final installment of my sweet lost retelling

I wrote this a long time ago (not long after part one and part two) and never posted it – whoops!  That seems to happen a lot around here… Anyway, here goes, a day late and a dollar short:

Even though his body was a goner, Esau still got to take on corporeal form – well, sort of corporeal – as a big black cloud of noisy smoke. The smoke turned out to be quite a killer, and it doesn’t take much reading between the lines to see the message there: those cigarettes are gonna come back to haunt you one of these days, kiddos!

Smokey also got the sweet superpower of being able to look and sound like other dead people, which came in handy now and again. Sadly, being technically dead himself didn’t do much for his temperament. Now, along with being obsessed about getting off the island, he also was pretty obsessed with killing his brother. It’s hard to say whether he was physically capable of doing that or not. I tend to think the island probably wouldn’t let him, but maybe he just assumed that he couldn’t from the get-go and never tried. You know what they say about when you assume things…

More time passed. Finally out of his brother’s shadow (haha), Jacob was able to exercise his brain. He decided the murderous route that mommy dearest took was perhaps not the only way to manage things on the island. When Ricardo’s ship sailed into port and Esau’s plan to use him backfired, Jacob jumped on the opportunity to recruit a helper. This set his long long long long long long-term plan in motion. Every now and again the island would let people find it, and the ones that Esau or wild boars or plain human orneriness didn’t kill, Ricardo formed into a group that would someday come to be known as “The Others.” He gave them a little info now and then, but mostly used them to do things like build magical lighthouses.

Meanwhile, back in the “real world”, a group of people emerged who had gleaned from the history books a little something about hot spots, and desired to seek them out. Somehow, using quantum mechanics and ancient religions as their guide, this group was able to track down the island. A powerful man named Oliver Hanso backed the venture, and in the name of science (and money and, oh yeah, can’t forget power), he sent researchers there on a submarine to figure out how the island could be used to his advantage. These lovely people became known as “The Dharma Initiative.” Of course they had no idea what sort of forces they were messing with, but then again that’s not too surprising when you realize that throughout time no one had as of yet had a clue about the true nature of the island. In any case, they wore tie-dyed tee-shirts, said “Namaste”, hired a drunk who abused his son to be a janitor, and unleashed a whole lot of dangerous electro-magnetic energy, which obivously meant they were doomed to be gassed and thrown into a mass grave. Yay karma!

The mass murder part was led by Benjamin Linus, soon-to-be leader of The Others, who “lost his innocence” after being shot by a time-traveler from the future and presumably healed by the water in the temple (which probably flowed down from the energy hub in the cave). At some point the actual leader of The Others, Eloise, who was pregnant out of wedlock, left the island and lived a fairly normal life in England, probably mostly because her son Daniel had come from the future to see her and she shot him dead. She insistently raised him to become a physicist, and thereby ensured that he would know more than anybody else on the planet about time travel and that she would definitely unwittingly kill him in her past/his future. (Let’s not even pretend we’re going to bother trying to make too much sense of this part.) Charles Widmore, the father of her unborn child, was then the leader on the island, but he was soon banished by Ben the usurper and also went to England to live with his wife and legitimate daughter, Penelope. [Sometime around in there Ben also stole a baby from shipwrecked Danielle Rousseau, who had had kind of a raw deal, what with having to shoot her convinced-by-Mr.-Smoke-Man-to-kill-kill-kill husband and all (Esau was quite adept at that peer pressure thing).]

Widmore was pretty bitter about the unfolding of events re: himself, and attempted for the remainder of his life to get back to the island, even though that was supposedly against the rules. As an adult, his daughter fell in love with a man named Desmond. Widmore was pretty stinkin’ mean to Des, either because truly believed that Desmond wasn’t good enough for Penny, or because he knew the truth about Desmond’s special abilities and needed to indirectly prompt him to get to the island. However it happened, Desmond joined a sailing race around the world to prove himself, and ended up you-know-where.

Some guy saved him and took him back to the Dharma Initiative Swan Station, aka The Hatch, where he got the awesomely fun job of pushing a bunch of buttons every 108 minutes for several years. No real salary, no real benefits, but at least the DI continued to make food drops for him. Mmmm, peanut butter.

Before you know it, we’re up to the pilot episode of the show, where Jacob’s hand-picked replacement-island-protector-candidates/real-life losers survived a plane crash onto the island. From that point onward you can probably piece together the rest of the story pretty easily by following along with the series – mostly it’s a struggle between Jacob and Esau, with some counter-productive stuff happening at ignorant Ben’s behest.

The End, say I, at least to my version of the story, though I do have one nagging question left: why did Richard Alpert (you know, the hundreds-of-years old fella in the black eyeliner) get to fly away to America when the rest of the characters that I actually cared about pretty well ended up dead?

Tut, tut, you writers of Lost, tut, tut.

more lost-y thoughts for my own amusement

After I watched the final episode of Lost, I just wasn’t satisified.  The writers didn’t make it all make sense for me, so I decided to make it make sense for myself.  So here’s the second part of my re-imagining.

Time goes by with the island just kicking back and relaxing, enjoying a year or two without people. Well, except for the dead ghosty whispering people. They don’t go anywhere but then again they’re pretty insubstantial and therefore not much of a bother.

In the meantime, the island and its new bubbling inferno of mystical energy have developed a type of consciousness and even a certain amount of will (thought it is far less human than the god the Atlantians imagined). The place now has a desire for self-preservation and, better yet, a desire for entertainment. Eventually it gets to be a little boring with nothing but wild boars to keep the island occupied, so it allows, perhaps even draws in, another ship – Roman, this time.

They really weren’t the nicest people ever, these Romans, especially to the Oracle/prophetess/priestess lady that they brought along. Not that they can be blamed too much for that, though. She was completely batty and pretty intense with the creep factor, too. The other peeps get tired of her dire predictions and whatnot and banish her to the other side of the island. They would have just offed her but that was too much bad juju even for them. She cursed them anyway, though, and then hunted them down like rats, just for good measure. The island wasn’t exactly thrilled with this turn of events, but it tried to remain a fairly impartial observer. Still, it was kind of lonely, so it let la senorita loca in on the secret location of the energy hub. In hindsight, that was probably a mistake.

She blew the whole thing out of proportion, declaring the golden light the source of rainbows and puppies and hugs, and herself as the protector. She said some ineffectual magic words and drank the water to seal the deal. The water, being full of the aforementioned mystical energy, coated her insides with plutonium, and as a result she lived to a ripe old age.

Of course, she wasn’t the greatest company ever so the island, getting desperate, pulled in another passing Roman ship. But as you’ve read, this chick didn’t think much of other people, and she took her vow pretty seriously. She seemed to do the Good Samaritan thing by saving the preggo woman and playing the part of the midwife, but all the time she was mostly looking for information. Oh, and babies. Cuz babies are innocent. And cuddly. And she hoped maybe one of them could someday take her place. This gig just wasn’t all it was cracked up to be.

She started things off right by bashing in the new mommy’s head (Yikes. Super disturbing  to watch.) and stealing her babies. Who knows how she actually fed the twins…boar’s milk, maybe? Could that be any grosser? And she went ahead and named the first one Jacob, just like the real mom had wanted. Crazy lady had more of an affinity with baby #2, anyway, so maybe she gave him some sort of ineffable name of power, or maybe she gave him power by not giving him a name at all, or maybe she thought Brother was an appropriate name, or maybe she called him Steve and the producers just didn’t think that seemed cool enough. In any case, I don’t call him MIB or the Man in Black. I call him Esau, because it seems to fit quite perfectly. Don’t you agree?

She did a pretty good job of raising the boys, considering she was completely insane. Jacob wasn’t the brightest crayon in the box, but he loved her so she loved him back. Esau, on the other hand, was too smart and too curious for his own good. She tried to mold him into her replacement, but all the time she had misgivings. She knew he would be good at the job, but would he be satisfied? It looked less and less likely.

Partly because she was crazy and truly believed it herself, and partly to keep her little brats in line, she made up rules for everything, and did “magic spells” to enforce them. In other words, there was no reason why Esau couldn’t leave the island. She just made it up. She didn’t want him to go out into the wide world and get killed, or to become a killer. Also, it was obviously possible for the brothers to hurt each other, 1) because Jacob pummeled Esau at one point, and 2) because he threw him into a rock and killed him at another. The island really didn’t need a protector, but since it did seem to keep drawing people to itself, it probably wasn’t a bad idea to have somebody there to keep an eye on things. (That mystical energy is powerful stuff, you know. If we aren’t happy about the North Koreans and their nukes, think how much more we wouldn’t want them to have this island.)

Eventually adult Esau threatened to leave the island and his fake mother murdered a bunch of people to stop him.  He went all quid pro quo and murdered her back. Jacob got a bit angry at this, and tried to teach his dear brother a lesson by throwing him into the cave of energy, which resulted in Esau being coated with plutonium inside and out, and also dead. The island decided to take this opportunity to create its own protector by giving his restless, wandering soul a lot more power than it gave the other dead people.

To be continued…

my thoughts on Lost

Everyone who cares about Lost even a little has already offered a re-hashing of the finale, so I won’t bother to do more than lay out my opinions about it as succinctly as possible:

1. The Sideways Universe was a waste of time. It’s nice that pretty much everybody got resolution and a happy ending after they’re dead…but…yeah, they’re dead. So it had almost nothing to do with the real story, and way way way too neatly tied up our characters’ loose ends in a sweet little bow. I’m all for happy endings, but come on! You kill off Jin and Sun and then try to placate me by reuniting them in limbo, on their way to a secular view of heaven? Eminently unsatisfying. Damon and Carlton, don’t you know you’re supposed to leave a little something to the imagination? Which brings me to my next point:

2. They “illuminated” the mythology of the island in the lamest way possible. Wow, a glowing golden light that holds the key to all the goodness in the universe.

Neato.

The early seasons of Lost were awesome because they brilliantly developed the characters and the mystery of the island at the same time. I realize they couldn’t explain everything about the island in this final season, but they didn’t actually explain much of anything that mattered. The big reveal needed to be more science-y, less touchy-feely. I mean, why did they give us all this enticing information about time travel and magnetic fields and healing and four-toed people and smoke monsters if they were never going to actually tie any of it together?

All I’m saying is, you had 6 or more years to figure this out, guys, and you could have come up with something that actually fit the feel of the first five seasons of the show.

Here endeth most of my complaints.

In case, like me, you were hoping for a bit more out of season six, but, unlike me, you don’t want to waste loads of energy coming up with your own semi-logical explanations, I hereby grant you access to my personal Lost theories.

There are certain “hot spots” scattered across the globe with somewhat unexplainable (even for me!) sources of mystical energy. The energy is neither good nor bad, though it can be harnessed for both, and it tends to affect things in its vicinity in unexpected ways. The island is a hot spot, obviously. It was just hanging around, minding its own business for thousands of years, until some folks – probably Egyptians – stumbled upon it.

Because they were people, and people like to own things, they claimed the island for their own and named it Atlantis. It wasn’t obvious at first, but eventually the new Atlantians realized there was something kinda freaky about their new homeland. People still got sick, but they didn’t tend to die as often as they did back in Egypt. When they did kick the bucket, occasionally they would show up again with cryptic messages or wanting to play checkers. A couple times the Atlantians tried to send a boat back to their place of origin, but it never worked out. Usually the sailors would wash back to shore, babbling like babies until they were taken out by brain aneurysms.

Anyway, these people were pretty darn smart and it didn’t take them long to come to the only rational conclusion: the island was the home of a god. The god obviously didn’t hate them, but judging by the way things had been going he also wasn’t too excited about having them there, interrupting his peace and quiet and being generally disrespectful. They decided to do what they could to get some harmony with this dude, and the first order of business was to build a statue. A biggun, too. They put their best engineers and their best slaves to work and before you knew it they had a 500 foot tall four-toed work of art. (They hadn’t really seen their new deity up close and personal, so they had to wing it on the representation part. It seemed insulting to make him too human, thus the elegantly rendered lack of appendages.)

Unfortunately, the completion of the statue didn’t change the way things worked on the island. They decided to give it another go by building a fancy temple, but no dice. A lot of time had passed by now, and the Atlantians had finally realized that babies did not get born here. Not to mention that the only chick left alive was the one who had passed menopause. Sort of a bummer for adventurous, virile, warrior-type males. So instead of spending the rest of their miserable, lonely lives paying homage to their mysterious island god, they hatched a plan to steal his power.

They searched for the perfect spot, at last settling on a cave near the center of the island. There they combined their knowledge of the laws of physics and the workings of the spirit world to draw the energy of the island into one gigantic hub. Unfortunately this powerful convergence was too much to bear for the frail human bodies nearest the magical energy magnet, and they all went to kaput. One guy was further away but since their doodad also somehow drew in water along with energy, he drowned. Au revoir, dear Atlantians.

Having written this much, I find myself wanting to write more by way of a Lost mythology fill-in-the-blanks explanation. However, this post is already quite long, so I’ll stop here and wrap it up in a day or two.

nina, michael, heidi – you should be ashamed of yourselves!

All I can say is that episode 7 (“Hard Wear”) of Project Runway season 7 was an absolute travesty.

You sent home this:

Instead of THAT?!?!

Seriously?

No, I mean, like, SERIOUSLY???? 

Are all the judges smoking crack, or did Jesse Lenoir mow down Michael Kors’ dog, talk smack on Nina Garcia’s grandma and pee in Heidi’s Cheerios or what?  Cuz something is just wrong here.

thou shalt not judge ridiculously ineptly

I decided to give Project Runway another chance after its horrendous last season, and was happily surprised to find it didn’t suck.  In fact, I would rank episode 2, when the designers had to make a beautiful look out of burlap, as one of the best throughout the show’s history.  But I just watched episode 6 (“A Little Bit of Fashion”), and I am utterly flabbergasted.  The challenge seemed like it could be a good one: to create an age-appropriate but fashion-forward outfit for a little girl, and later, as a twist, to create a “mommy” look to go along with it.  I approved of Heidi, Michael, Nina and the guest judge, Tory Burch‘s choice of the top three and the winner, but was appalled by the selection of two of the bottom three.

Admittedly, Amy deserved to be there by virtue of her ugly, ugly, ugly pants:

(Although Tory Burch did shamefully display her ignorance of complementary colors while discussing the ugly.)

But I actually liked Jonathan‘s look, both for the little girl and the adult model.  I thought for sure he would be in the top 3!  No, I wouldn’t have worn the “toilet paper dress”, but I wouldn’t wear half of the stuff that they come up with on this show.  The dress was innovative, and at least to my untrained eye, moderately well-made.  And I would indeed put my little girl (if I had one) in the adorable dress he made for her.  She looked good!

Last but not least was Janeane.  Ah, Janeane.  You SO should have known this was coming.  I’ll agree with the judges that her look was boring – and most of her looks up to this point have been boring.  So obviously I do understand why she was the one to hear a bittersweet “auf wiedersehen” from Heidi.  But both the little girl and the model looked comfortable and pretty in the clothes she made.

Most of all, I am just ticked that Emilio got a cushy, safe spot in the middle.  His little girl’s look was by far the worst that walked the runway.  One of the other designers derogatorily called it an Easter dress – but I sometimes “ooh” and “ah” and squeal “oh-that-is-SO-adorably-precious!” over the fluffy pink frou-frou dresses I see in department stores – this sad, tired little thing would have been more appropriate for a hard day’s work on the prairie than for dressing up on a special occasion.

I’m not as outrageously offended by his adult look but it was definitely not fabulous enough to have saved him from the bottom three on this one.

As a side note, I think I would have worn Mila’s little girl’s outfit…

…in 1989