The ‘Lost’ season premiere: Smokin’!

Before I get to my reaction to Tuesday’s “Lost” season premiere, a quick plug for a good cause: You can get a cool “Lost” pin if you donate $25 or more to the Haitian medical charity Partners in Health here (spread the word, “Lost” fans!). And I’ve just added a boatload of new items to the Watch Us Care eBay auction of choice TV memorabilia — including five books about “Lost,” a “Battlestar Galactica” DVD set signed by the show’s stars and executive producers, tons of “Supernatural” items, cool “Dollhouse” and “Buffy” gear and “Sons of Anarchy” items as well. Check it out! All the money goes toward helping people in need in Haiti.

On with my reaction to that brainmelty “Lost” season premiere.

What’s that on the floor?

Oh.

It’s a puddle of brains.

My brain has melted.

It’s on the floor.

Wow!

Executive producers Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse have said they were going straight into “answer mode” when the final season began, and they were not kidding. There were some gigantic revelations in “LA X” and also some answers to long-asked questions.

It’s going to take me a while to process all this information, but I can say this for certain: This was a fantastic season premiere. I was on the edge of my seat as all the revelations and heartbreaks and the dual timelines unfolded.

That’s another thing Darlton talked about before the season began: They said they’d be using a “new narrative device.” That new device appears to be the dual timelines we saw — one timeline shows the Oceanic flight landing safely in L.A. and the various passengers going on about their business (some of them enjoying good fortune, some of them not), and the other timeline shows the people on the island dealing with the fallout of Jacob’s death.

In the end, will the people on the island find out there’s a different timeline? Will they have to choose which one they want to stay in? “You have a choice,” Jacob told Ben last season. I wonder if that dilemma will be presented to the survivors — stay on the island and/or stay in the island timeline, or go off and never have those island experiences. I’m betting that will become one of the main features of the final season — pondering which choice might be better, and why, for various characters.

But I’m getting way ahead of myself. What about the biggest revelation? Or one of them, anyway?

We found out that the Smoke Monster is actually a person, or vice versa. And that person/monster is now occupying the body of John Locke. And whatever is in UnLocke, or SmokeLocke if you will, you do not want to mess with it. You really, really don’t.

Here’s my understanding of the situation, or perhaps I should present this as my theory: There are two powerful entities on the island, Jacob and whatever’s in SmokeLocke. I’m thinking the SmokeLocke entity used to be in the Man in Black, whom we first saw on the beach at the beginning of the Season 5 finale.

My theory: These two entities, Jacob and SmokeLocke, have been in combat for thousands of years, and they occupy the bodies of various island inhabitants (or even dead people?) at times when they need to take human form. Ilana and her people serve Jacob, as do the Temple of Doom folks (and more on that later).

(Fun off-topic trivia fact: Mark Pellegrino, who plays Jacob on “Lost,” plays the Devil on “Supernatural.” When casting agents need someone to play a powerful angel or fallen angel or god or devil in human form, I guess they call Pellegrino’s agent.)

Anyway, Ben had served Jacob — he thought he served Jacob, or perhaps pretended to — but as Ben realized, SmokeLocke manipulated Ben into killing Jacob. And then SmokeLocke occupied Jacob’s Throne of Power, in an indelible image that recalled not only a king on a throne but Locke’s former mode of transportation — a wheelchair.

There’s so much to ponder when it comes to the swaggering SmokeLocke. For a while there, it appeared that Jacob and his forces had the upper hand on the island and somehow kept SmokeLocke in check (maybe?). But now SmokeLocke seems to have the upper hand, and things are already getting very unpleasant for anyone who SmokeLocke doesn’t like. That would include Richard Alpert (who served Jacob faithfully — and perhaps is somehow a creation of Jacob’s, which is perhaps why he doesn’t age?). SmokeLocke also killed Jacob’s bodyguards, and he’s no doubt setting off for the Temple of Doom to wreak a little more vengeance. No, a lot more vengeance.

Here’s another theory: Sayid was dying around the time that Jacob was killed by Ben. Jacob’s ghost told Hurley to get Sayid over to the Temple in order to save Sayid — or to put Sayid’s body into place. Perhaps we’ll find out next week (or further down the road) that the Jacob entity is now in Sayid’s body?

Truth be told, I had a feeling Sayid wasn’t dead. First of all, Naveen Andrews is a series regular this season. You don’t give an actor a series-regular paycheck and then kill him in the season premiere. And secondly, why wouldn’t the Temple do what it did for Ben years earlier — heal him and somehow change him? (Although whether Ben was truly changed is a matter for debate. Or perhaps Ben was more changed than we know?)

So when Sayid woke up right at the end of the episode, it sort of just fit in with where I thought the story was going to go. But hey, I’m not complaining. There were so many tasty reveals that I’m going to be chewing on the implications for days.

If I have any complaint, and it’s not really a complaint but a mildly amused observation, it’s that the Temple of Doom really does seem like something out of an “Indiana Jones” movie, right down to the decor, the mysterious powerful entities, the guards in red turbans and vaguely exotic clothes and the imperious leader strutting around like a Kung Fu master. It’s not that the set designers did a bad job with the Temple, it’s just that the whole vibe sometimes brought to mind the much more jaunty Indiana Jones movies and the super-serious cheese of the TV series “Kung Fu.” As James Poniewozik wrote, the Temple scene “is skating the edge of silliness” at times.

It looks like we’ll be sticking around the Temple of Doom for a while this season, and so I’ll get those questions out of the way: So dozens of people have been living on the island, but most of the characters we know were never aware of them? None of the main Losties encountered any them before (aside from Jin)? It would appear that the Temple compound is an offshoot or a branch location of the Others (given that the Others took Cindy the Flight Attendant and those two kids, and Alpert took Ben there for healing). I’ve changed this paragraph a bit since I first posted it, but what I’m getting at is — can we assume the Temple people had a good relationship with the Others we’ve come to know (the ones led by Alpert and Ben)? A couple more questions: Where did they get the food to support all those people? Did some Dharma folks end up at the Temple? John Hawke’s translator character did seem to have a hippie-ish vibe.

So that’s another huge chunk of stuff that the show introduced us to right there — the Temple and “the other Others,” as I took to calling them. Then we also had what I’ll call the Safe Landing timeline — all those familiar faces engaging in activities that seemed familiar. Charlie was taking drugs, Kate was on the lam, Locke was still in a wheelchair (but seemed even sweeter and more likable in contrast to the scarily intense SmokeLocke), Rose and Bernard were in love, and Jack seemed much more like the forthright straight-arrow we met in the pilot.

By the way, as I’ve already mentioned, I watched about 14 hours of “Lost” over the last few days: “Pilot,” “Tabula Rasa,” “Walkabout,” “Man of Science, Man of Faith,” “Orientation,” “A Tale of Two Cities,” “The Man Behind the Curtain,” “Through the Looking Glass,” “The Constant,” “The Variable” and “The Incident.” I haven’t slept much in days, but I’m really glad I got that “Lost” re-watch under my belt before venturing into Season 6. I think if you’d re-watched only the Season 5 finale, you’d have been fine (and let me know if you weren’t — I’m interested in the reactions of folk who hadn’t watched the show since Season 5 ended last year. Was it totally confusing? I wouldn’t have thought so, but I’m curious about that).

What was terrific about having seen all those episodes is that I not only got a refresher course in the characters’ histories and motivations, but I also noticed many callbacks to small and large moments in older episodes. I’m sure I missed a lot of them, but here are just a few of the callbacks I noted:

Jin asking Sun to button her top button, which he did in Season 1 (I believe in the “Pilot”).
Cindy giving Jack one bottle of vodka (instead of the two she gave him in the pilot, right?).
It was cool to hear Greg Grunberg’s voice again as the pilot of Flight 815.
Jack asked for pens to save Charlie on the plane — he’d also needed pens on the beach when he was helping people (and Boone brought them to him then).
Frogurt! Arzt! Desmond! Where’d he go, anyway?
We saw Charlie’s ring, and his drugs, and we heard him say he was supposed to die.
Rose and Jack talked on the plane again, but their dialogue was slightly different — she didn’t seem as nervous as Jack was when they hit turbulence.
Did you see Desmond’s exercise bike in the Swan Station rubble?
Of course the biggest callback was the shot of Kate’s eye — we’ve also had close-ups of Jack’s eye (at the start of the “Pilot”) and Desmond’s eye (at the start of Season 2). I’m sure there’ve been other eye closeups, but it was cool to see Kate finally get one.

Those are just small things, and fun ones at that.

But the season premiere also delved into the big issues and mythical themes that undergird the whole enterprise. There has been a lot of religious symbolism on this show, and here we had a character appear to die (as he was being baptized) and be reborn. We had the yin and yang or Jacob and SmokeLocke and their eternal battle. We got to see what people do when they are (unwittingly) given a do-over in life — will they keep making the same mistakes? Will they end up in the same places or do they really have choices?

Locke’s last thought was, “I don’t understand.” Poor Locke. He died confused, with so many questions. I have questions too, but I also got so many interesting answers that I’m not at all dismayed. These questions are clearly setting up an intriguing endgame for the show (and the series finale, Cuse and Lindelof announced on Jimmy Kimmel Tuesday night, will be Sunday, May 23).

Now for some of those questions, large and small. I haven’t written down every question because I really must get to bed before I fall asleep on the keyboard, but here is a selection of my ideas and queries:

Could Jack and Sawyer be the next iteration of Jacob and SmokeLocke? What I mean is, could they be used, eventually, as the bodily vessels of those two entities and carry on their battle? Or will Jack and Sawyer just be locked in a mirror struggle of hate and misunderstanding? And is it going to take forgiveness or reconciliation or surrender from one of those parties, in either of the struggles, before peace can truly come to the island? I guess now’s the time to quote from the Dhammapeda (an ancient text of Buddha’s teachings — and forgive the indulgence but after all, the island was the home of the Dharma Initiative): “For hatred does not cease by hatred at any time: hatred ceases by love, this is an old rule.”
Is “Lost” trying to show us that continuing the battle and the grudges and the score-keeping isn’t the way to reach a higher level or accomplish anything good? It’s entirely possible that I’m reading way too much into the Jack-Sawyer conflict. But Sawyer’s so devastated by Juliet’s death that I could see him going one of two ways — either deciding to take out all his rage and pain on Jack, or reaching some new kind of harmony and peace with not just her death, but with his life. Sawyer has a choice, and I wonder what he’ll choose.
As a commenter below pointed out, the dichotomies and disagreements of Locke and Jack over the years also plays into this yin-yang scenario.
Where did Desmond go? Really, what’s up with him?
Safe Landing Locke was clearly much nicer than SmokeLocke — but he still lied to Boone about having gone on a walkabout. Didn’t he? He must have.
How much did you laugh when Hurley said, “Nothing bad ever happens to me.” Some of the Safe Landing folks are living in Opposite World, huh?
Was this the best exchange of the night? Ghost Jacob: “Because I died an hour ago.” Hurley: “Sorry, dude. That sucks.” Ghost Jacob: “Thanks.” Or was it this: Ben calling SmokeLocke the “monster,” and SmokeLocke replying, “Let’s not resort to name-calling.”
What’s the circle of ash made of? Why does it repel SmokeLocke?
“It worked.” What worked? Like Sawyer, I’m dying to know what Juliet meant by that. Alan Sepinwall thinks it meant that setting off Jughead did work, in a way.
To me, Sawyer and Juliet were so great together, and it was so moving when she died, and Sawyer’s grief is so powerful, that I wonder what will happen with the love quadrangle, which I never much enjoyed (at least not the Kate-Sawyer, Kate-Jack, Jack-Juliet parts of it). To me, the only couples who’ve ever moved me are Desmond and Penny and Juliet and Sawyer (and to a lesser extent, Rose and Bernard). If the writers come up with another iteration of the Kate-Jack-Sawyer triangle — and it’s fresh, compelling and not incredibly annoying and repetitive — I’ll be cool with it. I’m not saying there can’t be romance on “Lost.” I’m saying it has to be not the same old stuff with those three. Please.
SmokeLocke can deflect bullets. And kill people when he goes Ole Smokey on them. Wow! No question here, just … holy cow!
Where are Michael and Walt? Or just Michael? Are they totally done on this show? Or do we just catch up with them later? Clearly it would be a problem for “Lost” to depict the pair in the Safe Landing timeline, given that the actor playing Walt has just about doubled in size since the series began.
Does Miles know what Sayid thought at the time of his death? UPDATE: Several commenters said iti appeared that Miles could not hear anything — which proves that either Sayid was never truly dead or something unusual was going on with him.
So are we going to find out, in the end, that crashing on the island was the best thing that could have happened to some of these folks? It cured Rose’s cancer, it fixed Locke’s legs, it allowed Kate to stay out of jail, it got Charlie off drugs, it allowed Jin to avoid getting in trouble with the US authorities, it allowed Sun to be someone other than the wife of a somewhat unpleasant man.
The Kate we see running off hasn’t learned much about facing up to consequences. The Charlie on the plane hadn’t yet learned that he can be heroic in a crisis. The Locke on the plane never got to catch a wild boar or lead the adventurous life he’d craved. The Jack on the plane never got to resolve or at least work on a few of his daddy issues. The Sun and Jin on the plane probably would have stayed in a strained marriage.
I’m sure there are an equal number of examples in which characters were better off staying in the Safe Landing storyline — certainly Hurley seems happier there and in that timeline, Boone doesn’t appear to be headed for death. But, as I asked earlier, will there have to be a choice between the island and Safe Landing timelines? I know if I were Sawyer, I’d choose the island story. No matter how much he suffered there, he also began to know true love and real friendship. All of them suffered, but wasn’t it suffering that taught them something?
I do wonder how these two timelines are going to converge. Because as the book Jacob was reading in the Season 5 finale reminds us, “Everything That Rises Must Converge.”
One final thought from Jack: “Nothing is irreversible.” I guess we’ll find out.

Your thoughts?

A couple of notes:

*Check the roster of “Lost” bloggers and critics mentioned on this post on Tuesday to read more reactions to the “Lost” season premiere. Jeff Jensen at EW.com has an interview with Cuse and Lindelof, check that out here.

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