Angry Robot

Michael Bryant Walks?

Yesterday the province decided not to prosecute Michael Bryant. According to the Star, here’s what happened the night Darcy Allan Sheppard died.

This is the part that gets me:

He succeeds at restarting the engine and the Saab accelerates into Sheppard, who lands on the hood. Bryant hits the brakes when he sees Sheppard. Sheppard falls off the hood. (2.5 seconds elapses between the car starting and stopping. It travels two car lengths before Bryant stops.) Sheppard stands up within two seconds, not seriously injured. Bryant reverses and drives forward, trying to get around the bike.

I’m not saying that Bryant purposefully murdered Sheppard, as I agree that it sounds like sheer panic. Nor am I saying that Sheppard is remotely close to being a good cycling role model. However, it bothers me that this car “lurching” forward two car lengths, striking a human being, is not a bigger deal. It certainly explains why Sheppard grabs onto the car (not that it’s a good idea). I don’t see why the charges don’t involve vehicular manslaughter, careless driving, and leaving the scene of a crime no matter how angry and drunk the victim was.

That said, IANAL and perhaps lesser charges will now be forthcoming. But it would be a shame if Bryant escapes all blame, as it sends the message that it’s okay to kill cyclists if they seem angry or drunk.

Gnostic Lost

Via Ram comes this post from a site I’m sad to only now be discovering, which points out some very juicy tidbits from Gnostic myth just waiting to be plucked and half-baked into a Lost theory pie (how’s that for carrying the metaphor just a touch too long, yet falling short of comparing the Tree Of Knowledge to the magic light cave, thankfully for all involved):

In Gnostic mythos, God is living energy — pure spiritual light — a tiny spark of which burns inside each of us. Occasionally, this divine light produces avatars of human form, one of whom was Jesus. Another was Sophia, an expression of the divine feminine. Sophia became estranged from God and tried to cure her loneliness by creating a son. But something went terribly wrong, and she gave birth to Demiurge, a being of pure evil with many names, including Satan and Samuel.

Dude, where are you going? I haven’t even gone to Wikipedia myself yet. Here it goes:

Gnosticism presents a distinction between a supranatural, unknowable reality and the sensible materiality of which the demiurge is creator … several systems of Gnostic thought present the Demiurge as antagonistic to the Supreme God: his act of creation either in unconscious and fundamentally flawed imitation of the divine model, or else formed with the malevolent intention of entrapping aspects of the divine in materiality.

Boom! I was already thinking about Buddhism in the context of the alternaverse, especially after the last ep where Desmond thought Ana-Lucia “not ready yet,” i.e. not enlightened, not aware of the true reality that lies behind the apparent reality. But move over Siddhartha, time for Sammy McSmoke to drop some Gnosis on that ass.

There’s the idea that some of the pre-crash discrepancies in the Alternaverse could theoretically be attributed to Jacob not having intervened in the lives of the candidates. Also, that when Smokey promises people things “when he gets off the island”, they are things that are true in the sideways world. So then the sideways world is the Smokeyverse, the world that Smokey made by eliminating the island and preventing Jacob from having intervened in said world.

It’s a perfectly serviceable Lost theory. It’ll do until tomorrow.

Lost Season Six Episode Sixteen, "What They Died For"

This was not the episode I was expecting. I hoped the title meant some back-story-rich flashbacks with now-dead characters (Faraday in Ann Arbor, bitches!), not another reiteration of how important it is to stop Smokey blah blah blah. But I didn’t kick it out of bed, as it was pretty straight dope. The body count-o-meter went up a few more notches, the plots advanced on the island and in the sideways world, and the previous episode tied into things, with Jack’s coronation as Jacob 2.0.

Early in the season, we started speculating that the presence of this mysterious alternaverse gave the writers license to destroy one world or another, as they’d always have the other one left over. Seeing as every in-the-know character keeps on telling us that the Man in Black wants to destroy everything (often “everyone you care about”), they may well pull the trigger on the island world right quick, meaning that the locus of action will switch to the sideways world, and Desmond will have to rouse the remaining sleeper characters right quick. To what purpose, of course no one can know – if the sideways world becomes the real world, can they do something to flip back to island reality? What’s so wrong with the sideways world that a character who lives in it would want to go to a world in which they are dead?

As these episodes progress, there’s less fuel for speculation, really, and more a sense of resignation. Not in a bad way, but I’m just eager to watch the series play itself out. That, and I’m thinking a lot about what this series signifies. For me it has been an exceptional ride, quite possibly the most enjoyable show by virtue of the room for speculation and nerd-out sessions that the series’ many mysteries and lacunae have provided. It’s been the most complex narrative I’ve ever been exposed to – Lost needed to be tackled in a group in order to have a remote chance of appreciating it. It’s been the most interactive narrative experience I’ve had outside of a video game, and even if the finale winds up sucking and everything was a dream and none of the various hanging narrative threads are tied together, it won’t change how gol-durned awesome the past six years of Lost viewerhood have been.

Namaste, Darlton.

So with that, I’ll cut short any further speculation, and begin the prep work on the Dharma Mai Tais, Otherton Cave Light Beers, Smokey Soul Tobacco and cans of fucking peaches (oh wait, wrong show) that we’ll need for the finale, which for once may turn out to be the TV Event the promos always promise. See you after that.

Further reading:

AV Club writeup
Lost in Lost’s critical culture

PS no way Alpert is dead.

The Trainees

Let this just be a teaser for something I’ll share with you next week.