The Man in Black
Titus Welliver played a key role in the pilot of Touch, a role that was all wrapped up in the show’s numbers. And, according to an interview he gave several months ago, he will be coming back.
If you missed the Pilot, you can watch it now on Hulu.
Warning: spoilers (if you haven’t seen the Pilot) after the jump: Continue reading
Posted in Man in Black (Titus Welliver), Touch
The Touch pilot was LOST-like in several ways, with its mysteries, its eerie connections between characters, its explicit mention of fate and destiny and, especially, the way it ripped off (or paid homage to) the LOST numbers — not the exact numbers, of course, but the general idea of them. It’s even got a LOST alumnus — Titus Welliver (the Man in Black) in a crucial guest role (hat tip to Geri in the comments for recognizing Welliver). Continue reading
Posted in Man in Black (Titus Welliver), Touch
Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse were surprise guests at Jeff “Doc” Jensen and Dan Snierson’s “Entertainment Weekly Presents Totally LOST One Year Later” panel at the 2011 San Diego Comic-Con yesterday afternoon.
Darlton said they had a scene from the Season 1 finale that had never been shown before — and that it would prove, once and for all, that they had planned the ending from the start.
It was actually a joke, as the footage was shot last week. It’s pretty funny, though:
“Yahoo for you and your light.” LOL.
The new footage was shot by Jack Bender on a back lot at Disney.
Here’s a good write-up of the event: LOST producers reunite at Comic-Con.
In the last (so sad!) official audio podcast, Damon and Carlton talk about listening to the scoring of the music for the finale, the polarized fan reaction to Across the Sea, “this is what answers look like,” “every question will lead to another question,” that they just did a DVD commentary for Across the Sea which will explain why they made the decisions they did for that episode, and the alternate endings that will be on the post-Finale Jimmy Kimmel show.
They say that they are done with the mythology — Across the Sea was the last of it. From now on, it’s going to be all about the characters. Damon said “Everyone you know and love is going to feature prominently in the next three-and-a-half hours of the show.”
Damon mentions how Across the Sea was a departure because it was about a bad Mommy when so much of the show before had been about bad Daddies. He says that one of their jokey titles for the episode had been “I’ll Just Sit Here in the Dark.” Ha!
They answer (and sometimes sidestep) viewer questions of varying seriousness: What did Locke say when he was unconscious in the sideways world? How could Jacob kill his brother if they were unable to hurt each other? (The answer was that he didn’t hurt him directly.) Did Smokey kill the author of “Bad Twin”? Is the water in the pool in the temple the same as the water in the cave that Jacob is protecting? Was the tortoise on the beach an incarnation of Vincent? Was the drawstring in the last episode an anachronism? Do Damon and Carlton secretly hate each other? What is their favorite podcast moment?
Great podcast, worth listening to: May 14, 2010 official audio podcast
The Man in Black still doesn't have a name
Earlier this evening, before 6×15 Across the Sea came on, I took a look back at my Oedipus Lost theory.
How does it stand up after 6×15? (Warning: 6×15 spoilers ahead, so close your eyes if you haven’t seen the episode yet).
Like many other fans, I was right in thinking that Jacob and the MiB were brothers — twins, like the Biblical Jacob and Esau.
I was wrong in thinking that the Jacob-MiB saga would be rooted in patricide. This dysfunctional family had brother killing mother, and brother killing brother, but nobody killed a father because there were no fathers to be found.
I was right in originally thinking that Jacob was a prisoner, of sorts, of the Island, even though I later came to doubt that.
Well, enough about theories. Some random thoughts about the episode, along with some still-unanswered questions:
Amazing opening. When Mommy Dearest picked up the stone and attacked Birth Mother, I did not see that coming.
Quibble: Why was Mommy Dearest so surprised that there was a second baby? Did she not see Birth Mother’s belly?
Oh, and another quibble: Kid in Black said he didn’t know what death was, but then in the next scene he was running after a boar with a spear. What did he think he was going to do to the boar?
So Smokey will eventually inhabit his own dead body? Hmmm.
What gave Mommy Dearest, Jacob, and the MiB the ability to live so long? What gave Mommy Dearest the power to prevent Jacob and the MiB from hurting each other?
Who was the guardian of the light before Mommy Dearest?
If Mommy Dearest was the power behind Jacob and MiB, who was the power behind Mommy Dearest? Who started the chain of guardians of the light, and why?
And what is the light, anyway?
What was in that wine?
Who would have thought that Jacob could be so whiny and petulant! (“I don’t waaaaana guard the light.”)
Not sure how I feel about having the MiB revealed as a sympathetic character — not after what he did to Sun and Jin, and the 815 pilot, and the people in the Temple, and all the random strangers who got in his way.
How did the nice light turn him into such a mean monster?
When Mommy Dearest said “Thank you,” to the MiB, was she thanking him for killing her (thus ending the curse of immortality)?
The screenshot is from the Season 5 finale, from when the MiB asked Jacob, “Do you know how much I want to kill you?” Now we finally have some idea why he felt that way, and also why he needed a loophole.
Oedipus Rex
We know that Jacob brought the LOSTies to the Island, and before that, he brought the Black Rock ship, and before that, he brought other people — the ones who came, fought, destroyed, and corrupted, in the words of the Man in Black.
The big question, of course, is why is Jacob bringing all these people to the Island?
One thing we know about the LOSTies is that, as a group, they have an extraordinary number of Daddy issues.
What if that were actually the reason that Jacob chose them?
And if that were the case, then why?
Suppose that Jacob himself has Daddy issues. Suppose, also, that Jacob is on the Island not because he wants to be, but because he has to be. There’s a hint of that, I think, in Jacob’s oddly impassive reaction to the Man in Black when the MiB said he wanted to kill him.
Combine the two ideas: Jacob having his own Daddy issues, and Jacob being stuck on the Island for centuries against his will. That suggests some sort of crime and punishment, with the Island being a place of exile, a prison. Because of the Island’s strange time-warping properties, Jacob’s sentence spans far more than a normal single lifetime.
Such a long sentence implies there must have been a horrible crime. And the worst crime that exists that involves Daddy issues would be patricide. Maybe, like Oedipus Rex, Jacob — way back in his original life, eons ago — had killed his father.
And now he is stuck, seemingly forever, on an Island prison. Maybe there is only one way for him to end his sentence — by restoring some balance to the world by doing something that would counteract his terrible crime. Only in that way could he atone and be forgiven.
Maybe Jacob’s task is to heal people who have been harmed by terrible rifts with their fathers. More precisely, maybe he is trying to show them how to heal themselves. Success in this task would be the only thing that could release him from his centuries-long sentence.
Perhaps he has tried, and failed, with all the previous groups he brought to the Island — which is what was frustrating the Man in Black. But the current LOSTies do seem to be responding to Jacob’s guidance, and many of then have, while on the Island, come to terms with their Daddy issues and grown beyond them.
Two possible holes in the theory: (1) If the Island is a prison, how did Jacob get off so many times? and (2) What is the role of the Man in Black?
Perhaps Jacob was able to leave only when certain conditions were right, and only for the purpose of choosing people to bring back. As for the second question, maybe the MiB was a participant in, or at least an accessory to Jacob’s crime. Since the MiB does not believe that Jacob will ever be successful in his task, maybe the MiB sees killing Jacob as the only way to bring his own long exile to a close.
And perhaps Jacob could not succeed in his task of guiding enough people beyond the Daddy issues which had warped their lives. At the end of “The Incident,” when Jacob told Ben that he had a choice — he could choose to listen to notLocke, or he could choose to walk away –Ben was so caught up in his Daddy issues, projecting onto Jacob all the rejection he had felt from his own father, that he could not make the right choice. Ben, at that moment, could not get past his Daddy issues, and for Jacob, that meant both failure, in his task as a guide, and death.
Picture of Oedipus Rex from an 1896 production, via Wikipedia
(edited 1/31/10)
Also available for men.
