6/1/10 - LOST and the perils of endings

I've had time to sit with it, and I've gorged myself on all the analysis, and I wanted to weigh in with my own thoughts on the finale of Lost in particular, and my thoughts on the series in general now that it's over and the whole work is out there.

First, though, the reading that I would say I align with the most is Noel Murray's analysis on The Onion's AV Club site:

http://www.avclub.com/articles/the-end,41436/

The most resonant point that Murray makes is the following one:

"Does it work as a finale? Yes and no. As noted above, it was definitely emotional, and allowed fans to say goodbye to the characters. But Lost wasn’t just about the characters; it was about the place where the characters met and lived together and died alone and had that shared adventure that Christian Shephard insisted represented all of them at their best. Understand this: I don’t need to know any more about The Island than we already do. It’s a source of great power that can be exploited for ill and thus must be protected—I get that. But in focusing so much on the Sideways resolution, I’m afraid that “The End” doesn’t give The Island itself a proper sendoff. This is a magical place, right? I needed to feel that magic a little more in the closing moments."

I'm going to bullet-point this out, because like Lost itself my reactions are a little all over the place:

• I felt emotionally satisfied by the ending. From a storytelling perspective, Lost really threw in with the inner journeys of its core characters over an exploration of the island itself. There is a strength in that: when science fiction doesn't invest in characters, it can get either really dry, or really hard to care about. Without believable people anchoring crazy events (and Lost had plenty of those), there's just no way in as an audience member. In fact, one of the most satisfactory elements of Lost as a show is the way that Jack's character arc is elegantly completed - his evolution from disbelieving man of science to uber-believing man of faith happened completely organically, with all of his messiah issues and daddy issues and all other issues laid bare and fairly explored over the six seasons of the show. The same is true for Ben and Sawyer, and to a lesser extent Jin, Sun, and Sayid. Because the characters were so strong, Lost was able to really try on some ambitious things narratively.
• Unfortunately, narratively the ending did what many Lost naysayers claimed the show would do: it petered out to a whimper that suggested that a lot of the intrigue and mystery of the island itself and the overarching narrative were just thrown in without a lot of careful narrative underpinning. The more you look at the show as a whole, the more unsatisfactory it becomes from a narrative perspective. It seems that fundamentally it has to do with the fact that the writers never really resolved the questions of the Island into any sort of elegant structure - rather, some questions were answered, some hinted at, and some left outside the scope of the show, while the overall question of the island, Charlie's bemused "Guys, where are we?" never really got a definitive answer. I.e. the Rules between Jacob and the Man in Black, the Rules between Ben and Widmore, and a lot of the initially intriguing mysteries got half-resolved, and never seemed to add up to a cohesive whole. For example, in the Shining a lot of crazy stuff happens, but it all comes back to the fact that the hotel is haunted. There's no such elegance of underpinning structure to the island of Lost.
• A cardinal rule of sci-fi and fantasy is that the rules of the world have to be consistent. Otherwise events just seem arbitrary and the stakes disappear. This became a major problem for Lost. Characters couldn't come back from the dead, until they could. Some people got "infected" for some arbitrary reason never understood. Eloise needed everyone on the plane to get back to the island, until she didn't. Christian was a nasty alcoholic, until he was a shining dead figure of forgiveness. The various websites devoted to unpacking Lost exhibited a much stronger adherence to the rules of world-building than the actual writers of Lost did.
• It was a major mistake to let characters get off of the island. In retrospect, there was no reason to have them get off, come back, and then get off again (at least the ones that lived). And it put the emotional escape from the island not at the end of the show, but right in the middle. That meant a lot of the fourth and fifth seasons, in retrospect, were wheel-spinning. And it meant that the Man in Black's attempted escape from the island never acquired the mythological weight that it seemed like the writers were going for in the finale.
• The buildup/reveal of Jacob and the Man in Black happened too late. The creepy scene of the Man in Black in the cabin in the woods was enormously effective, but then we wasted a whole lot of time with Keamy's mercenaries, who served Widmore, who ultimately was less than irrelvant.
• The glowing cave was a total cop out. The island is "death, rebirth, everything." Sorry, but that's bullshit. If the Man in Black gets out, "everything ends". That means that the meaning of the island and the stakes for the story are both exceedingly vague. This may work for a loose allegory, but the island portion of Lost is structured as a mystery show, almost like a supernatural Agatha Christie novel. That's why so many people fixated so much on "the answers", which the writers/creators seemed to chafe against at a certain point. People wanted answers because the structure followed the structure of a mystery - several strange occurrences were presented with the suggestion that these occurrences were all stemming from some central organizing fact or truth about the island itself. That this central truth was that there was a mysterious glowing light in the middle of the island was incredibly deflating; akin to finding the wizard of Oz was the small man behind the curtain. The narrative expectation that the shows own writers set up was that the show would follow the course of something like Murder on the Orient Express, where a series of details became stranger and stranger, and more mysterious and more dislocating for the central characters (in this case Poirot), until the solution of the mystery resolves those mysterious happenings like a set of dominoes falling over. On Lost, instead of having that first domino fall to trigger the logical falling into place of all of the narrative questions, the creators just kept stacking dominoes and then ultimately said "you know what, they're just dominoes, forget about them, we're not knocking them over, you should pay attention to the people stacking the dominoes." Which would all be very convenient if they hadn't been telling us along (through the cliffhangers and story structure) that the dominos would fall. Nobody cares if things are left unresolved in something like 28 Days Later. There are zombies, they want brains, OK fine. But narratively you get in a lot of trouble if you say something is important and interesting and organized around a central truth and then wind up having to insist that that central truth is vague and ineffable (glowing cave).
• The show really benefited from its two villain characters being such strong actors. Even when Lost treaded water, watching Michael Emerson and Terry O'Quinn act was always a pleasure. It really goes to show how a strong story needs strong antagonists, and for all of its faults Lost really brought it on that front.
• Jin and Sun's story really suffered from them being kept apart for so long. When the show explored their marriage it was really interesting. When it reduced them to just asking "Where's Sun/Where's Jin," they kind of collapsed as characters. So their deaths didn't carry as much weight as it might have. That said, it still carried a lot of weight, even if it's ridiculous that Sun never insisted Jin leave to take care of their child (!)
• Lost was terrible with children. The writers loved the drama of pregnancy, but had no idea what do with actual motherhood. So as soon as Aaron and Ji Yeon were born they were whisked away to the mainland so they could be separated from Kate/Claire and Jin/Sun. It really highlighted how the writers just liked to go for the dramatic pregrancy/childbirth scenes without considering how infants might fit into the overall story.
• I agree with some other comments made by critics: at some point, Lost fell too much in love with its remaining characters. It was a much more interesting show when you never knew when a character might get shot by surprise (Shannon, Libby), or fall off a cliff to their death (Boone) or just have the Smoke get medieval on them (Eko). But that taut sense of danger disappeared right around the fifth season or so, and we were left with characters that repeatedly came back from the dead. Lost was always stronger when it was able to let the dead rest, i.e. John Locke.
• The story of John Locke was an uncompromising tragedy handled really well. He remained one of the most fascinating characters in the show until the very end.
• I respect the towering ambition of the show. It strove to be about more than just good vs. evil, up until the very end, touching on reincarnation, free will, fate, and the stories we tell ourselves about our own lives. For that I'm willing to overlook a lot of the narrative flaws. It also had some amazing individual episodes, as well as one of the most mind-bending and intelligent time travel story arcs in mainstream media.
• My favorite episode from the show - definitely "The Constant".
• My favorite moment: early in Season One, when Sayid is walking along the beach and discovers the huge cable in the sand. He lifts it up, and just looks incredibly confused. The intrigue of that cable, and the suggestion of all that was beneath the surface (of the island, of the story, of the characters), was, for me, the moment that really hooked me, and remains a moment that encapsulates that rush of not knowing and needing to know (plus we eventually learned where that cable went, so it wasn't one of Lost's dead ends, so bonus points).

5/20/09 - Lost, Season 5, Final 2 Episodes

1. OK, Miles finally voiced what I've been saying all season, which is that the Incident is being created by the time-travelers at the heart of this season. I would be very surprised if S6 opens with anything other than the time travelers awaking on the beach back in the present, everything unchanged. I appreciate that the writers have stayed true to their own rules of time travel, namely that you can't change the past. What was so interesting this season was seeing the ways that the castaways created their own past. What it makes me wonder is why Daniel got the idea that he could actually change things, when he for so long had been the consistent voice arguing that the past could not be changed. His change of heart was unclear, and naturally, to maintain the mystery, he was gunned down before he could do much explaining other than speaking cryptically about people being the variable and how the hydrogen bomb would need to be detonated to ground the energy pocket.

2. There are way too many guns on Lost. One thing that was great about the first season was how scarce weaponry was. Now everybody seems to belong to the SWAT. There's no reason Jack should be in a gunfight with members of the Dharma Initiative - on a show that strains credibility on the best of days, there's no need to employ the dreaded 80s action movie cliche of the villains being unable to hit the broad side of a barn.

3. Jack is such a tool. For him to say that he wants to detonate the bomb to erase the misery of him screwing up his relationship with Kate is such tiresome BS. He remains purely reactive and hasn't changed a bit.

4. Fascinating when dead Locke tumbled out of the box. Really plays up Terry O'Quinn's spookiness as Locke, which is something that the show does an excellent job with. In contrast to Jack, who has hardened into a very 2D character, Locke remains an intriguing enigma. Sometimes pathetic, sometimes irrational, and sometimes creepy as hell and twice as threatening. And now that he's imbued with the spirit of the nameless Man In Black from the beginning of the episode (or is that man, or is the smoke monster, or is one or both of those and Locke), the intrigue surrounding him deepens. I'm reminded of the moment in the pilot when he puts the orange peel in his mouth and appears absolutely terrifying. Sometimes he's got the scary nutso intensity of a true believer, and sometimes he's the most lost character on a show full of them, and both are eminently believable.

5. All that racing around LA was just time filler, as suspected. It really wasn't necessary to get the O6 off the island - just false obstacles to stretch the story out. Nothing really crucial happened while they were off the island.

6. Juliet dying feels like a cop-out. It's bizarre because she and Sawyer have so much more history accorded to them than we have spent time with them. As viewers we're seen them in a relationship for a total of about 4-5 hours. They've spent 3 years together. I think that the 3 year mark is too long - it's just so much time and killing Juliet off so soon after we learn about the relationship throws the audience's perception of the depth of that relationship off. Sawyer knew Kate for about 100 days- what, he's really still hung up on her? The length of time he spent happy with Juliet makes the whole Kate love triangle seem even dumber (and it's already excruciating).

7. I've never seen a show that foregrounds its weakest elements so often. The difference between a Ben/Locke/Faraday centered episode and a Jack/Kate one is profound, and the the quality of the latter has been on a steady downward trajectory.

8. I'm happy that we have finally been introduced (presumably) to the top of the pyramid, conflict-wise. Jacob vs. the Man In Black would seem to be the ultimate conflict of the show, with Ben and Widmore serving as pawns and the castaways serving as the pawns of pawns. I liked how Ben snapped - carrying the burden of being Oz the powerful left him with a pretty intense chip on his shoulder, indeed.

9. Bring on Season 6!

3/20/09 - Lost: Season 5, Episode 8 - 9

Thoughts on Lost, Season 5, Episode 8:

- WTF. So Sayid is part of Ben's origin story? That both makes a lot of sense, and no sense at all. The writers of Lost have been playing with fire all season with the time travel paradoxes, and they just ratcheted up the stakes with Sayid's action at the end of this episode. That said, I think that it's not really as much of a game-changer as it seems. Doubtful that Ben will die; much more likely that he will be resurrected by the island and conclude that he should be the leader of its people and maniupulate a man named Sayid into attempting to murder his own self in the past, since he has always known it has happened. Even writing that sentence made my brain hurt.

- I like the suggestion that Sayid had a hand in creating the Monster (The Monster That Is Ben, that is). Over the course of the show we've seen time and again that Sayid's judgments and decisions are the correct ones. He was the one that believed that Ben was not "Henry Gale", and in conflicts among the castaways he historically has had his judgment borne out by the events of the show. I wonder if his decision to shoot will also be borne out by the events of the show.

- Although in the following episode, it looks like the writers are positioning Ben as a flawed but redeemable character ultimately. At some point they have to get off the fence with Ben and with the ghost of Alex giving him his new marching orders it looks like he may yet work his way toward some sort of salvation. Seeing him forced to use his manipulations to serve Locke instead of torment him will make for some interesting new wrinkle's in Ben's method of operations.

- It's easy to forget now, but Lost's whole first season had no Ben at all. It's amazing how primary and elemental he now seems to the central narrative. Although narratively I see no way for him to make it out of the show alive, I have to admit that if they do wind up killing him off I'll be sad to see him go.

- Locke & Ben are a cut above, acting-wise. The contrast between the poorly written and decently acted Kate scenes previously in the season and Locke and Ben's charged tete-a-tete's really bring it home. I don't think the writers do Evangeline Lilly any favors, but it's kind of unavoidably noticable how far above the bar Michael Emerson and Terry O'Quinn consistently reach.

- I love the temple scenes. Straight out of the Indiana Jones school of kinda-hokey-but-actually-really awesome. There's a real sense of place and power in that temple - it's a strength of Lost that it slowly reveals the layers beneath its most narratively important locations. Similar to the way that we first saw the hatch exterior, and then gradually saw what was underneath (ultimately leading to the 'charged electromagnetic deposit' or whatever it is), we've been slowly led to see the temple fence, the exterior, and now the underground layer where the smoke emerges.

- Watching things fall apart around Sawyer is amazing. LaFleur as wielder of authority is great, LaFleur as cover-up artists really tests Sawyer's ability to think on his feet in an amazing way.

3/13/09 - Lost: Season 5, Episodes 5-7

Thoughts on Episodes 5-6

1. 2 episodes without Jack and Kate. Glory glory hallelujah! Watching two episodes back to back without those two just reinforced my opinion that they have become the least compelling characters on the show. Especially in contrast with Locke, whose adventures and struggles are much more dramatic (as opposed to melodramatic) and whose character arc resonates much more strongly with the overriding themes of the show. I really wish that they would just leave Jack and Kate off-island with a happy ending so that I don't have to witness high-strung Jack making asinine arguments and moony Kate biting her lip in confusion over which man to string along. Blech.

2. One of the things I like most about Locke is that he is very different in demeanor depending on which other character he is dealing with. Like in real life, where one's persona/personality comes through differently depending on who you are with (subtly in some cases, dramatically in others), Locke's persona shifts depending on who is he is with. So, when he's talking to Jack, who has such a poorly defined sense of self/comfort in his beliefs, Locke comes off as calm, certain, and at peace with himself and his choices, because compared to Jack, he is. But when he's talking to Ben, Locke comes across as fearful and uncertain, because Ben's strategy of manipulating people is predicated on a kind of titanic certainty in whatever Ben is saying at any given moment. In the face of that kind of certainty, Locke's self-doubt flowers. So you have two dramatically different scenes: a calm Locke attempting to talk Jack into returning, and a frantic Locke flailing suicidally and questioning everything in his dealings with Ben. Both scenes make sense based on the way Locke is written and portrayed, which speaks to the breadth of scenes Lost is capable of bringing off.

3. Why did Ben have to kill Locke? Why not let him kill himself. My 2 theories: 1) he didn't know about Eloise Hawking before Locke told him, and once he found that out Locke became redundant for Ben's purposes; or 2) Somehow Ben thought that if he killed Locke, if Locke did not die of his own free will, that the island wouldn't bring him back. Ben wants the leadership position that the island wants Locke for, that much is clear.

4. I'm really glad that all the off-island nonsense is over. Who wants to hang around LA when you can be on the Freak Island?

5. Similarly, although the time jumping was fun, I'm glad that we've stabilized in the '70s Dharma era. The building time paradoxes were starting to make my brain hurt, and now things are stabilized I'm looking forward to the writers using the deposit of our heroes in the Dharma era to flesh out a lot of the exposition/mysteries of all of the leftover Dharma relics that have provided so many questions over the first 4 seasons.

6. So happy to see Juliet and Sawyer as a pair. They work together quite well. Although it was annoying to see the suggestion that Sawyer hasn't gotten over Kate. Really? They were only sporadically together over the course of a couple of months, and now Sawyer and Juliet have a 3-year (!) relationship. I would think that would be plenty of time to get over a not-worth-it Kate.

7. It seems clear that Ben is revealed to be more unequivocally evil. Amazing how many predicaments he's been able to talk his way out of so far, but how is he going to talk his way out of killing Locke to Locke's face?

2/13/09 - Lost: Season 5, Episodes 4-5

Thoughts on Episodes 4 and 5:

1. Usually Lost does a really good job of integrating its new characters (Nikki & Paulo excepted), but I feel like Charlotte was never really a compelling part of the ensemble, which makes her death feel a little weightless. Which is a shame, because the other three members of the science team definitely feel like they've made their place in the ensemble. Faraday stands at the middle of this season's time travel madness and, as portrayed by Jeremy Davies, is a fantastic portrait of the twitchy meddler in Things That Maybe We Shouldn't Be Meddling With. Miles is solid comic relief, and really having him and Sawyer in the same crew is a treat. Like Hurley, he's an audience stand-in, reacting to things with the same nonplussed slacker disdain that he might react with if he were watching the events of the show instead of participating in them. Charlotte's dominant trait, though, was possessing scary-intense blue eyes. We never really got a sense of her as a character, so her death doesn't hit very hard, except for the fact that it clearly unnerves Faraday; especially in the suggestion that he tried to prevent it.
2. The time travel paradoxes are opening some Pandora's boxes that are straining the narrative logic - namely, there don't seem to a set of rules as to whether or not you can a)change the past b)interact with past events/your past self without causing problems or b) have people from the past remember you. As awesome as it was to see Jin witness the dark days of Rousseau's crew's arrival, is raises the logical question of: why the hell didn't Rousseau say something about it when she met the castaways?? Surely she would remember that having happened since, after all, Jin was the one that stopped her from going into the scary cave where the smoke monster lives. That strains the suspension of disbelief that's so necessary for Lost, which already operates on a thin margin of error on that front due to all of the mystic occurences flying around.
3. It's unclear as to why the O6 have to return to the island, aside from taking Ben and Eloise Hawking's word for it. This makes the action in LA seem really arbitrary. Of course they are going to make their way back to the island - the obstacles are just ways to extend the show, it seems. The LA stuff is not very compelling, except for the ways that it shows Ben operating improvisationally instead of with advance planning (the strain shows - he's never lost his cool in front of Jack before).
4. In contrast, the action on the sland is extremely compelling. One thing that Lost has done very well is to make the island a major character on the show - the queasiness and sense of everpresent danger is very much alive and well on the island, from the monster's terrifying arm rip near the temple to the way that Rousseau's man seems to lose his mind. Not to mention all of the rainstorms and time flashes - the island remains the most interesting character on the show.
5. Jack and Kate have worn out their welcome several times over. Kate as a mother is much less interesting than Kate as a tomboy criminal. Jack is infuriating - for all the time we've spent with him, he's grown very little - he never considers things rationally and is a ridiculous control freak. Kate spends way too much time biting her lip. Jin and Sun, Desmond and Penny, and at this point Sawyer and Juliet are all much interesting romantic (or potentially romantic) pairings. I wouldn't mind if Jack and Kate just got written off the show into some happy domestic life in LA so that we could spend more time with the more interesting characters.
6. Terry O'Quinn is fantastic as Locke. One thing the writers do really well with Locke is show that depending on who his interactions are with, he can seem serene and self-confident or scared and uncertain. With the other Oceanic survivors he is an expert manipulator - with Richard, Ben, and now Jacob, he is consumed with fear and indecision. His self-possession is a mix of genuine confidence and bravado. O'Quinn does a great job of showing Locke dropping the mask of bravado once he falls down the well and encounters Jacob and reveals he doesn't know what the hell he's doing.
   
7. I think it was a mistake to kill off Rousseau and Alex. Rousseau's story is fascinating, and her time on the island had the potentail to open up a lot of context. And Alex was such a major part of the Others/Castaways conflict that having her gunned down just seemed short-sighted on the part of the writers.
8. Jin and Sawyer's reunion was fantastic - the core ensemble is really strongly drawn and has such a history together.
   

1/30/09 - Lost: Season 5, episodes 1-3

I'm a huge Lost fan, and I have to say that for all of its easily identified flaws (an overreliance on surprise reveals, a certain stinginess with revealing secrets, a really weird balance between its invisible redshirts and prominently displayed prime time players, and some large logic/plot holes), the show is attempting to pull off something that is insanely ambitious for a network TV series with over 10 million veiwers: namely, to tell a narratively complex sci-fi story with consistent, 3-dimensional characters while narrating in a a variety of nested flashbacks. That's a damned hard task to accomplish in a novel, let alone a series running for multiple years.

One interesting thing to me that I've noticed from discussions with friends of mind that watch the show is that they're not into the time travel angle, they're tired of Lost introducing mystery after mystery with no solution in sight. Which just illuminates the problem that faces the creators and writers of the show - the mystery is always, always more interesting than the resolution. So in a season that sees Lost actually driving towards answering some of the overarching questions that its been posing since day 1, people are losing interest because the resolution is coming into view, or erroneously asserting that the show is only piling on more mysteries.

My counter to that is to say look, watch, and see how many things that the writers are actually pivoting to address now that there's only 2 seasons left:

1. A huge question about the island in the first couple of seasons was succinctly summarized by Charlie as "Where are we?" and could be extrapolated to a greater question of "Why do fucked-up things happen on this island?". Without doing the big speech of exposition (yet), the writers have started filling out the outlines of an answer to this question - the island is a place where time is unstable, and where time has been messed with.

Also, an aside: for people asserting that the time travel is too arbitrary, I would second Alan Sepinwall's excellent recommendation to rent 12 Monkeys. That movie and Back to The Future capture the two competing theories of time travel, as far as I understand it. The Back to the Future model is the butterfly effect theory of time travel.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Butterfly_effect

This is seen in the Ray Bradbury short story A Sound of Thunder that holds that making small changes in the past have a huge effect on the future. Thus, if Marty's parents don't fall in love with each other, Marty will be wiped out of existence.

12 Monkeys, on the other hand, ascribes to the linearity theory of time travel that basically states that the past cannot be changed because it has already happened. Thus, if you went back in time and tried to kill Hitler, for example, you would be unable to do so - maybe the gun would jam, maybe you would be killed en route, but because Hitler survived to start WWII that could not be stopped.

Lost is operating on somewhat of a hybrid model - Desmond has a limited ability to move in time and change things from happening (limited because Charlie eventually had to die), as, it is suggested, does Faraday as a result of his experiments, but the rest of the characters can't change the existing timeline.

2. Why do the Others know so much about the castaways? This question was posed in S1 and deepened throughout S1-S3, and now it seems clear that it has something to do with the time shifts on the island. We are now seeing that Locke has made contact with Richard in the past, which explains all those mysterious assertions in the first couple of seasons that the Others were waiting for Locke to show up.

3. The polar bear? Clearly, related to the Dharma Initiatives experiments with the big wheel. If Ben can be transported to Tunisia and back, so too could a polar bear.

4. Why does Widmore care so much about the island? We don't know yet, but we have now been shown how he first got there by way of the U.S. military.

5. What is the Dharma Initiative doing? We don't know the full details, but the big time wheel is clearly something that has prompted their scientific interest.

6. Who is the con man that caused Sawyer so much pain? Anthony Cooper, Locke's dad, and he's toast.

There are more, but that's just a representative sample to rebut the idea that Lost never answers the questions that its raising. Since they pinned an end date to the show I'm a lot more confident that they are moving toward resolution, which parodoxically seems to make people less interested.

Thoughts on Eps. 1-3:

• Faraday is a great character. A strength of Lost is that for the most part they have been able to effectively introduce new characters and fold them into the existing ensemble if they take the time and care to do so. We're starting to get hints that Faraday has some dark secrets in his past related to the whole knowledge over morality dilemma portrayed in so many stories of the tragic scientist. In addition he's shown as being present at the discovery of the time wheel by the Dharma initiative - looks like Dan's actually the man with the answers. Just don't expect him to give any since he's terminally twitchy and stressed.
• Charlotte is not a great character. A weakness of Lost is that with such a large ensemble sometimes they can't get a character defined before they have to be a part of the action, the way that the first 2 seasons had the luxury of fleshing out the main players through all the flashbacks. Charlotte has a perpetually pissed-off look on her face, and Faraday cares about her, but that seems like all we know about her. So who cares if she gets the time travel disease?
• Jack and Kate have moved from compellingly tortured to really, really uninteresting. Ep. 3 was the best episode of the season so far partially due to the fact that Desmond was the protagonist of the main story, Sawyer and Faraday took the lead in the secondary story, and Jack and Kate off-island were nowhere to be found.
• Sun slipping into the morally ambiguous realm is a great move. We've seen the pain that could underpin any destructive course of action she might choose to pursue.
• They're going to milk Ben's good/evil ambiguity for all that its worth. Although I wouldn't be surprised if he doesn't wind up the Wizard of Oz figure, the small man behind the curtain. Now that we're seeing that Richard is really the power behind the Others, it gives more perspective on the leadership conflicts between he and Ben once Ben came on the scene.
• Are the whispers we always used to hear in the woods related to the unstuck in time nature of the island?

More after episode 4 - I'm still all in.