Lost 2/23/07 Season Finale w/ spoilers

[Banshee16]

Desmond has mentioned before that he does not see a complete picture of the future only pieces of it. I don't thing Penny was every going to land on the island. He assumed it was her because he saw someone parachute down, found a bag with a book and a picture of him and Penny, none of his visions actually showed Penny as the parachuter. He assumed it was her.

I never *got* that. My interpretation has always been that for the parachutist to be Penny, Charlie had to die. Because Desmond saved Charlie from getting a spear in the throat, he changed the future, and consequently, it wasn't Penny parachuting down.

Banshee

 

[Blind Azathoth]

1-The Others actually haven't really killed many survivors. How many? Maybe one?

2-The survivors have killed *several* Others. As of last night, at least 10.

3-In the first season, the Frenchwoman talked about her crewmates going mad.

4-What if the survivors are actually the jungle savages, and the Others are the civilized ones?

5-All of this suposition could be invalidated by the fact that the Others murdered like 40 Dharma Initiative members in cold blood.

So far, the Others have killed only two castaways, although in both cases they "started it." Ethan kills Scott... Steve?... er, whichever one... and Goodwin snaps Nathan's neck.

On the other hand, the survivors have thus far managed to thin the ranks of the Others by seventeen, I believe. The ten in the beach party, Ethan, Goodwin, the three Ana and Eko took out their first night on the beach, a random background Other killed by Sawyer in a gunfight at the end of season 2, and Colleen.

The Others really aren't so civilized. In addition to the Dharma massacre, they also kill each other not infrequently; Juliet guns down Danny and Mikhail shoots Bea Klugh, Greta, and Bonnie (and of course presumably also kills himself, though I wouldn't be surprised to see him turn up next season with a band-aid on his chest and a hook to replace the hand the grenade blew off...).

 

[Felon]

I liked it. I decided before the show came on that if the 'climbing music' played, I would love the episode, and it played a lot. Y'know, the heroic travel music they have? Groovy.

However . . .

Very amusing, but I think it's been made clear that Ben doesn't want to exchange information, even with his own people.

 

[Felon]

Well, do you think the moonpool was deeper than 66 feet? Beyond that is the point where divers have to start planning staged ascents. Plus there is a risk of an embolism if they tried to hold their breath on the ascent...they would have to exhale the entire way up (which isn't as easy as it sounds) or their lungs would rupture from the expanding air. I can see Dez having the training for that from his military and sailing days, but not Charlie.

Does anyone seriously think the bends was actually on Charlie's mind at the time?

I too thought it was obvious that Charlie could have exited the room, either by door or porthole (which, when we saw him drowning, seemed pretty darn large--I guess grenades can do that sort of thing), so that made his sacrifice rather pointless.

Gretta and Bonnie were pretty hot. Wish they'd been kept around a little longer.

 

[Taelorn76]

From lostpedia.com, easter eggs section:

The funeral parlor Jack visits is "Hoffs/Drawlar", an anagram of "flash forward."

The newspaper clipping Jack holds appears to contain information about a man from New York, who died after 4 a.m. in "The Tower" on Grand Avenue in downtown Los Angeles. The man's first name appears to begin with a J, with his surname possibly ending in "antham."


Asmo

Speaking of the funeral parlor, Haven't we seen the funeral director before? I don't know if I know him from another series or from Lost?

 

[Grymar]

I meant, why didn't he swim out the window? The pressure wouldn't be pushing water in, once the amount of air in the room had decreased, so theoretically, he could get out and swim to the surface. He kept looking at that hole, like he was planning on swimming out it, and I was waiting for him to make a go for it.

I think the window was too small for him to fit through.

As to the bends, would he even get the bends? I'm no diving expert, but I thought you only get the bends from compressed air in scuba tanks etc. Unless breathing air in a sub-surface habitat, and then trying to swim to the surface would simply cause the same problem.

Banshee

This is getting off of the topic here, but if the Looking Glass was sealed like a sub then you may be right. But the existence of the moonpool means that they would have to increase the air pressure in the base to compensate to the increase of water pressure (which increases by 1 atmosphere every 33 feet you descend). So assuming the moonpool was more than 66 feet deep, which is hard to say, then the air pressure in the Looking Glass would have to be at least 3 atmospheres...right at the limit of a direct ascent without fear of getting the bends.

 

[Hand of Evil]

OFF-TOPIC

Dive table stuff, okay it has been a while and I don't have my charts, hell if I remmber the math any way; it is all based on the amout of time his is down, he only has to be concerned in an hour at 60 feet (that I remember), then he will have to come up slow, no faster than his own bubbles but should not have to worry about the bends. The greater the depth, the shorter the time to stay down and the longer you can't go back down.

So, if Charlie was down 2+ hours somewhere at 60 (I don't think it was that deep, I think 30 or less), he would have to come up at a rule of thumb rate of 2 minutes every 15 feet, taking 8 minutes for decompression stops, to get to the surface to have no chance of the bends, he could risk it.

Now, if the station was like a diving bell, pumping and venting fresh air into it and not using compressed air, I don't think there is that big of a problem, it is like being at the surface but we don't know if that is the case.

Don't shoot me is my math is wrong, it has been a LONG time.

 

[Cthulhudrew]

Speaking of the funeral parlor, Haven't we seen the funeral director before? I don't know if I know him from another series or from Lost?

I thought he looked familiar, too, but it doesn't look like the actor (Nigel Gibbs) has been in Lost previously.

 

[Cthulhudrew]

On the topic of the bends, my neighbor who is pretty hardcore into diving these days has been on the issue ever since Charlie first went down into the Looking Glass, and seems to think that it definitely would be a real danger in this situation.

That said- like Felon points out- I seriously doubt Charlie's last thoughts were- "Dang! I'd better shut this door and trap myself in here so that Desmond and I won't get the bends trying to escape!"

None of which addresses the matter of- even with the flooding and potentially non-lockable door, the interior of the hatch was large enough that the two men would still have had plenty of time to get the scuba gear Desmond had been preparing, and get out properly. It was a pretty pointless and silly death scene, even if it was kind of dramatically cool (the video from Penny, the handwriting).

There was a quote by Harlan Ellison that I read yesterday to the effect that story writers these days have learned their craft too much from watching television and lack a genuine grasp of structure and pacing, with the result that the dramatic (or melodramatic) often rules over realistic behavior and common sense- things are shoehorned to fit the way the author wants them to play out rather than the author following them through to their logical conclusion. Ellison was specifically referring to comicbooks, and put it much more succinctly than I just did, but I think that's very much applicable to shows like Lost in general, and this episode in particular (even more apt when you consider that at least a couple of Lost's writers are comic writers themselves).

I really like the show, don't get me wrong, I just get tired of seeing good characters get written into inappropriate situations because the writers need to reach a particular beat and can't do it organically. (Going all the way back to an earlier- and ongoing- comment about the characters never talking to one another.)

 

[occam]

The newspaper clipping Jack holds appears to contain information about a man from New York, who died after 4 a.m. in "The Tower" on Grand Avenue in downtown Los Angeles. The man's first name appears to begin with a J, with his surname possibly ending in "antham."

Jeremy Bentham? Fits with the other characters named after philosophers of the era. In fact, check out the first name listed under "Influences" on that Wikipedia page.