Lost Season 5 Episode 1 & 2: What about the present?

If there is any show that needs a 2 hour premiere to get going, it’s Lost. I’m not saying that in a bad way, but it’s a compliment to the show’s intricate narrative that requires time to set everything in motion. So complex that I think for the first time, we had in episode flashes to the previous episode to remind the audience why people are where they were. Guess they didn’t want the “previously on Lost” to be 5 minutes long. Despite the complexity of the story and time travel (more on that later), the show makes us care about how these crazy circumstances affect the characters we’ve come to care about for 5 years. That’s no more prevalent then in Hurley’s long and sad explanation of the show to his mother. It was both funny (probably sounding similar to the explanations fans have tried to give to non-fans over the years) and heartbreaking to see this man who only wants to live a quiet, happy life being forced to live a lie. The audience needs Hurley there to call out the ridiculousness that occurs, especially with Sawyer’s sarcasm traveling through time and being chased by flaming arrows.

As for time travel, I’m not going to bother to understand it let alone explain it in a blog. First, the producers haven’t given us enough information to even conjure a random guess that is relatively close and 2^nd - as with all shows/movies that involve time travel the explanations never fully make sense anyway so to concoct a theory on the how and why of the island “shifting” through time would go nowhere. Just sit back and enjoy the exciting storytelling. However, its important to understand this, the producers have a set of rules and if they follow them (and I believe they will) then the audience will get a satisfying explanation eventually. Not an answer but an explanation. The producers promised this with the response by Marvin Candle to the worker’s “go back and kill Hitler” question – “There are rules.” A not so subtle hint to the audience to say, we’re not going to go back and change the past, you haven’t wasted 4 years of watching this show and caring about the character’s lives and deaths just so we can quickly erase or change the past in the last 2 seasons. The last 4 seasons were real and so were the consequences. Basically, they were saying “we’re not Heroes.”

Dharma

Not everybody involved with the Dharma Initiative knew the real purpose of the team being on the island. Of course the construction workers wouldn’t but with Marvin Candle making up fake names and using a script for

fake experiments, it’s clear that the majority of the people on the Island were puppets. Most were probably ambitious

scientists that were lied to and controlled by a combination of Widmore and Sun’s father. I think we’ve been given enough clues to believe they were behind Dharma so the questions shouldn’t be who was behind Dharma but rather why and how? How did they discover the Island? Why did they go to all the trouble of creating the Dharma Initiative and what was their overall goal? Somewhere in those answers lies the answer to another question, why is Widmore protected by the Island? During Ben’s flash forward last season, he confronted Widmore in his home and Widmore more or less said, you can’t kill me. And through Michael (flashback) and Jack (flash-forward), we learned the Island is preventing certain people from dying until they’ve survived a purpose. So what is Widmore’s purpose? If Locke dies, does he not get to achieve his destiny? Did those arrows miss Vincent? And what is the deal with Mrs. Hawking’s machine?

Other quick highlights or this blog would go on too long:

- flaming arrows

- guy from That Thing You Do getting a flaming arrow in the chest

- flying hotpockets

- more Richard Albert (that’s a request as well)

- and once again, Sayid is being a badass killing 3 guys