Evangeline Lilly, Matthew Fox and Jeremy Davies in LOST:"Confirmed Dead"(2008).
© ABC

Mania Grade: A+
Grades: "Beginning of the End" (A+), "Confirmed Dead" (B+)
Starring: Evangeline Lilly, Josh Holloway, Mathew Fox, Michael Emerson, Elizabeth Mitchell
Created by: JJ Abrams, Damon Lindelof
Written By: Drew Goddard
Network: ABC

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LOST: Premiere & Confirmed Dead

Due to a combination of a hard drive crash followed closely by tornadoes, I was unable to get a review for the season premiere of LOST posted last week. I thought the episode deserved discussion though so this week this extensive article will look at that premiere and the current episode.

The Beginning of the End

Wow, was I glad to see this show back on the air. Last season started weak but the creators listened to us and fought to get control of their show back from the network. The very minute they got that control back, the show was awesome again. The season ended with the first ever flash-forward showing a destroyed Jack back at home telling Kate that they have to go back. It was a painfully strong cliffhanger that made the time between that episode and this one seem even more expansive than it actually was. 

So now we’re back and the castaways are split up across the island. Part of the group is at the beach while the rest are at the radio tower calling a mysterious savior via a satellite phone from the mysterious Naomi. I’m not going to cover this fairly epic plot point for point but I do want to talk about specific points. At the radio tower after a call on the Sat phone, Jack realizes that Naomi has crawled away. This leads to the only scene that really bothered me in this episode, Naomi’s attempted escape. She not only crawled away with a knife in her back with no one looking but she also managed to create two blood trails in an attempt to send the castaways on a wild goose chase. After they find her ,she adjusts the radio so her friends can get her coordinates and then she dies. The whole fake blood trails thing felt not only implausible but it also seemed completely unnecessary to the story. This is a pretty minor gripe for an overall great episode. Spirits are high at the tower as they plan for their eventual rescue. On the beach by contrast, everyone now knows that Charlie is dead and the rescuers aren’t who they seemed to be. Hurley is obviously hit the hardest by Charlie’s death but everyone seems genuinely upset by the loss. Those on the beach make a decision to go into the jungle to meet the rest of the castaways to warn them about the mysterious rescuers.

Locke ends up returning to the group and in a great scene Jack pulls a gun on Locke. Locke is convinced that Jack won’t shoot him but he learns he’s wrong when Jack pulls the trigger. Luckily the gun is empty. Locke can afford to take these kinds of chances though because the island always seems to save him. This scene and another earlier in the episode redefines Jack making him tougher and willing to go to more extremes to protect his fellow castaways and it’s about time this evolution happened to him. I’d have wanted to kill Locke after the explosion of the submarine. When the group reunited they split between Locke who believes the rescuers are dangerous and Jack who believes they are saviors. Kate and Sawyer had cemented themselves into a relationship but they took different sides this time. There’s a conversation between Jack and Locke that I hope is about to lead to Locke revealing why he wants everyone to stay on the island, not just himself. We unfortunately don’t get that answer. We just get something like “I only did it because I care”. Also, Locke and Hurley have both seen the cabin but they haven’t talked about it. At first I was disappointed but the reality is that Hurley may be scared to bring it up because of his penchant for seeing things that aren’t there.

The flash forwards continue but they’ve jumped back from last year’s season finale. Now you know why Jack grew that beard last year. It was so we can know if this flash forward is pre-beard or post-beard? We saw at the end of last season that Jack had begun believing that he and Kate need to go back to the island. At that point we were left wondering why he believed that. This episode’s flash forward jumps back a little in order to show Jack’s evolution in to this belief and it shows us what Hurley’s been up to since he got off the island. He’s seeing Charlie, and Charlie is telling him that he needs to go back to the island. When Hurley tells this to Jack the response he gets from Jack is that it’ll never happen. So, what will it take to change Jack’s mind? The one piece of dialogue that grabbed me was when Hurley apologized to Jack for not choosing to go with him instead of going with Locke. That scene was gripping because we had just seen Hurley make that decision. What are the repercussions of the decision? Also we hear Hurley tell a police officer at the beginning of the episode that he is one of the Oceanic Six. Did only six castaways get off the island? Hurley ends up back in a mental institution where he received some interesting visitors that set up more questions. Other than the previously mentioned visit from Charlie a mysterious man came to Hurley offering him an “upgrade”. Hurley saw through the man and ran him out of the institution but before he left he asked “Are they still alive?” What does that mean? It’s probably connected to a secret Hurley and Jack share. We learned about the secret from Jack when he visits Hurley to make sure he’s not going to let the cat out of the bag.

This episode sets the tone and pace of this season and I couldn’t be more excited. We got a few answers and of course a bunch of new questions. The new questions don’t feel tacked on just for the sake of additional mystery. They truly feel like the evolution of this story. So, are these rescuers really Dharma returning to reclaim their island? Other than my minor complaint above I have to say that the creators are going to have to be extremely careful with these flash forwards. I enjoyed this new twist but if they are going to continue to jump forward and back within flash forwards they’re going to have to go out of their way to establish the time and place, possibly something better than using the existence of a beard. With that said, I was riveted sitting forward in my chair looking for every little detail I could get. There are a ton of additional little hints in this episode. One of my favorites is Hurley’s artwork. I really hope the rest of the series can keep this pace up. If it does, we’re in for one heck of a ride.

A+

Confirmed Dead

Last week was epic in story but it still felt cohesive and easy to follow but this week’s episode is just sort of messy and convoluted. I’m not saying the information provided in the episode isn’t intriguing because it really is; the presentation is just not as well done as it could have been. 

We’ve been accustomed to a certain presentation as far as flashbacks go, and yes this week we do get a flashback not a flash-forward. Usually the flashbacks, and flash-forwards, for that matter are focused on one individual telling their back-story and showing how that story is connected to current events. This week the flashback jumps around to different characters and if came off a bit confusing at first. It eventually settled down and started to make sense but the first few scenes of the episode felt a bit jumbled up. So, in the flashback we meet the team assembled to return to the island, a pilot, a ghostbuster, Naomi who seems to simply be some sort of mercenary, and a couple of scientists. The team makes perfect sense to me. They all have a part to play in unlocking the secrets of the island. I wasn’t thrilled with Miles, the man who can talk to ghosts, but his existence in this series and on this team makes sense. Daniel and Charlotte, the two scientists, bring more questions to the island, the most intriguing of which is Charlottes. We meet Charlotte in Tunisia where she is on some sort of archeological dig where she finds buried in the desert a polar bear skeleton with a DHARMA collar. The smile on her face at the discovery of the DHARMA collar is fascinating. All of the members of the team, other than Naomi, are obsessed with the story of flight 815. The flashbacks start with the reports of the discovery of the plane wreckage, which is something Naomi mentioned to the castaways last season. In the opening of the flashbacks the pilot calls Oceanic to tell them that the identification of the pilot in the report is wrong and that he knows because he was supposed to originally be the pilot.

While I wasn’t a fan of how we learned about these new characters I am very interested in the secrets they bring to the island. Are they working for DHARMA? We learn that their primary goal of coming to the island is to find Ben, which leads me to believe these are DHARMA people seeking revenge. I believe Charlotte has a scientific interest in the island and she seems a lot less nefarious than Miles and Dan. Dan mentions that their primary mission isn’t the rescue of 815 survivors. I don’t believe that it’s a part of their plan at all. When Naomi first gets her team her mysterious new boss, the man who visited Hurley in the mental institution, insists that she won’t find any 815 survivors. Along those lines the pilot and Miles seemed to really be excited when they learned that Juliet isn’t a member of 815 but she is in fact a “native”. Here’s my question; is she really a native? Ben and his crew are natives but she was brought in by them to help with the pregnancy problems on the island.

On the island, the castaways have split into two groups, one following Locke and another following Jack. Locke is leading his group to the cabin, because Walt told him too. The best part is that Locke admits to the group that Walt not only told him to but that Walt also saved him from a gunshot wound from Ben. I liked that everyone didn’t just go crazy yelling at Locke because so many of them have had visions of their own. In fact Hurley blurts out that he thought the cabin was in a different direction. When the new “rescue” team arrived at the island they had to parachute out of the helicopter due to an electrical storm spreading them all over the place. Dan and Miles end up with Jack’s group and Charlotte ends up with Locke. Ben right away starts plotting when Charlotte makes her appearance and as soon as he can he tries to kill her. Ben is such a great character and he can really take a punch! Sawyer wants to kill Ben but Locke insists that they keep him alive for his knowledge of the island. Just when Locke finally changed his mind and was ready to do Ben in Ben started rattling off personal information about Charlotte and saying that he could tell them the truth about why these rescuers are really on the island. How does he know all this? He has a man on their boat. I love seeing Ben save his own skin again and by doing so he creates more intrigue and gets me really excited for next week!

Jack’s group finds the pilot along with Miles and Dan and they see their escape right in front of them. That’s been the focus of this group for the episode, not much evolution as far as questions answered or characters evolved here. There were some moments of Miles not trusting Jack but he learned that what Jack and Kate told him about Naomi was true after he had a chat with her ghost. 

We’ve had new characters introduced on LOST before with varying success. Some of the tail section were interesting but most weren’t and don’t forget about the terrible Nikki and Paulo characters. These new additions however have deep importance to the series and the mythology so they don’t feel as tacked on as Nikki and Paulo did, and the tail section too for the most part. While I think the flashback could have been handled better overall I have to say that I’m really excited about what’s happening with the series. Yes we were given even more questions this week but these new questions feel more attached to the finality of the series than most of the questions we’ve been given so far. The pace is still pretty brisk and each scene is exciting as the previous one.

B+