Lost stuff

[prog]

I dub this episode 12 Monkeys for Algernon Five.

It's a little disorienting (ha ha) to see the show dip into several very familiar SF tropes that don't really appear elsewhere. It's kind of interesting how they're all so tightly bound to just this one character.

Comments

[dougo.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I had very mixed feelings about it. It was a great story on its own, and had many awesome moments (the visual cut of Desmond careening into the wall in the stairwell was masterful), but it had some kinda lame stereotypical elements (like the mad scientist scribbling on a chalkboard full of calculus) and generally felt really different from the rest of the show. It felt like more of a one-off subplot like the Nikki & Paolo episode, but it involved things that are pretty crucial to the main story so they can't really just tie it off with a bow (or a pile of sand, ahem).

On the other hand, it led someone to post to lost_theories a link to a pretty interesting and well-developed unifying theory about what's going on in Lost. (It's not really a spoiler, since he doesn't have any privileged information from official sources, but if it turns out to be true, it might ruin a lot of surprises, so don't read it if that would bother you.)

[prog.livejournal.com]

I like this theory better.

[dougo.livejournal.com]

Jack Shephard is educated stupid!

Seriously tho

[prog.livejournal.com]

This ep made me less annoyed with Faraday, in that it strongly implied that his absent-minded-professor act specifically comes from strange energy experiments and possibly time travel scrambling his brain.

Agreed that it was a great one-off. I was gonna comment that it didn't feel very "Losty" because it replaced flashbacks with time travel (which aren't the same at all). But then I remembered that they did this (or something almost like it) with this character before.