16 years, but the point is taken!
Hurley’s not nimble. He’s “spry”. 
By the way, here is a wonderful recap video – everything you need to know about Lost in 8 minutes and 15 seconds:
There’s a great line at 1:50. 
Check it out…
Word. I just finished Season 3. We’ve been at this for a few weeks though. Somehow, they lost us at the beginning of S3. Must have been a bit slower than S2, but I can’t wait to start S4. It’s slightly disappointing to see that the questions I currently have I’ll still have at the end of S5. But not enough to stop watching.
I think that’s perfectly normal; I’m under the impression most Lost fans agree that the start of season 3 was a serious lull in quality which manages to be at least somewhat rectified by season 4.
ignore this post
OK, so I’ve just gone and compared the second half of the spoiler leaked on page 1 of this thread with the relevant parts of the pilot episode (‘Pilot’, after the first commercial break, when we are seeing Jack on the plane right before the crash.) It opens the same, until the flight attendant hands Jack one little bottle (spoiler) vs. two little bottles (pilot), and asks him not to tell. He responds, 'It’ll be our little secret" (spoiler), vs. “This, of course, breaks some critical FAA regulations.” In the pilot, he pockets one bottle (he will later use this when Kate stitches up his wounds post-crash), and pours the other into his drink, which he chugs. In the spoiler, he starts to pour his single bottle into his drink when the plane shakes, causing him to spill a bit and prompting him to buckle up as the fasten seat belt announcement goes up; Jack then drinks up as Rose assures him the shaking is normal. In the pilot, post-chug, Jack gets up and moves into the aisle just as Charlie goes charging down it (to snort some heroin in the bathroom), smacking into him; no Charlie charge in the spoiler. In the pilot, this causes Rose to open the conversation with Jack by sardonically commenting that he must have really had to go.
In the spoiler, [spoiler]as Jack takes a drink post-shake, Rose comments to him that the shaking is normal, that her husband (who is in the rear of the plane using the bathroom, as he must have been in the original crash given that he was in the tail section that landed on the other side of the island) has assured her that the plane ‘wants to stay up.’ There is further shaking, Jack holds on very very tightly to his seat, stuff falls from overhead bins, and Jack has a look of blank terror on his face. Then the shaking stops, and Rose tells him he can let go, and he relaxes his death grip on his armrests. He smiles, says “Looks like we made it,” to which Rose responds, “Yeah, we sure did.” The captain comes on the line to apologize for the turbulence, saying they hit a rough patch of air, but that they “just hit a pocket of rough air.”
In the pilot, post-Charlie, as the plane starts to shake more, Jack sits down again, and assures Rose ‘It’s normal.’ They have substantively the same conversation as in the spoiler (Bernard has always assured her that ‘planes want to be in the air,’ Jack says he ‘sounds like a very smart man,’ Rose says she’ll tell him that when he gets back from the bathroom, Jack says he’ll keep her company until he gets back) but with much more shaking and groaning from the plane, and a more visibly nervous Rose. This is followed by the crash itself - more shaking, with someone thrown to the ceiling, oxygen masks descend, Jack and Rose look at each other in panic, cut to Jack staring out at the serene ocean from the Beach.
Why no Charlie? I mean, everything else that isn’t the crash unfolds in basically the same way, with minor variations in tone and phrasing, but why doesn’t Charlie come charging down the aisle in need of a fix?
And yeah, I want to know who are the Others, why Jacob has them take people, why the taken appear happy to be Others but we don’t see them, what happened to the statue (Ben knows, and wouldn’t tell Sun in ‘The Incident,’) why did Claire wander off and leave the baby, what IS the Island really, why has Jacob apparently been involved with our main characters since way back, why are they interconnected in so many ways, etc., etc. Much like the rest of y’all.[/spoiler]
Ack! Please put spoilers in spoiler boxes.
It was a serious lull in quality and they lost of a lot of viewers because of it.
IIRC, it also coincided with a return from a huge break in airings. People basically came back to the show, were given some really nothing episodes, and were left thinking, “We waited X months for THAT?”
-Joe
Fenris:
I don’t know that I’d consider Leslie Arzt’s knowledge on the subject of dynamite to be perfect. Sure, he’s had some intimate experience with the stuff, but he’s something of a scatterbrain.
Really? I thought he did a bang-up job.
They always said he had an explosive personality.
He certainly made an impression on Jack.
One question that’s always bugged me -
Desmond said that Charlie had to die in order for Desmond’s vision of Claire and the baby getting on the helicopter to come true. Charlie dies, but we have not yet seen that vision come to pass. It still could happen that Claire and Aaron get off the island via helicopter, but you would think Desmond might have mentioned that Aaron was not quite a baby…
Aaron’s off the Island (via helicopter, as a baby). He was one of the Oceanic Six, and Kate gave him back to Claire’s mother before coming back to the island. Aaron’s the only one of the Six that has actually stayed off the Island. I suppose Claire could get off it by helicopter if she ever wanders back from druggily hanging out with her dead father.
Also, the Smoke Monster takes the form of dead people (eg Eko’s brother Yemi; Ben’s adopted daughter Alex). Esau/Jacob’s Enemy/The Man in Black also takes the form of at least one dead guy (Locke.) Is Esau the Smoke Monster? When people (the real Locke, Ben) get guidance from ‘Christian Shepherd’, are they getting it from the Island (how they’ve interpreted it), the Smoke Monster, Esau, something else?
ETA: Sorry about the unboxed spoilers in my post above. I meant to go back and include spoiler boxes after I finished typing the whole thing up (rather after my bedtime), then forgot.
I notice a lot of people seem to regard the question of “What is the Island?” as a given – the central mystery that MUST be answered by the end. But I’m not so sure that we’ll get a definitive answer to that, or even that one is necessary. I’ve always looked at the Island as basically akin to The Twilight Zone. At no time throughout that series did Rod Serling ever explain exactly what the Twilight Zone is – and furthermore, you never expected him to. All you need to know is it’s a junction in time/space where the normal laws of reality don’t apply, and the strange occurrences there serve to reveal or test the character of those trapped within it. The Island is a similar phenomenon – we may get the “why” part answered, but not necessarily the “what.” And frankly, that’s fine with me. Getting too technical about the explanation would probably result in a level of disappointment similar to when George Lucas tried to explain The Force with “midichlorians.” It would take away the sense of wonder and leave us with a literal explanation that is little more than techno-babble.
I’m much more interested in the mysteries that clearly should have literal answers. Who are the Others and what was their goal? What does Widmore want from the island? What is the relationship between Jacob and the MIB? Is the Hanso Foundation still involved in all this? Etc. etc.
I am on the edge of my seat for tonight’s premiere, but the more I go back over things the more I worry they won’t be able to pull this off in just 18 episodes. With any other series that would be more than enough to wrap everything up, but with Lost, the number of unresolved questions is almost mindboggling. I can easily see them having to rush through (or completely ignore) several of them by the time we get down to the last few chapters.
The one mystery that has kind of faded but not due to an answer was “why do the others take the children?” They had Walt do tests, there were two children in the tail section that were with the flight attendant too.
We got an answer for that. Women who got pregnant once they arrived on the island couldn’t carry babies to term.
That doesn’t really answer “Why are the kidnapping children?” so much as it answers “Why don’t they just make some of their own instead?”.
Different question, really. Unless it’s “We want to propogate our way of life, and since we can’t have kids this is a stopgap measure until we do”.
Thinking about it, probably the best answer we’re going to get is that: ^^^
-Joe
Sawyer or Jack?