Monday, January 14, 2008

Lost: Missing Pieces - "Jack Meet Ethan. Ethan? Jack." (and bonus ARG ramblings!)

Quite a bit to say to get through today, so let's jump right in...

First off, the 10th of 13 Mobisodes is finally up on ABC.com, featuring the first meeting of Jack and Ethan: http://abc.go.com/primetime/lost/missingpieces/index?pn=index

Thoughts:

- Ethan producing the suitcase full of medicine helps explain how Jack always seemed to have a decent amount of medical supplies during the first season, pre-Hatch. Nice way to help add some realism to the situation after the fact. But the more intriguing thing here is that the Others clearly wanted our Survivors to survive (so it's not just a clever name) - so much so that they are giving them medical supplies. Why? Because they offered hope - fresh life in the form of new babies, and the potential to increase their ranks - something that they couldn't do on their own due to all the Other woman dying during childbirth.

- Ethan (and we can assume all the Others) love Jack from the start - because he's focused on building a stable society there, rather than just worrying about getting off the Island. He's thinking "long term", which is precisely what the Others want. Ethan even mentions that Jack is "smart" for focusing on life on the Island... too bad this is going to all go terribly awry for the Others and Jack in about two and a half seasons or seventy Island days...

- Ethan had a wife, and she died during childbirth. It helps to humanize someone who we originally (circa mid-season one) was a superhuman killing machine.

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More than anything, this mobisode helps to explain why the Others didn't take out our Survivors right from the start. They watched them, they learned about them, and they had hope for what they could be. It was only later that they began to realize some of the "threat" that they posed due to their free thinking and obsession with Island escape.


On to the ARG...

The newest "game" is up at http://www.find815.com - nothing tricky, but rewarding us with two videos and some very subtle but important facts:

1. The Christiane I is NOT Naomi's boat. It's not the freighter sitting 80 miles offshore of Lost Island. When the first video opens, there's a full shot of the Christiane I - with no helicopter anywhere on it.

2. The timeline of the ARG is now approaching Christmas time (per Sam's comment), which conveniently is just about the time on the Island - all the sudden the ARG has caught up to the start of Season Four in terms of the series timeline. To me, this makes it all the more likely that there will be some sort of interaction with the current storyline on Lost, and Talbot's mission is more than just faking some wreckage (again, if we are to believe Naomi - the wreckage has already been found at current time of the ARG).

3. Talbot is working for "the syndicate", which turns out to be "The Maxwell Group", which now features the subtitle: a division of Widmore Industries". It's all coming together! East Ocean Trade Group --> The Hanso Foundation --> Widmore Industries --> The Maxwell Group? Or, maybe they're all arms of one super-powerful conglomerate that would have the power to be behind all the wacky mysteries of who faked the plane crash, who kidnapped Anthony Cooper, who's looking for the Island, and who has the money and power to fund the activity of the Others!


16 days people. Keep breathing - we're almost there...

13 comments:

Anonymous said...

But, they don't die during childbirth. They die during pregnancy. Specifically, they die just before the pregnancy is far enough along for the child to survive.

Anonymous said...

There's already a HQ version of the 11th Missing Piece:

Here's the code to embeb the video:

http://www.darkufo.co.uk/embedmobi11a.txt

Anonymous said...

We don't know that Ethan's wife died on the island. Seeing him in Juliet's flashback off island suggest he may have been recruited. But yeah, on island women die during pregnancy.

I'd still like to know how Ethan was so strong... what's in the Other's Wheaties?

Doug McCaughan said...

Brian, you don't have a "contact" page.

Has anyone sent you pictures of the OceanicAir billboards? Knoxville has some http://www.knoxnews.com/news/2008/jan/08/billboard-entices-lost-viewers/

Brian said...

I do love the fun marketing behind the Lost ARG - taking out billboards in all the cities that have a tie with Lost (Los Angeles, Miami, Ames, Knoxville, Seoul, Sydney, Portland, New York, Tustin).

If only Cincinnati had some Lost tie-in, I could geek out even more.

But good point about some sort of "contact" link on the Blog. I'll get on that!

Anonymous said...

Sh##ty Beatles :)

I miss my VHS copy of Wayne's World. Now I have to go get it on DVD!

Anonymous said...

ARGH!!! (No pun intended)
Am I the only person who only gets a black screen when I try the "find815" link, or am I just a geek and I'm not doing some special thingy-mabobber?

P.S. Yes, I know I AM a geek.

Anonymous said...

I just get the the black screen too. I have been going to lostpedia.com. You don't get to play the game but at least you know what is going on.

Brian said...

Sometimes when you go the Find815 webpage, it takes a moment for it to load (since a video is one of the first things that comes up). I suppose if you had a slower internet connection, it might look like it's doing nothing for a few minutes?

Sawyer's Optician said...

Becca,
I just watched "Not in Portland" again. Ethan and Richard Alpert were uber creepy!! No, we don't know if Ethan's wife died on the island or not. I suspect that she did, because otherwise, why would it even be mentioned? Ethan may have been a recruit, but he was definitley converted to the others ways.

Katie Kat,
move your cursor up or down the right side of the screen. There are a few tabs that appear. It took me a while to figure that out also.

Anonymous said...

OK, 10 more days until the S4 premiere but as of 10:23am Central time today (1/21/08) there are only 10 mobisodes that have been released out of the 13 promised. I wonder when the last three will be released for viewing... Any ideas?

Brian Leonard said...

Tara, at 4 PM EST I saw the latest "Missing Piece" on the ABC site. (boy, was it revelatory...NOT) So the
12th one should be availble there on Monday the 28th, and the 13th should be available on Verizon Wireless on the 28th or
29th. Possibly those of us who have to or want to wait for the ABC site to have it may have to wait till February 4th, unless they decide to release it early.

Brian Leonard said...
This comment has been removed by the author.