Purpose & Destiny

Quick Hits cont’d.

• We briefly see the sub’s captain, sporting a new entry for the Dharma Logo archives.

  

  Is it just me, or was the sub making some decidedly “un-sub-like” sounds when it was getting ready to depart? Maybe it’s the quantum pulse generator in the engine room. (I have no idea what a “quantum pulse generator” is, but I will happily continue to make such words up.)

• A shame that Hurley never got a chance to lose any weight, but I suppose that could’ve wrought havoc with continuity in all the flashbacks and forwards. Ah well, he continues to entertain.

  

• I loved how quickly a 46-year old Hurley folded under Chang’s intense questioning, with pointed queries like, “How old are you?” and “So you fought in the Korean War?”

  “There’s no such thing.” Good stuff.

• Why is (Stuart) Radzinsky so intent on making sure groundbreaking for The Swan goes off on time (within 20 hours, he says)? Is he under orders from Ann Arbor to do so? Are the DeGroots somehow aware of the timeline and how it should flow, and thus “The Incident” needs to occur at a specific time?

  

• Sayid returns in time to join Jack, Eloise and Richard on an underwater passage to the network of tunnels that would seem to criss-cross the entire Island.

  

  The extensive network of tunnels would lend itself to facilitating easy Smoke Monster passage, I presume.

  

  We now have an idea of where Smokey was trying to drag Locke way back in season 1.

• There certainly seemed to be some finality in the way Sawyer bade “good riddance” to the Island. Not just in his performance, but in the way the scene was shot. Are he, Juliet and Kate really going to be gone for good?

  

  Next week’s preview would seem to indicate they won’t be gone long, unfortunately. I’d find it an interesting subplot to have them back in the real world and fighting the good fight on that front (that “fight” being the coming war that Widmore et al. have referred to).

• The “warehouse” where Jughead is stored reminded me a bit of the final scene of Raiders of the Lost Ark, with the massive hangar housing the Ark and countless other boxed artifacts.

  

  What other goodies are down there?

• Anyone else find that fish/squid/jellyfish rack odd?

  

• Just for record-keeping purposes, Richard mentions the Others are divided into two groups in 2007, those on the beach and the rest bedding down at The Temple, as they were directed to do so by Ben a season or so ago. I couldn’t help but think of season 1’s finale, “Exodus,” when that shot of Locke leading the Others into the jungle hit the screen.

  

  The Temple has replaced the Caves as the destination du jour. They’re off to see the Wizard.

Other Stuff from Other Sites

• Chopin or no Chopin, the revelation that Faraday can tickle the ivories is also interesting for this reason: He’s not the only one. Lost has also shown us that Charlie, Jack, and Ben can play the piano. Why might this be significant? Because as Lost blogger JOpinionated reminds us over at docarzt.com, there’s a music-based mystery in the Lost matrix that has never been resolved. Recall, if you will, when Charlie swam down to the Looking Glass at the end of season 3 to turn off the jamming device preventing the castaways from communicating with the outside world. He learned from Bonnie — one of the lovely Other ladies that Ben had stationed down there — that the code to shut off the jamming device was harmonic, set to the tune of the Beach Boys’ ”Good Vibrations.” Right before Bonnie died, she said that the code ”was programmed by a musician.” At the time, these cryptic words inspired a great deal of wild theorizing. Many of us wondered if it wasn’t an accident that the Dharma programmer created a code that rock star Charlie would be uniquely qualified to crack. What if the musician behind the Beach Boys puzzle knew Charlie’s destiny?
  
  But in light of what season 5 has shown us, should we be wondering if this mystery musician was one of the castaways? It’s JOpinionated’s theory that Faraday himself created the code, leveraging his knowledge of future events as well as his all-access Dharma pass as a member of the Initiative’s Black Swan team. It’s a nifty theory — it very much echoes my long-held assertion that much of Dharma was created or at least revised with the castaways in mind — and I suggest you click over to docarzt.com to read it in its entirety. [EW]

• Tonight Charles seemed to indicate that Ellie was pregnant at the camp. You can barely hear the sound, but Charles puts his hand on Ellie’s stomach and says “not in your condition.” This isn’t necessarily a huge reveal, since it seems obvious that she would be pregnant with Daniel at this point in time, but it is something that some people might have missed.[Sledgeweb]

• The official podcast recapping last week’s episode: Podcast. Of note, we haven’t heard the last of Alvar Hanso.

See ya next week one last time in 2009. Time flies, eh?