This is from Lostpedia so take it with whatever sized grain of salt you need, but…
Ben/Linus also emphasized that since the electromagnetic discharge that the sub’s trip away from the island would be a one-way one, since no one can navigate their way to it. But then how did the parachutist’s helicopter find the island? And how did a helicopter get to the island? They don’t have very long ranges.
The arrow going throught the fret board of the guitar above Charlie’s head didn’t do it any good though…
I was aware of Ovation guitars, I knew people with them and I wanted one badly but my parents couldn’t afford it and got me a crappy warped and badly repaired guitar. I think I would have kept playing had I had an Ovation. I however was not aware how they were made. But as I said the people I knew who owned them treated them carefully and always carried them around in their case. Even though we lived in a beach town I never saw them take their Ovations swimming with them.
Granted, the hard case would be a lot of extra weight and harder to strap to his back but they have an abundance or tarps there, why not wrap it up a little with tarp?
As for the strings, most musicians carry at least one extra set. I wonder how many sets Charlie has?
Why am I talking about the guitar so much? I think I have started to focus on silly little mysteries instead of thinking about the bigger mysteries because that usually made my head hurt. I could go back to talking about how attractive Desmond is, or I could focus on something else, like …
Another important question I have about this episode, where was Vincent?
Yeah actually that’s me griping about the weirdness in the timeline. 
Ya know, for the entire show I kept think Desmond was going to change his mind and save Charlie but the arrow would hit the guitar. The apparently that happens and I missed the arrow hitting the guitar. I saw a brief flash of what looked like the arrow in the ground and remember wondering how the arrow just dropped out of the air. Heh. I really need to get a bigger TV screen. I can’t believe I caught the woman in the picture but I didn’t catch that.
Sorry, I guess I’m still talking about the guitar.
[sub]Vincent![/sub]
Marsha Thomason, who plays Naomi.
Tania Raymonde, who plays Alex.
They have similar noses and similar mouths. Marsha is a light-skinned half-black woman; Tania is a dark-skinned Caucasian woman. And the shot that confused me was a poorly-lit low-angle shot of Naomi’s face.
Okay, so obviously you’re much better-acquainted with the actress than I am. That doesn’t make it so incredible that I could think the two actresses look similar.
Where are you getting the dates from? Except for the rare occasion that one of the characters says something directly, I’ve never seen them spell it out.
I thought that it was Alex for a second too. The producers have got to stop hiring actresses that look so much alike for the secondary roles.
Same here. And of course I didn’t realize until this morning when I read the thread that it was somebody else – and I wish I knew that last night, because I actually spent time before going to sleep wondering about how the hell Alex ended up in the goddamn helicopter, and why she would have come back to Craphole Island.
A pro like Charlie almost certainly had a few extra sets with him.
Storyteller’s analogy is far off. It implies that we’re getting all that we should’ve ever expected to get, and that people are irrational for being unhappy about it.
I’m against thread-shitting, and even though I’ve become very dissapointed with this show (although less so recently) I don’t try to take a big dump on the discussion, I try to contribute.
But a more apt analogy is more like this.
You go to a much hyped restaurant, but you’re not even sure what kind of food they serve. You watch as the chef masterfully prepares ingredients - chopping vegetables, mixing spices, doing all sorts of fancy stuff. You’re convinced that this chef really knows what he’s doing, and will give a very special and satisfying meal.
After an hour, you start wondering what’s taking so long. You watch the chef again, and now he’s cutting up the same vegetables again, mixing the same spices, maybe in slightly different ways. Maybe he’ll spend a few minutes preparing something that doesn’t really have anything to do with your meal.
You wait another hour. You start to think that this chef doesn’t really know what he’s doing - that the ingredients he has prepared can’t really get go together to form a satisfying meal, and you start to wonder if you’ve been wasting your time waiting for this entire time. You bring this up to other people, and some of them tell you “oh, it’s not about the meal, it’s about watching the ingredients get prepared, you should be happy with that, it was never about the meal”. It’s understandable that you get irritated.
It’s not a perfect analogy, but it’s much closer than the one made. That said, though, Randwill adds nothing to the thread by saying what he does. But his dissatisfaction should not be brushed off as having unreasonable expectations.
Waiter, I’ll have what Wile E is having. I’d like it served wearing Hurley’s t-shirt and no pants. Come to think of it, hold the t-shirt.
But why? Why get irritated? Why not just find a restaurant that does something that you enjoy? And why keep coming back?
My argument is something like this - without the food analogies because I can’t afford to get hungry again right now: the essential nature of the show is as it always has been. A group of strangers with wildly divergent personalities and agendas - and all of whom have secrets - are placed under severe physical and emotional stress. Some continue to pursue their original goals; others develop new goals. Sometimes they form loose teams, but they are always themselves. To Locke, Locke is the hero of the story of LOST. To Charlie, Charlie is the hero of the story of LOST. To Kate - well, you see where I’m going? They will deceive one another, sometimes foolishly, because they don’t know what we know as outside observers. They won’t ask the questions that I would ask, because they’re focused on their own concerns - which is how real people often are. Theirs is a series of interconnected stories, not a single story of itself.
This is why sometimes Hurley spends time fixing a car instead of solving the mysteries of the island. That’s why Kate and Jack and Sawyer worry far more about who is doing who than seems logical from an external standpoint. That’s why there are flashbacks - to emphasize the fact that all of these people, no matter how close to one another they ostensibly become, are ultimately isolated from one another by their past, by their varying perspectives.
To me, this reflects real life much more than would a show where every character acted intelligently (as seen from our perspective), where every scene and every action and every line of dialogue supports some central narrative and uncovers information key to that central narrative. In our real lives, I submit, we spend a lot more time fixing cars and worrying about who the girl we want wants than we do following some sort of main storyline. Lost gives me people that seem real to me, doing their own thing and blundering across the main storyline as a consequence, rather than pawns acting as they must to further that storyline.
Now, I totally get that this isn’t for everyone. Some people want their fiction with more dramatic unity, more plot motion. I get that. But this is the show that was introduced two and a half years ago. Flashbacks. Divergent stories that sometimes don’t advance the central narrative. Characters that act selfishly, deceitfully, sometimes even cruelly, even when it seems unwise to the viewer. Scenes and moments that serve no narrative purpose other than to reveal, highlight, or deepen our understanding of some element of someone’s character. That’s the show.
As someone aptly said, to criticize Lost for this is to criticize House for having a medical mystery in every episode, to criticize Buffy for the vampires, to criticize American Idol because there’s pop music in every episode.
You don’t have to like it; you don’t have to watch it. I don’t watch House anymore, because I got bored with the formula. To continue watching it, getting angry and frustrated because the show won’t be something that I want it to be that it was never intended to be, would seem to me like the height of masochism.
Because you’ve already wasted several hours in that restaurant, and you’re angry that your time was wasted under false pretenses.
That’s a point. If you truly hate it, you shouldn’t.
I have to admit that about mid season two I kept watching mostly because it was only an hour a week half of the year, and because I’d already invested time in the show, and held out hope that they weren’t just toying people, that they knew what they were doing, and if I stopped watching now, not only will I have admitted my previous time was a waste (not that my time is very valuable) but also would miss out if the story really started coming together again.
The setup of the show clearly implies that there’s an overall story that has been constructed and is being slowly revealed to us piece by piece. That’s a big part of the appeal for a lot of people - a well crafted mystery being gradually resolved.
You seem to deny that this aspect of the show ever existed or was important, so that we shouldn’t be irritated when it becomes more clear that the writers have no clue what they’re doing and are just stringing people along. I admit that they’ve gotten better in the last few episodes in that regard, though.
Season 1 is seems very well written. It seems very focused - the writers seem to know exactly what they’re doing and where we’re going and it looks like they have a fun ride up ahead for us. We learn interesting new things about the characters. There’s definitely the impression that there’s going to be some sort of satisfying, reasonable conclusion to the story. There are new mysteries, but it’s early yet, and we’re not exhausted from lack of resolution.
Season 2, in the middle, really starts to drag on. We start getting backstory on people that’s either repetitive or irrelevant. We’ve had several episodes spent on Sawyer’s con man history for example. More filler episodes appear. Mysteries are added but previous ones aren’t resolved. The show really starts to lose the sense that the writers are crafting a good story, and are instead just trying to make stuff up as they go along. The characters become less interesting, and change as the plot suits. The backstory is almost never interesting. No real progress is made on resolving mysteries. In general, everything good about the first season really falls apart in the second.
The second half of season 3 has been an improvement thus far. But, from the very beginning, Lost has implicitly promised some sort of satisfying, pre-planned story, at least in my view. I watched because I trusted the writers knew where they were going, not that they were just manipulating me just enough to keep going. When I realized that was the case, I became pretty irritated.
Yeah, but Gilligan’s Island had subtext and mystery. What was the Professor up to, and which woman would get the Most Eligible Bachelor on The Island? Was that his real hair? Why were a “millionare and his wife” taking a cruise on a rickety old pail like the S.S. Minnow? What kind of sailor can’t patch a two foot hole in the hull of his boat well enough to make sail for civilization? What Gilligan really just a “little buddy”, or was this a winking nudge to the repressed middle aged homosexual male demographic? When is Mary-Ann going to give that prissy flounce Ginger what was coming to her? Of course they’d fail to escape from The Island; as with The Prisoner, it’s a given. It was a show of breathtaking depth and complexity.
Oh, you were talking about Lost. Yeah, I only watched the first series. After that, I have no opinion. I think it’s unfair, really, to hold it up to the standard of Gilligan’s Island, though.
Stranger
I am not doubting that you made the mistake. I’m just saying that to me there was no doubt that it wasn’t Alex. Never entered my mind. I am not that familiar with the actress. I watched the episode. It ended. Then my mind started telling me, “I think that was the English chick from Las Vegas.” Never knew the actresses name until I confirmed it on IMDB. To me she looks absolutely nothing like Alex. One is a 31 year old black woman. One is a 19 year old white girl. If they show her next week at all you will see there is almost no resemblance. Except for the shared hotness.
Add me to the list of people who, for a split second, thought it was Alex. After that split second I realized my mistake, but the one scene really looked a lot like her in my opinion.
It was a very bad angle that even made her unattractive for a bit. And that is almost impossible.
I think the point was to get an actress that looked nothing like Penny so there was a bit of a surprise at the reveal. I don’t think the producers even though about if she looked like Alex or not.
I thought she looked Indian, but I see from the photos of the actress that I was wrong.