, Kate.

The Sheriff has got a lot to ponder from here on out. Hurley should not cause him any problems, unless he makes one of his famous slips of the lip. Juliet's got his back, and so far Jack is willingly playing along with his Sheriff role even if only to allow James to trip himself up so then Jack gets to laugh at him. Kate's good at lying, but how long will her patience last if James doesn't come running back as quickly as she wants? And the rest of the Left Behinders apparently don't exist anymore, so they aren't going to be a problem. But I reckon that the Sheriff is learning that it's lonely at the top.

"That's The Way They Became The Dharma Bunch - 5.09"

An unexpected vacation kept me from posting on this great episode in a timely manner, but I guess I'll still put down some thoughts anyway FWIW. I loved the opening shot in the cockpit of 316, during the crash. And I will now make the type of comment that I usually don't make in my blogs...FRANK IS TOTALLY HOT!!!!! Ahem. I like pilots. And yes, I'm going to see the retro-showing of "Top Gun" at my theater next month, up in the front row. I hope that it's in 3D. :-)

Back to Lost; who doesn't think that Jin is feeling great in his new security job?! He gets to do the kind of work that he probably would have preferred to do for Mr. Paik (if he absolutely had to work for him), that is, be a benevolent gangster. This kind of work he gets to do in DHARMA-ville with a flourish. I love how TPTB wrote the dialogue between Jin, the captured Sayid, and James to keep their facade going in front of the DIs. It was all very savvy and Sayid's war-seasoned reply about whether or not he was a Hostile was pure Sayid.

It really pains me to have to relive the 1970s again in the show. The 70s were not kind to me on the whole (bad marriage, scary divorce) but I did meet some wonderful people who made sure that I came out of it OK. Too bad I couldn't have escaped to DHARMA-ville, which we got to see much more of this episode. I worried that there would be more than just side glances between Kate and James on the porch there. And as noted everywhere in the Lost-o-sphere, Jack getting vocational placement as janitor was priceless. Like James would probably say, "Payback's a b#tch," but he most likely did it to keep loose-canon-Jack on the sidelines where he might not cause too much trouble.

Concerning time paradoxes, I just put my brain in sleep-mode for that area of the story. There were some serious activities there that would surely cause a few moments in time to be rearranged, especially Juliet playing hot-potato with baby-Ethan after she found out who he was, considering the fact that he was the one who recruited her. Oops, too late, my brain just exploded again!

James' little speech to Jack was long time coming. Even though Christian tried to say the same thing to Jack at times, it didn't take because he said it in the wrong ways. James laid it out logically and succinctly. Hopefully Jack will heed the advice this time, but I have a feeling that the Jack is going to hit the fan soon enough.

Frank as the responsible pilot, has his work cut out for him in the middle of this second motley wreck he's crash-landed onto with this island. But like pilots say, any landing that you can walk away from is a good landing. It's really too bad that he wasn't on 815, because having him in charge (surely a pilot would rank over a surgeon in the castaway-leader qualifications!) would have saved us all a lot of Jack-face. And Dedjezter (at TLC) and I were right, Ben did take off alone after the crash to pursue his own interests, we just didn't know it yet when we saw him in the infirmary, thanks to Sun playing Whack-A-Ben with him!

"A (Very) Little Humor"

This comic in the Sunday Funnies made me think of Lost. My additions aren't very funny, but you can probably sympathize with what I was thinking. So far I just can't get my head to understand the contradictions of what TPTB have told us about living through time more than once. It's like, "now you see it, now you don't" but with Lost it's, "now you can change it, now you can't." Don't they realize what they've done to our brains?! I'm sure they do, and I'm sure they are having a lot of fun with it. But I hope that they have mercy on us and give us a little more insight into their rules of time and space before the hiatus for Season 6. :o)

http://comics.com/f_minus/

"Introducing, James - 5.08"

How do you know that you spend too much time thinking about Lost? Well for one, you have a dream that TPTB have chosen some fans to be in the show and you are one of them. You are given the script the night before shooting and are expected to have your lines memorized by the next day. Some of your scenes will be in the water, and you are just glad that you don't have to wear a bathing suit, but some of your clothes will be burned in another scene with a fire. All of a sudden "reality" turns into fantasy and while you are doing scenes with Jeremy Davies, time starts skipping all over the place. You find his mother, who happens to be Nina from Fringe(!). You escape out of a window while being chased by a train, and then all kinds of other weird things happen that are just too goofy. Then you wake up and want to go back to sleep to finish the dream! :-o

So obviously, I really enjoyed this episode! First, I was so blown away by how Sawyer has totally evolved into a person who has done a 180' turn in his life, and most importantly doesn't hate himself anymore. His transformation is fascinating to me, because I've always believed that a person can improve or change if they only want to. And Sawyer the bad-ass, has turned into James the fine upstanding citizen because he wanted to, while still retaining his sense of humor and fun (life doesn't have to be boring just because he's nice now!). The only question is, will he be strong enough to maintain his shiny new self after Katherina the Shrew (thank you Shakespeare) gets her claws into him again?

The other subject of note in this episode was the few seconds worth of the island's giant statue during one of the flashes. I won't delve into that here, as talk of Egyptian deities has been burning up the Lost blogs since Wednesday night. But I have to say that all this brings to mind the research of Thor Heyerdahl, the Norwegian ethnologist and adventurer who sailed the Atlantic in a papyrus boat (two if you count the first try that wasn't successful) to see if it would have been at all possible for Egyptians to sail to the New World from Morocco, with their limited technology. He and his crew proved that it was.

And wouldn't you know, Morocco just happens to be very near one of the Vile Vortices of Africa that we suspect might be involved in the travel from Tunisia to the island, and vice versa. Could that be how Egyptians, of all peoples, managed to make it to our island? Did one of their boats run into an unfortunate vortex that swept them through a cosmic corridor to a moving island? I've had a long-time crush on Thor (and oddly, he died on the same day my dad died) and I will be very excited if TPTB have chosen to include his amazing work in the plethora of world history that they have woven into the show. He is from Norway after all, just like Hanso. http://www.kon-tiki.no/Ny/Dok_eng/e_start.html

One thing that I will mention about Old Four Toes is that the peeps at DarkUFO seem to have found the most similar deity (Taweret) that actually has a cake on its head like Four Toes does! I have to admit, when I was looking through the list of Egyptian gods, I skipped over the ones with alligator heads and did not see this one. As a former technician in a research lab, I should have known better than to pass over any possible data!