LOST: BACK TO THE ISLAND: SEASON 6 PREMIERE

Sawyer: “If she dies, I’ll kill him.”

• Ominous, part II.

• Charlie and Sayid appear on the off-Island Oceanic flight, with Sayid on his way to see Nadia (and putting him in more-or-less the same position he was in originally), and surprisingly casual about things like kicking in airplane doors. Charlie’s the one in the john, an echo of the way he ran to the bathroom and dropped his heroin into the toilet. Only here, Charlie’s not breathing, an echo of the moment in Season One where Jack finds him strung up courtesy of Mad Man Ethan. So, Jack decides to do an emergency tracheotomy with a pen, an echo of the moment in the first episode where Boone goes pen-seeking for him. Luckily for Charlie, Jack fishes the blockage out by hand – and discovers a baggie of heroin. In this “off-Island universe,” Charlie apparently ran to the bathroom and swallowed his stash, rather than trying to flush it. The effort almost kills him, and it gets him arrested.

• Sawyer calls Cindy the flight attendant “Earhart,” as in “Amelia Earhart,” who I talked about in conjunction with the sweet old lady in Juliet’s Dharma Cabana back in Season 3.

• Back to the “huh?” of Juliet. When we last saw her, she was plummeting down an open shaft, straight down into the earth. Here, she’s a few feet beneath the Hatch wreckage but her injuries are still fatal. Also in the “huh?” department: Juliet tells Sawyer that it didn’t work – that she hit the bomb and they’re “still here” (which is true, in that they’re on the Island, but untrue, in that they’re in “present”). Not long after this, she’ll apparently tell Miles that “it worked.” Huh?

Hurley: “Can you fix Sayid, Jack?”
Jack: “No.”
Hurley: “Then you’re gonna have to let me do it.”

• Jack’s character continues to evolve. He flat-out admits his inability to fix things here, and cedes control to Hurley.

• Bram and the other “shadow” people bring Ben into the statue to confront Anti-Locke, and we get a massive reveal: Anti-Locke, aka the Man in Black, IS the Smoke Monster. We’ve suspected this for a while, but having it confirmed is amazing.

• Bram and the “shadow” folk apparently function in part as Jacob’s bodyguards (they also echo the mercs sent by Widmore to the Island), but when it comes to battling sentient columns of smoke, these guys are as ineffective as Keamy and company (and less lucky, to boot).

Anti-Locke: “You’re free.”

• Interestingly, Anti-Locke doesn’t set out to kill Bram and crew. He offers them a chance to leave, telling them that they’re ‘free.’ I’ve talked before about the Man in Black’s motivations, and I’ve suggested that his freedom was a major motivation for the character. It’s nice to see that confirmed here, at least in part.

• Anti-Locke and Superman share at least one quality: they’re both bullet-proof. Does this suggest that Anti-Locke’s “true” form is made up of metal? Say, a compressed swarm of tiny nano-machines? I know that the writers have said nano technology isn’t at play, but they said that about time travel at one point, and look how that turned out.

• Anti-Locke seems to vanish, just as he did in the Temple with Ben. He literally disappears, which suggests alternatively that “he” is not actually the Smoke Monster, but maybe a projection of it, originating from the same source.

• Smokey pushing his way into the statue’s chamber is pulpy greatness. Watching as the Monster wipes the floor with three armed men I’m reminded again that for all the high-falutin’ hot air I expel over this show’s “depth,” I also love just how unabashedly weird and sci-fi it’s become.

• Bram dies a particularly gruesome death (yay!) and we learn that the ash we saw sprinkled around the cabin was meant to keep Smokey out – something I’ve talked about before, most recently in the Season 5 finale column. Whatever the “ash” is, it serves as a kind of magical “ward” and prevents Smokey from crossing it. In effect, it’s a primitive ‘sonic fence.’

What’s in it? I’m assuming metal of some kind. Given Lost’s fondness for referencing other sources (again, shades of the “ocean of the stream of stories”), I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that it contains iron and/or salt – both of which, so legend claims, able to repel the ‘supernatural.’ It’s also possible that the ash is connected to the Island’s volcano, which was conspicuously mentioned, then never mentioned again. Did the eruption of the Island’s volcano destroy most of the Island and sinking the rest, ala Krakatoa? There are some parallels to be drawn. Krakatoa is a volcanic island located in the Sunda strait in Indonesia – the same general location of the crash previously given by Oceanic Airlines. The 1883 eruption of Krakatoa was cataclysmic – equivalent to 13,000 times the nuclear yield of the Little Boy Bomb dropped on Hiroshima. The explosion was heard as far away as Australia, and it destroyed 2/3’s of the island. Since then, new eruptions have built a new Island. Is any of this relevant to the show? Who knows!

Great Anti-Locke Line: “I’m sorry you had to see me like that.”

Juliet: “We should get coffee sometime. We can go dutch.”

• I think what we’re seeing here, in Juliet’s final moments, is similar to what we saw happen to Charlotte just before she died. She sounds as though her ‘past’ consciousness is speaking. Rather than slipping forward or backward in time, I suspect Juliet’s consciousness is slipping sideways – to a reality where, potentially, she and Sawyer get the chance to start again. Will we see the other side of this implied conversation before the season ends? Is this what gives her the conviction that “it worked” after all?

Charlie: “Shouldn’t have let that happen, man. I was supposed to die.”

• Charlie may simply be talking out of a suicidal state of mind here, seeing as he’s a druggie in handcuffs and all. But his comment echoes both Charlie’s eventual death as well as the times in which his death was delayed. Does that include the moment in Season One where Jack revives him after he’s been hung?

• Eventful flight! Now Desmond’s disappeared. Jack looks around the cabin, but he’s nowhere to be found. If theory 1 about Desmond’s presence on the flight is correct, he may have just moved back to his original seat, or gone to the loo. If theory 2 is correct, he may have literally vanished from the plane.

• The slow-mo montage of the Oceanic passengers disembarking mirrors the slow-mo montage of the passengers boarding the plane from Season One.

• Hurley’s guitar case and Charlie’s guitar case appear to be one and the same. It’s taken from him as he exits the plane.

• The sight of Locke, still paralyzed, lifted into a chair, is sad, sad stuff. I’m loving O’Quinn’s work in this episode, but I’m hoping the real Locke gets a second chance when all is said and done – and it looks as though that may happen.

• So far, this episode’s been compelling but a bit unwieldy. In that sense, it’s not unlike Season 5’s premiere.

• Miles’ character continues to get more interesting, and more sympathetic. Watching him with Sawyer there’s none of his trademark snark. He’s respectful of his “boss” in a surprisingly touching way.

• Oh, for cripes’ sake…as if things weren’t already mysterious enough, Jack’s father’s coffin has vanished, again confirming the importance of Christian Shephard to the story in some weird way. Why is Christian gone? In this off-Island reality is Christian somehow still alive? Is his body still on the Island aquarium?

• Montand was reading Soren Kierkegaard’s “Fear and Trembling,” a work of philosophy dealing with the Biblical figure Abraham, and the Binding of Isaac, found in Genesis 21:1-24. Through the story of Isaac’s binding, and in the guise of a fictional meta-aware narrator, Kierkegaard explores questions of faith and devotion, of good and evil. He proposes that humanity needs to come to terms with the concept of infinite transcendence (and here there’s an echo of ‘consciousness expansion,’ which I talked a fair amount about in the Season Rewatch columns). As “faith requires a total and constant engagement of the individual’s selfhood with regard to God’s existence, this means that we believe truly only when we do not shun acts that understandably generate fear and trembling both as to their nature and consequences.”

The Binding of Isaac, in which Abraham is ordered by God to sacrifice his son Isaac on Mount Moriah. I’ve spoken about this story before, in my Rewatch columns. Moriah was the supposed location of the Temple of Solomon, ‘the first temple’ of the ancient Israelites. Solomon’s Temple was built to contain the Ark of the Covenant, and to provide a place for his people to sacrifice to God. Moriah is also the location of the Foundation Stone, the location where the Biblical Jacob was to have dreamed about his famous, namesake Ladder, which I discussed here (S3, Catch 22). In real life, the room directly below this Foundation Stone is called “the well of souls.” I’ve theorized that there may be an actual “well of souls” on the Island. If so, I suspect it lies beneath the Temple, just as the real well lies beneath the Stone. Sayid’s strange spa treatment may help to suggest that this theory has some basis. I’ll talk about it shortly.

• The discovery of Montand’s body confirms that he never made it out of that hole, and suggests that the Man in Black may have lured the rest of them down by impersonating dead Montand.

• Hurley, Jack and Co. come across the hole in the floor that Ben made when he fell through into what looked like a kind of shrine to Smokey. The group passes around it, and continues through the passage. The geography of this is interesting. Smokey appears to Ben in that underground chamber, and apparently impersonates Alex to convince him to follow Locke. So, Smokey can approach fairly close to the Temple, can pass under it’s wall, perhaps through the crack in the foundation (as it seems to have passed through the gap in the ash at Jacob’s cabin – suggesting that the wall around the Temple might also function in part as a primitive ‘sonic fence,’ designed not just to hide the Temple, but to protect it.

Clearly, though, if that’s the case it isn’t working. So why couldn’t Smokey/the MiB attack the Temple before Jacob’s death?

• Hurley’s group is separated and subdued by the Others, accompanied by their now-trademark Whispers. Here’s to hoping we learn something about those before the season ends.

• I think “turban Other” is my favorite-ever extraneous Other.

STILL MORE, AFTER THE PAGE BREAK! (Hang on…we’re almost there)