I Am DB

Yesterday we looked at the posters for the new season, but some of you may also have seen the cast promotional photos that were produced recently, which are modeled on The Last Supper – a popular source of inspiration, as this website attests. The series has been called The Lost Supper, and features three different poses. People have been analyzing them in great detail, trying to extrapolate meanings not just in how they reference DaVinci’s original painting, but also in how they differ from each other. You might think I’m one of those analyzers, but I’m not. I just think they’re cool. If you’re interested in such detailed examinations, I’m sure you can find some articles online. Do I have to do everything?

One picture features the cast staring out at us; one features them all looking at Locke; and the last one is sort of all over the place, though the people at Frank’s end of the table seem awfully interested in him.

So we’ve established this final season’s cast of regulars, and we know some of the old friends who will be coming back. And while I’ve read nothing affirming this, I assume that all the actors who plays Lost‘s pivotal recurring characters are locked in for the necessary episodes, because what would this season be without Christian Shepherd, Charles Widmore, Eloise Hawking, Penny, Pierre Chang, Horace Goodspeed and Bram? And I wonder if we’ll see Jacob again (in the same form, that is).

ONE STEP FORWARD, TWO STEPS BACK
Even as the show enters the home stretch, new characters will be introduced. One will be played by William Atherton, the King of 80s Movies Smarmy Antagonists (see Ghostbusters‘ Walter Peck, Die Hard‘s Dick Thornberg, and Real Genius‘ Professor Jerry Hathaway), while another will be played by John Hawkes, known for TV series like Deadwood and Eastbound & Down, as well as movies like The Perfect Storm and American Gangster.

The casting of Hawkes interests me, as a point of trivia, because he is by my count the sixth Deadwood alum to be featured on Lost. What is it with Damon and Carlton and their hard-on for Deadwood? (Technically speaking, I suppose “hard-on” and “deadwood” are contradictory, so please forgive me…both for that contradiction and for the lame, juvenile joke I’m making about it right now.) Anyway, are they trying to tell us something? Do the answers to Lost‘s mysteries lie in HBO’s admired Old West series? In addition to Hawkes coming onboard, Deadwood resident Robin Wiegert played Juliet’s sister Rachel; Paula Malcolmson played Colleen, the Other who was shot by Sun on Desmond’s boat, driving her asshole husband Danny Pickett to almost kill Sawyer; Kim Dickens played Cassie, friend to Kate and mother to Sawyer’s daughter Clementine; William Sanderson played Oldham, the Dharma medicine man who administered a truth serum to Sayid last season; and Titus Welliver played Jacob’s mysterious nemesis known by Lost fans as the Man in Black.

I have no idea if Atherton, Hawkes and the other new characters/actors announced will be one-time guest stars or more significant, recurring characters. But what does seem clear is that while we can expect lots of big answers this year, we can also expect lots more questions and confusion along the way. Emile de Ravin (Claire) said at a press conference a couple of weeks ago that she had to read the script for the season premiere three times before she could make sense of it. Damon’s response to that comment was, “Get ready to scratch your heads, America!” My response to that comment is, “We’ve been scratching our heads for six years, Damon.”

Michael Emerson (Ben) has gone further. Just last week, in an interview with TV Guide, he said, “I feel great curiosity, because from what I’ve shot up to this point, I don’t see any end in sight. The storyline is continuing to expand instead of contract. It’s grown more fragmented, rather than becoming more unified. The threads aren’t joining up, they’re flying away. It will be dazzling to see. Certain big mysteries on this show are being answered. Every episode, something huge is falling into place, but it’s still a mystery.”

I can’t wait to see how they tie it all together. I recall going into the final Harry Potter book thinking that I had a pretty good idea of what big things the book would need to address, and while it did address most of them, it brought up so much new stuff and went off in such unexpected directions that I would literally have to stop periodically and see how many pages were left because I couldn’t figure out how Rowling would wrap up all the new ideas she was introducing, let alone all the questions from earlier books that she had to resolve. But she did it. And I expect Lost will do it too.