Sexy Teens with Dumb Names in the Post-Apocalypse, Part 1 of 100

This is a show in which sexy delinquent teens are sent to wild Earth, far away from their stupid parents in their stupid suburban space satellite. There is love, there is death, there is an older generation who just doesn’t understand. It’s the teen adventure of a lifetime. Come along with me, won’t you?

It’s 97 years after a nuclear apocalypse rendered the earth uninhabitable and the remnants the human race live aboard a giant space station called the Ark, which they presumably borrowed from the Autobots because they are giant space robots who can survive in radiation, or maybe from John Cusack at the end of 2012. Or maybe from Noah. Is the Ark even a viable allusion anymore?

In the series’ first (and, as of the end of this episode, only) nod to scientific accuracy, the station is made of giant rotating wheels, which create artificial gravity for the people living inside them. One of those people is our lead character, a pretty blonde girl named CLARK, which is a terrible name for anyone whose last name isn’t Kent so right off the bat I have high hopes for this show. She fills us in on the back story of the series via voiceover narration while drawing a mural on the floor with colored chalk. It will take another 100 years before the earth’s radiation level subsides enough for humans to live on it again, but they’re going to do it anyway in about three minutes.

Some tough-looking dudes in uniforms burst into Clark’s room and it turns out Clark has been locked up in juvie for the past year. She starts whining at them that they can’t kill her because she’s only 17, hoping they won’t notice that she’s clearly 25. Clark beats up the two burly security guards . . . somehow . . . and escapes, but then CLARK’S MOM appears and tells her that she and the other prisoners aren’t being executed, they’re being sent to Earth! Then someone injects Clark with something and she passes out.

“Pretty but vacant” is the defining characteristic of a strong female young adult protagonist in any medium.

After the title sequence, Clark and the Ark’s 99 other juvenile delinquents awaken on the spacecraft carrying them down to the planet. A pre-recorded message from the PRESIDENT OF SPACE, an African American Arkian (?) gentleman played by the guy who was fired from Grey’s Anatomy for being a homophobe, plays on a TV, telling the eponymous 100 what an important thing they’re doing for the future of their species. The president’s son, PRESIDENT JR., is sitting next to Clark. He explains that he somehow got himself arrested so he could apologize to her for turning her father in to the police and getting him executed, and he hopes she’s not still mad at him for that. Clark tells him to fuck off.

Some of the kids take off their seatbelts and start floating around in zero-g, even though everyone’s hair is hanging normally around their faces. Clark whines at them to strap back in but then the ship crashes for some reason (srsly I have no idea why) and two of them are killed instantly. So five minutes into the first episode the show’s title is already out of date. The CW should have just used the title as a running tally of how many characters are still alive and updated the title card and promotional material every week to reflect that. As far as I’m concerned The 100 is now called The 98.

After ten minutes of breakneck exposition, the show finally pauses to take a breath and introduce some more of the main cast. There is BELLAMY BLAKE, a bad-boy rebel who stowed away on the ship to reunite with his sister, OCTAVIA BLAKE, a sexy brunette who was imprisoned for violating the one-child-per-family law (as we are informed by unseen characters shouting “That’s the girl they hid under the floor!” and, twenty seconds later, “That’s Octavia Blake, the girl they found hidden under the floor!” in what may be the worst sound mixing ever to air on TV). There is FLYNN RIDER, another bad-boy rebel, who was arrested for stealing oxygen for “an illegal space walk.” He instigated the redshirts who died in the crash but he might secretly have a heart of gold . . . if he can decide which of the two leading ladies it belongs to! There is JASPER, a hipster doofus who wears goggles as a fashion accessory, and his friend, ASIAN GUY, who is good with computers, because of course he is. They were arrested for smoking weed. Also there is some guy whose name might be ERIC, who has it in for President Jr. for some reason I can’t remember but might be because Space Obama had his parents killed too. Apparently this society has a habit of killing people’s parents and then sending the kids to jail because they don’t know what else to do with them. It’s good to see the American justice system is still alive and well after the atomic holocaust.

Octavia Blake, 28-year-old teenage sexpot/girl in the floor.

Bellamy Blake starts trying to force the spaceship’s door open so they don’t suffocate or burn to death but Clark whines at him about the radiation. Bellamy is all like, “Bitch, no,” and opens the door anyway. The 98 step outside and set foot on Earth for the first time in what I would think would be kind of a solemn moment but then Octavia, overjoyed at being sent to a slow death by radiation poisoning, screams, “We’re back, bitches!” and Imagine Dragons’ “Radioactive” starts playing, because contemporary pop music is the most appropriate soundtrack for a post-apocalyptic science fiction show.

Meanwhile, back on the Ark, we are introduced to DESMOND FROM LOST, the vice president and apparently the antagonist of the show. It’s weird hearing him talk with an American accent, his voice sounds way higher and thinner than it did on Lost. Someone alerts Clark’s mom that Space Obama was shot by Bellamy Blake earlier that day and I guess they just found out. Clark’s mom immediately starts shouting this disastrous information at everyone within earshot. Jeez, lady, you think you might want to keep that one under your hat for a minute? Seriously though I hope he dies so Desmond can take over. Desmond’s friend/adviser/minion tells him, “Desmond, now that you’re president you can start killing people immediately.” One of the perks of the job, I guess. But Desmond’s like no, if we’re going to kill everyone we have to wait for Space Obama to die so we can do it legally.

“I’ll see ya in another despotic regime, brotha!”

On Earth, two characters call Clark “Princess” entirely independent of one another.

Back in space, Clark’s mom is a doctor I guess and she breaks the law by giving Space Obama too much blood, so Desmond has her arrested because in the future “all crimes are capital crimes.” KELLY HU, Desmond’s adviser?/assistant?/girlfriend?, makes an impassioned plea for her life because they are BFFs, and damn now that Desmond’s basically president you’d think he could afford some nice shirts that haven’t been gnawed at by space moths. All the kids on Earth look like they just walked out of an Abercrombie & Fitch. (I am glad though that the one resource we won’t be short on after the apocalypse is hair product.)

“You all think I’m the bad guy but I’m the only one willing to do what it takes to save us,” Desmond says with a condescending smirk, because he’s Desmond From Lost and he’s awesome. He then orders his guards to fire Clark’s mom’s ass out an airlock. Clark’s mom has been trying to devise a way to communicate with the 98 via the vital signs monitors in their wristbands. As she is dragged away to her doom, she shouts instructions at some scientist guy for how to continue the operation and tells him “Nod if you understand!” Um, why couldn’t he just answer her normally? Desmond’s standing right there watching, none of this is getting past him. The guy nods anyway though and Clark’s mom is about to get “floated” when Space Obama comes staggering down the hallway in his hospital gown and officially pardons her for wasting valuable medical resources to save a single person’s life. So he can just do that, huh? And he just let his son get arrested and shipped off to Earth anyway. Not to mention executing Clark’s dad for, as will later be revealed, doing nothing wrong. Space Obama is kind of an asshole.

On Earth, everyone looks tan and healthy despite living on a space station for a hundred years. Clark has salvaged a map from the crash and is trying to plot a course to Mount Weather, the site of the old government bunker they were supposed to land near. “Where’d you learn to do that?” Flynn Rider asks her. What, to draw a line on a map? Clark starts whining at everyone that they need to gather food and hike to the mountain so they can tell Space Obama that it’s safe to send more people down. Someone needs to tell this girl that she’s never going to get ahead giving head to the man. “Let the privileged do the hard work for a change,” suggests Bellamy Blake, founding member of Occupy Post-Apocalyptic Earth. Realizing that an unsupervised group of delinquent teenagers may not be the most altruistic people she could ask for help, Clark resolves to head off by herself.

President Jr. attempts to follow her but is confronted by that Eric guy who is about to beat the shit out of him until Flynn Rider steps in and points out that President Jr.’s leg was injured in the crash. Since murderous thugs are known for nothing if not their strong sense of honor, Eric backs off. “Hey, Space Walker,” Octavia says to Flynn. “Rescue me next.” This dialogue.

Flynn Rider, dreamboat.

Clark heads out and is joined by Flynn Rider because he wants to bang her, Octavia because she wants to bang Flynn Rider, Jasper the Hipster Doofus because he wants to bang Octavia, and Asian Guy because he’s Jasper’s wingman I guess. At least if they get lost they can just follow their trail of pheromones back to camp. After trading arrest stories, one of the dynamic duo asks, “What’d they get you for, Octavia?” Dude, were you not paying attention?

As they trek across the wilderness, they behold the majesty and wonder of this brave new world, such as a mutant two-faced deer covered in tumors. They come across a river and Octavia strips down to her underwear, prompting Jasper to exclaim his love for Earth because lmao he’s so horny. Before the others can join Octavia in the water, however, she is eaten by a giant catfish. Oh wait nvm, she survived, the catfish just smeared some red paint on her leg. Jasper pulls her out of the water and is rewarded for his heroism with a brief hug, giving Asian Guy the opening he’s been waiting for to joke, “Note to self: next time, save the girl.” Everyone laughs.

Back at the camp, President Jr. is further harassed by Eric and his crew but fends them off by making fun of a spelling error in their graffitied death threat. They are then recruited by Bellamy to serve as his enforcers. Bellamy abducts President Jr. at gunpoint and marches him out into the woods where the goon squad holds him down and pulls off his wristband while President Jr. screams like he’s being gang raped instead of just getting his bracelet stolen. Bellamy has decided to make himself the leader of this fledgling non-society and the easiest way to maintain their isolation is by getting everyone to remove their wristbands so the people on the Ark will stop receiving their vital signs and assume the radiation levels are still too high for humans to survive. To celebrate their independence, the 98 minus Clark’s party throw a big pep rally around a bonfire. I don’t know how they have the energy for this since they all belittled Clark when she suggested they look for food earlier that morning. Shouldn’t they all be busy starving to death right now?

As Clark’s gang journeys on toward Mount Weather, we get yet another scene of expository dialogue wherein Clark reveals that her father was an engineer on the Ark who discovered that they were running out of oxygen far more quickly than was generally believed. He thought the station’s citizens had a right to know the truth but Clark blabbed to President Jr., resulting in her father’s arrest and execution before he could tell anyone. Clark was then incarcerated in solitary confinement for a year but instead of losing her mind she just came out of it looking like a girl on a CW show.

They come upon another river but rather than risk attack by another mutated creature that the script calls a snake even though the animation didn’t look anything like a snake, they decide to swing across it on a vine, which is apparently just hanging down directly from the sky rather than any of the nearby trees. Flynn Rider is about to go first because he’s the daredevil, but Jasper convinces him to switch places with him so he can impress Octavia. Jasper swings across and discovers a conveniently placed sign for Mount Weather lying on the ground right where he landed. The celebration is cut short, however, when, with a cry of “DIE, HIPSTER SCUM,” a wooden spear comes hurtling out of nowhere and strikes Jasper directly in the chest, lifting him off his feet and carrying him backward through the air to collide with a tree. Finally. The only way this scene could have been better is if the spear had impaled him directly through his stupid goggles. Clark and the others take cover behind some logs and Clark announces forebodingly, “We’re not alone,” which is the least helpful thing anyone could say in this situation. Cut to title card, end of Episode 1.

It was all worth it.

I came off this episode feeling pretty high but the preview for the next episode already spoiled that Jasper is apparently, improbably, still alive and that they find E.T.’s skull so now I don’t know what to believe. Suffice it to say that, based on my expectation of CW programming, The 98 did not let me down. The premise of the show has potential, which I don’t expect to ever be fully realized, and the cast, while kind of bland, is serviceable for the subject matter and acceptably pretty. The writing is atrocious but no one expects good writing from TV, a.k.a. “the idiot box” LOL! So far my favorite character is the spear that almost killed Jasper and my second favorite is the snakefish that almost ate Octavia. I look forward to watching their arcs develop in surprising and satisfying ways over the course of the season.

I will keep watching in the hope that Desmond becomes president and has all the annoying teen characters (mainly just Jasper) lined up and shot, then the show switches gears and becomes about Desmond banging Kelly Hu in space while executing mass segments of the population at sporadic intervals. And also they get someone else to write all the dialogue. It’s a bold new direction for The CW and I for one can’t wait to tune in for more!

The Ice Bucket Challenge Is Not Offensive—You Are

A few days ago, someone posted a link to an article about the shameful stupidity of the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge on my newsfeed with the noncommittal description “food for thought.” I’ve been thinking about it on and off ever since, so I guess that was an accurate summary. Instead of considering the issues raised by the article, however, mostly I’ve just thought about how reductive it was and how angry and disappointed it made me feel.

If you haven’t heard about the Ice Bucket Challenge, you’re probably not reading this because you don’t know how to turn on any of the YouTubes. But basically it’s a viral charity campaign that nebulously involves some combination of recording a video of yourself dumping ice water on your head and donating money for ALS research. Short for amyotrophic lateral sclerosis and also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease, ALS is a horrific motor neuron disorder that slowly paralyzes you until you’re no longer able to swallow or breathe and you die of respiratory failure. Sounds like a good cause, if promoted in a somewhat dopey and narcissistic way, right? Of course not; if you have an Internet connection and an entitled sense of outrage, nothing is above your scorn.

“The Ice Bucket Challenge is an EMBARRASSMENT,” fumed the author of the social justice rant that made my newsfeed even more depressing than usual. In a professionally published editorial that reads like a Tumblr post, she expressed her outrage, her befuddlement, and, most (tellingly) of all, her disappointment that so many Americans had decided to jump on this bandwagon and help people with a horrible debilitating illness. “We’re the laughingstock of the global community,” she wrote, facepalming lugubriously.

The main sticking point for her seems to be that ALS primarily affects old white men (yeah, 55 is real fucking old, kid), and who cares about them? They’re the one group causing most of the world’s problems in the first place! Everyone knows that old white men aren’t even really people anyway; they’re not even worth the price of the ice cubes you’re dumping on your head. Of course, the author couldn’t just come right out and admit this widely acknowledged truth. It shows, however, in the fact that she felt justified in writing off ALS as an “old white man’s disease” in her screed.

This is actually something that people believe. If you contribute to the Ice Bucket Challenge and donate money for the medical research needed to help sufferers of this illness, you’re seen as an immature, privileged fool embarrassing our country in the eyes of the world because ALS is a rare disease that affects middle-aged white men more frequently than the other demographics that it also affects. Basically, if a disease only harms an oppressor, we shouldn’t bother curing it. Remember what Gandhi said: “An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind. But seriously, though, fuck the British. Given the choice I’d let them all die.”

 

To be fair and balanced, this isn’t the crux of the argument. The Anti-Ice Bucket Brigade spends much more time parroting another common and frustratingly obtuse point, one that people have used to obstruct and obfuscate everything from civil rights to women’s suffrage: the point that various other tragedies are more important than this tragedy. So let’s focus on those first; we’ll get to this one if we have the time.

According to this argument, the seriousness of ALS isn’t a legitimate concern because of who is statistically more likely to be afflicted by it. But why does that make any difference? What if there was a disease that affected only Holocaust deniers or men’s rights activists? Don’t we all deserve the same human dignity, assholes and idiots and Social Justice Warriors alike?

This idea that ALS is a less urgent issue than XYZ and therefore you should ignore it entirely is completely baffling to me, but it seems to be the central thesis of the obstructionists’ argument. “Have you heard of Michael Brown and Ferguson?” they ask. “Israel and Palestine? Mental illness and depression? The border crisis? The Ebola outbreak? Police militarization? Women dying in childbirth? This stupid meme?”

People are incapable of caring about more than one issue at a time, you see. We’re not expected to worry about institutionalized racism and social upheaval if we’ve already poured water on our heads. Because everyone doing the ALS Challenge just to show off online would otherwise have used that time to become a champion of social justice, am I right?

Do you know how difficult it is to shake people out of their apathy, even for the five minutes it takes to fill a bucket with water, record yourself dumping it on your head, and upload it to the Internet? Do you understand what an achievement that is? So what if it’s gimmicky and slightly self-serving? It allows people to feel good about doing good, to feel like they belong to something greater than themselves, a higher force for change. And what’s wrong with that? It’s not like they’re paying to have their egos jerked off without actually helping anyone. We can’t all quit our day jobs to build schools in some war-torn, plague-stricken developing country half a world away. Or write condescending Internet editorials and reblog sarcastic image macros, as the case may be.

Here’s the thing about the people doing the Ice Bucket Challenge: contrary to what the news media might lead you to believe, most of them are not celebrities. They are the ordinary, unexceptional, oftentimes annoying people on your Facebook feed who won’t stop using hashtags or sharing Taylor Swift’s new music video. The majority of them will most likely never find themselves in a position to evoke any great social change. Their daily struggles and achievements are as important as anyone’s but will never be recognized on the global stage.

By that same token, ALS is as devastating as any mainstream disease, but its sufferers (like those of an infinite number of other unpopular afflictions) have always been marginalized or forgotten in the shadow of behemoths like cancer, AIDS, or autism. The Ice Bucket Challenge isn’t about making yourself feel good; it’s about raising awareness for people whose pain is just as real and matters just as much as that of anyone we’re used to seeing in the headlines. ALS and those afflicted by it deserve our attention even if they aren’t underprivileged, even if their struggle isn’t the result of some upworthy crisis in Sub-Saharan Africa

Who can I throw money at to cure police oppression? How many stupid videos of myself doing something completely unrelated do I have to make before white privilege no longer exists? How much suffering do I have to trivialize to convince you that my pet causes are more important than yours?

The editorial that started my whole thought process here signaled its conclusion with a single imperious directive: “Grow up,” the author urged us. “Get over this non-factor that kills thousands of people each year and focus on the issues that really matter.” But maybe she and others like her are the ones who need to grow up, if only a little bit, to realize that this accusatory, judgmental brand of social activism is just another form of entitlement.

Who is she to say what act of kindness and compassion others should spend their money on? Who is anyone to make that determination for anyone else? How does taking people to task for trying to help strangers who are suffering contribute anything to the conversations she cares about? Pain is pain, and we will never end all the misery in the world, no matter how many Jezebel articles we retweet. What does this do to alleviate any of it?

Instead of pitting two goods against each other (and let’s be honest, racial politicking aside there’s no reason anyone should object to raising money for victims of a degenerative neurological disease), why not take advantage of the publicity the Ice Bucket Challenge has gained to promote the causes that you believe in? Why not invent your own viral campaign to promote awareness for all those other objectively terrible things you think are so much worse than this objectively terrible thing? Chances are you won’t raise $94 million in a month, but at least you’d be making a constructive contribution instead of fueling all the hate and hurt with more bitterness, more disrespect, more negativity. Surely that would be a better use of your time than preaching to the social justice choir?

This is what’s real: every day, ugly, fucked-up things happen to people who deserve better, and it’s easy to feel overwhelmed in the face of so much terrible shit that we can do so little about. But to take out that frustration on people doing something to remove a little bit of that pain, to draw attention to an overlooked suffering, is unworthy of us and of the causes we champion. Causes that, by the way, typically involve calling attention to overlooked suffering. By all means cite your statistics and your studies, shout your uncomfortable truths from the rooftops of the world, help the apathetic and the privileged open their eyes to the injustice around them and see the change that is possible if they lend their voices to the dissenting chorus. Just don’t be a dick about it.

How LOST Betrayed Us All from the Beginning

Are people tired of complaining about Lost yet?
 

It doesn’t seem like it. Sometimes it feels impossible to browse the comments on any article or video even tangentially related to J. J. Abrams, Damon Lindelof, or modern television without someone bringing up the catastrophic series finale of Lost and how it retroactively ruined six years of everyone’s lives. Inevitably a few people who liked the ending will show up and muster the same tired defenses, and the entire comments section of an article about a movie Damon Lindelof mentioned on his Twitter will devolve into an ouroboros of wasted time and confused hatred.
 

Of course Star Trek Into Darkness was voted the worst Star Trek film of all time; it was co-written by one of the guys who wrote Lost! Of course Lost tops this random website’s list of worst series finales; did you miss the part where everyone was dead the whole time? Lost may have been gone and buried these past four years, but it seems that fan bitterness and resentment is still alive and well, simmering just beneath the surface.
 

But with last year’s conclusion of Dexter being dubbed the new Worst Television Finale of All Time by the Internet Hate Machine, perhaps there’s a new standard for comparing failed ways to end a narrative. If so, perhaps people will finally be able to put their dissatisfaction with Lost to bed and move on to other disappointments. But before that happens, let’s get one thing settled: most of the hate and hurt over the way Lost ended is the result of faults imagined or exaggerated. That’s a topic for another article, perhaps, but that said, faults there definitely were. I don’t mean minor questions that were set up but never paid off, or questions that were answered but everyone thinks weren’t, or any of the plethora of questions people ask that aren’t really questions at all. These are questions that Lost had to answer not for the sake of its fans, but for the sake of its own narrative cohesion. The writers of Lost could have given the most satisfactory answers imaginable to the smoke monster and the island and who was in the second canoe during the boat chase in Season 5, but it still wouldn’t have been enough to make up for the gaps in the story’s internal logic left by these questions that should have been answered but, for whatever reason, weren’t.

 

1) Who saved Locke after he was shot?

In the antepenultimate episode of Season 3, John Locke is shot in the gut by Ben Linus and left to die in the mass grave of the Dharma Initiative. Faced with a slow, agonizing death, Locke is on the verge of shooting himself in the head when he’s stopped by a teenaged apparition of Walt, who at that point in the show’s timeline should still have been ten years old. The apparition tells Locke that he still has work to do and sends him off on a mission to prevent Charles Widmore’s freighter from reaching the island. Locke recounts this experience early in the following season, and then it’s never mentioned again.

So who the hell was that? It’s kind of a big deal, since “Taller Ghost Walt,” as Sawyer later nicknames the specter, not only saved Locke’s life, but also directly initiated his Season 4 character arc. Everything Locke does in that season, from causing a schism among the castaways to moving the island in order to save it from the people on the freighter, is the result of what Taller Ghost Walt told him. But who was this apparition and what was its motivation? Seasons 1 and 2 established that Walt—the real Walt—is capable of psychic abilities like astral projection and clairvoyance. That could explain how he was able to appear on the island long after he had left it with his father and how he knew to warn Locke about the freighter. It doesn’t explain why in future seasons he had no knowledge of anything that had transpired on the island since he left, however, or why he appeared as an aged version of himself. The actual explanation is that more time had passed in real life than in the show and actor Malcolm David Kelley hit puberty long before his ten-year-old character, but the characters brought up his changed appearance in the show itself, which makes no sense if we were supposed to shrug and say, “It’s just a TV show.”

 

“Who am I supposed to be?”

So if Taller Ghost Walt wasn’t actually Walt, who else could he have been? How about the smoke monster? He likes to appear in other people’s forms, right? The problem with that idea, of course, is that the monster can only take on the forms of the dead, and only when the body he’s copying is physically present on the island (except when it’s not, but, you know, whatever). So that’s out as well. The third option is that Taller Ghost Walt was a manifestation of the island itself. Remember back in the early seasons, before the whole show became about two ageless white guys with mommy issues trying to kill one another, how the island was often referred to as having a consciousness and a will of its own, and it would often express that will to various characters, especially Locke, through dreams or visions? Maybe that’s what Taller Ghost Walt was supposed to be, before the writers changed gears and basically rewrote the entire mythology in the last three seasons. But usually in those dreams or visions, the character who appeared was in some way connected to the message being communicated. Walt had been off the show for an entire season by that point and had nothing to do with the freighter (besides his dad being on it, but Locke never found out about that). And why the hell would the island manifest as a version of Walt from the future?

If the writers ever had a clear idea of who Taller Ghost Walt was supposed to be, why he appeared as a teenager, and what his motive was for telling Locke to stop the freighter, it was never revealed on the show, leaving the whole incident just another deus ex machina.

2) How did the Oceanic 6 get back to 2007?

In mid-Season 5, the Oceanic 6 finally return to the island three years (in the show’s timeline) after escaping from it. As their plane approaches, some of them (not all, the reason for which was also never explained, but one thing at a time) are spontaneously transported back in time to 1977, where they are reunited with their friends who had remained on the island and traveled back in time three years earlier. They spend the rest of the season in 1977, trying to change the future to prevent themselves from ever being stranded on the island in the first place. In the season finale, they think they’ve finally figured out a way to do this: by detonating a nuclear bomb, of course! The idea is that the bomb will prevent the electromagnetic research station that accidentally caused their plane to crash in 2004 from ever being built in the first place, thus preventing the crash and rewriting the entire timeline. The season ends on a cliffhanger at the moment of the bomb’s detonation, which is resolved in the Season 6 premiere when all the characters who time-traveled to 1977 wake up back in their proper time, 30 years later. This includes the character who set off the bomb by hitting it with a rock and detonating it right in her face.

So . . . how did they get there? The show never addressed what caused the Oceanic 6 and their friends to return to 2007. It was just like, “Okay, they’re here now, just accept it, we’re doing the last season now and the time travel doesn’t matter anymore.” Lost is infamous for creating the most fascinating mystery hooks and then quietly sweeping them under the rug when the narrative advances past them without ever providing an explanation, but this is one of the most audacious instances of that phenomenon, and also one of the least talked about. Did no one notice that between seasons several characters jumped 30 years in time with no explanation?

“The bomb did it,” some fans will say, as if it’s common knowledge that atomic warheads function primarily as time travel devices. I’m pretty sure there are several episodes of Star Trek where some kind of massive explosion tears a hole in the space-time continuum and time travel occurs. Did people get confused and think they were watching an episode of Star Trek? “No, it’s because the bomb blew up in the island’s reservoir of magical electromagnetism that causes time travel.” If anything, trying to explain how it happened just makes it even more nonsensical. The show already showed us how its electromagnetically induced time travel works: it’s completely random and unpredictable, and no explosions are required. Why would an atomic warhead have any effect on the electromagnetism’s time-travel properties at all, let alone the very specific effect of sending a select group of people exactly 30 years into the future to the exact moment in time they were originally supposed to be in? And why would Juliet be among that group instead of being completely obliterated the moment the bomb went off?

The interior of a TARDIS is much larger than its exterior, which can blend in with its surroundings using the ship’s “chameleon circuit.”

 

There’s never any clear indication that the bomb even exploded at all. The future didn’t change. The Swan station was still built in the same spot where it always was. There’s no sign of any lingering radioactivity. I’d like to think that the bomb did go off, because if it didn’t then that entire subplot was completely pointless and Jack Shephard’s character growth stemming from his failure to change the past was artificial, but the show never clues us in either way.

“The island did it,” someone will suggest. Regardless of whether this means that the island guided where in time the explosion sent them or that it just plucked them out 1977 all on its own, no explosion necessary, it’s still stupid. Even accepting the island still existed as a conscious character with its own motives in the demigod chess game Lost had become by that point, it had never before taken such a direct role in influencing the characters’ destinies and never would again. Even Taller Ghost Walt didn’t physically pull Locke out of the pit, but gave him the motivation he needed to do it himself. I think I just put more thought into this plot point in these few paragraphs than the writers did when they came up with it. The characters just needed to be back in 2007 for Season 6, and so they were. That’s even lazier writing than a deus ex machina.

3) The cabin. Just the cabin.

In case you’ve forgotten, because it ended up not mattering at all by the end, a select few characters in Seasons 3 through 5 would occasionally end up at a mysterious shack in the jungle known only as “Jacob’s cabin.” Benjamin Linus first takes Locke there at the end of Season 3 when Locke demands to meet Jacob, the Others’ mysterious, unseen leader. It is surrounded by a ring of ash, which is later revealed to be a method of repelling the smoke monster (but at the time was hinted by the writers to be a method of keeping Jacob imprisoned). Inside the cabin, Ben speaks to what appears to Locke to be an empty chair, but as Locke turns to leave in disgust, he hears a disembodied voice say, “Help me.” Shit then proceeds to go crazy as objects start flying around the room, smash into pieces, and are then whole in their original places again. A fire breaks out and then disappears. For a split second, the silhouette of a man can be seen in the empty chair. This episode was fucking nuts and a step beyond the level of crazy Lost had reached in the past.

In the Season 4 premiere, Hurley gets lost in the jungle and finds himself at the cabin. He sees two figures inside: Jack Shephard’s dead father (whom Hurley has never met and doesn’t recognize) and the eye of the invisible man who spoke to Locke. Unnerved, Hurley runs away, only to find himself right back at the cabin. He closes his eyes and wills it to disappear, and when he opens them again, it has. Later that same season, the ghost of the long-dead Dharma Initiative scientist Horace Goodspeed appears to Locke in a dream and tells him he must go to the cabin, which Horace reveals he built as a private get-away for himself and his wife. Locke returns to the location to which Ben brought him and finds the ring of ash still on the ground, but the cabin has disappeared. Through a convoluted chain of events, Locke finds it again, but Jacob is nowhere to be found. Instead, the cabin’s sole occupant is Jack’s dead father, who tells Locke he must move the island to save it from Charles Widmore’s freighter.

The final piece of this insoluble puzzle comes in the final episode of Season 5, when Ilana, one of Jacob’s followers who has traveled to the island to protect him, goes to the cabin seeking Jacob. When she arrives, she finds a message from him directing her to the giant Egyptian statue on the beach where he now lives, but she is also horrified to see that the ring of ash encircling the cabin has been broken, creating a gap in its barrier. She burns the cabin to the ground and it’s never mentioned again.

So pretty much nothing about the cabin makes any kind of sense. It’s clear to me that the writers’ idea of who Jacob was and what role he played on the island shifted dramatically between Seasons 3 and 4, and then possibly again between Season 4 and his first actual appearance in the Season 5 finale. The Jacob who is introduced in that episode and appears throughout Season 6 never displays the ability to turn himself invisible, telekinetically throw objects, or reverse time. He has some supernatural abilities, including apparent agelessness, but such dramatic powers are never shown to be among them and don’t really fit with what his character ultimately became. It’s never explained what he meant when he asked Locke to help him; in fact, Jacob and Locke never interact again. Jacob also has no apparent connection to the cabin, aside from leaving the note there for Ilana. In flashbacks dating both hundreds and thousands of years in the past, Jacob is seen living at the statue that is his home in Season 5. If he ever really lived in the cabin, or when, is never touched upon.

In fact, the implication, insofar as the show actually makes one, is that despite everything we were told and everything that was suggested back in Season 3, the invisible man who spoke to Locke might not really have been Jacob at all. The writers never draw a direct connection, seeming more content to sweep it under the rug and hope television viewers in the age of DVR and social media just forget about it, but there are a few small hints, made long after the fact of course, that that entity in Jacob’s cabin was actually the smoke monster. At the very least, the gap in the ash ring suggests that the monster had infiltrated the cabin at some point. We were probably meant to assume that he was impersonating Jack’s father when he told Locke to move the island (although whether or not that was the writers’ intention at the time that scene was written is up for debate). The writers could therefore reasonably expect us to extrapolate that the invisible man from Season 3 was the smoke monster as well, playing some kind of mind game to either lure Locke into his service or trick Ben into killing him so the monster could then imitate Locke’s body. 

“So I’ve got Mr. Obama sitting here and I’m going to ask him a couple of questions . . .”

It should be obvious, however, that originally it really was supposed to be Jacob, but then the writers changed their idea of who Jacob was and tried to patch this gaping plot hole without calling attention to it. They kind of failed miserably, though, because while the man in the chair being the smoke monster makes slightly more sense than him being Jacob, it still doesn’t actually make sense at all. I think the monster did randomly use telekinesis one time, but invisibility and time reversal were never shown to be in his power set, and the ash ring being broken in Season 5 only makes sense if it wasn’t yet broken in Season 3. Ben and Locke stop and look at the ash when they approach the cabin, and Locke sees the circle again when looking for the cabin in Season 4. Neither time is there any indication that the circle is broken, meaning that the monster could not have been in the cabin the first time Locke met “Jacob.” So who was the invisible man who said “help me”? Maybe it was another personification of the island; that seems to be the go-to answer for these unresolved mysteries.

Basically the whole thing is a clusterfuck.

We haven’t even touched on how the cabin teleporting all over the place is never addressed but at this point the sweet release of death seems a preferable alternative.

4) What is the sickness/infection?

Of course one of the first mysteries ever introduced on the show was also one of the few never resolved. Unlike most of the others, however, such as the mysterious food pallet delivery or why Hurley never lost any weight, this one wasn’t just brought up a few times in the early seasons and then forgotten; the writers kept the sickness in play up until the very end.

It’s first brought up in Season 1 by the crazy French woman Danielle Rousseau, who’s been marooned on the island for 16 years. She confesses to Sayid that she killed her husband and the four other members of their science team after their ship sank offshore and they became stranded. She explains that her team was sick, infected in the “Dark Territory” by something carried by the Others. (She also claims that the monster is a security system protecting the island, so apparently she’s unaware that it’s an intelligent being that used to be a man. That’s okay, though, because at the time the writers were probably unaware of that too.) At the end of the episode we’re left to wonder if she’s telling the truth or if she’s just been driven mad by isolation.

The writers continued to tease “the sickness” for years, from the quarantine label on the hatch (which turned out to be fake) to the outbreak of insanity on Widmore’s freighter (which turned out to be caused by approaching the island from the wrong coordinates or something) to Baby Aaron’s diaper rash, but the original infection finally comes up again in Season 5. During the span of episodes where everyone is jumping through time, Jin comes across Rousseau and her team when they first arrive on the island in 1988 and witnesses firsthand the fate that befalls them. One of their team is attacked by the monster and dragged underground into a series of tunnels that run beneath a mysterious, walled-off temple. Rousseau’s husband and the other members of their team venture into the catacombs to search for their friend, but Jin cautions the pregnant Rousseau to stay aboveground. He’s then transported slightly forward in time, arriving in the midst of Rousseau’s final confrontation with her husband. She has him at gunpoint and claims that the monster made him sick, but he replies that the monster is just a security system guarding the temple. Then he tries to kill her and she shoots him. She catches sight of Jin and thinks he’s one of the Others because she saw him time travel, and then there’s a throwaway line where she calls Jin a “carrier” to explain why she thought the Others carried the infection in Season 1 when the writers changed their minds about that later.

So already there’s some fairly weak writing here, with the “carrier” business being brushed under the rug and Rousseau thinking the monster is a security system because her crazy husband told her it was. It’s not until Season 6, however, that the sickness becomes unsalvageable.

The season opens with Sayid dying of a gunshot wound. Jacob appears and tells Hurley that the only way to save him is to take him to the temple, which they eventually do after putting it off for an unnecessarily long time. They enter through the same tunnels where Rousseau’s team was infected, emerging in the temple to find that it is the Others’ final sanctuary from the monster. So why did Rousseau’s husband say the monster was protecting the temple if actually the temple’s whole purpose was to keep the monster out? They don’t even try to explain this discrepancy, instead introducing an Asian guy named Dogen who runs the temple and for some reason knows a whole lot more about the island’s mysteries and what’s really going on than anyone else. He puts Sayid in the temple’s magic healing pool, which saved Ben Linus’s life when he was shot as a child. The pool’s magic no longer works, however, and instead of healing Sayid the Others succeed only in drowning him. But much to their surprise, a few hours later he sits upright, apparently no worse for wear. Dogen runs a series of tests on him that mostly involves torturing him with a red-hot poker. From this he deduces that Sayid has been “claimed”—infected by the monster. Sayid has a darkness inside him that will destroy everything he used to be, he explains, adding that the same thing happened to Jack’s sister, Claire.

“You don’t even want to know where this goes.”

Over the course of the season, Sayid grows increasingly detached and unemotional, surrendering himself to the smoke monster’s influence and carrying out his orders without question. When the monster sends him to kill Desmond, however, Desmond makes some kind of impassioned plea about “what would your dead wife think of you” and somehow this allows Sayid to overcome the monster’s hold on him and die redeeming himself for his sins.

There are a few things here that don’t make any sense, like everything. I assume the pool has nothing to do with the infection, since it only just stopped working right before Sayid got to the temple. The inference I make, therefore, is that the infection was somehow caused by Sayid being resurrected by the smoke monster, even though Sayid was inside the temple and the monster was barred from entering. If that’s the case, wouldn’t that mean everyone else who was infected (i.e., Rousseau’s team) also had to die and be brought back? We never saw the French scientists die, though. Are we supposed to assume that the monster killed them off-screen in the catacombs and then resurrected them? Why did he have to lure them down there first instead of just killing them aboveground? There’s nothing to imply Rousseau’s husband and the others ever died at all. In fact, the only two members of their team killed by the monster on-screen are also the only two who don’t come back and aren’t infected. Hieroglyphs seen in the temple in Season 5 associate the monster with Anubis, the Egyptian god of the afterlife. It’s possible that the writers still hadn’t decided how the sickness worked or what the temple was as late as the end of Season 5, explaining why it changed from a place where the monster was worshiped to a stronghold intended to keep it out.

Then there’s the matter of Claire. The only reason to even think she’s infected is because Dogen says she is, an assertion that is never challenged or proven false. But as far as we know, Claire never died and came back. It’s true that she’s under the monster’s influence, but that’s because he was the only one she had to talk to while stranded alone on the island for the three years when all her friends were in the 1970s. She doesn’t following his orders unswervingly, and unlike Sayid, who only becomes colder and less emotional when infected, Claire is wildly passionate and excitable. It just doesn’t add up, and there is no reason for Dogen to claim she is infected, from the perspective of either the character or the writers.

It seems like the writers had already seeded a few different possibilities for the sickness in the previous seasons, then in Season 6 went “forget that, it’s this now.” Whatever they thought they were doing, I still have no idea what the sickness was, and given the crucial role it played in the final season and its prominence throughout the series, it deserved a better explanation than none at all.

5) What would happen if the Man in Black left the island?

The plot of the entire final season of the show hinges on this imperative: stop the Man in Black from leaving the island. For thousands of years, ever since he lost his corporeal form and became the smoke monster, he’s been trapped there with nothing to do but murder people or screw with their heads. His goal throughout Season 6 is to kill off Jacob’s final candidates—Jack, Hurley, Sawyer, Sun, and Jin—because apparently Jacob placed some kind of magic in them that is binding the monster to the island. This is what he believes, anyway, but it’s not entirely clear if this is even true, because in the penultimate episode of the series he realizes “hey, I don’t even have to do that, I can just do this other thing and then I’ll be able to leave.”

But why is it so important that he not leave the island in the first place? In the end, that’s really what the entire show can be boiled down to (if you want to be cynical about it). Surely something so pivotal to all six years of storytelling, and the final season in particular, would have to be explained. Why would the characters even care about stopping him if they didn’t have a clear understanding of why it mattered?

In a flashback to 1867, Jacob unhelpfully tells Richard Alpert to think of the monster as wine trapped inside a bottle so he can’t stain your carpet. The island is the bottle, holding back hell from engulfing the earth, which would somehow happen if the bottle ever broke. Cool metaphor, bro, but the majority of your viewing audience isn’t uneducated 19th-century Spanish peasants. Maybe try explaining it again a few hundred years later when people can understand concepts a little more complex than religious allusions and the threat of spiritual damnation. While you’re at it, you can also clear up why all the Man in Black ever talks about doing after he escapes is going “home,” which I assume means some little Italian village where his mother lived before she gave birth to him on the island. Who knows, maybe after a while of herding goats and building cabinets he’d get bored and decide to use his supernatural powers to destroy the earth, but that never made his bucket list. Is that seriously the motivating factor here, that the monster might, conceivably, murder everyone on the planet one day, just because he has the ability to? Why would he do that, and why does everyone talk about it like it’s a certainty?

“Everyone” in this case includes even the island’s Greek choir of unquiet spirits, as the ghost of Richard Alpert’s dead wife tells Hurley that they have to stop the Man in Black from leaving the island, or else they will all go to hell. Okay, Richard’s dead wife, do you understand that that is meaningless pablum? Could you be a little more specific, do you think? Seriously, you’re saying nothing. Since you seem to have some sort of divine omniscience now, how about explaining, in detail, step by step, precisely what would happen if the Man in Black escaped? Do you mean everyone will literally go to hell? Like the Hellmouth would open and pour forth everything you ever dreaded was under your bed but told yourself couldn’t be by the light of day? Is that what you’re saying?

In the second-to-last episode of the series, Jacob makes his last confession, telling the remaining candidates that he was responsible for creating the monster and because of his mistake, there’s a chance that everyone they know and love will die. And of course, of course, not one of the candidates speaks up and asks him what the hell he’s talking about, how is everyone going to die and why, they just ask about the mistake he mentioned, which in any competently written scene would be by far the least interesting part of what he just told them.

To make matters even more confusing, at this point Jacob isn’t even talking about the smoke monster escaping the island anymore, he’s talking about the smoke monster extinguishing the magic light at the island’s center. The candidates’ job is to protect the light, not to stop the monster; stopping the monster is only incidental, because he’s discovered that putting out the light will allow him to leave without having to kill the candidates. So is it the monster getting off the island that’s so dangerous, or is it him putting out the light in order for him to get off the island? Was he seriously wasting his time trying to kill Jacob and all the candidates for literally thousands of years when that wouldn’t have accomplished anything anyway?

It’s another classic Lost example of no one asking the questions that matter and everyone being satisfied with answers that answer nothing. What happens if the Man in Black gets off the island? “Then we all go to hell.” What does that mean? “It means that the world will end.” What does that mean? “It means that everyone you know will die.” As if that wasn’t already going to happen anyway. I mean seriously, WHAT WOULD HAPPEN? Would everyone just immediately drop dead? Would the monster personally hunt down and kill everyone in the world individually? Would the earth physically explode? Would everyone’s souls be damned to an afterlife of eternal torment? Would everyone lose access to the afterlife and just become nothing when they die? Would no one physically die but instead become evil and “infected” like Sayid? It could be any of these, it could be none of these, I don’t know and the writers probably never did either.

It’s the end of the world as we know it.

 

It’s frustrating to think about these questions, even after so much time has passed. It’s frustrating because you see people complaining about the church and the afterlife and how the island was purgatory all along, they totally called it back in Season 1, fuck you, Damon Lindelof, you hack fraud. As if these are the things that really matter, not all the parts of the show that were so great it hurt, or all the parts that were so bad and stupid and lazy it hurt even worse (see above). As if all there was to six years of Lost was some out-of-context story points pulled from the tail-end of the show. “Hey, whatever you do, don’t watch Dexter, the show about how a serial killer becomes a lumberjack. That show fucking sucks.”

If you’re going to waste everyone’s time complaining about Lost, at least complain about the things that matter, not the things you heard someone else say were dumb. But remember when we found out Locke was in a wheelchair? Remember when the red-and-black hieroglyphs flipped up on the countdown timer in the hatch for the first time? Remember when Jack told Kate they had to go back? Man, what a great show Lost was, and what a shame that it made so many people forget.