LOST

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Readers’ Expectations 1: Chris Harrison Shirtless, The Remake of Starry Night, and The Personality That Causes Cancer

Straight up, what did you hope to learn about here?  If I was someone else, would this all fall apart?

What makes a post popular is not necessarily when a lot of people read it the day it’s published.  What makes it popular is when random people do Internet searches and stumble on it, day after day.

For example, by far my most read is Capital Punishment, In Theory, which at the moment has had 889 direct hits.  That means nearly a thousand readers have come to my site because they wanted to know more about the morality or immorality issues of executing criminals.  So it’s safe to say that more random people have come to my site to hear my thoughts on capital punishment than for any other specific reason.

Statistically speaking then, the other main reasons people wash up on my shore is to read my thoughts on The Bachelor, LOST, healthy eating/organic lifestyle, and oddly, mustaches.

Honestly, when I write, I never think about what the reader might want to read about.  No offense.  I write about what I personally would want to read about it.  Then from there, the readers can sort out what they feel is worth reading past the first paragraph of.

My definition of successful writing is the ability to write about anything (from The Golden Gate Bridge (I Wish You Would Step Back From that Ledge, My Friend) to an old abandoned amusement park (Canyon Land) and make it interesting and intriguing and to hopefully reveal some kind of truth in the process that wasn’t obvious before.

But far all the times the metaphorical spaghetti has stuck to the wall, there were also times it didn’t.  I have made it easy to revisit my most popular posts with pages like Best of 2009 (statistically the most popular posts from last year) and Reruns (a collection of all my different series), but today I will celebrate my least popular.

That doesn’t mean they weren’t popular the first time they were published, because many of them were.  It just means no one has read then since.  In other words, they evidently don’t have much replay value.

Bottom Ten Posts of All Time

Mixed Reviews

The Friendship Police: Why the Heck Not?

Dr. Deja Vu: The Interstate to Memory Lane

The Modern Day Tortoise

I Was Born in a Small Town

Of Mutts and Men

Did You Know?

Ghosts in the Machine

Dr. Deja Vu: Before and After

The Edge of “Me Too” Culture

That was fun.  But before I’m done with this subject today, I also need to acknowledge some of the random Internet searchers who came to scenicroutesnapshots.com, only to be disappointed.  I’ve seen all kinds of random search terms that people have typed in to get to my site.

Surprisingly, only a few of them have been kinky.  And a few were deliberate pranks, like “Nick Shell that I dated in high school”.  I never did find out who did that.  But just in the past few weeks, grazing the floor of search terms, I have definitely come across some oddities:

“Chris Harrison shirtless” I’m sorry, sir or ma’am.  I know you really want to see what’s underneath that tuxedo, but he’s the host of The Bachelor, not a contestant.  You wish.

“Buzz Aldrin shirtless” Okay, same person.  Chris Harrison was one thing, but leave the 80 year-old astronaut alone.

“where can I get a remake of Starry Night?” You mean a reprint?  If you want a remake, I’ll do it.  I haven’t painted since the 4th grade, but I can make this work. I won’t even charge that much.  Fifty bucks sound good?  It may end up looking more like the abstract version of the original, but I’ll get you your remake.  Nice doing business with you.

“to increase your salary, simply mustache” Alright, buddy.  Yes, it’s true.  I can actually help you with that one.  Men with mustaches have higher salaries (Must Not Mustache).  But never, and I mean never, say the words “simply mustache” again.  Not cool, man.  Not cool.

“Lynyrd Skynyrd song that goes- oh that third eye blind” I’m no Casey Kasem, but I think you’re referring to their song “That Smell”:  “Oh, oh, that smell.  The smell of death all around you.” The actual lyrics were a lot different than you thought, I know.  Yes, because “third eye blind” and “that smell” sound so much alike.

“personality that causes cancer” That would be “the Kate Gosselin”, but I haven’t written about that yet.  Good for you for reading my mind, though.

“road turns into mouse” Oh, I get it.  I’ve heard about guys like you.  Look, it must be pretty cool to test different kind of marijuana for pot dispensaries in Denver for a living, but maybe you should cut back on your Internet searching while you’re “working”.

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LOST Recap: Season 6, Episode 13- “The Last Recruit”

Jack and Sawyer are both against The Smoke Monster, so technically they’re on the same team.  Sawyer is escaping The Smoke Monster, while Jack is choosing to face him head-on to attempt to defeat him.  Ultimately, the ongoing theme of science vs. faith and dark vs. light will take place when Jack soon challenges The Smoke Monster.

I forgot Jack has a son in the flash-sideways world.  Who else could Jack’s ex-wife be other than Juliet?  I can’t think of a better candidate.

Hooray, Jin and Sun reunite, at last.  I just wish it wasn’t tainted by the unbelievable storyline of Sun not being able to speak English until she saw Jin again.  But hey, I can’t complain.  They’re back together and they weren’t instantly shot by Faux Tina Fey as soon as they reunited.

Yeah, Jin and Sun have to stay alive a while longer to establish the importance of Baby Kwon as one of the chosen Kwon.

In case you missed last week’s recap for “Everybody Loves Hugo”, click on this link:

http://wp.me/pxqBU-IN

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LOST Recap: Season 6, Episode 12- “Everybody Loves Hugo”

I’m getting a little nervous.  After last night’s episode, I can’t help but think that there are so many questions that will not be answered in the next few weeks.  It raised more questions than answers.  Here’s what I did learn from “Everybody Loves Hugo”.

1)     The “whispers” on the island are from the people who died there but can’t “move on” because of the wrong doing they committed while they were still alive on the island.  Despite the writers of the show promising that the island is not really purgatory or hell, it’s hard not to see it that way.

2)     Desmond has the ability to interact between both reality and alt-reality.  He ran over the real Locke in alt-reality after Faux Locke threw him down the well in reality.  Unless alt-Desmond was simply carrying out some shady dirty-work orders of his boss, Mr. Widmore and that ultimately Desmond’s attempted murder of Locke was to show the balance between the two realities, being that Locke had a near-death experience when he was thrown out of the window.  Of course Jacob saved his life in reality.  Will someone save Locke’s life in alt-reality?

Desmond, Charlie, and the Widmore’s aren’t the only ones aware of alt-reality.  We can now add Hurley and Libby to that list.

I don’t know why, but Ilana always annoyed me.  Ben Linus’s response: “The island was done with her.”  It’s funny how dynamite typically gets rid of annoying characters on the show.

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LOST Recap: Season 6, Episode 11- “Happily Ever After”

Everybody loves Desmond.  And Desmond loves Penny.  Even when he’s in a flash-sideways and has never met Penny before, the Scottish fellow still has memories of her and is in love with her.  If that ain’t love then I don’t what love is.

This big reveal of this episode is that the flash-sideways really are connected to what actually happened.  Daniel, Eloise, and Desmond all end up becoming aware that their flash-sideways life is not the way it was supposed to happen.  The island should not have blown up.  Therefore, the plane was meant to crash on the island.  Which of course comes down to the philosophical challenge between Jacob and Esau (“The Man in Black”).

It was fun for us to see Charlie and Desmond relive that fateful Season 2 episode as a drowning Charlie placed his hand up against the window.  Even when he’s a heroine obsessed jerk, it’s hard not to like ole Charlie.

Hard-core Losties took special notice of the balance scale in Widmore’s office along with a model ship which caught Desmond’s eye.

Widmore told Desmond that Penny and his son will be gone forever if Desmond doesn’t help Widmore and his minions.  I’m seeing Widmore the way I used to see Ben Linus: A man determined to do whatever it takes for his higher purpose, even if it means innocent people die in the process.  But not necessarily an evil man.

Desmond is special, of course.  So he escaped Widmore’s torture chamber unharmed and actually motivated to help Widmore even further.

Ironically, the half-Scottish, half-Peruvian actor who plays Desmond, Henry Ian Cusick, played the part of Jesus in a 2002 movie called The Gospel of John.  So this isn’t the first time he has played a compassionate man who becomes a savior for the greater good of mankind.

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LOST Recap: Season 6, Episode 10- “The Package”

My sister Dana, the one who got me started on LOST three years ago, often teaches me good theories about the show.  She picks up on details I miss.  Today for my recap, I am copying and pasting her e-mails as a way for her to co-write this with me, despite her living in Alabama and me in Tennessee.  I’ll let her take start us off.

Dana:

Some things are just meant to be, so Mikhail would have lost an eye no matter what.  Are the 2 timelines intertwined, like The Butterfly Effect somehow?

Sun was pregnant and got shot. At the end of season 2 (or maybe it was 3 and shot an Other (who was pregnant) who came onto their boat. But maybe she wasn’t pregnant. Sun shot someone, and Sun got shot.  Balance.

Also, once someone becomes evil (Claire and Sayid) they stop feeling emotions. But Claire seems to have gotten hers back in the last episodes. She showed rage toward Kate and then later felt sorry and hugged her.

Any thoughts on why capturing Desmond would be so important to Jin? Not sure why Widmore wanted to show him to see Desmond ‘The Package’ Hume.

Do you get the feeling that Widmore is somehow one of the good guys?

Widmore warned that “a war” was coming. And now that we know he and Smokey are on different sides, he appears good. Widmore said that if Fake Locke were to escape the Island, everyone they cared about would cease to exist. (Sound familiar?) That’s what I thought he said.

There’s got to be so much more to Desmond than we’ve been told. Eloise Hawking appeared to him several times trying to get him not to marry Penny. Then he crashed on the Island, worked for Dharma, got rescued by Penny. I wonder if Widmore knows that Desmond is somehow a bad guy (connected to the smoke monster somehow?) and he’s trying to protect Penny.

We saw “room 23” again finally, where Alex’s boyfriend Carl was being brainwashed with subliminal messages about God and Jacob.

Nick:

Well done.  My take on Sun is that she doesn’t die.  After us waiting two seasons for her and Jin to reunite, I just think that would be cruel of the writers.

I agree Widmore is ultimately good, just like Ben.

I stand by my prediction that the Kwan Kid is the chosen Kwan, not Sun or Jin.

I remind you yet again that at no point so far in the series has it showed what happens in the year 2010.  It’s only showed up to early 2009 so far.  A major twist in episodes to come will involve the year 2010: present day.

So far we’ve only seen the past (though at the time it sometimes was the future, but not the timeline never ventured into life after 2009).  The LOST writers are keeping us in the dark about the immediate present day as far as where the characters are and the island itself.

In closing, I think it’s interesting to see the names of the upcoming episodes, with my predictions in parenthesis:

Episode 10: Happily Ever After (Jin and Sun reunite?)

Episode 11: Everybody Loves Hugo (Hugo and Libby get a second chance at love, in a flash-sideways?)

Episode 12: The Last Recruit (Desmond?)

Episode 13: The Candidate (The Kwan Kid?)

Episode 14: Across the Sea (We get to learn more about Widmore’s life off the island?)

Episode 15: What They Died For (Not necessarily implying that more main characters die, but instead an explanation on why favorite characters had to die, like Charlie and Libby.)

Episode 16: The End (The timeline finally reaches the year 2010.)