Let's go, kiddo.

Did you see that? Yes, I did. But I didn't see it coming. I was never a friend of any purgatory theories, believing somehow in a Jughead-created alternate timeline like in JJs Star Trek, for me everything in Lost was aways 'real'. I settled for the The End with a nice bottle of Shiraz from Australia, after 16 weeks without any drink, and boy, I needed it. Let me go back to my beginnings of Lost for a moment. I watched the pilot on german TV, and while I mistook the Monster for a jungle-roving T-Rex, I got hooked by the mystery of Rousseaus message. My thought then was… this is going to take forever. I did not follow season one on TV, but when it came out on DVD I ripped it down to test the then first video-capable iPod. As I reached the numbers, I was totally trapped. Then it ended, with the open hatch. Lucky me, season 2 was already available, so I did not suffer the one-year-gap before finding Desmond in The Swan. What really rocked my boat was that I had something like a hatch, too. My old darkroom was located in a bunker, and in it were as well an Apple II like the one used for entering the numbers, as an unread copy of The Third Policeman, as in the Swan library. From the moment I glimpsed the book in Lost, I was a believer. I grew up as a scifi/movie buff with a history with Douglas Adams (being a photojournalist helps getting close to people you want to meet), so I embraced all of Losts promises and riddles with an open heart. After sason two ended, I watched it in one go, like the first one, I reached out to the web to find answers. For the forst time I engaged in forums and dicussion boards. I spent the hiatus and season 3 on the ABC board, and witnessed how the line 'like the hatch blew off your underware' was written there and ended up in Hurleys mouth. Later I was on Lostargs, following the clues dropped by DCAAPB at the final comicon panel, fighting with our very own tribe of Others, the foulmouthed print-flippers of Expressobeans. I met friends worldwide via Lost, some I expect to stay in contact with long after the end. I tried again and again to get a question into Damons and Carltons podcast, haha. On may 23, 2009, one year before The End, something strange happened. I got caught with my left leg between a subway car and the platform, but managed to escape in a split second before the train left. As near death experiences go, it changed my life. Sometimes during the seasons I came to the conclusion the Lost was a trick of the universe to tell me something I did not want to know. So I promised to follow the advice the finale was supposed to deliver. I am a pretty stubborn person, often too smart for my own good, unable to let go, but I played along. So the message for me was clearly, forgive your father and move on. Which I did, but the realisation hit me like a hammer. Like the train, one year ago. I embraced both events, and moved on. Lost is over. Of course I have lot's of thoughts on the mythological impact of The End, but this is up for interpretation, and everybody will come to their own conclusions. Some love it, some hate it. From the moment Jack checked out that skull x-ray I was sure he will die.

Which was okay for me. I totally loved the end, with him closing the eye that opened the world of Lost for us all these awesome six years ago.

All the Best Cowboys Have Mommy Issues

Elisabeth Sarnoff and Jim Galasso know their pop culture.
Nice to see how cop Jim gets from Indy to Bullit to Little House…
I would have expected to find some Deadwood DVD boxes in his condo somewhere, next to Watership Down. I will not repeat myself about LOST B, but with only 8 weeks to go I am still convinced that what we see is the happy ending and the result of the actions happening in LOST PRIME right now. And I hope I'm wrong. (The only question I have about LOST B this week is… why did we have to see Charlies brother?) And very Sawyer, to smash the Mirror of the Week™

So after 5 seasons of heros with daddy issues, here comes the kicker: Smokeys mother was crazy! Now all we have to do is look up the list of greek deitys with mother issues, and we know the name of our favorite ManInBlack. And maybe we throw in a couple of Pharaohs, for good measure. So maybe Jacob was Imhotep, and Smokey was Djoser. But that is just a wild guess. But it was touching to see Locke opening up to Kate, and how honest he was about Sawyers mission to Hydra, and manipulating Claire. Of course he is the main suspect for killing all these Ajira 316 passengers. Which leads us to sweet innocent Zoe. Widmore never stops to amaze me with his hand for henchgirls in sexy eyeware. Must be a british thing. Her guys with guns strangely reminded me of Bram and his folks. Good to see that they thought of bringing a sonic fence with them, maybe that works better than rings of ash. And the secret weapon, stashed away in that U-Boot locker. Maybe some cases of McCutcheon, or our laddy Desmond Hume. I still wonder who will get shot by Juliet from that outrigger race… right now my guess is poor Zoe.

Wanna try another stick?

Taking a history lesson from Napoleon, Dr. Linus settled for getting rid of detention, having the history club back for the 5 kids who care, and making Alex happy. Roger Linus decided to leave all that Dharma beer behind, getting off the island before the Incident could drown it for good. LOST B, the sideverse, shows us a reality in which the Swan outburst was unchecked by Jughead's core. If this timeline, that shows the best outcome for all our protagonists, should converge with LOST PRIME in the next couple of weeks, pigs are flying. It is the happy ending. The Kitsis/Horowitz outing from last night proved that again.

Jacob is a good guy, and he has a plan. Poor Richard was just not able to wrap his mind around it, because like us, he had not enough intel. The question is, what was Jacob's job anyway, and was he the first the to keep watch over evil incarnate over the ages, or was he a replacement already? After the kickass performance with Richard, who lost his faith, in the belly of the Black Rock it would really surprise me if Jack would not end up as Jacobs replacement in the finale. His life saved in the last moment by Ben Linus, maybe. All that manipulating of Ben will fly straight back into Locke's face in the end, now that Ilana saved Linus soul. And then Shepard will accept his duty and keep us all safe from Evil Incarnate™, for the next couple of centuries.

Kitsis/Horowitz episodes are usually my favorites, and they did not disappoint last night, with Miles ignoring Bens offer and going after Nikkis and Paolos diamonds. Which are, as we know, forever. Very sweet writing to pin LOST B Arzt against dynamite in the Black Rock again.

And when I thought the 42 minutes of Dr. Linus were over… cut to water and a sub. For seconds I thought Locke found another Dharma U-Boot. But no, it's Chuck from London.

But if Locke and his arrmy travel by outrigger to the Hydra, maybe we finally see who got shot by Juliet in 'The Little Prince'…

Have Knife, Will Travel

In Sunddown we learned that Locke 2.0 has no problem being stabbed with knifes in the chest, which makes sense because even old John Locke was pretty good handling them. And all the ash circles couldn't stop him from entering the temple in his smoke form, after Sayid got rid of Dogen. I wonder if we will see Ilana using Jacobs ash later in the season with more success. I wonder if Smokey and Jacob were influenced by the TV show Have Gun - Will Travel, which had it's own six season run on CBS from 1957 through 1963. Paladin, the otherwise nameless protagonist, lived as a smart man for hire in San Francisco. The gentleman gunfighter for hire was dressed in black and sported a thorough knowledge of ancient history and classical literature. Directors as Andrew McLaglen and Sam Peckinpah worked on the show, which featured Star Treks Gene Roddenberry as a writer.

The first episode of season 6 revealed Paladins backstory, not typical for 60s TV shows. In it Paladin was forced to hunt down and kill a mysterious gunman named Smoke, played by Boone himself without his trademark mustache and with grey-white hair. Smoke gave the Paladin character his nickname, facetiously calling him "a noble paladin." The question turned out to be doubly ironic, as Smoke revealed in his death scene that he was not evil incarnate, but the protector of a nearby town (from the man who had sent Paladin in the first place. Classical con) Paladin adopted Smoke's black costume and killed the real bad guy.

Now I don't say that Smokey and Jacob are beased on this in any way, but Have Gun - Will Travel was part of the american pop culture for six seasons, like Lost is today.

European History 101

So Ben is a teacher in timeline B. And like Jean-Luc Picard he likes Earl Gray. Or he likes Locke for liking that flavor of tea. Ben teaches European History, I like that, being european and all. But what does it mean? Did his mother never die giving borth to him, and his father never spiralled down that road of drunk and violence, and they never met the Goodspeeds and went to the Island?

Matthew Fox said about season six that about a third of the way through the season both time lines will be "solidified into one time" and there will be one linear time throughout the story on the island with no more flashbacks. With the speed timeline Lost B evolves I start to wonder if that will really happen. We see a lot of crossings in B, now that John met Hurley, and even Rose. I wonder if the flashsideways show us the happy ending that will be the product of everything that will happen from now on till may 23 in Lost Prime. Time moves slow in Lost B, John has a new job and will not call Jack anytime soon, Claire will have Aaron. Looks not like collapsing timelines to me.

Really awesome moment in Lost Prime: Ben at the grave. Followed by another priceless comment of Mr. Lapidus. The climbing down to the cave was nice, and Sawyers encounter with poor frightened Richard was proof enough that candidate Ford was not ready to switch to the dark side yet. The cave with the scales and the candidates names on the ceiling reminded me of Myst, the Miller brothers game from 1994. The episodes name was genious again, covering Lockes new job as well as Jacobs efforts of finding a replacement.

Aly Et Alia Vident

Others see it yet otherwise, and we still don't know who these Hostiles are in the first place. But there seem to be factions. Maybe they are from different times, brought on the Island and stayed because of the healthy climate. Now that we had our first glimpses at the temple dwelling Others with their Fountain of Youth and their turbans I wonder why Tom bothered with his fake beard in the first place… and if Bea Klugh was part of their tribe. Dogen makes a pretty good mysterious leader for them, and his translator Lennon reminded me of another temple in another jungle.

In Coppolas Vietnam epic Apocalypse Now Ben Willard and his crew venture into the heart of darkness and meet a manic war photographer (Dennis Hopper), who is a translator of some sort for Marlons Brandos Colonel Kurtz.

Interesting is that both temple tribes have a knack for building stuff from bamboo…

Somewhere beyond the sea

We'll kiss just as before
Happy we'll be, beyond the sea
And never again I'll go sailin'

The sailin' is not over for us, yet. Everybody happy on Oceanic 815, as planned. Jack has a new haircut, plus he cut himself shaving or something, and the airline dispatched a different plane. The seats are rather gray than blue. Desmond is aboard, reading Salman Rushdie for a change. And then… the dramatic Pre-Title-Climax: The Island is drowned, including sonic fence, Dharmaville and Tawaret. BOOM.

What happened?

A couple of years ago Damon stated in the Lost Audio Podcast that the Hatch may have moved sideways after Desmond turned the failsafe key. Now we have a whole sideways (which I will call Lost B) universe to explore. A universe in which Kate did not kill her father, but his apprentice, and in which Hurley is the luckiest dude on the planet. (Really sweet that he is flying coach). Christian is still dead, but missing, and Locke is still paralysed… but Jack tells him that nothing is irreversible, with him performing neurological spinal surgery at St. Sebastian and all. So we will witness the totally awesome moment were Jack cures Locke in Lost B this season. What a payback for their relationship in Lost Prime. Talking about Lost Prime, the main timeline we followed the last 5 years, in which the crew jumped 30 years into the future after Juliet banged long enough on Jughead's core. Too late for Hurley to save 'The Phantom Menace', but he will rise to the occasion anyway, later in the Temple. Kate finds herself in a tree, but unlike Desmond with her underware in place! They are at the post-failsafe Hatch, and amazingly Juliet travelled with them. Sawyer blames Jack for her useless death, but she tells him post mortem via Miles that the plan worked…

which is hard to see right now, from the Lost Prime perspective. For them, nothing changed, except the jump from 1977 to 2007, but still in their timeline. Bear with me here for a moment. Faradays plan was to counter the incident with Jughead's fission core, to negate the catastrophic results of Radzinsky's drilling into the exotic energy pocket. And that plan worked. Lost Prime is the result.

Flash sideways to Lost B…

Oceanic 815 passes the Island on the way to LA. Everything is under water, but we see that Dharma was there, even the shark is still roaming the area. Radzinsky and his folks in the cool black jumpsuits drill into the pocket… and the catastrophe insues. Our time travellers were not there to stop this. Miles could not tell his father to start the evacuation, so he dies as a baby. Faraday was not in Ann Arbor, hurrying to the island with his plan to use the fission core to counter the Incident. Jughead was never hidden in the tunnels, because Faraday did not timejump to 1954. The Incident hits the Island, the Dharma Initiative and the Hostiles, totall unprepared. No one survives, and the Island drowns 1977. Rousseau and her team never set foot on the Island. Charles Widmore never becomes a business magnate in the UK. There is no Hatch, and no Desmond pushing the button. No crash. The lifes of Jack, Kate and everybody else are influenced by this. I don't know what the destruction of the Island in 1977 means for the game between Jacob and Esau, but I am sure that he visited our friends in Lost B. It is the only way for Locke to survive that fatherly push…