Lostwatch Addendum: Who the Hell Is Anakin?

On the first point you’re making, I would argue that the fact that “Smokie” isn’t a character, a person, or anything of the kind, is what makes him appealing. He is a complete mystery. While characters like Ben makes me wonder what made him what he is, with Smokie, I am just wondering what the hell he is. He might be good, he might be bad, he might be real, he might be fake. I have NO IDEA. It’s beautiful.

When it comes to Widmore and the rocket, I think that Widmore wasn’t making an attempt to kill Smokiething, but he may be aware of the fact that in order to leave the island, he needs his entourage. That’s what he was trying to use as a bargaining chip, not Smokie’s life.

James, you strike me as the kind of guy who would be a lot of fun to watch the finale with. Feel like swinging out to Wisconsin?

Will there be cheese curds? Frozen custard? Leinie’s?

Good point. Also raises further question, though: given what a bastard we know Widmore to be, why not (if he knows Smokey needs the Candidates) just bust a cap in his prisoners? Problem solved.

I’m also wondering how a Candidate “accepts” or is accepted for the position of New Jacob. Is there a human resources office?

I presumed that the rocket attack was meant to take out Smokey’s followers rather than Smokey himself.

For weeks, my wife has been referring to Zoe as “low-rent Tina Fey,” so it amuses me to see that others have made similar comments.

Slightly off-topic for this week’s episode, but one thing that’s bugging me: If the Others were Jacob’s followers, and the “candidates” were brought to the Island by Jacob, why were the Others so thoroughly belligerent toward them for the first few seasons? (And, as a corollary: if Kate isn’t a candidate, why did the Others kidnap her along with Jack and Sawyer at the end of season two?)

STAR WARS aside: While I agree that the Emperor in RETURN OF THE JEDI was a stock baddie, Palpatine/Sidious is perhaps the best thing to come out of the prequels. Ian McDiarmid is the only actor in that trilogy who knows what to do with Lucas’ dialogue. As a friend of mine pointed out to me, Sidious is the rare supervillain whose extremely complex master plan *actually works*. He manages to keeps his schemes for galactic subjugation going for 35+ years!

There were glimmers for both Sayid and Claire this week — maybe proximity impacts the amount of control over your freewill that Smokey has? I just don’t think that Claire would have gotten on that boat if Smokey had been closer.

And it was mention of the people Sayid and Claire love the most in the world, Nadia and Aaron, that gives each of them pause. Lindelof and Cuse have said that this season — the whole show — is ultimately about love. Is that what enables people to resist Smokey?

I’ve seen a lot written about the influence that the “Wrinkle in Time” books might have had on LOST. Interesting because in all her books the single greatest power in the universe is love. It’s what saves Mr. Murray, Charles Wallace, the twins, and eventually the entire world over and over (Meg was often doing the saving). In “As Swiftly Tilting Planet,” there ends up being two realities — the one where war is about to start and the one where peace wins out because Charles Wallace corrects a “might have been,” a point in time where a decision is made that has a cascade effect on all decisions after that and decides the future. Charles Wallace is able to travel between the two realities, and Mrs. O’Keefe and Meg share part of the multi-reality-awareness with him. I have wondered if the difference between the two realities in LOST comes down to a might-have-been, something we’ll discover in learning more about Jacob and Smokey.

Finally, I like Smokey as a malevolent force, simply because Terry O’Quinn is playing the hell out of it!

Yes, yes, yes.

I agree O’Quinn is great here, as when he was Locke. And I think Smokey as a mystery/force is fascinating–but I don’t think the show can rely on him to serve the functions of a traditional psychological character.
Imperfect analogy, but Sauron in Lord of the Rings worked as a distant malevolent eye… but as a close-up character, you needed Gollum.

To answer your final question (as it draws the most ire in me these days), I give you a few thoughts. One is subjective: the actress playing Zoe is doing a bad job. I realize that she’s been around for years (I believe she was on L.A. Law), but she’s doing a really bad job on Lost. Her first scene last night irked me because I felt she was reading her lines in an odd, stilted fashion. Add to that the fact that the actress did a few interviews where she all but said that the entirety of Lost would be represented by her character (keeping in mind, of course, that the comments were said after she’d appeared in one or two episodes, where no such hints were dropped), and you’ve got some backlash.

Here’s another question: why is she alive? Sayid should have killed her at the end of Happily Ever After (and from what I’ve read elsewhere, if the producers/writers didn’t like her performance, she would have died then). I find her character useless at best.

North Carolina’s closer. Just sayin.

My guess re the Others: they were consistently belligerent toward the Losties as a group, but were interested in capturing/detaining the Candidates (recall “Jacob’s list”). But I’m sure there are things I’m forgetting.

With “Unlocke” having the personality that he has I feel it gives the chance for the show to focus on the characters that we’ve been watching for 6 seasons as we move closer and closer to the finale. Obviously, with the child and the little flashes of emotion we see from him, there is something behind the character but for now I would rather the other characters tie up their loose ends. As of right now he’s much, much more interesting than Vader.

Hmm… pulled pork? boiled peanuts? Maybe we’ll have to work up some regional finale-night menus here.

Truth be told, I have a friend who is having the temerity to get married the afternoon of May 23. It’ll be all I can do to get to Brooklyn in time.

Maybe Sawyer never got around to seeing the Star Wars prequels (and Vader’s real name is pretty forgettable in the original trilogy). His pop culture knowledge stopped in 2004, so he definitely missed episode 3. Whereas Hurley got to leave the island and probably got caught up.

Just a nitpicky thing, but it drives me nuts when Claire rails against the Losties for abandoning her and they just stand there blankly. The obvious retort is: “Claire, we woke up and you were gone. We searched everywhere but couldn’t find you. You left us, left your baby. . .” yet nothing of the sort comes out in response to her crazy gun waving.

For such a smartly written show, it requires the characters to act uncharacteristically stupid.

As for UnLocke, I’m counting on the mysterious boy scout that pops up to give the character some flesh.

6|13 surprised me twice, A) with Sawyer not knowing Anakin //re Star Wars, with Empires 30th birthday on May 21… do we live in the timeline in which Leigh Bracketts script was replaced by Hugos, finished with a little help from Kasdan?//
and B) by Smokey calling Locke a sucker. I am quite sure that this will smash right back into his stolen face, and that the real John Locke will make a kickass return.

Jack saying goodbye to his son foreshadowed that he will return as a changed man from operating on Locke, and it can’t be a coincidence that Johns neural sack was obliterated…

I know! She took off, nobody could find her. She chose to leave THEM. She chose to leave Aaron. She abandoned her son to run around with Island spirits or whatever, and they did the best they could without her. It definitely seems like somebody should be bringing this to her attention.

For a completely oddball perspective, you may want to check out this blog, neverseenlost.wordpress.com. It’s done by someone who has never seen any Lost episodes previous to Season 6. It’s hilarious, and is a great example of seeing the show through fresh, innocent? eyes.

As I am from Wiscsonsin, I have to let you know that my friends and I are indeed cooking up our own deep fried cheese curds for the finale! And oh yes, Leinies will be present.

What struck me is odd about the whole ‘Anakin’ thing was that the writers deliberately chose to go with the less recognizable name. After an extremely scientific poll of three co-workers, no one was able to tell me Vader’s real name. They all knew who Darth Vader was but they couldn’t pull Anakin’s name out of the ether. So it stands to reason that Sawyer might not recognize Vader’s real name.

BUT…We, the Lost watching audience, would.

So then that just leaves us with the theory that the writers deliberately chose to reference ‘Anakin’ and not Vader. Could we just chalk it up to Hurley’s dorky love for Star Wars? I would say no, because Hurley is not a real person and everything he says is scripted by the writers to achieve a purpose. Some times that purpose is to make you think “Hey! Hurley’s a real 3D character.” and sometimes that purpose is to voice what the audience is thinking i.e. “Are you a vampire? Terminator?” etc. Hurley, like every character ever written, is speaking for the writer(s).

The question is then, what is the writer trying to say by using Vader’s first name instead of the high marquee value of ‘Darth Vader’? I can’t honestly believe LFL would sue over Lost using Darth Vader in dialogue and I find it even more unlikely that the writers are wasting time trying to buff up Hurley’s Dork-Cred by having him fling around Evidence That Hurley Likes Star Wars ™. I think that’s been proved quite nicely.

So then why is it “Anakin” and not “Darth Vader”?

There is a theory that I’ve recently bumped into is that Darth Vader and Anakin are essentially seperate beings. Vader literally ‘invaded’ Anakin and imprisoned him somewhere in the back of his mind or whatever. So all the evil that was done was done by Vader and NOT Anakin. Once Anakin sees the Emperor torturing his and Padme’s son, he has the strength to overthrow Vader, rescue his son and kill the Emperor. With the Emperor defeated, the light side of the force has won and Anakin can die and become one with the force. I believe this is theory behind having Hayden Christensen era Vader appearing in the newer DVDs of Return of the Jedi as opposed to Sebastian Shaw.

So…What if the people we’re interacting with now are not actually Sayid and Claire but are…for lack of a better term actually Darth Sayid and Darth Claire? This would play into the theory of infection mentioned earlier in the series by Dogen and it could even be applied to MIBLocke and our dearly missed John Locke. If MIBLocke has pulled a Vader on our Locke then there is still hope, as voiced by Hurley, for our Locke to come back from the darkness to chuck MIBLocke into the reactor core and free everybody else.

So perhaps the Anakin shout out is a way to say to the audience, “Don’t give up hope! This is the Empire Strikes back part of the season. We’re almost to Return of the Jedi. Stick with us just a little longer!”

Wow! That’s probably the longest post I’ve made here and it’s probably totally obvious to everybody else but I thought I would share.

I don’t know how much this quote or this scene had to do with the series as a whole, but one thing definitely struck me. When Sawyer and Hurley had their exchange, the entire room I was watching LOST with chuckled. I’m going to miss having these moments each week, and a show that has been such a water-cooler pop culture sensation for so long. For a show about a deserted island, it has done an incredible job of including other pop culture staples. It’ll be interesting to see what happens to all these characters in 4 weeks, and what happens to the actors afterwards (http://thesmogger.com/2010/04/21/band-of-misfits-where-will-the-lost-cast-end-up-once-the-curtain-closes/)

Also, the Others were pretty much under Ben’s control when our Losties arrived, yes? I think Ben used the idea of Jacob to control people, but he never actually had any communication with him. So maybe Ben had no clue about the candidate stuff or the fact that our characters were brought to the island by Jacob.

I’m guessing we’ll have an upcoming episode where we learn more about both Smokey and Jacob and their backstories. Maybe it’ll all make sense then.

“Smash right back into his stolen face.” hahahah!

Also, I hope you’re totally right.

Interesting thoughts about unLocke. Perhaps he is just a malevolent force and not a fully realized character. But why take on Locke’s body? He could have become anybody; he could have stayed Christian. Why choose Locke? Yes, to manipulate Ben into killing Jacob, because Ben had the most turbulent history with Locke, but still, perhaps MIB identifies with Locke? Both had the same line: “Don’t tell me what I can’t do.” Perhaps MIB was once a man of faith who was played for a sucker, perhaps by Jacob. He could have been a good, idealistic guy who was tricked and turned over to the Dark Side. Maybe Jacob for all of his people have a choice philosophy is really the villain here. (MIB given a choice by Jacob, made the wrong one, was sentenced to the island because of it, and is now very bitter.)

Though I think the final will have all the characters reject this sick game between these two forces and leave them to endlessly fight. Perhaps an Annakin like redemption will occur for the MIB.(Jacob could be lying with the bottle metaphor).

i still think it’s all about mormons: http://www.lightplanet.com/mormons/book_of_mormon/books/jacob.html

sorry i’ve been on holuday, so i’m late here having onlyjust watched this episode. think next week’s a jacob/esau backstory episode.

and wallace is looking more and more like desmond every week (mr 108 degrees)