EPISODE REVIEW: Lost: “LAX” (Season 6, Episodes 1 and 2)

I was feeling terrible last night, just full-on sick terrible. One of those flu-days where you just want to go to bed at 7, and lapse into a coma for a couple days until you’re feeling better. I really didn’t feel like staying up for two hours of Lost, and I didn’t feel like I’d have been able to do it even if I wanted to. I try to put the needs of you, the readers, before my own, however, and I figured I’d give it a shot.
I’m really glad I did. The episode hooked me and held on tight for two hours. Just as I think things can’t get any stranger, they turn up the convolution factor again, and manage to re-ignite my waning interest. (As opposed to, say, the RDM Galactica, where my interest was long since spent, but I held on to the bitter end in hopes the show would redeem itself in some way. It didn’t, of course.)
PLAY BY PLAY
We start out with a recap of the bomb and Juliet’s sacrifice from the season finale last year. Everything goes white - which most of us presumed was the bomb going off - and the next thing you know, we’re back on the original plane trip, with jack being snarky about his drink to the stewardess, and them hitting air pockets. Everything calms down, however, and they continue to fly on their way without incident. We then get a quick shot of The Island sunken beneath the ocean.
We then have *another* recap of the bomb and Juliet’s sacrifice, after which everything goes white, and then we find Kate in a tree. She gets out of the tree, finds Miles, then finds the blast crater created when the Swan Hatch blew up at the end of the second season. “It didn’t work,” she says.
That’s right, kids, we now have two timelines running divergently! To avoid taxing your patience, I’ll detail them separately:
In The Rebooted Timeline:
The Transoceanic flight heads towards LA, and Desmond - who’s inexplicably on board - sits next to Jack and reads a book. but someone notes that Charlie isn’t coming out of the bathroom. They ask Jack for help. Sayid busts open the bathroom door, and Jack finds that the washed-up rock star isn’t breathing. He fixes that, but of course they find he was choking on a bag full o’ cocaine. He’s none too thrilled about being rescued. Charlie is restrained and sent back to his seat. When Jack gets back to his own, Desmond is gone. Meanwhile, Locke and Boone strike up a conversation, but Boone’s sister, Shannon, is inexplicably not on the flight.
They land at LAX without further incident, but Jack finds out they’ve lost his father’s corpse. Locke explains that they didn’t loose Jack’s dad, just his dad’s body. Moved by this, he offers to try and fix Locke’s spine, free of charge. Kate, meanwhile, manages to escape form her guard/escort, and carjacks a cab with a very pregnant Clair Littleton in it. Sun and Jin never make it through customs - the officials find a big wad of cash in his suitcase that wasn’t declared, but since he speaks no English they take him into custody until the matter can be straightened out. Sun speaks English, but can’t blow her cover about that, so she plays dumb.
In The Business As Usual Timeline:
Meanwhile, everyone connected with the bomb fiasco. Sawyer beats hell out of Jack for being wrong and killing Juliet. They hear Juliet screaming from the shaft, so Sawyer heads down to rescue her. She has a breakdown when she realizes her sacrifice accomplished nothing, then she starts doing that same Billy Pilgrim “Unstuck in Time” thing that Charlotte was doing, where she’s speaking her half of a conversation from the past, unaware of the present. This clears, and she tries to tell Sawyer something really important, but dies.
Jacob’s ghost appears to Hurley, and tells him to take the briefcase and Sayid to “The Temple.” Jin will know where it is. After some uncomfortable milling around, team Jack goes, leaving Sawyer and Miles behind to burry Juliet.
Sawyer forces Miles to read Juliet’s dead mind: the message she was trying to impart was, “It worked.” Neither of them know what this means.
At the statue, “John” talks to Ben about killing Jacob. He tells Ben to go outside and bring in Richard. He attempts to do this, but Richard grabs Ben and shows him Locke’s corpse. The mysterious soldier-type-guys who appeared last season, and were carrying Locke’s coffin around storm the statue and shoot Evil Locke, but he transforms into the Black Smoke Monster (!) and kills them all. One of them buys some time by making himself a circle of ashes from a sacred flame, and the monster can’t get past that, but he collapses part of the ceiling, causing the soldier to jump out of the way, and then, once he’s out of the circle, he kills him.
Ben realizes that Evil Locke had been using him, and is pretty upset. Locke declares to all the followers outside - including Sun and Frank -how disappointed in them all he is, then beats the crap out of Richard.
Attempting to enter the temple, Team Jack is ambushed by others and captured. The kinda’ cool Japanese guy who runs the temple - a priest, perhaps? - is going to kill them until Hurley opens his guitar case and they find a large ankh in it. The Japanese guy breaks it open, and there’s a note inside. This changes his mind, and they bring them all inside the temple, to put Sayid in the spring. The water is a different color now, which confounds them, but they try anyway. Sayid dies. Jack tries to bring him back, but to no avail.
Sawyer and Miles are captured by the priestly Others as well, then Hurley lets it slip that Jacob is dead. Everyone in the temple freaks the hell out and starts preparing for an attack, launching fireworks into the sky, and laying down a perimeter of sacred ash.
Sayid comes back to life…
The End
OBSERVATIONS
So now we’ve got two diverging timelines, one in which the accident happened, another in which the Island apparently sank. How and why? Well, in the “No Crash” timeline, the Bomb must have gone off, in which case possibly it destroyed the island, or maybe not. In the “Crash” timeline, however, everyone appears to be in the same time again, and events progressed exactly as they always had, with our main characters evidently causing “The Incident” at The Swan, as they were predestined to do.
Juliet’s postmortem final words were interesting, suggesting that the plan worked, but not in the way they intended, obviously. Given that all last season was about Fate vs. Free Will, I found myself wondering if we’re actually looking at a “Fate” timeline and a “Free Will” one. Fate is obviously the folks on the island, Free will would be the folks in the “No Crash” timeline.
Of course this is all just a wild surmise, but that’s what I took from it. What did you folks think?
So Charlie was suicidal *before* they crashed on the island?
With Desmond being on the plane and Shannon *not* being on the plane, it would appear this new timeline diverged slightly *before* the flight took place.
Jack says that “The funeral is in two hours” and Jin says that he has a business meeting in two hours. Given how interconnected the Lostiverse is, could Jin’s meeting be *at* Christian Shepherd’s funeral?
How did Juliet know that they’d created a new timeline?
Presumably, the waters went muddy when Jacob died.
Evil Locke/The Black Smoke Monster wants to go home. Why, and where is home?
Man, we had a lot of cameos in this episode, didn’t we? The science teacher - annoying as ever - Boone, Charlie, the stewardess lady, the two little kids with the teddy bear nabbed by the Others, even the same Captain’s Voice over the PA, but reading new lines.
That said, it’s hard to pretend these people look like they did six years ago: Jack’s got a different haircut and he’s got some grey in his sideburns, Sawyers got just a dash of grey in his beard, Boone’s quite a bit denser than he used to be, Charlie looks wirier and kind of pugnacious (More like his character from Flash Forward than the Charlie we know), and of course the Stewardess Lady had way long hair now. Remember, these folks crashed on the island before George W. Bush’s second term, so the actors are all considerably older now, and some of them are definitely starting to look it.
For the record, Desmond and Juliet are off the cast this season, but Claire is back on the cast. I presume that in the “Business as Usual” timeline, this means Des and Penny had their happy ending, and sailed off into the sunset with their little boy. In the “No Crash” universe, obviously, this must not have happened.
Regardless of the philosophical underpinnings of the dual timelines, it’s obvious purpose is to show us what the Lostaways’ lives would have been like if the crash had never happened. Well, duh. Will it be a happy ending, or a sad one for them? Well, Evil Locke gives what might be a clue when he says “John was the only one who didn’t want to leave, the only one who realized how pathetic his life off the island was.” This hints that the folks in the “No Crash” universe will probably have a pretty miserable time, being killed off or otherwise ruined ten-little-Indians style, while the folks on the island will step up and save the world.
Of course I could be completely wrong on this, conversely, the “No Crash” universe could be all about giving our characters a happy ending while the ones on the island get ruined and/or killed. I suspect this isn’t the case, however, since Rose has terminal cancer, and without the island there to save her, she doesn’t have long to live. And Charlie’s in jail for possession. And Kate’s on the lam, again. Sun and Jin's marriage is all-but-dead, and so on.
So: a lot of neat stuff going on here, and I’m not being hypercritical, but here at the start of the endgame, I found some things kind of nagging at me:
1) We never really found out what The Swan Hatch was for, though the plot has been weaving in and out of it for five years now.
2) I’m not entirely sure that Evil Locke being The Black Smoke Monster entirely makes sense. Don’t get me wrong, it’s cool and all, but it feels a little bit retconned. I mean, at different times, the monster has appeared to be mindless and beastial, at others it’s been reasonably benevolent, on others it’s appeared to be Ben’s pet attack dog. So I’m not sure if it’s being The Devil entirely tracks. It is sorta’ neat, though, so I’m not complaining too much.
3) You know, there’s a lot of dead ends and blind alleys in this show. Aside from Rose and her husband, you could cut out the entire second season and not really loose anything of consequence. The entire Mister Eko plot was particularly frustrating, since it came to nothing and ate up a hell of a lot of screen time.
That’s all regarding the Series as a whole, of course. Objections to this specific episode: It felt a little bit padded out, like they had too much story for one episode, and not enough story for two. It felt a bit talky for a season opener, particularly for a season as important as this one. I didn’t really think that Juliet needed a death scene, I felt it was time consuming, kind of slow, and it robbed her season-ending sacrifice of a lot of its impact. I realize they needed to get that message to Sawyer, but there’s a zillion other ways they could have done that. I also felt the episode was a bit over-scored, you know? Normally the soundtrack is rather sparse, but there was a lot of music going on here, even in scenes that didn’t really call for it. In one or two moments, I found it rather distracting.