The Jin Lives Rant

Hey you, have a look at this a second.



What an amazing death scene, eh? Action. Drama. Tragedy. It’s got it all. It’s probably one of Lost’s finest moments and a heck of a way to kill off one of the main characters.

What’s that, you say? Jin didn’t die?

Get outta here! Don’t be a dick! Course he did! Weren’t you watching?

Huh? What’s that? Take a look at. . .?



Oh.

I see.

He made it. Jin managed to. . . get off the exploding freighter and. . . drift back to the Island. So, I guess, Jin’s not dead after all? Cause for celebration then?

Like fuck it is. What a crock of shit. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I do like Jin and all, but there’s no way he got back to that Island. I don’t care that he once managed to get off an exploding raft. That was OK. We briefly saw him dive off that piece of crap just before it went up. That’s not the case here. Here he was flapping his fucking arms around right on the deck when the thing went ka-boom.

Oh sure, the sequence cut away for a moment to show Michael talking with Christian Shephard, so some might argue that Jin jumped overboard whilst we weren’t looking. You’ll say, Hey AC, don’t be such a fucking know-it-all asshole. You didn’t see what Jin did! You didn’t see him dive off the freighter! You didn’t get to watch Jin right up until the last second so shut your Comet mouth!

‘Tis true. I didn’t get to see the whole thing. But I know someone who did.



That’s not the look of a woman that thinks Jin might have a done quick sprint to the side and high dived into the water before the enormous explosion destroyed everything and dragged The Freighter wreckage to salty depths. That’s not the look of a woman that thinks her husband might have made it. She never took her eyes off what was happening and she saw Jin die, for God’s sake!

Hence:



And there then followed a grudge that lasted for years where Sun turned against her own father and plotted the murder of Benjamin Linus. She was serious and she was sure. (That she suddenly became convinced she was wrong is down to the writer’s betraying the moment we already witnessed. We can file it under the same bullshit as Faraday’s ludicrous ‘explanation’ that the blast must have thrown Jin clear. Sure it did. That’s what explosions do. They just throw people clear. They don’t turn people into charred fragments in a searing 700 degree fireball – they’re like a stiff wind lifting people away into the air like leaves on a breeze!)

No? Not buying it? Still think Jin could have made it? Fine. Great. He survived the explosion. Terrific. How did he get to the Island?



Now we know that, when the Island disappeared, there was a ‘radius’ that you needed to be inside. For argument’s sake we could therefore give this incident leeway and suggest that the radius was large enough to ‘capture’ Jin – only we’ve got various pieces of evidence that suggest otherwise.

Firstly, The Freighter was not within this radius. We know this because Sawyer and Juliet were on the beach and were looking at the black plume of smoke (that was fucking miles away) of The Freighter. Then the Island moved and, hey presto, the black plume of smoke was gone. Therefore we know for a fact that The Freighter wreckage did not move with the Island and was therefore not in the vicinity of the ‘radius’.

Faraday and his zodiac raft were, mind.



Faraday explained that he was headed towards The Freighter when he saw it blow up. So he turned around and headed back to the Island. Let’s be clear on that. Faraday wasn’t even at The Freighter, and then he turned around and headed back to the Island in a motor boat to get within the disappearance radius of the Island.

Jin might be a fast swimmer. He could have been the fastest swimmer in the world. He’s still not making that kind of distance. I mean, to be fair, even a helicopter didn’t make it!



See, Frank departed The Freighter in the helicopter. And sure, he may have circled around a little bit surveying the wreckage but the whole issue was that they didn’t have much fuel. Frank wasn’t for fucking about – he was heading back to the Island as fast as he could to get to some solid land because the helicopter was airborne on nothing but fumes.

And he didn’t make it!

The Island disappeared and the helicopter didn’t make it to the bright white disappearance radius. Get that: The helicopter didn’t even make it!

Can Jin swim faster than a helicopter? No.

Should Jin have made it to the disappearance radius of the Island? No.

Is this bullshit?


Yes.

That the Lost creators tried to make us swallow this bullshit by sweetening it all up to make us think it was chocolate cake is perhaps the most reprehensible part of the whole fiasco. Because the revelation that Jin was alive arrived at the same time as we were meeting Young Rousseau and the long-awaited French team! One of the most exciting and eagerly-awaited moments in Lost mythology smacked us about the face to make us forget about the rotten bitter taste of CHEATING and FRAUDULENCE we had been subjected to.

Probably they’ll say that Jin didn’t die because he still has “work to do”, like Michael did. Yeah, well, whatever. That still doesn’t explain how Jin managed to swim like a fucking torpedo to make it to the Island disappearance radius, does it? Just because he’s a fisherman it doesn’t mean he can swim like a shark shout out of a cannon, does it!?



No, it doesn’t.

They break our hearts. . . and then they take it all back.

Next thing you’ll tell me that Charlie’s not really dead.



Oh for fuck’s sake. . .

16 comments:

Corellian said...

HEuaHEuahuh, fucking awesome. Laughed my lungs out...

Anonymous said...

I do believe that he had time to make it off. The last scene where we actually see Jin is in the second to last picture of your rant. Notice how close the heli is to the freighter. When we see the freigher blow, it is from the heli's POV, which is now way above. It would take quite a while for the heli to reach that height from where it was when we last saw Jin.
Now, if you were Jin and knew that the boat was about to blow and that the heli was not coming back, what would you do? Run, jump, and swim like hell.
Now, for the radius. Imagine a snow globe over the island. Sure, it is pretty convienient that it had to of ended just before the freighter for Jin to have been within it because, as you state above, Jin is not a cannon shark (great visual by the way). But, the heli could have just been to high to be in the "snow globe" so it can't be compared to Jin in terms of closeness to the island.
That is my take on things anyway.

Anonymous said...

Your rant seems to have two points:-

1. Jin should have been barbequed when the boat blew up........... I agree with you here, there is no way he would have made it here.

2. Jin would not have made it back to the island to start time jumping..........I'm on the writers side here. Think back to when the doctor washed up on the beach in season 4. He was shown being killed by the freighties two days after his dead body was found and tossed over the side. The only conclusion we can draw here is that within a certain radius of the island Jin would have performed a mini time jump and given himself enough time to get very close to the island. Though I think it would have been even cooler if Jin was shown sittng on the beach watching the freighter blow up. This leads to all sorts of chicken and egg questions but the writers don't seem to mind them.

Anonymous said...

youre a n00b d00d, did you see the blast wave push the helicopter? that same blast wave knocked jin towards the island, havent you ever seen mission impossible 1, where tom cruise blows up the helicopter with the c4 gumstick and the blast throws him about a hundred feet forward so he lands on the train????

Corellian said...

If you take Mission Impossible as a referencial, Jin not only would be alive, but would also have stollen Jack's wallet from his pocket in the process...

Anonymous said...

hahah! he probably did

Anonymous said...

uau

Anonymous said...

Well, after I had a chance to rewatch (can't watch it at work) the video, the second to last picture in your rant is not the last time we actually see Jin. However, the argument still holds true, and we actually see him running like hell.

AngeloComet said...

As ever, my 'rants' are bound by a certain form of indifference to rigourous application of logic. In short, I don't let the idea of being wrong get in the way of a good rant. They are as much for amusement as for interrogation of the show's integrity.

I'd say BennyTN's happy-chance explanation that the 'dome' of the radius stopped just short of The Freighter and Jin swam into it is probably the one we're supposed to believe is right. (Though that would infer the bright light should have been below the chopper, like a sea of whiteness, and I don't think that's what we saw.)

The 'time-jump' idea also posited by a poster above is, given a moment's thought, quite a good angle to come at the problem, though. But I bet the writer's won't touch that time discrepancy between on-Island and off-Island with a barge pole between now and the end of the show.

The swines.

The 'Mission: Impossible' explosion dynamics explanation is, obviously, the kind of rationale "n00bs" and Scientologists would apply.

Heh.

Next week: Why Jin's grasp of the English language is utter bollocks.

Anonymous said...

Yeah AC!!!! I loved it I feel the same way there was no way he would have made it off that boat.

But if he did it does give them an opening to bring back Charlie and not have it seem unrealistic after this. But I must admit Charlie was my favorite character. Something about the skinny pale British guys that I can’t get enough of :) and while we do now have Faraday he is just no Charlie.

Alaina from Losties

Anonymous said...

If Jin is protected in the same way Micheal was then he wouldn't have died in the explosion and he would have been thrown from the explosion (with his chunk of wood i would bet) and that would be how the writers justify him being alive and making it to the island.

Unknown said...

Explosions are unpredictable. I read this book on Hiroshima once and some survivors talked about how somethings were smashed to bits and other things nearby were left untouched. And making it to the island is easily explained by the time anomalies we have witnessed. -Iluvatar

Scott Cahill said...

My thought process is that it was because they were in the air, not the water.

Scott Cahill said...

My thought process is that it was because they were in the air, not the water.

Jdubb84 said...

There is no way jin was closer to the island then the helicopter was. The fact the helicopter that was headed straight for the island didn't move with the island, jin shouldn't have either. The freighter didn't move with the island either which was why the smoke disappeared when the island moved. Maybe he swam close enough, maybe. Maybe the island only moves a small portion of things at sea level and not what's in the sky... either way, it still made no sense. Jin shouldn't have made the move, jin couldn't have made the move. Unless he had some sort of water rocket pack... there is a hole in the story that can't be ignored but with that being said, it's a tv show.. there is a gigantic blooper page with hundreds of mistakes they made in this show but it's a show so it can't be perfect. This part however, bugged me the most.

RichieGlanzer said...

This is why I'm no longer a fan of the show. Shit like this. Very good rant from a guy who makes very good rants himself.