The Tail Section

Disney IS going to be releasing LOST Season Three  - The Unexplored Edition on Blu Ray!  This is super significant for a couple of reasons.  First, for us easter egg hunters it means a new transfer which targets Blu-Ray’s more aggressive bit-rate.   Cable is around 13-15mbps vs Blu-Ray’s 40mbps.  Even though its very fine, anybody who has done intensive easter egg hunting through a raw Transport Stream captured from a cable box knows that there is ‘digital grain’ in the picture.  So a Blu-Ray transfer IS going to have better quality.  Also the native resolution of Blu-Ray is 1920×1080(p) vs 1280×720(p) of broadcast HD.  Bottom line,  we will be able to read Ben’s diary without hundreds of hours of image processing.  The High Def format war has just been won in my house.  (Don’t tell my Xbox 360)

As for extras, Hollywood reporter says: "Lost: The Complete Third Season — The Unexplored Experience" follows Dec. 11 on DVD and Blu-ray Disc. The 23-episode, seven-disc set comes with a one-on-one with star Matthew Fox, a featurette on "The Others," a documentary chronicling 24 hours in production and a selection of never-before-seen flashbacks. Also included are behind-the-scenes looks at 10 episodes, audio commentaries, deleted scenes and bloopers.

UPDATE! www.tvshowsondvd.com has confirmed through their sources at Disney that the Blu Ray set is NOT going to happen.

(image courtesy of http://www.tvshowsondvd.com/)

Damon and Carlton have finally opened up a little about their feelings over Spoiler Gate ‘07.  I would characterize their statements as ‘tempered’ towards a minimal display of disappointment;  nowhere near approaching the explosion of profanity that probably took place when they first got the word.

The downside, and part of what I was cautioning about, is that Disney security is trying to form a chain of custody to try to figure out where the finale got leaked.  Sure, this is probably more a study in internal process improvement, but it is also times like this where ‘how do we combat this next year’ focus groups are held and over zealous security and legal folks start flying the ‘DMCA’ flag.

ABC has been incredibly tolerant of the rampant copyright violations that we LOST fan sites commit on an average day, and why shouldn’t they be?  I mean, it is free promotion, right?  But the fact is, at any given day ABC would have to do little more than write a letter to our hosting companies and registrars and we’d be forced to remove any photos, sound clips, video files, etc, that are protected by the copyright holders.

No more tears for our good friend Dominic Monaghan.  Not only is he negotiating to host a nature show, which I think is terrific, but he is hard at work in my other passion: the horror film industry.  And how coincidental is it that he just happens to be working with Angus Scrimm, star of my all time favorite horror film ‘Phantasm.’

Dom co-stars as a legendary grave robber named Arthur Blake in "I Sell the Dead."  The film marks the feature debut of Writer/Director Glenn McQuaid.  Plot wise it goes something like this:

Body Snatchers Arthur Blake and Willie Grimes have pillaged their last grave. With just five hours before Arthur follows Willie to the chopping block, he recounts his life story to Fr Francis Duffy. It soon becomes clear that Blake and Grimes were no ordinary grave robbers. And through his stories the priest learns that not all corpses are equal.

A new theory is beginning to arise concerning the identity of the mysterious Mr. or Mrs. Lantham/Latham.  A poster at the pearl did some pretty inventive detective work and confirmed that the casket was far too small for an adult.  To see their study visit this link.

I will say in challenging their reading that i held my own hand down to see what my relaxed span was and my span was nearly 7 inches.   I’m a mere 5′5"  (Yeah, I’m short… get over it) and Matthew Fox is 6′2", I’m guessing his span could be as wide as 8" easily, which would make the casket around 7′4" wide.   But I wasn’t going to just leave it to the double blind, so I tried another method to see if I came anywhere near their measurements.

click for full size

I was very conservative with this operation.  Matthew Fox is 6′2,  I took as upright a picture of Fox as I could find, cropped at the feet a bit to allow for around an inch of heel, and tried to determine where the top of the casket lines up with Matthew’s body as he is standing next to it.  You can tell it is somewhere around the middle of his abdomen, which would be the four foot mark, but I chose to aim low and went with his belt line, which according to my Fox-o-meter is about 3.5 feet.  So using that as the distance from the floor to the top of the casket, I developed a measuring stick and ran it along the edge of the coffin.  Allowing for even a bit of perspective error, the coffin comes in at around five feet from tip to tip. 

If we go with the mid-riff, we’re still looking at six feet max and with liner, you have an effective carcass storage area of somewhere around 5′8.

Looking at the height of some of the suspects:  Michael Emerson is 5′8" making Ben a very good possibility going with the max measurements.   Harold Perrineau is 5′10, which would be pushing it with either estimate.

Again, though, the LOST producers, prop masters, writers, editors, etc, are going to make mistakes which we are not intended to catch.  So does work like this really get us closer to the truth, or just prove how insanely obsessed we are with the most minute details?

Of the many lingering questions from the season finale, the one that seems to be generating the most hotly debated conclusions is "Who is in the casket?"  Our best clue is in the few shots of the wrinkled obit Jack tore from the newspaper.  Fans from all over the LOST fan community have managed to translate most of the text.  It is so wide spread at this point, I can’t begin to guess who to credit for deciphering the text other than to say it was a communal effort.  The complete text reads:

The body of John Lantham of New York was found shortly after 4 am in the 4300 block of Grand Avenue. Ted Worden, a doorman at the Tower Lofts complex, heard loud noises coming from the victim’s loft. Concerned for tenants’ safety, he entered the loft and found the body hanging from a beam in the living room. According to Jaime Ortiz, a police spokesman, the incident was deemed a suicide after medical tests. Latham is survived by one teenaged son. Memorial services will be held at the Hoffs-Drawlar Funeral Home tomorrow evening."

It is interesting that the victim’s name is spelled ‘Lantham’ in the beginning and ‘Latham’ later.  Is this an oversight, or is there a purpose behind this?  Many of you are assuming it is "John Latham" since he is an artist who was involved in creating a concept called ‘Flat-Time.’  You can see an archive of his actual website here.

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Our good friend Jeff "Doc" Jensen has published his final immersion into all that ranges from enlightening to the absurd.  Many of you, particularly those of you who engaged me pitched denial-saturated battle over whether or not Christian is alive, will be very displeased to know that Jeff is a little more open to the possibility:

1. IN THE FUTURE, WILL JACK’S DAD BE ALIVE?

Why I’m intrigued: Because Jack’s Dad should be dead! But in the flash forward, Jack referred to the unseen Christian Shepherd in the present tense.

Check out the whole thing here!

The good news is you can now Pre Order Lost Season Three from Amazon, the bad news is you won’t get it until December 11th!

The set is subtitled ‘The Unexplored Edition.’  So far only a few details have been released concerning the disk.  Keep an eye on  Amazon’s LOST - The Unexplored Edition page for updates on what the set will entail.

(Image from TVShowsOnDVD.com)

Everyone is on break now, getting some much deserved rest, but that doesn’t stop the rumor mill from cranking.  Here are some tidbits that came our way over the Memorial Day weekend.  Apologies to those of you who kvetched that I wasn’t updating enough.

Also within the next day or so I’ll be rolling out some design changes targeted at making the ads a little less obtrusive, while keeping the advertisers happy.

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So one big question from the finale is this:  is Christian Shephard alive?  I got the answer from my local pharmacy,  if Jack’s prescriptions were from Christian’s pad, there is no way in heck that they would be filled if he were dead.  Now it is possibly his original prescription was forged from another doctor, but if it came through on Christian’s pad, it simply would not be filled because deceased doctors are immediately removed from the database to protect against the kind of misappropriation of meds that Jack was attempting.

The only way Christian would be alive is if Kate, Jack, and whoever else got off the island came out in an alternate time line. 

Now, I’m sure this will raise the ire of some of you, particularly those who despise the alternate time line theories, but there are more indications than just Christian possibly being alive.  Kate’s comment that "he" would be wondering where she was.  That is purposeful ‘LOST’ ambiguity at its best.  We are absolutely supposed to be wondering who ‘he’ is for the next eight months, and it isn’t because ‘he’ is Sawyer.

The journal is without a doubt the equivalent of the Blast Door map as far as obsession is concerned, even if it doesn’t contain as much interesting information.  What was Ben writing about in that journal.  It has been my obsession for the last 4-5 hours.  And I think (THINK) I have at least 90% of it worked out.  It’s, unfortunately, not very exciting.  For those interested in how I did it…

I took all 151 frame that the journal appeared in and experiment with overlaying them.  Essentially looking for various combinations where parts of words might be clearer on one frame than another.  All enlargement was down with a program called PhotoZoom Pro.  Since some of the composites were made only to solve a single word, I didn’t keep every last one.  Foolish because in retrospect I could have made a nice mosaic.  But hey, time is on our side.  We have nine months to worry about this!  Here are some examples of the various image processing ploys to extract the text.  Click to enlarge.

And Now:  My shot at Ben’s Journal

_/12 An important meeting tonight with (R) and (M) regarding the developing situation. We are now on day 3 of our exodus from the village and I am, I fear, at the limit of my tactical resources. (T)’s agenda, which I don’t question, is however a narrow and difficult one, and I could well wish we’d had time to prepare, not merely for the military strike, but for a surveillance campaign of the beach. We are short on provisions (seasonal) and, more importantly, the long-awaited re-supply of camp gear having been missed (and so necessary!) _____ _____ _____ just as our water supply ____ ___ have been cut off. We look like a very sad sort of gypsy army.