***I began writing this while experiencing turbulence in a 737 somewhere over New Mexico. I am attending a conference in LA from Thursday-Saturday, and that means a Friday post may not happen on Friday. I originally planned on putting up some questions and then try to get back to this in a day or two. After seeing the episode, a good deal of those questions were addressed, and I just couldn't wait.***----------------------------------------------
The Short Time Mob moved in and wiped away six weeks.
Before the season picks up again, it might be useful to ask a few questions about what we know and don't know, and what answers we might look to for before this season is out. A list of a few head-scratchers is presented here, with some info divulged in "The Shape of Things to Come," and if you have any other problems you'd like addressed or think should be addressed in the next six episodes, add 'em.
So:
What about off-island events that seem island-generated? Juliet's husband Edmund Burke was squished by a bus, her sister's cancer was cured, and Oceanic Six can't seem to die for trying (Jack tried to jump off a bridge when he was distracted by a convenient car wreck, and Michael can't manage to crush or shoot himself).
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Let's talk about Hurley:
- What about his seeing Charlie?
- What does it mean that Hurley may be able to find Jacob's shack?
- What does it mean that Hurley saw Christian Shephard in that shack?
- Is Hurley becoming a problem for Locke, almost like Locke is becoming a problem for Ben?
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Why is Christian kibitzing in Chez Jacob in the first place, and what's he doing alive? Is he even alive?
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How did the Oceanic Six make if off the island, and what happened to the rest?
- How does Aaron fit into this, and will Aaron have some sort of spokesperson function like his biblical namesake?
- Is Jin actually dead in the future, or is he still on the island with the other survivors?
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I was going to ask how Sayid came to work for Ben, but now we know; Ishmael Bakir, a seeming employee of Widmore hunted down and killed Nadia. Why? No idea yet. Maybe Widmore is hunting down the loved ones of the Oceanic Six and Ben; after all, the Oceanic Six seem to be death-proof, so the next likely targets would be their friends and family. That leaves the question of why open for speculation, but it may have its origins in Keamy killing Alex and Ben threatening to kill Penelope as retribution.
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Widmore also claims to have once had the island, and now Ben has hidden it from him (and rooked Widmore out of some more, it seems). Is Widmore a descendant of one of the crew of the Black Rock? How did Ben hide the island? And who's really behind the planted wreckage at the bottom of the Sunda Trench? Is that Widmore's doing, or does Ben have a hidden hand in all that?
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Speaking of Ben and Widmore – rules? What rules? Are Ben and Widmore engaged in some kind of game, an existential worldwide version of backgammon? Are these rules part of the reason Ben can't kill Widmore? Marshall McLuhan has a nice quote in an essay about games that is telling: quote: Games are dramatic models of our psychological lives providing release of particular tensions. The game Ben and Widmore and locked in doesn't seem to bring any release, but it's certainly a dramatic model of psychological lives.
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Ben arrives in the desert wearing a Dharma parka and with a wounded arm. He just seems to pop up there out of nowhere (bamf!). It seems one of the Bedouins says that there is no trail, and asks where Ben came from. It's a safe bet that wound in Ben's arm came from the forthcoming war with Keamy and the Freighties. However, Ben tells Sayid that he took Desmond's boat The Elizabeth to Fiji and flew to Syria from there. It would seem not. So: How did he get there, and why the parka (which had the logo of another station on it)?
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Did Rousseau and Carl die from the surprise attack in the jungle? This episode suggests Ben didn't set them up, like he did with Goodwin. His brinkmanship seems to have found its brink when it came to Alex.
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What will become of the Maxwell's Demon idea (if anything)? Is it Smokey? Maxwell's Demon is the subject of Ken Kesey's book of short stories Demon Box, and one of those stories features Neal Cassady, who was fictionalized by Jack Kerouac as Ben's passport ego, Dean Moriarty. We saw Ben use that passport again, so we know this Moriarty thing isn't done yet, and it has at least one trail pointing back to Maxwell's Demon.
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Locke got a bit of one of his questions answered, "What is the smoke monster?" It seems Smokey and Ben are a little closer than Ben would admit. There's a hidden passage behind the hidden room behind the bookcase in Ben's bedroom; when Ben emerges from it, he's covered in a kind of soot. This may be a clue to another formative background text, Willis George Emerson's The Smoky God: Or, Voyage to the Inner World (1908). It's notable for being about the first text to take on the idea of a world within our world, bringing Agartha the Hollow Earth theory to a broader mass audience. (Agartha is one of the names for the land inside the hollow earth; it's main city is said to be Shamballa). This twice-told tale of the discovery of a Norwegian fisherman, Olaf Jansen, relates how deep within the earth (which is accessed via the North Pole), another civilization lives. The inhabitants of this inner world are 12 feet tall, and electricity seems to charge the air. These people are sustained by "a mammoth ball of dull red fire" that gives off "an electrical cloud" they call "the Smoky God."
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What happened to :
- Harper Stanhope
- Isabel, the sheriff of Otherville
- Richard
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Polar bear in Tunisia and a four-toed giant statue of a foot: Please to explain?
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Is the fact that Bernard knows Morse code just convenient or significant?
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Who's banging on the freighter pipes, and what's making the Freighties brainsick? Is the cause the same reason Radzinsky painted the ceiling of the Swan Station with the contents of his skull?
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What is Abaddon's function? Does he work for someone (Widmore?), and what's his interest in the island?
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A big question: TIME. Faraday found that there was a time gap between the island and the outside world. Is that gap consistent? Is it different between, say, the island and the freighter vs. the island and Manhattan? Is it even a gap, or is time moving at different rates on and off the island?
If there is a gap, or if time moves more slowly on the island, do we really know how long Michael was off the island? (This possibility was brought up by DS9Sisko in the comments, and the lads on the new Nerdtastic podcast CastaBlasta recently went so far as to claim Michael had to be off-island for a year if he was to recover from traction.)
Has the time shifting all been set aright, or does something else still need working out? While discussing time trouble one of the podcasts, Damon Lindelof said, "Even if you did something in the past that you didn't do before, somehow the sort of 'fabric of time' swoops in around you and fixes everything so things don't go off the rails." (As suggested by Mrs. Hawking.)
This is the answer to the paradox problem ? if the past changes, something will happen to reset that difference. That reset was Charlie's death; because Charlie was supposed to die on a number of occasions, but was saved by Des, things happened in the past that hadn't happened before. Why? See Minkowski (Hermann, not the Short Circuit guy), or David Lewis (the philosopher, not the father of Charlotte Staples Lewis); spacetime isn't divided between past/present/future, they're all of a piece. Change the future, and you change the past and present. Des saving Charlie changes the future, and the past and present.
We've already seen some changes: Charlie not swimming in the first season, a champion swimmer when he makes the dive to the Looking Glass; Christian seemingly alive and drunk in a flashforward; the eight (8!) episodes of a freckless Kate (contentious, I know, but I'm sticking to it until confirmed false); picture frames along Mrs. Gardner's staircase being wooden on the way up the stairs, metal on the way down; etc. Have we seen the last of this? Ben had to double-check the date and year when he arrived in Tozeur, Tunisia.
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There are some other points worth addressing in this episode. First and foremost, the title comes from H.G. Wells' novel The Shape of Things to Come. Similar to The Smoky God, The Shape of Things to Come is a fictionalized chronicle of a third person's account of events. In this case, though, we're dealing with a history of the future. Wells had a dark vision of the future, and his book purports to be the collected notes of a diplomat from 1933 who had dreams of a history textbook from 2106. As a futurist, Wells wasn't half-bad, and in this text he predicts that submarines will one day in the future be armed with missiles that could cause mass destruction.
The Iraq War also figures into the background of this entire episode. Lost hasn't directly taken on the Iraq War, but has found some ways to weave it into the seams of the narrative. Ben is in Tikrit ? Saddam Hussein's home town ? in 2005, and we see U.S. Soldiers patrolling the streets. But more interesting here is Ben's bio of Keamy, a former U.S. Marine from 1996-2001 who then became a mercenary, operating primarily in Uganda. Mercenary firms who hire soldiers of fortune have become a major issue with the Iraq War, particularly with the firm Blackwater. The soldiers of such private military companies (PCMs) do not have to operate under any particularly national laws or guidelines; Blackwater soldiers are not subject to the same rules as the U.S. military, and this has become a real problem for both Iraqis, U.S. soldiers, and the Pentagon. In fact, it's not very clear under whose rules PCM's should operate.
One particular PCM group worked in Uganda during Keamy's time there. The Canadian firm Heritage Oil and Gas is directed by the industrialist Tony Buckingham, who also helped set up the PCM's Executive Outcomes and Sandline. Sandline's manager was a former British special forces officer ? in the Royal Scots Regiment, like Desmond ? named Tim Spicer. Sandline shared offices with Heritage Oil and Gas, and closed its doors in 2004, but was known for being contracted to stage a paramilitary takeover of Bougainvillea, Papua New Guinea in 1997; contracting with the ousted Sierra Leone president in 1998; and aiding in a rebel coup of Liberia's president Charles Taylor.
Of note is that in 1997 Heritage Oil and Gas started to explore western Uganda, and in 2002 secured a contract for 3.1 million hectares of easter Democratic Republic of Congo from President Joseph Kabila, land bordering Uganda. The extent of paramilitary activity to help secure the contract isn't known, but 3.1 million hectares is an astonishing amount of land for a nation to parcel out to a private company, especially if that land is oil-rich and the country could use the resource.
After Sandline and Executive Outcomes folded, many of the major players, including Spicer, were folded into another British PCM, Aegis Defense Services. In 2004 Aegis was awarded a massive three-year contract with the Pentagon to work in Iraq, alongside Blackwater. The 2007 videos of a security detail driving through Baghdad and shooting at passing vehicles ? to the soundtrack of Elvis' "Mystery Train" ? were leaked onto a website run by an employee of Aegis. Aegis sued to have the web page taken down. Both the U.S. military and Aegis conducted investigations, but since Aegis is a private company, the results are confidential.
Is this the kind of outfit Keamy worked for in Uganda?
Journalist Jeremy Scahill has a one of the most detailed studies of one PCM, Blackwater, in a recent book: Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army.
(Body count in this episode: +6)
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ADDENDUM
* I made notes about Ishmael Bakir and the Moby Dick link, and was searching for some significance to the name Bakir, but didn't find any. In my haste I failed to get the notes into the post, and Ike caught me up short about it in the comments. Ike, this one's for you! *
Call him Ishmael. The man Ben tracks down in Tikrit, Ishmael Bakir, works for Widmore and killed Sayid's wife, Nadia (yes, it seems Sayid makes an honest woman of Nadia when he gets off the island). In the bible, Ishmael was the illegitimate son of Abraham and the servant Hagar; when Abraham's wife Sarah was barren, she offers her servant Hagar to Abe, and the offspring was Ishmael. Abe loved Ishmael, but when Sarah finally did get pregnant and gave birth to Isaac, Sarah became a little more jealous of Abe's fatherly attention, and demanded that Abe cast Hagar and Ishmael out. In Moby Dick, Ishmael is the name of the narrator, or the pseudonym the narrator chooses to be identified by ? he just asks to be called Ishmael. Melville chooses to name his castaway protagonist after a one of the earliest castaways.
Ishmael's first name is evocative, but the Moby Dick theme isn't focused on him, his name is just the marker. The overarching theme of Moby Dick is Captain Ahab's monomaniacal revenge quest, to the point that Ahab sacrifices his ship and crew just for the chance to run a harpoon into Moby Dick's side. Some of Ahab's most famous lines (and Khan Noonien Singh ? KHAAAN!) show how he's willing to rip apart his world just for the chance to hurt the whale:
Towards thee I roll, thou all-destroying but unconquering whale; to the last I grapple with thee; from hell's heart I stab at thee; for hate's sake I spit my last breath at thee. Sink all coffins and all hearses to one common pool! and since neither can be mine, let me then tow to pieces, while still chasing thee, though tied to thee, thou damned whale! Thus, I give up the spear!
Compare Ahab's drive to destruction with Ben's, who is systematically whacking Widmore's people, and is determined to kill Widmore's daughter Penelope. He's let his grief become anger, as he tells Sayid. But is he the only Ahab figure? Widmore is plenty driven as well; it seems he was willing to spend a small fortune and express a fair amount of power to plant a fake plane crash at the bottom of the Sunda trench. He's trying to retake the island by any means necessary, and at least prior to "The Shape of Things to Come," seems as monomaniacal about finding Ben and the island as Ben becomes about taking out Widmore's empire.
When one thinks of the white whale in this context, though, it's hard not thinking about the black smoke as well.