Hello, Lost junkies! Thanks for joining me today as we embark on our journey through season 5—this show just keeps getting weirder and weirder, I’m sure you’ll agree, and I am LOVING it!!!! This season, I’ve been unable to stop watching. It’s at the point where a few hours without an episode is too much. So, let’s get to the reviewing. As a side note, technically episodes 1-8 make up the first half of the season, but the show takes a distinctly different turn in episode 8, and thematically it really belongs in the 2nd half of the season. So, enough with the explanations; let’s get started!
So, the first half of season 5 deals mainly with Locke, now on the mainland, trying to convince the Oceanic Six to go back to the Island. Meanwhile, the people left on the Island are time-hopping, a la “Where in Time is Carmen SanDiego.” Their stay in each time sometimes lasts as little as a few minutes, sometimes as long as a day or two. The show flip-flops back and forth from showing the people on the Island to showing Locke trying his luck with the Oceanic Six. All of this proves very demanding for the viewer, but anyone who’s come this far is more than capable of following the plot as it gets even crazier (even if you have to do a lot of mental recapping!) It’s cool to see that the writers and producers aren’t afraid to demand more and more of their viewers as the show goes on; the fact that millions of people kept on watching despite how confusing it got is a real testimony to the quality of the show.
The main new attribute that makes this season harder to follow than previous seasons is the time-hopping going on on the Island. After each hop, the characters have no idea when they are until they stumble across some event unfolding (and even then they sometimes don’t figure it out!) During this time-hopping, the audience is very much in the same situation as the characters—using clues around them to figure out when they are. Except, you know, without suffering the nasty side effects that the characters do. This proves to be a lot of fun for the audience, because we get to have this interactive element that isn’t normally found on TV. I felt almost like it was a race between me and the characters to figure out what time they were in, and I would always try to figure it out before they did! It was really novel to me that at times I didn’t know precisely what I was watching, and it was up to me to figure it out. A favorite of mine is the episode “The Little Prince,” where Jin, who has miraculously survived the freighter explosion, washes up on shore completely unaware of the time-hopping. And who finds him but…well, I’ll let you see for yourself, but this was one instance of getting to figure out what year it was by using what I already knew. There are plenty more examples like this one throughout these episodes, and as well as being fun riddles for the audience to solve, they also serve to fill in some older plot gaps. This filling in of plot via time travel takes a distinctly different and bizarre turn in episode 8, “LaFleur.” Stay tuned!
It’s during the first half of this season that we really start to understand the true scope of what’s been going on for the past four seasons. It’s all part of something a lot bigger than we thought. Turns out, there’s an epic war brewing between Ben Linus and Charles Widmore, rooted in an old rivalry between them. We first saw glimpses of this war in season 4, but now that the Oceanic Six and Locke are off-Island, we get to see the true extent of how far both Ben and Widmore can exert their influence. For four seasons, we have seen the Oceanic 815 survivors as the major players in this story, as the ones making everything happen. Now, in a rather unsettling twist, we see the true nature of what’s been happening: there’s a war over the Island going on, and it seems like EVERYONE is involved, from Locke’s old orderly to Daniel Farraday’s mom (who we saw previously in season 3, not knowing who she was). Everyone has got a role to play in this war, and it’s devastating when we realize that everything we’ve been seeing for the past four seasons is only a small part of this whole saga, this saga that goes back to when Ben and Widmore were both on the Island together, and maybe even further back than that. All this importance has been placed on the Oceanic 815 survivors, and now many of them are being used as pawns in this epic war, by one side or the other. In episode 7, “The Life and Death of Jeremy Bentham,” we see Widmore and Ben fighting over Locke; each of them is trying to get Locke on his side to do his bidding. Locke has always been a leader, a character who doesn’t hesitate to think for himself, even if his opinion is unpopular (which it usually is), and now he’s being used like a puppet, being pulled one way by Widmore’s strings, and another by Ben’s strings. This giant shift demonstrates how close we now are to the show’s end. The pieces are being put into place, set up for something big. Everything seems to be gearing up for some major showdowns involving the castaways, the Others, the Freighteries, and practically everyone we’ve ever seen on the show. It’s got another year and a half to play out to fruition, and I’m sure it’ll be amazing!
One more thing before I wrap this one up; in my last post, I mentioned that I was going to switch from doing the “Sawyer-coaster” to starting up the “Ben-coaster.” If you recall, I had actually started sympathizing with Ben a little bit after his daughter was shot to death in front of him and he prepared Locke to take over his position as leader. After watching the first half of this season, however, my opinion of him has once again dropped, so quickly and suddenly that I couldn’t even believe I’d been feeling bad for this guy a mere few episodes ago. Let’s take a look at some of the selfish things he’s done now. First, in the episode “316,” the Oceanic Six are preparing to return to the Island, and Ben is coming with them (for some unknown reason, considering that in the previous season finale he made it very clear that the Island wouldn’t let him come back). Anyway, for several episodes I had been wondering what would happen to the dozens of other passengers on this new ill-fated flight, and I was very surprised that none of the Oceanic Six brought this up with Eloise Hawking when they visited her, or even raised any concerns about it to each other. Then, we see that Hurley bought every available seat on the plane, so as to save others from the fate that he is about to face. Still, there are a few others on the plane, and Jack begins to worry. He turns to Ben and asks “What’s going to happen to everyone else on this plane?” Ben just looks at him, with his usual cold, emotionless stare, and says “Who cares?” That line really hit home for me, and reminded me what kind of a person Ben really is. He cares so much about the Island, and what’s best for the Island, that he long ago stopped seeing fellow human beings as individual people. To him, they’re all nothing but pawns in the grand story woven by the Island, and he really doesn’t care what happens to anybody. And then of course, there’s the matter of “The Life and Death of Jeremy Bentham,” where he TALKS SOMEONE OUT OF COMMITTING SUICIDE and then KILLS HIM HIMSELF after getting some important information from him. I was absolutely shocked when this happened; I had not been expecting it at all, even though we already knew from the flash-forwards that this character was going to die. I was just blown away. Any sympathy I’d had for Ben at the end of season 4 is, as of now, completely gone.
Well folks, that’s a wrap! Have any thoughts or opinions on the first half of the season? I’d love to hear about them in the comments! Anyway, I’ll see you next time as we discover DHARMA (for real this time), and wipe the metaphorical slate clean, in a way. Until then, later dudes!
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