Harry Potter and the Order of My Favorites

I didn’t get port-keyed into the magical world of Harry Potter until it hit theaters in 2001. I loved the introduction to the series  so much that I decided not to dig  into the published spoilers right away, but to wait until someday when an offspring was old enough to discover the books for the first time with me—I thought it would be the best way to experience both mediums. I have a daughter of almost 1 now, and I miraculously have no idea what happens next to Dumbledore’s Army,  so the timing and the patience—and the living in seclusion—might just work out perfectly.

With every release of a new Potter film, my wife—who has read the books, but is banned from discussing them at home—and I refresh by watching all of the previous entries. With the latest opening this week, I thought I would list the order of my favorites with the hopes that Half-Blood Prince can reach the top spot by the end of my day off on Friday.

I’d love for you to debate my list or leave your own order, but because of what I laid out at the top, I have no choice but to not allow for comments. I can’t trust you muggle, mud-blood bastards. It would be like shooting myself in the foot with a stupify if I were to allow it all to be spoiled now.

1) Chamber of Secrets

A warning not to return. A great escape from the Dursely’s. Travel by flue powder. The hilariously egotistical Gilderoy Lockhart. The Whomping Willow. A magical diary. A giant-spider-infested dark forest. Polyjuice potion. A Harry vs. Malfoy wand duel. Messages scribed in blood on the walls. Parseltongue. Chamber is everything that makes Harry Potter great—whimsical, magical, funny, dark, and scary. It has the best balance of normal kid stuff and the danger that comes with the territory. And it’s got the better Dumbledore.

**UPDATE**

2) Half-Blood Prince

Half-Blood Prince has everything that I thought was missing from Order of the Phoenix—David Yates’s first HP film—a great mystery, some teenage normalcy in Harry’s life… even Quittich. Maybe it’s the return of screenwriter Steve Kloves to the series, or maybe it’s just a little better source material this time around. Prince could have easily gone into montage mode for the teen-romance sections like how its predecessor handled Harry’s teachings and Umbridge’s takeover, but instead it deals with it perfectly, mixing it in with the mystery and madness.

After repeated Blu-ray viewings when this releases—this holiday season, no doubt—this one could move in either direction in my top 3, but for now, it’s locked in at #2. If a newbie was only going to watch one HP film, I would recommend Chamber of Secrets, the way it best encapsulates the Harry Potter world with a balance of whimsy and dark mystery, but Prince may just be the one that people who know the story and the characters will want to watch the most.

In Rafer Guzman of Newsday’s review, he writes, ‘The movie based on J.K. Rowlings’s novels gets its The Empire Strikes Back moment. It’s a downbeat cliffhanger that suggests its central characters are exiting their age of innocence.” Well put. The ending reminded me a lot of The Empire Strikes Back; even the way Harry and friends are looking out from Hogwarts tower is similar to the way Luke and co. are looking out into the galaxy from the spaceship (I’m sure there’s some nerdy name for this spaceship that I don’t know, the XY-Z Pilot Striker, or something).

I call Half-Blood Prince the Larry Bird of HP movies because it makes all of the other films around it better; it even adds some mythology to Chamber, knowing what we do now about Voldemort’s diary. I’m so confident now that this saga is going to end great. And it’s in such good hands with director David Yates, whom I originally had concerns about. Half-Blood Prince is just awesome to look at.

My only two nitpicks involve the titlar character. Snape has coveted the Defense Against the Dark Arts position for years. When he finally lands the position, the story switches its classroom focus from Dark Arts to the potion classes that he used to teach—DOH! It would have been nice to at least get a taste of how Snape handles his new opportunity. And the title itself isn’t given much significance beyond, that’s what Snape called himself and Harry had one of his old text books. Maybe it’s not important to know the meaning behind the nickname. Maybe they’re saving it for the final films. All I’m saying is that this one could have easily been called HP and The Vanishing Cabinet.

Whatever it’s called, it’s my favorite of the darker Potters.

And now I can worry… can people be Whore Cruxes (yes, I know, I most likely spelled it incorrectly by using the word “Whore,” but that’s how I heard it and I’m afraid to Google it and land on a spoiler; so for now, it’s “Whore,” like Voldemort’s mom)?

3) Prisoner of Azkaban

The best looking and best-directed Potter film without a doubt. Din, din, din, din-din-din; the music in this one is awesome too. The scene when Harry sees Peter Pettigrew on the Maurauder’s Map sends chills and may just be my favorite scene in any of them—I just love the lighting and look of that hallway. I like this one more and more with each viewing. My only problem with the story always comes down to the somewhat muddled explanation of things that comes to a head in an overcrowded Shrieking Shack. By the way, time traveling seems pretty easy; it’s a wonder that they don’t do it more often. All in all, this is as close to a Harry Potter Dark Knight as they’ve come.

4) Sorceror’s Stone

Harry enters into a whole new world with expressions of astonishment that I shared from my seat in the theater. Difference being, I was in my mid-twenties.

5) Goblet of Fire

What kind of school subjects their students to the kind of danger that comes with the Triwizard Tournament? And why are they so shocked when one of the contestants turns up dead? DUH! Talk about a great moment to whip out the time turner! The Death Eaters’ plan needed too many things to go right—why jump through all the loops to get Harry to touch the Triwizard Cup at the end of the tourney? Why not just make Harry’s eating utensil the port-key to Voldemort’s graveyard? How about a bowl of soup, Harry? Boom—graveyard. There should be some rules around what can be a port-key that make better sense of this. Maybe there’s more to this in the book.

We meet a new professor of the dark arts, MadEye Moody, but not really. Turns out it’s just Barty Crouch, Jr., laid back, sippin’ on Polyjuice with his mind on his Dark Lord and his Dark Lord on his mind. I can’t think of another story that develops a character who isn’t really the character. Even Mission Impossible gives us the characters first before they start slipping on the masks. And what about Fleur Delacour, who gives up on her sister underwater because she couldn’t get past a thicket of seaweed? Maybe there’s more to this in the book.

I also wish this one started at the Dursely’s; I like that consistency that brands each title.  Nit-picks aside, I do love this one as much as the others. So far, they’ve all been great films. Although, I would pull my daughter out of Hogwarts the second I found out that they trapped her underwater as part of a Triwizard event. Why is it that the students need permission slips from parental guardians to visit the candy store at Hogmeads, but not to become Mermaid bait? Why aren’t any of the students upset about this when they come to? Maybe there’s more to this in the book.

6) Order of the Phoenix

I get the sense when watching this one that it must have been the hardest of the books to adapt to screen. Much of the middle of the film is montage, and other parts are told through dreams, flashbacks, and smash-cut edits. It’s missing a good stand-alone mystery, classroom studies, and Quittich. But it does have one of the best scenes of all—the climactic Wizard battle. The look of the films continue to be inspired by Cuaron’s Azkaban and this one looks great as well. I like the themes and it does a good job of setting things up for a great ending to the series. Please, oh please, let the giants Hagrid was recruiting be in the next one!

Bentham’s Bucket List

It sucks to be the guy whose best parts of his being are his birth and death. Such was the case with Jeremy Bentham, who, between fantastic opening and closing acts, led a life that had me readying my air noose. We were previously aware that Bentham made unsuccessful visits to Sayid, Hurley, Kate, and Walt in his quest to bring them back to the island, and these scenes in The Life and Death of Jeremy Bentham tell us not much more than that—other than we may have seen the last of Walt (I really hope I’m wrong)— “he’s been through enough,” Locke tells us, and sadly, unlike all of the Bentham visits, we never got to see it. Perhaps the visits from Bentham should have been given more time to develop over the course of the season or could have been left on the cutting room floor in favor of more island action, but because they didn’t drag on for long, this episode kept from hanging itself.

Having been prescient to his inevitable death, you’d think Locke would have drawn up a better bucket list. Here’s what I would have done in my last days if I were Jeremy Bentham:

1. Strip-backgammon with Walt
2. Enter my Mango Surprise in the Pillsbury Bakeoff
3. Pretend to be a ghost and follow Hurley around the mental hospital for a couple of days just to mess with him
4. Play a game of Mouse Trap against Faraday’s mind-traveling mouse, Eloise
5. Send Desmond back in time to stop me from giving my father one of my kidneys, and then go piss on his grave
6. Compete in a wheel chair marathon with Abbadon
7. Start a charity in Boone’s name that raises funds and awareness in support of healthy incestuous relationships
8. Paint a series of smoke monster works and feature them in an art gallery show
9. Watch a Married with Children marathon
10. Two words: Naked Walkabout

Science, Tell Me How My Ass Tastes

“Oh, stop thinking how ridiculous it is and start asking yourself whether or not you believe it’s going to work.”

Sorry, Eloise… I can’t.

• Why does Locke’s body have to be the proxy for Christian Sheppard? Why can’t they just dig up any body and slap Christian’s shoes on it and have Locke return alive? Wouldn’t this role be a perfect opportunity for 2Pac to make his return to the stage and reveal that he faked his death?
• If Locke is Jesus will we get to see Doubting Jack finger his leg wound? Will somebody paint it?
• Jack’s boys can swim (Kate had to get pregnant to replace Claire so she can get back to Sawyer, the irony! Could little Jacob in that womb?)
• Aaron’s gotta be with Claire’s mom—remember she had those face growths removed.
• Ben even lies in his jokes—his mother couldn’t have taught him to read; she died giving birth to him… unless of course her ghost taught him, which at this point is entirely possible.
• Is the island segregated? Michael gets blown the hell up. Eko gets destroyed by the smoke monster. Walt doesn’t get invited back to the island or to the plot. And Rose is nowhere to be found.
• I didn’t think Lapidus wanted any part of the island. Why would Jack risk talking to him? Why didn’t Lapidus just turn that bomber around? Maybe he did and an inflatable autopilot took over and forced Lapidus to blow him.
• I wish there was a character named Striker so someone could be trying to remember his name, “Striker… Striker… Striker… Striker!”, while someone overhearing strikes Kate in the face.
• I don’t recall Jack leaving his seat to speak with Kate on the original 815 flight—Ajira airlines should have an Oceanic 6 light next to fasten seatbelts—DING! The Oceanic 6 are now free to roam about the cabin.
• Jack, Kate, and Hurley are in Dharma time with Jin n’ dem. I’m thinking there are other 316 groups in different times—maybe one group is in four-toed statue time.
• What was the point of Desmond going to Faraday’s mom? What a waste of time and “special” ability. This payoff was a total letdown. Remember, he was given a new memory by someone encountering his past self—and he had met Ms. Hawkings before—and that’s all we got?
• Ben either killed Penny or got beat up by Desmond—or both.
• So Sun was fingering Jin’s ring because Rose was fingering Bernard’s on 815. Sun’s flight would’ve been more interesting if Rose had gotten fingered.
• I was hoping Season 5 would mirror Season 4—the off-island action happening linearly and the flashback/flashforwards taking place on the island. This season’s goal of getting back to the island has been accomplished—for the most part—at the midway point, most likely to bring structure to the season. It seems now that we’ll get the typical on-island main action with flashbacks showing how everyone made it onto 316, like Season 1 all over again. I’m fully expecting future episodes to focus on Sayid, Hurley, Sun, Kate, Ben, and Lapidus. 316 felt like a season opener to me.
• Why is Eloise Hawkings and the silly Lamppost station even necessary? If the island wasn’t finished with our heroes and fate brought the remainder of the group to flight 316, then wouldn’t fate have got them all together anyway just as it did the first time around on 815? I would have liked it better if the Losties had discovered the off-island Dharma station(s) on their own and Ms. Hawkings was limited to a jewelry store or two.
• I was hoping that they would return to the island via another way other than plane; caravan, cross the desert like a Arab man; by sail boat, climb a tree and swing rope to rope, take a sled and slide down slope.
  
• I like watching the show better on DVD.

Two reasons I didn’t enjoy this episode more:

1. It stalled the major plot line that had all of the momentum: what happened when Locke turned the wheel?
2. We see flight 316. This episode could have focused on the return of Jack, Hurley, and Kate to the island and them being found by Jin and the gang. We could have found out exactly what happened to the time-skipping survivors on the island after Locke turned the wheel. Think about if we hadn’t seen flight 316. It would be great suspense wondering how Jack, Kate, and Hurley made it back; were they the only three? And what if next episode we see a few more from flight 316 turn up—maybe a clean shaven Lapidus—how did he get back we would wonder, he’s not even part of the O6. 316 could have spent it’s time advancing the plot and saving the flight until the finale—at this point in the chapter, we don’t need to know how they got back; we just need to know that they get back. We need to know if the time-skipping survivors are still in danger. What happened to Locke? What’s Christian’s deal? What exactly is this smoke monster? I could go on and on, but you get the point.

Like Wah-Wah for Chocolate

My wife cried in the first Ice Age movie when an animated sabre-toothed-cat-presumed-dead turned up alive; she cried in the Halloween episode of Freaks and Geeks when the neighbors discarded the Weir’s homemade cookies in their front lawn because of tampering paranoia; she cried at the end of Be Kind Rewind. But not a tear was shed in This Place Is Death when Rousseau was forced to shoot dead the father of her unborn child or when the love of Faraday’s life croaked in his arms. My wife must not have known these characters enough to give a shit—we don’t learn anything about Charlotte’s past until her last words and Rousseau’s man could just as well have been the owner of a French frogurt shop.

I’d be lying if I didn’t say that I’m slightly disappointed in the use of time-travel so far this season. Locke and co. have skipped about the timeline at the writers’ convenience; the time flashes always seeming to know when they need to be rescued from danger or what they need to see or find next—never once confronting the idea of the time skippers appearing on top of a new tree growth. An episode dedicated entirely to Rousseau, the smoke monster, and the self-destruction of her crew would have been fascinating. But the time flashes allow us only to see the beginning and end of that X-File and the result leaves us feeling ripped off like that French guy’s arm—if I was British that analogy would have worked even better because I could have said bloody ripped off, which would have both better emphasized my let down and better described the arm. We may still eventually see all of what happened, but at this point the suspense is, well, lost. If Ice Age can produce tears, than I can’t help but feel like Season 5 is missing a certain something—a sabre-toothed tiger? Maybe if my wife had learned about Charlotte’s love for pre-dinner chocolate treats just a little sooner.

Locke just crossed “fixing the donkey wheel” off Christian’s honey-do list, so that action could have done a number of things: locked them into the current time period, slowed down the flashes to the pace I’m craving, or caused Claire to discover a new supply of Dharma peanut butter, meet up with Vincent the dog, and get into some pretty freaky stuff in Jacob’s cabin. The point is, I really should be withholding my nitpicks until I see how all this craziness plays out.

I have enjoyed this season, so much in fact, that I started blogging about it—and believe me, that’s saying something. So maybe I’m just mad that I spent days worth of deep thought on my last post about how Jin got inside the island’s radius and not Lapidus’s helicopter, only to have Jin explain it in two words of broken English, “in water.” A slower pace could have given a little more attention to Jin’s miraculous—no, superhuman—survival, or could have at least allowed Sawyer to stop and help Jin with his speech (1:40 in).

I guess the air inside the island’s radius doesn’t move with it, only the wah-wah does. And wouldn’t we have seen Jin get blown into the wah-wah from the high-angle shot of the freighter explosion? That’s how Faraday said it must have happened, and Faraday was Sawyer Slapped, so that’s exactly what did happen.

I would never let a smoke monster make me turn on my wife and put a gun to her, especially when she was preggers; I love her and my little girl too much to ever do something like that. You see, I have no doubt that she’s reaching for a tissue as she reads this part. This post had a beginning, middle, and end. It took its time and gave you a reason to care about it—to maybe even comment about it.

Okay, I’ll admit it, that last paragraph was inspired by the end of Be Kind Rewind—just by the fact that it was touching as hell.

Other thoughts:

• The fact that the actress who plays Claire’s mother had the two giant moles/warts removed from her face tells me that we haven’t seen the end of her character this season. I would suspect that, with the heightened consciousness of her physical appearance, she has signed on for a four-episode block—maybe more considering she had both removed.

• Locke finds Vincent’s dog collar without Vincent in it. Either I’m right about Claire and the peanut butter, or maybe that’s an indication that Walt has returned to the island. Richard told Locke in 1954 that there is a very strict process for choosing the leader of The Others and it starts at a very early age. Could this be why The Others kidnapped Walt in Season 1—were they checking him out in the same way Richard was testing Young Locke when he visited him at his home? Christian tells Locke that Black Jacob’s instructions were for him to move the island, not Ben. This tells us that Ben is still in character, scheming away; he may have lied to Locke in telling him that he would be the next leader of The Others. This could be why Richard is visibly angry when Young Locke fails the test during his visit. Richard’s anger could have been directed towards Ben, not Young Locke.

• In an earlier post I pondered the use of polar bears being trained on the island to turn the wheel down in the cold temperatures so a human wouldn’t have to be sacrificed off the island. All I can picture now is an awkward scene of a group lowering a polar bear down into the well we saw in This Place Is Death.

Oh, crap, here comes a time flash… One last thing, the island is a—

Rousseau French for Racist

Lost has frustrated its fans at times for its knack to pose more questions then it answers, but in The Little Prince, we learned a few things: the lawyer that’s fighting for custody of Aaron is Ben’s, Miles may be Dr. Cheng’s/Marvin Candle’s baby, and Rousseau is a racist.

It wasn’t a surprise that Jin only suffered severely sunburned smackers from the freighter explosion; but how in Jacob’s name did Jin get inside the radius of the island to move through time with Locke and co. and not Lapidus’s helicopter and the Oceanic 6? I went back and took a look at the Season 4 finale and the flashback scenes of Ben moving the island from this season; the helicopter, short on gas, is heading from the freighter back to the island, shot from above at one point, flying only a few-hundred feet above the water. From interior shots, we can see water out of the helicopter windows. The shot of the island moving is from the helicopter’s POV, only a little higher than the island’s tallest peak. If the thought is that the helicopter was flying above the bubble, then the radius would not be nearly wide enough to reach out to the freighter.

The only logical explanation is that the special coordinate is a path to the island that reaches a safe zone at some point and the helicopter had not reached that safe zone yet; Faraday in the Zodiac raft had. Jin, then, must have floated into the island’s radius through the wrong coordinate, which would mean that we should see Jin experiencing the same type of time-travel sickness that Desmond and the freighter captain and crew members suffered. But the writers wouldn’t recycle the classic Desmond episode and have Jin searching for Sun as a constant would they?

The only other explanation—and possibly the easiest for the show to explain—is that the air in the bubble doesn’t move with the island. The island has been described as a snow globe, so I would assume that if a helicopter was flying inside of a snow globe it would go along with it if moved.

There are other theories. If either of these are the case, I sure hope we get to see them in flashback scenes. The first is that the freighter explosion launched Jin hurdling through the air over the helicopter and into the island’s radius. The other is that Jin grabbed the door he was found floating on and used it to surf a tidal wave caused by the explosion through the special coordinate and into the radius. That flashback scene would look something like this:

There were many shocking moments in The Little Prince, but the most shocking of all was to see a young Rousseau basically stop short of calling Jin a tasteless four-letter “G” word. I don’t recall a moment in her time spent with the 815 Survivors when she approached Jin with the astonishment of having met him sixteen years earlier on the island during her traumatic shipwreck; I think she thinks that they all look the same.

Très décevant.

Locke, Interrupted

It’s part of the Lost rules that once a conversation is interrupted you don’t go back to it.

Sawyer: John Locke, who from the past shot you in the leg?

Locke: I’m going to tell you, James, as long as I don’t get—

Juliet: I’m going to interrupt here, Locke, so that you can’t say the name of the person who shot you, and I’m going to use urgency as the excuse; that’s right, we don’t have enough time for you to tell him.

The dialog should have continued in a normal world:

Sawyer: Now, hold on, Dr. Huxtable. All he was going to say was the name of a person. You said more in your interruption. I wasn’t gonna get into a big thing if you had let him finish; I probably would’ve just said one of my witty one-liners and it would’ve been done with. We’ve been skipping through time and one of us got shot; I just find that really intriguing, especially since I could know the person who shot him. If you’re so worried about time, then we can walk and talk. Look what you’ve turned it into now; we’ve spent way more time talking about it then we would have if you hadn’t interrupted. And the audience already knows who shot him, so what’s the big deal if I find out? Wait a minute… wait a minute… do you not want me to know who shot Locke for some reason because you already know who shot him from your time with The Others? Ooh, looks like I’m on to something with that one; you didn’t think I was smart enough to put two-and-two together, did you?  It’s like the over-blown news coverage of Janet Jackson showing her nipple in the Super Bowl halftime show. A harmless name-slip is all it would’ve been. I wouldn’t have thought that much of it, but now you’ve gone and turned it into a conversation-malfunction.

I can’t help but think of the benefits this rule would have if applied to the real world.You could literally get away with murder.

Jury Leader: We, the Jury find this murdering scum—

Defense Attorney: Your, Honer, I interrupt!

On second thought, Sawyer should have just slapped somebody. I disrespected the power of the bitch slap Sawyer laid across the face of Faraday in the season opener. When Faraday was withholding information, the slap from Sawyer had the force of the entire Lost fan base behind it and should have knocked Faraday into a new zip-code, but they already have a donkey wheel for that. So, instead, the Sawyer Slap seems to be a device that elicits the truth. And the fact that Charlotte was freely tossing around her superior’s name to the wind shortly after means that just the threat of a slap from Sawyer gets answers; before “Ginger” was shown the palm, Widmore’s name would have been left as pronouns.

I owe Faraday an apology; in an earlier post I labeled his breakdown of Lost time-travel as contradicting B.S. I initially thought that it was quite obvious that the writers were using Faraday’s voice to lay the groundwork of the Lost time-travel fundamentals, but when Charlotte started forgetting her mother’s maiden name and getting nose bleeds and changes in the color of her pubes, I got confused. I shouldn’t have second-guessed it; Faraday’s character has always told the truth when under pressure—the latest example in Jughead when pressed at gunpoint by Ellie—and a slap from Sawyer is the type of heat that lasts for an entire season. I’ll take everything Faraday tells us about Lost time-travel from this point forward as gospel. This season shouldn’t be about getting the Oceanic 6 back to the island, it should be about getting whomever and whatever we want answers from within arm’s reach of Sawyer.

When we learn that Locke told Richard in 1954 to visit him after his birth in 1956, it confirmed Faraday’s “one street” analogy. Everything Locke and co. are doing happened in the sole timeline. Sawyer can’t get into the backdoor of the hatch because it didn’t happen; the Losties don’t discover the hatch until after the 815 crash. They can’t stop Lapidus from taking off in the helicopter with the Oceanic 6. They will never interact with 815 doubles because they never did (unless we learn that it was a double in a scene from a previous season). You can’t go back in time to kill Hitler. You can’t go back and kill Widmore; he’s alive as an older man, so obviously no one ever killed him as a young man—Locke can’t bring himself to fire at Young Widmore; Sawyer pulls the trigger, but misses. The h-bomb won’t destroy the island in 1954 because the island is still there fifty years later… but maybe the h-bomb creates some of the island’s magnetic properties after it’s burried… hmmm…

So, do the time-skipping Survivors on the island need to be saved? I don’t think we’re seeing the “bad things that happened” after Ben moved the island. If everything Locke and co. are doing happened, then you can’t change what they’re doing until they’re done doing what they did. At which point they will do whatever they do—unless Desmond and his freaky-deaky mind-travel make Faraday, contradicted, and Locke, interrupted.

Sawyer: We’re seriously not going to finish the conversation about who shot you in the leg? One name. That’s all it would take to finish that thought.

Me: Psst, Sawyer… it was Ethan.

Other thoughts:

• Shouldn’t Penny understand when Desmond wakes on the boat with a new memory of Faraday at the hatch door? Desmond altered a moment in 1996 to make Penny his constant; he asked for her phone number, told her not to change it, and that he’d call her on Christmas Eve 2004, the present day. So, wouldn’t Penny have waked on Christmas Eve 2004 with the new memory? And how would she have known not to change her number between 1996-2004 if she didn’t get the new memory until present day?
• In Jughead, Faraday asks a suffering Charlotte if she is “seeing double.” Is this a hint that there is a Charlotte double on the island or should I not be reading that line as a pun? Or did Charlotte turn the donkey wheel at one point in time and we’re seeing what happens when those who were kicked off the island come back? An avid reader of my blog suggested to me that polar bears were trained in the cages on the island to move the donkey wheel in the cold temperature so that a polar bear would be booted off the island instead of a human. Charlotte did know exactly where to find a Dharma polar bear in the Tunisian Desert and we do know that she was happy to have returned to the island.

loSTD: Sawyer, the God of Herpes

In my ongoing quest to piece together the Lost mysteries, I’ve been analyzing some of the re-runs on SciFi with the clues we know now. What I believe is the key to the entire series happens in a scene from Season 1 where Jack diagnoses Sawyer with farsightedness. With Kate close by, Jack skews his line of medical-history questioning to get Sawyer to disclose that he’s been with a prostitute and has had, or has, an STD.

I immediately thought to Season 3 when Kate and Sawyer get it on in the animal cages. Maybe Sawyer’s herpes went away with Locke’s paralysis and Rose’s cancer when they crashed on the island, but if I’m Kate I’m not taking any chances. I never saw a supply of Dharma prophylactics on the island, and if there were, Hurley most likely dipped them in ranch dressing and ate them. Kate must have thought Sawyer’s pecks were worth the risk and I can understand that. I like to believe that the island didn’t take away these medical conditions but rather our characters all exist in an earlier part of the timeline before they got them; the thing with Sawyer, I don’t believe that there ever was a time when he didn’t have herpes.

There’s no need for a blood test in Season 5, the easiest way to tell that Aaron is not Kate’s son is the fact that he doesn’t have herpes all over his face from an adventure he missed out on through Kate’s birth canal. I wonder if with all of the time-travel going on if we’ll start to see cold sores popping up on Aaron’s head indicating a change to the timeline. It would make for a pretty surprising twist—Kate really is Aaron’s mom!

I keep coming back to that thorn Sawyer stepped on with his big toe in The Lie; they made such a point to focus on it. What if Sawyer has (or had, whatever) stepped on something poisonous and eventually will have to lose the toe? What if then, the island skips Sawyer back in time to the island’s beginnings and places him in front of a crowd of the island’s original  inhabitants for only enough time for a quick quip before vanishing him off to another time? The island’s original inhabitants will naturally think  that they’ve just seen their God appear before them. They would erect a statue in his image—flowing hair, six-pack abs, four toes, and herpes.  The island’s original inhabitants will think that the herpes is a sign from their God, and they begin to fornicate with the statue and then with multiple partners until they all have contracted the nasty STD. The smoke monster is born out of the flames from an entire village that burns with every urination.

When the smoke monster kills, it passes on the characteristics of the herpes virus to the ghost of its victim. This is why we don’t meet Jacob when Locke visits the cabin; Jacob’s ghost is in a dormant period at that time. SPOILER: Jacob was killed at some point in time by the herpes smoke monster.

So what did Locke see when he gazed into the eye of the herpes smoke monster?

He saw God.

If the carpet matched the drapes in the past will the carpet always match the drapes?

One of the most important details to come out of the Lost Season 5 Premiere regarding time travel is the fact that Charlotte can no longer recall her mother’s maiden name. I think this detail might be addressing the old time-travel quandary that is, what would happen to you if someone went back in time and killed your grandfather? How would Charlotte not remember her mother’s maiden name? Well, if her grandmother had married someone else, her mother would have a different last name; that’s one way. We can conclude that something has changed in the past to affect Charlotte’s memory, in the same way Faraday’s interaction with Desmond-In-The-Hatch added a new memory to Present-Day Desmond on the boat.

Could the mysterious patrol guard that Locke threw a knife into the back of have been Charlotte’s grandfather? Remember, you heard it here first if that stab-in-the-dark is true, unless someone has traveled back in time and said it before this, of course—but know that they originally read it here. While I’m making predictions, I also think the black guy that visited Hurley in the mental hospital and Locke in rehab is Jacob.

If something has changed to affect Charlotte, then Faraday is wrong in saying that it is impossible to change the past and that “if something didn’t happen it can’t happen,”  despite what seemed like an obvious use of Faraday’s character to almost adamantly lay down the fundamentals of the Lost time-travel rules. Time-travel can be a fickle, confusing bitch; could they possibly be deceiving us about the rules? And if the time-skipping Survivors are stepping on butterflies that are affecting the present, then that doesn’t make Desmond so “special”, unless what makes Des “special” is that he is the only one whose present actions can change the past. Maybe what the time-skipping Survivors are doing always happened in the original timeline and it’s something that Desmond is doing with Faraday’s mom at Oxford that is changing Charlotte’s past. Any effed up way you look at it, it makes Faraday’s “only one street” analogy seem like a bunch of contradicting B.S.

Would it have been too obvious if it were a butterfly that Sawyer stepped on with his bare feet in The Lie? Could it have been a butterfly bush—do they grow on tropical islands? I guess if there are polar bears there can be butterfly bushes.

If I thought about my mom, or mum, if you will, and suddenly couldn’t remember her maiden name, I think my mind would  quickly move on to realize that I couldn’t remember my freaking grandfather either, or a whole bunch of other stuff that would have surely trickled down. But Charlotte still exists with the same genetic features, minus a memory and plus a nose bleed—will she discover new memories or lose more old ones? Should she not have forgotten her mother’s maiden name but just now remember it as something else? Will her brain eventually hemorrhage from all of the changes like mine has from trying to figure this shit out? Is it possible she no longer has firebush? Maybe her new grandfather didn’t have red hair and her hair is now just dyed red.

Pube color is just one of the problems time-travel presents.