Lost - "LA X"

Finally, after all these months of waiting, Lost has returned!

I meant to get to this post early last week, but life happened, as it often does.  So as I sit re-watching the second half of the premier, I'll try to catch myself up a bit.  I almost didn't get to watch it live last week, as the local ABC affiliate's antenna had iced up to the point they had to reduce the signal below where I could pick it up.  Thankfully, they managed to get things back up and running again just in time for me to be glued to my set last Tuesday night.  And what a wild ride I was in for!

Now, on to the spoilers....

The biggest questions from last season's finale were finally answered.  What happened when Ben apparently stabbed Jacob to death, and what happened after the white flash?  At first, it looked like Juliet had managed to successfully detonate the bomb, and that had actually repaired the timeline.  We started with Jack on Oceanic 815 just moments before the crash would have happened.  But almost immediately there were subtle (and not so subtle) differences from the original flight.  Jack was the one nervous during the turbulence and Rose reassured him while she waited for Bernard to return from the restroom.  Hurley was optimistic and up-beat about his lottery winnings, declaring himself the "luckiest man alive."  Charlie choked on a balloon of heroin and had to be brought back by Jack.  Most spectacularly, Desmond was on the plane, though he disappeared before landing.  Things are clearly different from the first iteration, down to the glimpse we got of the sunken island with Otherton and the statue foot on the bottom of the ocean.

It looks like, for that timeline at least, everything worked, and they managed to prevent the crash and all the tragedy that followed.

But then we find out that right after the flash, Sawyer, Jack, Kate, and the rest had flashed forward to 2007, waking up at the site of the exploded swan station.  Even Juliet is alive, pinned under wreckage at the bottom of the shaft.  My own guess is that the bomb itself didn't actually explode, despite Juliet banging away on it with a rock.  Instead, the Incident, the sudden release of electromagnetism triggered by drilling into the pocket, caused them to flash forward through time.  I suspect Jughead wound up buried under all that concrete when they sealed up the pocket like Chernobyl.

Juliet herself is dying from her injuries, and when Sawyer finally makes it down to her, she seems to become confused, perhaps even unstuck in time, talking about going out for coffee.  She has something very important to tell Sawyer, but dies before she can.  Thankfully, Miles the Ghost-Whisperer helps out later (a little reluctantly) and tells him she wanted to say "It worked."  This makes me wonder if she, in her final moments, had actually experienced the other 2004 timeline and seen that the flight made it.  She may even have seen that she and Sawyer still shared a connection of some kind there.

Meanwhile (and now in the same time period as the other survivors), False Locke has revealed himself to be the Man in Black, Jacob's Adversary, and further revealed that he IS the smoke monster (or one of them, if you subscribe to the various theories that say there are more than one).  Jacob's corpse disappeared from the fire, making me wonder if he'd pulled an "Obi-Wan Kenobi" and become more powerful than the Adversary could have imagined.  When they finally emerge from beneath the statue, we get a another clue about Richard's past.  The Adversary's off-the-cuff comment about seeing Richard out of his chains could be literal, a reference to time spent chained in the hold of the Black Rock.  Of course, he could also mean that with Jacob dead, Richard is no longer beholden to him.  The Adversary also mentions that he just wants to go home.  He could mean finally escaping the island himself, but I suspect from the way the Others fortified their temple using the grey dust, that this is the home he means.

And speaking of the temple, we finally see where Ben must have been taken when Sayid shot him.  They have a healing spring in there into which they intend to immerse Sayid, but the water is no longer clear and no longer seems to have any healing properties.  Rather than reviving, Sayid drowns in there, though he later revives on his own.  Of course, he may no longer be Sayid, just as False Locke turned out to be the Adversary.

In the alternate 2004, we continue to see connections form among the survivors we've been following for five seasons.  In some places we see evidence of the universe trying the course correct.  Federal marshall Mars receives the exact same head injury at Kate's hands as he did when the luggage from the overhead bins struck him during the original crash.  Kate and Saywer share an elevator, and he is clearly drawn to her as before.  She also forces her way into a cab at gunpoint, putting the pregnant Claire at great risk.  She's always got to mess things up for everyone else, after all.  Jack the spinal surgeon and Lock the parapegic find each other in the lost and found, and Jack offers him a free consult.  He may well walk again without going to the island.

I really enjoyed how that kicked things off answering some big questions left hanging from throughout the previous seasons, but, as always, gave us plenty more to ponder.  I'm dying to see how the rest of the season plays out.

Now, as the repeat episode finishes up, I'll sign off.  See you in another life, brother!

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