Here are some of my thoughts after rewatching episodes 20 and 21 of the first season of LOST, as part of my contribution to The LOST Rewatch (see my previous rewatch posts). When I get a chance, I’ll post my rewatch commentaries in the podcast feed as well.

Season 1 Episode 20 – “Do No Harm”

Jack promises Boone, “You are not going to die. I’m going to fix this, okay? I am going to save you.”

We find out through flashbacks that Jack was married to Sarah, who became his fianceé after he “fixed her” when a car crash left her with a broken back that other doctors said was irreparable.

Claire begins to go into labor while Jack is trying to save Boone. Jack can’t deliver the baby because by the time he finds out about Claire, he’s in the middle of giving a blood transfusion from himself to Boone using a rubber tube and sea urchin spines as needles.

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Here are some of my thoughts after rewatching episodes 18 and 19 of the first season of LOST, as part of my contribution to The LOST Rewatch (see my previous rewatch posts). When I get a chance, I’ll post my rewatch commentaries in the podcast feed as well.

Season 1 Episode 18 – “Numbers”

Hurley notices the number sequence “4 8 15 16 23 42″ written over and over again on Danielle Rousseau’s papers. He has a flashback to winning the lottery with those numbers. Throughout the episode, there are lots of individual occurrences of these numbers, so I won’t attempt to chronicle all of them here. There are lots of things that happen in Hurley’s flashbacks that indicate to him that the Numbers are cursed. I like the juxtaposition of the very serious and grim episode “…In Translation” right before this very humorous Hurley-centric episode.

Hurley finds out from his accountant that he is “the majority shareholder for a box company in Tustin.” Guess who worked at a box company in Tustin? John Locke. Hurley’s former boss from Mr. Cluck’s Chicken Shack, Randy, would later work at the box company as John’s insolent boss.

We find out that Hurley got the Numbers from Leonard Simms, a patient at Santa Rosa Mental Health Institute, where Hurley used to live. After Hurley begins to believe that the Numbers are cursed, he goes to tell Lenny that he used the Numbers to win the lottery, and Lenny freaks out. He tells Hurley, “You’ve opened the box. … It doesn’t stop. … You’ve got to get away from it or it won’t stop,” and says that he got the numbers from Sam Toomey in Kalgoorlie, Australia. Hurley visits Sam Toomey’s house (which is the reason why Hurley was in Australia prior to Flight 815). Sam’s wife Martha explains that Sam and Leonard “were stationed at a listening post monitoring long wave transmissions out of the Pacific” and one night they heard “a voice repeating those numbers over and over again.” Perhaps this was Danielle’s voice being transmitted from the radio tower on the Island. Sam used the numbers to win $50,000 at the local fair, and on the way home Sam and Martha got into a car accident that caused Martha to lose part of her leg. After that, “Anything terrible that happened to anyone around us, he believed it was all because he used those numbers.” Martha tells Hurley that Sam committed suicide to get away from the Numbers. Interestingly, his chosen method of suicide (“He put a shotgun in his mouth and pulled the trigger”) is identical to that of Kelvin’s hatch mate Stuart Radzinsky, who also had a connection with the Numbers, having to type them every 108 minutes into The Swan’s computer; perhaps Radzinsky also felt cursed by the Numbers, or perhaps he simply went crazy from being cooped up in the hatch for so long. Martha Toomey tells Hurley that the numbers aren’t cursed, and that “You make your own luck, Mr. Reyes.”

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Here are some of my thoughts after rewatching episode 17 of the first season of LOST, as part of my contribution to The LOST Rewatch (see my previous rewatch posts). When I get a chance, I’ll post my rewatch commentaries in the podcast feed as well.

Season 1 Episode 17 – “…In Translation”

The episode begins on Jin’s eye, and it focuses on his perspective as he deals with the frustration of not being able to communicate with any survivors other than his wife (hence the episode title, LOST “…In Translation”).

We find out in a flashback how Jin became such an unpleasant person: the deal he made to work for Sun’s father, Mr. Paik, turned out to be not at all what Jin expected. Mr. Paik “promotes” Jin to be his new special assistant to personally deliver messages of Mr. Paik’s displeasure. When Jin simply delivers a verbal message to the man at his home, apparently the recipient doesn’t take the hint, and Mr. Paik later tells Jin that another associate will show Jin how to deliver a message. As Jin drives back to the house, the associate puts on gloves and pulls out a gun with a silencer on it. Upon arriving, Jin rushes past the associate into the house, violently beating the man with whom Mr. Paik is displeased—right in front of the man’s wife and children. Jin says quietly to the man, “I just saved your life.” Thus Jin begins “saving people’s lives” from assassination by Sun’s father’s thugs.

Incidentally, the first time Jin went to the man’s home, Hurley was on the television in the background, so this evidently took place sometime after Hurley won the lottery.

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Here are some of my thoughts after rewatching episodes 15 and 16 of the first season of LOST, as part of my contribution to The LOST Rewatch (see my previous rewatch posts). When I get a chance, I’ll post my rewatch commentaries in the podcast feed as well.

Season 1 Episode 15 – “Homecoming”

After Claire comes back, she can’t remember anything that has happened since she was on the plane. The entire past month is gone from her memory. Jin asks Sun if Claire is all right, and then he asks about the baby. Sun says in Korean “I’m sure the baby is fine.” Sun and Jin exchange awkward looks, which in retrospect was a small hint about their inability to conceive a child of their own prior to the Island.

Ethan seems to have been a very mentally disturbed person. He tells Charlie in this episode that he’ll kill someone every day until he gets Claire back and that he’ll kill Charlie last. On the first night, Ethan not only murders Steve (presumably by breaking his neck) but he also breaks “his arms [and] all the bones in his fingers” according to Kate. Later when Ethan sees Claire, he has an angry, sinister look on his face before he begins chasing her through the jungle. This is a very different perspective from what we later see of him in flashbacks. He seemed to have been very kind to Juliet, and surprisingly he even seemed to care for Claire after having captured her (aside from keeping her drugged and injecting her abdomen, of course).

How did Ethan sneak past the Flight 815 survivors’ guards and traps to kill Scott? Locke suspects that Ethan came by water, and although this was never verified we do know that The Others had a submarine, at least two boats, and canoes at that time. It’s also possible that Ethan sneaked past Boone, who fell asleep during his shift.

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Last night we re-watched The Greater Good the 21st episode of season one. We coming to the final episodes of season one, and this is what I call a chess-piece episode, moving all the people into the right places for the finale. The consensus seems to be that it was good but not as good as Do No Harm.  So read what we wrote, and tell us what you think, or what we missed.  And don’t forget to vote for what to do on Friday.

Quick synopsis: The Sayid backstory revealed that Sayid will do almost anything for a chance to be with Nadia.   The island story had a few interesting things happen.  Jack confronted a still blood coated Locke for lying about Boone’s injuries. Jack almost exhausted himself searching for Locke, and Kate had to drug him to keep him settled. (hey, didn’t Jack get addicted to pain killers? THANKS for that KATE!).  Locke takes Sayid to the plane where they discuss more stuff.  The end result is Locke gets away with lying again.

#LOST #WFTB Tweet-Cap for LOST #s1e21 “The Greater Good” LiveTweet (read top to bottom) http://u.nu/8nsf (continue reading…)

Here are some of my thoughts after rewatching episodes 13 and 14 of the first season of LOST, as part of my contribution to The LOST Rewatch (see my previous rewatch posts). When I get a chance, I’ll post my rewatch commentaries in the podcast feed as well.

Stay tuned for my commentaries on episodes 15 and 16, “Homecoming” and “Outlaws”, coming soon!

Season 1 Episode 13 – “Hearts and Minds”

This episode starts out on Boone’s eye as he jealously watches Sayid flirt with Shannon.

We find out that Shannon has been pulling a long con on Boone: she consistently feigns involvement in an abusive relationship to get Boone to pay substantial amounts of money to her boyfriends to get them to leave her, and then the faux boyfriends split the money with her. Shannon sees it as her way of getting what Boone’s mother owes her after treating her unfairly after Shannon’s father died.

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Here are some of my thoughts after rewatching episodes 11 and 12 of the first season of LOST, as part of my contribution to The LOST Rewatch (see my previous rewatch posts). When I get a chance, I’ll post my rewatch commentaries in the podcast feed as well.

Season 1 Episode 11 – “All the Best Cowboys Have Daddy Issues”

At the end of the previous episode, Ethan was staring creepily at Claire and Charlie, and meanwhile Hurley began telling Jack that Ethan wasn’t on the flight manifest. This episode begins with Jack and Locke trying to find them. Locke finds footprints and evidence of two people having been dragged off. Jack says, “This doesn’t make any sense. How could one man drag two people, one pregnant?” For a while, many fans assumed that The Others had superhuman strength because of hints like this about Ethan. Oddly, this never seems to have been fully explained on the show, and we now know that at least some of The Others—including Ethan—are normal humans who have been recruited by The Others. We know that Ethan and Ben were originally DHARMA Initiative members’ children, Juliet grew up off the Island and was recruited for her medical expertise, Cindy, Zach and Emma were tail section survivors who were assimilated, John Locke was chosen as the next leader of The Others before Ben’s departure from the Island, etc. Richard Alpert and Jacob comprise a different class of Others who never seem to age, but we haven’t seen any indication of them having unnatural strength.

So, since Ethan was apparently born to normal human parents under normal circumstances, did he have some help from other Others that we never found out about? Presumably if Ethan had assistants, they could have walked in each others’ footsteps when dragging away Charlie and Claire, or perhaps they dragged the bodies in such a way as to cover their tracks. However, based on the conversation that Tom had with Ethan (as seen in a flashback in the Season 2 episode “Maternity Leave”), it sounded like Ethan acted on his own, even before making the list that Ben ordered him to make. The mystery of Ethan Rom’s apparent superhuman strength remains unsolved.

Walt does exceedingly well against Hurley at Backgammon, rolling exactly what he wants twice in a row (4 and 3, then double sixes). Hurley contends “No one is that lucky,” to which Walt responds that his step-dad Brian Porter “said I was the luckiest person he ever knew.” Yet again we have subtle hints that Walt may be able to subconsciously make things happen with his mind.

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Here are some of my thoughts after rewatching episodes 9 and 10 of the first season of LOST, as part of my contribution to The LOST Rewatch (see my previous rewatch posts). When I get a chance, I’ll post my rewatch commentaries in the podcast feed as well.

For those who are strictly following the Rewatch schedule, you’ll notice that I didn’t get a chance to watch all four episodes this week. I found so much to research and write about these two episodes that I spent several hours on them, so I’ve had to put off episodes 11 and 12 for now. You can subscribe to this blog (see the links in the sidebar) and/or follow me on Twitter to be notified about my LOST articles as soon as I publish them.

Season 1 Episode 9 – “Solitary”

The episode begins with Sayid sitting on the beach looking at a picture of Nadia with a note written on the back. He later tells Danielle that the writing says “You’ll find me in the next life if not in this one” and we find out in a flashback that Nadia wrote this.

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Here are some of my thoughts after rewatching episodes five through eight of the first season of LOST, as part of my contribution to The LOST Rewatch (see my previous rewatch posts). When I get a chance, I’ll post my rewatch commentaries in the podcast feed as well.

Season 1 Episode 5 – “White Rabbit”

The episode again starts with a closeup of Jack’s eye, but this time it’s a flashback of Jack as a boy. This is the first time we’ve seen a flashback that doesn’t deal directly with how a character ended up on the Island.

Someone is drowning, and Charlie yells for Jack and claims “I don’t swim.” That’s a bit strange considering that Charlie didn’t seem to have any problem with swimming when he volunteered to go to The Looking Glass, the underwater DHARMA station, in the Season 3 episode “Greatest Hits.”

Jack saves Boone from drowning, but fails to save Joanna, whom Boone had been trying to rescue.

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Tonight’s Live Tweet was Special. Oh man, I’ve been waiting all day to type that sentence, I’ll just let it sit for a second.

No really, it was special, for that was the episode title ‘Special’, but it was also special for all the people that watched and tweeted and discussed. Thanks to all of you including: @batchoutlost @hawaii @joseph_lavalley @kilinahe @lostdogs10 @LOST_WFTB @nyakototo @Psifen @Tomwilson24 @ZachsMind

If you haven’t joined in, and you’re a LOST fan, mark a calendar for a Monday, Wednesday and Friday night. Check the schedule and grab an episode. It’s really a lot of fun to watch, and read and discuss the best show ever for an hour.

Special – the episode – was about Michael and Walt’s relationship. We’ve had hints dropped since the beginning that Mike and Walt are new to the whole father-son thing. Michael is a bit protective of Walt in some places, and in other places he’s been dismissive. John Locke has seem to taken a liking to Walt, but also has been helpful in getting Michael established as a father figure. For instance, while John found Walt’s dog Vincent using a whittled dog whistle, he let Michael take the credit. So it’s a strange triangle already at the beginning when Michael finds Locke teaching Walt how to throw one of those ‘now, Aaat’s a knife’ knives that Locke is always toting. Michael don’t like it and tell’s Locke to stay away.

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Great night for tweeting, lots of new faces in the crowd.  We missed some of you regulars, but are sure you’ll be around another time.  Lots of great comments, I even went over my tweet limit for the hour (didn’t even know there was a limit).  Great to see everyone tweeting and carrying on a conversation.  Now is the time to read through and summarize some thoughts and theories in the comments.

Cast of Twits:
@TheLostBlog @sweetbippy @ZachsMind @justinkeyes @batchoutlost @ASHATL @ccollinsmith @joseph_lavalley @restartt @MollyFaraday @MathiiasCAT @islandscientist @nyakototo @3FLryan @lostdogs10 @Tomwilson24 @aheartofstars @_ingo @AliGraysAnatomy @Roobadoo87

Do you like this?  How can we do it better?

bah. enuf. lets see what you said: (20 twits tweeted 308 tweets – You all everybody) (continue reading…)

A heroic effort by fellow WFTBer @batchout. a list of 159 short codes for repeated LOST Characters (both active and deceased), Locations.  Perfect tool for crafting #LOST140 posts or for use during live tweeting. (he also has a HTML version with links to Lostpedia pages for each ‘element’.)

UPDATE a handy list suitable for printing and keeping handy)

click to embiggen.

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Walkabout is the fourth hour of LOST’s opening season. For myself and many this episode was the hook that caught us up in the unfolding mystery of the island (or trapped us in Jacob’s net).  The plot focuses on John Locke both on an island quest for wild boar (need to keep Hurley fed) and his pre-island life and what led up to him being on Oceanic flight 815.

We started the Live Tweet a little late, but it was well attended and had some great conversations.

In attendance: @LOST_WFTB @batchout @ASHATL @justinkeyes @Model_Melissa @Molly_Faraday @DieCer @ccollinsmith

I’m going to break this up by scenes, as I started watching the show at the beginning.  Some people watched it first then joined the live tweet, so I’ll try and combine the threads into a true twee-cap along with the context of the show.

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Monday’s Tweet up was lots of fun.  With the number of people interested in WFTB growing, lets share how we’re doing things in Twitter to have a great conversation.  Your input here is greatly appreciated, if you tweet me a good suggestion, I’ll add it to this post.  (save me some work though, and hit the comments, or tell me if they’re broken )

So here’s my thoughts.  As people follow @LOST_WFTB, I re-follow if they look like they’re interested in our quest.  That’s getting harder to do with some bots, marketers, etc that are starting to follow the account. So if you’re interested in joining us, pester me if I haven’t followed you back.  That way if people want to participate in the Live Tweet they can follow who I’m following and have a good representation of the conversation.

Some other tools that I found useful last time:

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There’s a lot of buzz today about a supposed new LOST alternate reality game (ARG) revolving around a couple of new Twitter accounts and an old YouTube account that just posted a video after being stagnant for three years. A lot of people are excited about it, but so far there’s little evidence that this is an official LOST ARG.

Let’s take a look at the chronology of events. Late Thursday night (depending on your time zone), one day after the Season 5 finale aired in the U.S. and Canada, a new Twitter account was created (@simeonhobbes), which has posted a lot of cryptic messages, many of which refer to someone named Jacob in a reverent manner as if speaking of a deity.

On Friday, May 15, a new video was posted on the YouTube page of a user named “thelostexperience“. The video is titled “Who is Simeon Hobbes?” and is technically just a photograph with an audio track. The photograph is of a starry sky, and the audio has been identified as Morse code spelling out “I AM THE BENNU BIRD, THE HEART-SOUL OF RA, THE GUIDE OF THE GODS TO THE TUAT”. According to Lostpedia, this video was later referenced by the @simeonhobbes account (the tweet said simply “KLbOw2XTWg8″, which is the YouTube video’s ID), but the tweet has since been deleted. Earlier today, Twitter user @DEBauslaugh deciphered a riddle posted by @simeonhobbes and determined that @epithetalpha is also part of the game, which @simeonhobbes confirmed.

But is this an official LOST ARG, or just a fan-made game? As of right now, there doesn’t seem to be any solid evidence that it’s official, and the evidence that exists seems to point to it being unofficial (that is, a non-canon, fan-created ARG). For one thing, the YouTube account and Twitter accounts only make reference to each other, and none of them seem to be referenced on any official ABC sites as far as I’m aware. There’s no mention of anything related to the game at http://abc.go.com/primetime/lost/ which is ABC’s official LOST homepage. I asked fellow LOST blogger and podcaster DocArzt about it since he often has inside information about LOST (he also owns the domain thelostexperience.com, incidentally), and he agreed with my suspicions that it’s not official. And as if that wasn’t enough, Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse gave a small hint on the most recent episode of The Official LOST Podcast (May 11th) that there may be a new ARG beginning at Comic-Con San Diego 2009 (July 23-26). This doesn’t necessarily mean that an official ARG won’t start before that, but they didn’t give any hints about anything coming sooner. Here’s what they said:
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