Television: Lost

You know, I took a class in college called Parageography--the geography of imaginary places. As in Narnia and Middle Earth and Oz, or even the places Odysseus (aka Ulysses) visited when trying to get home from the Trojan war. Part of the class required us to create our own imaginary places. Mine was an island called AElit. It was an island no one could find. The back story was that an Englishman named Jonathan Engleman had gone on a sailing holiday and disappeared for 11 years, only to turn up talking about this island he'd been on . . . Now AElit was inhabited, mind you, and had its own history and language, etc. I used to have a Web site devoted to it, but I let the domain name lapse a long while back. Now I'm not saying the Lost guys stole, in part, my ideas. At any rate, mysterious islands--ones that move or can't be found--are nothing special to literature or myth. Islands seem to lend themselves especially to being small enough to lose in the great expanses of water that house the world. It's all in the execution of said story or myth . . .

A few thoughts about last night's episode:

• Is the "very clever" person Hawking mentioned her own son?
• Did Ben go off to attempt to murder Penny? After all, once he saw Desmond, he must've assumed she was in the vicinity. And Ben did tell Charles that he (Ben) would kill Charles' daughter (Penny) as revenge for Ben's own daughter's death.
• I'm guessing Kate probably left Aaron with Claire's mother. Giving up a child is difficult, even when one does it with the child's best interests at heart. But if anything more drastic than that had happened to Aaron, Kate would surely have been an even bigger emotional wreck than she was.
• So the island has always been jumping? In space, if not in time? But turning the donkey wheel made it move in time as well? Am I understanding this right?

As we neared the point in the show where it was clear something would need to happen to the plane soon (Ajira 316--which conjures the biblical John [Locke?] 3:16), I turned to my husband and said, "Wouldn't it be funny if they just landed in Guam?" Think about it: that would have been pretty funny. "Great, now we're in f***ing Guam! Now what?" But of course that wasn't the case. Just as well, I suppose, since we don't need any more stretching of this part of the story.