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Lost: Dr. Linus
Mar 9th, 2010 by Seth

First off, let me say that I love the Ben Linus charcter more than almost any other character in the Lost pantheon (save perhaps Locke). Michael Emerson is a great actor and, prison guard instructional videos notwithstanding, I think Ben is his finest role.

So an entire episode devoted to Dr. Linus is a real treat. Here are my main questions and takeaways:

Questions:

  • Which Kwon is which?
  • Per a few weeks ago & repeated here, your candidates:

    4 – Locke
    8 – Hugo
    15 – Sawyer
    16 – Sayid
    23 – Jack
    42 – Jin and/or Sun

    Locke is a wash since he’s dead, Jin isn’t looking so good now that he’s with the Temple/Not Locke team and Sayer is AWOL; Sayid is Zombie Sayid so I doubt it’s him either. That leaves Hugo, Jack & Sun.

    Or, like Not Locke said, maybe Ben will be put in charge. Or maybe Widmore?

    Of those two only Ben is candidate (117 on the Lighthouse dial) but he’s been crossed out.

    So is the Kwon a reference to Jin, Sun, neither (their child, maybe?) or both?

  • Are there really sides anymore?
  • I’ve mentioned it here before – my naive thought that Jacob & Not Locke represent New Testament God & Old Testament God respectively – and this (old by now) ABC Promotional Poster with the Last Supper theme doesn’t help matters much, though it does feature Not Locke as Christ. Not too big of a deal if you accept a triune Christian deity, but not quite in keeping with my hypothesis either.

    In misremembering the poster I had initially thought that the characters had aligned themselves by sides that somehow matched the two camps we now have, but that’s not true at all (at least not yet). At the very least the three still-viable candidates (if you believe the numbers) are on Not Locke’s left/our right and also includes Ben (117). To Not Locke’s right we’ve got Jacob’s right hand, Richard Alpert, plus Sawyer (15) and Kate (51).

    Best sequence of the whole episode was Not Locke freeing Ben, Ilana giving chase, Ben confessing his sins and Ilana forgiving him. Did Not Locke know/want that to happen or was he counting on Ben to fire his weapon? Are Jacob and Not Locke really so separate or are they somehow forever intertwined. Will it matter what “team” folks have chosen OR how they chose their actions (free will)?

  • Did Jacob summon Widmore?
  • And just where in the world are Desmond & Penelope and do they matter in the story? Will they appear again in either reality?

    108 on the lighthouse dial was “Wallace” which means “Welsh”. Widmore could be using a psuedonym but his accent never struck me as Welsh. Maybe a Scottish connection back to Desmond or MacCutcheon?

    I’m shooting blanks.

Takeaways:

  • Alpert, Arzt & The Black Rock
  • I called it a few episodes back (and maybe longer ago than that, I haven’t searched the archives) that Richard Alpert was a passenger in some capacity on The Black Rock. Still no explanations from him (other than Jacob’s touch being the catalyst for his youth). I want to know about the guyliner more than anything else.

    I also think it’s great that the episode featuring a Black Rock storyline (and dynamite) also brings back Doc Arzt who memorably blew himself up with that unstable explosive. [Smaller points for Miles knowing about Nikki, Paolo & the diamonds though, as Jenn pointed out to me, neither of us could remember how, exactly, he might know that. Did he ever feel their graves? Were their dossiers among the reading materials when Miles first came to the island in search of Ben?]

    Lastly, did anyone else draw the conclusion that The Black Rock had something to do with tea, given Dr. Linus’ tutoring session covering the East India Corporation? Lostpedia says The Black Rock was headed to Siam and not India when it was lost, but I’m not expert on the tea trade.

  • Redemption & Forgiveness
  • Maybe I’m going to reveal my own struggles and problems with organized (actually any) religion, but I find comfort in the fact that maybe Ben had his priorities out of whack regarding what he thought Jacob/The Island wanted. His statement to Lapidus that “The island got you in the end” might be a bit of foreshadowing, at least I read it that way. Even though he was there all along, manipulating and being manipulated by the forces at play, it “got” him in the end via Ilana’s forgiveness and phrase “I’ll have you”.

    Now this is where I part ways with Christianity (and maybe the show). Ben is certainly shown as being someone whom, it could be argued, isn’t worthy of forgiveness. One of the tenets of both of the Protestant religions I’ve semi-practiced in my lifetime is that we human beings are not worthy of God’s love or forgiveness but that it is, quite literally, divine to forgive. Or maybe I’m reading it wrong. Maybe Ben is worthy because of the confession. I don’t know. Religion makes my head hurt, but Ben not getting killed is better for the story and the themes of the show.

    Now I don’t know if I’d have spared Ben’s life, but I do believe his sincerity about the guilt of his actions regarding Alex. It was nice to see that in the Flash Sideways, Ben chooses her well-being over his own and maybe, just maybe, attains some of what he was looking for in the process. He gets what he ultimately wants – History club, no detention, respect, Alex’s admission to Yale – without all that blind pursuit of power stuff.

    Bonus points for the Napoleon allegory (is Ben really short?) and an Island/Elba connection. Good on ya!

  • Jack as the viewers’ stand-in
  • While I always like Locke’s character, I had to admire Jack’s search for the truth, the facts, the science and the reason of The Island. Even now that Jack is the new Locke (willing to trust the process [a little bit, anyhow], leading folks back to The Island, following Hurley/Jacob) I also dig that he remains committed to finding out the whys and what-fors.

    If we can’t have The Island version of Locke, having Jack (and Jack’s transformation) and still-paralyzed Locke of the past, works just fine for me.

    Now if I could only strangle those damn promo editors. Enough with promises and the hype of the post-show spots! Just give us the damn footage without the text/chyrons! I care not for your pithy promises! Give me more Jack and ANSWERS! (I can’t believe I’ve become *that* fan, but there’s only so much time left).

Until next week!

Growing Up Strange
Mar 4th, 2010 by Seth

The title of this post is the second half of the sub-head of Mark Barrowcliffe’s memoir – The Elfish Gene: Dungeons, Dragons & Growing Up Strange (a memoir) – so I’m going to be taking a little stroll down memory lane and reviewing the book but also a large(ish) slice of my past. Buckle up.

If we’re friends on Goodreads, you’ll know that I just recently finished reading the book, taking an inordinate amount of time (well over a year) to finish the damn thing. That’s not a bad thing nor is it an indictment of my interest level in the subject matter or the quality of the writing. It just means that the story, such as it is, only grabbed me about halfway through and the bookends of the book (ha!) are much weaker.

Here’s a trailer:

Let me back up.

The book is a memoir that relies heavily upon D&D as a backdrop and not the other way around. If you’re looking for a book about the early days of D&D that might also feature some funny quips about being a teenager look elsewhere.

Here’s the thing: Barrowcliffe is a really excellent writer who can write some insanely funny dialogue (or remember it well) but his self-deprecation is borderline self-loathing and I think that fact cuts a bit too close to the bone.

You see, I was one of the folks around his gaming table. Figuratively.

I was insecure as a middle schooler and early high schooler.
I had an insanely well-manicured fantasy life.
I wasted (not really a waste, but still) many days/late nights/early mornings/all-nighters huddled around a gaming table with my Jolt Cola and a bag of salty snacks.

I think the part of me that didn’t like the book is the part of me that still can’t quite acknowledge how maladjusted and weird I was back in my own youth, struggling to figure out myself, other people and young women (only one of whom I actively remember gaming with us. Once.).

The best parts of the book – other than some of the more hilarious put-downs and bad behavior of the boys around the table – are those indelible sense memories of actually playing the game and affinity he (and I) had for the look & feel of the source materials: the game books, character sheets and ephemera.

This is where I jumped down the rabbit hole.

Reading the book spawned all kinds of memories of my initial game purchases, at a Toys R Us in Marietta, GA no less.

The D&D stuff sat in a bin, low to the floor at the endcap of the action figure aisle (near Strongheart & Warduke), facing the books – as if kids in a toy store in the 80s wanted to get a book for their 10th birthday. Feh!

My interest was in the fantasy, the wonder, of playing a game that came without a board or pieces, but merely a set of rules and illustrations.

I’d seen the TSR/Marvel cartoon series (now out on DVD!) a year or two earlier – the year of the book purchases would have been 1987 or 1988 – so I understood the mythology, such as it was, of Dungeons and Dragons, and so I pawed the books but didn’t have the cash on hand to afford 2 or 3 (let alone even 1) of the $20 tomes.

My first purchases were actually modules for D&D, AD&D and Gamma World, not that I knew what any of these things were. Try being a 7th or 8th grader spending time at a sleepover with your buddies and trying to reverse engineer a rules system from 24 to 32 pieces of paper. Good times. [I *may* still have these modules in a box somewhere. They came from my parents house with a ton of comics, books & toys.]

When I finally did have the cash on hand – after a birthday or Christmas – I found the books on sale. I was able to buy AD&D 1st Edition stand-bys Unearthed Arcana, Player’s Handbook & Dungeon Masters Guide. Of course when I actually started playing regularly in 1989 or 1990 our gaming group was using AD&D 2nd Edition, heavily modified with older rules because of an older brother of one of the group. I can still remember arguments over calculating THAC0 and even the pronunciation of that key metric: (Thay-coh versus Thack-oh; the “th” sounds like “thistle” in both cases).

Around this time, I actively started collecting comics again – I’d gotten a TON of comics from my great grandmother in Michigan as a younger kid – and bought my first set(s) of polyhedral dice at Dr. No’s (at that time called Dr. No’s Books, Records & Comics). A few years later the comics industry would go full speculator, the records were gone and all the gamers were obsessed with Magic: The Gathering (me included), a past time that followed me to college.

The games in high school were epic. Rowdy, raucous affairs fueled by caffeine, unchained imaginations and the raging male hormones of puberty and early manhood. A game about swords & sorcery was the perfect outlet for our burgeoning masculinity.

I want to remember all the good bits – the laughter, the camaraderie and the storytelling – not the awkwardness of youth: pimples (warts) and all. Maybe that’s why I didn’t like the book as much as I might have otherwise, because I recognized too much of myself and others in the characters/caricatures of Barrowcliffe’s past. Nobody wants to be the asshole DM with the God complex or the Tolkein fanboy or the dreaded Min-Maxing Rules Lawyer.

Much like Barrowcliffe, I’m no longer an active gamer, though I’ve dabbled in MMORPGs recently (mostly WoW). In college, as I’ve said, I played M:TG, but I also tried out F.U.D.G.E, so I eased my way out of it.

I sometimes think I’d like to have those experiences again – the late nights and the hurling dice; the cackling and the cracking of skulls – but I’m not that person anymore, not entirely anyway.

In the end, maybe that’s the best/worst thing I can say about the book: that maybe some things are best left in the past. Fun to remember from time to time but not to be revisited or relived. (And, I’ll admit, fun to collect. I bought some old guidebooks, ones that pre-date my initial purchases, at a yard sale a few years back.)

Happy Reading/Gaming!

Lost: The Substitute
Feb 17th, 2010 by Seth

After a lengthy hiatus (both between seasons and after the birth of Evangeline) I’m back.

A day late.
A dollar short.
Until something else gets in the way. ;-)

Here’s a brief recap of things we probably all saw (The Numbers) and some of my pet theories.

Things we all saw/Things that relate to previous storylines:

  • The Numbers
  • 4 – Locke
    8 – Hugo
    15 – Sawyer
    16 – Sayid
    23 – Jack
    42 – Jin

  • Music
  • Search & Destroy by The Stooges. I’m an Iggy Pop fan but I think we can all see the foreshadowing of what that means for the Man in Black and Sawyer.

  • Don’t Tell Me What I Can’t Do!
  • That statement from Man in Black (over Locke’s lips) coupled with Ilana’s statement to Ben that maybe MiB can’t change the way he looks makes me wonder about the secondary effects of MiB fudging the “rules” suggested by the little kid.

    Bets on who that kid is anybody? Reborn Jacob? I’m open.

Things I think I think:

  • The Substitute
  • Obviously Locke is a substitute teacher so that’s one meaning.

    Locke’s body as a substitute for MiB’s original plans, if ever he had any.

    Sawyer as a substitute for MiB’s original escape. Same caveats as above.

    Any other hidden double meanings I’m missing?

  • Zipper Time
  • Folks on Lostpedia are calling this narrative device a “flash sideways” and note some of the audio characteristics of the transitional sounds used in the Season 6 episodes. Judge for yourself.

    I have my own, similar pet theory: both timelines are working towards a combined resolution that probably/likely turns on another “incident”.

    We’ve been told by the producers that the timelines aren’t alternate realities but I think Daniel Faraday’s metaphor of a skipping record (pre-”incident”) is still at play, only now the needle is either playing both sides of the record or two records or ping-ponging spots on the same record.

    Hey, it’s not perfect, but it’s what I’m thinking.

    Anyhow, I contend that both storylines are true, accurate and even concurrent.
    Maybe one is even influencing the other.
    Maybe not.

    Either way I think that the choices in both stories are somehow playing us towards a resolution that leaves us with only ONE of each of our characters.

    Hence: zipper time

That’s all I’ve got tonight.

Better timing next week.
Better thinking next week.
Better blogging as we know more.

Oh, and DAMN ABC and their “the time for questions is over”! I have more questions than ever and we’d better see answers in the last 12 episodes.

Season 6 is 25% complete!

Until next Tuesday!

A Conspicuous Lack of Lost Blogging
Feb 2nd, 2010 by Seth

There will be NO Lost blogging tonight.

I REPEAT: There will be NO Lost blogging tonight.

You see, Jenn & I welcomed a new addition to our family today: Evie

Full stats:
Evangeline Ann Miller
Born @ 10:41 AM on Tuesday, February 2, 2010
7 lbs., 7 oz.
20 in. long

Mom & Baby are doing fine, but we won’t be in our normal routine (though we *may* watch the premiere) so NO LOST BLOGGING (OR SPOILERS).

And to answer the most obvious and oft-repeated question: NO, we did not name her after Evangeline Lily who plays Kate on Lost.

We named her after one of our favorite songs: Evangeline by Matthew Sweet.

Have a nice night.
Enjoy Lost.
I’ll see you all on the flipside, later in the season (maybe even next week).

Oh, and a more thorough, proper post on our Evangeline (with many more pictures) is coming very soon. I hope.

G’night!

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Jan 19th, 2010 by Seth

From the center director of our daycare this morning:

Seth,

I had Owen with me this morning and he was telling me how much he missed you. He wanted me
to take his picture and send it to you.

Happy Tuesday!

The visual evidence:

Owen pouting

Owen pouting

I love and miss that kid and, obviously, he loves and misses me.

I think it gets to me mostly because he looks so much like I did at that age, pout/scowl and all.

See you soon, Owen!

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