Previously on Lost…

The beginning of the end.

That’s what ABC’s crack team of sales weasels have been billing last night’s season premiere. And based on what we’ve seen, they may be right – or they could be way off. After all, there seemed to be ample evidence to support that we may just be watching the End of the Beginning. After all, our intrepid brand of heroes eventually made their way to their original destination, LAX, as spoiled completely by the Title Card.

Let’s get the elephant in the room out of the way first: alternate time lines. That’s what Jack created when the hydrogen bomb was detonated by Juliet last season. Once upon a time we had flashbacks, then we had flash forwards, and now we have flashsideways. As Miles learned from Juliet later in the episode, “It Worked” – only not quite as Jack had expected.

To paraphrase Daniel Faraday, time travel is a bitch. Daniel was insistent that there’s no changing the past or the future – at least not along the same time line. This goes way over my head, but the rudimentary idea behind string theory is that while time is one concrete line, from that line other tendrils can spring (if the right INSANE conditions are met), thereby creating alternate time lines. This is where Black Hole talk gets you – time travel, alternate dimensions, and déjà vu. It’s all theoretical of course, but scientifically sound, if ever proven possible.

So, at a base level, Faraday told them they could never simply alter time but he theorized that the hydrogen bomb detonated at a place as special as “the Island” could potentially create a new path. In one time line, Jack and company would revert back to their former selves before they ever crashed on the island and would continue on their flight towards LAX. What Daniel didn’t account for is that by splintering the time line, the two entities (i.e. the two Jacks) might retain some knowledge of past events. The one on the island is fully cognizant of his past on the island.

The one on the plane in the “corrected timeline” is somewhat oblivious, although we’re given enough lingering shots of his face as something like dawning awareness or déjà vu creeps across it, to realize that he suspects something’s off but can’t quite put his finger on it. In a sense, it’s like that episode from the last season when Faraday visits a hatch-bound Desmond and implants a memory in his head. He doesn’t change the future but he influences it as Desmond wakes in the current day with the inexplicable drive to go help his friends. As if it all came to him in a dream.

That’s what’s going on with the Jack on the plane, and I presume the other passengers as well. The thing is, even that timeline is a little screwy as important details have changed from the first time we met them all on the plane and these differences all appear to be intentional. They hint that while Jack set one time line back on schedule, it has been altered slightly thereby indicating another deviating thread off the original time line. Before I get into those, I figured I’d post my wild and crazy theory about what I think this season will be about.

Tying off loose ends, or at least closing out some of these alternate timelines. Essentially, bringing them together, and thereby Jack and company end up whole again and on the original flight headed back to LAX. More on that in a moment but that’s what I think the point of these flashsideways are all about. Eventually the LAX Jack and company are going to realize that while everything looks right, it’s not. And somehow they need to converge with their island selves again.

I think the Jacob/Man-in-Black stuff weighs heavily into this and is likely the cause of the fluctuation in time lines. My guess is that had Ben not killed Jacob, the balance between good and evil would have been fine and Jack’s hydrogen detonation might have proven successful. This secondary time line (where they are still on the island) hints at unfinished business. It’s almost as if, they are needed to mount a stand against the Man in Black and thus cannot be fully returned to their plane-bound selves.

That’s where we have to address their true nature. I think it’s clear that Jacob and the Man in Black represent the ultimate Good and Evil. And that’s the central conceit behind Lost. On this amazing island, two figures are locked in a battle for power. They both seem to have long-range influence (as in Jacob’s ability to draw people to the island) and they both seem to be attempting to prove the true nature of man. Jacob feels that man is essentially good; he just needs to work real hard at it to prove his theory. He gets small measures before they ultimately kill each other but as he put it “It only has to end once. Everything before that is just progress.” The Man in Black revels in man’s constant, predictable behavior. “They come. They fight. They corrupt. They kill. It always ends the same.” Their debate brings to mind the debates of the gods; always looking down upon man in judgment.

So now the world’s screwed. Yup, MiB took advantage of Ben and got him to murder Jacob. Of course, we saw all that last season but one thing this episode spelled out quite clearly is that John Locke is definitely DEAD and MiB is now the defacto leader of the island; thereby setting up a pretty grave condition for the survivors.

One thing about the Man in Black that I find interesting is the creator’s admission that “Man in Black” is what he should be called in lieu of an actual name. I’m a huge Stephen King fan and one of my favorite works is The Dark Tower books, a fantasy series that involves a race against time between the forces of good and evil to prevent one world from spilling over into another. It deals with alternate universes and time lines – with a fantasy land merging into our real world. At the heart of the crooked conspiracy is an evil entity that has designs on crushing all universes by disrupting the balance of power. A disparate group of individuals (including a junkie and one in a wheelchair) are brought together to chase down this villain. The first book, titled The Dark Tower, begins – “The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.”

I don’t feel that they are stealing, but rather paying homage to one of their more vocal celebrity fans. King has voiced his love of the show in many avenues, including his recurring feature in Entertainment Weekly, and a few years back, the Lost creators met with King about potentially turning The Dark Tower series into a film or television show. They’ve specifically cited this series, as well as The Stand, as being inspirational in the creation of Lost – so these plot parallels make sense.

So, we have two theories. Either LAX Jack needs to reconvene with island Jack and tie together one time line, or island Jack needs to kill the Man in Black (or resurrect Jacob), thereby restoring the natural balance of good and evil and eliminating the dark days that may lie ahead.