Thursday, March 4

Sundown (S6, ep. 6)



The Back to the Island column for "Sundown" has been drowned in a dirty pool for your reading pleasure on Chud.com.

13 comments:

  1. Can't wait for the recap.

    One thing I haven't seen discussed anywhere -- what did Kate see in the smoke monster? She definitely saw something. I took her reaction to be fascination and a bit of "that's what the monster is?" surprise. She didn't look afraid of it. They lingered on her reaction from 3 angles, so I think it's pretty important. From what I could see, there appeared to be more ghost-like images in the monster than I'd noticed before (definitely saw streaks of white).

    Could the monster be a collection of souls? That's where my mind went.

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  2. Alnyden,

    In the past Rewatch columns I've theorized that the Island functions in part as a kind of "giant battery," and that when a person dies on the Island, their energy/"soul"/memories are absorbed into the Island's "hard drive" (for lack of a better term). In other words, there's potentially a literal "Well of Souls" on the Island.

    I think that Smokey/the Man in Black is able to access this well, and to take the forms/memories of people who have died on the Island. Notice that when Smokey rushes overhead you hear screaming - and that the screaming stops once he's passed by. I think that these are the "souls" of the dead, and that they're trapped just as Smokey is.

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  3. Here are some of the columns where I've talked about this possibility:

    http://www.chud.com/articles/articles/21822/1/LOST-THE-REWATCH-COLUMN-SEASON-4-EPISODE-2/Page1.html

    http://losttherewatch.blogspot.com/2010/02/la-x-s6-ep-1.html

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  4. Great recap as always, thanks.

    Interesting food for thought on the nature of Jacob and Smokey. It is arguable that the motivations of Smokey's growing band of followers directly parallel the similarly selfish actions of Jack in last year's season finale. He was equally as willing to risk sacrificing the lives of other people to achieve his goal.

    Then again he believed his actions were going to rewrite history meaning none of those people would have been dead at all, so it's a murky area. Still, there was no way to be sure, and he took a helluva risk... Wondering whether Smokey may have been responsible for putting the concept into Daniel/Jack's mind.

    Setting up the early stages of an as yet unrevealed grand plan perhaps?

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  5. Nice point, Dave. In my mind, I'd paralleled the Man in Black's current mission with Jack's Season 3 quest to get folks off the Island, but the Jughead detonation is also a good potential "mirror."

    Thanks for reading!

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  6. I'm curious as to why Claire didn't let Kate die when she had a chance, as she said she would in the previous episode. Instead of telling Kate to come down into the pit with her, she could have let the Monster kill her as it whooshed by.

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  7. She could have - but I suspect that some part of her may believe what Kate is saying.

    Either that, or she's biding her time. It's possible that she's been told by the MiB not to harm Kate yet.

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  8. So, Smokey is kinda like Malkovitch in "Being John Malkovitch?" ;D

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  9. Though it'd be kinda fun to jump onto the Jacob-is-Evil bandwagon, I don't think I'm quite there yet. I’m really frustrated with him, but I’m trying to hold out judgment for a bit longer. I can get why people aren’t big fans of him though. My biggest qualm with accepting him as a good guy isn't so much that he pushes and nudges people around to do what he wants, like Fake Locke accused in The Substitute, or that his capability for disseminating useful information makes The Others look like open books. It's that from what we've seen, he's been strikingly dismissive to most of the people who claim to care about him the most. Jacob went to pretty big lengths last week to get Jack and Hurley away from the Temple, but he didn't seem to make much of an effort to help out the people who lived there and essentially dedicated their lives to his cause. Instead, he just sort of writes them off, gives them a Ben-style "what about you?" and lets them all get taken out by Smokey.

    Of course, he could have a relatively good reason for this that hasn't been revealed yet (and perhaps a related reason for why he and the Others are all so crazily secretive all the time). Maybe Fake Locke does too. And that just drives home the point that all the Losties are being forced to join sides in a very high-stakes face off with very, very little info on what’s actually going on and with both sides appearing less than friendly. And that nicely refers back to the issue of choice that’s been all over the place since the beginning of Lost, and especially prominent in this episode – how do you make a decision between two seemingly bad choices? Anyway, I like that Lost is being relentlessly ambiguous right up to the end.

    Thanks again for the recaps, Morse! They’re always great to read.

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  10. another great recap Morse.

    - this was an awesome episode, but very unsettling. Sayid episodes always beat up soul a little.

    - I was slightly bummed that Jack and Sayid didn't seem to recognize each other. It can only have been a day or two since Sayid-ways kicked in the bathroom door on 815 and hung around while Jack fished a bag of heroin out of Charlie's throat before landing safely in LA. I guess it's realistic that Jack wouldn't recognize him out of context.

    - Is it possible that in LAXpt. 2 Sayid awoke 2 hours after drowning in the Temple because his sideways self died and his soul transferred over? Sort of like a reverse of what people speculate was happening to Juliet when she died?

    - When is Tom Friendly going to show up in sideways LA?



    - If Dogen's machine does test for evil or bad kharma or negative energy, is it possibly what it detected was Sayid's 2 years of service to Ben and his self-loathing?

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  11. 3 more things:

    - I had the idea that Smokey didn't intend to kill any remaining castaways. So it's not so much that Kate hid as it is that he didn't want to or couldn't kill her, or Miles. Or Sun, etc.

    - I had forgotten that Kate was pretty much the first person that Miles met on the island, followed shortly by Sayid. I also liked the acknowledgment that he feels close to Sawyer and has pretty much followed him for 3 years as a snarky sidekick.

    - I also started thinking about Jacob's appearance to Ilana when she was wrapped in bandages. Did he heal her injuries in exchange for her service and commitment? Was that part of the exchange not shown while she was in bandages. She seemed to know him already, which differs from Dogen's history.

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  12. Another very large object that could require tremendous manpower to move is the Ajira plane. If Smokey really does just want to be able to leave the island then maybe he needs this group to help him get the plane back on the runway.

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