My flight to Heathrow departs at 5 p.m. today and gets in at 7 a.m. tomorrow. I’m planning to take full advantage of the 777’s excellent in-flight entertainment system, but I’m also taking my Kindle to pass the time, too. Catch enough sleep to be alert for the rest of tomorrow, too, if possible. I want to know where the darned teleporter is–boy, I’d love to just step on the pad and end up across the Atlantic a second or two later.
My biggest problem with the convention is likely to be trying to connect real people with the online correspondence I’ve had with them over the past few years. I’m generally bad with names (but name tags should help there) but if the name tag says Bill Johnson and I only know the person as WickedKarnival666 then my brain doesn’t connect the two easily.
I’m not taking a computer with me, but I have mapped out the internet cafés closest to the Royal Albion so I might get online once or twice during the weekend, schedule permitting. I think a few people (Scott Edelman, Lisa Morton) are planning to tweet the Stokers on Saturday evening (Saturday afternoon stateside).
At least I’m not going to miss any episodes of Lost while I’m away. Last night’s was pretty awesome, don’t you think?
This must be the week for gratuitous Tenerife mentions. Richard Alpert’s story begins there during the year that Canada became a country, and Walt on Breaking Bad rambled about the worst ever plane accident involving two 747s on that Canary Island. The early part of the episode reminded me of something Alexandre Dumas might have written–a poor, basically honest, hapless man becoming imprisoned after events spiral out of control–and all for not, as it turns out, because he gets back to his wife too late to do her any good. And then the priest tells him he can’t absolve him of his sins because he won’t live long enough to do the penance. Cruel world.
So, Magnus Hanso, great-grandfather of Alvar Hanso, saves his life and gives him time to do penance. Plenty of time, as it turns out–a century and a half, so far. And who is Hanso’s right-hand man? A guy named Whitfield, which I thought sounded an awful lot like Widmore the first time it was pronounced.
The episode was like an entire novel packed into 50 minutes of drama. They introduced a new character and made you care for her enough that the scene with Alpert, his ghost-wife and Hurley at the end was dramatic instead of melodramatic. Who thinks Hurley could be the new Jacob? At first I thought there would be some dramatic justice in having Ben finally get the job he’s been stumping for all his life, but Ben is now reduced to making pithy asides (“This should be interesting,” he says when Sun is getting ready to tell Jack about Locke.)
I wonder how much the Man in Black is influenced by the body he inhabits. As Locke, he seems to be fairly direct. He’s not above manipulating people, but I can’t remember Flocke ever telling a direct lie. Man in Black, though, clearly lied to Alpert–or at least we believe that he lied if we credit Jacob’s story. Jacob reminds me an awful lot of the Turtle from It–the force representing good who doesn’t wish to get involved. I liked his reaction when Alpert pointed out the potential pitfalls of such a strategy.
Nice resonance between MiB and Locke uttering the same line to Alpert: Good to see you out of those chains.
So now we know: 1) how the statue was broken 2) how the Black Rock ended up so far inland 3) where Alpert came from 4) why he doesn’t age and 5) what the island is. I saved the best for last. I wonder how Jacob does his job–how he keeps MiB on the island. Is his mere presence enough to accomplish this feat? Does it have anything to do with the island’s strange electromagnetic force? Is he the first “person” to do the job? And where do they originate from–how was MiB bottled up in the first place, and who was his crazy mother?
Jacob’s pastime seems a little cruel, though. Very Job-like. Testing people, playing with them, to prove a theory. He may be the good guy by comparison to MiB, but maybe he’s gotten bored over the years. Who would have predicted this arc to the story five years ago? Clever stuff.
