We will begin with a sexually repressed Japanese businessman fellow who is smuggling money from Australia. His wife is unwilling to bail him out of customs.
There is a spinal surgeon whose coffin’s gone missing.
A suspiciously friendly and affectionate interracial couple.
An equally – if not more – suspiciously friendly stewardess.
A bad-ass chick – well, her plotline is really boring. Let’s not deal with her.
A fat man who had to buy two tickets, cuz he could not fit in one seat.
And a cripple. (He took part in some homoerotic male-sensitivity enclave in Aussieland.)
* * *
If the plane does crash (or does not crash into the ocean), some of these people will end up on a semi-inhabited island in an alternate reality with derricks, automatic weapons, a hippie-mobile, ancient ruins and a faux-Thai colony complete with a bespectacled translator. (His optometrist has yet to be seen).
The cripple has magically regained the use of his legs on the island. He has become a demi-god who can control the smoke monster and has indulged (Ayn Rand-style) in his own brand of pseudo-pop-psych religion.
There was a drug dealer – I thought he choked on his retainer on the plane, but disappointingly, it was a small baggy of narcotics. The surgeon saved him with the aid of some male model or rock star, whatever, on the plane.
On the island, the survivors arrive at the faux-Thai temple where the fat dude goes head-to-head with the bescpectacled ex-hippie in an effort to out-translate.
The drug dealer had smuggled an enormous ankh in his instrument case. The ankh contains a time-line defying list of all survivors present. This is their entry into the private temple where the natives attempt to revive the moribund rock star in a Hévíz-like thermal spring and an orgy of Wagnerian Christian symbolism.
He revives, but drowns, (parallel to Petőfi Sándor’s János Vitéz). This is bad news for the survivors but not as bad as the news for the natives that X is dead. (The fat man delivers the news in deadpan style).
The news of [Jacob’s] death triggers an Armageddon of sorts among the natives, who launch low-tech fireworks (inadvisedly) in bright daylight.
The cripple-who-is-no-longer-crippled guru comes back, is surrounded by armed adversaries, then he punches the man who begged the others not to shoot him. (He was not a victim of his own victimization, and so on and so forth).
But all of this may not have happened if Julia (the coolest bitch on the Island) managed to detonate the A-bomb with a rock. There was an explosion (that unearthed ancient ruins), but she managed to survive long enough to tell SOME GUY that she had something important to tell him. Then, she croaked. Then, they buried her, but the out-of-it Asian dude channelled her and said that her message was... It worked.
This gives us a whole Philip K. Dick (Man in the High Castle) twist to the entire proceedings.
