LOST Fan

Cuse and Lindelof have done another video for Dharma Special Access. The password is EMAL which, of course, is “lame” spelled backwards — I didn’t need to consult Google for that one!

They answer viewer questions, and they promise that in Season 5 they will explain why Christian Shephard was wearing white shoes on the Island, and that we will be seeing the four-toed statue again in Season 5 and even more in Season 6. I think they meant it, although the two producers have such a deadpan style of humor that it’s sometimes hard to tell when they are giving us information and when they are pulling our legs — especially when one is nodding his head yes, and the other shaking his head no.

The video is followed by an ad for “Ajira Airways,” which has the slogan “Destiny Calls.” The ad gives the URL www.ajiraairways.com, so there’s a new internet toy to play with.

Carlton Cuse
Damon Lindelof

Writers/Producers Carlton Cuse and Damon Lindelof do commentary for the finale of Season 4, There’s no Place Like Home Part 2, on Disc 4 of the DVD set. It’s the first time a commentary track has ever been made for any LOST season finale.

I recommend watching this if you get a chance. These guys are funny! And they get better as the episode goes on — toward the end, as they start getting punch-drunk from fatigue, they come up with increasingly goofy — and clever — comments.

They talk, tongue in cheek, about wanting to write a show that has flashbacks and flashforwards for Sawyer’s shirt (you know, the shirt that Sawyer is always taking off) — filling in the shirt’s backstory, revealing how it was made in the factory, then going into its time on the Island, and showing what the shirt realizes it has to do to redeem itself.

Another example — when commenting on the scene after the helicopter crashes into the ocean, when the characters are thrashing around in the water, the producer pair say they originally planned to have a shark rescue Desmond, but when they started filming they found they couldn’t afford to get the shark. They say they had also hoped to have the characters do synchronized swimming accompanied by a whale song.

By the end of the commentary, they’re promising to come do the laundry — and provide commentary on their doing of the laundry! — of any viewer who made it all the way through.

This is all very entertaining. Most of the commentary, though, is actually quite informative. In addition to providing background on how some of the scenes were filmed, the two discuss the characters and themes that will be important in the upcoming Season 5. I’ll talk about some of that in future posts.

In the “Course of the Future” bonus feature, Damon Lindelof, one of the producer/writers, describes the flash forwards. He says that they think of the flash fowards

“… as being flashbacks on crack. Jack used to be a doctor with sort of daddy issues before, now he’s a doctor again, but the daddy issues are on crack.”

In the flashbacks shown in the feature in chronological order, we see Jack speaking at his father’s funeral, meeting Claire’s mother, going to see Hurley, testifying at Kate’s trial, not wanting to see Aaron, then changing his mind and moving in with Kate and Aaron, going to see Hurley again … and then the story turns spooky (I mean spooky even by LOST standards):

Jack is in the hospital, climbing on a counter to shut off a beeping smoke alarm, when he hears a voice call his name. It’s his father, sitting on a couch at the end of the corridor! The vision, if that’s what it is, disappears when another doctor comes into the room. But Jack is shaken, and he asks the doctor to write him a prescription for something to help him sleep – and that’s the beginning of Jack’s slide down into decrepitude.

He drinks, he swallows pills, he fights with Kate, who is doing some unspecified favor for Sawyer. He moves out. Next time we see him, he’s got the big bushy beard — and this is where we came in, at the end of Season 3 — and he’s on an airplane, hoping it will crash. He learns Jeremy Bentham has died. He’s about to jump off a bridge when he hears the cries of car crash victims calling for help. He goes to “Bentham’s” funeral. And then there’s another spooky daddy-issues-on-crack scene:

Jack is in the hospital, being grilled by a fellow doctor, who asks him how much he had to drink. Jack replies,

“I tell you what. You do this. You get my father down here. Get him down here right now, and if I’m drunker than he is, you can fire me.”

What does this mean? When I first saw this scene, I was mystified. And this is the one scene where seeing it as part of a linear sequence didn’t help make things any clearer. I still have all the same questions. Is Jack being sarcastic? Or does he really think his father is upstairs? If so, IS his father upstairs? Is Christian now un-dead? Or is Jack deluded?

The flash forwards continue with Jack begging Kate to see him. They meet outside the airport fence. Then Jack returns to the funeral parlor, opens the coffin, and gets a surprise visit from Ben who tells him they all have to go back together. During this scene, the camera coyly stays away from the inside of the coffin, but it finally lets us have a peek – and that’s when we see Locke.

And that’s it. The last scene in the flash-forward bonus feature turns out to be the same as the last scene in the finale of Season 4. Now we know that’s the furthest point in the future we have seen so far.

Carlton Cuse and Damon Lindelof, producer/writers on the show, made a short video spoof of “Course of the Future,” the Season 4 DVD bonus feature that I wrote about in the post below. In the spoof, which is posted online for one week only, the writers appear in the future to warn their present selves that they have ended the show badly.

It’s at Dharma Special Access. The password is yksnizdar. Again, it’s there for one week only (though I’m sure someone has posted it to YouTube by now. It’s just more fun to do the whole secret password thing.)

By the way, you’ve probably noticed that the password is “radzinsky” spelled backwards. Do you know who that is? (I had to google it to find out. It’s a very obscure reference!)

This weekend, I rented the bonus features portion of the Season 4 DVD set. There’s a lot of great material — two discs worth (discs 5 and 6, which rent, at least in the place I got them, as one unit).

My favorite was a feature called “Course of the Future: The Definitive Flashforwards.” It takes the flash forwards which we had seen in bits and pieces, and puts them all together in chronological order. The result is a linear narrative of what happens to the Oceanic 6 and Ben after they leave the Island. Watching this cleared up many things that had confused me before. It was also a great lead-in to Season 5. It refreshed my memory, and it made me anticipate the new season even more. Highly recommended!

The same feature has the actors talking about what they were thinking when they learned about the flash forwards. It’s fun to see that the actors enjoy trying to figure out the mysteries as much as we do. They do have a bit more at stake though – when they see there are scenes written with their characters appearing in flash forwards, they know that their characters have survived, and that they will still have jobs on the show for at least a while longer.

Also in the same feature, Carlton Cuse, executive producer and writer, has some interesting commentary:

“We had the present on the island, and we had the flashbacks. Now we have flash forwards, and that kind of completed the mosaic, because now we can tell stories in any of these three realms. We sort of view the mission from here to the end of the series as fitting the tiles into the mosaic, and they’ll go in all over the place.”

P.S. Did you know that in his normal speaking voice, Naveen Andrews (Sayid) has a British accent?

Here you go. One minute of LOST promo goodness …

Wow, this one moves fast!

It’s got the “Destiny Calls” line again!

And Locke — alive, and on what appears to be the Island. Has he come unstuck in time? Is his corpse still in the funeral parlor?

And an ancient computer with a green-on-black screen, like the one in the original hatch.

And people running through the woods and falling out of trees — that takes me back.

Who is that popping out of the water at 0:24? Is that Locke?

You know, there was a time when I said that I wasn’t the kind of obsessive fan who would analyze every frame. Now I have to take that back! It looks like I am exactly that kind of obsessive fan! Uh oh.

The story of Hurley’s father, who is played by Cheech Marin of Cheech and Chong, fits very well into the theory of the bad fathers. Hurley’s father deserted his family for 17 years, returning only when Hurley won the lottery.

My theory is that what the bad fathers take away from their children, the Island gives back. And it holds true here.

Remember the scene from Season 3 where Hurley finds an old VW bus on the Island, and gets behind the wheel? Here’s the clip (it’s from the Tricia Tanaka is Dead episode):

It’s significant that when Hurley and Charlie safely reach the bottom of the hill, the radio in the VW bus suddenly starts playing Shambala, the same song that the radio was playing when Hurley’s father left him. (A detail, by the way, that I picked up while browsing through the excellent resource Lostpedia.)

Hurley, laughing ecstatically at the end of the scene, seems to have overcome not only the pain of his father’s desertion, but also, at least for the moment, the curse of the numbers.

The fathers take away, and the Island restores — and then the Island gives even more.

Next: Charles Widmore — the baddest father of them all?

Yay, here’s another sneak peek from ABC! This one is even shorter than the first one — only 1 minute, 42 seconds. But, again, there’s a lot packed into it.

Jack and Ben are in a hotel room:

My random thoughts, most of which are questions:

It’s odd to see Jack and Ben, the former enemies, so friendly and casual around each other.

Where are they? Why are they in a hotel?

Why does Jack think they won’t get Kate to join them? Does he know that she’s on the run?

Is Locke really dead? I mean really, really, really dead?

Jack apparently doesn’t know that the boat exploded.

So what DID happen to everyone after the Island moved? Ben knows, doesn’t he?

I’ve been thinking about this, and I remembered some more bad fathers:

Ben’s father accused Ben of killing his mother merely by being born. While Ben presumably was not “brought” to the Island for the same reason that the Flight 815 passengers were, it’s still striking that his father was so awful in a way that seems to fit the show’s larger pattern. Of course, Ben is no prize himself, and his revenge against his father was literally overkill.

Walt’s father Michael was not an evil father, but he was an uninvolved one (although that was not entirely his own fault). Much of Michael’s story on the Island has been about his trying to make amends to his son to relieve his own burden of guilt.

At the end of Season 4, Michael does seem to reach an Island-enabled resolution — aided by the appearance of another of the quasi-bad fathers, Christian Shephard! — when he sacrifices his life for Jin.

I wonder if Walt’s side of the story might have been developed more, especially considering the early hints about how Walt was “special,” if the actor playing Walt hadn’t grown so tall after the first season. Maybe now that we’re seeing scenes set in the future, time will have caught up with Walt’s size, and we’ll be able to see more Walt-centered scenes or episodes.

Although Michael’s death at the end of Season 4 would seem to put a damper on further development of his side of the story, as we all know, on LOST the dead don’t necessarily stay dead for long.

I’ll have more bad fathers soon.

One theme that keeps recurring in LOST is that of the crash survivors’ terrible fathers. There are so many of them!

I see two possibilities. Either this unusual abundance of bad fathers is just a coincidence, something that seeped out of the subconscious of the writers, who perhaps themselves struggled with father issues, without any larger significance — or else it is a key element of the overall plot.

I believe it is a key element of the plot. I think that the shortcomings of the fathers must have something to do with the reason that these particular sons and daughters were all brought to the Island, whatever that reason may turn out to be.

Locke’s father Anthony Cooper, aka the “real” Sawyer:

Probably the most evil of all the bad fathers is Locke’s father, the “real” Tom Sawyer, who conned his son out of a kidney and then tried to kill him by pushing him out of a high-rise window. Here’s a clip of that scene (it’s from The Man From Tallahassee, Season 3, episode 13), in case you want to take a little trip down LOST memory lane:

Locke, of course, miraculously survived the fall, but became paralyzed.

So Locke’s father took away Locke’s ability to walk — and then the Island gave Locke that ability back. Could that be a clue as to what the Island is all about? Does it restore what the bad fathers have taken away?

If so, why? Why would the Island give back what the fathers have taken away? And how?

Let’s look at some of the other bad fathers for clues. There’s Sun’s gangster father, Mr. Paik. Sun seems to have found the courage, on the Island, to stand up to her father in her post-Island life.

There’s Sawyer’s father, who killed his mother and himself. When Sawyer killed Locke’s father on the Island, he seemed to reach some peace with his memory of his own father.

So in this two cases, the pattern does seem to hold — the Island gave back something that the fathers had taken away.

The stories of Jack and Claire’s erratic alcoholic father, Christian Shephard, and of Kate’s father, who abused her mother, are still unfinished, but I expect will be signficant — especially the story of Shephard.

Another interesting aspect of the existence of the bad fathers is the way they provide connections between many of the main characters who would otherwise be unconnected. This is something I will write about in a future post.

What are the cast members of LOST up to these days? That is, aside from being in Hawaii to shoot Season 5?

Josh Holloway (Sawyer) is expecting his first child.

Sonya Walger (Penny) got a role as the lead actress in the upcoming TV science-fiction drama Flash Forward, a show some are calling a potential successor to LOST.

Lance Reddick (Abaddon) made an indie film called Tennessee with Mariah Carey (whose acting he praised). The film was shown at the Tribeca Film Festival this past April, and played in L.A. this month for just one week in order to qualify for Oscar consideration. The general release date has been moved around — it’s now scheduled to open in March 2009.

Yunjin Kim (Sun) and Daniel Dae Kim (Jin) were together named # 17 in Entertainment Weekly’s 25 Entertainers of the Year.

Jorge Garcia (Hurley) has posted on his blog a picture of himself in a bubble bath.

For readers new to this blog, I’m reposting a video that you may not have seen (it’s buried in the bottom of an old post, hidden behind a non-descriptive title). It’s so good that I wanted everyone to see it.

When I started this blog, I went to YouTube and looked around for LOST-related videos I might post, not knowing what I would find. I was delighted when I discovered this one, and it was the first thing I linked to on this blog. You’ll see why, when you watch it …

There’s a sequel, of sorts, for Season 2, done to a Weird Al Yankovich polka medley. If you watch it, make sure to watch it all the way to the end.

Now … carry on, carry on!

ABC is teasing us now! They posted a two-minute sneak peek of Season 5. It’s a single scene where Kate is in her post-island suburban home with Aaron, and there’s a knock on the door…. I’ll wait while you watch it …

Random thoughts:

It’s interesting to see Kate on the run again. And she’s even packed a gun! I wonder if her previous experience as a fugitive will be helpful.

Pause the video at 1:39 to see the photo of Jack pushing Aaron on a swing.

Who is the mysterious client? Is the sheriff in on this too, or were the lawyers (if that’s what they really are) bluffing?

Well, that was an exciting two minutes! I want to see the whole episode NOW! (I’m just putty in ABC’s hands.)

(I used the YouTube version of the video because it’s easier to post on this blog. In case it gets pulled, you should be able to find the video on the front page of abc.go.com.)

Season 5 promos previously posted here:

15-second mini-promo

Official trailer # 1

P.S. A bit of trivia I found while trying to see if I could find out the name of the child playing Aaron: In Season 2, they used 27 different babies to play the role, and in Season 3 they used 30!

Entertainment Weekly claims to have info that a casting call has gone out for three Arabic-speaking roles — a father and his two sons, ages 8 and 12.

That sounds like they are being cast to play Sayid as a child, along with his brother and his father, and that they will all appear in a flashback — assuming that the show will still be using flashbacks in this upcoming season. (EW says this Sayid-centered episode will be the 10th episode of the season).

I’d be very interested to learn about Sayid’s childhood. I’m also curious about whether Sayid’s father will fit into the mold of bad fathers that are so common on the show (a theme I will be writing more about soon).

So far, all we know about Sayid’s father is that his name is Hassan, that he was a soldier in the Iraq Republican Guard, and that Tariq, Sayid’s military superior, told Sayid that his father would have been ashamed had he known Sayid was helping the Americans.