Wednesday, May 20, 2009

Lost Top Ten

Here are are my top ten moments from Lost, Season 5. By moments I don't mean events that are the most significant in the Lost storyline, but rather the moments that had the strongest effect on me.

Almost every episode had at least one memorable moment, and many had more. I decided to pick at most one per show. Here they are, in ascending order:


10. This Place Is Death - Jin reunites with the gang. Sawyer's uninhibited glee showed us better than anything else he was a changed person.

9. Tie, Some Like It Hoth/Follow The Leader - Miles and Hurley discuss their different methods of talking to the dead/Chang gives Hurley an impromptu current events quiz.

8. The Variable - Faraday is killed by his mother.

7. LaFleur - Stuck in the early days of the Dharma Initiative, Sawyer walks out to meet Hostile Richard Alpert and surprises him with unexpected information.

6. 316 - The Oceanic 6 (sans Aaron), plus Ben and Lapidus, reunite on a new flight. They nervously eye each other--they have a good idea what's about to happen.

5. He's Our You - Sayid figures out his purpose and shoots young Ben.

4. The Incident - We finally meet Jacob.

3. The Life And Death Of Jeremy Bentham - Ben stops Locke from committing suicide--and then murders him.

2. Jughead - Locke marches into the Others' camp demanding to see Richard. The hothead who wants to kill him turns out to be Charles Widmore--and another piece of the puzzle falls into place.

1. Dead Is Dead - Ben meets Smokey. First he's shown his past failings and when the smoke clears, there's his beloved daughter, Alex. He apologizes, but she'll have none of it. Instead the reunion gets ugly as she slams him against the wall and threatens to destroy him.


A few notes:

Jack and Kate, arguably the two leads, barely figure in my top ten.

In almost every episode, Hurley or Sawyer or Miles say something funny. The tie at #9 are my two biggest laughs of the seasons.

For #8, it's not the shooting so much, which we could feel was coming, as who shot Faraday. And it actually gets better in retrospect, when you realize how tragic it makes everything Faraday's mother did up to that point.

On the other hand, my top pick seems less powerful in restrospect, if certain indications from the finale are correct. If it's just Smokey-Alex telling Ben to listen to Smokey-Locke, it's not as big a deal. (However, this may not be the case, as I will try to explain some time next week.)

3 Comments:

Anonymous Lawrence King said...

I don't rank your # 1 so high. And Chang's quizzing of Hurley I would rank way up near the top.

Here are two more that really affected me a lot at the time:

1. "Promise me you'll never ask what happened to Aaron." Chilling. For a month after that, I continued to think of numerous horrific explanations. (I didn't consider them likely -- the most likely explanation in my mind turned out to be the right one -- but I was worried.)

2. "A twelve-year-old Benjamin Linus just brought me a chicken sandwich. How do you think I'm doing?" The whole time travel story reminded me of Faulkner's As I Lay Dying: the story is on one level utterly riduculous, but since we see it through the eyes of people who are so emotionally invested, the silliness never becomes conscious. Neither Sayid nor Sawyer found this line funny at all, and in fact it wasn't funnny... which is what makes it sort of funny.

4:04 PM, May 20, 2009  
Blogger LAGuy said...

The appearance of young Benjamin Linus with the sandwich came close to making my list.

4:26 PM, May 20, 2009  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Jack And Kate Plus 8.

11:26 AM, May 23, 2009  

Post a Comment

<< Home

web page hit counter