Well, I loved the season six premiere of LOST, and we have basically what amounts to one really long day left until the show wraps up. Sixteen hours of storytelling, and that’s it. Friends of mine and readers of my various missives into the aether are well-aware of my love for this show… this THE PRISONER with hot chicks… that not only rewards multiple viewings of episodes but pretty much demands it. So I won’t be doing any summing up; no overview of my various positions and theories and whatnot; rather, I’ll just assume you’re up-to-date or can catch up because frankly we’re at the end of the ride here and if you don’t know about my fixation with the whispers and the eye color changes and all, for example, it’s too much to go into now. So let’s start:
1. THE WHISPERS AND THE EYE-COLOR CHANGES: Thank God this seems to be being addressed in the first ep of the season. The producers made a lot of hay over the break about a new storytelling narrative device being utilized this season; not a flashback nor a flash-forward, but some new trope. It seems clear from Dead Juliet’s message “It worked” that this new device is the simultaneous revelation of On-Island Adventures and Changed Timeline Adventures. It looks to me that On-Island is in 2007 and Changed Timeline is 2004, and that the next sixteen or seventeen episodes will be the gradual merging of a new, corrected, crisis-on-infinite-Sawyers sort of reality. Juliet, by virtual of being at the heart of the Jughead explosion (which she caused by banging the bomb core with a … wait for it… BLACK ROCK) was uniquely situated to have a view, however briefly, of both worlds. They hit us over the head with that one where she said to Sawyer: “We should go for coffee sometime; we’ll go Dutch.” Very reminiscent of Charlotte’s last words to Faraday… the view of elsewhere at the end of this line.
So it seems clear to me that the whispers are a bleed-over of observers of the various timelines, and the one-blue-eye/one-brown-eye motif is indicative of characters with one foot momentarily in both worlds… if not literally then at least thematically. Although Jack’s “Have we met before?” to Des on the plane seems to indicate at least one character’s awareness of possibilities….
Oceanic 815 never crashes, in the Changed Timeline. So that means the survivors don’t end up on the Island to time travel back to Dharma. The Swan Station is built, and Desmond causes 815 to crash. Which causes the survivors to travel back in time and set off Jughead which means Oceanic 815 never crashes. Oh, Jack and Juliet. That’s right: a pair o’ docs.
2. TIMELINES: Anyone notice that the JJ Abrams STAR TREK and the JJ Abrams LOST now have alternate timelines for you to accept or reject as is your wont?
3. KATE AND SAWYER ARE THE SKELETONS IN THE CAVE: Remember when Desmond says “See you in another life, brother” to Jack? Last night was that other life. And people say these writers are “just making it up as they go along.” Well, given that all storytellers just make it up as they go along, I think the argument can be made that the writers have had the signposts up for a while.
4. I’VE GOT A BAD FEELING ABOUT THIS: I loved the Rose/Jack exchange-of-roles between this ep and the pilot; specifically that during the pre-crash turbulence in the pilot, Rose was afraid and Jack was the calming influence, and in the Changed Timeline, Jack was afraid and Rose was calm. I even liked her assurance: “You can let go now” which I think is going to have some special meaning in the last episode of the series. At the very least, it echoes Miles telling Sawyer just that when they time-travelled to a time when the well hadn’t been dug yet, and Locke’s rope led into nothing but ground.
5. DHARMA SHARK: Dharma shark!
6. JUST CALL ME ANGEL IN THE MORNING: I loved that Frogurt is the guy napping between Boone and Locke in the exchange where Boone says that if there’s a crash, he’s sticking with Locke… but it wasn’t until Kate tries to get Frogurt’s cab after she whangs the Marshall that Mimi saw he was on the plane. Honestly, it wouldn’t have shocked me if Steve and Scott were on the plane, too.
7. YOU CAN’T ALWAYS GET WHAT YOU WANT: Desmond and Christian and Locke’s knives are not on the flight anymore. And, seriously, Juliet fell down a well, and had a bunch of electromagnetically-charged crap fall on her, AND she’s got a lead role on V. The amazing thing isn’t that she died; rather, it’s that she flies back and forth from Vancouver to Hawaii to give us story closure. GOD BLESS YOU ELIZABETH MITCHELL.
8. SOME OTHERS HAVE SHOES AND OTHER-OTHERS DON’T: And maybe only my wife knows how fixated I was on the story-bomb of Cindy the stewardess and the kids, but I literally could not believe that Cindy takes Zack and Emma and all the other tail section kids off into the jungle in Season Two and we would never hear from them again. I can’t believe it took four years to get there, but I usually don’t dig on the demands of sequential entertainment, anyway, myself. I like my beginning, middle, and end, please and thank you. So it was awesome to see Cindy again with the other-Others while she name-checked the two waifs.
9. So, yeah. Sayid lives in the Lazarus Pit that they had obviously used to save Young Ben when Sayid gut-shot him. But it only half-works because… Sayid needs to be redeemed? The Asian Guy leading the other-Others isn’t healed when he tests the spring, so… who knows? Sometimes, we don’t have all the information. Sayid’s messed up, Miles didn’t get a reading on him because he was only mostly-dead, and since Young Ben was “changed,” so can we expect “New Sayid” to be so altered as well.
Me, I just know I love this show, and I’ll see you next week.
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I’m just a casual viewer but I can say we’re going to have a different bedtime ritual on Tuesdays for the toddler who MUST BE ASLEEP by 9pm so I can be ready to devote full attention to the show. This is one show that I believe live viewing is a must with DVR for repeat viewing or to address heated LOST theory conversations.
Great stuff, Larry. You’ve got a great eye for the little details (Juliet and the black rock! Good one!)
At first I was angry that they made us go through the agony of Juliet’s death AGAIN just to get in that “It worked” line. But then I realized that her coffee talk might be her talking to Sawyer in another reality much like Desmond would skip through timelines.
What are your thoughts on why Kate was up in the tree?
Hey, Rich! Thanks for the kind words.
I don’t really have a theory on specifically why Kate was up in the tree, other than to note that the idiom “up a tree” usually means trapped in some way, or in difficulty. And to also note that there are a bunch of people in trees in this show: Bernard was first found still strapped in his seat way up in a tree; Charlie, of course, hung by his neck in a tree until dead. Ben, first appearing as Henry Gale was up in the balloon, and Naomi was suspended by her parachute lines.
Maybe it’s just as simple as Jack waking up on the reset away from everyone in the crash; that during specific resets characters with major issues are physically as well as metaphorically far from where they’re supposed to be.
I do like that in the Changed Timeline, Kate’s up for murder of a random plumber, and not the more audience palatable death of an abusive step-father. Makes her harder to redeem, and more likely to be in the cave.
The Devil reads Vogue.
Man, how good was that season premiere?! Im worried though. It aired almost one week ago and Im still dissecting it. Apparently, the biggest Lost nerds out there, are actually the writers and producers! Now, we all noticed the blatant changes in core Lost history. People changing seats on the plane. People never getting on the plane. Such noticeable changes. Such awesome! But, wanna know what Im digging more? All the little Easter eggs. Particularly, this one..
When the plane hit that rough patch, Rose was flipping through a magazine while waiting for Bernard to return from the bathroom. The magazine was entitled, “Weekly Woodsmen”. Now, I didn’t know this, but, this was the same prop used in season FOUR of the show, Supernatural. The episode where the actor playing Jacob was in. In episode where he played the Devil.
Why would they do that? Now, I want.. I have to believe this is just to mess with us. Start the nerd fires going. I tucked it away in the back of my head. Tried to let it disappear. But man… Think of all that Jacob has done? Manipulated people. Let loved ones die. Let people fall out of buildings. He’s had his hands in all the worst things that have happened to our heroes. Now, maybe he’s in the body of Sayid? A man who believed he was going to hell. The man in black just wants to go home.. We assume he’s bad.. But, lets think about the smoke monster and all that it’s done. It’s bad.. Right?
Man.. I can’t wait for Tomorrow’s episode. How am I going to sleep tonight?!
Nice one, Mark. I think you’re on to something, there. Remember when they were brainwashing Karl in Room 23, one of the title cards they flashed was “God loves you as he loved Jacob.” Since Jacob was then a going concern, it’s God’s love that was in the past tense, just as one assumes God gave up on his best friend Lucifer once the division of power got sorted out.
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