617 – The End – Ben

Ben

616 – What They Died For

Review:

If that was a set up episode then it was the best one ever.  I don’t think it was a set up episode, it seemed more like it was part one of the finale.  I can barely even count all the things that happened tonight.

First of all the surviving Candidates mobilized and decided to follow the plan to kill “Locke”.  Finally they’ve stopped trying to escape.

Secondly Ben is in the position of a lifetime.  He’s conning the most powerful being on the Island.  This is what he was meant to do.  Unfortunately to get to this place Richard probably had to die, and Ben had to kill Widmore (not a big loss).  But he’s got himself a front-row seat and a position of pivotal power.  I am thrilled about what he managed to do in this episode.

Then Jacob showed up and answered questions, and appointed a replacement.  I didn’t see this coming at all.  Who knew that would happen before the finale.  Jacob had one of my favorite speeches in a very long time.  He finally explained to these fools that they belong on the Island, they had nothing left in the real world.  I’ve said this forever.

Off the Island things really kicked into high gear.  In what was possibly the best choreographed flash-sideways yet, Desmond started two sets of dominoes that resulted in Ben getting matched up with Rousseau, Locke giving into to fate and finally agreeing to Jack’s surgery, and finally Desmond started inviting/coercing people like Hurley, Kate and Sayid into going to the most anticipated concert of the year.  This concert looks like it’s going to be the place to be in the finale.

This episode blew me away.  If it was Richard’s last episode than that’s unfortunate.  Regardless, this episode accomplished a lot.  If this is anything like what the finale will be like, I don’t think I’ll have any trouble giving it a perfect ten.  As for this episode I think it warrants a 9.0/10.0

What It’s Like to Die

Pictures from here.

Entertainment Weekly is going nuts over the Lost finale, understandably.  But one of their obsessions is the long list of dead characters.  They had many of the dead characters come back for photo-shoots and interviews.  The photos were odd, I never really like seeing the actors all cleaned up and shiny, they just look strange.  But some of the interviews were fun.  For example there’s a video of the actors talking about what it was like for them when they found out their characters were dying. You really feel bad for these people, and you can tell many of them are barely restraining their anger.

Check it out at ew.com.

(Frankly I don’t think the Ethan guy has anything to complain about, he’s been in almost every season since he’s died.)

– izi

Good vs Evil: Jacob & “Locke”

It’s been a while since I did a Good vs. Evil post, and I’ve put this one off for a long time.  I mostly want to write this now because it seems like everyone is grasping at straws trying to figure out if we’ve been misled, maybe Jacob isn’t as nice as we like to believe.  I think it’s possible that people have lost some perspective about the issues.

And one disclaimer before I continue.  I feel very strongly we can discuss whether someone is good or evil.  I know many people dislike it when I debate these things, they wants more vagueness, they don’t want their favorite characters pigeon-holed.  But I like drawing lines in the sand.  I want there to be barriers between good and evil actions.  In the end of this show there will be two side, and I don’t think they will both be good and both be evil.  I’m pretty sure there will be villains and there will be heroes.

And another thing, I have to write this post about Jacob and “Locke”/Smokey because they are undoubtedly on opposite sides, if I write about one of them then it affects the other one.

603 – What Kate Does

Review:

Boooring.  No I’m just being mean.  Kate episodes are always meant to take things down a notch.  We can’t just go full blast through a season with Smokey destroying things in every episode.  Sometime we have to deal with characters and emotions.  This seems to happen in every season, we get a Kate flashback and it slows the story to a crawl.  I actually don’t always hate Kate flashbacks, but it usually takes me a few years to appreciate them.  Combine that with my general disinterest in Claire and hate for Sayid and we have the makings of a truly boring episode.

Here are the parts of the episode I did like: Aldo’s return, Hurley’s new leadership role, Ethan’s surprise return, and half of Dogen’s explanation of the Infection.  Claire’s Island return was also very surprising, but I’ll bet we’ll come back to that next week or the week after.

I’m still a little buzzed from the fact that Lost is back on, but not too excited to ignore the fact that this episode did almost nothing for me.  3.5/10.0

Better Season 6 poster

Way back at Comic-Con the Season 6 poster was blurrily revealed.  It’s a picture of all the main characters of Lost standing in a row with Locke in the center.  There was a some confusion and debate about who exactly was in the poster.  Well we now have a better quality version of that same poster.  It’s still not good quality, but we can see who all the characters are.

So here it is:

From DarkUFO.

Lost Comic-Con 2009 Analysis

First of all I should say SPOILER ALERT.  I personally don’t think that anything that happens at Comic-Con is a spoiler but some people do.  So you’ve been warned.

Secondly, you should probably check out these videos from Comic-Con:

The Panel

The Videos

Now on to the analysis:

Lost Comic-Con 2009 Videos

If one wants to remain completely untainted by spoilers of Season 6, official or otherwise, then don’t read ahead.

SPOILER ALERT

The Comic-Con 09 panel was posted on Saturday.  Here are the other official videos that were shown at Comic-Con.

512 – Dead is Dead

Review:

Mwahahahaha (evil laugh).  This is episode was very good for me.  I want many things in the show to happen but I rarely get to see them.  This episode had a plethora of good stuff for me.

Ben didn’t kill Penny!  This was one of my greatest fears.  Since Ben promised to kill Penny at the end of the last season I’ve been severely conflicted about him as a character.  I didn’t know if I could go on rooting for Ben if he was going to kill another one of my favorites.  But he didn’t succeed!  Huzzah.

Also, we saw how Ben took Alex.  This was very unexpected, I wanted to see this scene, but it didn’t seem likely after Danielle’s episode came and went.  I hope everyone feels a lot of sympathy towards that woman and her tragic life.

We saw Widmore leave the island.  Again I didn’t expect to see this scene, ever.

Alex came back.  This one was truly from left field, she came back and with a vengeance.  I can’t even describe how happy I was to see her.

Ilana went nuts.  I have a slight obsession with this new character, so seeing her go all Screw-Eyes crazy made her all the more intriguing.  (Remember “We’re Back” anyone?  No?  Too bad.)

Ben finally heard about Christian, this was a little anti-climactic, but I’m still waiting for his reaction on this one.

We saw under the Temple!  Uh… we saw the Smoke Pit, that was awesome.  (Spread that around everyone.  Smokey’s house is called the Smoke Pit©.)

Locke confronted Ben.  Again, slightly anti-climactic, but at least he’s in control now.

Guess what I’m going to rate an episode about Ben including Smokey, Richard, Widmore, Alex, Rousseau, Penny living and Locke.  Go ahead just guess, you’ll probably be right.

Hey, you were right!  10.0/10.0

505 – This Place is Death

Review:

Apparently I had very low and narrow expectations for this episode.  I expected to get Rousseau’s story, so when I got that before the second commercial break I was a little surprised.  This episode had it all.  I still can’t even believe it.  Smokey, Christian, The Frozen Donkey Wheel, The Temple, Charlotte’s death, Charlotte’s backstory, Mrs. Hawking, Desmond.  All I wanted was Rousseau, this is like buying a bag of chips and finding money inside (whoa, that was a weak simile, I really shouldn’t write these things so late.)

So we got to see what happened to Rousseau, it was surprising, and satisfying.  I expected to see more, but I can fill all the blanks in.  I wouldn’t mind seeing Ben take Alex, but that was hinted at in this episode so I guess that’s enough.  Did anyone see Smokey coming?  I never factored him (it?) into her story at all.  And the Temple!  Really shocking and interesting developments.

Charlotte dying was unfortunate.  Ironically I am accepting this death well.  I don’t even know if it’s definite, but it really felt that way.  The recurring guest star thing was way too much of a tip-off.  But I’m glad she told us her true backstory.  It’s something that we can guess about for a long time now.  I doubt we’ll be getting many answers, but it’s fun to have these guessing games.  (Why am I so OK with her death, I held out hope that Rousseau was alive for a long time, I even came up with many theories to keep Nikki and Paulo alive.  And now Charlotte dies and I don’t even care, I really liked Charlotte too.  I’m weird.)

The Sun and Jin jazz was pretty good too.  I actually felt bad for Jin, he just got back to the land of the living and he already laid his own life aside to protect Sun’s.  Sad.

And suddenly Mrs. Hawking is the last hope for mankind, everyone converges on her at once.

This episode was intense, and I won’t be forgetting it soon.  I’d have given it a high score for the first 15 minutes, but it just kept going and going.  And a huge improvement from the last episode.  10.0/10.0

(Note: This is one of those prolific episodes that you can base a lot of theories on, not unlike “The Man Behind the Curtain” or “Cabin Fever”.  If you have any theories about this episode, or if you know of any good theories about this episode on other sites please tell me about them in the comments.)