MythBuster Adam Savage on Lost Premiere: James Cameron's Time Travel has Nothing on Lost

He blogged last year's explosive season finale. Now MythBuster Adam Savage is back with his theories on Lost Season Five, including a Ben/Locke showdown, what the island really is and the secrets behind Jack's beard.

I'm so glad to be back in the world of Lost—and after seeing the season premiere, I can say it was worth the wait. Somehow the show always seems to get the exact right ratio of questions answered to questions raised, and last night's season opener was no exception. (Now, I'm trusting them here: If the series finale doesn't end up with some serious 'splainin', I'm going to be pretty angry.)

The beginning of this season of Lost reminds me of one of Kurt Vonnegut's favorite phrases: "Keep your hat on, we could end up miles from here."

I don't want to give too much away, even though it's aired, but I'm not sure I can hold out.

Okay, how about one spoiler. Just one. You ready?

Jack shaves that awful beard off.

Whew! Am I glad to get that off my chest. I HATE Jack's beard, which seems to have some kind of super-wussifying effect on him, like a reverse Sampson: Jack GAINS power with proper grooming. Thank goodness. Now he and the rest of the Oceanic Six can get back to the island, where they belong. It's disconcerting to see them out in the world—it's just not right.

The season opener adds a whole new dimension to the island's powers. We reconnect with everyone, on the island and off, and it's clear that they've bumped up the question quotient about six-and-a-half notches. Remember in Terminator how you had to wrap your brain around John Connor sending Reese back in time to romance his mom and thus become his father? Yeah, well, that was nothing.

Like Billy Pilgrim in Slaughterhouse 5, our entire island-bound community of Lost-ites has become unstuck in time. While the Oceanic Six are three years in the future, the survivors on the island have no idea when they are, because they're zipping back and forth between the past and the future. But they can't change the past, because, as on-show physicist Daniel Faraday explains, time is like a string, and though one can move back and forth on that string, one can't create another string. It works well narratively, but I'm not sure if I totally buy it. Of course, Faraday might be lying to save the characters all the trouble of running into themselves and causing a temporal anomaly (or is that Star Trek?).

I love the time-travel thing. LOVE it. Clearly the writers have inculcated themselves with the canon of time-travel movies and literature and they've taken it on as a personal challenge. They teased it a bunch last season, but now it's taken over with gusto. Thankfully we've got Faraday—who clearly knows his stuff—as our tour guide through the space-time continuum. I can't wait to see when—and where—it takes us.

Jeremy Davies' Faraday is easily my favorite of the new roster of characters (though Miles' constant Corporal Hicks-like doomsaying is hilarious), but he's given a heck of a lot of exposition to do, and not everything he says holds up to scrutiny. For instance, why would you need to head on a specific compass bearing to get away from the island? Or why couldn't he just explain to Sawyer that the island was unstuck in time, instead of saying, "It'd be hard to explain it to a quantum physicist, let alone you." I dislike when characters aren't clear with each other in the interest in expediency.

Of course, what we're watching for isn't perfect logic from a physics point of view, but a real emotional logic to the characters. I really do want see them fulfill their destinies. (Can you tell I've been drinking the Kool-Aid?)

As for the other characters: Sun is going to rule the world. Penny is gorgeous. Desmond is special, and the rules of space-time don't apply to him, but we're still not sure why. Penny's father finally takes shape as a central, pivotal character. Ben Linus is STILL not telling anyone everything he knows—and is always looking spooky/scary/smart/creepy—but by now he and Locke are my favorite characters on the show. The jury is totally out for me on whether Locke's really dead. He's already been healed once and revived once (after Ben shot him). Ben wants to bring him back to the island, so I don't think it's a done deal. I love the idea that there's a biiiig showdown between them in the offing. Don't you just know it? I'm sure of it.

And here's a question: What if the island is an alien spaceship? That's my new guess.

The good news is that we're not in the middle of a Season Three slump. Season Five starts off cracking and popping and I'm ecstatic to be Lost again.

Advertisement - Continue Reading Below
More From Science