"Deja Vu All Over The Place - S6.13"

Emilie de Raven should get an Emmy for having the cutest little devil-faced pout on TV. And other than that, I've got very few thoughts or words for this episode and Season 6 in general. Perhaps we're not supposed to, I've seen that other people are somewhat dulled in the senses like I am this time around with Lost so close to the end - flying across these spiraling, bumping, helixed universes, reliving skewed flashbacks when we were starving for some new developments. So I'm not alone I see but I'm not, um, happy for suddenly feeling bereft of any reaction to my favorite current TV series. After writing over 200 excited posts in a few years about this show, you'd think that I could come up with something better than lame jokes now, but it isn't so. Oh well. So here are a couple of the things that I thought were sure to happen, but didn't, in The Last Recruit.

************

The End. I'm scared, pinch me when I should wake up.

:-o

"Ilana Loses To The Curse"

Richard: Do you have the dynamite?

Ilana: (Nodding) Four sticks.

In the game of Universal Rochambeau (i.e. metaphysical rock, paper, scissors) it looks like the Curse of the Four Sticks (as my friend Wayne Allen Sallee calls it) must trump the will of the island. I didn't catch what Ilana replied to Richard on my initial watch, but the second time around it really stuck out. "Four sticks" is the phrase for any sighting of the numbers "1111", which presents itself in many forms, but usually as 11:11 on a digital clock, message machine, timer, etc. In numerology, repeated numbers like 1111 are considered a sign of synchronicitous portent -- that is, bad luck, good luck, omens, or whatever scares ya.

To tell you the truth, when Ilana was yanking that bag of unstable C3H5N3O9 around, I would have been disappointed if she hadn't blown up since we've been programmed to expect it now. And sure enough there she went into the ether! So the disappointment I'm left with is that she did die...without telling us the things that we needed to learn from her. This is getting to be a pattern here, Jacob the man with all the answers dies, Dogen who knew island secrets dies, Ilana who knew Jacob's secrets dies, dangitt everyone who knows the secrets of the island is dying!

I wonder what time it was when Ilana was jostling around that dynamite?!

Led Zeppelin wrote a song called "Four Sticks", where the story has it that John Bonham used two pairs of drum sticks to record the song. Just another brick in the wall of the legendary curses of Led Zeppelin?

Here's a Freaky Factoid about Nitroglycerin for ya: (Wiki)"Infrequent exposure to high doses of nitroglycerin can cause severe headaches known as "NG head". These headaches can be severe enough to incapacitate some people...for workers in nitroglycerin (NTG) manufacturing facilities, this can result in a "Monday morning headache" phenomenon for those who experience regular nitroglycerin exposure in the workplace...over the weekend the workers lose the tolerance to NTG and when they are re-exposed on Monday the prominent vasodilation produces tachycardia, dizziness, and a headache."

I think that Lost is giving me NG-Head! Kidding aside, I don't think that TPTB were using the Four Sticks curse on the show, but it is a weird coincidence. And I've run out of steam for analyzing or critiquing the show this week, so weird thoughts like this are all I've got for now.

"And The Emmy Goes To...Nunu!"

It must have been the "Awwww!" heard 'round the world, for Jorge Garcia fans. Now the only question is, does Nunu have her SAG card?

"Random Thoughts on S6.11"

OK, damn the migraine, full speed ahead. Because this episode ran all-stops-out too and blew me away, with my favorite elements in it, i.e. Desmond (and Penneh), Faraday, Mrs. H, and weird science. The Flash Sideways in this ep made more sense to me than any of the other FSs, and makes me a little more accepting of the concept. Desmond's FS scenes (or should we say his old-style mental time tripping?) created some connective tissue between the 815-time and the FS that make us believe that the weaving of the two time-threads has begun, with a little help from Dan the Piano Man.

I was surprised to realize that Des had been pulled straight from the hospital scene from last season onto the sub! TPTB still haven't told us yet why you have to be drugged to take the subway ride, and I'm wondering now if they ever will. And it would be nice if there was the opportunity for Widmore to wax poetic about how it feels to be back on the island again, but episodes and time are whizzing by, so no place for that either.

TPTB go all out as usual to give us some realistic DI science equipment and apparatus to play science with and it's much appreciated, I love lab gauges, gizmos and heavy equipment. Some events that occurred seemed kind of cheesy, like the typical lab doofus who trips the switch without following the check-list or seeing if everyone else is 'go' on the procedure, which produces the proverbial hapless worker turned into the crispy-critter. But that's not to say that there aren't any dummies like that in a real lab, in my lab someone once actually shook a bottle of nitric acid and glycerin and...well, he almost became Doc Arzt, so it does happen.

I also doubt if a rickety shack could withstand the heat that was apparently emitted from a giant red-hot electromagnetic coil like this, and it bothers me a bit on the realism scale that it's not in some kind of insulated chamber but what the heck, let's just pretend that the Professor made the giant coil out of coconuts and get on with the story. We are to believe that Des can take the heat as well in all his specialness, unlike the human roasted marshmallow before him.

We get another juicy artistic morsel in Widmore's office, and I do hope that they sell prints of this one too eventually like the others, I would really like to have one.

I half expected, if Des took Minkowksi up on his offer, that Kate or one of the other Lost ladies would be an escort babe and I'm glad that didn't happen. There's no more time for skin-games now anyway, let's cut to the meat of the answers and the story. So what was the point of wasting valuable seconds making Minkowski look like a pimpish jerk? To show that Des is far too busy to insert a little down-time into his life as Charlie warned him? I dunno, what do you think?

Did you hear it? It really was the shark music. X-D It felt like Charlie's revelations and explanations were a little rushed and too perfect of a fit, or maybe I'm just being too critical. But it seems like it might take a guy like Charlie a while to figure that out, unlike Dan for instance who is a super genius and can think abstractly. Though I suppose that a near-death experience could be impetus enough to enlighten Charlie's shallow bloody rock god conscience.

This little piggie....hhheheheh. Wait, did I say no more skin? And press a button to stop the magnetism? Oh really?

Will Des and Charlie team up to get the others together and convince them? Which leads me to another question...did the Losties "have to go back" before just to make a big mistake and change events, only so they'd have to go back again and undo the changes that they went back for the first time? It's beginning to look as though the Losties are going to be caught in an eternal loop of going back and messing it up, and going back and fixing it up, and going back and messing it up...like Mrs.Hawking's previous ouroboros pin.

I wonder if Eloise's new binary star pin stands for two the universes. Or maybe she's just a member of the Madeleine Albright giant funky pin club. At any rate, she's got me as confused as she has Desmond. She knows everything (almost) and she still cares about her garden party, where as Charlie (newly christened to the universal laws of chaos and love) sees it all as vanity, like King Solomon. And she's still telling Desmond what to do, why? Seriously, Eloise has a lot of explaining to do.

Obviously Dan's been doing as much existential cogitating as Charlie has, and also has some advice for Desmond. It's great to have Jeremy Davies back, and we finally get to see some more of Dan's logbook, which I'll try to do some investigating on for my Lost Science blog over the weekend.

Do we really have enough time left in the season to watch Desmond go through all the machinations and hoops that Jack had to go through before, to get everyone from the FS to act like lemmings and jump back over into the good old days? It makes me think that maybe some of this part of the story should have begun at the end of last season. I sure hope that we have enough time left, unless TPTB plan an epilogue feature film.

Oh those impish Powers That Be of Lost, leaving us with Desmond in his wormhole happy-place following Sayid off into the jungle to meet up with MIB. Has Desmond seen where Sayid is taking him, and to whom, in a time-jump? Why did Sayid let Zoe go? And is the whole point of the Lost universe just about love, like our religions and romantic philosophers try to tell us? The Bible says that we could have many great talents and gifts, "but the most important of these is love," and if we don't have that one, all the rest are wasted.

"Please Stand By..."

...and enjoy these promo shots of Des while we are having technical difficulties.

"Random Thoughts On S6.10"

* Wow, we sure got a submarine load of answers this week! Oh wait, that was the other J.J. Abrams show that gave us answers. Haha.

* I don't know what to think about the FS sequences still. They're weird, different, and still confuse me. But Greg and Wayne have talked about the possibility that the Losties might cross universes, which would be pretty neat and could explain some of the strange out-of-character behavior that the Losties have exhibited at times. Many times. And the deja vu moments as well.

* It was curious that MIB didn't have much to say to Sayid about the emptiness he feels. Something like, "Yeah, it's cuz you're dead and just a shell now," would have been useful. I get the feeling that although MIB has an overall goal, he might not have the best of strategic plans for escaping. He doesn't know too much about humans and human nature. We know that he assumes they're all idiots - and to him useful idiots - but perhaps he doesn't take into account the chaos factor and millions of variables in play when humans don't react the way that you expect them to. Enter Sawyer's plan to trip him up, perhaps?

* When Jin turned on the brainwashing program in Room23 I wonder if he had seen it before? Jin got more answers than we did this week, heheh.

* Finally Jin gets to see his daughter for the first time, how great was that. Someone at TLC or EyeMSick mentioned that it would be pretty neat if Jin is taking Sun to get treated by Juliet for the gunshot wound. OK, OK, I guess the Sideways world could be interesting sometimes.

* Thanks Lost Untangled for the cool picture of eeevil Mr. Paik. Harsh dude, making Jin pay the assassin for his own demise. I don't think even Mario Puzo thought of putting that twist in 'The Godfather'.

* Kudos to those who noticed that Keamy was wearing Paik's watch back in the Sayid episode.

* I wonder why MIB couldn't have just given those pylon stands a Jean Claude Van Damme sweep-kick to knock them down?

* Does MIB need to get the candidates off-island (or at least all in one place to kill them) to make sure that there is no new Jacob to keep him trapped? I don't think that he has plans to grant them any wishes.

* Should we derive anything from the fact that Widmore calls MIB a 'thing'?

* Aww, look at Jack being all responsible and leadery and stuff for Sun. Well I guess it's about time. It was a good scene.

* And last but not least, if Danny Faraday is married to Zoe Blowy in the FS, I'm going to puke like Muppet Dr.Chang. Blargh!!!!!