Recap, Weirdness Alerts and Analysis by Amy: #LOST 6.07 “Dr. Linus”

Previously on LOST:   [6.06 - "Sundown" Recap Here] Oh my — things were not so good when we last left our losties.  LA_X:  Sayid visited Nadia.  Turns out she’s his sister-in-law (whoops!).  He flip-flopped around before finally crossing over to the dark side and killing Martin Keamy (for extorting/beating up his brother, Omar). He finds/rescues “No English” Jin.  TEMPLE:  Sayid flip-flopped around before finally crossing over to the dark side killing Dogen and Uber-Hippie (dumping them in the spring).  Clairuso crossed the line with Mock Locke’s message: “Join me or die.”  Kate returned to the temple and confessed to Clairuso.  Smokey attacked at sundown. Illana and Co. appeared outta nowhere, retrieved Miles and escaped just in the nick of time.  When the dust settled, Sayid, Clairuso and Kate stepped over the dead (who chose not to “join”) and followed Mock Locke away from the temple.

EXTREME WEIRDNESS TO WATCH FOR:  Okay, remember those patterns of white lights I’ve mentioned before?  I said they almost look like constellations? I didn’t mention that? Well, there have been instances of unusual and repeating patterns of STATIC dots or white, star-like dots, or whatever’s handy: manhole covers at an LA intersection, Ana Lucia’s shooting practice pattern – stuff like that.  So far in Season 6, these patterns are 1) becoming more and more frequent and obvious and 2) clearly mean something important.  Why? BECAUSE, with VERY few exceptions, THEY ARE ALL CREATED DIGITALLY and INSERTED POST-PRODUCTION.

I’m mentioning this now because these patterns/”constellations” occur a LOT during this episode (LA_X and On-Island), and I’ll be noting when and where I see them.  Sometimes they are hidden (like at night in the jungle) and sometimes they are NOT hidden.  And NO. I do not think these patterns actually represent constellations – that’s just what they LOOK like.  My best guess is that they are some kind of code because, although I’ve seen more than one pattern, the same pattern seems to repeat around certain characters.  The best name I could come up with them was Dot Code (because I KNOW if I stay “constellation,” everyone will start freaking out.  FYI:  The ONLY stars we EVER see on the island are in the sky at the Oceanic 815 CRASH SITE—and guess what? Even those stars are oddly and carefully manipulated).

New term to remember:  DOT CODE

Okay. Let’s go.

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Begin Episode 6.07

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JUNGLE

[NOTE: The last time we saw Ben he was fleeing the pool room.]

A terrified Ben barrels through the dark.  He looks back and runs faster. He trips and lands spread-eagle. He raises up and gasps, looking even MORE terrified for a moment.

Weirdness alert: camera movement here could be interpreted as something unseen, low to the ground closing in on him OR as if HE is moving closer to where the POV of the camera (“us”) originates.  What I think has happened here is that Ben has hit a “barrier,” and, after falling down, crosses through it, like moving from one bubble to another.  It works like this: one moment he’s on THAT side of the barrier – whoosh move by camera (with appropriate gasp and terrified expression on Ben’s face during the transition)  — then he’s on THIS side of the barrier – where Illana and co. are.  Ask yourself: Illana and co. are walking PARALLEL to Ben with LOTS of firelight.  Why couldn’t he see them until after this moment? Why couldn’t they hear him before this moment?

If you put THIS 10 sec sequence together with other pieces of the puzzle, like:

• “Smokey’s POV island tour” sequence in “The Substitute” (right before Mock Locke cuts Richard down from the tree),
• How Jack and Hurley end up at the caves and find the lighthouse in “the Lighthouse”

with

• Jin’s fainting spell,
• The “red shirts,”
• The “constants” (like Shannon’s inhaler),
• The underground temple wall weirdness (when they carry Sayid in on a stretcher),
• The temple’s layout weirdness and
• Clairuso’s crossing the line of ash action for Mock Locke –

Put all of those things together and maybe toss in, say, the island weirdness we’ve seen since Jacob died, and the more extensive island weirdness now that Dogen is dead, you’ll soon see that Season 6 has already spelled out EXACTLY:

• What the island is,
• How it works “geographically,”
• Jacob’s and Dogen’s JOBS on the island,
• What Mock Locke is up to,
• What Jacob and Dogen are up to,
• Why NO ONE’S gonna end up replacing Jacob, and
• Why Mock Locke’s plan won’t work in the end.

[Cool, right?]

This would be why I’m so irked when fans bitch and moan about Season 6.  Team LOST just told us what the ISLAND IS!  Why are they complaining about it?!! ACK!

WHOA!  We got way off track there!  Let’s try that again.  [RESET!  HAHAHAHAHAHAHA!]

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Welcome To The Jungle

Before we begin, I feel obligated to make a few things absolutely clear.

I do everything I can to be positive and accommodating to all kinds of LOST fans online.  I think haters are completely worthless morons, and I refuse to be one in any way.  That being said, I’m pretty darn frustrated that fans are complaining that they aren’t “getting answers” in Season 6.  I’m even MORE frustrated that complainers quickly jump to the conclusion that the SHOW and its CREATORS are to blame.

[I won’t go into too much detail because I am actively trying not to single ANYONE out, so if you recognize yourself in the following statements, take them for what they are:  random observations.]

For example, I’ve heard fans complain (primarily about Season 6) that:

1. The flash-sideways (LA_X) storylines are “meaningless” and disconnected to what’s happening on the island.
2. The episodes offer few or no answers for the basic mysteries of the show.
3. The answers that are provided are anticlimactic, silly, contrived, confusing or unrelated to anything that’s happened in the show before Season 6 begins.
4. Characters’ storylines are not being resolved in any way.  Off-island events for characters don’t make any sense given the previous timeline/histories.

Remember, I am not a hater.  I have no intention of berating or embarrassing or insulting any LOST fan in any way.  My primary intention here is to offer possible reasons that fans are frustrated and observations from Season 6 episodes that refute every statement I list above.  If my comments sound snarky, please remember: 1) that snarky quality is something I’m afflicted with and 2) it actually makes things funnier as we go along.  Above all, please remember that just because I’m trying to point out things that you might not have seen in the show so far, it doesn’t mean I’m trying to prove that you or your theories are stupid.

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Behold!  The stars and peeps of LOST put in the extra effort for fans at the premiere!

If you’re a fan of television, and your on twitter, and you’re not following Maureen Ryan (Mo) @moryan, you need to do three things before continuing to read this article:

1. Go here and follow her.
2. Go here and add her to your favorites.
3. Then go here, and consider donating to her “charity thing”. (eBay swag auction here.) (also as a bonus, you get a free DHARMA Beer Station pin for a $25 donation.) (more information here and here.) (Mo herself plugs this more in her interview, but I also want to put it up here at the top)

Now, since your a LOST fan, you’ve probably already done all three of those steps, and this might be repetitive, but Mo sat down with LOST Executive Producers Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse for a whole hour, and posted not just one, not just two, but three transcripts of the entire discussion (if you have a short attention span the summary of this awesome interview is here).

I’ve enjoyed discovering Mo Ryan through her tweets and articles, and she’s a genuine TV fan first, and a professional journalist second (hey, it’s my article, my opinion, and she AWESOME at both!).  A self described “hardcore” fan of the Battlestar Galactica series, she is a popular columnist that still has time to tweet back to her twitter followers (like me).  I was extremely excited that she agreed to the brutal LOSTblog 16 questions, but I dared her to go DEEP and answer 7 more.  And. She. Did.  So without further ado, here’s Mo’s interview.

LOSTblog: How long have you been watching Lost? If you’ve been watching since
the pilot, can you remember your initial reaction to it?

Mo:

Oh, absolutely. It was the first fall that I was writing about television full-time. I watched the two-hour pilot that ABC sent and I was absolutely thunderstruck by how good it was. It was exciting and different and it had so many of the things I love about television — it was chock full of trippy, surreal elements, unusual characters, mysteries and adventure. More than all that, it was just a hell of a good story — or the start to what appeared to be a hell of a good story.

So of course I thought it would get terrible ratings and die right away! Most of the shows I love the most tend to do badly in the ratings, and I can distinctly recall thinking, before the premiere, that I’d have to be part of a “Save Lost” effort by the show’s second week.

It was beyond thrilling to see America and the world embrace the show, especially in that first season. It was just so unlike anything else out there — popular entertainment that was truly challenging and exciting.

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Geeky Tom is a part of the Lost Initiative which is the UK’s offical Lost video podcast so he needed to be asked to take the interview i think.

Q:  How long have you been watching Lost?

Since the beginning. I worked at Channel 4 when they bought the rights to the first series. I got told to watch it by a colleague because they thought I would absolutely love it..they were right. I got asked to do the Channel 4 Lost podcast on the back of the work I did on the Channel 4 Lost website and because I had seen the first season and the majority of the second. It seems that my Geeky status is a bit of a cheat!

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by aohora

7 Days Until LOST Season 6 (Mini)-Premieres in Waikiki, Hawai’i

View From Hale Koa (Nearish to Waikiki)

As millions of LOST fans dodge spoilers, wrap up re-watch and finalize their best guesses on what happens after Juliet smacks the bomb, the Waikiki Improvement Association [WIA] and ABC/Disney studio marketing peeps are gearing it up, locking it down and rolling out the red carpet for what could be the single largest premiere event in television history.

On January 30, Sunset On The Beach, a WIA sponsored program that offers free, family-friendly movies viewed on a 30ft screen set up directly on Waikiki Beach, will host the highly anticipated, rabidly debated and virally marketed premiere of LOST’s sixth and final season.  A full-court media parade of LOST heavies will walk the red carpet, including writer/producers Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse and (yet unconfirmed) number of cast and crew members. (FYI: Matthew Fox had better be there. That’s all I’m saying.)

This will be the first time since S3 that LOST has premiered at Sunset On The Beach.  S4’s was cancelled in the wake of the writer’s strike (and my pal Gina has never forgiven WAG for that because she moved off-island six months later), and S5’s was never scheduled at all.  No one was more irked than me (being 20 minutes away from Waikiki but only for a limited time).  I kept my ear on the ground, crossed my fingers and hoped for the best.

LOST Fans Rock — LOST Fans Rule!

And I got nothing.  After Damon and Carlton did a fan tribute skit-type deal at ComiCon (07/29/2009), the “We Love All You Crazy LOST Fans!” phase of ending the show seemed to run out of steam, and by the time I attended the Hawai’i International Film Festival [HIFF] sponsored “Evening with Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse” (10/17/2009), it seemed unlikely ABC/Disney would revisit the event for S6.  They obviously didn’t need the publicity (I dare you to find a TV watcher who DOESN’T know about LOST ending).

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In all my years, I have never conducted a more unusual interview.  Once, I had to spend a week pretending that I was an Oompa Loompa just to convince Johnny Depp to open to me, but that was another day at the office compared to what I had to do for this.

To begin with, I had to agree to being drugged, transported to an undisclosed location, and give up all contact with my friends and family for three weeks.  Then, they trotted me around the Island, eventually bringing me to a quaint little ranch-style house nestled between groves of banyan trees.  Once inside, they led me down to the basement, where I was splattered with something that might have been chicken blood but smelled more like the strawberry syrup I mix with my milk.  After a few incantations, one of the walls slid away to reveal a torchlit chamber.  Miles and miles later (and probably deeper into the earth, too), we finally made it into what they call the monster’s den, a square room that seemed too big to be real.  The walls were adorned with artwork from time periods ranging from early cave drawings right up to Andy Warhol prints.  Here, I was given unprecedented access to one of television’s most enigmatic creatures, LOST’s “smoke monster.”

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Geeky Tom from Sky1’s fanzine The Lost Initiative has kindly agreed to send some theories for season 6 before it all kicks off in a couple of weeks ( 2 weeks left YAY!!!). Check out the Lost Initative’s shows here: Sky1’s The Lost Initative

I thought I would keep it short and to the point so we can tick them off as the series progresses. I went for some outlandish onesbecause knowing Lost, some of them could actually happen!

1. Sawyer is going to die
2. Jack will kill a major character – See what I did there?
3. The Island will be destroyed
4. We find out that Jacob is really the bad guy
5. Desmond died when he turned the key, he’s some kind of time echo currently – this one needs work
6. There will be a big swirling time vortex on the island somewhere -  Well at least I hope there is lol
7. Jack will probably succeed and make it so none of it ever happened by preventing the plane crash in the past. Which would be a sh*t ending.
8. The Egyptians will be connected to the islands mythology in some way. Jacob used to be an ancient Egyptian ruler or something like that.
9. Aliens from outer-space crashed their ship on earth and the island formed on top of it. Hence all the magnets and stuff
10. Jacob is really ME GEEKY TOM

Yes they get worse the further down you get lol.

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From DamonCarltonandAPolarBear.com :

In celebration of LOST’s final season and as a project of fan appreciation, 16 top designers and artists, who are also fans of the show, were commissioned to create artwork celebrating one of the series’ most memorable, and unforgettable, “water cooler” moments. This ultimate “fan art” was then turned into labor intensive, hand-pulled screen prints, limited to an edition of just 300, with less than 200 available to the public through our websites. Each beautiful poster tells its own different story, allowing the fan to relive memorable and influential moments in an artistic manner, as the show’s storied run comes to a close. Once this limited edition print has sold out, they will never be printed again. Celebrate the fandom, community and family created by one of televisions’ greatest shows by hanging a little part of it’s history, inspiration and influence on your wall.

Now that all 16 of the prints have been released, Lost Blog has set out to interview each of the respective artists. All these talented artists have different influences, different backgrounds, and accordingly…different takes on our favorite show. Over the next few weeks we will post our interviews with these incredible talents. Enjoy.

Our first interview is with Leia Bell. Her piece is entitled “The Love Triangle.”

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LOST BLOG is pleased to present the first of several sneak peeks of the
LOST season 5 DVD (release date December 8, 2009)! 

One of Ben's People: This deleted scene from LOST's fifth season episode
"Namaste"takes place when Christian Shephard, Sun and Frank
Lapidus meet at the abandoned Dharma barracks.

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Check out the press release and cool photos for the upcoming release of LOST Season 5. Courtesy of Buena Vista Home Entertainment. ©ABC Studios.

LOST S5 Press Release

Since I started talking about the lack of Asian Americans in mainstream media last week, I thought I’d continue that thread today, because it struck me this week that LOST has a fair number of regular and non-stereotypical Asian characters who have significant roles on network t.v.  And if we broaden this category out to include British actors, then there are four prominent Asian characters and Asian (American) actors on the show:  Jin & Sun, Sayid (Iraqi but played by Asian-British-Indian actor Naveen Andrews), and today’s subject: Ken Leung who playes Miles “he-can-talk-to-dead-people” Straume.

I find Miles to be a fascinating character, perhaps one of my favorite’s of the show (I also really liked Charlie–bummer that he had to die).  Anyway, it’s not surprising that Miles is a character with a lot of charisma, because he is played by Ken Leung, who is an AMAZING actor.  In fact, the role of Miles was created around Leung–the producers had seen him in the last season of The Sopranos (a show I never watched–not a single episode) and apparently loved him when he played the mental patient inmate of one of the regulars.   So he never had to audition for the role–he was always slated to play Miles, to be Miles.  And they created the name “Miles Straume” because they thought it sounded like “malestrom” and they liked the play on words.  I have to say, I like that this guy, who is clearly Asian, has this very non-Asian surname.  And, of course, once we learn about who his parents are, it adds to the mystery of why he’s chosen the last name “Straume.”

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Season four of LOST did a lot of things right. I think death, however,was not one of these things, with of course the exception of a couple moments presented terrifically. Differing from the three seasons preceding it, season four uses death less as a thematic device than before. The stories the writers tell this season rely more on the suspense and drama of who the people of the freighter are, whether they have good intentions, what the deal is with the “Oceanic Six,” and a sense of “Hey, check out how fresh the show is now that we flash forward instead of back.” With all this other focus, using death to tell stories about character and emotion takes a back seat for the most part. However, two key instances really shine through: Jin and Alex.

Alex pleads as Keamy has no mercy.

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Fire + Water is a pretty wacky episode, listed as one of the top 5 shark jumping moments on the show according to one blog (Notably absent in the list is the episode featuring the shark) and an early hiatus for a popular podcast (see the tweets from @hawaii) Before I digress into a blob of metaness, let me say that this episode appears to be more revealing after a re-watch. First of all, in context, this episode is all setup to the next episode The Long Con. But it also has its fare share of a longer con foreshadowing. The first scene with images of John the Baptist, and baptism, foreshadow the struggle Charlie has with his dreams, and the importance of Aaron (which is still to come in many fan’s mind). But his mother also says “play the music Charlie, save us”, which is a big ol’ foreshadow to what Charlie does in the Looking Glass station. This episode also shows a change in Locke, who for the first time gets physical with another person. Locke may have his anger management issues, but he’s never been the violent sort. Enjoyable re-watch, though still kinda weird, enjoy reading the tweets.

DieCer: Just finished watching S2E12 of LOST. Charlie’s a trip. I wonder if the baby REALLY needed to be baptized. I wonder if that IS what it was

LOST_WFTB: @Sefus you can do it! Fire + Water Monday at 8PM CDT

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