Come on, you guys, it’s Lost; can’t just go blow-by-blow, and plus you all watched it anyway. Instead, we will examine some themes and motifs and answered questions and stuff. OR BY GOD WE SHALL DIE TRYING. And if you think there will be spoilers…you are correct.
Our main motif: descent. As we hurtle headlong down the path of this season, and this series, we will have to dig deeper and go further down into all its mysteries before we can surface. This is made abundantly clear in this episode’s action. We start on Oceanic Flight 815, just like nothing ever happened, with Jack looking out the window, la de dah, la de dah. Suddenly, the plane starts to shake violently, like we’re going to do the whole thing over again—but no, it stops, it’s all good, we’re still all alive. (S0 nice to see Rose and Bernard together and happy again…although isn’t she now just going to die of cancer?) Jack talks to his seatmate Desmond, whom he kind of remembers a little bit but maybe not. This is kinda bogus, because Jack remembered him right away, before (“Hey, you were the guy in the stadium when I was running stairs!”), but whatever.
But then…the descent! Our camera plunges down DOWN DDOOWWNN through the clouds into the ocean and across the ocean floor until we see, uh, GASP, The Island Is At The Bottom Of The Ocean. Boom.
But then, gasp, we see the end of last year scene, again, and then suddenly Kate’s in a jungle tree and everything is weird and muted like there’s been a massive explosion or something. Uh, what? So she has to descend to the ground, where she finds her hearing again and a whole bunch of other Survivors. Well, and Miles. But wow, there’s Jack, and uh-oh, there’s Sawyer, and hey, Hurley and Jin and dying Sayid! The whole gang! And they’re still on the island!
So what the hell does this mean? A couple of things. First of all, we now have two realities. Should have expected that, what with all the time travel. As we know from reading science fiction, TT can take you one of two ways: either into a universe-resolved single reality, or into universe-refuses-to-do-all-the-hard-work double, or triple, or infinite realities. And that’s what we have here. While Sawyer is kicking the crap out of Jack, screaming “It didn’t work!” he’s also back on Oceanic Flight 815, because it DID work after all. Ha ha, joke’s on him, and on our handful of Survivors (pretty sure these are all just the ones touched by Jacob in the past reveals).
Although, of course, this doesn’t REALLY mean that there are two realities. Because the plane would be in the air in the past, relative to the current island action, wouldn’t it? I’m a little mixed up. Anyway, I think the window might still be a little open, is all I’m saying.
So that’s what we’re going to get from now on—one group of our characters is safe and sound, one is unsafe and unsound. In the sky, Sawyer is all happy-go-lucky, like he never killed the wrong guy in Australia, chatting with Hurley, who is somehow saying, “I’m the luckiest guy in the world,” when in fact we know that before he went to Australia in any version of the story he was freaked the hell out by his lottery numbers and success, because that’s the whole reason he went there in the first place, right? But on the island, Hurley’s still seeing ghosts (JACOB OMG) and Sawyer is acting all Wolverine, sneering and snarling and blaming Jack for Juliet’s death…
…but wait! She’s still alive under all the metal that went down after her! So they do a heroic rescue and Sawyer grabs her and they kiss and THEN she dies. Oh. Later, thanks to Ghost Whisperer Miles, we know that she says “it worked.” Dang, how does she know?
The jungle folks soon run into all kinds of new trouble: new bad guys headed up by new Asian Ass-Kicking Dude and his semi-Buddhist minions. They will kill them, but Hurley mentions Jacob, and there’s an ankh in the guitar case and a secret message, and the water’s not clear but Sayid isn’t quite dead but then he is dead, and all kinds of stuff happens.
More importantly: When the island got unstuck in time, the audience got unstuck in certainty. We went right along with the characters; we used to think we knew which end was up, but suddenly we were unmoored, just like the Black Rock and the airplanes that keep crashing into the island. There was a very direct parallel between each viewer and each survivor: we learned our information at the same time, we got scared when they were scared, happy when they made out, etc. Easy way to build an audience, oldest trick in the book.
But now, thanks to the paradox of time travel, we are suddenly in two realities. One of them is up in the air, the other is back in the jungle. The latter we understand, because it’s pretty much like life: you stumble around until you find something you like or that seems useful, then you try to guard it from outsiders. That’s the story of the Hatch, the Temple, virtually every location in the show, and it’s how we think of ourselves.
But in the other, “happier” reality, where there is no crash, we are in the strange position of knowing more than the characters do. We KNOW that somewhere they crashed, while they are blissfully unaware. Actually, that’s the case on the island too: we KNOW that they actually didn’t crash, while they think they still did. Because to them that IS the reality. Dramatic irony—we know more than the characters do, and we’re all set up for tragedy now for real.
And we should mention the fact that in the non-crash reality Jin is still a dick to Sun and Kate is still a prisoner (although she gets away and gets into a cab where HOLY CRAP CLAIRE IS THERE) and Jack is probably still an alcoholic with daddy issues (LOL they lost his dad’s coffin) and life isn’t necessarily better for anyone. Hell, even Rose is probably just going to die of cancer now. So bad fortune can be good, vice versa, blah blah blah.
Other random stuff: Oh yeah, Locke is pretty much fully revealed as not only the Man In Black, nemesis of Jacob, but also THE SMOKE MONSTER! So that’s a mystery solved. In the form of Smokey, he kills a lot of people, even cheating to get a guy out of the chalk circle by hitting him with a rock. And everyone’s pretty freaked out that Locke is walking around when Locke’s dead body is lying on the ground; in fact, Richard catches a face jammy from Bad Locke and is carried off into the jungle by him. Ben goes around doing his crazy-eyes thing, mostly to no avail. So there’s that. And Ilana is still hot but ineffectual.
Also: Desmond is on the plane, but then he isn’t. Charlie tries to die on the plane, but Jack saves him (what the hell was in Charlie’s throat?), only to get yelled at. And Shannon never comes back from Australia, which would be more interesting if, y’know, Shannon was.
And further: in the temple, Sayid wakes up. BUT IS HE SAYID REALLY? Smart money says he’s actually Jacob, who was the one who said he should go to the temple in the first place. But smart money has been wrong before.
Okay there is some other stuff, but it will have to wait. This was a great jump-off, and who the eff knows where it’s going next. Love that.
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