LOST: Pre-Game for “Happily Ever After”
Danny Boy: Keamy identifies Mikhail as being “a friend of Danny’s”. I assumed that it was a reference to Daniel Faraday, but spunkybuddies Larry Young and Evonne both pointed out a far more reasonable candidate. After all, it’s hard to picture Faraday and Mikhail hanging out, and even harder to picture anybody ever calling him “Danny”. As our pals suggested, Danny is probably Danny Pickett. He was an Other in Season Three – Sun shot his wife Colleen (who was played by Trixie from Deadwood), and Danny later tried to kill Sawyer when he was locked up in the polar bear cage. Danny died in the shootout on the beach that season, but he’s a much more likely possibility to be Danny X.
I wish I’d thought of that. Clearly, I was addled by my desire for one last Faraday appearance. Up until a couple of weeks ago, I’d assumed that Faraday X couldn’t possibly exist, since a pregnant Eloise was most definitely on the Island when the bomb went off. Since the last couple of episodes have made it pretty clear that Timeline X was not created by Jughead, though, Faraday is back in the mix.
Leave it to Mumbles: I had a lot of response to Keamy’s mumbled possible reference to the Island. To re-recap, when he’s tying up Jin in the freezer, it sounds like he says “Gotta strap you in here, just in case you figure out what’s about to happen on the Island; can’t have you freaking out.” I heard from a bunch of people who heard the dialogue that way, too. Apparently spunkybuddies Sara and Grant just about wore out the reverse button on their respective remotes listening to that line. And Larry heard the line the same way, in open defiance of what his closed captioning said. But spunkybuddy Jennifer reports that closed captioning tells us that the line is “what’s about to happen to you. I-I-I can’t have you freaking out.”, and the aforementioned Evonne agrees that Keamy is throwing some “ums” and “ers” into that line.
I still hear the line as “on the Island”, but given Keamy’s weird vocal tics, I’m willing to accept that it may not be what he said. However, I’m pretty sure that there was at least some intent on the producers’ part for us to hear it that way. In the past, they’ve played audio tricks on us – a favorite is to alter the pitch on dialogue spoken by an offscreen character to lead us astray as to the identity of the speaker. It’s not hard to imagine that they told Keamy to be extra-mumbly over those words. Heck, I’m willing to bet they chose Danny to be Mikhail’s friend for the sole purpose of making people think it was Faraday. There are dozens of Others to choose for that reference, and they picked the on with a shared name. Yep, we’re into the final hours and the creators are just actively taunting us now.
Sunrise, Sunset: So, does Sun X speak English or not? Her reactions in her two appearances have indicated that she know what’s being said but is pretending that she doesn’t. The most notable to me is that she tells Jin that they should pay Keamy. But, you know, the airline confiscated a large sum of money, and this guy was hanging around looking for something. You don’t have to be Batman to figure out that maybe the guy is waiting for his envelope of cash.
As Larry pointed out (by the end of the season, these pre-games are just going to be a page full of links to his recaps), our Sun learned English in preparation for leaving Jin. Since she isn’t even married in Timeline X, she doesn’t need to go to elaborate lengths to leave her husband. However, she does seem to be planning to disappear, this time to escape her father. She’s putting away a nest egg in secret, and once they’re in America, she almost immediately proposes to Jin that they get away from it all. Realistically, she was never going to be able to get away from Paik in Korea, so it’s not out of the question that she’d learn a second language for her new life.
On the other end, it’s pretty clear that they want us to assume that Sun X speaks English, so the lack of definite confirmation is a decent clue that she actually doesn’t. And I hate to be the one to say this, but there are only a handful of episodes left. I’m assuming that we’ll get Timeline X episodes about Desmond and Hurley yet. There might be an episode with Ilana’s backstory as well. There aren’t enough episodes left to give everybody a second Timeline X episode. Timeline X is going to get really bad really quickly.
As long as we’re talking about Sun, we might as well work on the question as to which Kwon is number 42 on the list. The more I think about it, the key is that the Candidates have to leave the Island together, per Look-a-Locke. And maybe that’s why it was so important that Locke bring everybody back – some Candidates left the Island and some didn’t.
Why didn’t Sun jolt back to the 70’s when the other Lostaways disappeared from Flight 316? Maybe because the Island was keeping the Candidates together. Confirmed Candidates Jack, Sayid, and Hurley jumped back in time to meet up with Confirmed Candidate Sawyer. Wouldn’t it make sense, then, that Jin would be the other Candidate? The Island keeps them together. Sun was left behind with non-candidates like Frank, Benry, Ilana, and the cannon fodder.
But what about Kate? She was pulled back to the 70’s with the Candidates. The Lockelganger said last week that Kate wasn’t a Candidate “anymore”. Her name was not crossed off at the Lighthouse, and we didn’t see it in the cave (though Lindelof and Cuse confirmed in an interview that her name was intended to be crossed out on the wall of the cave). That would mean the cave is the more up-to-date of the two, so Kate may have been eliminated as a candidate recently. (Don’t try to think about how her actions in 1977 got her eliminated in 2008 – let’s just assume that time is different for Jacob.) It’s hard to say what might have removed her from the list, since we really don’t know what the criteria is in the first place. Let’s face it, some of the remaining candidates have done far worse things than people who have been eliminated.
That’s where it stands for me now – the actual Candidates were pulled together by the Island, and that means Jin is number 42 and Kate was a Candidate when she got on Flight 316 but was eliminated prior to Jacob’s death.
Black is the New White: As I mentioned briefly last week, spunkybuddy Chicago Rachel notices that when Jacob meets Ilana, he’s wearing all black, including a pair of black gloves. The we have Isabel warning Richard that he must stop “the Man in Black”. That’s upsetting, to say the least.
So what have we seen Jacob wear up to this point? Let’s start with last season’s finale.
-In his first appearance, talking with Silas, Jacob is wearing a white peasant shirt and black pants. (I think those are called peasant shirts. I could be wrong. It’s not like you’re looking to me for fashion, though.)
-When he meets young Kate in the convenience store, he’s wearing a plaid shirt (blue and white) and blue pants.
-In 1976, he meets Sawyer after the funeral. He’s wearing a black suit with a white shirt. His tie is black-and-white.
-He wears a brown button-down shirt and blue jeans when he meets Sayid.
-As mentioned earlier, when he meets Ilana, he’s wearing all black.
-When he meets Locke, he’s wearing a brown jacket, blue shirt, and jeans.
-At the wedding of Jin and Sun, he’s wearing a black suite and tie with a white shirt.
-In the hospital, he’s wearing a black (possibly navy blue) suite with a purplish shirt.
-When he meets Hurley, he’s wearing a dark blue jacket and a gray t-shirt.
-Back on the Island, when Benry stabs him, he’s wearing a white button-down shirt and tan pants.
-His ghost on the Island is wearing the same outfit he wore when he died, which makes sense. (Although it’s not a requirement for Hurley’s ghosts.)
That is a lot less definitive that I thought it would be, actually. He doesn’t wear a lot of white off the Island, and other than his meeting with Ilana, he doesn’t wear much black. For me the question now is: How does Jacob leave the Island? Does he physically leave? Or does he borrow a body to get around on the mainland? You know, does he possess the body of somebody near the scene to do what he needs? And do people see him as Jacob, or is it like Quantum Leap where we see him as Jacob but the people around him see the body that he’s using?
I will say that clearly Hurley saw him as Jacob, since he recognizes him in ghost form. However, it’s possible that he didn’t use a physical form to meet Hurley – it’s not like you need to actually be there in order to talk to that guy, after all. The body-jumping would at least account for his wardrobe, and his method of travel. Unlike Smokey, he has a physical body that can be damaged, and it would seem difficult to get that body from place to place as he seems to.
And it’s possible that I’m barking up the wrong tree entirely, but it’s hard not to look for significance in his all-black wardrobe in Ilana’s scene. After all, she’s the one person who seems to understand his nature. The scene implies that they’ve met before – there’s a definite familiarity there. She later describes Jacob as “the closest thing I had to a father”, so I have to think their relationship extended beyond that hospital visit. In fact, he tells her “This is what you’ve been preparing for”, which makes me think he was a long-term mentor to her. The only way the black wardrobe makes sense to me is if Jacob leaves the Island by taking control of somebody else (probably using those Lighthouse mirrors). Heck, that’s the only way any of his clothing on the mainland makes sense – I didn’t notice any closet space in the Statue or his cave.
That black outfit is bugging me. Let’s all thank Chicago Rachel for throwing off my entire worldview!
One last neat idea that will probably be confirmed or denied pretty quickly with the next episode, but spunkybuddy Larry asks: What if the Desmond we saw at the end of the episode is Desmond from Timeline X? Frankly, if anybody could drug a guy up and pull them from an alternate reality, it’s Widmore.
And for more of his insight, be sure to check out Spectacularry – this week he’s got the symbolism of the tomato in Sun’s garden, a possible allusion to Mr. Eko, some good old-fashioned Frank Love, and much more.
We’ll see you back here tomorrow for “Happily Ever After”. I assume that title will turn out to be ironic.
