Eloise fucking Hawking: fucking time travel, she knows how it works. (Fuck).

Of all the things that the Lost finale did not wrap up, I am most fucking pissed about Eloise Hawking. I love Eloise Hawking.

Image description: A completely badass older white woman, Eloise Hawking, with fierce white hair tells some likely-time-traveling douchebag what the fuck is up

That lady knew what the fuck was going on at all times, and on a show that basically can't write women well and where mothers in particular are evil and crazy, that was pretty fucking refreshing. She embodied mysterious sci-fi Lost at its best. Eloise is symbolic of the lost (HAHA I AM SO GOOD AT PUNS) promise of the sci-fi-free sixth season. She was the only one who understood fucking everything. Whatever happened, she basically reacted with "CALLED IT!"

I mean, the lady fucked shit up, don’t get me wrong. She’s not exactly my role model (note: she kind of is my role model, as far as women on Lost go). Like, she did some Jedi mind-trick on Desmond where she made him not propose to Penny, which is sad and all but also fucking cool. She cold shot her own son, which sucks and all. (but it was awesome when Widmore whined and she was like "fuck you I shot my son").

You want to talk sacrifice, Jack "It's Raining On My Face" Shephard? Or John "Destiny, fucking DESTINY" Locke? Eloise Hawking killed her son, raised him to be a doomed fucking genius, then sent him back just to make sure she would shoot him again.

Christ, Eloise was so fucking awesome. She told people where to go and what to do and how long they had to do it, and when they (read: Ben and Fucking Jack) whined about it, she was like "well, shit, I did my fucking part of the work, chop chop." She swam through caves with nuclear bombs. That is not a fucking exaggeration.

Eloise Fucking Hawking was a bullshit-detecting machine - a quality most characters on this show (like Jack "This Is A Totally Normal Island, Yay Science" and later "Sure, Let's Blow Up This Atomic Bomb" Shephard or John "Yeah, Let's Trust The Con-Man Who Stole My Liver" Locke) lacked in pretty much every situation. But that lady? She knew when people were from the future when even Richard fucking Alpert was like “Oh, US Army? Right this way!” She was the only fucking person who seemed like she knew what the fuck was going on in season five. Fucking time travel, how does it work? Eloise fucking knows.

That's the thing about fucking Eloise Hawking. She knows what the fuck is happening with this Lost bullshit. She fucking knows. Better than fucking Jack, or fucking Hurley, or even fucking Jacob's stupid ass. Eloise Hawking? Has got a handle on this time-travel situation.

Eloise fucking Hawking is so fucking awesome that she could have save the sixth fucking season. As I've said before, with less foul language, I liked the finale but shit where was the fucking science this season. In one fucking scene - one fucking scene - I bet Eloise could have explained the whole goddamn mess. She could have been like "look, Jack" or "look, Hurley" or "look, Desmond" or even fucking "look, Charles" and just laid shit out. Yeah, maybe it would have been a little exposition heavy, but Finoula fucking Finnigen could pull it the fuck off, no matter how fucking shitty and clunky the dialogue was (and it would have been hella shitty and clunky).

Or you know, if Darlton wanted to be awesome (note: they don't), they could give her her own fucking episode. God. Think about how awesome it would be to have an episode about that badass fucking women with all the badass fucking women who played her. She could have faced off with Jacob and been like “look, asshole, I need some answers right fucking now.” And Jacob could have explained things to a point where they made sense beyond “hey guys, God is cool, but we’re all going to die, so, here’s heaven”. It wouldn’t be perfect, but it would be at least as good as Ab Aeterno and it would at least go beyond the magic fucking light cave in explaining what the fucking show was about.

Okay, I've realized that from the amount of time I've written "cold somehow fucked up poor sweet Daniel Faraday" that she's not a great mother. Yeah. You know what, fine, yeah, she was a kind of shitty mom. And she kept Des and Penny apart. Yeah, that sucks. Every character on Lost does shitty things.

But you know what else? Most every woman on the show to be a shitty fucking abandoning-ass mother in one way or another (even if it’s not really their fault, WHATEVER WHATEVER that’s for another post). Why would Eloise be any fucking different? And you know what else? Some women have more fucking important things to worry about than being a good mother. Being a good mother is fucking awesome. I had an awesome mom, and I one day hope to be an awesome mom.

But Eloise fucking Hawking had more than Daniel Fucking Faraday to fucking worry about. Bitch had to prioritize. You know what's more important than Daniel fucking Faraday? Two of her other little responsibilities - namely space and fucking time.

Vincent: the best thing about Lost

So my next post is pretty critical of Lost and how it treats Eloise. And I’ve written a lot recently about ways in which Lost sucks and does a disservice to its characters.

And it does. But there’s one character that I think they handled beautifully from start to finish in Lost. And not coincidentally, it’s the character that I have never heard a complaint about from the fanbase.


That’s right. Vincent.

It’s hard to go wrong with a dog this sweet. But Darlton did more than just give us a cute puppy to coo over. They used Vincent as a character and as a plot device pitch-perfectly throughout the entire run of the show.

Vincent the character was someone we, the fans, deeply cared about throughout the show. We cared about his relationship with Walt – Cara cited Walt’s farewell to him in the season one finale as one of the most moving moments of the show. He helped Shannon before she was killed (for loving Sayid). I cared about what happened to them as the human characters skipped through time and space. He made episodes that featured him better because I was always happy to see Vincent when he showed up. One common refrain I heard throughout the often discouraging sixth season was “More Vincent!” And as the show waned, it turned into a beg – a wish for a bright spot in the disappointing winding down of the show.

Vincent was also used brilliantly as a literary device. He was used to lead people into the Jungle of Mystery for believable reasons. Because, everybody loved him, who wouldn’t save Vincent? He was an emotional or comic relief for many scenes, a way to easily but effectively punctuate scenes without overdoing it.

And Vincent’s placement in the opening and closing shots of the show was just unbelieveably beautiful and perfect, and multifaceted. First off, dogs are cute and make everything +1. Furthermore, at the beginning of the show, it created just the right amount of mystery and suspense. At the end of the show, Vincent, the developed character we cared about, gave the show its last strong punch of emotional resonance. Furthermore, it reflected the parallelism of the beginning and ending shots of the show.

The sixth season made a lot of mistakes, but its closing on-island shot was an excellent choice that emotionally redeemed many of my qualms as I watched the show end in tears. And Vincent was the reason that shot, and to some extension the show, worked as well as it did.