5x09: Namaste - Initial Reaction

Coming to you live on location from Nature’s Classroom - Greetings from Colebrook, CT!

I am here with my school’s 6th graders on the first day of our four-day trip, and it’s really effin’ cold. I’m typing this up on my laptop at the moment without an internet connection; I need to find a fellow teacher who has a laptop with Wifi access, but for now, I’m saving this on my flash drive so I can post it here for you when I get a few minutes of valuable interwebs time. (EDIT: And that time came right now, on Friday morning.)
Considering that I’ve only watched our latest episode, “Namaste,” once, and it was at 1am last night, this will only be my initial reaction to it. As I think I mentioned in a previous post, I may not get to the recap until after our next latest episode, “He’s Our You,” which is airing in just two nights. Although I’m away, I plan to watch that episode here at NC with some Lostie friends on Thursday, when it is available on ABC.com (Wednesday is out of the question, since there is no cable up here).
So, let’s get to it!

First of all, nice opening crash sequence! I loved the shot of the runway and the landing of Ajira 316. So they were building a runway, which begs the question: did the Others, and Juliet specifically, really know they were going to need a runway? For this moment? How much do/did they know? How much did what they’ve done in the 1970s (and what we’re seeing happen currently on the show) possibly change the future?

I can’t get enough of the Dharma Initiative. More, more, more. So I loved this episode for that reason – seeing Marvin Candle interview Jack, the hustle and bustle of the place; seeing it alive and kicking before its inevitable downfall is always fascinating to me.

How ‘bout that standoff between Juliet and Kate? Juliet rescued her, but I think only as a challenge. You could tell in the scene when Sawyer finally tells her that Kate, Hurley, and Jack have returned that she is irked and worried, to say the least, that Kate is back on Sawyer’s radar. So that scene in the recruitment center was Juliet’s way of throwing down the gauntlet to Kate.

We saw Radzinsky! At long last, Radzinsky, in all of his obnoxious, Paul Giamatti-like anger appears in the flesh. We’ve been told that he is responsible for the blast door map in the Swan, and now we know that he is at least partly responsible for the design of the Swan itself, as he is building a model of it in the Flame station, which obviously was built before the Swan. Was it intended for what we saw it used for, though, or was the Swan originally being used for something else? I keep coming back to the one section of the Swan that seemed hastily “built,” where concrete seemed to have been haphazardly poured over a wall (large buckets were half-covered in place on the floor with concrete, as if there wasn’t any time or thought of removing them), and was an area of high magnetism, as a key that (I think) Jack had around his neck was pulled toward the wall as he walked past it. Certainly, that couldn’t have been planned that way; so what was behind that wall? Was it an entire section of the Swan that was sealed off? Was it a room? The control panel of a machine of some sort? And of course, there has been a lot of talk since “Jughead” that the hydrogen bomb of the same name was buried there, and the Swan was built around it. I still don’t think I buy that, unless maybe the Swan’s original purpose was to take the leaking nuclear energy and convert it to magnetic energy, or that the bomb somehow reacted with the island’s natural “negatively-charged matter” to produce energy. The jury is still out.
We also know that Radzinsky supposedly committed suicide, as Kelvin told Desmond when he came to the Swan. It’s anyone’s guess what brought that on…or if it was indeed a suicide.

Sawyer is feeling awfully superior to Jack in this episode, and there was something off-putting to me about that. As strange as this may sound, it just didn’t seem like Sawyer, or at least the Sawyer that we’ve been seeing this season. It came off almost like he was taunting him, and I just don’t see that in the “new” Sawyer. He seems too content to even worry about making sure Jack knows what a big man he is. Or is it simply that he feels that Jack is a threat to his relationship with Juliet, just as Juliet is threatened by Kate’s return, and he’s puffing himself up?

Sun and Frank really were the two people who left the 316 crash scene, as was widely speculated, but because Sun was chasing after Ben, and Frank was chasing after Sun. When Sun clobbered Ben with the outrigger oar, I jumped out of my seat – I wasn’t expecting that at all! Yet again, Ben gets smacked around. Cesar, despite theories that he is an insider for Widmore or some other nefarious agent, doesn’t seem to know a lot about the island. He points out that there is a building in the distance that they should go to see, that there is another larger island across the water, and that he has some doubts about Lapidus’s story that they’ve crashed on an uncharted island. But then we see him in “316” rooting around Ben’s old Hydra station office as if he’s looking for something specific, so I still can’t get a solid theory about what he was doing on the plane. Also, Frank gives a very old-school-Jack-like speech on the beach – I’ll have to read up or go back and watch the episodes in Season 1 to try to catch Jack’s version.

And speaking of Ben… Finally, we all knew it was coming, and they did a great job all around, from the lighting to the direction to the acting, of making Ben’s first appearance with the Losties in 1977 as creepy as ever. That kid is spot-on as a young Ben. Now, what are we left to think about this? He meets Sayid, and there are no aliases or other tricks; they both introduce themselves with their real names. So did Ben really recognize adult Sayid when Oceanic 815 crashed? Or, as the big question this season seems to be, are they changing the past and therefore changing their own futures, despite Daniel’s insistence to the contrary, or did what happened really happen this way in the past? Also, Sayid had an interesting, somewhat hard-to-read reaction to young Ben. You could tell he was surprised for sure, but he also seemed curious, maybe. Will Sayid, being the pretty smart guy he is, try to change and influence Ben as a child so that he won’t grow up to be a monster as an adult?

I think that’s all I have on this one at the moment. I have not checked out any podcasts or websites for this episode, and I am actually wrapping this up without having seen last night’s episode, “He’s Our You.” (We get the kids back from the Nature’s Classroom teachers right at 9pm, just in time to miss LOST.) I plan on watching it tomorrow during the day before the Underground Railroad. (I am totally piquing your interest in NC, aren’t I?) So that’s that. I’ll continue to be out of the loop on LOST probably through this weekend as I work to catch up.
I invite you to please let me know what you’d like me to mention about “Namaste” that I forgot to that you think is important. Just post it in the comments section. Thanks!

Until next time, Namaste, and Good Luck,

~Matt

UPDATE: I watched "He's Our You" yesterday afternoon, and, well... Oh. My. God. The last scene was HUGE! I watched with David H in the Nature's Classroom dining hall, and we were both like, "What...? How...? Uh...what?" I can't wait to see it again, as well as "Namaste." I'll have to have a little mini-marathon this weekend. If I manage to stop sleeping at some point...