Broken Frontier

There lie spoilers within, so tread carefully, effendi.

Lost, Episode 21: Greatest Hits… a lot of questions; but few answers.

For me, here is the primary question, and it’s based on actual dialogue from the show: How can you “blow someone to hell” if you’re already in Hell?

Good question, eh?

In honor of a now defunct TV show, I think that Lost, Episode 21: Greatest Hits should be renamed: “Freaks and Cliques.”

The reasons should be obvious to anyone who has been following along with the show’s meandering plot line.

Freaks Part: Some of the people on the island are very normal … Jack Shephard, for instance, is simply a doctor who carries around a lot of knowledge and more than his share of responsibility for the others in his group. James “Sawyer” Ford is a slick talking con man who changes his ethical code like most of us change our shoes. Kate Austen is a murderer, but otherwise she’s ordinary (and extremely easy on the eyes, but that’s not a strange power). None of them can teleport, fly, or explode in a monstrous fireball – if they could then the show would be called Island Heroes.

On the other hand, there are others on the island who are anything but normal. Locke was a cripple but now he can walk, and run, and climb, (and leg wrestle if required by the script, but mercifully, that scene hasn’t been written in yet … there’s always time in Season Four for that). Ben Linus takes orders from some sort of invisible primal force locked in a shack somewhere out in the jungle.

The most relevant “freak” within Freaks and Cliques is Desmond Hume. He is subject to sporadic, insightful flash forward episodes that provide details about the future, most often about Charlie’s future. And Charlie’s future is anything but bright. While he is incredibly gifted as an actor and I could listen to him recite the Manhattan phone book for several hours in that melodious Scots voice of his … those flash events make him a freak. The big freak this week. The El Supremo.

Without him, there is no story.

SIX HOURS EARLIER:
I am in bed, asleep, and dreaming of my best friend, Frank, using computer software to model a baby’s arm holding an apple, a half eaten quart of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream (New York Super Fudge Chunk) and Pamela Anderson doing Tai Chi in a Der Weiner schnitzel uniform … not necessarily in that order.

BACK TO THE REVIEW:
Cliques Part: Almost from the beginning of the series the island has forced groups of people to decide who they were going to hang out with. In the beginning there was the cave group and the beach group. Then there were Jack’s people and the Others. But even within these groups there were sub-groups – cliques – that fell into easy categorizing and that allowed people to spice things up by either falling into a new clique or out of a familiar one. Examples abound. Charlie fell in with Claire and then later with her newborn baby. Hurley and Charlie are on again, off again buddies. Locke and Rousseau seem to get along pretty well when they cross paths. The guy who adds the most by moving around is Sawyer because you always wonder what he hopes to gain via the transition.

TWO HOURS EARLIER:
I was having a bowl of corn flakes, half a banana, and a cup of coffee whilst getting mentally prepared for dropping the kids off at school and making the surface street trek over to the office that houses my day job. Inside my copy of the Los Angeles Times, I am secretly reading Painkiller Jane #1. Nobody seems to notice I have the issue upside down.

BACK TO THE REVIEW:
This episode is all about the freaks and the cliques. Desmond continues to prophesy doom for Charlie, this time giving him some clues about how the watery way it will happen. Jack’s crew recognize that The Others are going to attack to steal all the pregnant women, so they begin preparations and are confident of a swift victory. But one of the friendlier Others (see, someone crossing cliques … happens all the time) arrives by canoe to say that the bad guy timetable has been moved up by a day! Egad!! Meanwhile, Sayid recognizes that in order to stop the Dharma Corporation’s machinery from blocking signals to the outside, somebody is going to have to swim down to a conveniently isolated underwater installation and shut down the jammer by flipping a switch that is probably insidiously well hidden.

Does all of this seem like a videogame plot to you?

TWENTY MINUTES EARLIER:
I sit down to type this review having refreshed my memories by watching it again using an online download service out of Zimbabwe. On the surface this seems perfectly credible, but I can’t shake the suspicion that the computer is actually siphoning off part of my uniquely skewed creative genius to populate other online programs and made for TV movies. What can I do? To write is to serve, and to serve is to watch.

I’m screwed.

BACK TO THE REVIEW:
A freak, Desmond, says that a member in his clique, Charlie, will die if he flips the switch.

Does he?

That’s a question that will be answered downstream and underwater …

… maybe.

For right now, make like Credence Clearwater Revival … Better run though the jungle.