Wednesday, March 3, 2010

MY THEORY ON LOST SEASON SIX


I've been wanting to post on Lost: Season Six for a while now. I keep putting it off to see if the next episode busts my theory or gives it credence. So far, so good. Before I go any further, no matter how LOST winds up, I have to say that JJ Abrams is a creative genius. The first five seasons of LOST have been exquisitely written. Really magnificent. And there is this part of me that wants to go back and break down each one of them and revel in what made each of them so glorious. Alas, another blog(s). Season six is shaping up to knock them out of the ballpark.


Of course, in order to address season six I do have to revisit some of the past seasons because that is how we got here. One of the style choices that has worked so well throughout the show is how each episode is dedicated principally to a character or characters, in the case of Jin and Sun. For most of the show that was flashbacks for the audience to see what these people were like before the plane crash, but it always interfaced nicely with the current events on the island. Like I said, really good writing. Then we went through a period of flashforwards, which was odd, but it worked.


At the end of season five our survivors threw a hydrogen bomb into The Swan to counteract the electromagnetic energy being released. The idea was that it would prevent the necessity for "the button" to be pushed that released all of that built up energy. Desmond was late pushing the button and that caused their plane to crash. If they can change the past, maybe they can change the future, and their plane never crashes. Season five ends with the bomb detonating because Juliet gets pulled into the hole and smacks it until it detonates.


Now that we are up to speed, season six has broken new ground even for LOST! First thing is that everyone on the island is now in the same time/space continuum. That wasn't the case before the bomb went off. We had some people in the 70s and some in the present (from the second plane crash which was intentional). And Juliet was pulled out of the wreckage alive to bid adieu to Sawyer and say these fateful words that went totally over his head, "It worked." And then she died. From where he was sitting, not a damn thing worked. Juliet died and he was still in the jungle and not in LAX. He was not a happy man. Not that Sawyer has ever struck me as happy go lucky. Anyway, everyone was still on the island.


And everyone was on the plane. Now the juxtaposed scenes are not the past and not the future. The juxtaposed scenes are the alternate reality. It worked. JJ Abrams is proposing a theory that an alternate reality is a possibility. I am proposing that this story is going to end with an island ending and a non-island ending. They are both true. One is not more true than the other. They are equally true. Some will say that it is impossible for a person to exist in the same time/space in more than one place. JJ Abrams is bold. He is suggesting that something happened to create an alternate reality. I am not saying that it is or isn't possible. I am saying that it's brilliant.

2 comments:

  1. Love, love, love "Lost". Love to watch it, read about it, think about it. The writers better not have come up with some lame-o "Dallas", dream sequence ending. At this point, it could go either way.


    My opinion, which isn't worth its salt, is that the alternate reality will somehow end up exactly the same as the island reality. What goes down on the island will go down (maybe in a different way, but with the same result) off the island. They want to prove that we can’t escape our destiny or what God (or whatever spiritual entity they’re pointing to) has planned for us, regardless of our environment.


    That or it was all just a dream…

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  2. The guy is a friggin genius. I've never seen a show like this one and I hate hearing people whine about how they don't get it and they don't like it b/c they don't get it. I love shows that make me think...Lost is that show. You write about several shows I like. :) Roswell, Everwood, Lost...will be coming back later to see what else you wrote about, interesting stuff. :)

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