The "Getting Lost" series is about a Lost newbie's attempts to watch all five seasons of the show for the first time, just as the sixth (and final) one rolls along.

What I Watched on Week 15: Season 5, Episodes 13-17 ("Some Like It Hoth", "The Variable", "Follow the Leader" and "The Incident")

I'm sure I'm not the only one who felt Lost's fifth season was a bit, well, blah. The first fifteen episodes or so was an exercise in just connecting things. Widmore is Faraday's father! Uh, okay. Chang is Miles' father! Uh, okay. Maybe it's just me having watched too much of the show in too short a time, but in the past few weeks I was somehow able to predict things before it even happened--well, except for that crazy idea that Faraday is his own father. That's too cartoony.

What I wanted to say is, the fifth season started off too slow. They moved the island! There must be huge implications, right? I waited for that implication and nothing really happened--just all those time jumps, and those who remain on the island joining the Dharma Initiative, and everybody else doing things that affected their past, in a crazy Lost way. I guess it's because I was getting into the idea of time travel, as explained in previous seasons. The moment I watched "The Variable", I knew things went boom! around me. "Finally," I thought. "For a moment I thought the one thing that'll amaze me is the way every character seems to say 'son of a (bleep)!' to everything."

It was, of course, the idea that the calculations were all wrong, that the survivors of Oceanic 815--and, maybe, everybody else they dragged into this mess--weren't meant to be there, and that once Jughead is detonated the string of events will change. Someone, maybe something was playing tricks on them, yes? And just at the right time, Sawyer's cover back at the Initiative was blown, and all of a sudden, detonating that bomb was more imminent, and not just because the Incident is going to happen in hours.

The rest was, well, lots of action, the pocket of energy running out to the wild, Juliet detonating the bomb... and then, I was finished catching up with Lost, all fifteen weeks of it.

The huge question, of course, is whether Faraday's theory worked. The huge answer, possibly, is yes. It was anticlimactic of sorts for me, knowing that there will be a timeline reset of sorts--thank you, all the spoilers I've seen before I started this--and watching "The Incident" for the first time, knowing that all that they've done will not matter. But that leads me to another question: what now? We still have 18 hours of Lost confusion to fill, and if in the end the plane landed and they don't actually know each other, what's this all about? They will be reintroduced again? I didn't learn this back in school, but they say ending everything by revealing it's a dream--St. Elsewhere, yes--is a big letdown. No, this cannot be.

Oh, right. Jacob and that other guy. "Locke", for our purposes. The fifth season finale is, after all, just a prologue to the sixth season. The idea that Jacob brought Black Rock to the island captured me. Surely that means he brought the Army to the island, and surely the Dharma Initiative, and surely Eko's brother, and surely Rousseau, and surely Desmond, and surely Oceanic 815? It doesn't really make sense to me, mostly because I don't know why.

My early idea involved the island wanting to reveal itself, but by then I only know about the thing between Ben and Widmore. Turns out that's just a minor blip on the radar, and now I'm thinking about that talk between Jacob and the guy who will be "Locke". Why again? Is Jacob an anomaly? Sticking with my "observers of time" theory (which already looks shaky), was he someone who was doing what he shouldn't be doing? Sticking with my outrageous "Judgment Day allegory" idea last week, is Jacob actually the equivalent of, uhh, Lucifer?

No, I'm not confusing him with Supernatural. I haven't watched that, ever.

Just right now, I thought that Jacob didn't really have encounters with the survivors of 815. It's possible that the man in black (apparently that's what you all call him) also disguised himself as Jacob, went to the survivors, and somehow caused them to get to the island. The "loophole", as he called it. Black Rock didn't work. Rousseau didn't work. 815 actually did. Pawns in a chess game. But, again, why? All he wanted is to kill Jacob, because of whatever, but it's quite curious why he had to alter everything just to do it, too. Oh, right, because this time he knows 815 will be able to straighten out the string and end up not changing anything at all, right. Still, I cannot clearly define who the bad guy is, or who the good guy is. Or who the person who will "save us all" exactly is. Or why Ilana is looking for that guy in the first place. And, perhaps most importantly, why it will still affect the survivors--that term is possibly not applicable, by the way.

I would've asked more questions, but we all here figured that we'll just talk about it in the weeks leading to Lost's final season premiere on Groundhog Day. (Crazy thought. The producers won't let ABC leak new footage--because new footage is actually old footage!) I'm quite glad I'm not as patchy as I was when I started. Then again, I might lose my ability to work my brain like Faraday once did. Surely I still failed to mention many other things, but that's where future conversations will come in.

Oh, and you'd rather not talk to strangers, yes? Let me introduce myself. Hello there. My name is Henrik, and, believe it or not, unless someone's trumped me in this regard, I have seen all 103 episodes of Lost in just fifteen weeks.


The series:
Week 1: An Introduction and the First Six Episodes
Week 2: I Want My Australian Accent Back!
Week 3: The Week I Felt Like Locke
Week 4: All These Numbers Are Giving Me A Headache
Week 5: I Tried So Hard, Shannon, But I Can't Seem To Like You
Week 6: "I Guess It's All Relative Now, Huh?"
Week 7: The Science of Going in Circles
Week 8: You Know, Like in Cartoons, When You Watch Too Much and Your Eyes Swell?
Week 9: Can You Help Me Untangle This One, Brother?
Week 10: Killing Charlie Softly and Other Destiny-Related Issues
Week 11: If Anything Goes Wrong, I'm Dead
Week 12: An Assault On The Senses
Week 13: Someone's Bending A Lot of Rules To Get Here
Week 14: Correct Questions, Wrong Equations, Bigger Problems





(Image courtesy of ABC)