Tuned In

Lostwatch: Locke and Load

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SPOILER ALERT: If you have not yet watched Lost, secure your gas mask. It’s going to get ugly.

This was not the best episode of Lost to be watching, on vacation, at my mother’s house, without benefit of TiVo. There were plenty of scenes I’d have liked to have paused, freeze-framed and rewound. Anyway, I’ll keep it brief(ish) and let you have your way in the comments:

* Locke? Locke?! No. Not after he had some if his most thrilling, you-the-man scenes yet. Locke pounding the crap out of Mikhail, and totally undermining Ben’s authority in the Others camp by mentioning Jacob in front of the rest of the group: Hells yeah. It showed Locke again as the one Lostie capable of getting to Ben and out-Benning him. Well, except for the whole business of getting capped in that mass Dharma grave. I’m not sure if I should be mourning Locke yet–we didn’t see him expire, we know the island has a special thing for healing him, and Ben, in the manner of a good comic-book villain, didn’t bother to pop a slug into the brain of his still-breathing nemesis. Then again, we have been promised a high body count at the end of this season, and it would be a ballsy way to go. I mean, even The Sopranos has yet to kill someone this central (and I’m counting Big Pussy). [Update: God killed Livia, not David Chase.]

* So what happens now to the producers’ long-held contention that nothing is going on in Lost that can’t be explained by non-supernatural means? I’m not thinking the scene with Ben’s Mom so much — this is not the first time we’ve seen an apparent ghost on the show — but the Jacob scene pretty much took the show into Carnivale territory (with Jacob in the role of Management). I’m sure there may be a scientific explanation for what we saw in Jacob’s cabin. I just can’t think of one that doesn’t sound like the denouement of a Scooby-Doo episode.

* Devastating-in-retrospect moment: Ben looking at his carved wooden figurine, while he knows (and before we know) that this is the day he will abet the mass murder of the Dharma group, including (presumably) his childhood sweetheart.

* One advantage of watching Lost on my mother’s TV: she leaves the closed captioning on. The whispers–which we have not heard in quite some time–are explicitly identified in captioning as “[ghostly whispers].” For whatever that’s worth. For now, early Happy Mother’s Day, Mom. And to you, Mrs. Linus, wherever you are.