The Space Between (LA and X)

All my bags are packed I'm ready to go I'm standin' here outside your door I hate to wake you up to say goodbye But the dawn is breakin' it's early morn The taxi's waitin' he's blowin' his horn Already I'm so lonesome I could die

So kiss me and smile for me Tell me that you'll wait for me Hold me like you'll never let me go Cause I'm leavin' on a jet plane Don't know when I'll be back again Oh babe, I hate to go

Mr. John Denver must have traveled in time during one of the island flashes, 'cause this song sounds like the perfect tune to accompany the opening of LOST's sixth season. He even mentions the taxi that Kate hijacks (with Claire in it...but is she pregnant?) outside of LAX.

Speaking of LAX, my suspicions Tuesday night were confirmed by LOSTpedia: there was a space between LA and X, so think of the X as you would a Roman numeral. Or think of it like this popular comic book that the writers of LOST say is one of the countless influences on the show.

Earth X is a 1999 comic book limited series written by Jim Krueger with art by John Paul Leon and published by Marvel Comics. Based on Alex Ross' notes, the series features dystopian future version of the Marvel Universe.

The series was followed by two sequels, Universe X and Paradise X.

A comic book about an alternate universe/reality that influenced the writers of LOST? Hmmm. Interesting, no?

Let's get the most pressing thing out the way first: the scenes on the plane and in LAX between many of our beloved characters from the original Oceanic Flight 815 were, from what I can gather, an alternate reality. I mean, it was clear that things were different (i.e. Shannon not being on the plane, Desmond being on the plane, etc.)...but everyone wants to know (or should want to know) "What the heck is going on here? When are they? Why are things so different?"

Here are some of the videos that the LOST people put out back at the Comicon Conference this past fall. One is about Oceanic having a perfect track-record in their company's existence. The next is Hurley in a commercial for the fried chicken joint he bought with his now-lucky millions. The third and final one is an "America's Most Wanted" story about fugitive Kate Austen (with some added/new twists to her insane flee from justice). All three videos are depicting another reality, contrary to the one we've witnessed the past 5 seasons, but also very similar to the original storyline as well. Things are different, but not that different (at least not yet).

I open with this because I wanted to establish that we really are dealing with what I believe to be an alternate chain of events. It's not in the future or in the past, but a different telling of the story that we originally saw. The bomb went off when Juliet hit it with a rock, and that time-line changed (and is the one we saw Tuesday night being played out on the plane and in the LAX airport). When half of the airplane landed on the Hydra island last season, with both living and dead Locke in-tow, they arrived in the future that was created by the rest of the gang (Jack, Kate, Hurley, Sayid, etc.) who went back to Dharma time and blew up the island...which likely sunk to the bottom of the ocean. (See: sunken four-toed statue)

I hope this helps clarify some things for those of you confused by what you saw in the season premiere. I also hope that it is right.

Let me move on to the parsing of the episode itself and the exciting new plot twists we were introduced to:

I'll start with what happened on the plane and in the airport.

As far as we can tell, all of the main characters from Season One are on the plane except Shannon. Locke is still crippled, both physically and emotionally, as exhibited by his apparent lie to Boone about the "walkabout" he likely never took Down Under. Jack is still boozing and a mess about his dad. (Although, and maybe it's nothing, the stewardess gave him two bottles of booze in Season 1 and only one last night.) Kate is still the hottest fugitive I've ever seen. Jin hasn't let his hair grow long or learned any English, and still treats Sun like their dog Bpo-Bpo. Rose and Bernard are still...zzzzzz....oh, sorry. I feel asleep because I was so bored even remembering those two pointless characters. Sayid and Sawyer still have proverbial chips on their shoulders. Hurley is all smiles as the "luckiest dude on earth."

The two characters that intrigued me the most on the plane were Charlie and Desmond. Charlie, because he tried to off himself in the lavatory (classy, bro) and then said "I was supposed to die" to Jack (the guy who saved his life on the island after my boy Ethan hung him like a sack of potatoes from a sycamore tree). I don't know exactly what I think about Charlie's cryptic comments regarding his own mortality, but I know there's something bigger there. "Whatever happened, happened" isn't the rule any more, but perhaps Charlie is in for another death scene shortly. His last (think: Not Penny's Boat) in the Looking Glass station at the end of Season 3 was actually really well done and powerful. Yet he was originally meant to die sooner than that, and if it hadn't been for Desmond....wait....isn't that Scottish yachtsmen on the plane as well this time?

Desmond pops up in first class with Jack and is reading a book by the mysterious real-life author Salmon Rushdie entitled Haroun and the Sea Stories. For more in-depth discussion of the book, it's connections to LOST, and correlating theories, read Doc Jensen's re-cap at Entertainment Weekly Online here. I'll just say that the book is about people who live in a city that is so old it has "forgotten its name." Sounds like that "might" touch upon some of the themes in LOST.

Jack recognizes Desmond, but Desmond doesn't remember him. The two of them should have met three years earlier while running sweatily up and down the stairs at a football stadium (presumably the Rose Bowl). Does Dez not remember Jack because that never happened in this alternate reality? Or does Dez remember him (because, as Faraday said last season, the "rules" don't apply to Hume and he is "special") and is just pretending to not know him?

Let's say Desmond does recognize Jack and is pretending to not remember him...could it be because he is now working for Widmore? Jacob? Smokey/Esau?

Or could it be because Desmond is on the plane to save Charlie's life again in this alternate reality? Lots of questions. If you have theories of your own on this specific point, post them in the Comments section below.

The rest of the "alternate reality" time is spent in the LAX airport terminal and much of what happened is self-explanatory. I can't pass up a chance to comment on the interplay between Locke and Jack, both in the plane, and then most notably in the Oceanic offices. Locke is looking for his knives and Jack just wants his dad's body back. (I'm Tom Jane.) For Locke, his refusal to accept that he is a "farmer" and not a "hunter" has plagued him his whole life, as we saw in Season 4's Cabin Fever. He cannot accept who he is, and those knives in part represent his refusal to let go of what he wants to be true (as opposed to the healthier acceptance and embracing of what is true). But Locke is a complicated dude, and who knows what the new future holds in store for him. His old ideological nemesis, Jack, became a Man of Faith and led the crusade to blow the island up, and here, in the new alternate reality, Jack befriends Locke. He even gives John his card and says, "Nothing is irreversible." Wow. What a loaded sentence that was! Especially coming from someone like Jack.

Okay, so let's move to a discussion of the happenings on the island itself. The year is supposedly 2007, and Jack, Jin, Sawyer, Kate, Hurley, Sayid, and a buried Juliet were transported from 1977. Juliet lets us know that "It Worked", but it's hard to say precisely what she meant by that. If she meant "The wreckage of the Swan falling on me to crush my body and kill me worked", then I totally on the same page. If she meant, however, that the detonation of the bomb worked in "fixing" things I have two simple questions: What? How? (Both how did it happen and how do you know, Blondie?)

Side note: I love Sawyer, but those lines he delivered under the Swan wreckage to Juliet were cheesy and over-acted.

Jacob, fresh off his stabbing in the foot of the four-toed statue, visits Hurley and tells him how to save Sayid: bring his Middle-Eastern carcass to the Temple's fountain-of-youth for some rejuvenation juice. Was anyone else wondering why Hurley didn't suggest that maybe they should bring Juliet with in case the healing pools were open for other miracles?

I know I'm jumping ahead, but Sayid "coming back to life" has to be Jacob indwelling his body, right? I guess it could be the Smoke Monster, but we know he is over with Richard and Ben on the beach. Plus Jacob was just murdered and would be looking for a new body. This makes me think that the body we know as Jacob now was someone else he took control of in days of island yore. Same thing with Esau/Smokey. They can take the shape of other peoples' bodies (see: Walt appearing to Locke in the Dharma mass-grave). They use the people drawn to the island as pawns in their cosmic game. It sounds similar to Shakespeare's The Tempest. Check it out and let me know what some of you think.

The New Others that the group meets in the Temple seem just as creepy and just as indifferent to human life as the original band. We've already seen last season that on this new island reality Othersville is destroyed so it is safe to assume that these New Others aren't faking their hobo garb and Spartan living conditions. They've built a new little society and have defensive protocols for how to keep "him" (Smokey) out. Some dude named Dogen is their leader and hates to speak English. (He should immigrate to America.) He wants to kill Jack and the Gang, but Hurley brings up Jacob and the old Egyptian wooden symbol in his guitar case and after finding a list of names unnecessarily hidden in the wooden symbol, Dogen agrees to try and help Sayid. They "help" Sayid die so Jacob can take control of his body.

On the beach, Richard and the group of people Jacob recruited to be on Aijira Flight 316 are wondering what to do about the fact that Locke seems to be both in the basement of the statue with Jacob and Ben, and also dead in a casket on the beach. Ben seems shell-shocked beyond words, although I loved his feeble attempt to trick Richard into going in to see "Locke". The guy is still learning.

Bram and a few of the Jacob-recruits do go in and get man-handled by Smokey. Some people are calling the Fake Locke "Flocke", so let's stick with that from now on. So, Flocke has his way with those saps who try to shoot a floating cloud of smoke that fights back. What I really enjoyed was Flocke's conversation with Ben about what real Locke was thinking before he died. Flocke commented on how silly and sad Locke was his whole life, and confirmed that he used Locke as his stooge because John was the most willing to give his all to the island...anything to avoid having to deal with the reality of his pathetic life back home.

Things wrap up on the beach when Flocke emerges and tells everyone there that he is "Very disappointed" with all of them. Phwaaah? Does he know all of them? Does he know their thoughts (like when he judged Mr Eko, appearing as his bro-bro Yemi)? What's this Flocke/Esau's deal?

He beats Richard up and puts him on his shoulders to go God only knows where. It was weird to see Richard get hurt, and even weirder that Richard recognized Flocke for the impostor he is only after Flocke said "It's nice to see you out of your chains." Is this a reference to the Black Rock being a slave ship and perhaps Richard Alpert was a slave (or criminal) on that ship when it crashed? Will we find out that the ship that was sailing in to the island's harbor while Jacob and Esau chatted at the beginning of last year's season finale was the ship Richard was on?

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Alright, that's what I got for now. I may add some things this weekend if I think of anything else, so check back from time to time.

Here are my closing thoughts/theories going forward in Season 6:

-The book that Hurley picked up in the Temple was Fear and Trembling by Soren Kierkegaard, and is described as follows:

Fear and Trembling (original Danish title: Frygt og Bæven) is an influential philosophical work by Søren Kierkegaard, published in 1843 under the pseudonym Johannes de silentio (John the Silent). The title is a reference to a line from Philippians 2:12, "...continue to work out your salvation with fear and trembling."

Fear and Trembling presents a highly original and provocative interpretation of the Binding of Isaac story as told in Genesis Chapter 22, and uses the story as an occasion to discuss fundamental issues in moral philosophy and the philosophy of religion, such as the nature of God and faith, faith's relationship with ethics and morality, and the difficulty of being authentically religious

Notice his pen-name (John the Silent), and the LOST-rich connections in even just that short synopsis. This show is just a little deeper than How I Met Your Mother, eh?

-A number of LOST theorists out there on the interweb have pointed out connections between this show and Dante's Paradiso. It is Dante's vision of what the after-life (Heaven) will be like. One thing that stood out to me was that in his version of heaven, there is a hierarchy among its inhabitants and some get to experience heaven in different ways than others. Almost as if there were lists of who was special and who was not.

- My money is on Desmond being responsible for stealing Jack's dad's corpse. He might be one of Widmore's street-toughs now. Or he is a wondering warrior who can move in and out of time (which would explain his disappearance act on the plane).

- Claire is still pregnant and Aaron will end up being more important to the story than we previously have seen. I still want to know what that psychic in Season 1 was talking about when he told Claire she "had" to be the one to raise Aaron and that evil surrounded him.

- All of the people Jacob visited in last season's finale are the people who went from 1977 time to new alternate reality time on the island. They were also all the people on the list hidden inside his weird, wooden Egyptian symbol. More on that next week.

- What was with Jack's flesh-wound on his neck when he was in the airplane's bathroom? Shaving-while-under-the-influence accident?

Thanks for reading. Thanks for loving LOST.


Namaste,

John Locke's Pants