Wednesday, February 3, 2010

Review - Lost Season 6 Episode 1 & 2 LA X

If you have no clue what's going on, I'm in the same boat. The season premiere brought up more questions than answers, but there is clear direction where everything is going.

Instead of flashbacks or flashforwards, the new thing is a parallel storyline where Faraday's theory is correct. Juliet detonating the warhead puts everyone back in 2004 and everything is fine. The only problem is that it really isn't. Kate is in trouble with the law, Jack is drinking, Charlie is whacked out, Jin and Sun are back to their old relationship, and Locke can't use his legs. Hurley, Sayid, and Sawyer seem to be doing fine, but that's going to change.. Since this storyline may or may not be happening (how could both occur?), I think the parallel story will show how Jack's idea that resetting everything is a terrible idea. Their lives were never good to begin with and staying on the island is the best option. Claire makes an appearance as Kate hops into her cab with a gun after escaping from the authorities. Jack and Locke bond over lost luggage,

If these events are not occurring, I'm not sure how I feel about it. The main purpose of the story would only be to reveal something about the characters, but what happens will not be important. Whether Kate escapes or gets caught has no consequence on Kate on the island. If the events occur in the same universe as the stuff on the island, that would be a far more satisfying twist. What if the detonation of the bomb created a universe where two sets of the islanders exist? Miles says Juliet wanted to say "It worked."  Is she referring to the alternate universe? We don't know yet (correct me if I'm wrong) whether the plane story has  truly reset to 2004. What if it is 2007? Could the pairs of characters meet somehow? Given how open ended the writers framed the episodes, there are endless possibilities where they can go. The only worry is the hard deadline of the series finale.

Back on the island in what I assume is the real story where the events are actually happening, everyone isn't dead from a nuclear explosion. They've been sent back to the present where everything is pretty much the same. Juliet is still under the rubble and Sawyer gets to have one last moment with her. The highly emotional scene came fairly early before the first hour was up, and the rest of the episode had everyone in confusion and/or despair. Sawyer accuses Jack of killing Juliet and in some regard he is correct, but as Kate points out later, Jack's just trying to help. This adds a new angle to the battle between Sawyer and Jack. Sawyer has evolved greatly and isn't as myopic as he was before. In the past he might have held a permanent grudge against Jack, and in the beginning of the episode, in his rage and grief, he does vow to kill Jack. In the temple near the end of the episode when he's wallowing in sorrow, he tells Kate he won't do anything to Jack and he'll let Jack suffer on the island with the rest of them. The combination of maturity and sadness has dampened his anger towards Jack, but at the same time, lets Jack take a beating. Pain does not have to be physical and Sawyer acknowledges that as he chooses for Jack to live and suffer rather than die instantly.

Jack is sitting there still in shock at what happened. In season 5, he had a drive to get back to the island and he succeeded. That ended in failure as he disrupted the Sawyer and Juliet, and got caught up in the Dharma mess. He then receded into apathy, not caring what happened. Then he got a second wave, deciding to save everyone by detonating the nuclear bomb. That too ended disastrously. Going back to the first season, Jack sees his failures and it wears on him, but as he tells Locke in the alternate world, "Nothing's irreversible." Jack has that never ending drive, and while he may suffer for a while, he's always bounced back.

Jacob pops up from the great beyond and tells Hurley to get Jin to bring them to the temple, so Sayid can be saved. They go to the temple where the Others beat them up and take them out to shoot them, but Hurley has an ace up his sleeve: Jacob's message and guitar case. The Japanese guy who's in charge breaks the ankh inside the case and pulls out a piece of paper, and asks everyone to say their names. They take Sayid to a spring inside the temple and dunk him in there. Apparently their revival method includes a bit of drowning. Sayid dies, but at the end of the episode, is alive again and asks "What happened?"

In the Lost "Last Supper" poster, Locke is positioned as Christ and Sayid as Judas. My theory--crazy as it sounds--is that like Smokey, Jacob has an ability to become a dead person except he can literally take over a body. In the island where good guys and bad guys have no real definition, Jacob could very well be the traitor while Smokey is the messiah. As Smokey says, all he wants to do is go home. His home is the temple, and we saw him dragging the French into his lair last season. This season, there's Others inhabiting the temple and preparing to defend it from Smokey. My guess is that the Others and Jacob kicked Smokey out and took it for themselves. Payback is a bitch.

Fake Locke is on the warpath and reveals himself to be the Smoke Monster. Ben figures out he's been played, but there's nothing much he can do. Smokey comes out of the foot as confident as ever, takes out Richard with ease, and walks toward the jungle. We can assume he is going to the temple to take it back (or kill everyone). This is where the show becomes unclear. The Smoke Monster had previously been seen as a mere entity that enforced rules or went around doing random things. Ben knew how to call upon it to help him against the commandos in season 4. Last season it told Ben to follow Locke which plays into his ultimate role of killing Jacob for Smokey. Before season 5, it seems the writers didn't know what Smokey was and just had it kill people or almost kill people. Now that they've decided who Smokey is, but its actions are inconsistent with what they were before. That's the problem with a show that wasn't planned out from the very beginning.

Score: 9.5/10

Random thoughts/observations:

Are the people in the temple really Others or a completely separate group? They look similar, but what they do seems different than typical Others fare.

Rose+Bernard=awesome, but where are they on the island?

Two separate ships: Jate on the island, Skate in the other universe. Would that satisfy everyone?

I hope the old characters--Boone, Charlie, Claire--aren't there for the sake of them being there. They're in the story which isn't "real," so that's disappointing.

I'm still mad Libby's story won't be resolved.

Why did Desmond pop up on the plane and then disappear?


Cousin said...

Good thoughts! I'm with you on MIB/Locke not automatically being bad and Jacob/white not automatically being good. For all Jacob's talk about choice, he sure makes some major life decisions for people (and am I wrong or did he distract Sayid so that he did not notice and prevent Nadia's death? I need to re-watch that). MIB objects to Jacob's experiment of bringing people to the island to prove that they don't HAVE to end up going all Lord of the Flies or something -- just because he's cynical about human nature doesn't make Jacob's experiment right.

I don't know if "home" is the temple though -- it might be "heaven" or such, like that they were put on Earth to answer this debate and MIB wants it concluded. Just my $0.02.

Anonymous said...

what was juliet saying that she had to tell sawyer? it didn't really make since that it worked? what worked the bomb she put off?

and the smoke monster has been so inconsistent i agree, it would kill people, and now the person or "thing" inside locke's body controls it too? i don't quite understand.

it just seems like a lot of people died in this episode? are they REALLY dead? jacob?

from this first episode do you think its going to end that they arrive home safely and there are no more questions to ask? if so, i believe that'd be very disappointing

jeffgoblue said...

Good review!

In interviews and on the official Lost podcast, the producers made it very clear that both storylines are equally real, and they also accounted for some of the differences we see in this version of the plane 2004 versus what we saw in season 1.

"And we don't use the phrase "alternate reality" because to call one of them an alternate reality is to infer that one of them isn't real, or one of them is real and the onter is the alternate to being real."

kerrySSG said...

Surely Desmond is on the plane as he never ended up working for Dharma, as if it worked he never would have. Also wouldn't the bomb have killed all the dharma people? So that would mean that Daniel Faraday might never have been born in the first place so couldn't have told them to detonate the bomb at all? When did Chales Whitmore leave the island originally? He was the father of Desmonds girlfriend so maybe again she was never born??? If the young Ben died then surely most events leading up to the destruction of the bomb would not have needed to take place anyway??? Would Miles have been born? his father would have been killed by the bomb blast also in 1977. Questions, questions, questions.....

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