Lost - Live Together, Die Alone **

There is a moment towards the end of the second season finale where Jack, Kate, and Sawyer are on their knees with their mouths silenced by rags. Hurley is told by the Others to go back to his Oceanic mates and tell them not to ever search for Jack, Kate, and Sawyer. The camp is to stay put and everything would be okay. Hurley is standing there in turmoil as Jack nods to him that it is okay. Before the Others had shot Jack, Kate, Sawyer, and Hurley with incapacitating darts, they learned of Michael’s actions. Michael killing Ana and Libby is no longer a secret to them. Michael’s release of Henry also fully acknowledged to them. Michael’s excuse was to get his son. Henry is revealed to be the leader of the Others, and finally there are names involving Klugh (Bea) and Gainey’s character (Tom). Kate addresses Tom’s disguise so he feels there is no need to go on pretending. The looks on the faces of Jack, Sawyer, Kate, and Hurley certainly is what you would expect. And Michael stuck having to cop to his misdeeds as Hurley needs him to confess about Libby’s death puts him on the spot. But Henry grants Michael his wish…in that boat, once occupied by Tom when he shot Sawyer, who was on the raft, is Walt. Henry informs Michael to follow a certain heading with his son and never talk of his experiences on the island. So Michael and Walt start up the boat and leave as Kate, Jack, and Sawyer are held captive by the Others. Doesn’t quite seem fair. I felt a sense of disgust, admittedly. Michael killed two people. Regardless of his reasons (to get his son), Michael granted access off the island and away while Jack, Kate, and Sawyer are exchanged as “collateral” (despite their flaws and mistakes made in the past) left me feeling sympathy for them. I can’t imagine what that must have been like. How disheartening it must have been to see Hurley getting to leave and Michael given the keys to his escape while Kate, Jack, and Sawyer are to be prisoners.

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Charlie has underwent quite a resurgence towards the end of the second season compared to the middle of the season when he was excommunicated from the Oceanic camp. He helped himself, though. By tossing those heroin statuettes into the drink, giving himself purpose by helping Eko build a church and keeping busy (until Eko began his excursion into The Swan to man the computer, entering the code and pushing Execute), and providing Claire space (and offering her vaccine he had access to); Charlie earned some merits. Of course, Eko comes to him for help because he feels that if they don’t get to the computer, past the blast doors, everyone on the island will die. Claire’s stance against Charlie for his lies and reckless behavior dissolves until she even kisses him. Charlie can be close to her again, he’s forgiven.  When Desmond releases the electromagnetic force from The Swan, and the sky lights up, with everyone holding their ears, looking up to see what is going on, the threat of island extinction is no longer a concern so Charlie and Claire can rest a bit easier as the stars in the black sky light up beautifully. Considering Charlie was nearly blown to bits and crushed under rubble when Eko lights the explosive near the blast doors of The Swan, the end of the second season was a bit better to him than others less fortunate.

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Since Shannon’s death, Sayid has held onto his quest for revenge against the Others, just looking to get his pound of flesh. Some of that was taken out of Henry in his cell of The Swan, but Sayid never got to truly avenge Shannon’s loss. Sayid is the one who suspects (and is correct) Michael is deceptive and compromised by the Others, hatching a plan to flank them by using Desmond’s sailboat as an alternate route. So Jack, Kate, Hurley, and Sawyer follow Michael while Sayid is joined by Jin and Sun (Jin knows how to navigate the boat and Sun wants to serve as interpreter for Sayid) on the sailboat. Sayid will go a different direction with the plan to surprise the Others by locating their camp. Sayid does indeed locate their camp (or what appears to be a camp, basically just a mockup of a community of empty huts and tepees with two faux bunker doors leading to nothing but rock) but the Others are nowhere to be found. What I was floored by was this introduction to a statue of a foot with four toes Sayid spots on the boat before surfacing to look for the Others. I asked myself with wide eyes, “What is that about?!?!” The island certainly has its mysteries to potentially solve.

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Desmond made an interesting comment to Jack that perhaps the orders to monitor in The Pearl were the experiment not what was happening on the screens from other stations (like The Swan). There is a pneumatic tube that those in The Swan were supposed to feed their filled notebooks of activity penned from what was happening on the monitors into. The Orientation video inside The Pearl indicated that these notebooks went to the Dharma Initiative for further study. But a rather startling development has Jack, Kate, Michael, Sawyer, and Hurley locating a giant hill of notebooks (and the paper map Locke fed into the tub while inside The Pearl) when journeying towards the location of the fake Others community. There is the other end of the pneumatic tube curving out of the ground like the upside handle of an umbrella with all those notebooks piled up and unattended to. Again, there was an “incident” that interfered with the entire objective of the Dharma Initiative, but, just the same, monitors wrote in those notebooks and took the time to survey the tasks of others in different stations. And yet all of those notebooks rest in that pile, seemingly a product of scientific endeavor never to serve any clear purpose. The fascinating part to me is these Dharma Initiative stations on the island left derelict and in disrepair. Great strides were made by those involved in the Dharma Initiative to build these outposts, occupy them, as assignments and tasks were doled out, but this island seemed to have “other plans”. This island perhaps was the wrong choice for the Dharma Initiative, but as the first two seasons have shown us…coincidence doesn’t seem to be the ultimate reason why anyone ends up on the island.