I have to go back!

LOST. SEASON 5. So sorry to take so long on responding. The weather in Portland has been amazing, so when I'm not working (which has been, um, difficult lately) or running because I no longer have an excuse, I often find myself sitting out on the grass in the front yard reading because there is such little time to enjoy sunshine in Portland it seems. But I digress.

It's been so long since I read your response to my post, I had to go back and read it again. I guess I should again, just to be safe, give a SPOILER ALERT as I will take no efforts to restrain myself from talking about when happens in the episodes. So my biggest conclusion from reading your email is that we agree too much on the show! I usually get get pretty riled up in conversations with people -- arguments with my sister over whether to trust Juliet and an ongoing battle with a coworker over just about everything related to one Ben Linus, whom I still contend will have his ends if not his means vindicated -- but I read your post and pretty much agreed with everything you said. I am completely with you on the Juliet-Sawyer/James relationship and perhaps it is that sense of a truly meaningful union that should have given us the hint that it would end poorly. (Side note: One of my roommates thinks Elizabeth Mitchell is the hottest actress in Hollywood. Discuss) In response to one of the questions you posed, I don't know how far you are with me on this idea but I think that much of what we have seen on the show has been orchestrated by our cosmic warriors. I do think Loophole wanted John to move the island and eventually get off the island and come back so he could be used to kill Jacob and Ben got in the way because he wanted to be as useful to the entity that he thought was Jacob as it turns out John was becoming. My view is that these guys see the broad range of the timeline of the island instead of just the immediate event -- either because what happens is predetermined or because they can simply see the entire string of events of the events that cause the actions, we don't know that specific yet -- and that much like "the island" course-corrected to kill Charlie (hmmm...perhaps that is code for Loophole or Jacob, methinks), our two adversaries do not see an individual event as preventing their ultimate ends, just a bend that has to also be straightened out.

Alright, so I actually do want to move on to season 5 as a whole, which I think you laid the ground for quite well even before commenting on it specifically. This season really threw me at first, as I think was the intention. I do not agree that season 4 was too plot centric -- quite the contrary, seeing the future plot development of our Oceanic 6 brought a new dimension to the characters, especially in the hearbreaking episode detailing Sun giving birth. The first half of this season, however, eschewed from the episode blueprint used all but a handful of episodes that blended the current timeline with character development from the past and later the future. Because of that, it wasn't until the eighth episode (when I might add we also returned to the more traditional character-driven format) that my way of remembering the seasons becomes apparent: who the new people are. First season were the survivors/losties/Oceanic 815 whaever you want to call them; second season were the tailies; third season was the Others; fourth season were the freighters; and then it turned out that the fifth season were the Dharmas.

Although I did find myself emersed in trying to figure out what this whole time-travel stuff meant and geeking out on that, I don't know about you but I became a bit detached from the show. Not to the point where I would stop watching, mind you, but definitely watching without a whole lot of emotional involvement in the episode. I do agree that the shorter seasons do weed out a lot of fluff, but I would have liked to have seen what was happening with Sun or have cared more when Charlotte died. I know the writers had to cut out some backstory on the freighter people last season because of the strike and we were told they would revisit it this year, but I would have to criticize the writers for not giving us the opportunity to know these characters better. One of the apt comments you made in your post was on the way ability of the writers to make the viewer question moral assumptions about characters and I found that Charlotte in particular never got the opportunity to transcend being a selfish harpie. And, no, her as a cute little kid didn't cut it.

Did the season succeed in the end? Yes, I do think it did. It left me wanting more and I assume on repeat viewin I will not get a little bored in the middle, as I find happens in seasons 2 and 3. Withat a finally like that, how could it not please? What I particularly appreciated was how I thought it answered a lot of questions and made clear where we are coming from but at the same time leaving a lot of mostly new questions. The issue of time travel, as you brought up, will indeed be an important issue, but at times it felt a little like a gimmick this past season. They are going to need to prove to me next season why we needed this adventure. My guess is it will tie into how the debate of free choice and determinism pans out. I will say if the idea of time and how it relates to the broader issues of the show becomes a major focus, I am quite excited. Perhaps it was because they had to spend so much time dissecting the time travel they did not have as much time to explore what it means, and I look forward to season 6 brining that up. That would be the ultimate way to tie form to function and account for why the show chose to pair up different timelines throughout the entire run of the series. We might have discussed this before, but books/movies/televsion that play with time by either running multiple stories at the same time (one example being, um, Lost) or through reinvention of timelines (a la Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind) are generally pieces for which I am a bit of a sucker. The idea of how past and future experience are tied to the present and what the existence of these concepts mean is a topic I find bother intruiging and particularly dramatic in a way that comes across best in works of fiction or film. If Lost ultimately becomes a dramatic telling not just of good and evil but how actions and time are a web of interconnectedness, I will in the end likely be even more of a fanboy.

So I think this is a bit shorter this time. I'm definitely up for more Lost conversation, but I do want to get into some other posts. I do want to finally write that other post I mentioned (OK, I'll stop keeping you in suspense -- it's a comparison of the British mini-series State of Play and its American film remake). Yeah, that and about a half a dozen movies I have watched recently for which I really should write. I will try not to take as long next time.