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Perception, Illusion, and Bruce Willis

In all the movies and shows I've ever watched, my biggest holy shit moment came at the end of the Sixth Sense. I was lucky enough to see that movie without knowing the ending, and I'll never forget the shivers that shot down my spine during the big reveal. Even cooler, they spent the next minute or so going back to show me just how many clues I'd missed along the way - clues that seemed so obvious at the end, but not so obvious as the story was told.

LOST's ending is going to be exactly this way. There's going to be one big huge crazy no-fucking-way reveal, and when it comes it's going to make time travel look like a secondary sub-plot. Half the viewers will act cataclysmically pissed off, but to the other half I think it will be the most ingenious thing they've ever seen.

As I watch LOST, I look for these clues. I think back to my seat in the movie theater during the Sixth Sense, and I'm trying not to get fooled again. The producers and writers have strewn clues everywhere... all over the show. But they pepper these clues with red herrings, songs, book titles, and comedic anagrams to the point where we just chuckle and start to disregard them. Kind of like the word "Illusion" on the back of the boat at the dock scene this episode (and last episode). We've seen this dock scene three times already, and each time with suddenly different dialogue, just as the wound on Ben's chest suddenly has a different position, just as the picture frames changed in Miles' flashback and a whole host of other stuff.

Humor me for a minute, and watch Kate and Aaron in the supermarket. She asks where the juice boxes are, gets distracted by Jack's call, and then loses Aaron. Watch the look the stockboy gives her when she tells him she lost her son: as he says "excuse me" his facial expressions register confusion, not concern for someone who just walked by with a little blonde boy in tow. Rewind to when Kate first asks the question, and the stockboy never even looks at Aaron. In fact, no one looks at Aaron in the supermarket at all, except for Kate. As she frantically runs through the aisles the next scene is shown, not surprisingly, in the store's giant mirror.

Suddenly Kate sees Aaron again, this time seemingly being led away by Claire. We know Claire is supposed to raise Aaron, and the island is showing Kate this. It's slapping her in the face with the fact that she's living a lie. It leads Kate back to Cassidy's house, where Clementine answers the door. "Hi Auntie Kate!", she says. She doesn't say hi to Aaron. She doesn't even look at Aaron. Strange too, because Aaron apparently rang the bell.

Later on, Kate gives Carole a picture of Aaron on a tire swing. Immediately she asks "Where is he?" Kate answers her question with "two doors down", but Carole continues to stare at the photo. Where is he indeed.

Okay, let me back up a minute. Am I saying that I believe Aaron's nothing more than a figment of Kate's imagination, and that he never existed at all? Nope. Aaron is as real as reality gets - on LOST, anyway. There are lots of people who see and interact with Aaron - Cassidy for one. But I am saying this: Cassidy's words this episode were all about how Kate needed Aaron, instead of the other way around. The minute Kate began wondering if Aaron wouldn't be better off without her, he suddenly and instantaneously disappeared.

Yes, I know they used the whole curly blonde woman scene as a vehicle to influence Kate's decision to leave Aaron with grandma. The scene where she said goodbye to Aaron was also very touching. But what if perception plays more of a part in every single character's story than most of us are really, truly looking into? What if every time we're seeing something, we're only seeing it from the perspective of the person or people involved in that scene at the time?

S2E1 - Swan Hatch. Desmond's record player, the lamps, the shelves - it all looks one particular way. An episode later Desmond storms off into the jungle and the 815er's inhabit the Swan... and suddenly all these things have a subtly different look to them. What if these things never changed at all, but the way people saw them did? Sayid saw a bullet hole in the left side of Ben's chest. Jin saw it in the right side. And when Sawyer and Kate take Ben out of the van together, the wound is now lower down, much closer to his abdomen. Is this their own vision of where the wound is? Or am I batshit crazy?

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