Now Even Lost Followers Are Lost

When watching Tuesday’s season premiere of the sixth and final season of Lost, the phrase that best comes to mind is “What the hell is going on?” Whenever I recommend this show to people I always insist they go back and start watching it from the beginning, because there’s simply no way one can understand what is going on if they try watching it randomly from the middle. But now even long time Lost lovers will have a hard time figuring out what is going on.

The premier started right where we left off last season, with a “previously on Lost” flashback of Juliet (Elizabeth Mitchell) detonating the hydrogen bomb in 1977 in an attempt to stop Oceanic Flight 815 from ever crashing onto the island. A flash of white light occurs and suddenly we’re back at the faithful 2004 Oceanic flight. Things appear more or less the same, with Jack (Matthew Fox) talking to Rose (L Scott Caldwell) while she waits for her husband to return from the bathroom. There are deliberate differences however. This time Rose is comforting a nervous Jack and Desmond (Henry Ian Cusick) is now a passenger. The cold open ends with the camera pulling downward into the ocean, where after an impressive underwater zoom we see the island under water. Which begs the question: what exactly are we seeing?

Things become even more complicated after the commercial break. Again we see Juliet detonate the bomb, but now Jack and everyone else who was transported into the 1970s wake up back on the island in 2007. And since Jacob (Mark Pellegrino) later confronts Hurley (Jorge Garcia) and tells him he’s been killed it’s safe to assume this group is in the same 2007 we witnessed last season.

My two best guesses as to what we are seeing are these. Either the 2004 scenario is an extreme flashfoward/rewind in which the events of the final season will lead to. Or the bomb detonation created an alternate reality in which we see how things would have unfolded if the energy from the hatch had never been released. While I’m sure I can go on-line and read a spoiler as to what happened, I would rather take the more patient route and naturally see what unfolds on screen.

My guess is Vincent the dog is the one behind it all.