What I Didn't Like About Season 5

I really enjoyed this season, I did. But there were a few things that I felt fell flat. Or perhaps just didn't work. Or simply weren't thought through. Here are a few in no particular order:



Ana Lucia’s Warning to Hurley

I personally thought it was really cool to see Ana Lucia again, and she seemed to genuinely care about Hurley, offering him helpful advice on how to deal with the crisis in which he found himself. Her last piece of advice, “And stay away from the cops.”

Now, I take seriously what ghosts on Lost tell us, and I sincerely believed that Hurley needed to avoid the police. I was therefore upset when Hurley turned himself in to the police just to avoid Ben. When we didn’t see Hurley for several episodes afterward, I figured that bad things were really going to happen. Then, nothing. Ben’s attorney managed to get Hurley literally tossed out of jail. Hurley took a cab, where he had a meaningful conversation with Jacob. Hurley decided to return to the island. Nothing sinister occurred. Nothing at all. There seemed to be no reason for Ana Lucia to say it.

Sidebar: I read somewhere that it was actually designed to poke fun at Michelle Rodriguez, the actress who played Ana Lucia and famously was arrested for DUI in Hawaii, violating her probation.

Jin’s Limited Storyline

One of the reasons I was worried that Jin might actually have been killed on the freighter was that the actor who portrays him, Daniel Dae Kim, was arrested in Hawaii for a DUI (his BAC was twice the legal limit). Well, we all know what happens when Lost actors get arrested for that particular crime (see above). But it appears that the Lost producers have a new way of punishing their criminal cast. Limit the lines they speak. I think that once This Place is Death was over, Jin had maybe one line per episode, if he was lucky. We’re told his English improved, but we never saw evidence of it.

Walt and John’s Conversation

I said it before, and I’ll say it again. This conversation was, to me, extremely disappointing. Walt and John Locke started developing a close bond early on, in the second hour of the Pilot. John taught Walt to play Backgammon, and may even have told the boy that the Island healed him: “Walt, do you want to know a secret?” (We never did learn exactly what “secret” John shared, but in Tabula Rasa, Walt told Michael that Locke had told him that he had experienced a miracle). Their relationship progresses, despite Michael’s attempts to keep them apart. John not only teaches Walt to throw a knife, he also figures out that Walt is different. John also knew that Walt, not Jin or the Others, burned the first raft Michael built. The relationship appears strained, however, after Walt begs John not to open it (apparently referring to the Hatch), even though Walt had never been told about the Hatch. But let’s not forget that Walt appeared to John in Through the Looking Glass, after Ben had shot John and left him for dead amongst the dead Dharma folk. John had given up hope, and was trying to kill himself, when Walt appeared, telling John to get up, because “you have work to do.” John later said that he received orders from Walt, only taller.

So, you would think that the reunion of these two special people, who shared so much in such a short time, would be meaningful. But instead, it was flat and dull. Lifeless, even. Here it is.

WALT: Hey, John.
LOCKE: Hi, Walt.
WALT: What happened?
LOCKE: I hurt my leg. You don't seem surprised to see me.
WALT: I've been having dreams about you. You were on the Island, wearing a suit, and there are people all around you. They wanted to hurt you, John.
LOCKE: Good thing they're just dreams.
WALT: Is my dad... is he back on the Island? I haven't talked to him in three years. I figured he must've gone back.
LOCKE: Um, last I heard, your dad was on a freighter near the Island.
WALT: So why'd you come to see me?
LOCKE: I just wanted to make sure you were okay.
WALT: Yeah. I'm doing pretty good. Well, I gotta go. It was good seeing you, John.
LOCKE: Yeah. Take care.

Didn’t these two deserve a better reunion?

Is Kate the Secret to the Island?

I know that I wasn’t the only one to be disturbed that the impetus for much of The Incident was the passive presence of Kate. Kate is a doer, never one to sit still if there is something that she thinks needs doing. So imagine her surprise if she realized that the reason Jack wanted to blow up the island was not just to revive all those who had been killed, but because they broke up:

SAWYER: What did you screw up so bad the first time around you're willing to blow up a damn nuke just for a second chance?
JACK: That's not what this is about.
SAWYER: Then what is it about?
JACK: Three years ago, Locke told me that all this was happening for a reason, that us being here was our destiny.
SAWYER: I don't speak "destiny". What I do understand is a man does what he does 'cause he wants something for himself. What do you want, Jack?
JACK: I had her. I had her, and I lost her.
SAWYER: Kate? Well, damn, Doc, she's standing right on the other side of those trees. You want her back, just go and ask her.
JACK: Nah, it's too late for that. Your five minutes is up.
SAWYER: Jack... if what you're doin' even works, you and Kate will be strangers, and she'll be in damn handcuffs.
JACK: If it's meant to be, it's meant to be.

Since reason didn’t work, Sawyer used his fists to convince Jack to not blow up the island, only to be stopped by Juliet. Juliet had just earlier been convinced by Kate to get off the submarine to prevent Jack from blowing up said nuke. Suddenly, she changed her mind. And why? Not because she thinks it’s a great idea, but because of the look that Sawyer gave Kate when Rose and Bernard were talking about their need to be together.

SAWYER: I need you to tell me where all this is coming from. I mean, one minute, you're leading the great sub escape, and now you're on board with blowing up the damn Island? I got a right to know why you changed your mind.
JULIET: I changed my mind when I saw you look at her.

Whatever. These were the weakest parts of an otherwise excellent season finale.

There's no real reason to include the picture above, other than to say I finally found a photo of Jack and Sawyer duking it out.

Good Sun/Sinister Sun

Since leaving the Island, Sun has been shown to be a ruthless business woman who ousted her father from his powerful position because she partially blamed him for Jin’s death. Meanwhile, she approaches Charles Widmore, clearly an evil dude, to suggest that they have a common purpose, to see Ben Linus killed. And even though she seemed friendly to Kate, and seemingly forgave her for Kate’s part in Jin’s death, the way she asked Kate about Jack sent shivers down my spine. I nearly screamed when Kate left Aaron with Sun, a fair instinct considering that Sun fed him candy and left him in the car when she threatened to kill Ben. And who can forget the package that Sun received that included a gun with chocolates?

But all Ben had to do was show Sun Jin’s wedding ring, and suddenly, Sun was all about whatever would bring her back to Jin, without any questions. She certainly showed some spunk when she knocked Ben out with the oar, but that was it. She spent the remainder of the season following and asking lots of questions. Perhaps she was also suffering from Daniel Dae Kim’s DUI.

The Island didn’t seem all that hard to find

Maybe we missed all the drama. But it seemed to me that it took a pendulum and a 1970s-era computer to determine what “the event window”. And how to get there? A flight to Guam. Too bad Jack never thought of that while flying to and from Australia in his attempts to find the Island.

A 12-Year-Old is nearly killed and kidnapped, and oh, who really cares, anyway?

The Dharma Initiative was all a buzz after the shooting of young Ben, and search parties were undertaken to find the nefarious Hostile who committed the crime. Next episode, nothing, even though Ben was kidnapped. Indeed, only two of the Dharma Initiative seemed to care. One was his drunken father, who made sure Sayid was punished by shooting him in the stomach. The other was Phil, who discovered the video showing Sawyer and Kate taking Ben out of the safety zone. Other than that, life seemed to go on as usual in the Barracks.

If that's withdrawal, maybe drug addiction isn't that bad afterall?

I know, I know, it is just a show, and has no responsibility to show that not only is addiction dangerous and bad, but also withdrawal sucks. Especially withdrawal from narcotics, which is presumably what Jack was abusing (along with alcohol). It is possible that once Ben sent Jack home, he found a stash of his pills (did you ever see House?) and decided to take them along with him on the trip. We know he didn’t really seem to give up alcohol, which most substance abuse counselors would say is necessary for true recovery to occur.

If Jack truly was addicted to opiates or opioids, then an abrupt discontinuance would likely lead to sweating, nausea, depression, fatigue, vomiting, and pain. Lots of pain. Instead, we saw a nice, clean shaven Jack, albeit one who refused to operate to save the life of a 12-year-old and wanted to detonate a nuclear bomb because he broke up with Kate. Perhaps the Island prevented Jack from suffering from withdrawal?

Ben’s Amnesia

One of the most fascinating storylines this season involved the shooting of a 12-year-old Ben by Sayid. Hurley put his finger squarely on the issue. If Sayid shot Ben, and Ben survived, then he must have known who Sayid was when Danielle first turned over the ersatz Henry Gale to Sayid, and further, must have known exactly what buttons to push when trying to convince Sayid to return to the Island. My belief in Ben’s powers of manipulation is apparently higher than warranted, though, as we learned from Richard Alpert that Ben would lose all memory of the shooting. Indeed, Ben was surprised in 2007 to learn that Jack, Kate, and Hurley were members of the Dharma Initiative in 1977. Honestly, it felt like a cop-out.

So, what did you think? Anything you wish had been different?

What I Liked About Season 5

So, I've been quiet on the Blog for a while, which is driving some of my friends and readers a little crazy. I apologize for the silence, and hope to more than make up for it in the next couple of months.

A lot happened in Season 5, the penultimate season of Lost. The writers and producers were in a bind, because they couldn't reveal too much, but they also couldn't just leave the story limping along, either. And in some respects, they did a fabulous job. This post will talk about what I liked about the Season. I hope that you will post what you liked as well.

All quotes are from Lostpedia.



I really liked the time traveling aspect. Until John turned the wheel in This Place is Death, the Left-Behinders found themselves skipping through time at an ever-increasing rate, putting their lives in danger, and eventually killing Charlotte. Each time we visited the Left-Behinders, I was on the edge of my seat, worried about what would happen next and exhausted by the time changes. These scenes shows Lost at its best, with the frantic pace with characters who acted, well, characteristically.

Juliet and Sawyer’s love story. I know that I declared myself a proponent of Kate and Sawyer earlier in the season, but watching the mature relationship between Juliet and James turned me into an apostate. I am voting the scene where James brings Juliet a flower as the most romantic involving any members of the Dreaded Quadrangle.

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The fight between Sawyer and Jack, because honestly, they’ve been headed toward this for five years now. Well, three for them. (Sadly, no picture. Can you believe it?)

Any scene that featured Miles and Hurley together. These two are comic gold. Hurley has always been the go-to guy whenever comic relief is needed, but his relationship with Miles ramped it up exponentially. Hurley served as us in his discussions with Miles about time travel, and Miles learned, just as we did five years earlier, that there’s more to Hugo than meets the eye. And only Hugo could successfully compare Miles’ daddy issues to Luke Skywalker’s in the Empire Strikes Back. I heard some people were thinking that Miles would die in the season finale, since his storyline with Pierre Chang resolved itself, but I’m hoping that we get to see him until the very end, coping with Hugo.
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Hugo’s confession to his mother about the crash, the island, and the lie. How many of us have tried to explain to non-Lost fans the appeal of the show, and then realized that what we were saying just didn’t make sense? As Hugo stumbled over his words and tried to explain to his mother just what was going on, a huge lump took center stage in my throat. The words are worth reciting:

HURLEY: Okay. See, we did crash, but it was on this crazy island. And we waited for rescue, and there wasn't any rescue. And there was a smoke monster, and then there were other people on the island. We called them the Others, and they started attacking us. And we found some hatches, and there was a button you had to push every 108 minutes or... well, I was never really clear on that. But... the Others didn't have anything to do with the hatches. That was the DHARMA Initiative. The Others killed them, and now they're trying to kill us. And then we teamed up with the Others because some worse people were coming on a freighter. Desmond's girlfriend's father sent them to kill us. So we stole their helicopter and we flew it to their freighter, but it blew up. And we couldn't go back to the island because it disappeared, so then we crashed into the ocean, and we floated there for a while until a boat came and picked us up. And by then, there were six of us. That part was true. But the re... But the rest of the people... who were on the plane? They're still on that island.
[Carmen puts her hand on her son's wrist.]
CARMEN: I believe you. I don't understand you, but I believe you.

Finally getting to meet Pierre Chang. We’ve seen Pierre Chang in various Dharma Initiative videos, both in the show and through the internet (several, apparently, were shown at various Comic Cons), using different aliases (what’s that about, anyway?), orienting new DI recruits to their new assignments/tasks. We always knew that he was a cranky scientist, but now we got to see him as a principled family man who was willing to believe some crazy talk about his son coming from the future.

The birth of Charlie Hume. I must say I was tickled pink, first that Desmond and Penny had a baby, and secondly, that they named the child after Charlie. Some bloggers used some strained Lost logic to determine that Charlie Hume was actually Charlie Pace, but I’m still on record as saying that I find it far-fetched, and honestly, I feel that such a twist would actually ruin the poignancy of both Charlie’s death and his namesake.

How much fun was it getting to meet the young Danielle Rousseau, and watching her transformation from a young, naïve scientist, to a woman capable of murdering friends and devastated by the loss of her child to Ben? Mira Furlan, the Rousseau we know and love, asked for her character to be killed off (I guess she was tired of Hawaii), so this allowed us to finally learn her story.

Ben’s humor. Not many can pull off a dry line as well as Mr. Linus. Case in point, when Kate accused Ben of starting legal proceedings to remove Aaron from her custody and Jack defended Ben, Ben responds, “No, Jack. She’s right. Sorry.” That "sorry" made me laugh out loud! No one can take semantics to such an extreme either. Ben told a furious Jack he never lied to Jack about John not seeking Ben out; instead, Ben sought out John Locke.

Ben’s apparently successful murder of John Locke in The Life and Death of Jeremy Bentham. It was so unexpected, yet so in character for Ben. I was completely shocked.

Getting to know Richard Alpert. Last season, we had little of Alpert-action because the actor, Nestor Carbonell, who apparently has heavily-lined eyes without the help of make-up, was in a really bad nighttime soap with Jimmy Smits. Thankfully, on two levels at least, the show folded, and Alpert was back to guide, protect, and amaze. Even though we still don’t know who the hell he is, at least we know his role a little better.

Sayid’s response to Oldham’s truth serum was the lightest part of a very serious and dark episode. Sayid gave his interrogators nothing but the truth, but the truth was so bizarre, that all but one of his listeners thought that Oldham gave Sayid too much serum. This exchange is also worth another look:

OLDHAM: I'm going to ask you a few questions. I want you to relax and answer them truthfully...Not that you'll have any choice about it. What is your name?
SAYID: [Clearly drugged] Sayid. Sayid Jarrah.
OLDHAM: All right, Sayid. Why were you in handcuffs when we found you?
SAYID: Because...because I am a bad man.
OLDHAM: Were you running away from your people?
SAYID: What people?
OLDHAM: The hostiles.
SAYID: I am not a hostile.
HORACE: Then where did you come from, Sayid?
SAYID: I came on a plane.
OLDHAM: What plane?
SAYID: Ajira flight 3-1-6.And that's how I returned to the island.
OLDHAM: "Returned"? You've been here before?
SAYID: Oh, yes. The first time, I was on Oceanic flight 8-1-5. It crashed. I was here for a hundred days. Then I left. Ask Sawyer.
OLDHAM: Who's "Sawyer"?
RADZINSKY: Who cares?! None of this matters. Ask him about the Flame.
HORACE: [To Radzinsky] Quiet.
OLDHAM: What do you know about our stations here?
SAYID: I know the Flame was a communication station. The Pearl was to observe other stations. The Swan was to study electromagnetism. But, of course, that was before the incident--
RADZINSKY: [Interrupting] The swan?! How could he know what we were gonna name it? We haven't even built it yet! I told you! He saw the model! You see?! He is a spy!
HORACE: [To Radzinsky] Hey!
RADZINSKY: I knew it!
HORACE: Radzinsky! I'm not gonna tell you again. Cool it.
SAYID: You're all going to die, you know.
HORACE: [To Sayid] What?
SAYID: You're going to be killed.
HORACE: How exactly would you know this, Sayid?
SAYID: Because I am from the future.
OLDHAM: [To Horace] Maybe I should've used half a dropper. Oops.
[Sayid begins to laugh uncontrollably.]
SAYID: You...You used exactly enough.

Somehow Kate became extremely likable in the episode Whatever Happened, Happened. Kate-centric episodes usually end up annoying me, but by the end of that episode, I wanted to hug her, not throttle her. She did the right thing, giving Aaron back to this grandmother, and decided to return to the island so that she could find Claire (I’m sure finding Sawyer was the last thing in her mind). Lastly, unlike Jack, she realized that it was immoral to let a boy die just because he would grow up to become, well, Ben Linus, and took action, in her Kate way, to save him. This doesn’t mean that Kate didn’t manage to annoy me later in the season, just that I found myself sympathizing with her for the first time ever in a Kate-centric episode.

Penny lives! Last season, Ben promised Widmore that he would kill Penny in retaliation for Keamy’s murder of Alex, a violation of “the rules”. I’m sure I’m not the only one who worried that Penny was a goner when Ben showed up in 316 wounded. Finally, in Dead is Dead, we saw what happened. To this day, I think Ben changed his mind about killing Penny when Charlie poked his head out to see what was going on. Regardless, Ben deserved the thrashing that Desmond meted out.

I also thoroughly enjoyed how Rose and Bernard handled their three years in the 1970s. I thought it was remarkably romantic and sane. I heart Rose & Bernard.

Watching Ben’s comeuppance. I’ve loved watching Ben over the years as he’s manipulated just about everyone with whom he comes in contact. Ben loves being in control, and frankly, he’s quite good at it. To tell the truth, I didn’t think that any one of our Lostaways would figure out that Ben was a lying, manipulative jerk. Jack never got it, and the real John Locke never got it. But Sun did. Watching her whack Ben on the head once she learned all she need to learn from him was extremely satisfying. Later, we didn’t know just who was manipulating Ben when he returned to the island with not-Locke, but either way, it was also edifying. I will be curious to see how he handles learning that he was not serving as John Locke’s bitch after all, but some super being who’s been fighting Jacob for years.

The mythology. From the references to ancient Egypt (discussed earlier) to Latin, from “What lies in the shadow of the statue” to fighting on the right side, to finally meeting Jacob, this season was heavy on the mythological subtext. This is just one of many reasons why Lost will be discussed in college courses in the future.

Watching Neil Frogurt take a flaming arrow to the chest. He was really annoying. It was pretty satisfying to see Phil die too.

There was so much to love about the season, and I realize as I worked on this that there were other scenes I've left out. Oh, well. I hope that you'll let us know what you liked about Season 5. And expect another post on what I didn't like about Season 5.