I’ve been catching up with the Ask LOST video series where the stars answer viewer questions. This one, the fourth in the series, features Naveen Andrews (Sayid).
I get a big kick out of hearing him talk in his British accent:
It’s interesting that he finds it “disturbing” and “unpleasant” that he is able to get emotionally involved in his fight scenes. In that way, Naveen the actor resembles Sayid the character — both are repelled by their own capacities to enjoy violence. Maybe Naveen’s ambivalence is part of what makes his portrayal of Sayid’s self-loathing so powerful.
Sonya Walger as trauma surgeon Olivia Benford in FlashForward
ABC is pitching a new show, FlashForward, as something that will appeal to LOST fans. In the preview video (below), they even start off by saying “From the network that brought you LOST ….”
The show features Sonya Walger, LOST’s Penny, in a starring role. There are also rumors that Dominic Monaghan, who played Charlie, may be in the cast, but the FlashForward producers are just saying “no comment.”
The premise of the show is that everyone in the world, for some unknown reason, blacks out for two minutes and 17 seconds and gets a glimpse of their lives six months in the future, although they don’t know if what they see will actually happen.
I must say, the premise doesn’t really grab me, but it will all depend on what they do with it. When I first heard the premise of LOST — a bunch of people crash on an island — I thought “eh.” And now look where I am, totally addicted.
ABC screened the pilot episode for the press yesterday. One reviewer called it “grand in scope, but uneven.”
Emilie de Ravin, who plays Claire, has already said that she will be rejoining LOST next year.
Now producer/writer Carlton Cuse has confirmed it. He said that he and Damon are excited to bring Claire back, and “even more excited for people to experience just how she will return.”
Just how she will return. Interesting. Would that be through the Zombie Entrance?
Zombies from the 1968 classic horror movie "Night of the Living Dead"
Claire in Jacob's cabin, in Episode 4x11 "Cabin Fever"
Val asks:
Do we have any idea what really happened to Claire? After she turned up in Jacob’s cabin with Jack’s father, I got really confused about what her role in the whole island mystery is.
I originally thought Claire was killed after she wandered into the jungle, leaving Aaron behind. I had thought if she were alive, she would have come back for her son.
I was surprised to see her show up in Jacob’s cabin and in Kate’s house on the mainland, but I still thought she was dead. She was with Christian in the cabin, and we knew he was dead. As for showing up on the mainland, other dead characters had been doing that as well, and Clair’s appearance could also be explained as being just a dream.
But then while I was watching Destiny Calls, the Season 5 clip/recap show that aired in January 2009, Damon said something in the commentary that surprised me, and made me think that Claire might still be alive:
Damon (at 3:34 on video): And now, essentially, Claire is missing. We don’t know where she is. She saw Christian Shephard in the jungle. She left the baby behind. And that’s it.
At the time I saw the Destiny Calls recap show, I thought, “She’s only missing! So she’s not dead, after all!” But now, on second thought, I believe she could still be dead. Damon didn’t actually say, for sure, that she wasn’t — just that we didn’t know what happened to her.
Forging on, I found an interview that eonline did with Damon and Carlton last year, before the Season 4 finale, where they muddied the waters even more:
Q: “Is Claire dead?” Is that a question you are wanting the fans to be asking at this point?
Carlton: I think we want the fans to ask, “What’s happened to Claire?” I don’t think it’s “Is she dead?” I think it’s like, “Where is she?” and, “What’s going on with her?”
Damon: What’s fascinating with Lost is there’s a scene where Claire is in the cabin, and she is sitting next to a guy who is dead, and nobody is saying “What’s up with that?” They’re all asking “Is she dead?” I think the more operative question is “What is dead?” That’s a good question to ask, and one you will certainly be asking over the long hiatus.
“The operative question is ‘What is dead’?” Okey-dokey. 😉
It sounds like Claire may have joined the ranks of the undead, the quasi-dead, the not-quite-dead — or, as I like to think of them, actors who still have a job even after their characters die.
And, in fact, Emilie de Ravin recently told TV Guide that she would be coming back to LOST in Season 6:
TVGuide.com: Having been involved in all these projects as of late, will it be harder to go back to Lost for its final season?
De Ravin: No, I’m really looking forward to going back. I’ve had a wonderful time being able to express myself creatively in different ways [during this Season 5 absence]. I’m looking forward to seeing everyone again and, being the last season, I’m thinking it’s going to be pretty exciting.
In the first scene of the finale, we heard Esau (the man in the black shirt) say that he wanted to kill Jacob, but he couldn’t. That scene reminded me of an earlier one, from Season 4, where we heard Ben say that he wanted to kill Widmore — but couldn’t:
Widmore: Have you come here to kill me, Benjamin?
Ben: We both know I can’t do that.
Ben told Widmore that he was going to kill Penelope, and that after she was dead
You’ll wish you hadn’t changed the rules
Here, again, is the opening scene from the Season 5 finale:
Esau: Do you have any idea how badly I want to kill you?
Jacob: Yes
Esau: One of these days, sooner or later, I’m going to find a loophole, my friend.
Ben couldn’t kill Widmore, but he could (in theory) kill Penny. Widmore was able to kill Alex, but apparently only by breaking the rules. Esau needed a loophole to kill Jacob. A loophole suggests there is a law — a set of rules — that has to be circumvented.
A law or a rule may be natural: What goes up must come down. It may be written and enforced by an individual or institution that possesses power: a monarch, a warlord, a constitution, a legislature. It may be supernatural: a God or a strange electromagnetic force.
When we saw Ben and Widmore last season, they were the most powerful forces we had seen up to that point, appearing to control, between the two of them, almost everything that happened on the Island.
This season, it was as if a camera had pulled back and given us a wider shot, showing us the forces behind Ben and Widmore, forces even more powerful than they are. Jacob and Esau are now the most powerful people we have ever seen on the show.
But even Jacob and Esau cannot do everything they want. So there is someone or something powerful enough to make and enforce the rules that limit what Jacob and Esau can do. It may be a law of nature, it may be a person or group of people, it may be a supernatural force or being.
Perhaps next season, after we find out who or what it is, we will discover that it’s just another intermediate layer, and the camera will pull back yet again, to reveal the power behind the power behind the power.
I received some questions from long-time reader Fazel from Amsterdam, who recently finished watching Episode 5×10 He’s Our You.
I was watching ep 5×10 (Sayid-centric) last week and I think I noticed some screw-ups in the script. But I want to run it by you, the Lost expert, first.
Sayid reacts to kid-Ben when he first introduced himself and then later on tells someone (Sawyer?) that he had met a kid-Ben in 1974(?). Now, tell me this… How the hell could he know that? Let alone even believe such a thing (he hadn’t seen the same evidence as the other Losties, thus his convincing was poor). The guy was separated from the other Losties, he was never on their journey of information and discovery. In fact, did he even participate in the meet of Hawkins? Didn’t he leave before they all went inside to meet her?
Had anyone even briefed him about time traveling and 1974? The first thing that seemed to have happened to him when crashed (he was there on his own and not on the plan of returning, thus makes him poorly informed) was being captured by Jin and Radzinsky. Their hadn’t been an opportunity to bring him up to speed up to that point, but yet he seemed very updated and convinced of these revelations (despite seeing little proof of it).
What do you say? =)
I was looking on YouTube for a clip of the scene where Jin saw Sayid in the jungle — and I saw that Disney recently pulled most of the clips for that episode off of YouTube! Boo! I hope that doesn’t leave too many holes in the archives of this blog and all the other LOST blogs, because we’ve all relied heavily in the past on embedding those clips.
Anyway there are just a few little clip-lets left. Here is where Jin sees Sayid in the jungle (this is from 5×09 Namaste):
The clip ends right at the point where Jin and Sayid recognize each other, so it doesn’t show how long they were alone together before Radzinsky shows up. As I remember it, though, they didn’t have very much time.
Even if there wasn’t enough time for Jin to say anything to Sayid, I think Sayid would figure it out. He must have thought that Jin had died in the freighter explosion. Yet there was Jin, alive, and wearing a Dharma jumpsuit!
In this next clip-let, Sawyer, Jin, and Radzinsky are bringing Sayid back to Dharmaville. Sayid sees Kate, Jack, and Hurley, who he last saw on Flight 316 — and they too are wearing Dharma jumpsuits! So he must just put two and two together to figure out that he is in the past. And as soon as Little Ben says his name, a lightbulb must have gone off in Sayid’s head.
Yet another inquiry. In the same ep as above, Sayid tells Dharma: “I know about, the hatch, swan, ‘the incident…’” etc. Now, I know that the season finale is named that and is about that, but I wondered where he got that information from. All the things he said, we the viewer had seen them too with Sayid. But the incident? When was this brought to Sayid’s attention?
I appreciate if you enlightened me without spoiling the finale
That’s another great scene whose clip I had linked to earlier that is now gone from YouTube (grumble grumble). Only this little clip-let remains:
I think that when Sayid said “the incident,” he was not seeing the future, not seeing “the incident” that will be shown in the Finale. I would guess he meant either (1) The “purge” that wiped out the Dharma Initiative (did the Losties learn about this from Ben??) or (2) What happened when Desmond turned the key at the end of Season 2.
I envy you not having seen the Finale yet, because you have a big treat to look forward to!
