LOST Analysis: The Doctor is Fine

Le dénouement d’Alex, owner of the best hair and perpetual rose-stained lips on the show.

As for the doctor being fine? Well, Jack is at least. Appearance-wise, anyway. I hate this new development about his ruptured appendix.

So, the worst thing imaginable happened last night. I was out during the faux premier last night. My roommate Carrie had tickets to a screening of Deception (filmed in my office building!) and an afterparty. Who could turn down those plans? Even when LOST is back? Not me. I couldn’t. So Carrie and I returned home circa 11:30pm last night all set to watch our fave show… and the DVR DIDN’T RECORD it. Because of the show’s ridic new time slot which I totally hate. My DVR was only set to record it at 9pm. For some reason, it used to record the show last season when the show was at 10pm. This time, it didn’t. Carrie managed to record the last 25 minutes (apparently, you can record stuff from an hour ago… but not longer). So I couldn’t watch the beginning until THIS MORNING. Deception, by the way, was merely “meh.” It was semi-predictable except for one totally awesome part. The best character in the movie is this scoopy-backed mini dress that Michelle Williams rocks. The second best character is her hair. You’ll see. It comes out today.

So this episode alludes to Indiana Jones left, right, and center. Unfortunately, dolls, that is not one of the 80s movies in my repertoire, oddly enough. I saw one of the movies within the triology IN the 80s and barely remember it. It’s embarrassing for me to admit this as a LOST junkie, a pop culture scientist, and an 80s expert. I got nothing, analysis-wise for this reason. I did, however, notice these things.

Jack takes a pill, which he says he “prescribed for himself,” while Kate looks on suspiciously. This foreshadows Jack’s pill addiction and attempt to self-prescribe after he gets rescued.

Literary References
The man Sayid executes is named Ishmael, which was also the name of the narrator in Herman Melville’s novel Moby Dick.

This episode’s name, The Shape of Things to Come is a reference to H.G. Welles’ novel The Shape of Things to Come, a work of sci-fi in which a cabal based in Basra attempts to inflict its notion of world-wide utopia on the planet.

Games
Back at Camp Locke, Hurley, Locke and Sawyer play Risk. Games are a mage theme of the show.

Ben
Ben cannot kill Charles Widmore because he’s been on the island, I assume. Much like how Michael cannot be killed. The fact that Ben controls the smoke monster from a creepy portal behind his secret closet room was pretty wild news. So it’s safe to assume that he took out Eko himself? And for the first time, Ben’s attempted maniupulation of Keamy (“she means nothing to me… she’s not my daughter.”) doesn’t pan out the way he’d anticipated. Also, we now have confirmation that Ben is able to time-travel, although it seems it doesn’t afford him with an exact ETA. He looks surprised when the woman at the hotel tells him it’s October 24, 2005. Dude needs a De Lorean.

MacCutcheon Scotch
MacCutcheon Scotch once again makes a cameo in Charles Widmore’s night table. It helps him with the nightmares. Also interesting: the oil painting in his bedroom is Black Rock Storm, seen at the Southfield’s auction of the Black Rock ledger.

Halliwax
The name on Ben’s Dharma jacket when he arrives in Tunisia is Edgar Halliwax, one of Marvin Candle/Mark Wickman’s aliases.

What did you think of this ep? I thought it was phenom, I only wish I were better-versed in my Indiana Jones knowlege!

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