There's No Place Like Home

Today is a watershed day for many.

It marks the last Thursday of the month of May. It marks the anniversary of Edmund Hillary (and his Sherpa from Nepal) reaching the summit of Mt. Everest. Bob Hope was born this day. Wisconsin enters the American Union. And to be added to this vast catalogue of importance, , the season finale of LOST premiers.


I'll admit right now, I am a bit obsessive and - dare I say - fanatical with this show. You would be too after a lingering flu and a lazy Christmas vacation. but I'm not here to justify my noble cause: I'm here to enlighten and engage the general public to what will surely be the defining show of the Second Golden Age of television.

Whoah, sounding a bit too much like a COM class there...

So ... where did we last leave these island cast aways? We've discovered the Oceanic Six, and see their initial arrival to the civilized world once more. But ... there's something that Jack, Kate, Sun, Sayid, (and Aaron, though he can't really talk) aren't saying. What of this fabricated tale, that they were the only survivors, that their survival was one of Lord of the Flies - subsistence on a deserted island. And when any of the five "mix up" a detail, it is of course, due to shock, and not the inaccuracies of their fabrication.

One of the delicious riddles of the show now is how these people manage to get off the island; they are visibly unscathed, relatively un-traumatized, and all at separate points at part one of the "There's No Place Like Home" denouement. Kate and Sayid have been taken by Charles Widmore's people, Jack and Sawyer are again roaming the jungles of the island, Jack fresh from a recent appendectomy and sewn up like a 7th grade home economics project. And Sun? She and her husband Jin have been transported to the freighter to await deployment.

An interesting tidbit from part one of the finale was during the flash-forward. Jack is deposing what happened when the plane (as he says) hit water. "We used cushions, a few life jackets...at that point, there were only eight of us left." Eight, eh? but it's the Oceanic Six. I'm no math major, but some things are not adding up.

And, hallmark to LOST and its' hidden intelligence, this season's finale gives a more than generous nod to various cultural and literary elements. "There's no place like home" of course, is a line from The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, the beloved children's novel by L. Frank Baum. On many occasions, the show salutes these metafictions - that is, stories that open the characters into strange and wonderful worlds they never thought existed. It can be said with Alice when she goes "through the looking glass" (the title of season three's finale) or of Dorothy when she realizes she's not in Kansas anymore. could the writers be insinuating the island is no more than a vivid fabrication - a falsification made for whatever reason to keep the island's inhabitants in a sort of limbo or purgatory until their lesson is learned?

Or maybe they just really really like to freak the viewers out.

Quote of the day: Locke: You guys have electricity? How do you manage that?
Ben: We have two giant hamsters running on a massive wheel in our secret underground cave.