5.03 Jughead

100% sober. Well almost sober. I can see three computer screens in front of me, so I'm aiming for the one on the right. So, this writeup should have more analysis than rants. But those of you that want more rants, take heart. Those will be undoubtedly be a part of future writeups. Or maybe if I finish this bottle of wine before I stop typing. I don't like wine, but I've had it in the fridge for a couple of months. Is refrigerating wine a bad thing? Who cares. This episode felt a bit like filler, just a simple episode to advance storylines. But after some digging, some thought, and some screencap info, well, this episode is full of surprising importance to the overall show plot. I really enjoyed the way the story split up the 6 main Lefties (the official nickname I am calling the time travelers left behind on the island) into Locke, Sawyer, Juliet and then Daniel, Miles, Charlotte. When I refer to those groups further in the writeup, I will use initials. Two very unique perspectives to deal with the island situation. And how focking great was it that we saw not a second of Jack and Kate. I was so sick and tired of the Oceanic 6 at this point. While it’s cool to see Ben and Widmore off the island, I am just sick of the super boring, completely lifeless, terrible acted parts, the Oceanic 6. Obviously Hurley and Sayid have their moments. But the other 4, and yes I’m not letting Aaron off the hook, just put a damper on the show. Really. Be honest with yourself. What is more interesting at this point? The Lefties on the island traveling through time, or the Oceanic 6 trying to get back to the island to end the interesting stuff.

First of all, let’s look at the episode title. I spend some time Googling, and the only significant reference of Jughead is the the Archie Comics, as the slacker character Jughead’s true name is Forsythe Pendleton “Jughead” Jones. The connection to the this episode is two fold. First, the hydrogen bomb we see later is named Jughead. Also, the guy in the military uniform with a nametag of “Jones”, they guy SJL capture, ends up being an alias for another name, just as Jones is really Jughead in Archie Comics. Meh. Not much here to dig into.

We start with Desmond running willy nilly around a South East Asian port, looking for a doctor. Penny gives birth to a boy, sometime in the future after she and Desmond leave the Lost island folks behind and go into hiding. The boy will turn out to be called Charlie, remembering the junk head who died right before Desmond’s eyes at the end of season 3. I can’t help but think this seals the deal on Penny’s fate. She is going to die this season, and probably within a couple of episodes. Giving birth to a baby tends to bring about death in this show. It’s like a balancing out of the beginning and ending of life. Sun gives birth after Jin dies. Claire gives birth, but Charlie dies soon afterward. All the Other’s mothers kept dying during child birth. Penny will die at the hands of Ben. Yeah, viewers will be upset. Do you think these writers care about that? They killed off Charlie. Look at how clinically they slaughtered Alex, Danielle, and Karl. Death is a part of the show. Characters we like will die, and often. We then seem to jump forward in time, and the kid is more grown, most likely now 3 years in the future, the same time line as the Oceanic 6 storyline. Desmond is doing a bit of a soliloquy about returning to the isle of Great Britain. Penny is very skeptical, mentioning what if Charles Widmore finds them. Desmond says that Daniel told him he was the only one who can help the people on the island. However, Ben and Locke and Richard are saying that the Oceanic 6 need to return to the island to save the Lefties. So, which is it? Desmond finding Daniel’s mother, or O6 returning to the island? Or both? Or neither? Dammit. A contradiction in the plot. D.C.M. and two red shirts arrive at the creek safely, only to discover that nobody else is there. A trip wired kills the two background Lefties, and the Lost cast members keeps dwindling. Charlotte keeps getting sicker, and the romance nobody cares about keeping awkwardly going forward. Come on, now. Daniel is a likeable character; I have not seen a single person talk crap about the guy. He is a solid likeable key character, and impressively enough, a newbie who everybody adopted early on with his disarming quirky mannerisms and offbeat speech patterns. At this point, every body knows that we need him to help explain the increasingly confusing time travel shenanigans. But Charlotte made a terrible first impression. She came off very frigid, very inhuman, very unlikable. A few minutes after we meet her, Ben pumps some bullets into her, and we were all disappointed that she survived. Now, the writers are trying to build some sympathy for her by trying to rub some heat from the Daniel character onto her. Guess what? It’s just not working. Sorry. But if you dropped her into a kettle and boiled her for a week, she would still be frigid. And it has nothing to do with being British. Penny comes across as a very warm person. Charlotte is a penguin with a red headed wig. Yeah, she is attractive. But come on, Daniel. Flirt with Juliet or something at this point. Hell, you have a better chance of getting a kiss from a polar bear than Charlotte. I’m starting to go off on tangents and rant. Buckle up your seat belts. Long way to go. Anyway, the trip wire goes off and kills two nobodies. The noise brings the hostiles out of the woods to capture M.C.D The prominent woman with the shotgun looks at Daniel with curious familiarity and says “You just couldn’t stay away, could you. “ Now this is cryptic. It could refer to Daniel being a military guy, as the episodes goes on to explain that possibility later on. Or, it could be that this woman sees Daniel as somebody that she has seen before. Interesting to note.

Penny is asking Desmond a couple of very smart questions. Why now? If Daniel told you about this quest on the island, why are you only remembering 2 days ago? I’ll admit, I can spend hours trying to point inconsistencies now that time travel is the theme, but that would drive me insane. I’m not going to spend the time to dissect it that clearly unless it becomes too obvious to ignore. But with Desmond, the rules apparently do not apply. Desmond says that after he finds Daniel’s mother at Oxford, it will be over with forever. Penny asks Desmond to promise he will never go back to the island. Desmond conveniently says “Why would I ever go back?” He avoided answering the question. Desmond doesn’t want to lie, and Penny knows what is now inevitable. Desmond will go back. The Others have captured MDC, and are asking where the rest of their group of 20 were? This harkens back to my point from last week. There were a lot of people on the beach. When I kept pausing, I swear I counted a minimum of 30 Lefties on the beach. Yet, we are being told there are much less. I don’t get it. We are told the captors did not set up the line mines which killed the two red shirts. SLJ are holding two faux military officers captive. Locke is trying to tell us the rifle is from the 1950’s when he gets interrupted. Sawyer asks who shot Locke. Locke is about to answer when he gets interrupted. This was a theme throughout the episode. Characters being interrupted before they revealed something important to another character. The two guys are talking in Latin because they are Others. Now, Latin in a dead, old language. It really isn’t used much in today’s world. But if the Others have been on this island for many, many centuries, Latin would have been a natural, universal language to learn. Seems like we are getting closer to finding out the explanation of the 4 toed statue and what the Temple is. The Others are talking about themselves, asking whey SLJ are not in uniforms, again referencing military invasion. MCD, Miles picks up the scent of recently killed soldiers, shot and/or dying from radiation poisoning. He is unable to convey to Daniel what year it is. The Others are taking them to a location that looks exactly like the spot Ben took Locke and Hurley to as he flashed a mirror to the top of a cliff on the way to the Orchid hatch. Richard makes a grand entrance, looking exactly the same age as always, sweeps in, and askd MCD if they have come back for their bomb.

Desmond shows up at Oxford University and is having trouble locating Faraday’s mother. The lady in the library tells Desmond that there is no record of a Daniel Faraday ever being a member of the university. Here is a real swerve. According to screen caps, the librarian is the same exact woman as the ticket agent that let Hurly board Oceanic 815 many seasons ago. If you recall, Hurley went to Australia trying to track down what the numbers meant. He was told the person he was looking for died and had pretty much lost his mind prior to that. Hurley overslept the next morning at the hotel, and was in a huge rush to get to the airport. Running as fast as he could without getting a heart attack, he stumbled up to the ticket counter just as they were closing up the boarding gate/tunnel to get to the plane. He begged a lady to let him get on the plane. He talked her into it, saying something like it was his lucky day, if I recall correctly. So, we now have another instance of somebody steering a key Losties character in a particular way to get them to do something important for the island and/or search for the island. We saw Ms Hawkings (don‘t marry Penny), the Monk (stop being a monk), Libby (take my boat), etc steer Desmond towards the island. How often have we seen some insignificant character have a huge impact on a character in a flashback or flashforward. I guess the real question is who is behind the course correction activities. Is it Ben and the Others, or Charles Widmore, or the universe, or the island/Jacob, or some combination of these. One thing for sure, it that I feel coincidence no longer can possibly exist in this show. The game has changed to figuring out WHY things are happening instead of "gee, that sure was convenient". Desmond breaks into Faraday’s old office, and starts to snoop around amidst the dust and blankets covering old equipment. The place has been thoroughly searched. Desmond finds a photo of Daniel with his arm around somebody who turns out to be Teresa Spencer, who we meet later. He is interrupted by seemingly a maintenance man, who tells him about destroying Faraday’s rats and about the accident. M.D.C come up with a plan of pretending to be military. Apparently, the military has been doing bomb testing on the island, and attacked the native Others/hostiles. Daniel notices the radiation poisoning some of the Others are suffering from. He insists that he get a chance to fix the leak to a hydrogen bomb and that he can be trusted because he is in love with Charlotte. At this point, I’d like to point out that the time traveling Lefties are special in many ways, and if you buy into my looping theories, it gets even more interesting. Starting from the movie Groundhog Day, a wonderful film by the way and shame on you if you haven’t seen it before, I tried to piece together a theory on how people on the island were reliving a certain period of time, longer than just a single day, but still looping and repeating back around Season 3, and was talking about it freely throughout that season and finale. It was just that a handful of them were able to remember those past loops. Such as Desmond being able to remember the upcoming ways Charlie was to die, like Ben being a few steps ahead of everybody. But the reality is that instead of a Groundhog Day Loop, it turns out that time travel was the trigger. This is why Daniel is able to know so much about what is happening to them, like having to disarm a bomb on the island. This is why Locke seems to have so much good instinct in knowing the island. This is why Juliet, Sawyer, and anybody else that is time traveling is going to be able to remember past and possibly future events, as they lived through them before. This is a springboard to a devilish scenario where the Lefties will travel to a time where they can see themselves on the island, hopefully soon. I guarantee they will not be able to talk to themselves as this is a paradox, and the island won’t allow it, but how creepy would it be if this was the source of the whispers we hear in the woods, the Lefties can only try to whisper to themselves. Interesting, no? Remember, the first time we saw Daniel, he was watching news of the Oceanic 815 crash on TV, and weeping, but he didn’t really know why he was so distraught. But deeply ingrained in his mind, he must have time traveled to a point where Charlotte died, and it made him upset, although he couldn’t remember the event. Or was recalling subconsciously all the people that were going to die, in the future. Now that is a wild sentence: Remembering all the people that will die in the future. Locke knew, absolutely positively knew the freighter was bad news, and not just because of Taller Ghost Walt; he knew they needed to get inside the Swan hatch; he seemingly shows up in the nick of time to save somebody in trouble, over and over and over again. S.J.L. are told that the rest of their people are either captured or dead, since the Others knew exactly where they were heading. One of the others is convinced to take SJL to Richard, but Jones scurries over, breaks his neck, and runs away. Locke is unable to pull the trigger once he knew they were Others, as opposed to last episode when he shot one in the head, and threw a knife through another. He didn't know who they were. The man is loyal to people he won’t lead for another 50 years. I wonder what Locke would do if he had to choose between the Others and the Losties/Lefties at some point.

After his trip to Oxford, Desmond double checks a house address vs. something written on paper, no doubt from the “maintenance man”. He is to learn that the woman in the photo with Daniel that he found is Teresa Spencer (no Google info on this name), someone that has been having mind traveling effects for the last ten years, no doubt brought on by Daniel’s experiments. Surprisingly, Charles Widmore is Daniel’s benefactor and paying for Teresa’s care. Now, it’s not surprising that Widmore is involved with Faraday, since Daniel was on the freighter to begin with. But that he is paying for the medical condition of Teresa. Could it be that Widmore was sponsoring Daniel’s work and was demanding faster results, including human testing, which seems to be the beginning of every comic book story. Instead of gaining super powers, she fell into time traveling purgatory. Daniel is now feeling pressure to fix this woman, and the way to do it is through time travel, apparently. MCD are in the military tent. Charlotte tells Daniel that he didn’t have to lie to Richard. Daniel tells her he was being sincere. She has some reaction bordering on heartburn mixed with gas pains. Not even much of a smile as Daniel is led out of the test. Richard gives Daniel a run down, and gives up some pieces to the LOST jigsaw puzzle. The military arrived on the island, 18 men, and started the war. Richard explains that he follow a chain of command, whether he was talking about Jacob or not, I’m not sure. The escaped Other shows up, explains that they were outnumbered (bullsh!t) and calls the young woman with a shotgun “Elle”. Which to me means Elle is one of two people. It’s possible that this might be DaniELLE Rousseau. But I think Danielle 50 years from now probably would have looked a bit older than she did when we were seeing her the last few seasons, unless the time element of the island would keep her a bit younger than her age to some extent, maybe not like Richard, but a little help. The other possibility is Eloise Hawkings, where Elle would be a natural nickname. We learned that Eloise was Ms Hawking first name through an enhanced episode repeat. Then again, don’t forget that the first rat Daniel trained to run through the maze in his lab was named Eloise, obviously a name that meant a lot to him since he told Desmond to bring up that name when they met at Oxford in last year's Desmond time traveling episode. And how weird is it to think we have a bunch of time travelers in this episode, and Desmond is not one of them. Anyway, could this be the person that becomes Hawkings? Could she be Daniel’s mother? Then, who is the father? Is it crazy to think Charles Widmore is Daniel’s father? Charles and Eloise would be about the same age off the island, both were young 50 years in the past. Maybe they left the island because Charles got Elle pregnant, and mothers were dying on the island. Or
Widmore was forced off the island because he is an assh0le. Widmore is funding Daniel. Hawking and Widmore are both interested in the island, but seemingly not working together, if Ben is working for Hawkings. So Charles and Elle had a falling out. Let take it even further. Desmond is Scottish, and I believe Penny is too. We now that Penny is possibly Widmore’s kid. Daniel might be. But let’s remember, Charlotte is redheaded. Aren’t there a lot of people with red hair from the British Isles, moreso than any other ethnicity. Maybe Charlotte is a Widmore, Hawkings offspring, therefore making Daniel and Charlotte brother and sister. I’d say it’s a good thing they haven’t kissed yet. Did I make your brain melt yet? Back to young Widmore telling Richard that the leader of the militants is some old guy and there is no way that they could have tracked him back to camp. What, you think he knows the island better than me? Pan camera to Locke watching the camp. Arguably one of the funniest scenes in Lost history, maybe since the Ben and Hurley waiting outside Jacob’s cabin, sharing a chocolate bar, sitting on a log together. Locke is alarmed at how old Richard is. SJL split up, to save Faraday and stroll into the camp. As Daniel is walking along with Elle, he tells her that she seems so familiar. Well, for one thing, she looks a bit like the woman laying in a bed back in Great Britain. And if Elle is really Daniel’s mother, then Daniel would think she is familiar if he is looking at a younger version of her. Which brings us to the bomb.

Meet Jughead, the leaking, shaken bottle of coke that you are trying to open with just mild fizzing and not a full explosion bomb. Daniel is telling Elle very emphatically that the bomb needs to be treated with lead and then buried in concrete. If you bury it, it won’t go off, then spills the beans on time travel as Sawyer sneaks up and disarms her. Juliet stops by and Elle and Juliet give each other some type of peculiar look. I’m not imagining things. It looked like some kind of knowing glance. First of all, how many more episodes until Sawyer and Juliet start to have sex. The two that were rejected from Jack and Kate are destined to form their own relationship. A cool scenario if Jack and Kate return to the island. Four's company, five's a crowd. Next, where did the Others bury the bomb? At first thought, the Swan hatch was full of concrete and a button to save the world. I’m not buying that for a second. First of all Dharma who still hadn’t arrived on the island, built the hatches Next, the hatch blew up, and their was no bomb explosion. A fail safe key is not going to keep the island from becoming 100% shrapnel from a hydrogen bomb. A bomb isn't going to diffuse itself. That bomb is somewhere else, and might figure into the endgame of next season. Desmond barges into Widmore’s office. I’m not going to answer your questions. Well, that seems fair, Desmond. Why am I finding it so hard to like these characters anymore. I might have to start a list of characters I like, and see if it's more than 5. Anyway, he wants to find Faraday’s mother, which Widmore complied with. Really? What the fock? The only possible reason is that Widmore needs Desmond to find her, as a course correcting action. He must know that Ben is in LA and that Penny is with Desmond, so why would he put Penny in danger by sending Desmond to LA unless it was vitally important to do so. And then maybe follow Desmond to Ben. Widmore is a wily fellow. Remember when Naomi was putting together the invasion plan with the scientists to get to the island last season. Plan B was the Keamy team. Plan A was gathering a group of people that the island may draw in, a theory Jack tried out years later, flying over the Pacific over and over again. Frank, who was to be the original pilot. Charlotte, who claims was born on the island. Miles, who might be Dr Chang’s son. And Daniel, possibly the son of two others. Now, he is helping Desmond eventually get back to the island by meeting Daniel’s mother. His mother probably is Hawking, as Ben is in LA and visited her last week, probably in LA. It’s all falling into place. Widmore tells Desmond “…deliver your message…” Um, what? How does he know that Desmond has a message to deliver. Specifically, a message. Of all reasons to find someone, why theorize it’s a message. Desmond never told him that. Widmore knows some of the future events, and is course correcting. Stay in hiding, this fight goes back many years. Yeah, I guess so. It’s as if Widmore is seeking to extract revenge against someone or something. I’m starting to think it’s against Richard. Widmore and Richard had a falling out. Maybe over Locke, and his appearance in the past. Hell, maybe Widmore was to be the new leader, but Locke came strolling out of the jungle. Locke calls out Richard. Jacob sent me. While the name John Locke meant nothing to Richard, Jacob seemed to carry significance, and Richard told Widmore to lower his gun. Locke turned to the prissy Widmore and seemed amused to meet him. Of course, Widmore's uniform said "Jones".

Desmond is back on the boat, and tries to lie to Penny about his end result. She sees through the falsehood, and with a sigh, agrees to go to Los Angeles. Inevitable. She knows Desmond is going back to the island. She probably doesn’t know that she will probably die soon. I really do think it will happen. It seems like all the very recent off island people are slowly being nudged to leave the outside world and go back. We just don’t know about Walt and Frank at this point. But Desmond is a pawn, and I think he powerless to do anything about it. Remember, when the Swan hatch was first invaded by the Losties, Desmond took off into the jungle. He apparently try to use a sailboat to leave the island, but the island would not allow him to leave, as he kept sailing in circles. He first arrived on the island on a boat. Now, like a magnet, he is being called back. On a boat. Locke shows Richard the compass, which Richard doesn’t recognize. Now the presence of the compass in that point in time to a specific person was too confusing to work out on paper, so I gave up. Whether this is a plot hole or not, I’m just rolling with it. Locke tells Richard “it hasn’t happened yet.” Locke tells Richard the exact details of Locke’s birth, which absolutely explains why he watched the birth of Locke and tested him through the early years so to see when he was to become the person he was meant to be . Which is why we kept hearing things from Richard and the Others in Season 3 about waiting a long time for Locke; this conversation was going on behind Ben’s back, during the time when Locke’s father arrived and got killed by Sawyer. How do I get off the island? And, the camp disappears. Charlotte collapses with a massive nose bleed. You know Daniel, if you love this woman, why don’t you stop delaying and tell her what the fock is wrong with her. The viewers already know, and you are killing her. Daniel knows she needs a constant. So help her find one, for fock’s sake. I know you are carrying guilt over Teresa, and now Charlotte. But tell her. Constant. The super intelligent Daniel is a dummy. And where is the smoke monster? Come on, when are we going to see the younger Smokie, or does it not age, like Richard? The wine bottle only lasted until paragraph 3.