Lost: OMGWTF POLAR BEAR
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I want to see more about why she did what she did. Was she just that selfish or was there something else going on?
Sadly, I'd kinda tend toward "just that selfish," or maybe just that thoughtless. Despite recent shifts in the notions of what parenting is and who a father is to his kids, there's still a pretty large, many generations old, unspoken cultural assumption that mom is the parent who matters.
I have an acquaintance who has bent over backward to maintain daily contact with his daughter, at first in the face of his ex's baffled but patient indulgence and over the last two years in the face of her very thinly veiled hostility. She's married again, so their daughter has a father figure living at home ("at home" being mom's home, not dad's, despite 50/50 physical custody), so why doesn't he regard this as an opportunity to run off and be free? Just like Bitch!Babymama, she sees his insistence on having a relationship with his kid as overinvolved and a little selfish. Thank God she hasn't run off to Amsterdam yet, but she would if a job opportunity presented, and she'd be sincerely morally outraged if he objected.
And when I was gossiping and bemoaning Dad!Friend's situation with another friend, she shrugged and rattled off the stories of three other decent, trying-to-do-the-right-thing guys she knows in similar or worse situations.
I really wish there was some big dark secret behind the Amsterdam/Italy/Bryan/adoption/no-cards-ever thing, but it was probably just unspoken assumptions and a belief that she was truly acting in Walt's best interests. Which is shitty and thoughtless in a banal everyday regular people doing well-intentioned harm to each other way that makes me all kinds of happy as a storytelling consumer, however miserable it makes me as a Michael sympathizer.
And it does sound like, given her lack of interest in marrying, she was already making sure to maintain a distance and keeping herself as the "real parent" even while they were together.
OMG! LOSTZILLA!!! (With thanks to minaloush at TwoP.)
Actually, I'm glad she died, because if anyone ever deserved to die, it was her.
I agree, but I'm usually down on overly selfish people. That said, they wrote her in such a way that she really deserved a waxed moustache to twirl. I'm not blaming Fury, because many of the other characters from the flashbacks have been a bit cardboard, too.
I really wish there was some big dark secret behind the Amsterdam/Italy/Bryan/adoption/no-cards-ever thing, but it was probably just unspoken assumptions and a belief that she was truly acting in Walt's best interests. Which is shitty and thoughtless in a banal everyday regular people doing well-intentioned harm to each other way that makes me all kinds of happy as a storytelling consumer, however miserable it makes me as a Michael sympathizer.
Yeah, I don't think there's anything big. I maybe even think they used "lawyer" as shorthand for self-serving and ambitious, to play it against "artist/construction worker" with all its potential sensitive+hard-working-salt-of-the-earth shorthand.
Yeah, I don't think there's anything big. I maybe even think they used "lawyer" as shorthand for self-serving and ambitious, to play it against "artist/construction worker" with all its potential sensitive+hard-working-salt-of-the-earth shorthand.
Yeah, though I did like that they put in the lines about 'support us in the manner that we hope to become accustomed to' and the fact he wasn't working at all to indicate that maybe she had some reasons why she was viewing him as useless baggage from her past. I really liked this episode for the way it had people being flawed in a real-life way. As someone said above about a real life version of this, she was probably baffled that he kept holding on instead of taking the opportunity to be free.
The other thing the box of letters pointed out is that people in a plane crash in which the plane is ripped in two are apparently more likely to end up with their luggage than people who land at an airport.
I have a new theory about the island.
1) In this episode Locke told Walt to picture the knife and tree in his mind's eye.
2) In White Rabbit, Locke told Jack that he looked into the eye of the island.
3) Claire's dream about the crib happened during sleep, but she was seeing it in her mind.
4) Once in this episode and once in the Pilot something that Walt saw in pictures (polar bear, bird) caused it's presence to be known. Seeing something creates a memory, which is also a picture in your head (mind's eye).
Is this a coincidence? Maybe, but a possibility is that the island and everything on it (besides the people) is just a fabrication created in their minds. It mind help explain all the "coincidences".
I am kind of thinking, if Michael had any sense and any friends who are lawyers, he had some serious points in his favor, no? I mean, they weren't married, so he probably can't get alimony even if he claims it was a common-law marriage (although he supported her through school). But if he's the stay-at-home dad, and the mom wants to move to a
foreign country?
I bet that he had at least an outside chance of (a) making her not move or (b) paying for him to move too, or at least paying for his airfare (considering the kid can't fly alone).
Even if there isn't a court order of custody in place already, and even if we presume that the mom will end up with primary physical custody of the kid, the dad is still likely to get visitation rights, and she is interfering with those rights if she moves a continent away.
The moral of this story is, Michael is actually a lot more malleable than he thinks he is, since his ex steamrolled him so neatly. Especially with the adoption situation: he gave in because she engineered a situation he didn't think he could win, but if he'd been stubborn, there is no reason why he would have been required to sever parental rights. Like, men who murder their wives don't get their parental rights automatically severed; Michael's only crime is being a clueless and deeply klutzy pushover.
Maybe, but a possibility is that the island and everything on it (besides the people) is just a fabrication created in their minds. It mind help explain all the "coincidences".
A mass hallucination? (If the island weren't, well, lost I'd say "a conspiracy of cartographers"?)
I dunno. I kind of think that it's one thing or the other - either the island is real and things are happening, or none of it's real and it's just someone's fever dream. I lean toward the first.
I do think that, as we've tossed around all along, some of the things that are
happening
are generated by the mind - Walt's in particular, perhaps, but not just his. And once created, some of those things are real though possibly not others. But I think that's not what you're getting at.
