Media Diary Day 4
Again, what with the busy, cosmopolitan life I lead, there’s not much to report. Only the latest episode of HOLY SHIT HOLY SHIT HOLY SHIT Lost. I keep on drafting posts about how awesome Lost is lately, and I shelve them because they get fanboyishly long without ever feeling like they’ve done the show justice. Suffice it to say this is some of the most complex storytelling I’ve ever experienced. If you’re not watching, you’re missing out – but tragically, I can’t even recommend you start watching, because you’d have to go through a hundred-hour boot camp that contains some headnoddingly dull passages (end of season two, beginning of three – that’s where I stopped watching for a bit there). Just know that the end of three through to season five have been headblowingly awesometastic.
Note to self and/or anyone else: a great service to Lost fans-to-be would be to compile a list of which episodes to watch and which to skip. When I tried to get into Buffy after the fact I yearned for such a thing, too. Get it down to 20 hours for season one two and three, and you could have a winner.
Anyway, fuckit, about this last ep. (SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER etc.) I believe, as many at the AV Club do as well, that Farraday’s theory is wrong, and they cannot change the past. Indeed, he must have realized this during the ep’s final scene. If they were able to, they would prevent the crash of their plane, which would prevent them from going back in time and changing the past. Moreover, it’s a disaster for dramatic tension – if anything can then be gone back on and changed, no actions are permanent, and nothing has any stakes. And it’s hella confusing. No, I’m pretty sure that (as things played out with Sayid and Ben) their actions taken to prevent the Incident will turn out to cause the Incident.
Another Lostie note: let’s not forget the “Adam and Eve” skeletons in the cave. The cave by the beach, where Sawyer and Juliet plan to go. Note the closeup of hand-holding. Also, while I get the sense that despite this season’s extant resurrections, Farraday’s death is permanent, there’s much more of his story to tell, including a) what his previous, brain-frying experiments entailed, b) what he got up to in Ann Arbor, and c) what reason his mother would have for sending him to the island, despite knowing it will cost him his life.
Finally, I think the greatest tribute to Lost is that a group of us can gather a day or two after an episode and spend longer than the episode’s run time discussing it. And not in a “Picard is better than Kirk” kind of way – although perhaps such things are equivalent from the point of view of someone who hasn’t printed out Dharma labels for things.