I Am DB

Two things to share today as we count down the days to Lost’s return. (Have you had enough of me yet?)

MORE THAN MEETS THE EYE
When I sent links the other day to the “Lost Supper” photos, I mentioned that a lot of fans with even more time on their hands than me were closely analyzing them and looking for clues. What does it means that Jack’s hands are hidden behind Locke in one picture but crossed in front of his chest in another? Why are Jin and Sun apart in one picture but together in another? Why is Kate in the same position as Judas? I read articles that asked those exact questions and what seemed like a hundred more like them. I thought the speculation went a little overboard. There is, however, another sample of Season Six promo art that I’m much more interested in seeing analyzed but which hasn’t grabbed nearly as much attention. In the current-but-about-to-go-off-the-stands issue of Entertainment Weekly (with Jay Leno on the cover), there is an insert sponsored by Verizon Wireless. It’s a 14 page booklet that begins with a note from Damon and Carlton, followed by twelve pages of images, most focusing on a single character. They’re cool enough just on the surface, but upon my second or third look at them, I saw they were full of hidden imagery. Knowing that Damon and Carlton are involved in the creation of all these promotional materials makes me wonder what these clues mean, because they must mean something.

Unfortunately, the scans linked above aren’t high-quality enough to see all the goodies, and I couldn’t find another version to offer, so these will have to suffice unless you can get your hands on the magazine (click on the pictures to enlarge). I discovered some things on my own, while others I only found after reading the Comments section. Some of the “hidden” items aren’t too hidden; in Kate’s picture, for example, there is a reflection of Claire in the water that’s easy to spot. But here are some of the other things, which you may or may not be able to see in these scans:

• A hospital business card for Jack next to his reflection.

• A police badge between Ben’s feet.

• Turn Sayid’s page counter-clockwise and you’ll see the island’s statue where his reflection should be.

• On the same page, there is a face hidden in the second building down (or second in from the left if you’re still looking counter-clockwise).

• Hurley is wearing a plain T-shirt in his picture, but in his reflection the shirt has a Mr. Cluck’s logo.

• Half a face is hidden in the upper right side of the Hurley page. It looks like it could be Charles Widmore. Or John McCain. Maybe Benjamin Franklin.

• Barely visible even in the hard copy version, there is another face, this one in the clouds behind Jin.

• Also above/behind Jin, in the same spot as that face, is what looks like a newspaper headline, maybe in a foreign language.

• The Smoke monster is reflected in one of the foreground buildings on the last page.

• The taller building just above that one is marked with backwards text.

What does it all mean? I don’t know. Does it matter? Probably not. Do I want to know anyway? Yes, yes, a thousand times yes.

YOU CAN’T HANDLE THE TRUCE!
One of last season’s plot points was a truce that existed between the Dharma Initiative and the Hostiles. Very little was known about the terms of this truce, other than that one group crossing into the other’s territory was a violation (and remember that the Swan site – where last season’s climactic incident occurred – was not in Dharma’s allotted territory. They were “off the grid,” in Hostile land). Well now the truce is out there. In a clever bit of marketing, the Season Five Blu-Ray set was available in a special edition called the Dharma Orientation Kit, which was designed to be a replica of what new recruits to the Dharma Initiative would receive upon their island arrival. I decided to forgo this set; I’m saving my money for the inevitable Complete Series package (which, incidentally, I’m hoping comes in an octagon-shaped, Dharma logo case). Anyway, if you look at the picture in the link, you see there is a binder. Well apparently, tucked into the back of that binder is a sealed envelope. And in that sealed envelope is a copy of the original Letter of Truce as typed by Horace Goodspeed and notated by Richard Alpert. Take a look at the front (click to enlarge) and back. Surely the reasons (and intriguing wording) behind Alpert’s addendums will be revealed this season?

Chew on that for the weekend and we’ll reconvene on Monday…

[Post updated August 2010 to replace outdated links]

Today’s offering is short, and before I get to it, indulge me a Happy Birthday shout-out to my friend and reader Stella B., maker of best-selling zombie video games. Hope you’re having a good one, Stella.

THE RAIN IN SPAIN FALLS MAINLY ON THE CRASHED PLANE
Okay, just a few things to share today. Lost isn’t just a phenomenon here in the States. It’s a hit internationally as well, and other countries have been producing their own TV promos for the new season, perhaps none as cool as this one from Spain, which has garnered a lot of attention. You may need to watch it three times – once to appreciate the visuals, once to read all the subtitles and once just because the song is awesome (for those unfamiliar with it, it’s Everything in It’s Right Place, by Radiohead).

I also found a version with English narration, spoken by Terry O’Quinn. Picture quality isn’t quite as good, but you can check it out here if you’d prefer.

This commercial, from the same station, is also worth checking out. Cool Rorschachs.

ARS GRATIA LOSTIS
A few months ago I sent a link to a site featuring an awesome series of posters that were created by apparently well-known graphic artists. Their creations were part of a larger event/series called the Lost Underground Art Project, which culminated with a big show at a gallery in Los Angeles featuring a whole slew of Lost-inspired art. Check it out.

And finally, I leave you with another video, this one an interesting news story about enthusiastic Lost fans like us. Not to be missed…

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.

Greetings Lost fans, and welcome back. The beginning of the end is upon us, as you no doubt know: the final season begins a week from tonight, and my anticipation is at a fever pitch. I’ve been re-watching the entire series over the last few months, and on Sunday night I was once again slack jawed as Juliet bashed that bomb core and the screen faded to brilliant white. Next Tuesday’s two-hour season premiere, LA X, has popped up on my DVR To-Do list with the maddeningly vague plot synopsis, “The aftermath from the detonation of the hydrogen bomb is revealed.” Yeah…we got that.

Over the last few months I’ve been gathering material for what I thought would be one pre-season message, sent the day of the first episode. But I’ve got too much stuff for that, so welcome to Eight Days of Lost. If you weren’t sick of me before, I’m betting you will be soon, ‘cause my name will be popping up in your Inbox every day for the next week (maybe I’ll take the weekend off; we’ll see). Don’t worry, most of the messages will just have few links and other stuff to share. We’ll get into the heavy prep in the last day or two. For now, think of this as my way of staying sane for the next week. I’ve got Lost fever, and having these messages to send between now and premiere night is like taking my medicine. Plus I need to get back into the groove of writing these things. I have to rediscover my voice, and assembling a week’s worth of brief updates beats building a sweat lodge (John Locke’s method of voice recovery, if you recall Season Three).

THE RETURNING ROSTER
I talked about some of this in my last message a couple months ago, but here’s the most up-to-date word on who we’ll be seeing in Season Six. Henry Ian Cusick, who plays Desmond, will not be a regular cast member this year. He’ll be around, but presumably he doesn’t factor into enough of these last 18 hours to merit full-time status. On the other hand, Nestor Carbonell, Jeff Fahey and Zuleikha Robinson – Richard Alpert, Frank Lapidus and Ilana, respectively – will be factoring in significantly; they have been anointed series regulars. Last season regulars Elizabeth Mitchell and Jeremy Davies – Juliet and Faraday – will also be off the permanent list, but both will be seen again. Other dearly departed characters confirmed for reappearances are Charlie, Boone, Michael, Libby, Charlotte, Minkowski (the freighter’s communication’s officer) and Helen (Locke’s special lady friend). I have no idea if these returns will be substantial or amount to one-time cameos, but I look forward to finding out. And there’s no word yet on whether other former island denizens like Shannon, Ana Lucia or Mr. Eko will be back, but I’m hoping Damon and Carlton have some surprises up their sleeve. Walt remains a big X Factor. Damon had this to say in an October Q&A from USA Today:

“I think a lot of people are justifiably frustrated about the Walt of it all. We said he has this special ability, and the Others obviously grabbed him and studied him for awhile, then they got freaked out by him and decided to let him go. I think that there are certain stories on the show that feel like dangling participles based on external factors. For us, we were incredibly limited by the fact that Malcolm David Kelley was growing at an exponentially faster rate than the show was progressing. So, you know, when we showed him in Season 5 and Locke is trying to recruit members of the Oceanic Six, the only way that it worked was to see him three years older. But hopefully, why Walt was special and the role he played on the show will have a new significance when all is said and done. And I’m not sure we really need the character of Walt to explain the significance.”

Well, I didn’t hear a denial in there. He didn’t say that Kelley won’t appear again, so even though it doesn’t sound good, I’m hoping that he’s just trying to throw us off the scent.

THE LINE-UP
In my last message, I included pictures of an un-official Season Six poster, created specifically for last summer’s Comic-Con, which featured almost every major character from the show’s history. An official poster has since been released, and they’re very similar.

Some different pictures are used in the new one, but the order of their arrangement is exactly the same except for Lapidus, who is in an entirely new position in this official version, which can be seen in close-up here. For those of you interested in comparisons, here are the two close-up halves of the Comic-Con version:

What jumps out to me about these is that they do not feature Walt. Hell, Vincent the dog is in the official poster (though not the first one), but not Walt. Ilana is also conspicuously absent. But there is a reason for everything. In the same interview referenced above, Damon was asked about the poster (at the time of the interview, the official poster had not yet been released, but the answer still applies):

There’s been so much analysis of this year’s promotional poster. Do you have a big part in creating that?

Yeah. Everything in the design of that poster is intentional. We oversaw it — now we know the audience looks at that stuff so closely, so we don’t want there to be anything that we don’t approve, especially at this point in the game. I’m not going to explain why anything is what it is, other than that everything is by design. You’ll just have to watch the final season and decide for yourself. It’s a little bit like, “Why is Paul McCartney holding a cigarette with his right hand when he’s a lefty on the Abbey Road cover?”

Keep that admission in mind, because it will prove relevant for something else I’ll share later in the week. For now, I’ll wrap up day one of my Lost countdown with this short video that features some of the cast members looking back and ahead.

[Post updated August 2010 to replace outdated links]

Namaste, Lost fans. While I wish I were writing today because the final season of the show were upon us, I’m afraid we’re still a few months off. But we are close enough to detect echoes and whispers in the ether. It’s been a long hibernation, and now we’re ever so slowly nearing the waking hour. True Blood and Harry Potter helped my geekhood over the summer, and perhaps some of you have relied on Fringe or Flashforward for your trippy sci-fi fix.

Me, well, I skipped those shows for now and instead went back to the beginning of Lost. To refresh myself on all the mysteries and clues leading up to the final season, I’m re-watching the whole series. Ahh, nostalgia. The first time Sawyer calls Kate “Freckles.” Sun not speaking English. Boone not being dead. The first appearance of Ben, caught in Rousseau’s net and instantly elevating the show with his manipulative games. Sun’s pregnancy test revealing the show’s first mention of the name Widmore. And of course, the mysteries that are still unsolved. The two corpses in the caves. Whispers and apparitions in the jungle (Kate’s horse, Walt, etc.). Rose saying on the first night that there’s something familiar about the sound made by the “Monster” (a detail I had not remembered and now wonder about).

TITLE TEASE
So as Season Six looms a little closer on the horizon, what do we know? Well, we know that the season was originally slated for 17 episodes, but now we’re getting 18, allowing for a two hour season premiere. That opening salvo, which will take place in the aftermath of the explosion that closed out Season Five, is titled LA X. An allusion to Los Angeles International Airport, of course, where Oceanic 815 was supposed to land…and still may if Faraday’s plan – seized on by Jack – comes to pass. But the space before the X implies something more. X as in 10? X as in marks the spot? X as in incorrect, wrong, bad? X as in the Los Angeles-based punk band fronted by Viggo Mortensen’s X-wife?

The following two episodes are titled What Kate Does (a play on Season Two’s What Kate Did, in which we learned why she was wanted by the law); and The Substitute, an episode that is said to be Locke-centric.

Matthew Fox gave an interview last summer in which he said the beginning of the season would be “very surprising — and probably fairly confusing, initially, to the audience.”  Thanks for the warning, Matt. Because everything has been so crystal clear up to this point…

THE DEPARTED
A lot of the speculation for the final season focuses on what familiar faces from days past will be making a return. Given the potential for an alternate timeline in which the plane lands safely in Los Angeles, we could be seeing a number of old friends again. Here’s who we know will be back, though nothing has been said about when, how often or in what context (flashbacks, alternate realities, “real time,” etc.): Faraday. Juliet. Boone. Helen (Locke’s lady love). It’s expected that we’ll see Shannon, Charlie and Dr. Arzt (Season One’s victim of sweaty dynamite at the Black Rock), but they haven’t been confirmed to appear.

And other actors have indicated they’re eager and willing to return. Despite the stories that he was displeased with his character arc and asked to be released from the show, Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje has publicly stated he’s ready and willing to pull duty as Mr. Eko. And Michelle Rodriguez showed up for an Ana Lucia cameo last season, so I’m sure she’d be up for doing it again. I’ve heard that Cynthia Watros and Mira Furlan – Libby and Rousseau, respectively – have turned down offers to return, which is a bummer… but I’ll believe it when I don’t see them.

The big question marks for me remain Michael and Walt. For my money, finding out the whole scoop about Walt – his powers, what the Others wanted with him, etc. – is something the show must significantly address. Malcolm David Kelly is obviously too old now to play Walt in a plane-lands-at-LAX-in-2004 timeline, but once we get back to what’s happening in 2007…don’t let me down, guys.

And Michael? If any of you have been to an AMC movie theater recently, you might have seen that their normally annoying First Look reel that precedes the movie has been playing a short feature promoting Season Six. No new footage or anything like that, just lots of clips and newer interviews with Damon and Carlton. But toward the end of it, the narrator says something along the lines of “we’ll finally learn the fate of all the Flight 815 passengers.” This is said over a montage of character close-ups from seasons past, including Charlie and Michael. Does that mean that we can expect to see those two again, or is it just deceptive editing? The show owes it to Michael – and to all of us – to bring him back and make up for the way they blew it with his return in Season Four. Harold Perrineau didn’t seem too happy with the way Michael was brought back and then dispatched so clumsily, but it sounds like he’d still be willing to return if they asked him. I hope we’ll see him again. I’m re-watching those last few episodes of Season Two now – when he killed Ana Lucia and Libby and brought Jack, Kate, Hurley and Sawyer to the Others…and man, Perrineau was great.

Another hint that I don’t know what to make of is the poster for the final season that was produced over the summer for Comic-Con. Take a look at the full version, and then close-ups, split into two parts: here’s the first half and here’s the second. It’s cool to see pretty much the entire series worth of regular players lined up like that, but are we to read into it that all those characters will appear in Season Six? And once again…where’s Walt? I do like that Locke appears with his back toward us…setting him apart from everyone else – fitting considering that Locke doesn’t seem to be Locke anymore. It’s got a nice Abbey Road, Paul-is-Dead touch to it. According to ABC, this is not the official poster for the final season. When that artwork is revealed, it will sport the tagline “Destiny Found.”

Oh, and speaking of unofficial posters, you gotta check out this series of seriously cool posters that were created by graphic artist Lost fans (click on any of them for larger versions and a complete explanation of how they came to be). They’re all sold out unfortunately, but there are still three yet to be released.

CHECKING IN
With all the anticipation over who will be back from the dead for the final season, it would be easy to overlook who’ll be back from the living. But it appears that three previously recurring characters will be onboard for full time duty as regulars. Nestor Carbonell, Jeff Fahey and Zuleikha Robinson will join up full time as Richard Alpert, Frank Lapidus and Ilana, respectively. And though this is old, old news, it’s still excites me to know that Claire will be back full time. Where the %@$ has that chick been?

BACK TO SLEEP
I will end this brief update – probably the briefest e-mail about Lost I’ve ever sent – with links to two recent articles. The first is an interview with Elizabeth Mitchell, Damon and Carlton as they talk about all things Juliet. The second is an interesting article about a Lost spin-off that is in the works.

Oh, and I have to add – it was great to see Michael Emerson – aka Ben – win an Emmy award for Best Supporting Actor in a Drama Series. He was robbed last year, so it was nice to see him get it for Season Five.

Tonight’s Episode: Live Together, Die Alone (Season Two’s finale. Damn, I better pick up the pace if I want to be caught up by late January…)