thoughts about the second and third seasons

Originally written November 9

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So okay, before I get too far into the fourth season (only seen two episodes so far) I need to stop and assess the second and third.

The first season was about getting acquainted with the island and its mysteries, Season 2 was about the hatch and learning about the Dharma Initiative, and Season 3 is about learning about the Others.
First I'm just going to ramble about my impressions and then I'm going to talk about my ideas about this stuff.

One thing that I found annoying about the second season was what happened to Locke. Now, I was one of those types who couldn't make up my mind about whether Locke was a "good guy" or a "bad guy". In the pilot he gave me the creeps. But I quickly came to like him, particularly from the fourth episode of season 1 because I saw his backstory and thought now here's a guy who went from being the most pathetic loser in human history to being the ultimate g. And he wasn't just cool and a hunter, but he helped people and had insight into what they were about when no one else understood them.

So I was really rooting for Locke and then he got into the hatch and everything went wrong. It's weird and probably intentional on the writers' part, that as soon as Locke got out of the jungle into the relatively modern setting, furnishings, comfort, and technology of the hatch, he started reverting into the mamby-pamby, whiney mess that he was before the plane crashed. Over and over again he'd lie or believe the wrong person and I'd be like, "Awww, Locke!" I'm totally with Doc Jensen when he talked about how great it was to see Locke become Mr. Island superman again after season 3 started. (Yes, I have read quite a bit of the Doc's web site. I kind of made my head hurt, and I don't read it much anymore. I still go back to it now and then.)

It was cool to have a Nigerian character in the story (and Yoruba at that! It was neat to hear Yoruba spoken on an American TV show). One of the annoying things about Season 2 was that we got interested in the "tailies" as Doc J calls them, only to see almost every last one of them get wiped out. Especially Libby! She was so sweet and it was so cool that she and Hurley made a perfect couple.

And now a word about Ana Lucia. What's with the hate? I couldn't believe all I read from guys (on the hulu website) wishing her dead and stuff. What's their problem?! She was annoying at first, but she was a very tragic figure from beginning to end and I had a lot of sympathy for her. Juliette -- now there's someone who looked really obnoxious more than once. But Ana Lucia was cool.

I do have to hand it to Doc Jensen for two insights that seemed far fetched when he originally posted them, but which panned out in the end: that the Others are not the Dharma Initiative people, but the hostiles who were at war with them once upon a time. And the idea that Desmond and Penelope's quest for reunion is going to be the central theme of the story (well, I haven't seen enough of it to know if that's true, but it's turned out to be a major theme anyway).



And I fell for just about every trick they threw at me second season. I totally was with Jack thinking the hatch computer thing was a hoax. How could a 70's-Commodore-looking computer be what keeps the world from blowing up? Then it turned out to be for real. I thought the others were primitives even though Ethan and Goodwin were others and didn't seem primitive. I thought the tailies were others before they turned out to be tailies (the account of their first 48 hours after the crash was really chilling, I thought). But I think I'm getting the hang of this: when the finale for Season 3 started, and I saw Jack in a beard, I knew it wasn't a flashback but a flash forward. A few episodes before the finale I'd actually been thinking, "Man! After all these people have been through, how are they ever going to survive civilized life if they get back? They're going to be a mess!" Apparently Danielle Rousseau has already figured that out about herself.

Seeing Bernard and Rose reunite made me cry. Really cry. For real.

The episode where Hurley and Charlie jump start the van was one of the most awesome experiences I've ever had watching a tv show. I had "Shambala" (which I don't think I've heard since I was a teenager) playing in my mind for at least a couple of days afterward.

Seeing Charlie die and just the fact that he died was the hardest thing I've had to deal with on the show. Honestly I still don't see why he had to close that door. It would've taken ages for that huge station to flood and Charlie and Desmond would've been out of there long before that.

So now there seem to be four factions: The survivors with Jack, the survivors with Locke, the Others, and the pseudo-rescuers. It's very cool to see that the Others want Locke to replace Ben. Not that I'm sympathetic towards the Others, or even Locke anymore. It's just....Ben! He's pure super-geek evil. I'm telling you, when I saw him as a kid...I went to school with a lot of kids like that. In a way I was a kid like that myself. Which is precisely why I have no sympathy for Ben. He suffered a lot, with his mom dying and his dad being a jerk, and blaming Ben for his mom's death and all, but Ben made his own choice. He murdered his father when he was an adult. By that time most kids growing up with crap like that have figured out that you let some things go. Ben reminds me a lot of a verse from the Bible:

"Because ye have said, We have made a covenant with death, and with hell are we at agreement; when the overflowing scourge shall pass through, it shall not come unto us: for we have made lies our refuge, and under falsehood have we hid ourselves:" Isaiah 28:15.


Yeah, religion gets into this a lot doesn't it? It's remarkable that Ben's mom's dying words were, "Call him Benjamin."

"And they journeyed from Bethel; and there was but a little way to come to Ephrath [or Portland, whatever]: and Rachel travailed, and she had hard labour.
And it came to pass, when she was in hard labour, that the midwife said unto her, Fear not; thou shalt have this son also.
And it came to pass, as her soul was in departing, (for she died) that she called his name Ben-oni: but his father called him Benjamin." (Genesis 35:16-18)

And, of course, in the Bible Benjamin’s father was Jacob.

It's not just biblical stuff, though. Ben shoots Locke, leaving him to die in a mass grave surrounded by corpses. It's there at the point of death surrounded by the dead that he receives his commission (from Walt, no less). That's a near-perfect example of shamanism, where the shaman is killed and goes to the abode of the dead to receive his or her shamanic ordination, so to speak. In college I read some pretty astonishing first hand accounts of shamans who past through such an experience. Some literally order someone else to kill them by shooting or drowning just to go to the underworld to become shamans.

Bad news for Ben, too, because that passage in Isaiah continues:

"And your covenant with death shall be disannulled, and your agreement with hell shall not stand; when the overflowing scourge shall pass through, then ye shall be trodden down by it." (Isaiah 28:18)

I notice that Ben as a kid saw his mom on the island, before he met the hostiles, but as yet I don't know that he saw her again after that. My guess is that either Ben gets his come-uppance as in the above verse (the “overflowing scourge” from the rescuers?), or he sees his mom who melts his heart and turns him back from his evil ways. I don't know yet.

And what about Jacob? That puts me in mind of the unhappy revelation at the end of Season 2 when Sayid and company find the remains of the colossus statue on the island: a foot with four toes. The statue was huge, apparently ancient, and the foot had four toes. What else could it be but the remains of an alien civilization? I thought, "Oh, no, aliens." Aliens just seem like such a cop-out. "How do you explain this unfathomable mystery?" "It was the aliens!" "Simple! Aliens did it!" But now it seems inevitable that we're going to deal with aliens sooner or later. So Jacob is invisible, but evidently real. Is he an alien? I groan at the sneaking suspicion that he is. I'll soon see.

What's more interesting is: who are these hostiles? Are they the aliens? At least one of them, Richard, looks like he was the same age when Ben was 10 or 12 as he is now. Are they more recent than the aliens? If they're not aliens (and I can't tell if they keep their shoes on) who are they and what do they want? What do the aliens want? Ah, well, such is the stuff that Lost is made of.