Well, hello again, friends and neighbors. Here we are again. It’s been awhile since I’ve shared my brilliant and insightful insights and brilliances about whatever television show I most recently watched. I stopped writing about Dolllhouse as soon as its cancellation was announced. Kind of a bummer. But now it’s time for Lost, which is on borrowed time itself. We’ve now begun the sixth and final season of everyone’s favorite time-travelogue. And when we last left our beloved castaways, they were preparing to die in a nuclear explosion they somehow expected would prevent their plane from ever crashing on Mystery Island. Really? Can that possibly be true?

I guess it could possibly be true. “LAX”, the season premiere, opens with Jack making that same old joke about how “it’s not a very strong drink.” Then the turbulence happens, and Rose tells Jack how Bernard always tells her that planes want to stay in the air. We’ve seen it all before. We know the plane is about to snap in half. But this time it doesn’t. The turbulence ends and the guy from Heroes tells everyone that everything is fine, including the weather in Los Angeles. The plane lands safely. Apparently the bomb worked. Insert tasteless joke here.

But then we discover that Kate has somehow landed in a tree. She’s still on the island. And so are Miles and Sawyer. And Jack, whom we recently saw on a plane bound for the Southland. So did the bomb work or not? Well, apparently this is the new conceit of Season Six: the bomb both worked and did not. The castaways are both on the island as if they never left (though apparently back in 2007) and off the island as if they never crashed there in the first place. It appears we have alternative, parallel realities.

So what happens off the island? Well, Charlie tries to kill himself, apparently by choking on a bag of heroin. Jack saves him (with an assist from Sayid), and Charlie is hauled off the plane in handcuffs. Boone is on the plane, but this time has failed to convince Shannon to come with him. Hurley is still a lottery winner and owner of Mr. Clucks, but now he’s “the luckiest man alive”. Jin neglects to declare his big bag of money to customs officials, and Sun remains afraid to admit that she has learned English. Kate manages to escape from the federal marshal and hijacks a taxi, in which the other passenger is Claire. And both Jack and John have their luggage misplaced — John loses his knives; Jack loses his father’s coffin. But Jack gives John his business card, with the promise of a possible cure for his paralysis.

Back on the island, Sawyer hears Juliet crying for help at the bottom of the hole and climbs down to rescue her. Of course, he reaches her and she promptly dies, but not before cryptically suggesting that they meet some time for coffee, and that she has to tell him something important. When Sawyer later demands of Miles that he find out what she wanted to tell him, he returns with “It worked.” Was Juliet bouncing back and forth between realities the same way Desmond* bounces through time?

* Oh, Desmond is on the plane too, for some reason. But he disappears before the plane lands.

Having failed to keep Juliet alive, Jack tries to save Sayid (who ended last season by being shot). When he decides there’s nothing he can do, Hurley declares his plan. Earlier in the night, the “ghost” of Jacob appeared to Hurley and told him to take Sayid to the temple. Jin knows the location of the temple, having seen most of the French Party chase the smoke monster into it, so he, Hurley, Jack, and Kate head in that direction. Once they arrive, they’re immediately captured by a new group of Others, who threaten to kill them until Hurley produces a guitar case with a wooden ankh inside. The group’s leader — a man who only speaks Japanese because he hates speaking English — breaks the ankh open and produces … a list! It’s enough to keep our heroes alive, except for Sayid. They try to save him by drowning him in the pool, but it doesn’t work. He dies.

But then later, he’s alive again! Is it really Sayid though? Is his body actually inhabited by the spirit of Jacob — maybe Jacob needed an empty, purified (in the pool) vessel in order to save himself. In any event, there’s trouble on the horizon because Jacob’s nemesis — the creature wearing the form of Locke — kills several of the “good guys”, and punches Richard Alpert in the throat (after telling him he’s glad to see him “out of those chains”). He explains to Ben that while the real Locke was the only person who wanted to stay on the island, he — who is apparently the smoke monster (“I’m sorry you had to see me like that.”) — only wants to go home. Where is home? Is it the temple? The people in the temple are certainly acting like it is, spreading ash around and lighting off fireworks.

So what’s the deal with the split realities? I’m not sure, but I’m reminded of an earlier thought I had: that rather than being about eschatology as most early theories speculated, Lost is a show about religious belief. And if you extend that line of thought, maybe it’s about all beliefs, all mental processes. The one thing that has appeared clear from the start of the series is that all of the castaways left behind lives that were lacking (if not outright awful). Maybe the plane crash was always metaphorical. Maybe it was the moment when their lives, as they previously knew them, ended. Maybe it was the moment when they felt they began to feel the most abandoned and lost. Perhaps some turned to logic (Jack) or faith (Locke) or each other (Jin and Sun). It will be interesting to see if the progression of the characters off the island mirrors their progression on the island since Season 1.

I really thought it was kind of cheap to reveal that Juliet survived the explosion, but then kill her off anyway. But I’m looking forward to seeing if the two realities cross in any other ways — I think they have to. I enjoyed the episode, and there was a lot to take in, as usual. It’s kind of amusing to imagine Jack and Locke chartering a plane to go look for their knives and coffin, but in all seriousness, those two characters have always been the keys to each other. Jack might be destined to give Locke his legs back — perhaps it was always their proximity to each other rather than the island itself that did it initially. What will Locke give Jack in return?

I’ll withhold judgment on the parallel universe mechanism until I see where they’re going with it. And it was good to see some of the old characters again. But I actually found the episode — two hours, by the way — to be a little slow. But I’m excited for the season to follow. Let’s get on with it.

Rating:

What am I forgetting? I don’t know. Probably nothing important. Oh, Jack’s neck was bleeding on the plane. What’s that about?

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