Season 6 has a lot of story threads to bring together and let’s face it, the writers would have to invent things for Desmond to do at this point in order to keep him on the roster of regular – appearing in every episode -  characters.  Desmond had a tremendous role through seasons 2,3, and 4, but in season 5 it was very clear that his story was over.

I’d go as far as to say the ‘tapering off’ of Desmond’s story was in season 5.  His major purpose was as someone who “the rules” did not apply to, who could carry a message from the past to the… err… present(?).   (Not to mention taking a bullet from Ben.)

Please hold your Libby comparisons, no-one has said Henry won’t be appearing – just that he is not a regular.  Hopefully we will get the answer to why the rules don’t apply to him (marinating in the Island’s magical magnetism would be my guess), but the fact is he has not been involved in the overarching plot of the 815r’s since he provided safe passage to the Oceanic 6.

Sweeps season is April 29th to May 26. I would assume this means the rumored two-week hiatus will not happen since I’m sure ABC is expecting tons of stray LOST fans to tune in for the final reveals – but we’ll have to wait on that to be sure.

Here is the official word from ABC:

ABC announces the premiere of the sixth and final season of “Lost,” with a special all-night event on Tuesday, February 2. A recap special will kick off the night from 8:00-9:00 p.m., ET, followed by the much anticipated two-hour premiere from 9:00-11:00 p.m.

The series will then air in its regular time period – Tuesday nights from 9:00-10:00 p.m., ET – beginning the following week, on February 9.

“Lost” stars Naveen Andrews as Sayid, Nestor Carbonell as Richard Alpert, Emilie de Ravin as Claire, Michael Emerson as Ben, Jeff Fahey as Frank Lapidus, Matthew Fox as Jack, Jorge Garcia as Hurley, Josh Holloway as Sawyer, Daniel Dae Kim as Jin, Yunjin Kim as Sun, Ken Leung as Miles, Evangeline Lilly as Kate, Terry O’Quinn as Locke and Zuleikha Robinson as Ilana.

“Lost” was created by Jeffrey Lieber and J.J. Abrams & Damon Lindelof. Abrams, Lindelof, Bryan Burk, Jack Bender, Edward Kitsis, Adam Horowitz, Jean Higgins and Carlton Cuse serve as executive producers. “Lost,” which is filmed entirely on location in Hawaii and premiered on September 22, 2004, is from ABC Studios.

Lost may be set on an Island isolated from time, space and the laws of common physics, but there is no single piece within this puzzle-story that exists in isolation. Everything, everyone, is connected to something, someone, else. By now we’re familiar with these connections. We’re old hands now at the Where’s Waldo game of looking for them in episodes, but back in Season One we were just starting to deke them out. Sometimes it’s a name, or a book title, or an object in the background that cues our attention. It’s anyone’s guess whether or not these hidden trinkets, these Easter Eggs, are anything more than bonus prizes for the super obsessed, but either way, we wouldn’t be half as LOST without them.

This was also the first time we put an ‘Easter egg’ into the show – Hurley on the tv in Korea – and we thought maybe two or three people would catch it. But our audience is so dialed into detail, it didn’t get past them. – Damon Lindelof, TV Guide, May 29, 2005

If Damon ever doubted the OCD level of apophenia in this fandom, he shouldn’t have.

We didn’t just notice the connection between Hurley’s lottery win and the Korean Secretary for Environmental Safety’s living room, where Jin had come to deliver a beat-o-gram courtesy of Mr. Paik.

Some of us even noticed that Locke’s long lost mom had once been a patient in Hurley’s institutional home sweet home.

Some of us may have caught the throwaway connection made when Hurley’s financial advisor informed him that he had just bought a box factory in Tustin, CA, the same town where the box factory regional manager Locke had been sentenced to his cubicle gulag.

But there was no way for us to connect the body that flew by during their conversation in the California high rise …

… with the Californian named John Locke, whose paralyzing eight-story fall we wouldn’t even learn about until two years later.

Now that we have the luxury of hindsight, the connections run as deep as a viewer has the energy to pursue them. We might have expected that we’d someday see the corpse of the drug smuggling Nigerian priests made flesh,

and we did

but we could never have imagined the half of it.

We had no way of knowing back then that when Boone made joyous radio contact with another human voice,

the man on the other end of the line, identifying himself as a “survivor of Oceanic Flight 815″, was none other than Bernard Nadler, DDS.

Why was Locke temporarily lame during Boone’s climb up the terrifying tree-root cliff?

We may have thought it was because he’d been wounded by the metal shard from the trebuchet, but now we have to wonder if he wasn’t sort of existentially lamed by Ethan’s gunshot during his future journey to the past, in order to prevent him from being the one to climb the tree roots and die.

He wasn’t the sacrifice the Island was demanding just yet. It’s like Ethan was there to make sure Locke didn’t jump ahead in line and steal Boone’s ticket to the death lottery.

We’ve gotten so hyper-connected within this convolvulating story that the connections no longer help us find our way. They only leave us more lost than ever, on shakier and shakier ground.

They were already leaving us clues back then, even if we hadn’t yet learned to read them. Like this one telling us that Time would soon start Wrinkling on us.

We can’t have been expected to notice that Sawyer was a Madeleine L’Engle fan. We were all still Easter Egg neophytes at this point. Season One was before anyone thought of things like that, before we ever conceived of time travel and course corrections , before the Dharma Initiative and the Others and Widmore Corporation and Benjamin Linus, before we ever imagined there was a godlike Egyptologist weaving a magical tapestry inside a hollow four toed foot who was destined to be killed through a loophole deviously engineered by his ancient metaphorical nemesis who had long conned John Locke into donating him his body.

In Season One we were still making Connections 101. The connections were mostly simple, even primitive. We learned how all the characters ended up in Australia and why they were all collected inside the fragile hull of the doomed Oceanic Flight 815 on that fateful day. We were learning their backstories. One basic connection fast became obvious:

All of them were hopelessly, helplessly LOST.

Jin had lost his marriage and his moral compass.

Hurley was losing his mind under the incessant attack of the cursed Numbers.

Locke had lost his kidney, his dignity and his last shred of self respect.

Sawyer, conned into committing his first horrifying murder, had lost his soul.

in Season One LOST was a show that was accessible to everyone. It was still keeping its sci fi colors under deep cover. We all knew there was something askew with this story-verse, but we were hypnotized by the carousel of humanity spinning around us. The connections that we noticed in Season One, the connections that most fascinated us, were the ones being made between the characters.

The survivors were becoming a community. When Sawyer needed glasses to heal his splitting headache, it took a village to make him well. The whole gang pitched in.

You can almost hear the Smurf tune in the background, can’t ya?

Or was that just the redshirts starting up their own Blue Man troupe?

Jin wanted to connect to the community, even after they treated him like a terrorist and beat the living crap out of him. He even learned the word for the thing he wanted to do: Boat.

Walt felt so connected to the Island that he burned the raft that was going to disconnect him from it.

Jack, a/k/a The Keymaster, was starting to feel mighty connected to his new job as Boss of Everyone.

After all, nobody got a gun unless Jack let them have a gun. Suck on that, keyless losers.

Sayid decided to cut the Nadia connection that meant so much to him mere days before,

and connect up with the hot, hot blonde who was ready, willing and right there.

Carpe diem, Sayid.

As we approached the back end of Season One, the quality of the storytelling was picking up. Two of the episodes in this group were cited as the favorites of the original creators – J. J. Abrams and Damon Lindelof – in the May 2005 TV Guide wrap up.

(click to enlarge)

I concur with their choices. It’s an all stellar lineup: The Pilot (J.J.), Exodus (Damon), White Rabbit (Damon), Do No Harm (J.J.). Both Sawyer-centrics made the list: Damon chose Confidence Man, J.J. picked Outlaws. Unsurprisingly, both loved the transcendent episode Walkabout. Surprisingly, they both also chose …In Translation.

One episode that I’m guessing just missed the list was the well titled Deus Ex Machina. Episode titles in Season One were so beautifully chosen, I find myself drawn to interpreting each one. In literature, “deus ex machina” – the god out of the machine – refers to a literary device that is not generally much respected. It derives from the custom in Greek theater to have a god literally lowered down onto the stage. By a machine.

It was the ancient Greek equivalent of a WTF! ending. Aristotle considered it to be a cheat, because nothing the audience had already seen prepared them for it.

“It is obvious that the solutions of plots too should come about as a result of the plot itself, and not from a contrivance.” – Aristotle, Poetics

But despite its bad rep, WTF! is not an unusual method of turning around a story that has gotten itself lost. It’s not always a bad thing. I mean, without gods coming out of machines, where exactly would LOST be?

And we all ended up liking that twist, didn’t we? Even Aristotle had to admit it was often unavoidable.

“it is probable that improbable things will happen. – Aristotle, Poetics

The sepulchral light that lit up the hatch window felt like a sign to the bereft and desperate Locke. But that wasn’t a god down there. It was only Desmond Hume, buried under the earth with his button to push, shining up a light to see what was causing all that racket.

Locke was connected to Desmond before any of us even knew that Desmond existed. At times it almost seemed like Locke had become the hub in the connective wheel.

In just the few short weeks since the crash, Locke had turned Guru. We’d watched Walt seeking him out, admiring him. In these episodes, Locke deepened his connection with the young grasshopper.

To Walt’s amazement, Locke knew that he’d burned his father’s raft, and to Walt’s relief, the secret was safe between soulmates.

Locke knew it was Claire’s birthday. He even gave her a present! A cradle for the baby who would soon be born, another kindred spirit to Locke – the son of a child mother who hadn’t wanted to keep him.

Locke was so tapped into the Island grapevine by this point, he was even giving advice to Shannon on her love life.

But the person Locke had become most closely connected to was his devoted acolyte, Boone, whose faith in Locke was about to become a waking nightmare.

They were a kind of Master and Apprentice … except that it wasn’t clear what exactly Locke might be a master of.

Every day Boone went out into the jungle with Locke and dug holes and pounded fruitlessly on the sealed up hatch. He helped him build a trebuchet.

Boone gave a lot more than just blood, sweat and tears to Locke. He put up with a constant stream of crazy shit.

But more than anything, Boone listened to the old coot. And Locke had a lot to say. He filled their working days with long dissertations on The Meaning of Lost Island.

The Island had made him whole. They were supposed to be on The Island. The Island would tell them what it wanted them to do. The Island had given everyone a new life. The Island would test their commitment but if only they kept faith, the Island would show them how to open the hatch. Everything breaks if you apply enough force.

Boone knew Locke was pretty much batshit insane. Still he couldn’t help but absorb some of his rabid intensity. It was all SO clear to Locke. Maybe it was that certainty alone that convinced Boone to follow his leader.

Straight over a cliff.

Before that tragedy, Locke and Boone, for their brief wrinkle in time together, had become a kind of father and son.

And father and son, as we have seen time and again on LOST, is a connection that matters. A lot. Daddy issues were equal opportunity in this story. As Locke told Walt, everybody’s got a dad. It’s a universal connection. Everybody’s got a mom too, of course, but on LOST mothers don’t seem to be quite as important. Unless they’re filled with heroin.

Or have a funny accent.

Mostly on LOST, it’s the Y chromosome that counts.

Locke had been so hungry to have a real, live dad all these years that he was a sitting duck for the slimy conman who claimed to have donated a sperm on his behalf 40 years before. All it took was some drinkin’ and some shootin’ and Locke was ready to hand over his internal organs. Anything for dear old Dad.

Jin had a sweet, wise father, loving and forgiving – a true anomaly on LOST.

But to make up for it, he had the father in law from hell, a mean sturgeon faced psychopath who had Jin by the balls and didn’t plan on ever letting go.

Sawyer’s father was a pair of pointy toed, high heeled cowboy boots.

That’s all we ever saw of him, making it all the more sadly ironic to hear Sawyer referred to so often as a cowboy, or to hear him tell someone to “cowboy up”. The cowboy who killed himself on his little boy’s bed was an animal.

And Sawyer had been chasing the wrong man rather than deal with the fact that the enemy he should have been hating on all these years was his own daddy.

Since this is a story of connections, it stands to reason that the connection between Locke and Sawyer would be made through a Dad.

The same coldblooded con man who had snatched Locke’s kidney was the same ruthless creep who had conned this little boy’s family into oblivion.

We knew nothing about any of that then. But all the seeds had been planted for the story that was yet to unfold.

Perhaps the most memorable connection made in these episodes was the one forged between Sawyer and Kate in one of Lost’s signature scenes from Season One – the great “I Never” fireside chat from Outlaws, about which J. J. Abrams had this to say:

“I loved the dynamic between Sawyer and Kate. It proved to me that two people talking in the jungle could be as compelling as running from a monster.” – J. J. Abrams

“I Never” is a drinking game that lets you tell the things you’ve done by only admitting to what you have not. It started light and teasing. The tomboy had never worn pink. The redneck had never kissed a man.

It was just a game, a way to catch a much needed buzz after weeks of staggering hardship.

Quickly, the revelations turned personal. Kate had never had a one night stand. Sawyer had never been in love. Kate had been married, for at least a New York minute.

What made them slip into such sudden, unexpected intimacy? Why were they telling each other these things? They began to needle one another.

She teased him about chasing a boar. He challenged her for wanting to take off into the night and be alone with him.

She lashed out about his letter. She was teasing, but it cut deeper than she’d thought.

He asked her flat out if she had ever killed a man. She looked him in the eye and told him yes.

Darkly, brokenly, he confessed that he had too.

There was silence, maybe shock, that they’d exposed themselves so utterly to one another. In the morning they were back to snarking and bitching at each other,

but the encounter had left its mark. For reasons we have yet to discover, the writers had decided to give this love story the slow burn.

Kate was there to witness the moment when Sawyer let escape the boar he’d gone into the jungle to hunt. She didn’t know exactly what she was seeing when it happened, had no idea yet of the thing that was haunting Sawyer, but she could not look away. She was connecting to him. And we would see this connection continue to build, in ways big and small, past and present, on Island and off it.

In the Season Five finale, we saw another connection. Of all those he touched, Jacob chose only two children. He helped one child to see that, for her, crime might just pay.

And he encouraged the other child to hold tight to his anger and pain.

Why did Jacob choose only two children and why did he make a point of teaching them exactly the wrong life lessons? It was almost like he wanted to be sure they both ended up getting lost in the lives that were ahead of them, like he wanted to make sure they grew up to be a couple of Outlaws.

The “I Never” scene was notable, not only for Season One but for LOST in general, because it contained something very rare for this show – actual communication.

Connection after all takes language. And asking questions, giving answers – that’s something that doesn’t happen too often on LOST.

Jin let himself be beat almost into brain damage rather than signal to Michael that he had not burned the raft. Miscommunication leads to assumptions.

Watching Sun and Jin wrestle over her bathing suit on the beach, everyone assumed that Jin was a brutal abuser. No one suspected that he was instead the gentlest and most trustworthy of men.

Sun could have helped connect him to the larger group if she’d only revealed she spoke English, but Sun, for reasons known only to her, was hoarding the power of language to herself.

Sun and Jin parted bitterly in this episode, a reminder of just how fragile our connections to one another really are.

At the end of this episode, Hurley also loses his connection to the word. When the batteries on his CD player run down, he takes off the headphones with calm resignation. It was a poignant moment, not least because it had been inevitable for some time. It was a powerful reminder of just how alone and disconnected the survivors really were.

… In Translation, another great title, might be taken to mean “(LOST) … In Translation”. Or perhaps it’s a reference to “In Translation” by James Merrill, a poem about (I think) a child putting together a jigsaw puzzle that doesn’t seem to know what picture it wants to be.

There is a scene in … In Translation where for a minute we are inside Jin’s head, listening to the quarrels of the people around him, not a word of which he can understand. We get a chance to experience briefly what it has been like to be Jin. The voices are actually the soundtrack being played backward in that scene. It’s very short, and it’s the only time Jin’s language problems ever gets that much consideration, but it brings home the point. Without language, Jin is disconnected, as any of us would be.

The Island has its own language, and not just the one Locke is trying to hear. When Sawyer chases the boar into the jungle, he is suddenly engulfed in a swirl of hissing, whispering voices.

Like Sayid in Solitary, Sawyer can’t hear most of what the whispers are saying. However if only he had the the proper decoding audio software, he could have heard them saying a lot of creepy things, like “I knew he was American” or “He’s been in a plane crash” or “Hide against the bushes” or “I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry”. The voices seem to be talking about Sawyer as he stumbles around mesmerized and confused:

Sawyer’s whispers differed from Sayid’s in that there was one clear phrase repeated in the middle of the otherwise indecipherable murmurs. There were the dying words of the innocent man Sawyer wrongfully murdered in cold blood, to his own immeasurable horror.

Karma. The ring of birth and death that never ends, that none escape.

The incessant, inexorable wheel of causation and consequence.

After watching Sawyer’s tragic tale in Outlaws it felt like Sawyer’s soul was doomed to damnation. But no moral quandary on LOST is ever that clear, especially not when Sawyer is involved.

On his first pass, we saw that Sawyer hadn’t been able to bring himself to shoot the shambly old Yank, the nice enough dude who only wanted to cook him up some hot shrimp, half price. He ran. His soul would have been saved, he could have gone home with his conscience clean.

Except that he had the misfortune to run into a certain sozzled Boston doctor, in a bar bathed in an almost beatific light, who convinced him to get on with his business, and put that bullet into the man he thought deserved it, and finally get to read the letter that Jacob had helped him write. What was it with Jacob and his emissaries giving Sawyer very, very bad advice just when he was at his most vulnerable?

Sawyer’s story, in Outlaws as in Confidence Man, is a black diamond of exquisite moral contradictions.

No child in the Lost-verse has ever been more grievously harmed than Sawyer. But the murder he committed was the act of a grown man.

He had been conned into committing the murder, a karmic justice right there. We saw the horror and regret break instantly across his face when he realized what he’d done. But he couldn’t have ever been conned if he hadn’t been nursing evil in his heart.

He remains haunted, by the evil he has done and the evil done unto him.

In the years since, we have come to see that there is a world of good inside Sawyer, so what does his story mean? How are we to take it?

After freeing the boar Sawyer seemed to feel lighter, happy again, back to needling Lord Jack. Did that mean his guilt had been exorcised? Is it ever possible to be free of that kind of guilt?

Or is Sawyer trapped forever in a perpetual loop, both victimizer and victim, a creature inspiring equal parts of pity and fear? For Sawyer, will it always and inexorably come back around?

Karma is not an easy concept to understand, and it’s no easier when we’re all speaking the same language. Sometimes it’s a relief to just dispense with language entirely.

That brings us to the subject that is near and dear to the hearts of all original flavor LOST fans. When you really want to get lost on LOST, the thing to concentrate on is the Numbers. Mathematics is a unversal language, and Numbers are the indispensible building blocks of mathematical connection.

Hurley’s first great centric was a classic. Actually I think this one could have gone on Damon and J.J.’s list as well. The famous Numbers first showed up on Hurley’s lottery ticket. After that, they’d be popping up all over the place. At the end of the episode, we got an eerie glimpse of them stamped into the lid of the unopened hatch.

But that was just the beginning. In later months and years, we’d see them on the medicine vials.

On a girls soccer team.

On the odometer of Hurley’s Camaro.

On Eko’s magic stick.

The Numbers are the subject of endless fascination and speculation. LOST attracts a special breed of intellectually gifted interpreters, as any online fan knows. The things they have discovered about the numbers is truly awe inspiring. You might be interested to know that the numbers hold a valid Diophantine relation, that they appear in a mathematical relationship to the Flavius-Josephus sieve … and, what’s more, if you hold the ALT key in notepad/wordpad (font type must be “System”) and type the numbers 4 8 15 16 23 42, and then release ALT, you will get the Greek symbol µ (Mu) which is the name of the lost continent Lemuria, which is similar to Atlantis! Don’t try and tell me that’s an accident!

But what do they mean to we of little brain? Anything? In a May 2008 interview with Kristin of E!, Damon Lindelof seemed to hint that the infamous Numbers didn’t actually mean a dang thing.

“There are some questions that are very engaging and interesting, and then there are other questions that we have no interest whatsoever in answering. We call it the midi-chlorian debate, because at a certain point, explaining something mystical demystifies it. To try and have a character come and say, “Here is what the numbers mean,” actually makes every usage of the numbers up to that point less interesting….You can actually watch Star Wars now, and when Obi-Wan talks about the Force to Luke for the first time, it loses its luster because the Force has been explained as, sort of, little biological agents that are in your blood stream. So you go, “Oh, I liked Obi-Wan’s version a lot better.” Which in the case of our show is, “The numbers are bad luck, they keep popping up in Hurley’s life, they appear on the island.” … But if you’re watching the show for a detailed explanation of what the numbers mean—and I’m not saying you won’t see more of them—then you will be disappointed by the end of season six.”

You know I just don’t think that explanation could ever be acceptable to the kind of obsessives who managed to connect the Numbers to the lost island of Atlantis via their keyboards. So in 2009, again with E!, Damon took another crack at it and this time he did better:

“Here’s the story with the numbers. The Hanso Foundation that started the Dharma Initiative hired this guy Valenzetti to basically work on this equation to determine what was the probability of the world ending in the wake of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Valenzetti basically deduced that it was 100 percent within the next 27 years, so the Hanso Foundation started the Dharma Initiative in an effort to try to change the variables in the equation so that mankind wouldn’t wipe it itself out.”

Muuuuuuch better. It’s important to give the literal minded among us something to connect with. Personally, I’m fine with swimming around in a sea of vague multicultural free associations. I enjoy it. When Michael started rhapsodizing about the architectural genius of the Flatiron Building in Manhattan, it didn’t just strike me that the Flatiron was a triangle – LOST’s favorite shape – but I also recognized right away the location: 23rd Street!

It doesn’t mean anything, but gee, it’s kinda cool. Once you know the Numbers you can dig out Easter Eggs all over the place.

The numbers add up to 108 – the number of Penelope’s suitors when Odysseus was away, the number of names for each Hindu god, the number of beads in a Buddhist prayer mala, the number of times the bell is rung for Japanese New Year and in China, the most fortunate of lucky numbers.

Hurley wore a medallion on his neck with the Chinese symbol known as LU, which means Luck, specifically the luckiness of Prosperity.

There was cruel irony in that choice of symbol of course because Hurley never had a lucky day after the Numbers had made him prosperous. He became obsessed with discovering the source behind the curse. He was connected to the numbers via his pal Leonard from Santa Rosa,

who was connected to the numbers via his old Navy buddy, Sam Toomey.

Sam Toomey had built himself a house in the middle of nowhere, so as to be in a place where his numerical curse couldn’t hurt anyone but himself. Except for his wife, Martha, who had already lost her leg – in a car crash, the night after Sam had guessed there were exactly 4,815,162,342 beans in the jar at the Kalgoorlie fair.

Despite her loss and despite Sam being driven to madness and suicide by the Numbers, Martha refused to submit to the concept of a curse. She was emphatic in declaring to Hurley that bad things happen all the time, and everyone is still responsible for making their own luck. It was a classic Fate vs. Free Will dichotomy.

It was also in stark contrast to the philosophy expressed by Christian Shephard in the bar with Sawyer.

Christian’s core belief was fatalistic. Where Martha represented Free Will, Chris was a true believer in Fate. And in Curses. His slogan was “That’s why the Sox will never win the Series”, a reference to the once hapless Boston Red Sox who, as of September 2004, hadn’t won a world series since they’d sold Babe Ruth to the Yankees in 1920 and brought down the Curse of the Bambino on themselves.

It’s an interesting reference, and maybe a clue as to where the writers true affiliation lies in this perpetual debate between Fate and Free Will. The episode was set in September, 2004, about a month before the Bambino’s Curse was finally broken. On October 28, 2004, with a lunar eclipse adding a final surreal touch, the Red Sox won the World Series for the first time in 86 years.

After defeating the hated Yankees in the ALCS championship no less! After being down 3-0 and winning the last 4 straight. How’s that for Fate?

What to make of it? By the time Outlaws aired on Feb. 16, 2005, we all knew that Christian’s life philosophy had become permanently irrelevant. Was that a clue that fatalism was the false path? That Fate can sometimes bring good things? Or does it mean Free Will controls the outcome? Even if it takes 86 years to come back around.

Hurley’s quest to solve the secret of the Numbers had been in vain, until he finally met up with the crazy French chick.

He was driven to find her after he’d found her scribblings of the Numbers on one of her maps. Like Sam Toomey, Rousseau had heard the Numbers beaming through the atmosphere, repeated on an endless loop over a radio transmission. Her crew had followed the Numbers to the Island, as if they were magnetized by them, and been ruined there. Meeting Rousseau was a great relief for Hurley. Finally someone who understood what the Numbers had meant for him, how it felt to have your whole life stolen from you by a string of inanimate digits.

Rousseau listened to Hurley and then she agreed. They had both been cursed by the Numbers, the mysterious integers whose power had drawn them both to this same cursed place. That was all he needed, someone to understand him. They connected with a kingsize hug.

Rousseau’s belief that the Numbers were responsible for them landing on the Island sounds like an argument for Fate again. It’s a question that keeps spinning around and around. We all know by now we’re not getting the answer to that question until the bitter end, if then. In this game, we just have to accept we don’t know when or where they’re finally going to spring the trap.

In the Bible, the Book of Numbers tells the story of the Jews as they wandered in the desert, after they had left Egypt but before they entered the Promised Land. It’s also known as the Book of Aaron, because Moses’s big brother gets to play quite a prominent role in this part of the Exodus. As always, we are never far from Biblical allusions on LOST.

“When a prophet of the LORD is among you, I reveal myself to him in visions, I speak to him in dreams. “ – Numbers 12:6

Locke, the visionary, the dreamer, ended his episode in a state of despair, reduced from mystical wise man to a traumatized, unhinged child.

But the behavior we’d seen from him didn’t lend itself to literal understanding. None of it made sense. How did he know why Sawyer had been out in the jungle?

How did he know it was Claire’s birthday?

What spirit told him about Boone’s childhood nanny, Theresa, who had fallen up and down the stairs and broke her neck doing the bidding of a tyrannical six year old Boone?

How did he know that Walt had burned the raft?

Why did he try to convince the rest of the group that unseen Others had burned the raft when he knew all along it was his little backgammon playing buddy?

What was Locke’s agenda, right from the beginning? Rewatching Season One, I often feel like I’m missing something, some connection between the Locke we saw then and the Locke we saw at the end of Season Five.

There is more to Season One Locke than just a quirky old nut who likes the scenery on Craphole Island. But what?

There is a moment while Locke is building Aaron’s crib. Hearing that he has made his own glue out of rendered animal fat, Claire is fascinated, as are we all, by Locke’s incredible array of exotic abilities. Without tools or measuring sticks or levels or squares he has put together quite a quaint little manger for the Island’s chosen one.

He explains to Claire that he is good at “putting bits and pieces together”. Connecting things. Now that is the same thing all of us are trying to do whenever we watch an episode of LOST. That’s the whole technique of the whole big puzzle-game. But for some reason that comment reminded me of this recent Easter Egg, one of the more in-your-face book titles we’ve been given during the history of LOST.

Everything that rises must converge. As we approach final landing, I don’t get the feeling that all this confusion is yet coalescing into anything. Is all this dizzying complexity going to connect in the end to form one unified, transcendent reality? We are still waiting to find out. But it won’t be long now.

It only ends once. Anything that happens before that is just progress.

First up is the building from which John Locke was thrown:

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This view is taken from a bridge in Waikiki. But not just any old bridge. Oh no, it is the very bridge where Jin first saw Sun in her orange dress.

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Right there. And see that building in the trees back there? That is the Hawaii Convention Center. That is where they filmed the Oceanic ticket counter.

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Trust me, it’s in there somewhere.
Ok, now for a couple that Ryan pointed out on his blog,

Here’s Hurley’s mansion.

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This is where Bernard and Rose met.

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And finally the Mecca of all LOST Tours, the Beach Camp. Now as you might imagine, the Beach Camp is rather hard to see from the road, so no Street View for this one, and there’s really nothing from the air to mark this as the Beach Camp, but since I was there, you will just have to trust me.

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That’s all I’ve got. Obviously there are many more LOST locations on Hawaii, but why should I spoil the fun of searching for them?

Head on over to Hawaii in Google Maps and look for yourself!

Oh, and if you enjoy cheesy LOST-themed vacation videos, check this one out. It features many of the sites posted above, plus actual footage of the Beach Camp.
Enjoy.

UPDATE: The T-Shirt is no longer available.

I was very saddened to hear that you may not be able to attend LOST’s going away party, AKA the final season.  I’ll admit, I wasn’t a big Shannon fan in the beginning -  I was a bit skeptical of the attempts to bring depth to her character at first, but eventually – through great writing and great acting – I came to regard Shannon as a permanent fixture in the LOST ensemble. By the time of her death in “Abandoned,” her various hues had combined into one of LOST’s most complex characters.

Along her journey, Shannon’s redemption cried out for us to reexamine her past – both on the island and off.  I remember watching Abandoned and being totally dumbstruck by the fact that I actually understood why Shannon had become so self centered, and at the same time why she also seemed to be possessed by an inner need to do the right thing.  Whether it was the result of a trick of sly writing, or an artistic act of faith by all involved – it worked.  I was completely saddened to see Shannon go.

I guess the gist of what I’m saying is this:  Shannon is one of the most complete characters on LOST.  Probably because her story was told in a finite space.  Yet, even though we did not get to see Shannon listen to some records in the hatch, or get kidnapped by the others, or time flash, her story is a compelling part of the LOST story because – distilled to its purest form – LOST is a story about the journey characters take along the way to redemption.

Personally, I want to see what would have happened to Shannon if she had never landed on the island.  I want to believe that the damaged young lady with all of her suppressed artistic potential would have healed with or without need of her french translation skills.  Where would Shannon have wound up without the existential shock of surviving a plane crash?  Would she have continued playing the spoiled rich girl whose selfish nature is driven by a sense of loss and oppression, or would she have found herself again?

I realize you are busy with your film career, congrats on that, but please know that to your LOST fans – this one at least – appearing the final season would not merely be a ‘gimmic.’  Damon, Carlton, and the rest know that the only way to pay us off is by revisiting characters in a way that pays tribute to them.  I would not go as far as to assume you ‘need’ this role in a sense of artistic challenge, venue, or paycheck, but I can tell you with absolute certainty that your appearance would make your fans in the LOST community very, very happy.  Besides, I hear the weather in Hawaii is great.

Best,

Doc

We dance around in a ring and suppose.

But the secret sits in the middle and knows.
- Robert Frost

As we moved on in to the midsection of Lost’s great Season One, the secrets were beginning to pile up. There were the secrets the survivors had brought to the Island.

The secrets they found there.

Secrets kept.

Secrets stolen.

And secrets finally shared.

There were the secrets that others had left behind

And the secrets the Island wasn’t planning to give up.

Recently Damon Lindelof revealed his own secret in an interview with USA Today. It seems all episodes on Lost are not created equal, and this batch contains the episode Damon considers “my least favorite episode of the show ever …” Homecoming, I think, was flawed on almost every single level that an episode of Lost could be.” It’s true the quality flagged here and there in the first season. But maybe that’s an occupational hazard of trying to put together a puzzle when it has to be kept a secret where all the pieces are being kept. It’s easy to get a little lost.

I think Damon’s being too hard on himself about Homecoming. Even a subpar Season One episode was pretty damn fun. Things jump out at you that you never noticed the first time, things there was no reason to notice. Like this scene from Hearts and Minds. Jack approaches Locke, who is sitting on the beach, looking out to sea.

There’s more to it, a conversation where Locke bullshits Jack about there being no boar, because he’s keeping his secret about the hatch from Jack. It’s only a little scene. It’s probably just a happy accident that now, five years later, it seems almost like a bookend to this scene:

Now, it’s not exactly the same. Jack and Locke don’t achieve the same level of metaphorical color coded fashion in Hearts and Minds. Instead of black and white we get a beige and checkered theme … which means – like, nothing. But later, when the two alphas are out in the jungle digging up guns, they do put on their bicolored duds, just for the occasion. I’d like to draw your attention to whose wearing which color shirt. Not that I have any theory on it. Just sayin’.

I do realize this is most likely just a fortunate glitch, but when a story is clicking, those connections have a way of making themselves. I’m still giving even money that the final scene of Lost resembles something along these lines:

And of course I’m completely prepared to be completely wrong. How could I watch this show if I wasn’t?

There were other foreshadowy moments, though none quite as glamorous. There was a tiny moment when Sun and Jin were discussing Claire’s baby, just after Claire had returned from the jungle, and they gave each other a look that told us – even though we didn’t see it then – that this was a couple where babies were a big issue.

We had NO idea watching that scene that we were being given our first signal that infertility and infidelity would one day define the story of Jin and Sun. But it was there, and it was fun to spot it. That’s a big part of the fun of rewatching Season One as a visitor from the future. You get to see all the stuff that was always right there that you never saw before.

Another pleasure of a rewatch is just getting to watch – again – things you really enjoy rewatching. Like Kate and Sawyer jumping into the waterfall and frolicking and larking around like two kids. It is one of the most purely joyous moments of Season One.

It’s sexy, but it’s innocent.

It feels so natural. It looks so fun.

Until they bump up against those everpresent dead people that turn up everywhere on Craphole Island.

The discovery of The Case begins the quest for the shiniest secret of the batch.

What was in Kate’s Case? And by extension what was the deal with Kate? She had been traveling under heavy guard with a U.S. Marshall. Aside from that, we knew that she climbed trees better than Tarzan.

She could track. She seemed to feel pretty comfy living in the wild. And that’s about all we knew about her. Then as now, she’s a very hard character to get a bead on. Finding out that she had this case, and that it meant so much to her, became a not so subtle metaphor for how much Jack and Sawyer both wanted to find a way to get inside her … head.

This episode, coming on the heels of the epic sex-ay kiss in Confidence Man, was the next chapter in the LOST Love Triangle series of stories. It starts out light and bubbly with the waterfall romp.

Then it shifts into a hotter, more sexual vibe as Kate and Sawyer wrestle for The Case

and bargain for it and come to an impasse.

Kate enjoys the cat and mouse with Sawyer and almost gets the upper hand.

But then inexplicably, prematurely, she just gives up and goes begging to Jack.

That’s when it all starts disintegrating into a long, miserable slog towards Jack finally letting Kate have her lost Cracker Jack prize. And in the end, it’s still a total secret what it all means to her.

As a matter of fact, according to this 2006 interview with ABC, Damon Lindelof regarded Kate’s toy airplane as “probably the single biggest regret that we have as storytellers. ”

Our intention was always that there be a second flashback story that revealed that that plane was part of a time capsule that she shared with a childhood sweetheart. She was responsible for the childhood sweetheart’s death when she was on the run and, therefore, the plane had great emotional investment. And we would hear “What’s up with the plane? What’s going on with the plane? When are you going to pay off on the plane?” Then we paid it off and people still are asking us. So in the finale that year the marshal gives this big sort of monologue about, “You want to know about this f–ing plane? I’ll tell you, God damn it!”

It goes to show you how much forethought those guys were putting into Kate’s storyline. Like … none. The plane meant nothing. It just showed that Kate was clinging beyond all rational measure to a childhood trinket. But let’s let bygones be bygones, shall we? This episode, the cleverly named Whatever the Case May Be was a fun one, at least for the first half. It could almost be considered a kind of litmus test for shippers. For example, if you like your romance flirty and hot and where the girl gets to be on top sometimes,

then you just might be a Skater.

If, on the other hand, you’re more of a navel gazing no fun mopey type,

then don’t look now but you just might be a Jater.

Seriously, it’s wrong to generalize. There’s more nuance than that to both these stories. The differences between them, however, are striking. Sawyer bargains with Kate over The Case, and only wants her to tell him what’s inside. He’s not even asking to see it. He’s curious, not about what’s actually in The Case, but only why it means so much to Kate to have it.

Jack on the other hand not only has to see what’s in the case, he’s going to oversee any and all openings of said case, and then whatever they find, he’s going to take it.

Except that stupid plane, of course.

When Sawyer and Kate have their close encounter with corpses, they’re as weightless and playful and graceful as a pair of dolphins.

When Jack and Kate go grave robbing, they’re gagging and tearing up and trying not to retch all over each other.

Was this stuff deliberate or did the writers not see what they were doing? Even when it came to month old dead people, Sawyer and Kate managed to make it look sexy. Jack and Kate had peaked too early with all that hot and heavy verbal copulation. By this episode they had already moved on to the numbingly miserable bad marriage phase of the relationship.

Maybe it all boiled down to respect. When Kate couldn’t go along on the jungle trek to trap Ethan, Sawyer simply handed her his extra gun. No problem, baby.

Jack didn’t think a grubby little alley cat like Kate deserved his trust.

After he dragged THE TRUTH out of her and wrenched the key out of her hand, after he’d humbled her and made her watch while he opened her damn case and confiscated the key and put it around his own fucking neck!,

he left her to have a good girly cry. When it comes to these two ships the biggest secret for me still remains: Why did anybody like watching Jack and Kate? And more than that, what were these writers thinking when they dreamed up this shite? One possible answer? It’s an aspect of season one that makes fanboys a little uncomfortable, I’ve noticed, but I’ll say it anyway. The explanation for Season One Jack & Kate, as far as I’m concerned, was the not so pretty thread of misogyny that ran deeply through much of the early characterizations.

Jack, despite being as highstrung as a tripwire, was portrayed as the reasonable man, the decent guy, the great doctor who had every right to control and discipline the white trash brat, Kate. Kate was the liar and the criminal who deserved to be treated with suspicion and resentment. We had seen her use her feminine wiles to rook the bank manager,

and we knew she’d been pulling plenty of tricks on the fool she got to help her rob the bank.

Kate used sex, heavily watered down with tears when necessary, to get whatever she wanted from life. I’m not sure if we were supposed to be distracted by the way she handled a gun into thinking she was kickass,

because in the story we saw on the Island, Kate was playing the naughty child begging for the good graces of her mad daddy Jack, as traditional and demeaning a female role as there is. If Kate were a singular case, maybe I wouldn’t have noticed it so much. But Sun was also a liar. In fact, she was such a liar that she asked Kate, right after she stopped lying about not speaking English, “Have you never lied to a man you’ve loved”? As if to say that lying and loving went automatically hand in hand for women.

And on Season One LOST, unfortunately, they did.

Shannon lied to Boone to take his money, and then she duped him into quasi-incest sex, and then she dumped him with about as much warmth as an ice shower.

And to top off the array of women behaving badly, Walt’s mom Susan lied to Michael so that she could steal Walt away for herself and then she lied to Walt his whole life by never letting him know his dad had sent him letters.

In the twisted world of fanboy-written romance, the undeniable undercurrent is that girls, basically, suck. You can’t trust them. They lie and they’ll screw you over first chance they get. It’s a throwback to the mother of all misogynist archetypes – Eve, the devious manipulator who tricked poor Adam into losing innocence, immortality and the most prime piece of real estate in mythological history.

As in the Bible, there are exceptions made, but basically only for women that weren’t considered sexually desirable. Or available. The innocent madonna Claire was sacrosanct. Never more so than when she was playing damsel in distress, which is a female role fanboys can all get behind.

And no one could ever say a bad word about Holy Mother Rose, comforting her boy Charlie in this jungle Pieta.

So while it was being well established that hot girls are all sneaky ass bitches, what story were we being told about the boys?

Most of their stories revolved around a secret as well, the kind of secret LOST really likes to get its teeth into – the secret of what it takes to turn a boy into a real live man. Manhood, baby.

The first thing it takes is the one thing most of these poor schmucks on LOST ain’t got: a real live Dad.

What they had instead was John Locke, their resident fatherless mystic crackpot – boar expert, dreamweaver and most likely a hardcore devotee of the Iron John School of Mythopoeic Manhood. Iron John is an interesting fairy tale to read if you have a minute, with echoes of LOST that are quite striking and lyrical.

“I am Iron John, and was by enchantment a wild man, but thou hast set me free; all the treasures which I possess, shall be thy property.”

Walt met with Locke secretly, every chance he could get, trying to glean the secrets of manhood that Michael seemed so uniquely inept at teaching.

Locke had been mentor to Charlie as well, imparting to him the wisdom of bees and boars and the fine art of kicking a monkey off of one’s back. But the young man Locke was most invested in was his partner in hatch finding, that dreamy boy Boone.

Since time was of the essence, and Boone was a pretty limp subject to start with, Locke was forced to resort to his homemade Instant Manhood Recipe. He bashed him over the head and then slathered his open head wound with hillbilly LSD that he mixed up himself, right on the spot.

You won’t find this method in any of the parenting handbooks, but as always Locke knew how to think outside the box. Locke told Boone he had given him “an experience that is vital to your survival on this Island”, and despite the fact that Boone ended up not surviving on this Island, it seemed to be a very useful experience.

Manhood means freeing yourself from the effeminazation of modern civilization and grabbing hold of that big ass knife.



It means rescuing damsels in distress.

And then it means, when you lose the thing you love the most, you must suck it up and “let it go”.

There’s no crying in manhood. Because really, what girl is worth getting so messed up over, dude?

Especially your not-sister who is a self absorbed airhead who’ll flirt shamelessly with any old charming Iraqi torturer that wanders into her life.

Shannon’s first death scene, even though it was just hallucinogenic wish fulfillment, was pretty gruesome, and I’m sure it felt shocking the first time around. I don’t remember how I felt the first time I watched it, if I even realized it was a dream at first. But what I noticed this time around was that Boone’s dream accuratetly depicted the way that the Smoke Monster kills.

Shannon was lifted up in the air exactly as Eko was and thrashed around until she looked like chewed up hamburger.

Boone may not have lived very long in this tale, but he was very talented in the dreamosphere. We would see him again in Locke’s dreams, a bond between father and son that would not be broken by death.

Charlie, like Boone, struggled to find his way as a man.

He had his own flashback secrets. Instead of incestual longings, Charlie’s secret was his addiction to heroin. His sad attempt at fitting in as a normal workaday man type ended with him ralphing straight into the state of the art C815 photocopier he was trying to sell.

It was one of the most pathetic flashback stories ever told on LOST, small and weak, but it revealed a central secret. For Charlie, manhood was going to be about “taking care of someone”.

It didn’t work out with the daughter of the guy who bought the paper company in Slough (shoutout to the British The Office ), especially after he was caught stealing Winston Churchill’s cigarette case,

but he was determined to make it work out with sweet little Claire. He mourned her loss and tortured himself over his failure to save her.

Then he read her diary and got real happy because he found out she liked him,

which felt like a wildly inappropriate reaction considering at the time she was still missing and in the clutches of the dreaded Ethan Rom. (Come to think of it, maybe I can see why this is Damon Lindelof’s least favorite episode.)

He gently coaxed her back to reality after she survived her trauma.

And then he did the most manliest thing of all and picked up a gun and shot another man dead.

Killing Ethan left many secrets hidden, at least for another year or so. We wouldn’t know how Ethan got all those scratches on his face.

We wouldn’t know what happened to Claire or why Ethan took her or who he took her to. All that would have to wait because Charlie had decided to be judge and jury, to give Ethan what he “deserved”. Charlie’s story, as always, circled back to Catholicism and judgment, and to the biggest secret of all – the secret of Faith and why it means so much to some people and seems so totally irrelevant to others.

Let’s take a break here and collect some of the other secrets that were raining down in these episodes. Like, who knew, when we watched Sayid’s long passionate tale about his devotion to his beloved Nadia, that he secretly just had a thing for leggy blondes.

Turns out Sayid was down with that “love the one you’re with” mentality all the way.

Yes, that was a direct contradicton of what they had been telling us about Sayid just a few weeks before, but what the hell. Romance on LOST is the soul of inconsistency.

That’s one thing I think we all can agree on.

Here’s a secret I’ve always wondered about: Why are bathroom jokes always considered funnier when they’re about a fat guy ?

Hurley had to put up with Jack snickering because he had the shits, and then they had him grabbing at Jin’s crotch to beg him to pee on his foot! It was double the hilarity. Number one and number two in the same episode!

And why is it even funny when Hurley just looks at a dead fish? Like I don’t see any joke here, but this picture still makes me smile.

Another secret: How do assless men keep their pants on?

And speaking of Sawyer, how did he rebuild his shelter up beach when all he carried with him on the great migration was a backpack?

It was still a secret, a cool one, why 815 passengers kept showing up in each others flashbacks, like Sawyer during Boone’s visit to the Sydney police station. Come to think of it, it’s still a total secret what those pre-crash connections are going to mean in the end.

And we are able to wonder now, with all our wonderful hindsight, whether it was coincidence or fate that Kate was robbing a lockbox 815

in a bank in the same city where Sawyer later told the warden to deposit Clementine’s inheritance.

When Michael was hit by the car just before he was set to go and get his baby Walt back

was that the Island reaching out to shape his fate the same way the gun he bought refused to kill him?

Was the cartoon about the Penguin with a Sunburn a secret nod to the mystery of a Polar Bear on a South Pacific Island? Is there some meaningful secret behind the cognitive dissonance of Antarctic creatures existing in tropical climates?

Why was the unluckiest boy in town the one wearing the shirt with the four aces?

Here’s a secret I don’t expect any answer for, but what was up with those slimy greenish greyish guava seeds that Jack gave to Kate?

Was it some kind of squicky method of asexual seed transfer, sort of like second base for verbal copulators?

Why were there so many antibiotics on the plane? Jack was able to blackmail Sawyer into giving up the case by playing peekaboo with his Hippocratic Oath and threatening to withhold the cure. But where did all those drugs come from? Was this plane full of hospital patients being flown to a quarantine ward?

When Scott was killed, they reminded us again that nobody remembered if he was Steve or Scott and thus the ongoing secret of the redshirts continued. How many of them were there? And why were they always lugging heavy things in the background and never allowed to talk to any of the A-team?

The A-team meanwhile was beginning to put together its own cabal of secret keeping. Jack and Locke had a discussion about whether to tell the group what was threatening them, a question that would be troubling throughout the story. As late as Season Three, Jack still felt it was his private prerogative whether to tell the nameless redshirts that they were about to be murdered in their beds. In this episode it was decided, as would become a habit, that the ever so brilliant elites would henceforth make all life and death decisions for the blissfully ignorant masses.

By far the most intriguing secrets of course were the secrets of the Island. And there were juicy ones throughout these episodes. The Black Rock that Claire told her diary she had seen in her dream was a potent source of mystery. There was of course the Black Rock ship, which had only been vaguely referenced by Rousseau, but that we now know is an ancient slave ship that is inexplicably moored in the middle of the jungle.

The same Black Rock whose ledger Charles Widmore would one day be seen buying at auction.

The same auction where a painting of the Black Rock was also sold, later to hang on the wall of Widmore’s posh apartment. But there’s more to the term “black rock” than just a ship. Volcanic islands in the South Pacific have large concentrations of black basalt, an igneous rock with weak, but measurable, magnetic properties due to the metallic elements they contain. And we saw that magnetic anomalies were beginning to be a real problem.

First the tide shifted suddenly and unexpectedly, which is something tides simply don’t do. Tides commune with the moon, and like the phases of the moon, tides repeat on a metronome of mathematical regularity. So it was a very frightening phenomenon when this happened, although, again, I think most of us hardly noticed on the first pass around.

The compass that Locke gave to Sayid deviated from true North as well, and it was plain that Sayid didn’t think it was just because Locke had given him a crappy compass.

This wasn’t quite as intriguing a story point as Locke’s magical perpetual loop compass would be years later, but it was Locke being associated early on with compasses. Without some kind of compass to trust, a traveler will be forever lost. Did Locke really give Sayid a faulty compass? Did he know it was faulty? Was the broken compass hinting about an anomaly in the Island’s magnetic field or was it pointing us instead to an anomaly in Locke’s secret hidden agenda?

Nothing much was made of the magnetic anomaly, except to show us that Sayid was on the case of trying to grok out the Island’s secrets, but it was something that would come back again and again.

Most spectacularly when Desmond had to pass through the magnetic moat on his way to the freighter and it mindwarped his consciousness and sent it skittering all over the timespace continuum.

But I still don’t think we’ve scratched the surface of how magnetism is going to figure into the final solution. Magnetism is a geek subject, and a surprisingly complex one to understand, but I do hope it all means something that average dummies like me will be able to comprehend in the end.

Some of it can maybe be attributed to the legend of the Rupes Nigra, described in the Inventio Fortunata (a/k/a “The Lost Book”) as a phantom island located at the Earth’s North Pole.

But the Black Rock has other mythological connotations, especially in Hawaii, where there is an enormous black rock cliff called the Puu Kekaa. It is believed that this is the place where Lost Souls would take the great final leap into the afterlife. This ritual is still played out for tourists today.

Could this non-stuntman’s dive by the athletic Josh Holloway have been intended as a nod to Puu Kekaa?

As lovely a view as it was, it’s also true that he was quite literally diving into the final resting place of lost souls. The Black Rock is one of those deep, multilayered symbols on Lost that means so many things it may almost be a moot point if it’s ever pinpointed as meaning any one thing in particular.

In any case, Sayid, with the help of the less useless than usual Shannon, managed to piece together Rousseau’s map into a diagram of the location of the signal tower, or so he hoped.

He was distracted, not just by Shannon’s sexaliciousness, but also by the seeming nonsense the crazy lady had scribbled all over the map. In the end, the gibberish turned out to be derived from a song lyric.

Somewhere beyond the sea, / Somewhere, waiting for me,

My lover stands on golden sands / And watches the ships that go sailing;

The lyrics weren’t particularly helpful as clues, except perhaps in confirming once and for all that this place they were lost in was not someplace that really existed anywhere in the known physical world.

It’s far beyond a star, / It’s near beyond the moon
I know beyond a doubt / My heart will lead me there soon.

Rousseau’s maps would continue to turn up when convenient for the plot twist du jour, and I know a lot of fans like to analyze them, but it has never struck me that knowing the exact specific geography of anything on this show is vital to understanding whatever the hell is going on.

“No one ever keeps a secret so well as a child.“-Victor Hugo

Most fascinating – and frustrating – is the secret of the Special child, the manboy Walt. That great enigmatic character who disappeared so abruptly from the story after this first season. Walt had the power of parapsychology. Or telekineses. Or something like that, some conglomeration of mind control tricks and talents that even he didn’t seem to understand he possessed.

We had seen in Tabula Rasa that he appeared to make the rain stop when Michael said he’d be looking for the dog if only it wasn’t raining. But we saw much more of Walt’s special powers in Michael’s flashback episode “Special”.

Back in Australia, when Walt was still living with his mom, he complained about having to study the birds of Australia. This was a special scene for two reasons. First, Walt wondered why he couldn’t be studying the Birds of Egypt instead, and this marked the first mention on LOST of the great kingdom of Egypt that would figure ever more prominently in the mythology as time went on.

Second, the scene was remarkable because we saw that when Walt got irritated, he had the power to take it out on the literal world around him.

An Australian Bronze Cuckoo bird, the exact same bird Walt was not wanting to study anymore, crashed into the apartment window and died.

This had to be one of those reasons his unDad Bryan Porter wanted to hand him off to Michael the first chance he got. The kid was creepy.

And though we lost Walt too soon to puberty and never got to follow up on his mindmelding powers, we did get to see him do more birdkilling in the future, when he killed flockfuls of birds in the pre-Season Four mobisode named Room 23.

Walt also seemed to be able to dream himself into his own nightmares.

Michael threw his comic book into the fire and Walt ran off. When next seen he was being attacked by his very own dreamed up polar bear,

prompting another lesson in manliness from the great Iron John Locke,

and a heartfelt reunion for a father and son who at long last began to feel like family.

How was Walt able to conjure up the polar bear, if in fact he did? And why did the producers hinge such a pivotal plot point on a child actor who was so close to morphing into an unrecognizable man? One theory is that this plotline was the fail safe in case LOST was never renewed for a second season. They could have just had the whole thing be a fiction concocted in the mind of an imaginative child. It could have worked – in a pinch.

The imagery of children and childhood has always been prominent on LOST. From Kate and Sawyer’s wonderment at discovering their secret waterfall,

to Michael’s childish glee about the baby on the way,

and the cartoons he drew to try and share his life with his lost son,

to Claire being left as helpless bait in the enchanted forest,

and Boone and Shannon’s protecting one another from unseen demons like an hallucinogenic Hansel and Gretel,

there were many moments when the characters reminded me of children. Especially the children in fairy tales, where innocence meets evil as a matter of course. And pinning the whole plot on a child like Walt tied it all together.

Or maybe the clue was in Locke’s command to Walt to just “see it”. Seeing is serious business on LOST, as the constant parade of eye closeups reminds us.

Maybe Walt’s ability to conjure up what he sees in his mind’s eye is akin to the “wishing box” that Ben used to bring Anthony Cooper to the Island. Unless that whole thing was just an elaborate ruse to mess with Locke’s mind, which come to think of it, it probably was.

All in all, Walt’s comic book was a treasure trove of easter eggery. He was reading the Spanish version of the Green Lantern, the comic book Hurley was reading on the plane.

It was a Green Lantern/Flash: Faster Friends #1 (1997), for all you trivia buffs out there.

Not being a comic book geek myself, I can’t make any guesses on the relevance of that particular issue, if any, but I like that it has this kind of dialogue in it: “What we did half a century ago was bad, and what we did since then was further away from any type of forgiveness.”

That seems to fit this show. Somehow.

One of the prettiest pages in the comic, the one the camera lingers on long enough for us to notice, is this one:

It shows a castle atop a snowglobe atop a magical city, sort of a “Cities in Flight” image. It also reminded me of this image from Season Five.

If this were the only image of a snowglobe we’d ever seen on LOST, it would make no impact on the repeat viewer. But the writers have made a point of scattering snowglobes throughout the landscape, albeit scantily. They’re like rare bird sightings. They take a sharp eye and a lot of patience. There is one on the counter when Michael buys the fateful gun that refuses to kill him.

I think even then we could dismiss them as meaningless teases, except for the fact that Desmond, after failing to sail his boat away from the Island, described a ring around the horizon that couldn’t be passed beyond. Like the walls of a dome, or a snowglobe.

So maybe it’s something we should think about. Is it like a Rosebud kind of snowglobe, like Citizen Kane dropped on his deathbed, symbolizing …

… I don’t know. Something about the lost innocence of childhood, maybe, or the fragile vessel of our physical lifespan. Maybe it’s like the snowglobe at the end of the tv show St. Elsewhere, where at the end they sprung on the audience, for no conceivable reason, the random notion that the whole series had existed inside the mind of an autistic child.

Or maybe it’s about a controlled environment experiment, a metaphorical universe where human beings are forced to play out the wishes of a puppetmaster god.

I guess we’ll have to see about that one. Most likely the snowglobe is a fairly innocuous clue, one of the many subtle shoutouts the LOST writers like to give to both their classical and pop inspirations. But it’s fun to speculate, especially as this is, most incredibly, the last time this audience will ever get to speculate on anything LOST. Has the last-ness of this hiatus begun to sink in for everyone?

What will we all do without the speculating? LOST has created an entire subculture of speculating nomads doomed to wander the cyberverse without another show that will ever be this fun to speculate on again.

Word is out that the Premiere Date for the Big Finale Season will be January 20 2010 – or alternately, 01.20.2010. It looks so much more significant in that format, doesn’t it? Before you know it it will be countdown time. In the meantime, here’s the FIRST PROMO of the Season. It’s real short, so don’t blink after you press Play or you’ll miss it. But it gives me just enough of the chills.

It’s coming baaaaaaaaaack.

Atherton will play the role of Principal Reynolds.  How perfect is that?  Quite, right?  But wait, there is more.  I suggest you check out Ryan’s report here, and this follow up at TVOvermind which has a few more details concerning the shoot that Ryan has passed along.

One of ABC’s press sites is giving the date of January 20th for the premiere of LOST.  A week earlier than previous rumors, but who is going to complain about that.  Since no-one has officially verified that date, it is – as always – subject to change.  I’m going to shoot some emails around to try to get verification.

There is still no word on whether LOST will be pre-empted by the Olympics.  Since the nets have rarely pre-empted for the Olympics in the past, it seems unlikely – and the earlier circulated rumor turned out to be false (way to go, Harvard.)  Still, NBC is planning a huge push for the games, whether that spooks the nets or not we’ll have to wait and see.  If LOST airs on Wednesday, it would be battling Men’s Ice Hockey.

(Thanks to LyLy Ford for the heads up.)

Ben vs Desmond


Bernard&Rose requirement set

Locke’s leg

more vids here : Lost location “316″ and “this place is death”

@Docarzt – http://www.twitter.com/docarzt

and if you want the TVOvermind tweets

@TVOvermind – http://www.twitter.com/tvovermind

• The Premiere Date for LOST is still not solid. (Various folks say January 27th, but that is NOT official and is not verified by any of my sources.)
• If LOST is preempted by the Olympics, it would not be for the entire month of February anyways as the events run from the 12th (a Friday) to the 28th (A Sunday).  Worst case scenario: No LOST for two weeks. (Again, none of this information has been confirmed by anyone at ABC/LOST.)

For more on this visit my article on TVOvermind.com

UPDATE

Some don’t want to believe this, which is fine. To be clear:  there is no schedule, and there is no break.  Whether they are being talked about or not is completely up in the air.  However, most reports are saying LOST will be off the air for February, which makes no sense (IGN for example) since the Olympics are for two weeks, and everyone who wants this controversy to live – for whatever reason – continues to claim they have sources verifying this despite the total removal of the one blog post that spurred this whole thing.

Folks, that is the literal equivalent of saying it is true because you read it on the internet.  Next thing you know, it will be on Wikipedia, facts be damned.

What IS true, is that the last time the Winter Olympics aired LOST was not pre-empted and in fact won it’s time slot. Now, there is something else going on in February besides the Olympics… Sweeps.  Who believes that ABC is going to forfeit two weeks during a sweeps month?  Y’know, it’s not entirely impossible and it has happened before but with the Olympics performing poorly in ‘06 I have to say, logic gives me hope for no breaks.

On the other hand, I’m not trying to be vehement about it.  There definitely could be a break.  What is clear is that right now anything that riles up the fans is good for the bloggers, meaning this manufactured ‘controversy’ over a break.  If there is a break, it will hardly be the end of the world.

What makes more sense?  That Carlton casually gave a hot scoop to someone at the Harvard office, so we bloggers could start a firestorm of discontent?  Or that ABC hasn’t actually worked out the schedule yet? And trust me, everyone will claim to have bigger contacts to verify or disprove things, I’m confident in mine.  There is no schedule, yet.  There may be a break, but right now it’s up there with pigs could fly with the proper wingspan – entirely possible, but not real.  If ABC decides to graft wings on pigs and give LOST a couple of weeks off, I’ll let you know.

“There’s craft service and he’s got a massage table,” joked Welliver, who is headed back to La-La in a couple of weeks to film episodes of “Lost,” “Sons of Anarchy” and “The Good Wife.”

The quote comes from the BostonHerald website.  Does this mean M.i.b will be abandoning his Locke meat-suit, or that a Jacob/M.i.b flashback episode is on the way?

Thanks to KevinB for the tip

I just bought the season 5 DVD here in Australia, and it has an alternate cover and a bonus disc. I scanned it and attached it to this email. I believe this is an exclusive to JB Hi-Fi here in Australia, and the bonus disc is the same as the HMV bonus disc in the UK.