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.

The End of Lost, and why the sixth season missed the sci-fi mark

I am a rather contrary person, but I am also quite the conformist on occasion, which is why I write groundbreaking, earthshaking posts that generally go something like “HEY YALL DID YOU KNOW THAT CONTRARY TO POPULAR OPINION, CHEESECAKE IS DELICIOUS?” or maybe “HEY YALL I DON’T LIKE CLEANING AND HOUSEHOLD CHORES, I KNOW WEIRD RIGHT?”

So I’m not exactly sure how to react to the Lost finale after watching it yesterday morning.

I liked it. I did. But tentatively, problematically.

I reacted well to it, like I reacted well to Across the Sea. There were plenty of problems, but like that episode, I felt like it gave me a better idea of the nature of the show and its ideas and what it’s trying to get across.

I liked it much better than Across the Sea in many ways. While Across the Sea was a bit of a rush job as far as “developing the island as a character”, this was a coda for characters who were already extremely well-developed.

That’s what The End really did well. It banked on the viewer’s strong emotional ties to these characters: it made us remember how wonderful Jin and Sun and Rose and Bernard and even Jack and Kate are, made us remember that a big part of the reason we’d cared about this show for so long was the characters: well-developed, well-articulated, three-dimensional. The acting was also exceptional: I’m not usually a huge fan of Evangeline Lilly’s acting skills, but even she gave her character’s end gravity and meaning. In a show that consistently punished, tortured, killed its characters with rewards few and far between, it gave us something unexpected in its conclusion: their happiness in their death, their redemption through their trials. It showed us what they died for in a way the penultimate episode could not. Seeing these characters find understanding and happiness was incredibly powerful after six years, and it made the conclusion much more pleasant and satisfying. I cried several times, but not bitterly or out of sadness.

--

I have no problem with big, epic, science fiction shows ending up being about religion, like BSG and now Lost. Science, to me, is about religion. Maybe it’s because I’ve never been that good at understanding either. But life, growing, changing, nature, are wonders to me. Creation and science are fact, but the facts are constantly shifting, truth is constantly changing with our knowledge. The universe is not something we can intimately understand.

Thus, I did not mind the focus on faith and religion in this episode or these season. Faith has always been a strong current in the show. It’s mixed with science to create grand mystery and suspense, and when the plotting and pacing are good (as they were in this final episode, it can be magnificent).

But science was mostly abandoned this season, in favor of magic and religion. And that’s not living up to the show – it’s lazy fucking writing.

I had reserved judgment on the “magic everywhere in this bitch” aspect of the season. And now, I feel cheated.

Magic, as I hope I illustrated above, is not mutually exclusive with science. The light, the energy, the magic, the heart, works to a certain degree as a motif - flashes of light are a frequent punctuation on the show, and energy is a basic concept in science. But the show does not develop the energy/light/force as the scientific property behind many plot points on the show. Instead, it chooses to focus on developing a side world that ultimately does not exist. That’s wasteful writing, and it’s unnecessary.

A more productive tack to take, in my opinion, would have been to start developing the island as a character early on in the season, placing Ab Aeterno and Across The Sea early on in the season. Some of the weaker episodes (in particular Sayid’s, the Kwon’s, Kate’s, and Sawyer’s) should have instead been devoted to seeing more of the history of the island and developing how the energy affects the inhabitants, and defining the parameters of the protector’s guidance of the island. In this way, the show could have answered a lot of central questions: questions they built up and promptly abandoned. If you’re reading it, you know what they are. For me, I think that it would be easy to explain:


-the island’s past, particularly with regard to all of the Roman and Egyptian imagery and mythology

-conception and pregnancy [Particularly here – I would have loved to see more Alison Janney in different situations because I love her]

-fucking magnets, how do they work

-time and how it shifts

-the smoke and the nature of MiB

The problem with the construction of this season is that they did not trust the viewer enough. I do not dislike the idea of the sideways as purgatory. But they worked too hard to build it up when they really didn't need to in order to give these characters resolution. But I do dislike that they created a demand and an anticipation for specific aspects of the show, and actively chose to avoid answering those questions.

Further reading:
Jezebel
TLo
this ain't livin

Y'ALL I LIKE "ACROSS THE SEA"

SPOILERS DUH

Okay, so, I really liked Across The Sea. Like, I really liked it. I was taken in, involved, everything.

It's a little bizarre, and yeah, you know, it is about magic after a fashion. But honestly, what the fuck did you expect it to be? Was the "it's PHYSICS" explanation really any more articulate or seriously meaningful? Time travel doesn't actually exist, you know. It doesn't. Time may be a dimension but we don't understand it. At least they're giving some kind of explanation instead of being like "WELL IT'S THIS MACHINE WITH WHEELS AND GEARS YOU SEE". We already got the sci-fi weird machine bullshit out of the way in seasons 2-5. And besides, as my nerdy brother is fond of quoting, any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

This is a weird fucking island. A lot of weird, inexplicable things happen. Is magic really that surprising?

And it's not just magic (though it is very much magical). It's also about spirit. And yeah, it's hokey, but again: the fuck did you want? This is all about the power of fucking love and the human spirit and faith versus fact and all of that.

And it's not just magic and spirituality: think about the role that light, overpowering, beautiful light, has played on this island as a theme and a motif. Most notably, this light accompanied the time jumps of season five, due to the malfunctioning wheel MIB fashioned. When Desmond pressed the fail-safe, light accompanied the tremors that brought the plane down.

Also, what's so fucking wrong with magic? Magic is awesome. I love Harry Potter, and magical realism, and all of that bullshit. Magic kicks ass.

Was the CGI corny? Yeah. So? I thought it was also beautiful. This show is not about fucking reality.

I love this episode because it did not give "the whispers are SPIRITS" bullshit direct answers. It told a story of mythology that moved forward my understanding of the island and the essence of this show. Across The Sea shifted the way I view the show: what it's about, what lies beneath it, where it came from, what it represents. And I couldn't ask or expect anything more of it.

Further reading:

Lost S6E15: Across the Sea