I Am DB

If you don’t actually want to read this whole thing – and believe me, I understand – skip down to the last two paragraphs for an explanation of what is happening to the rest of this season’s episodes now that the strike is over…if you haven’t heard the plan already, that is.

Now then…

Shortly after 7:00pm last Thursday, the electricity in my neighborhood went out. It came back at about 9:05. DIRECTV rebooted and began recording Lost, having missed everything before the first commercial. In between the lights going out and coming back on, there was a lot of angry, incomprehensible swearing coming from my apartment. Neighbors reported making out phrases such as “goddamn motherfucker” and “any other night” amidst the loud banging of fists on the wall.

So I missed the opening, pre-credits sequence of the show. I’ve gathered the following online and from friends: Sayid closed Naomi’s eyes, and removed from her wrist a bracelet with the inscription, “N — I’ll always be with you — RG.” (How very J.K. Rowling of you, Lost…) Apparently there was some discussion with the freighter folks in which Frank said the helicopter wouldn’t leave without Charlotte, so Sayid volunteered to go convince Locke to release her. And somewhere in there, a flash-forward revealed Sayid as one of the Oceanic Six, on a golf course. He was approached by a guy who thought he looked familiar. Sayid said he was one of the Oceanic Six. The guy kinda freaked out. And then Sayid shot him. Did I leave out anything?

Friggin’ PG&E.

The writers and producers of Lost have kicked the “What the hell is going on?” factor up a notch or two this season. The questions are flying fast and furious, and the answers feel like they’re a long way off. So how did the mystery deepen this week? Let’s see what we’ve got.

MOBILE HOME
Jacob’s cabin remains on the move, as Locke discovered when he returned to the site and saw nothing there…except for that line of sand-like granules marking the spot. I knew last season when Locke crouched down and took note of that demarcation that we were meant to remember it. I also thought at the time that the substance might be gunpowder, though we have no reason to suspect that for now. The question remains – where is Jacob’s cabin? And who the hell is Jacob, anyway?

PICTURE THIS
Sayid wants to ascertain why Naomi was carrying a picture of Desmond and Penny, so Juliet leaves the helicopter site to fetch the time-leaping Irishman from the beach. When she returns with him, he begins questioning Frank, who insists that whatever Naomi’s reasons for having that picture were, they were unknown to him. Unsatisfied, Desmond demands that Frank look him in the eye and tell him that he and his crew have never heard of Penelope Widmore. Frank looks toward Daniel, who despite being engrossed in an experiment, manages to offer a shifty look in return…one that suggests the name Penelope Widmore is not at all unfamiliar to them. Frank remains mum, so Desmond announces that when the chopper leaves the island, he’ll be on it. Maybe on the freighter he can find somebody who has answers. Am I reading too much into Daniel’s look, or is there still a connection between this team and Penny?

WARNINGS
Daniel and Frank have two other brief but intriguing exchanges. The first comes when Daniel asks Frank to borrow the satellite phone so that he can call Regina on the freighter and get her help with his experiment. Frank hands Daniel the phone, but warns him to hang up immediately if Minkowski gets on the line. What does that warning mean? Minkowski is the still-unseen freighter member who took Jack’s call for rescue. Last week, Miles tried to contact him, but was told by Regina that he was unavailable. Miles wasn’t happy, and insisted that Minkowski call him back as soon as possible. So what’s the story with this Minkowski fellow? When will we meet him? Where was he when Miles called? And why does Frank not seem to trust him? Could Minkowski possibly be Ben’s spy? And while we’re at it, who’s Regina??

Intriguing Exchange #2 between Daniel and Frank comes later, when Frank is about to take off with the copter. Daniel pulls him aside and warns him that no matter what happens, he must follow the EXACT same bearing that they came in on. Frank gets the message; I wish we could say the same. Why is it necessary to be so precise and what might happen if Frank veers slightly off-course? In her recap (no longer available online) E! News columnist Kristin dos Santos theorizes that the bearing Daniel refers to is 325 – the bearing Ben instructed Michael to follow when he set him and Walt free. And I also caught a fan’s comment online suggesting that without using that bearing, one can not leave the island’s pull – hence Desmond’s inability to sail away after abandoning the hatch. Interesting idea…and probably accurate.

TIME LAPSE
The experiment about which Daniel contacts Regina has to do with her launching a device onto the island, which should be guided right to Daniel by a beacon that he sets up with some equipment he had on the chopper. Communicating with Regina via the satellite phone, Daniel watches the sky and listens as she counts down the moment to impact. But the sky stays clear, even after she reaches zero. Whatever she had launched, it didn’t land. Until it did, that is…31 minutes later. Daniel compares the clock on the beacon to the clock from the “payload,” and is definitely concerned about the difference in time. What larger implications does this have for the island?

MILES AWAY
Sayid, Kate and Miles arrive at the Others’ barracks, where Locke and Co. are awaiting them with a trap. Before the two groups meet however, Sayid makes an interesting discovery. In Ben’s home, he finds a secret room filled with suits, luggage and a drawer full of international currency as well as passports and identification. He opens one passport and finds Ben’s picture. I couldn’t make out the name on the page, but something tells me it’s not Benjamin Linus. (Entertainment Weekly‘s recapper says the name was Dean Moriarty – which has multiple literary origins. Here’s his full article. I don’t know whether to be annoyed by his constant references to literature or impressed that maybe his references really were intended by the writers of the show. Either way, his article is always an interesting read). Does this hidden room suggest that Ben leaves the island regularly on “business?”

Eventually, Locke and Sayid have a perfectly civil conversation in which Sayid insists that by returning with Charlotte, he can get a ride on the chopper to the freighter and look for answers. He offers Miles in exchange for Charlotte. I didn’t understand why it would be acceptable to Frank for Sayid to return with Charlotte and not Miles. I would think the idea was that Frank wouldn’t take off until all of his team was safe and accounted for. Maybe in the opening sequence that I missed, Sayid asked Frank for his word that he would transport him to the freighter if he returned with Charlotte. If this is the case, then Sayid could leave Miles behind thanks to the Law of Semantics. This would explain Frank saying, “You cheated” when Sayid brings Charlotte back. Whatever the case, Frank does pilot the chopper off the island, with Sayid, Desmond and Naomi’s body onboard. Charlotte chooses to remain on the island, saying that she has work to do. Daniel stays as well. So after Michael and Walt, Sayid becomes the third survivor of Flight 815 to leave the island. Will he be back again before returning home as one of the Oceanic Six?

By the way, with the absence from this episode of Matthew Abbadon, the creepiest (and coolest) moment of the night goes to Miles, who answers Hurley’s question about whether the freighter folk are here to kill them with an ass-kicking delivery of the line, “Not yet.”

“EVERYBODY HAS A BOSS”
So says Sayid to Elsa, the woman whose employer, a supposed “economist,” he has been tasked with killing. The episode’s big shocking reveal is that Sayid’s post-island boss, who has assigned him this execution, is Ben. (Or appears to be Ben…more on that in moment). When Sayid tries to tell Elsa, who he seems to have fallen for, that he is going to kill her boss because his name is on a list he was given (hmm, a list…why does this sound familiar?), she shoots him. Turns out she was just as interested in finding Sayid’s puppet master as he was in finding hers. Sayid seems caught in the middle of quite a fight – with Ben leading one side…and who on the other? Internet speculation is that Matthew Abbadon is the other key figure here. And if that’s true, maybe Ben really is one of “the good guys,” because this Abbadon dude seems evil to the core.

But how did Sayid get here? How could he be working for Ben? Back on the island, he told Locke, “The day I begin trusting him is the day I would have sold my soul.” It would appear that day has come for Sayid Jarrah. After being shot by Elsa (who he kills moments later), Sayid makes his way to what seems to be an animal hospital, where his bullet wound is tended to by Ben. Sayid is emotional over the night’s events, but Ben remains cold. What follows is the episode’s most fascinating exchange – even more so than anything spoken earlier between Daniel and Frank. Ben tells Sayid, “These people don’t deserve our sympathies. Need I remind you what happened the last time you thought with your heart instead of your gun?”

Sayid answers, “You used her to recruit me into killing for you.”

“Do you want to protect your friends or not, Sayid?” Ben asks him.

Whoa. So it seems that Sayid has been working for Ben for a while. How long is this list naming people that have been marked for termination? And what did happen the last time Sayid thought with his heart instead of his gun? Did he lose another love? Could it have been Nadia, the woman from his pre-island life who he still loves (despite the beach fling with Shannon)? How did Ben use Nadia, or whoever the woman in question is, to recruit Sayid? Hopefully his next flash-forward will fill in the gaps. And how are his actions protecting his friends? Which friends is he protecting? The other five members of the Oceanic Six? People still on the island?

One last thought on this scene. I couldn’t help but wonder when we saw Ben treating Sayid if it was, in fact, Ben. I’m sure it is…but there was just something about him that made the word “clone” pop into my head very briefly. I’m just sayin’…

FINAL THOUGHTS
Another mind-boggling episode that featured good material all around (including some great Hurley lines and a cool scene between Kate and Sawyer that led to a surprising turn of events) but deepened the mystery considerably. If I have one complaint about the season so far, it’s that new questions are coming at us like machine gun fire. I don’t mind waiting for the answers; it’s keeping track of all the questions that bothers me. Working on these write-ups helps me keep it all straight.

Tonight’s Episode: Eggtown.  If my power goes out again, mark my words: there will be blood.

POST-STRIKE NOTE:
Tonight’s episode is the fourth of eight that were shot before the strike. Originally, another eight episodes were supposed to be made, for a season total of 16. But the strike knocked that plan out of commission. Here’s the new plan: five more episodes, instead of eight, will be filmed for this season. The writers will figure out how to condense their original plan so that all the key story points that were left to play out this year will still be addressed. Supposedly, the missing three episodes will be worked into the next two seasons so that the show will wind up having the same total number of episodes as was planned. The remaining five episodes will begin airing on April 24th, at yet another new time: 10:00pm on Thursdays (a mistake, if you ask me, but they didn’t).

So that means there will be about a month between the end of this current slate of episodes and the beginning of the post-strike ones. I had also heard that ABC might possibly hold off airing episode eight for that month, and put it on instead the week before the five new shows start up. The reason for this is that apparently the end of episode seven is a more logical and less frustrating point to stop for four weeks than the end of episode eight, which is supposed to be something of a shocker. So says the rumor mill.