POST 13 - STAY THE COURSE

DEJA VU ALL OVER AGAIN, THANKS TO BEN

In “Further Instructions,” Desmond apparently knows what’s going to happen next, as though he’d already been there, done that. Hurley calls it déjà vu, but we wonder if he’s really a time traveler or if something else is going on.

For instance, by the time you read this, you’ll have already viewed episode four, “Every Man for Himself,” so you know what’s happened next, even though as we write this we don’t. In fact, everyone who is privy to a Lost script knows what happens on the show before it happens on our TV screens, but we think it’s safe to say that we’re all living in the same space-time continuum.

Although, it could be that we at the AC have special time travel skills: In our last post we suggested that the Losties’ experiences were actually scripts borrowed from the plots of novels by The Others. As an example, we said Kate and Sawyer’s rock-breaking scene might have come from a book found on the bookshelf in Jack’s flashback office. We wrote:

This synopsis of the Pale Horse Coming plot gives us an idea of how they relate: “it is the story of a prison in the deep-south run by an aging madman with insane theories of racial purity and administered by a brutally efficient Stalin of a guard sergeant.”

We don’t know that Mr. Friendly could be described as a “Stalin of a guard sergeant,” but the upshot in the book is that “a multi-talented group of adventurers is assembled to assail an unassailable target or to perform an impossible feat” to free the prisoners. Could it be that Hurley has been sent back to rally the troops?

Okay, so it turned out that Locke was the one who rallied the troops in his stirring beach speech (the very thing Desmond told Hurley was going to happen), but maybe we got it slightly wrong because unlike Desmond we haven’t seen the actual script, we’re just reading between the lines.

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And now that we’ve watched “Every Man for Himself” ourselves, and heard Ben quote from Steinbeck’s “Of Mice and Men” as though he were starring in a Broadway version of the play, we’re not only confident in our theory, we’re downright giddy because we think that this provided the key clue to decipher what’s happening to the castaway crew.

It is all a script but the Losties don’t know they’re acting. That doesn’t mean the big reveal will be a stupid “it’s all a dream,” cheat. We believe that they are unconscious and most likely each is connected to some sort of mind control machine. Are these machines on the island? We don’t think so. We think that they really are “Lost” at sea in the sick bay of the Helgus Antonius, the mystery ship Middelwerk and his Hanso co-conspirators sailed to Sri Lanka during The Lost Experience.

Why? We’re convinced that The Powers That Be -- and we don’t know if they’re aliens or a group of risen Atlanteans or Mu-ans or simply Hanso/Widmore/Paik Heavys -- have tracked down and subdued this group because they are the only people who either 1) know where the floating island is and/or 2) know the whereabouts of Geronimo Jackson, who we believe is a very special child.

How can the Losties find an island invisible to everyone else on the planet (and beyond)? They were there as children, which is an idea that we’ve been kicking around for quite awhile, but that came into focus when the guys on the podcast The Lost Lowdown ridiculed the scene in “Further Instructions,” when Locke picks up the ancient Tonka truck. They sneered, “Why is it that every time they see a toy they’ve got to pick it up? It would have served Locke right to get caught in one of Rousseau’s traps.” (Not an exact quote, but words to that effect.) Then on the Jay and Jack podcast one commenter remembered a flashback scene where a young Locke had exactly the same kind of truck. Then it just made sense that everything they’ve been going through has been a form of mental coercion to remind them of their childhood experiences and cull this vital information from their subconscious.

Gazing into our crystal ball (or are we surfing a glitch on the space-time wave, we forget), we’re convinced that the Losties will awaken from their unnatural slumber in episode six of this first pod or in the J.J. Abrams-directed February opener for the 17-episode pod-a-duex. Even though we “know” it’s going to happen, we can’t wait. We think it will be mind-blowing.

Possibly, not everyone will like having his or her mind imploded. It is probably going to be quite a leap for viewers still debating the fine points of island geography and the future of Charlie and Claire (and her Great! Big! Baby! The kid couldn’t’ be more than a month old by island time, but, boy, oh, boy, how he’s grown.) Anyway, we don’t think this change of mind, so to speak, will constitute a jumping of the shark, we just hope it happens before too many viewers jump ship.

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We recently had an opportunity to speak with a PWAL (Person With A Life), someone who watches Lost, and that’s it. No slo-mo, frame-by-frame repeat viewing. No deciphering the whispers. No fiddling with the images. No blogging, no message boarding, no The Lost Experience theorizing, no podcast networking. Consequently, this PWAL is finding season three pretty inscrutable, and unlike most PWOAL (you know who you are), she finds all this unknown to be, well, unwatchable. In fact, like Stephen Colbert’s bears, she’s put Lost on notice. Actually, she called it probation: If the show doesn’t make some kind of sense to her by the end of these first six episodes, she’s canceling her TiVo season pass.

Even some of us PWOAL-types are feeling a bit waylaid. We hear reports of what’s happening on the Lost fan frontlines, and it worries us—a lot. From The Dharmalars to the Lost Community, there is simmering dissent among the troops. At the Black Rock podcast they speak of the 600,000 viewers who’ve gone AWOL since last week, and they predict channel switching in the millions by the end of the first six episodes if the show doesn’t start making some kind of sense. “It’s a good thing the Big-O is giving up the name Lost Sucks. Maybe we can use it,” the Black Rock podcasters joked with the grim humor of the gallows.

We vote no; Lost does not suck. Indeed, the least-sucky part is about to start. So, in this instance (only), we discourage the change of tactics or strategy or the channel. “Stay the course” may have fallen out of favor at the White House, but for Lost fans it’s still a valid talking point. The alternative (cancellation!) is simply unthinkable. If this show ends before we find out what comes next (the island, it’s up in the air! Lift up your eyes!) would make us crazy insane. We simply must know: did we get it right? And we know you want to know, too? Yes, even those of you who claim to be PWALs.

Oh, and one last thing, in case the guys from The Lost Community podcast ever see this, we have a friendly warning: Bozo? Oh, he’s coming soon to an island near you. Be afraid. Be very afraid.

xxx