The answer to last nights question,“If I win I won­der how many LOST fans I’ll have to share the $12 mil­lion with?” is none. I played the famous num­bers, 4 8 15 16 23 42 and breath­lessly after the sea­son pre­mier of TDTVS for the Mega Mil­lions draw­ing. The num­bers picked? 6 7 26 27 49 9

We have had flash­backs as a story telling device on LOST, then flash­for­wards, then time travel and now this sea­son, for want of a bet­ter term, flash­side­ways. We have two, two shows in one, as one part of the story telling takes place right before the the Oceanic 815’s crash and con­tin­ues on as if Juliet’s 1977 det­o­nat­ing of Jug­head actu­ally pre­vented the crash in 2004. The other part now con­cerns our pro­tag­o­nists cat­a­pulted into 2007 and still on the island. Which one is real? Some­time in sea­son two I stopped try­ing to apply the­o­ries or fig­ure exactly what is going on, I am now just along for the ride.

I am a big fan of the show, but nowhere near the level of some folks. There is scene in the non-crash alter­na­tive real­ity where Desmond sits in a seat in the same row as Jack and they have a whole do I know you deja vu con­ver­sa­tion, they didn’t. Desmond is hold­ing book. A per­son left a com­ment on site where some­one had live blogged the show (this is just part of the comment:

The book Des was read­ing on the plane was Haroun and the Sea of Sto­ries by Salman Rushdie.

From Wiki:

“Haroun and the Sea of Sto­ries is a 1990 children’s book[1] by Salman Rushdie. It was Rushdie’s first novel after The Satanic Verses. It is a phan­tas­magor­i­cal story set in a city so old and ruinous that it has for­got­ten its name.[2]”

The book includes the fol­low­ing things:

- an ancient city so old that peo­ple for­got it existed
– a war between the rulers of that ancient city
– a main char­ac­ter who is rep­re­sented by two sides of him­self: an “anthro­po­mor­phic shadow” and a “dimin­ished man“
– a “poi­soned ocean” caused by above man’s split­ting of him­self into two parts
– a poten­tial mutiny of one of the war­ring tribes led by a man who isn’t the leader
– the anthro­po­mor­phic shadow has the abil­ity to “appear iden­ti­cal” to some of the peo­ple in the city
– a plan to destroy the ocean using “com­pli­cated machines pow­ered by elec­tro­mag­netic induc­tion“
– the Big Bad is killed at the end after his ice palace melts and his giant statue falls on him
– “a land­scape whose weather changes to reflect the emo­tions of the peo­ple cur­rently present in it“
– the two tribes are kept apart “by a force field named Chattergy’s Wall“
– “At the South Pole of Kahani is a spring known as the Source of Sto­ries, from which (accord­ing to the premise of the plot) orig­i­nated all sto­ries ever com­mu­ni­cated. The pre­ven­tion of this spring’s block­age there­fore forms the cli­max of the novel’s own story.”

Holy shit, that’s a ton of par­al­lels to LOST.

Are the writ­ers and pro­duc­ers that smart to find books that par­al­lel their story or are they just plagiarizing?

Sayid, who has been lay­ing bleed­ing, near death, since last sea­son, spent his island time lay­ing with his head in Hurley’s lap bounc­ing around in a Dharma van, until the newly dead Jacob shows up to tell Hur­ley how to save him. He is then taken on a not so quick detour to “res­cue” the soon to be dead Juliet, then dri­ven some more, placed on a stretcher, car­ried through the jun­gle, taken under a wall through a crack guarded by a long dead, one-armed French­man, almost hav­ing his stretcher bear­ers shot, dumped into a dirty pool in the mid­dle of the Oth­ers Tem­ple, only to be held under water until drowned.

At the very end of the 2 hours Sayid sud­denly wakes up and says, “What just hap­pened?” Both my wife and I on the couch in Aiken, SC in the year 2010 said, “Amen brother. What did just happen?”