TV Verdict

After nearly nine months of waiting, the final season of Lost is here to offer… what? Answers? Resolution? Ha! Spoilers follow. (This is a double episode after a major layover, so be warned: this is going to be a long one.)

When last we saw our time-hopping Losties, they were trying to prevent the creation of the hatch that crashed their plane by detonating a hydrogen bomb to stop “The Incident” from happening. Thanks to Juliet and a handy rock, they seemed to have succeeded—in setting off the bomb, at least. As this sixth and final season begins, we see the results of that explosion. A flash of white, then cut to… Jack Shepard, on board Oceanic 815 minutes before the crash that started the series, followed by a little turbulence, some reassuring words from good ol’ Rose, then… nothing. The plane doesn’t rip in half and fall out of the sky. No one dies. Instead of crash-landing miles away from his wife, Bernard returns to his seat after a mildly unpleasant restroom experience. It looks like the bomb gambit put everything back where it should be.

But that’s not how bombs work, is it?

Bombs don’t heal; they destroy. And the only thing you can do when the dust has settled is pick up the pieces. If this season premiere is any indication, we’ll be picking up the pieces for the rest of the series.

As showrunners Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse promised, the storytelling game has changed. No flashbacks, or forwards, this year. No jumping back and forth in time. Instead, the explosion seems to have ripped reality in two halves. On the one side, the story of the Oceanic passengers who didn’t crash on a mysterious island, landing safely in Los Angeles with all their baggage—emotional and otherwise—intact (well, almost). On the other side, the ’70s time travelers, propelled by the H-bomb explosion into the future…or is it the present? Either way, they’re still on the island they thought they’d escaped. Both stories occur roughly at the same time (I’ll leave it to the Lost fan site curators to figure out the actual timeline), but the chronology doesn’t matter as much as the fact that Faraday’s master plan seems to have worked and failed at the same time. And if any of this seems weird to you, then you’ve obviously never watched Lost before.

I can’t promise this will make much sense, but let’s unpack this guitar case, shall we?

We’ll begin with Reality #1, in which flight 815 makes it from Sydney to LAX without any unscheduled stops. In this reality, everyone from season one is back, with a few notable exceptions. Most passengers lives appear to be unchanged. Jack is still accompanying his dead father back to the States; Sawyer is still a conniving con-man; Kate is still in the custody of a U.S. Marshal; Sun and Jin are still in need of serious marriage counseling; and Locke, still crippled, is returning home from his walkabout. I say “appear” to be unchanged, but that may not be entirely true. Locke tells Boone (remember Boone?) that he actually went on his walkabout. Did he? Is he lying? Or did the bomb change that detail of Locke’s life? Speaking of Boone, though he appears to be the same guy we loved and lost in the first season, this time he’s traveling without sister Shannon, who apparently never left Australia. Trading a missing passenger for an additional one, “notha life brotha” Desmond is somehow on the flight as well—I assume taking advantage of the leisure time not having to push the button has afforded him.

Some of the changes from season one to now are subtle. Some aren’t. The award for most-changed passenger goes to Hurley, who has turned from unlucky sad sack to the self-proclaimed “luckiest guy in the world.” Not only did he still win the lottery, but the fortune granted to him by the Numbers allowed him to buy the decidedly un-crushed-by-a-meteor Mr. Cluck’s Chicken franchise. He’s rich, and lucky, and, thanks to this flight, now has the unwanted attention of still-bad Sawyer, who looks at the chicken king and sees a big fat pigeon. Look for some serious grifting in episodes to come.

On the surface, it looks like everything the island tore apart has been put back to normal—if not made better than it was—but beneath the calm waters of this newly created reality there’s weirdness afoot (pun intended). Why is drug-addled Charlie (taking a break from his current stint on FlashForward) so mad at Jack for keeping him from choking to death on a heroin baggie; and what does he mean when he says he was supposed to die? Why is Desmond on the flight, and where did he disappear to after the turbulence? What happened to Jack’s dad’s coffin? Did it pull a Desmond and vanish mid-flight, or was it never loaded on the plane in the first place? But the biggest question of all is the one raised by the haunting final shot of the opening sequence: what the heck happened to the island? How did it go from skittering around the seven seas to sinking underwater, Tawaret foot and (even creepier) Dharma swing sets intact?

Perhaps we’ll get the answer to these and other questions over in Reality #2. Back on the still above-water island, Jack, Kate, Miles, Hurley, and Jin go from Incident explosion to waking up next to the exploded Swan Hatch thirty years later. Ears ringing, the group comes to the realization that the bomb didn’t work, which sends Sawyer into a rage aimed at the already bloody doc Shepard, whom he blames for Juliet’s death. He is forced to hold that thought, though, when Kate hears Juliet calling out from beneath the debris. Jumping into excavation mode, Sawyer tries to dig her out, but by the time he reaches her it’s too late. With a few words and a kiss, she’s gone—for real—dying just before she can tell him something important. Back at the van, Hurley is interrupted in his vain attempts to help the dying Sayid by ghost Jacob, who tells Hurley that if he wants to save Sayid he needs to get him to the Temple, pronto.

So while Sawyer stays behind with Miles to bury Juliet (and to find out what she wanted to tell him before she died), everyone else carries Sayid down the hole in the outer wall of the Temple, where they are promptly captured by gun-wielding cult members who take them to the real Temple—home to Jacob acolytes and their 815 passengers who were taken from the beach right after the crash. Hurley convinces the Temple guardian that Jacob sent them, thanks to an Ankh-containing guitar case and a mysterious note, and they are taken to a magic healing fountain. Except there’s something wrong with the fountain; it has gone from crystal pool to a rusty spring. Worse still, the underwater healing ritual goes wrong and Sayid dies, which is exactly what Jacob’s note tells his people not to let happen. Oops. Of course, that’s not the end of the story…

I want to pause for a second and talk about the magic fountain. It would appear that this is the same fountain that healed a young Ben Linus back when he was shot by Sayid. Ironic, no? It gives new meaning to Richard’s warning last season that taking Ben to the Temple to be healed would cause him to be “changed.” Keep that in mind, because it applies to Sayid now, too—perhaps doubly so now that he has actually died and come back to life! His apparent resurrection brings to mind something else Richard Alpert said last year, this time in reference to John Locke. He said that while he’d seen the Island do amazing things, he’d never saw it bring anyone back to life. That would make Sayid’s return from the other side the first time it has ever happened, because, as we learned in last year’s season finale, John Locke didn’t come back to life. He was replaced by a dark impostor. Speaking of which…

Back at the Foot, fake Locke is where we left him at the end of last season: gloating over his successful bid to get Ben to kill his nemesis Jacob. But as we also saw at the end of last year, the jig is up. Outside, the Ajira rescue squad has shown Locke’s dead body to Alpert. They know that something bad has gone down, and so enter Jacob’s home with guns drawn. Bad idea. They know that fake Locke is really the Man in Black, but they don’t seem to know is that he’s also the Smoke Monster. Yep. You can check that one off your Master Mystery list. I’m sure some ornery fans will argue that because we didn’t actually see Mr. Black transform into Smokey, he might be lying about it, but I’m not sure they could have made it any clearer. He’s Smokey, and the ash ring we saw around Jacob’s cabin way back when was placed there either to contain him or to keep him out. Either way, he wants revenge on the Temple folk, and Jacob was the only thing standing in his way. Revenge isn’t the only thing he wants, though. As he tells his unwilling disciple Ben in typically spooky fashion, The Man in Black is tired of being confined to the Island. He wants to go home.

Okay, it’s Theory Time: With the exception of a few notable characters, Lost as a series has been about people trying to go home. To escape from the island, from their personal demons, from their pasts, from themselves. Where, exactly, is “home” for the Man in Black? If he is the unbending evil force he appears to be, home could be everything outside of the Island—a world of flawed humans ripe and ready for his harsh judgment. It’s possible that, rather than some kind of omnipotent equal, Jacob was actually a glorified security guard, tasked with keeping the Man in Black in ashen chains on his island prison. Looping back into the show’s themes of redemption, betterment, and reincarnation, perhaps the Island exists to keep humanity safe from its final, smokey Judgment Day until the cycles of violence and self-destruction have ended. Of course, if that isolation theory is true, why would Jacob lure outsiders onto his lonely Alcatraz, especially when doing so might mean that one of them could interfere with his plans, like Ben did when he was tricked by the Man in Black into killing him? Tough question, but one that might be answered by looking back to Adam and Eve’s story in Genesis. Why would God bring imperfect people in his perfect world? A better question might be why did He give those people the free will to choose to disobey? Leaving Christianity’s answers to those questions aside, in Lost terms, maybe free will is the only way for those imperfect people to improve themselves. Perhaps Jacob brings outsiders to the island to test the morality waters of the world at large, or in hopes that he’ll eventually prove to his evil inmate that humanity is worth saving after all.

Last year’s season finale began with the Man in Black and Jacob watching a ship full of unwitting sailors approach the Island. Mr. Black asks Jacob why he continues to bring people here when it always ends the same, with fighting and death. Jacob responds that things only end once; everything before that is just progress. Could we be seeing that cycle of human progress in the separate realities of Lost season six? If so, which one came first, and which one will bring this winding epic to a close? Did the bomb ploy work, as Juliet tried to tell Sawyer before she died? If not, can resurrected Sayid save the day? Will the Man in Black escape before humanity is ready for him, or (more likely) will everything I just theorized be proven complete hogwash next week?

I realize that I’m being decidedly uncritical for a critic in this first recap/review. To be honest, I’ve never been one to nit-pick Lost. I never hated the low parts as much as other people did. I didn’t even mind season three. At this point in the journey, I’m not sure second-guessing the show’s creators is useful. They’ve gotten us this far, and as far as I’m concerned they’ve more than earned the right to finish this story on their terms. Love it or hate it, let’s wait until it’s all over to render a final verdict. For now, I’m happy to sit back, grab my armrests for support, and let the pilots land the plane. Let’s hope it’s a smooth landing ’cause it’s been one heck of a ride.

My bag is now officially out of wind, so it’s your turn. What did you think? Did the premiere live up to your expectations? What do you think about the show’s new direction? Most importantly, what the heck do you think is going on?