Episode 012: 1996 to 1999

Back to a little more normalcy in Episode 012.  Michael says good-bye to Walt, Locke moves to a rural commune after Helen leaves him, Charlie saves Nadia from being robbed, Miles visits his dying mother, and Desmond is discharged from the army.  Charlie and Liam decide to go forward with Driveshaft, Jin gets a job at a hotel while Sun tries to find a husband.  And we finish out the episode with Sawyer trying to con a family in the same manner that Anthony Cooper conned his parents, but leaving upon discovering they have a child.

Episode 011: 1995 to 1996

So, Episode 011 ended up more focused than the previous episode, with us focusing on four particular stories.  First, we have Sayid helping Nadia escape from where she was being held captive, we see Michael get hit by a car and continue the downward spiral known as his life, and speaking of downward spirals, Locke ruins his relationship with Helen to help his father (who stole his kidney, remember?), and then...things get interesting.

Now, when Desmond went through his life, he had no knowledge of the island until he landed on it.  And yet, when he became unstuck in time, he flashed back and forth between 1996 and 2004.  So while he's experiencing these events in 1996, he didn't experience them when he first lived through 1996, only when he became unstuck in time.  This kind of presented an interesting dilemma, because these events didn't originally happen in 1996, and yet, they did happen, because Penny knew to wait for Desmond's call in 2004 after he told her in 1996.  With the rest of the show, any sort of travel through time has always been part of the natural order of things.  The time travel back to the 1970s, that always happened, so there was nothing unexpected about it.  But Desmond going back to 1996, that was unique, because it didn't always happen, it was very unexpected.  But that was one of the things that made Desmond special.

Anyways, back to the point, Desmond's time flashes finish up this episode, even though they didn't originally happen, but they did still take place in 1996.  It's a little confusing, but then again, it's LOST, so what do you expect.

Episode 010: 1992 to 1995

Lots of stuff going on in Episode 010.  We start off on a high note with Ben killing his father and the rest of the Dharma Initiative in the Purge, then follow that up with Hurley's father abandoning him, then Ben banishing Charles from the island.  Very uplifting stuff.  We then see Desmond join a monastery, and Daniel Faraday graduate from Oxford.  Then there's an interesting scene where Desmond and Penny first meet.  If you remember this scene, at the time it was intertwined with Desmond and everyone finding the parachutist, believing it to be Penny.  Since there was dialogue from the flashback going on throughout the scene, I had to fade to black a couple of times since the present day stuff goes later in the timeline.  Anyways, we then see Michael for the first time, crib shopping for Walt, Sayid putting his torturer skills to good use, and we start our storyline with John Locke and his father, that ultimately concludes the episode when his father takes John's kidney and leaves.

Audio Problems

So, I went to post Episode 010, and I loaded up the video to do my quick recap, and realized there was no audio!  Oops.  So I'll have to re-encode/re-upload tomorrow, which means no episodes today.  Sorry about that.

Quick side note, though, I had a few people ask me why the Christmas scene with Charlie and Liam when Charlie gets the piano as a kid wasn't on the last episode.  That scene was actually a dream sequence, not a flashback.  After Charlie and Liam started opening presents, Charlie's mother gave him the piano, then he looked back and Liam was grown-up, then Charlie was grown up, then he was playing the piano, then he was in the ocean, then the piano was floating away, and he hear Aaron crying, then he woke up.  So, since it's a dream sequence, it'll show up when Charlie has the dream on the island.

Quick side note #2, now that I'm thinking about it.  I included Episode 010 on the first torrent, so I'll just have to include the corrected version on the second torrent, since I've already got some people downloading it to act as seeders.

More to come tomorrow.

Episode 009: 1978 to 1991

With Episode 009, we're switching gears a bit.  Things are going to get a little more disorganized, as we start going through most of the flashbacks in the show.  We start with Sayid as a child, and move through the years, seeing Jack, Mr. Eko, and Kate as children.  We also have our timeflash into 1988, where our Losties encounter a younger, and pregnant Danielle Rousseau, who gives birth to Alex, whom Ben subsequently kidnaps.  The episode concludes with Sayid learning how to torture during the Gulf War.

Episode 008: 1977 (Day 4)

Episode 008, our last look at the Dharma Initiative in the 1970s.  With Daniel Faraday dead, Jack follows through with his play to detonate a hydrogen bomb in the electromagnetic pocket where the Swan is being built.  Sayid gets shot, poor Phil is impaled, Juliet falls down the drill shaft, and the episode ends with the Incident occurring.  This is a long episode, to accommodate the rest of our time with the Losties in 1977.

Episode 007: 1977 (Day 3 to Day 4)

We're almost there.  Episode 007 shows us the rest of Day 3 and takes into Day 4, the day of The Incident.  Hurley is working on a rewrite of The Empire Strikes Back, because Ewoks suck, dude.  Faraday returns to the island with a purpose in mind, but instead ends up with an unfortunate run-in with his mother, and Sawyer  throws out his first recommendation that they commandeer a submarine.

Episode 006: 1977 (Day 2 to Day 3)

We continue our stretch of Dharma-centric episodes with Episode 006, which starts things off with Ben being shot by Sayid, Miles asking to be shot by Hurley, and Miles picking up a dead body after a filling shot through the guy's head.  There is also Ben being taken to the Temple by Richard, and we wrap things up with "That douche is my dad."

Episode 005: 1977 (Day 1 to Day 2)

In Episode 005 we have our second full Dharma Initiative-centric episode, that starts with the on-island Losties (Sawyer, Juliet, Jin and Miles) meeting up with the Ajira Losties (Jack, Kate, Hurley, and Sayid).  We see Sayid get captured and treated as Hostile, interrogated, and ultimately set free by a young Ben Linus.

Episode 004: 1974 to 1977 (Day 1)

We start Episode 004 with the final time flash that lands everyone in 1974, where they encounter the Dharma Initiative.  In between 1974 and our first glimpses of 1977, we see Sawyer around the time of his parents' death.  The episode concludes with Jack, Kate, and Hurley waking up on the island after taking Ajira 316 to get back to the island.

Episode 003: 1954 to 1972

In episode 003, we play out the rest of the time flash in 1954, then we go on to see Locke born in 1956, then visited as a child by Richard.  We also see Ben born, as his mother dies, and eventually ends up on an island.  The ending to this episode is a little anti-climactic, with Ben meeting Richard in the jungle, but it was done to create a bit of a bookend for the next episode.

Episode 002: 1867 to 1954

Apologies for not getting this up earlier.  In episode 002, we pick up with Richard Alpert in 'Ab Aeterno' (Sorry if the clips from 'Ab Aeterno' look a little more pixelated than the rest of the episode, it didn't encode as well as I would have liked).  In between his time in prison and crashing on the island, we see Jacob's conversation with the Man in Black before the Black Rock arrives.  The episode concludes with another time flash, when everyone flashed to 1954, with Locke reuniting with Sawyer, Juliet & Co.