Follow along! The episode guide for “Live Together, Die Alone” is in Finding Lost, pp. 322-338 (it’s a long one!).Watching this season 2 finale is so weird in retrospect, isn’t it? It’s hard to get into the mindset we were in when we first saw it. I remember when I first saw the notice that the finale flashback would be Desmond’s, and I thought, “What?! Why Desmond? Why not Jack or John Locke?” And then it aired, and it was the perfect choice. This was an episode of firsts (at the time) that now seem like old hat to us. The first time we hear the Others referred to as the Hostiles; the first time we see Widmore or Penny; the first time we find out Desmond’s true backstory and how he came to the island; the first sighting of the statue; the first mention of Radzinsky. It’s wild to see it now, and realize that we went a full two seasons before all of this stuff – the very stuff that seems to have taken on the greatest importance to the series overall – was even touched upon.
Fun things I noticed:
• So, they spot a boat, and the three alpha males of the island jump into the water to go to it. If it HAD been a trap and they’d all been blown up, the rest of the islanders would have been rather screwed.
• A few weeks ago a friend of ours came down with his incredibly mature and astute 14-year-old, and while the friend and my husband went out to see Elvis Costello, I hung out with the teenager, who is a big fan of Lost (when the kid was 4, he was the ringbearer in my wedding… how time flies!) I showed him the mobisodes, which he’d never seen, and he had some really insightful stuff to say about the series as a whole, season 5, and things he’d been noticing along the way. He asked me how I thought the series would end (a question I can never answer) and then said he hopes it’s not one of those crazy endings of other shows where you find out it was all a dream or something. He said, “Remember that show where it turned out that the entire series was in the head of a kid staring into a snow globe?” (spoiler alert ahead about the series that did that, in case you don’t want to know) I had COMPLETELY forgotten about this, and it immediately made me think of Desmond making the snow globe comment in this episode, and now I’m convinced it was probably a reference to that series, St. Elsewhere, which ended with an autistic boy staring into a snow globe that had the likeness of the hospital inside it. Wow. I wish I’d thought of THAT one earlier, when I was working on the book…
• Does anyone else ever think those torches are going to set the actors’ heads on fire? Man, Sayid was carrying that one close to his head!
• OK. So. I posted a post on my main blog a few months’ back showing pictures of the statue foot that Sayid sees through his binoculars here, and said it looked like a left foot. But the foot on Jacob’s home is a right foot. People looked at the photos and some agreed with me while others argued that no, the foot Sayid saw was most definitely a right foot. Well, seeing it now, it is MOST DEFINITELY a left foot. Facing the foot, the toes are biggest on our left, which means it’s a leftie, not a rightie. So I’ll take that as me being correct. (No, I’m not above gloating.)
• In the whispers you can hear the word “Elizabeth.”
• UPDATE: This was originally a point where I was talking about how I was right about Locke and Boone and Aaron's birth and all that, but as a couple of people have correctly pointed out, I've gone mad. So I'm removing it. With a plea for your sympathy that I've been extremely sick all week, have missed most of the week of work, and yet still was staying up late to try to watch these episodes and post on them while popping Benylins and drinking Nyquil. I apologize for being too much in a fog to actually make sense. Next time I'll just delay it to the following week when I'm actually coherent again. :)
• I commented in the previous episode that it was annoying Bernard and Rose weren’t at the funeral, and here we see Bernard in the very end standing next to Claire, which means they would have had to have paid him for the full ep. Weird they didn’t just put him at the funeral.
• I didn’t notice this before, but this time I noticed that when everything goes haywire in the hatch, we see the table with the pages fall over twice.
• I remember being so convinced that the guy at the end in the blizzard was actually Matthew Fox. Turns out it's someone else, but check out the resemblance!!:
Things that have new meaning:
• The army guy who checks Desmond out of the prison tells him that his idea about reading Our Mutual Friend is a nice one, “as long as you know when you’re gonna die.” Interesting that after the blast, Desmond knows when Charlie’s going to die.
• Again, I always thought of Sayid as more of a free will guy, but again he talks about fate bringing the boat to them.
• And forward with our “Libby is an Other” game, could Libby have been following Desmond to the coffee shop and set him up? Or is she genuinely shaken by her husband’s death, and while she seems to be coping with it now, losing the boat (with Desmond on it) completely destroys her and sends her to the institution? Interesting that her husband’s name was David, which is the same name as Hurley’s imaginary friend.
• Will we ever see the Hurley bird again?
• Locke: “I’m more sure of this than anything in my entire life.” Hm… that’s what Jack said just before he dropped the hydrogen bomb. Uh oh.
• Inman: “He put a shotgun in his mouth when I was asleep.” Me: HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!! I’m so glad that we’ve seen what a dick Radzinsky was, so now we can watch this and laugh merrily that he’ll meet a horrible end.
• We’ve seen the sky turn and the noise happen a few times now… did Desmond actually move the island? Or time jump the island in any way?
• I STILL don’t understand Charlie’s blasé attitude that he has after the explosion. Do we just chalk it up to shock? He says nothing happened, while people could be dying back there and he should be alerting them all to help them.
