A location shoot for "LOST" doesn't usually merit an article in the local paper, but I guess when they take over a brand new, multi-million dollar University of Hawaii facility, someone's gotta notice. Spoilers inside! Getting no fewer than three separate tips last week that they'd be there, I went down to check it out yesterday and today. While most of the shooting was indoors on Monday, this morning the action moved outside. And until asked nicely by a staffer to please not take photos, I snapped a few good shots of the "LOST" crew at work.
"LOST" turned the John A. Burns School of Medicine into the Miami Central University's Medical Research Laboratory. And it seems like a flashback for Juliet, the new character played by Elizabeth Mitchell. She meets an older gentleman (played by Zeljko Ivanek, if this photo and Jen's encyclopedic brain are to believed). According to Spoilerfix, the guy is probably "Edmund Burke, a smug in his 50s who has a laboratory in a university who is the type to divorce his wife to date a young woman in her early 20s. He likes to take credit for other people's work."
They talk in front of the building, he steps into the street... and is hit by a bus.
Interesting that they're using TheBus, Honolulu's municipal bus system. (Though the Apollo bar ad is a nice touch.) The gold and yellow stripes are unmistakable, and have already been seen in the background of other characters' flashbacks in different cities: Seoul (when Jin meets Sun along the canal) and Los Angeles (when Ana Lucia is out driving with her partner).
As excited as I was to get some pictures and a few video clips, though, I didn't have the vantage point of the person who got a video clip of the bus stunt from inside the building!
Also, according to the photo accompanying the Star-Bulletin article, Ethan, or William Mapother, makes an appearance in this episode as well. But the photo has mysteriously vanished from the online version of the piece. Fortunately, they can't erase photos from hardcopy editions of the newspaper, so you can see the front-page presentation here.
Sadly, if this is indeed for Episode Seven, we won't get to see any of this on screen until 2007!