Re-watching LOST: Season five

By Josh_Holloway_2.jpg: Kristin Dos Santos derivative work: RanZag (Josh_Holloway_2.jpg) [CC-BY-SA-2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

Lots of people think this is the best season of LOST. These people are mostly nerds, since this season was all about the time travel. We thought the first half was bogged down by the Oceanic Six trying to get back to the island. It took a while, and it even took a while to convince some of them to go. Desmond helped them, and looked great in a scarf while doing so. Ern's brother dressed up like Desmond and went to school the day after Jughead aired. Only a teacher got it. Ern's brother is awesome.

In this season, we find out how Locke died and that he was really and truly dead. We thought, at the end of season four when we saw his body in the coffin, that he couldn't be dead. There was just no way. But the show surprised us with the ultimate, depressing twists that not only was Locke dead, but he was a confused little man who was never called or special. He told Richard Alpert that he was special, so Alpert set everything up for him. No one called Locke but Locke.

Our favorite episode of this season was The Life and Death of Jeremy Bentham. Locke's death scene might be our favorite scene of the entire season. It was so unexpected. Ben seemed to change his mind about wanting Locke to live in the span of two seconds. It was chilling and well-acted. The perfect end to the sad life of Locke. Since we all expected a resurrection though (not a possession), we never got a proper chance to say goodbye or mourn Locke. Lots of people hated him, but Ern always counted him among her top five favorite characters (along with Ben, Hurley, Juliet, and Desmond).

This season had nice fillers (like The Lie) sandwiched between knock-your-socks-off hours. Wait, was The Lie the episode where Hurley threw the hot pocket? Wait, then we take that back. That episode was the tits. Oh, hey, Jin was alive the whole time. While all our friends rejoiced, we rolled our eyes. Does anyone die and stay dead on this show? (Turns out, yes, but that's what we were thinking at the time). Who survives an exploding freighter in the middle of the ocean when they were on the freighter? Ideally, no one. At least Michael didn't come back.

This season introduced one of our favorite couples, Sawyer and Ms. Juliet Burke, who were way less dull than Kate and Sawyer. We were a little bored by main characters joining Dharma and Sayid shooting Ben. All of that spanned way too many episodes, and we felt like our time was wasted when we me the Dharma torturer and then never saw him again. Why make such a big deal out of him and then have almost nothing happen? Whatever Happened, Happened was the best Kate episode of the series.

We said goodbye to Daniel Faraday, and while it was sad that his mother killed him, were weren't that sad to lose him. One of our friends was pretty obsessed with him though, because she thought he was cute. We were like, "Um, do you not see nearly every other guy on this show? Daniel is not the island hottie. He's a hobbit to replace Charlie, that dead hobbit." To each her own root, we guess.

We loved seeing a young, pregnant Rousseau. She was so cute. We're weren't THAT sad when Charlotte died, but it was appropriately creepy when she whispered, "This place is death." Loved that. All the tediousness was followed by the emotional episode Dead Is Dead, where Ben was judged by the island for letting his daughter die. Really, it was the smoke monster making sure Ben was on his team.

The flashbacks of Ben acquiring and caring for Alex really worked for us. That was a father/child relationship worth spending more time on. The one that didn't work for anyone was Miles and his father. If that episode didn't feature a hilarious Hurley and an attempt to write The Empire Strikes Back, we would have given it an F. By then, everyone knew that the Miles character was going nowhere interesting.

The show was going over familiar ground and bringing up new pasts when it should have been wrapping up and moving forward. In short, Miles's daddy issues were unwelcome. No one cared. We already saw Jack, Kate, Sawyer, Claire, Hurley, Sun, Locke, Ben, Daniel, Alex, Penny, and to some extent Jin struggle with their fathers. The natural next step was for one of them to have issues with the Ultimate Father, some form of God...oh wait, Ben did kill Jacob at the end of this season, right? :-)

You know what else was crazy? Jack this season. Him wanting to blow up the island and change the past was insane. Didn't he learn anything from his time on the island? Weren't there good times? How was this going to help his relationship with Kate? He just lost it. We loved the last episode when Jacob visited key characters at important moments in their pasts. That episode was all about Jacob. We were sad when he died. We barely knew him. The heartbreaking cliffhanger ending with Juliet falling down that hole and Sawyer screaming was breathtaking. That was a good finale.

Because You Left: B+, The Lie: C, Jughead: A-, The Little Prince: C+, This Place Is Death: B+, 316: B, The Life and Death of Jeremy Bentham: A+, LaFleur: A, Namaste: B+, He's Our You: B-, Whatever Happened Happened: A, Dead Is Dead: A, Some Like It Hoth: C-, The Variable: A, Follow the Leader: B, The Incident: A+