So in case anyone needs to catch up on the last five seasons of Lost before these episodes began, I have handily watched and summarised all five seasons right here. And now I’m going to be doing the Last season week by week, though I’ll try and have a fiddle with the feed so it doesn’t spoil things for people who are waiting an extra day or two to watch it. However, until I’ve made that work, here be spoilers. There, I’ve said it. No whining.

Anyway, I did the last 103 episodes last week, and loved every minute of it. Although I did somewhat lose it by the end. However, that turns out not to matter so much, since the last two hours of season five can, I have realised, basically be summed up by these paragraphs:

“The Lostinsons, Scientists and significant Others run around in circles shouting and occasionally punching one another while trying to decide whether to set off a hydrogen bomb that might reset time and negate the last five seasons of their lives or not. They decide to, and then do, killing the significant Other in the process.

On the other side of the island, under the base of an old statue with four toes, someone who isn’t the old Lostinson friend they say they are convinces a man with eyes like a bug in bear-hug to stab a nice guy we don’t know very well until he is dead. DEAD.”

But who is the bad man pretending to be an old friend, REALLY? And why is the nice man so very dead? And did the hydrogen bomb really go off? Find out, in this week’s season six opening couple of episodes of…

Donk
LOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOsSSSSSST
whooooooooomvvvve

Of course, that is just my rendition of the theme music, of course. The official (full) version can be found here.

KABLOOOOEY!
Goes the bomb. And, as we saw in the closing seconds, the bomb went off after all. Kablooey.

And we find ourselves on flight 815, where a neatly groomed Jack is sucking down screwdrivers with aplomb. He is like a younger, more whiny George Clooney – although mainly because he is Up In the Air, which is a surprise. Turns out, then, that the hydrogen bomb that was meant to reset time – and make it so that the magnet would never leak super-magnetness, the button would never need pressing, plane would never go down, and all the Lostinsons would never fall out of the sky – did.

The passengersisons engage in tiny smalltalks. Jack passes Kate coming out of the loo with with her friendly US marshall, Sawyer passes Kate sitting down with her handcuffs and tips her a wink. Kate realises that, even with these brief interactions, she cannot decide between these two men, and will spend the next eleventy billion hours of her life endlessly flip-flopping between ‘toilet bloke’ and ‘other bloke’ until everyone gets really very, very bored of it.

Some small things are different: Shannon is not on the plane, Desmond is, Hurley says he’s the luckiest man that ever lived, and Jin is still a top-button-nazi when it comes to Sun’s cardigans. And one other thing is different: looking out of the window and plunging deep into the sea, through gallon upon gallon of bright blue and excerable CGI ocean, we discover Island Island, sunk to the ocean floor.

So wait – we can never go back to Island Island? Or we can, but only in a new, exciting, inspired-by-Avatar version of events (with considerably more amusing CGI).

But wait.

After the titles, Kate wakes up in a tree, head hurting, ears popped. For a while, all we hear is the over-amplified sound of Kate’s mouth-breathing, like a dirty phone call from an old asthmatics home. Or like spending a day with that freelancer who occasionally used to sit on the hotdesk behind me. Because of this association, I suddenly worry that she is about to start eating a family-size pack of Doritos with her mouth open, but luckily before she does that, her ears pop and we are released from Mouth Noise Hell.

Falling out of the tree, Kate finds Miles, and Jack, they find sawyer (when he punches Jack in the face) and Hurley and Sayid are quickly located too, all lying scattered around the blown up crater where Desmond’s Button Hole used to be. They’re still on the island. but blown into the present.

So the bomb DIDN’T work. Or rather, it did and it didn’t, which is a little bit of a cop out. If by ‘cop out’ we mean ‘introduction to the fact that we’re now expected to deal with alternate realities’.

Sadly, Juliet the significant Other was the only one not to make it. She also woke up in the same place, as the bunch of them all had – but unfortunately that happened to be a place under a pile of explodeyrubble. Still, they dug down till they found her, and Sawyer had the chance to bid her a tearful goodbye even more tearful than the last tearful goodbye. In fact, if he gets the chance to do any more of those we might understand the significance of the underwater island that we saw at the beginning of the episode.

Still, she has been brought back, even briefly, for an important reason: so she can croak out her final words: “I have to tell you something. It’s really important”, she said. And then she died.

…which surely ranks up there as some of the best last words ever, alongside “The diamonds are in th” and “This is the recipe for the antidote: it’s one part” and “I forgot to set the DVR fo…” and other such things you could not forgive your loved one for only getting halfway through on their deathbed. Of course, we don’t all have access to people who regularly converse with the dead. Miles checks later. She said “It worked”

And it did. Back on flight 815, everyone disembarks just as they should – Charlie saved from an overdose and led off by police; Locke still in his wheelchair, Rose still terminal-cancery, and everyone else just going back to the lives that, as we’ve seen, weren’t really going all that well to begin with.

Anyway – with Juliet dead (again), thoughts turn to Sayid, who isn’t well at all. Jacob – who is dead, killed by Ben at the behest of the mysterious Man in Black who looks a little like James Nesbit but isn’t. Of course, being dead means one can now officially only talk to Hurley if your corpse is elsewhere or to Miles if it is nearby. Being physically under the statue foot, or thereabouts, Jacob talks to Hurley and tells him that Sayid must be taken to the temple, and Hurley must take with him the guitar case that he was given to go on the plane with.

And thus off they pop … to the next episode.

SEASON TWO, EPISODE TWO; LAX (part two)

The bits after landing in the airport in LA are engaging rather than “OMG what’s going to happen NEXT!? I must know or I will a’splode!” exciting. They all trickle off into their icky lives, that’s all. Kate escapes from the world’s most ineffectual marshall, again, with a little help from Sawyer (of course) who is charming and dangerous and manly and doesn’t cry even once. She eventually leaps into a cab with a very pregnant Claire, and disappears away.

Locke, meanwhile, finds that they’ve lost his luggage – a suitcase bursting with knives; and Jack finds they’ve lost his luggage. Or rather, his dad. And Jack, on hearing that Locke’s spine is considered irreparable, suggests that he might just be able to ‘fix him’. Because, we are to understand, no one has learnt the life lessons that we have watched them learn over the last five seasons. Jack still thinks everyone is fixible, Locke is life’s greatest victim, and Kate still believes that running is the best way to travel and Away is her final and only possible destination.

Which is sad. But at least proves that in most cases, the plane crash was the best thing that ever happened to the bunch of them. Apart from possibly Frogurt.

Luckily, however, we have the OTHER set of Lostinsons to be going on with. And, of course, the far off dream that they may, one day, interact. Which would work, wouldn’t it?

See, it could work: One Sawyer could have Kate, One Jack could have the other Kate, and the other Jack and Sawyer could have each other. ALL the fans happy, ALL at once! Those brilliant Lost people had this planned out all along!

Anyway: we also learn more about the man in black who said he’d find a loophole that meant he could kill Jacob one day, and then did, by concealing himself in a spare John Locke he had tucked away somewhere and then convincing Ben to do the actual stabbing stuff. We learn that the man in black is really (or is also) the smoke monster. THE SMOKE MONSTER!

Thus explaining why the smoke monster in the shape of Alex was SO very keen to impress upon Ben the importance of obeying Locke’s every word toward the end of Season Five.

And we learn that the temple in the jungle where Hurley has to take Sayid is actually a much bigger temple than we had previously imagined. It’s a Tardis-temple. And it contains not only a deep pool of mysterious healing water, but also a whole tribe full of new and exciting people to get to know. People who know who Jacob was. People who were, in some cases, flight staff on flight 815. And people who know how to read the lists of names that Jacob sends people, and how important it is to get the people on that list.

Luckily, all our Lostinson friends are on that list. Including Sayid, who is quite dead indeed for a while, but then gets magically better.

And that is it, for the first two episodes.

WHAT I LEARNT WATCHING THESE EPISODES

1) John Locke is actually dead. Like, really, properly dead dead. Luckily, while the smoke monster still prefers to take on human forms (it is very difficult to get pants in his size otherwise), Terry O’Quinn is still in work.
2) There is a while new area of the map been opened up by the Lostinsons. Level UP!
3) All the people are dead that we presumed dead at the end of season five. Although Juliet wasn’t for a short while.
4) There are now two alternate universes, one in which the Passengerisons are alive (in september 2004) and the Lostinsons are also still alive (sometime after November 2004, although almost all of them have lived around three extra years within that).
5) There is a whole world of multiple hook-ups and self-love now we have two of each character.
6) There are a whole set of others, but they are GOOD Others. Probably.
7) There is a magic pool of healing liquid. I don’t THINK it is lucozade. Or gatorade. Or a bath of gin and tonic… but I’m not saying it isn’t, either.
8) WHAT?! You mean I have to wait a whole week for the next episode?! Who thought up that crazy way of doing things? Bah!