So I finally got to see Lost’s season 3 premiere this morning, after attempting several times to watch it yesterday to no avail. I loved the opening sequence with the new character Juliet, which was a nice allusion to season 2’s first few minutes. Lost is pretty much THE best weekly piece of pop entertainment out there today, and this new season looks like it may be the one that ties it all together. (I can dream, can’t I?) A couple of purposeful anachronisms and interesting implications throughout:
- Juliet owned a lot of CDs, the implication being that our villagers have had access to all sorts of modern gear. (Later, they confirmed this by tagging Sawyer with a taser.)
- The book Juliet was reading was Stephen King’s Carrie (thanks, Media Player Classic frame-by-frame!), which was disappointing because I gathered from their conversation that they were talking about Dreamcatcher, which would have zeroed in on the show’s timeframe fairly accurately. “Carrie,” meanwhile, was written in ‘76, so anyone would have access to it.
- The Others are leaving in a fairly developed little village, with plumbing and electricity and (maybe even) gas lines. They have access to fairly modern things, so you get the definite sense that they are on the island because they want to be there, not because they have to. The idea that was foremost in my mind during those first opening scenes was M. Night Shyamalan’s The Village, to be honest.
- Henry Gale (now known as “Ben,” the former host of the book club and by implication, Juliet’s ex-lover) is clearly the leader of these people. In the opening sequence, he knows exactly who to send to infiltrate the plane crash survivors. It’s interesting that there’s not a single one of them who are visibly shocked to see a plane being broken in two just a few miles above their village, so the other implication is that this has happened before (indeed, we have a few other examples: the Black Rock, the Nigerian drug plane, Desmond’s yachet, and the ship that brought Rosseau’s team to the island).
- Sawyer gets put into one of those Pavlovian-type animal-experiment cages, where one animal presses a button and another animal nudges a switch (later we find out that it was in fact a bear cage). Could these be the cages they used for Season 1’s polar/albino bears? I didn’t find this plot point particularly interesting, other than it was a chance to show Sawyer get slapped around some more. I swear to God, more than half of all the injuries and mishaps on this show have been applied to everyone’s favorite con man.
- Another kid, Carl, was in the cage next to Sawyer. He was neither from the fuselage or the tail-end, so he must have been one of the villagers. There is a definite “new life” kinda vibe with this place (Juliet actually verbalizes it when she says, “It doesn’t matter who we were, it only matters who we are.”) and my interpretation of this Carl character was that he was a misfit who was not “getting with the program.”
- This line of thinking eventually brought me to another character who was possibly not 100% committed to the utopian life, i.e., Kelvin (the ex-CIA spook whose head Desmond accidentally bashes in last season). He was fixing Desmond’s yacht in a hidden cove, which seems to imply that he wasn’t particularly happy with the situation they were all in.
- Regarding Jack’s rollicking past: Unless they build this storyline up somehow to tie in with the occurences on the island, I’m rapidly losing interest in whatever emotional baggage it is that the good doctor is carrying. Sure his wife was cheating on him, and sure, his dad was a drunk, but for chrissakes, you’re on an electromagnetic island with polar bears and black smoke and Amish villagers from Hell! Get over it already!
- And lastly, I saw this absolutely brilliant image today on the 4815162342 forums:
LOL.