Posts by David Hood
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>come to realise that Jacob and SOB (Smoky Old Bastard) aren't these all-knowing God-like figures after all.
One of whom is malevolent, and so is of no help in explaining things, the other of whom has some very archaic ideas about free will (I'd say Platonic-esque), so is of no help in explaining things.>Indeed. It was like "all that stuff you thought was cool and relevant? It wasn't. We were just filling space with it."
I wouldn't quite go that far. It was, basically a Grail Quest story, where the what could be seen as random encounters on the way draw out and refine the characters of the questers until one is fit to take the Grail (or two in this case). I'm surprised more people do not seem to have made this comparison.
That said my personal peeve is that they never closed the canoe chase shooting time loop (reportedly it would have been more effort than could be justified to bring back a bunch of people just for that). I would rather they hadn't set it up for being some kind of time loop at all.>A FUCKING DOOR WITH A BRIGHT FUCKING LIGHT!! THAT'S HOW BAD IT WAS!!!!"
I reckon that was one motif that worked particularly badly in a irreligious country like New Zealand. I'd have been happier had the doorway not been lit, and it had finished with a shot of an airport departures board- Oceanic Flight 815 departed LAX with no listed destination.
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I missed one:
> Was Desmond just some sort of crossing guard, there to point everyone in the right direction?
-Flash afterlife Desmond was the first to become fully conscious of his state, and so was prodding the others as he wanted to move on.
-Island Desmond, have had lethal amounts of electromagnetism run through him had a vision of the afterlife, and misinterpreted it. I would speculate that Desmond's lifetime experience might have made it easier to become fully conscious in the afterlife.>that still doesn't explain WHY POLAR BEARS
- "STATED GOAL, REPATRIATION ACCELERATED DE-TERRITORIALIZATION OF URSUS MARITIMUS THROUGH GENE THERAPY AND EXTREME CLIMATE CHANGE"If there is one thing the show was not about, it was answering ultimate questions of origin. If you treat the show as the story of Jack's experience with the Island, (mostly) everything is explained one or two steps away from the core narrative, but beyond that has ceased to be relevant.
>bad guy (help me out here with his name) who first appeared in season two.
Ben/ Linus/ 'Henry Gale'/ 'Dean Moriarty'/ and a whole bunch of other aliases.In a many year show you can't actually plot it super-tight, unless you resort to the soap opera dodge of swapping actors as the production circumstances changed. Babylon 5 faced similar issues, and was another one where characters could be dropped in or out (such as Eko- from what I gather they were initially thinking of a threeway tension between Science (Jack), Religion (Eko), and Mysticism (Locke).
I retrospect, I think the past couple of seasons was fairly tightly plotted- What confused people was the setting off the bomb, but looking back on it Miles had observed "What if setting off the bomb caused the incident?" but had been ignored. Juliet's "It worked" can now be seen to be her becoming aware of the afterlife as she died, but misconstruing what she was seeing.
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I liked it. Not without reservation, but I liked it.
>If the island and everything that happened on it were real, what was the point of the flash sideways?
-Resolving the character issues, rather than the plot issues.>And if flash sideways was just a staging post for heaven, why were there characters in the church who were still alive on the island?
-It was outside of time, some died earlier some died later. Basically, anything said on the show in the past few weeks should probably be taken at face value.> What about Miles and Lapidus?
-Not part of the core story of Jack and the Island. The show begin with Jack opening his eyes, finished with him closing them.>But in the end, it all began to look like a thinly-veiled religious metaphor
- Thickly unveiled, prehaps.> what about Walt?
-Strange mystical island sucks in strange mystical boy, the 2 are not compatible so the boy is sent away. No longer relevant to the Island.>but what about all those pregnant women?
-The ones living near a leaking nuclear bomb having trouble with pregnancies you mean? Clair was on another part of the Island.>what about Mr Eko?
-didn't like living in hawaii so was written out early rather than the planned 4 season story.
-had a pay dispute about returning for the final.
-or, if you prefer, was not actually a candidate and the smoke monster had decided he couldn't use him so killed him.>what about Eloise?
-Got her son's journal, so had partial foreknowledge until the point in time where Daniel went to the Island (hence her later "For the first time in a long time, I have no idea what happens next")
-In the afterlife was in a similar position to Desmond, and now Ben, of being aware of what is going on and trying to sort things out with her son>what's with Jack's son
- an illusion so he can work through his issues with his father.>finally died/accepted they had all died in the crash.
No they didn't, the dialog has been quite emphatic about that. They crashed into a magic island, which some died on, a few escaped from, and a few retired on.> polar bears
-introduced by the Dharma initiative, for reasons not known to the present inhabitants -
Of the two Lost devotees at work, myself and one other, I indulge in internet information and she doesn't. Then the day after the episode I fill in the context of the details in a chat we have about the just screened episode.
With the erratic number of "x many episodes to go" over the past six weeks or so, I was wondering if TVNZ were going to divide up the final into two parts. -
Since it is probably going to be used as an argument by those promoting abandoning MMP in the course of the campaign, I note Bad Sciences posting on government debt and countries with strong political parties.
blog link
Which basically shows that strong one party government does not lead to fiscal responsibility. -
Files starting with a dot are invisible on Unix/ Linux systems, so I suspect that someone may have been caught by cross-platform issues.
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Since the number of MPs is orthogonal to the system used to vote them in (at least to my mind), does the scoop article indicate that this is going to be a campaign like the 1999 "Should there be a reform of our Justice system placing greater emphasis on the needs of victims, providing restitution and compensation for them and imposing minimum sentences and hard labour for all serious violent offences?" referedum.
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Well done all.
Since it's Friday, I thought I'd throw in a video, and since it's the day before the Parks march, I thought it would be the one I made earlier this week as part of the material I am accumulating
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Somewhat late, I have my own idea for the sign Wellington needs
flickr link -
In the wake of this column I was vaguely disturbed to encounter, in a life imitates art fashion, a story about the
head of the SETI post detection taskforce.