Underpants On The Outside

Lost has a habit of setting up dozens of mind-boggling mysteries and solving NONE of them. My friend Jordan, whose use of imagery is nothing short of genius, describes the experience of watching the show as frustrating as “Dry Humping a Supermodel”.

This week’s Supermodel will be the healing powers of… sand or something.

Back in season one, my favorite character was John Locke, played by Terry O’Quinn. He knew how to throw knives, make traps, and he even made a dog whistle once. But he also had a very eerie calm about him bordering on creepy, because he insisted that miracles happened on the island. It looked like he was going to turn the island into Jonestown 2: South Pacific, but then, in one of the best episodes, we found out that Locke was a paraplegic until he woke up on an island in the middle of fiery plane wreckage and could wiggle his toes. You’d think that’d be pretty awesome. If I were in his position I’d be playing coconut soccer every waking minute of the day. Instead he kept it a secret and didn’t even do a fist-pump.

This is just the type of thing these supermodel posts are about. When we found out that Locke was a healed paraplegic, me and my roommate were stunned; absolutely hooked. How’d that happen??? Back then we were thrilled to be dry-humping a supermodel. We were brimming with optimism and we firmly believed that we’d be hitting it for real sooner or later.

Since then, we haven’t even found out how Locke got paralyzed in the first place. That’s like dry-humping someone in a denim jumpsuit. On top of that, we’ve seen so much of Locke running around the island that we take it for granted; we’ve forgotten that it’s pretty fucking amazing when a paraplegic walks. We had actually put that supermodel behind us. We had to cut her out of photographs and delete her from our phone, but we had finally stopped getting drunk and telling our buddies how terrible she was.

Then, like all bad exes, she called us out of the blue.

This week’s episode was about Bernard and Rose, an elderly interracial married couple who are like the kindly old neighbors on eighties sitcoms, or really, like old people in general: useful for comic relief and harmless as long as they aren’t behind the wheel of a car.

Well, this week we find out that Rose and Bernard were about as boring before the island as they are on the island. The episode doesn’t get good until, in flashback, Bernard proposes to Rose and she tells him she’s dying. Women: you ask them a simple yes/no question, and they gotta talk about themselves. Turns out Rose has cancer; bummer.

Of course, modern medicine has failed to heal her, so Bernard takes her to a faith healer in Australia, which costs him ten thousand bucks. The faith healer does a good impression of a Vulcan mindmeld, holds it for all of fifteen seconds, and tells Rose he can’t heal her. Really? That’s how you earn ten thousand dollars? I could do that. “You say you have a broken leg? Let me hold my hands in front of your face…. Nope. Can’t heal you. Next! So, you say you have the measles?” The only afflictions that guy could have cured were itches and unpopped pimples.

I don’t want to do a full episode recap; but I bet you can guess where this is going. The island healed her! We meet the Supermodel for coffee, just to catch up. She looks good. She tells us that we look good too, and the pit of our stomach drops out because we know that a half hour from now we’ll be mercilessly ramming ourselves into her button-fly.

Rose tells Bernard that she could always feel her cancer, but not anymore. Bernard thought the faith healer had saved her, but she told the guy to lie to Bernard so Bernard wouldn’t worry. It will probably take Bernard a couple days to realize he got scammed out of ten large, but if he thinks that’s bad, I’m sitting here waiting for the supermodel to leave so I can jerk off. I don’t know which is worse.

At the end of the episode, Rose and Locke meet on a secluded part of the beach. Locke was stabbed in the leg a few episodes ago, so he’s wandering around on crutches, which has really gotta suck when half of your island is sand. Unfortunately it’s going to be four weeks until he’s healed. Or is it? Rose tells him that they both know it won’t take that long. Rose remembers Locke from the plane, and she remembers that he was in a wheelchair. So he’s been healed, she’s been healed, but if you think they’re going to so much as high-five, guess again.

As for me, I’m once again wondering what the hell is going on as I try to glue the supermodel’s picture back into my photographs.

***It’s been a long time, but the Lost posts are back! I didn’t think anyone was reading these things, but I got an email from a guy named John requesting their return, and I’m here for you guys. His email domain was from Michigan State so… go Spartans. If you enjoy these, let me know and I’ll keep writing ‘em.

I’m going to focus less on episode recaps though, because Lost episodes involve too many story lines and everything gets confusing. Instead, I’ll focus on beating this supermodel joke into the ground. Don’t get too comfortable though, Lost has a really effed up schedule for airing their new episodes. I think it’s two or three weeks before the next one.