Things have been mighty quiet up in here lately. A busy work schedule, preparations on the upcoming Cinema Suicide web series, freelance writing and percolating a new script for a graphic novel have been keeping me away, allowing the other sites out there to fill you in on what’s coming up on the horror horizon. LOST, however, is enough to pull me out of my torpor. It seems like we’ve all been waiting a dog’s age for this final season to kick off and in that time I’ve managed to binge my way through four seasons of Dexter and three seasons of Battlestar Galactica. I feel like I’ve been sitting around waiting for a new season of The Sopranos, for crying out loud! But no more! ABC finally graced us with the season opener of what is looking like the most ambitiously complicated grand finale of one of television’s greatest triumphs. There were time splits, resurrections, paradoxes, ecstatic visions, The Island above and below water, the real Temple, and the identity of The Smoke Monster. All of that and more was provided in two hours of television, balanced out by what has to be the most insulting assault of advertisement ever devised by a television network. Not even The Superbowl packs in the ads like LOST.
So settle in and consider this your spoiler warning. Beyond the break is a detailed breakdown of what happened and what I think is going on. I know how LOST fans get when you reveal shit before they’ve seen it so you’d better take heed.
We begin in Jack’s seat on Oceanic Flight 815. Turbulence rocks the plane much as it did in episode one, season one. Familiar faces are spotted. Situations are similar. However, all is not what it seems. Boone comes back alone. Bernard makes it back to his seat next to his doomed wife, Rose, Hurley insists that he has awesome luck and Desmond, who at this point in regular continuity should be feverishly pressing the button in The Swan Station while rocking out to Geronimo Jackson, is seated for a time next to Jack on the plane. As the plane clears turbulence we fly out of the plane and deep into the sea to discover that The Island and everything on it are now chilling out in Davy Jones’ Locker
Back on The Island, however, in what appears to be an entirely separate timeline, the castaways are as they were prior to what appears to be Juliet setting off the bomb. Sayid is still bleeding from a gunshot wound to the stomach and Juliet is still at the bottom of the Swan Station, clinging to life. However, rather than being at ground zero of an atomic detonation, they’re back at the point in time where the hatch imploded.
On the beach at the foot of the statue, presumably in the same timeline as Jack, Kate, et al. Ben is horrified by what he has done by killing Jacob. Ben being Ben, of course goes out to the Others on the beach and tries to bullshit Richard Alpert about the condition of Jacob and tries to sucker Richard into going into the foot to meet his fate at the hands of fake John Locke who turns out to be Jacob’s still unnamed nemesis. The nemesis, by the way, is also the Smoke Monster and seems to be able to take on the form of anyone who has died.
The ghost of Jacob informs Hurley that Sayid, on death’s door from a bullet wound, can be saved if they take him to The Temple, which the Losties do after moving tremendous amounts of junk from the ruined Hatch allowing Sawyer to recover Juliet’s dying body. Of course, Juliet dies in Sawyer’s anguish stricken arms so that she can go be on V. Myles is pressured by Sawyer into divining her last words which turn out to be “it worked” implying that the bomb detonated. It just doesn’t look like it had the intended consequences.
Back in another timeline, Flight 815 lands at LAX. Charlie is once again alive, nearly asphyxiating on a balloon of heroin in the bathroom. His death is averted by Jack who fishes it out. Charlie’s parting words, “I was supposed to die”. Upon landing, in this skewed timeline where everything is a little bit wrong, we see how things might have gone had the plane not crashed on The Island. Sawyer helps Kate evade the cops for a bit. Kate escapes the Marshall that was bringing her back to The States. Jin is apprehended at customs when it is revealed that he is travelling with buckets of undeclared cash and it turns out that Oceanic lost the body of Christian Shephard. It also turns out that Locke’s bag of assorted cutlery is missing as well.
Back on The Island, everyone travels into The Temple with the dying body of Sayid. They’re ambushed by an until now unseen group of Others who, presumably, hold shit down in The Temple, manning a huge whirlpool bath that seems to work suspiciously similar to the Lazarus Pit from Batman, implying that either Richard Alpert or Jacob is, in fact, Rhas Al Ghul. Obviously, I kid, but this fountain of youth could account for Richard’s eternal youth.
It turns out that the guitar case given to Hurley by Jacob contains a wooden ankh that, in turn, contains a mysterious message holding the names of the survivors. The news of Jacob’s death sends The Others into a panic that puts into motion a great series of precautionary measures as if to defend The Temple from an invading force. A sand line is drawn around the perimeter of the temple, as one of the Others did previously in the episode to protect himself (unsuccessfully) from the attacking smoke monster. This is the same sort of sand circle that used to surround Jacob’s cabin that was either used to protect Jacob or keep the nemesis in the cabin so that it couldn’t escape. My personal theory falls on the previous since the Nemesis was routinely making the rounds on the island as The Smoke Monster.
Sayid is brought into the Lazarus Pit and held there where he should be healed but instead dies. Hours later he rises. Is it Sayid? Probably not. Jacob needed a new body to inhabit and it’s looking like Sayid fit the bill.
A couple of aimless excruciatingly confusing seasons of LOST look to be the continuing trend as the show’s arc continues to bounce wildly off of theological themes explored in just about every flavor of faith while borrowing brain-crushingly complicated theories about time and space from String and M theory. Champion acid heads the world around have been talking up ideas about every possible decision anyone could ever possibly make is spinning off existence into every possible permutation based purely on possibility. It’s enough to give the finest theoretical physicists in the world a collective stroke yet LOST tackles these crazy notions with the greatest of ease. Do they have it right? Probably not but it makes for great television, doesn’t it? In typical LOST format, rather than tie up loose ends and reel the show in a bit, it continues to branch outward, creating more endlessly complicated scenarios. An entirely separate timeline where Flight 815 lands adds a whole new dimension and will, most likely, weave itself back into the greater continuity as Not-Lost Jack In Los Angeles will probably have to join forces somehow with Lost Jack on The Island in order to tip the scales of the coming epic battle in favor of Jacob.
Honestly, who can say? This is LOST we’re talking about, after all, but for a premier episode, the good were delivered. There was a lot of hyping leading up to LOST season 6 and apart from a bit of filler to stretch it out into a 2 hour event this was the beginning of an exciting series closeout.
