Life of Brian

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?”