Lost: In which I wax lyrical & philosophical, regarding what is meta and redemptive. :P

Having felt pretty let-down by the last episode of Lost, I began watching this week's installment (entitled "Whatever Happened, Happened") with slightly less than my usual enthusiasm. I watched the events of the first few moments quite dispassionately, and was even unstirred by hearing Ben moan when Jin picked him up. I mean, I had figured the kid wouldn't die...

Then, unexpectedly, the episode became amazing. I typed this paragraph as I watched (well, commercial break anyway... verizon ad was on mute): I have no idea how the rest of the show is going to go as of yet, but I can tell you now that I am 100% a fan of this episode. I'm still laughing to myself over the Oceanic Six's discussion about time travel... Lost just went so meta, and I love it. I've seen bloggers mention Back to the Future several times in the last couple weeks, trying to puzzle out the time-travel mysteries, and to hear Hurley wonder if he's about to disappear and then reference the movie himself was awesome. To seal the deal, Miles then tries to explain how all the time-travel might end up fitting together, to which Hurley responds: "That was really confusing." Somewhat petulantly, Miles (/the writers) responds, "Get used to it." Fair enough, lol!

Even more awesome though, was a few minutes later, when Miles himself (/the writers) runs out of ideas and ends with a weak, "Huh. Hadn't thought of that." HAHA! I've got to wonder whether the writers are blog-hopping after each episode, looking for holes they need to try to patch and issues they haven't yet covered... Because I'm pretty sure that whole exchange was inspired by multiple disjointed message board posts and blog questionings.

And the show only got better from there... Moments later, just as I was thinking Thank God they're finally going to tell us what happened to Aaron... Kate proceeded to turn around in the grocery store and find that he had vanished. I promptly freaked out hard-core and started at the yelling at the TV, something that went a bit like this: "HOLY @*#%, she did NOT just LOSE him. Are you freaking KIDDING me??" and continued in that vein, and at quite a high decibel, the whole of the time she darted around the store frantically asking people if they had seen him. I'll admit, I kind of liked the feeling of justified outrage, directed at Kate's apparently sub-par mothering skills, so I was mildly disappointed that it was all for nothing. I had been having a hard time dealing with her lately and couldn't decide why, so I was hoping that discovering Aaron's fate would aid a reconciliation between the two of us...

Five minutes later my feelings towards her were even more jumbled. First she comes across as hugely dysfunctional and self-absorbed while discussing her motives for adopting Aaron with Cassidy, and then she's shown in a whole different light by revealing that she chose to go back to the island primarily to look for Claire. I guess if nothing else we can claim that Lost is accurate in portraying the many layers of human complexity and motivation... after all, in a broken reality most of our decisions are at least partially self-motivated, so I should hardly be surprised that poor screwed-up Kate's is the same.

As for the love-triangle (/octagon), I'm still doing a happy dance at the way the last fifteen minutes of the show answered my Sawyer + Juliet hopes... It was probably a good thing that I'm didn't watch this episode tomorrow online at work, because I would have been bouncing up and down in my chair so hard that my head would have popped up above the edge of my cubical. I'm so proud of Sawyer, and pretty impressed that even in the midst of all those conundrums and secondary characters bouncing around, the writers managed to incorporate some actual character development there. Had a literary character remained absolutely static through five years of happenings and changes, readers would cry foul... why not in a TV show? I think that the fact that the Losties aren't playing out the same old roles and interactions yet again this season is highly laudable (Heroes, please take notes).

I'm so pleased at the way this episode addressed so many of my long-standing itching curiosities (Aaron's whereabouts, an appearance by Richard Alpert, the status of Sawyer and Juliet, the reason for Kate's sudden decision to return to the island after all, indications that Claire will indeed reappear at some point) that my few laments will be voiced very, very faintly. But I have to say that though I absolutely loved Miles' attempt to get us up to speed with the whole time-travel thing, at the same time I also felt like he was acting as a stand-in for Faraday, and that made me a little sad. I still miss Daniel...

And then my big theory.... are Rose and Bernard with the Others at this point? If they were on the island being batted about by the flashes just like Sawyer, Juliet, et al, then they also ended up in the same point in time, right? It would stand to reason then that they must have ended up with the Others... wouldn't it? I was dying to know who would be inside the cave Richard carried Ben into at the last moment -- do you think we'll see whatever happens there, or just be jumped forward through the narrative into a time when Ben is well again? Is Claire with them at any rate, since she was with Christian/Jacob at the end of the 4th season, and we assume that Jacob is connected with the Others all along?

And so, as it turns out, Sayid is indeed the reason why Ben turns into the jaded, manipulative creature we have always seen him as. Wouldn't it be clever if the writers turn the show's title into an oblique reference to "innocence lost," and the show itself as an ongoing attempt to regain that innocence? Can we credit even our more-and-more adept writers with that kind of subtlety and deftness? I still can't tell if they have an underlying subtext for all this, or if they are making up the plot as they go along, perhaps with the help of a six-year-old on crack... but I have more faith in the Lost writers lately then ever before, so I will remain hopeful.

Note: Has any other show in history prompted so much discussion of the writers' intentions? That's not rhetorical, I'm seriously curious, because if so I sure can't think of one...