Final season Episode 1
As always MY FRIEND collects info from interviews, blogs, message boards and conversations with other LOSTiacs.
1. I think I need to manage my expectations for this season. I thought that we would get all unanswered questions answered last night and then sail through the rest of the season on character development. Leave it to LOST to create a thousand more questions!
2. Items to ponder from the producers:
"...These little clues [might help you] extrapolate when the Island may have sunk. Start to think about it. A couple of episodes down the road, some of the characters might even discuss it. We will say this: season 6 is not about time travel. It's about the implications, the aftermath, and the causality of trying to change the past. But the idea of continuing to do paradoxical storytelling is not what we're interested in this year."
Flash-sideways... "When our characters posited the "What if?" scenario, they neglected to think about what the other effects of potentially changing time might be and we're embracing those things." Lindelof (producer) then explains the show has replaced the trademark "whoosh!" sound effect marking the segue between Island present story and flashbacks or flash-forwards, thus calling conspicuous attention to the relationship between the Island world and the Sideways world.
3. The Oceanic 815 flight:
* Desmond is on the plane! The book he was reading is Haroun and the Sea of Stories by Salman Rushdie. It's a story, set in a city so old and ruinous that it has forgotten its name, about a father who loses his ability to tell stories after his son questions what the point of fictional stories is. Then, the son embarks on a fantastic adventure concerning someone who wants to destroy the ocean using machines powered by electromagnetic induction. The boy returns home to tell his father of his amazing adventure and restores his father's faith in stories.
Desmond, season 2, "SEE YOU IN ANOTHER LIFE BROTHER"... yes you will!
* Jack ... on the original flight 815 Cindy had given him 2 bottles of liquor. Maybe she knows Jack won't be needing the other one to disinfect his side wound this time around...
* This time Rose was calm and Jack was nervous... opposite of last time.
* Hurley... no longer cursed.
* Sawyer... still a con man? Too soon to tell.
* Charlie... Examine Charlie's many deaths a little more closely, and they all have one thing in common: not breathing. Desmond saw him drown (once in a dream, once in reality), Ethan hangs him to asphyxiation, and we see a vision in which he gets shot in the throat with an arrow. Now, in this episode, Charlie's choking on a big bag of heroin. Whatever happened to kill Charlie must apparently happen again and again, in the same basic way, no matter where, when or what universe he happens to be in.
* Kate... Kate stole Jack's pen! Jack didn't have a pen in the "Pilot, Part 1" episode. Remember? Boone was trying to do CPR on Rose, Jack comes over to help her and sends Boone off to get a pen. He comes back with a bunch of different pens.
* Some original 815ers were not on the plane this time (Shannon, Michael, Walt). Frogurt (still an a-hole), Artz...
* From the producers... The temptation will be to dismiss the sideways story as ''What if...?'', but we should trust that we're being shown this story for a reason, and so we should take the leap of investing in its reality.
* Jack's nicked neck was similar to the moment when Jack excused himself to the jungle in the pilot episode to patch up the ugly gash on his side. One wonders if the entire season 6 sideways story line will model the general thematic thrust of the castaway story, but with different incidents and events - a gritty, more down-to-earth version of the mythic, larger-than-life Island epic, like how Dorothy's adventure in Oz was a fantastical extrapolation of her life in Kansas.
4. The Island:
* Everyone on the island is now in 2007. The plane we saw in tonight's episode is travelling in 2004. We know that it is 2007 for everyone on the island because when the guy at the temple shoots the flare Richard sees it (and he is still in the same place we saw him at the end of Season 5....on the beach with everyone else...again...in 2007).
* Juliet "it worked"... what does she know at death that we do not? She said "let's get coffee"... was her conscious travelling to the alternate reality where she and Sawyer meet in the outside world? Wherever Juliet now "is", she's totally aware of the reset.
* The group at the hatch said that they were back at the hatch after Desmond blew it up. If you recall back from season 2, when they destroyed the Swan hatch equipment, time ran out, and everything metallic in the hatch was pulled to that spot, then Desmond inserted the fail safe key, and blew it up to stop it. It's as though Jughead never exploded when Juliette hit it with a rock....
* Theory: Are we going to see the 2004 real world people back on a plane again sometime soon? Jack will need to go back to Australia to find his father's coffin, Locke will have to go back and find his knives, Kate may have to go back for some reason, Claire gave up her baby in LA and will be on her way back to Australia, Charlie will be deported back to Australia, Hurley will have to go check on his Chicken Shack business etc...etc...etc... Maybe that is how they will catch up to where they are now on the island??? I don't know.