The Lost Recap: Season 6 – “LAX” Parts One and Two

Finally! Here it is! The next season of Lost. Sadly, it’s also the last season. This is one of the few shows I have watched since it’s premiere back in 2004 and have never missed an episode (well, except for a mishap the night of the 100th episode, but let’s not go there). The three-hour event started with a classic Lost recap hour narrated by Michael Emerson, and then we hit the ground running.

And away we go!

Previously, on Lost…Juliet hits the hydrogen bomb’s core with a rock and detonates it in the hopes of reversing everything that has happened on the island and making things right once more (click here for the season 5 finale recap).

Flash to white, which morphs into clouds and we’re whisked onto Oceanic Flight 815 where we Jack and company come through some rough turbulence, but the plane and everyone onboard survive. I’m glad we get to see this storyline play out. I have always wondered what would have happened if they had made it to LAX (yes, I know that if they had made it in the first place there wouldn’t be a series called Lost for me to write about at this moment).

But now they are exploring this road not taken, which also appears to be a parallel universe? Or does jack know what happened on the island and no one else does? The marks on his neck that he finds as he’s in the airplane’s restroom may be an indication that he, in fact, does have some memory of what took place. But Desmond (now on the plane) has never met him before, even though they did meet one night while at a darkened stadium.

We also get in this sequence a glimpse at what happened to the island: it sank to the bottom of the ocean and turned into classic TV-level CGI. If there’s one thing Lost struggles to achieve are realistic digital effects (see polar bear; helicopter crash; and this sequence for evidence). But we know from this sequence that the island did exist at some point in time and that it was inhabited by the Dharma Initiative.

The detonation of the hydrogen bomb’s core worked…or did it? Sawyer, Kate, Jack, Jin, Sayid, and Hurley are still on the island and the hatch appears to have been built and blown up when Desmond turned the fail-safe key. So, the gang is no longer in 1977, but has returned to 2007, which means they are on the island at the same time as everyone else from Oceanic Flight 815.

Of course, they don’t know this.

Poor Juliet is buried in the wreckage and after some effort they unearth her alive, only for her to die in Sawyer’s arms. Sawyer is not a happy camper and vows to kill Jack since he’s the one who told them to go through with Daniel Faraday’s plan after Faraday was killed by his own mother, Eloise Hawking.

And Sayid needs help due to his bullet wound that came courtesy of Ben’s father Roger in the season five finale. As Hurley tries to help him, Jacob’s ghost pops up and tells Hurley that he’s the only person who can save Sayid; he must take him to the temple. Luckily, Jin knows where the temple is since he was there with Rousseau and her science team after the smoke monster attacked some of their people when they first arrived on the island in the 1980s (Jin was there thanks to the white flashes and time travel thing).

The gang hop in the van and head to the temple, go inside and are captured. But by who?

And now we are introduced to a new set of Others who are presumably Jacob’s people who live in the temple. This temple has been an exit point for the smoke monster on a few occasions, which I find interesting since the smoke monster seems to be Jacob’s nemesis. So why does it utilize a structure that protects Jacob’s people? To taunt them, perhaps?

We also have seen that the new John Locke (since the old one is dead and lying in the sand) isn’t really Locke but the smoke monster/man in black/Jacob’s nemesis. He is a shapeshifter, bulletproof, and has done what no mortal man has been able to do: manipulate Ben Linus into doing something (in this case, killing Jacob). He lets’ Ben in on a little secret: what was going through Locke’s mind while Ben was strangling him.

Anyway, so we have a new group of folks to contend with this final season, which I personally felt those scenes slammed the second episode to a halt. They just didn’t have the momentum and energy of the other sequences surrounding them. Even the reveal of the giant Ankh symbol in the guitar case felt a little silly. If only Carrot Top had been there for that.

So the questions now become: what will this new set of people have to do with the saving of the island? What do the castaways have to do with this whole island-saving plot? And, do we really need MORE characters on a show with such a giant cast?

We can assume, then, that this is the same mystical pool that was used to bring Young Ben Linus back to life after he was shot by Sayid in 1974. Richard told Kate and Sawyer at the time that once Young Ben was taken into the temple that he would never be the same, which was true. So, does this mean that the mystical pool doesn’t necessarily bring the original person back to life? Does it re-incarnate a spirit alive in the pool?

WTF? you may be asking right now. But consider this: if the John Locke who is alive is inhabited by Jacob’s nemesis (the man in black/the Smoke Monster), then perhaps Jacob, much like the man in black, found a loophole and used Sayid’s body as a means to come back to life.

If this is the case, then Sayid/Jacob and Locke/man in black may just be prepping for a battle against one another; and our returning castaways are right in the middle of things.

Meanwhile, we still know very little about Richard, but did find out that at one point he was kept in chains. Is he also a “god” like Jacob and the man in black? That would explain his consistent agelessness and his ability to travel through time and space much like Jacob does.

As you can see, there’s a lot going on this season, but still nothing has been answered. Will it? Will they actually break down and answer the dozens of mysteries that have cropped up over the past five season? Will they only answer the big ones and skirt the small stuff? And will there be a big cliffhanger that sends us into the two week hiatus for the 2010 Winter Olympics? You bet there probably will be!

What do you think? What are your theories, observations, thoughts, and opinions on this episode? I can honestly say that I felt that the first hour was much stronger than the second hour. While the first part felt like a typical Lost, the second felt a little slow and too familiar (More Others? Really?). But, the season is still young and we’ll be back with more Lost next week with episode 603: “What Kate Does”!

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