The Ed Zone

Lost – ‘Confirmed Dead’ – 4.2

Friday February 8, 2008 | 11 comments (now closed)

Good news. For the last week or so, there have been numerous rumblings from all ends of the Earth that the Writer’s Strike is on the verge of being settled. Many believe that the strike will officially come to an end this weekend – when the Writer’s Guild meets with its members. By Monday morning, they could all be back to work.

Why do I bring this up in my Lost dispatch? With the ‘End‘ beginning on such a high note, the truncated 8 Episode Season seems like pure torture. This mystery continues to deepen and it would be a shame if all we got were six more eps and then out. Granted, there is bound to be some sort of layover as the production needs to ramp back up but I’ve read rumors that the Lost crew actually had the scripts for all 16 Episodes completed – only 8 had been delivered and filmed. That may prove to be good news as the script is arguably the most important ingredient when it comes to this show. Irregardless, the stike’s end is good for all.

Enough with that – on with the show.

1.   ‘Confirmed Dead’ got right something this show has stumbled a bit with in the past – dropping in newcomers into the established ensemble in a way that makes them as compelling as our regulars. While Ben, Juliet and Desmond were effortlessly introduced, the likes of Nikki and Paulo deserve to remain buried. Therefore, I was pleasantly surprised with how the four rescuers were introduced. It says a lot that I immediately want to know more about each one of them.

2.   The first rescuer is Daniel Faraday – whom we initially meet as he is mysteriously moved by footage of a recovered Oceanic Flight 815 in the Indian Ocean. (Wait – Indian Ocean??? I’ll get to that in a minute). Daniel is trembling with emotion and doesn’t know why. Fist off, perfect casting with Jeremy Davies in the role. Davies is a regular in the independent film world but his most widely known role is as the cowardly soldier/reporter in Saving Private Ryan. He brings a nice, unhinged intelligence to his role as a brilliant physicist. Loved his observation – “The light… it doesn’t scatter quite right.”

3.   The second one we meet is the angry Ghostbuster Milo Strom. Milo has a gift – the ability to speak to spirits – which ought to come in handy on this island of a few dozen corpses. Plus, with a teleporting haunted shack creeping around, a mystic is exactly the sort of guy needed for this job. The thing is, Milo appears to use his powers for evil or at least, his own benefit, as we see when he is contracted by the grandmother of a slain drug dealer. He helps rid her home of the unwelcome visitation but also liberates the specter’s sercet cache. At least he tosses the grandmother a bone by giving her half-off.

4.   The third rescuer is Charlotte S. Lewis. (C.S. Lewis?!?!?) We first meet her in Tunisia where she is investigating a mysterious discovery in the desert. As with the others, she has a mysterious connection to Flight 815 (a quick line of dialogue reveals she is obsessed with digesting every detail of its mysterious discovery). More mysterious is what she unearths in the desert. A polar bear skeleton. As if that weren’t odd enough – it’s a Dharma Polar Bear as evidenced by the Hydra Station collar it’s wearing. How the hell did a Dharma Polar Bear make it all the way from Lostralia to Tunisia? Could some of those mysterious electromagnetic island properties that Dharma was experimenting on been used for radical experiments? Teleportation? That might fit in nicely in explaining how Desmond traveled through time and back again following the Hatch meltdown. I’ve got one other thing to discuss about Ms. Lewis but I’ve to get to the final rescuer.

4.   Frank Lapidus, the helicopter pilot, is played by Jeff Fahey. Fahey has elevated Direct-to-Video works for years and really is a perfect actor to join the fold here. He brings a grizzled intensity to every role he’s inhabited and here, with the years starting to manifest, there’s some palpable history that he brings along with this newcomer. Frank’s flashback reveals a key element to this mysterious discovery. He correctly intuits that there is something off with the wreckage found at the bottom of the ocean. He knows the pilot (Greg Grunberg sporting a kick-ass Photoshopped 70’s Porn Stash) and doesn’t believe that the pilot featured in the cockpit video is the same guy that should have been flying the plane. In addition, he reveals another connection to Flight 815. He was supposed to pilot that bird.

5.   Before I get into some of the other observations, I’ll wrap up the A-Team introduction with a few words on the 2nd appearance of the creepy Matthew Abbadon. Here we see Abbadon is the man who pulled this team together – presenting these disparate individuals to Naomi as her dream team (she calls them “a basket case (Faraday), a Ghostbuster (Strom), an athropologist (Lewis) and a drunk (Lapidus).)” It’s fascinating getting all of this background and then wondering why this particular group was pulled together to apparently liberate Ben from his island.

6.   I think Lewis has some real connection to the Dharma initiative. When she unearths that Polar Bear she seems to have expected it to be there which leads me to believe this is part of a Dharma experiment. The fact that the polar bear is fossilized adds more credence to the time travel theory. Did Dharma send the polar bear back in time but couldn’t quite get the destination right? Or did they send it so far back that it made it to a point in prehistory where the island land mass was once connected to Tunisia (I’m too lazy to consult a map so I have no idea how far Tunisia is from the water). And to what ends would they care about time travel? I’ve often posited that Dharma is dedicated to making the world a better place and that they are soldiers in the battle against building evil. What if they are seeking to reset time – to transport everything back as a do over – and the polar bear was just one step in this experiment.

7.   One other thing about Charlotte. When she comes to (trapped in the tree) she appears familiar with the place. When she first lands in the water, she is outright giddy. This can be read one of two ways – either she’s been there before and has returned home again (back to Narnia!) or she’s been searching for this place her whole life and at last has found it.

8.   The wreckage. It is obvious that there is a major conspiracy at work to deter any further searches for Flight 815. But who could pull off such a massive undertaking (actually sinking a plane with real corpses on board) in a bid to get people off the trail. All we know is – that Flight 815 is not the real Flight 815.

9.   I read online that one of the viral Lost games that ran over the Fall involved a salvage crew looking for the Black Rock in the Indian Ocean. The video footage we see during the opening is apparently from that crew. I thought that was a cool tie-in by the creators to link their expanded universe into the main show.

10.    Sawyer brought his A game. Loved his reference to Locke as Colonel Kurtz and Ben as Yoda. He sure does love him some Star Wars.

11.   What do you make of Locke and Ben’s reaction to Hurley’s slip that he too has seen the cabin? Ben was looking like he may need to take another potshot (once he gets done perforating Charlotte) and Locke seemed like he was pleasantly surprised that someone else had seen into the island’s mysteries. Or… he could feel threatened that what makes him special may not be as special as he thought. Maybe this is the reason Hurley later regrets having joined Locke’s cause?

12.   It was a nice touch that Locke’s lack of a kidney was what saved his life. That and the Giant Walt.

13.   And then there is Ben’s final words that he has someone on the freightor? Who, how and why?