Lost Discussion Group: Setting the Scene

Like I’ve been saying since before Season 5 even ended, thinking this show will answer “Did the bomb change the past or not?” with a binary yes or no answer is overly simplistic.

Instead, the bomb changed the past off The Island – but either The Island stayed the same (and all the Losties on it), or all the Losties warp to the alternate reality’s Island, probably in 2010 to account for actor aging. Either way, there are now two Jacks, Sawyers, etc. running around.

Thus my guess for the opening scene:
Either start with the white screen or a two second shot of Juliet hitting the bomb, leading to the white screen.
Then dissolve to intense sunlight on someone’s eye (probably Jack), causing it to open. That someone was asleep on a plane; the sunlight through the window has awoken them as Parallel-815 lands in LA.

Then the showrunners attempt to trick us by staying in the parallel history for almost the entirety of the first hour, until in the last minute we hear our favorite sound effect and jump to the Losties waking up deep in the jungle.

I think the first scene will actually be at the statue with the chaos ensuing after notLocke kicks Jacob into the fire. After the flying logo, it’ll open with Jack’s eye opening, and it’ll be a mirror of the first season opener: in the bamboo forest, Vincent comes out of the trees. He staggers to the beach, where it pans out to show… empty sand. No plane, not chaos. And then Ilana steps out of the trees behind Jack with a line like, “Dr. Shepherd? We need you right away.”

Though I’ll point out that the opener I WISH we’d see is a scene on the Black Rock. That would be pretty awesome. But I think they’re going to deal with the task at hand before getting into the mythology.

Going out on a limb here: something round.

Here’s a discussion question: what meaning, if anything, did the ComicCon clips about the various characters have? I’m still as firmly WHH as ever, so I think the CC clips were all a ruse, but I’d be interested in hearing others’ opinions otherwise.

No idea what they will do, but I’m with commenter Dave above – I want to see a scene on the Black Rock. It would be cool if it opened in the vein of Desmond (s2), Juliet (s3), and Pierre Chang (s5) – Richard Alpert starting his morning on the ship, the day he came to the island.

I think Dave and Tom Shaw both have it right. Creating an alternate universe seems like the only other possible story telling device. I think the show will open with Jack’s eye opening and as he races through the jungle we will realize he has rejoined the rest of the survivors from Ajira. We will also flash to the alternate universe created by the bomb, where Jack is back on Oceanic.

From there, I don’t what to expect. This show is a giant mindfrak and I like it that way.

I’d love to have WHH but I don’t see how that can work story wise. I’ve compromised, and said I only hope that they still have memories. If they wipe even that I don’t see how it’s still a series, but I doubt very much they’d do that.

How will it open? Going along with lindseycathryn I’d like to see it starting with someone else who isn’t/wasn’t a main character. But again story wise I don’t see how they can do that, I think it has to be a right before then after the explosion.

I just said “I don’t see how Cuse/Lndelof can do it storywise” and then dismissed the idea. Twice. What an arrogant fool I am. I have no idea what is going to happen, they can do anything.

I’m going to go with the “wrapping back upon itself” theory of Lost for this one:

Season 1: Eye. Jack, alone in suit, lying in a jungle. Vincent comes along, he staggers out of tranquility to find — chaos of plane crash.

Season 2: Alarm clock. Unseen man gets up, puts on music. Domestic tranquility. Laundry, exercise, making breakfast, until…we hear an explosion, and realize we are INSIDE THE HATCH, underground.

Season 3: Domestic tranquility again, but this time we see Juliet, getting ready for a book club meeting. Meeting begins, everything seems fine until …RUMBLE. It’s the electromagnet in the hatch going off, and then we see the plane come apart in the sky….oh god, we’re with Ben and the Others.

Season 4: Normal stack of papayas, then BANG, a car drives through it, followed by police cars. Flash to — Jack, mixing a cocktail. The driver of the car? Hurley, who proclaims he’s one of the Oceanic 6.

Season 5: 8:15 am, an alarm clock goes off. Unseen man gets up from bed he’s sharing with woman, puts on music. He puts on a record, goes to pick up a baby and feed it its bottle. Record starts skipping….we see man is Dr. Chang. He ends up underground, where drilling is happening at the Orchid….a man is dead, and as the dead man is taken away, we see — Faraday.

So Season 2 matches up with season 5 (alarm clocks, music, domestic tranquility, until something happens underground). Season 3 matches up with Season 4 (tranquility, then an explosion/event, then we see a familiar character — Ben/Ethan in Season 3, Jack/Hurley in Season 4). So it follows Season 6 has to match Season 1, right?

So we’ll get an eye. We’ll maybe get an unknown character (or at least someone who APPEARS unknown, or maybe who we don’t remember….or not) in a calm, tranquil location. They’ll look around, confused. A dog/animal will approach. They’ll get up, follow the animal a small distance, until they come upon some calamity.

So my guess? We see an eye…and it’s Kate’s. She’s lying in a field. She wakes up, and sees her horse. It’s a foggy, rainy night, but no thunder. Trees/tall grass are all around her. She walks up to the horse, and pets it. A loud bang happens behind the camera (which has been following Kate from behind towards the horse). The horse runs off, and Kate turns…..to find the burning wreckage of a car. Rather than running away, she runs TOWARDS the flaming wreckage, where an unseen man is caught in the driver’s seat. She breaks open the window, reaches inside and pulls the still unseen and coughing man away….the car explodes minutes later.

She turns to the man, says, “Are you all right?”….and it’s the marshall. She’s back in Tallahassee BEFORE 815….time has been changed, and she’s changed…she no longer runs, she stays to do the right thing.

See, that’s kind of funny, because I don’t see how they can stray too far from WHH story-wise without needing a few more seasons to resolve things.

And as interesting as the parallel universe thing sounds, it seems too far-fetched to me. As insane as all of our theories over the years have been (see: Ms. Hawking), something that we were all expecting to completely blow our minds (Ms. Hawking the Time Cop!) turned out to be, in the context of the show, pretty reasonable (Oh, she had her son’s journal, and was using that as a roadmap. That kind of makes sense!).

So as insane as time travel and jumping around has been, it actually helps explain things. I don’t see how parallel dimensions does that. How would they resolve it? What would they do with things back on the Island post-Jacob murder and separately going to LA as if nothing happened? They’ve already said they won’t be doing a spinoff :)

I’ve largely agree with Tom on this one. But I think we won’t get the repeat of the bomb smashing (outside of the Previously on Lost montage), and it’ll go the full two hours until the smash-cut back to the Island.

Love Dave and lindseycathryn’s ideas about the Black Rock, but have a feeling we’ll get a eye ala Season 1 for the first scene.

I’d like it to be Claire’s, but have a feeling we’ll have to wait a while to see what shakes out there…

Everyone is back on the Island, but everything is bizarro! Jack doesn’t like to fix things, Kate doesn’t run from everyone, and Locke likes being told what and what not to do. Nobody has daddy issues… They all have mommy issues! Hurley calls everyone Sir, Walt won’t shut up about Michael, and Vincent… Is now a cat! The premiere begins with an eye (closed!) and ends with Charlie saying “Guys… I know exactly where we are.” The season finale has the group leaving the Island with Jack throwing a fit. “We have to stay! We have to staaaaay!”

Good robot!

Dave, I think they could conclude the show in one of two ways if they went with the alternate universe.

1. Following Battlestar Galactica’s mantra “everything has happened before and will happen again”, they still end up in similar situations (i.e. all the characters who died on the island die off island around same time) or they all somehow end up on the island anyways.

2. We don’t get a happy or sad ending. We get both. Every character has two endings. I originally believed Jacob interfered in their lives to prevent them from ever coming to the island, so that he would survive even if it was in a separate universe. This doesn’t really explain Hugo and Sayid though.

Like I said giant mindfrak.

Loved this!

That’s interesting… I always looked at it as Jacob intervening with people’s lives to put the blocks in place to properly set up his death.

Even so, I think it would be very messy and difficult to basically show two different shows at the same time. How would they be connected? How would one influence the other in any way? “We have to go back agaaaaaaiiiin!”

Dave, I just don’t agree with you.

There is very little of the Losties’ immediate pasts we don’t know; almost all of our mysteries we want answers to predate the 1977? 1974? point where the timelines would diverge. So anything we want answered can be found in either timeline.

And frankly, I think the parallel timeline could answer things on their own:

Are the para-Losties (should we use the P-notation, like we did with Fringe?) still constantly running into each other, or not? If they are, then they are connected at a level deeper than Jacob’s machinations. If not, Jacob is the ultimate mover in the conflict.

Does P-Walt still have powers? If so, his specialness has nothing to do with The Island; if not, whatever makes the Island special is the key.

Who does P-Aaron live with, and is he special? Etc.

Not to mention, I think there’s a lot of dramatic material to be mined from Flash-Parallels. The Island hasn’t been all bad; an episode showing Prison Jerk Sawyer vs. Sheriff LaFleur should summarize that nicely. Hell, aside from the people that are dead, you could make a case that most characters came out better in the long run: Jack isn’t the egotistical doctor, Kate isn’t constantly on the run, Sun isn’t a meek housewife, etc. An episode that shows P-Charlie dying of a drug overdose in the gutter makes his original death even more meaningful, in my opinion.

(And again, the P-structure even answers things they didn’t get to. Ji-Yeon was given no screen time because… she won’t exist now. We didn’t learn anything about the DI because all that history is now void. Etc.)

Of course, I could be completely wrong. But the structure seems to hold together well.

I agree with an eye being the opening image of season 6. My guess is that this time the eye belongs to Locke. A living Locke, waking up from a nap on an airplane, and not just any airplane, but Oceanic 815. His leg is sticking out in the aisle so he reaches down with both hands and moves it into line with his body showing us that he is indeed pre-crash Locke.

He looks around the plane and sees his fellow passengers. His gaze settles on one, Hurley. Hurley’s eyes turn towards Locke and they look at each other with a knowing gaze. Hurley unbuckles his seat belt and moves closer to Locke. Hurley looks Locke in the eyes and says simply, “It worked. Jack was right.” Cue Title.

I understand that we’d like to learn more about the characters, Tom, but amidst the characters, there still has to be some level of a story. Or would the story follow the goings-on of the “real” characters (post-Jacob murder), while we’d just get flashes to the P-Losties to show their character development from where they’d be without the Island? There would have to be a story-driven (-driving?) reason for the far-fetched content, and I just don’t see how that would work out.

Similar, but… we open on passengers on a plane. The camera doesn’t show anyone we recognize. It lands and taxis. Then a voice comes out from the intercom “Welcome to Los Angeles International Airport. On behalf of Captain Frank Lapidus and you Sydney-based flight team, thank you for choosing to fly with us.” Then a panning shot to a passanger looking down at his baggage claim slip, showing it’s Oceanic 815. The camera pans up to Jack.

OK, count me in the camp (which apparantly consists of…um…me and Dave?) that doesn’t think the show will delve into alternate reality territory. What happened happened, and last season was all about setting the Losties up to cause The Incident – fulfiling the 12 Monkeys time travel model – at which point they will have fulfilled their destinies and be zapped back to their proper place in time. They will wake up in the jungle in the future/present, just in time to get in on whatever showdown is happening with Ben and Zombie Locke and company. We will focus on an eye opening – probably Jack’s – and they will stumble out of the jungle and to the wreckage of the Ajira plane. Only this time, they have all come a long way (personally, emotionally, spiritually, whatever) from who they were when Oceanic crashed, and now will be better equipped to face the mysteries of the island head on.

BTW I am STILL kinda thinking that Baby Charlie was kidnapped in the hospital, when Penny left him with nurses to go see Desmond. I have been worried about that ever since the last season finale when Penny handed off the baby and we never saw him again.

Yeah Dave, I’m assuming that after the fake-out first hour, the structure would be similar to what we are used to: 66% of it would be “our” Losties running around on The Island (still not sure which Island though – ours or P-Island*), with the other 33% being flash-parallels to the other thems.

(Of course, I imagine there would be a couple traditional flashback episodes for Ilana, Richard, etc.)

*One thing I thought of since Season 5 ended – we may have already been in the new timeline.

Remember, when Ajira 316 “hits” The Island, it jumps from night to day.. and suddenly someone is reporting The Numbers over the radio. Not to mention the room Christian 2.0 shows Sun the ’77 Dharma photo in is completely wrecked – way more than what should be expected, given that people (first Others then Locke’s Losties) were living there a week ago.

So it’s possible that the entire post-Ajira section of the last season was already in the new timeline.

(I’m not flat out declaring it, because there is evidence against the theory – Alex’s room, the beach camp, etc. seemed unchanged. But it would match up with the weirdness we saw with the 316 crash.)

This is changing the subject, but did you guys see abc.com earlier this week? It was all about LOST, but the main header showed Jack, Kate and Sawyer with the tag line, “Who Will Kate Choose?”

ABC, I don’t care about dumb Kate and her dumb love triangle of dumbness! That is the least important thing you could choose to highlight.

Yeah, that’s something that I really care NOTHING about. I had half-heartedly been a Sawyer-Kate shipper up until the Sawyer-Juliet thing, at which point I realized that I don’t care the slightest bit about what happens with Kate’s love life. There are far more pressing things that need sorted out (like where/when the eff are Rose and Bernard?)

late to read through these comments, but:

delighted by Rorschach’s bizarro Lost, especially Locke liking to be told what & what not to do, Charlie saying “Guys I know where we are”, and everybody having mommy issues. plus, ‘Good Robot!’ fantastic.

I feel a likemindedness with the camp of Dave and Shara Says, because I do have an allegiance to what happened happened, it has to have, or the story will not hold. what is is what is. but darn if Tom Shaw hasn’t just about convinced me. parallel flashes seem so appropriate for the show at this stage. so the clips at ComicCon could have been examples, or suggestive, of what will constitute this season’s flashes. and the possibility of Ajira 316 landing on the parallel (alterna-world) Island: that sure could fit with the weirdness of the landing itself and the bizarrely wrecked New Otherton.

oh, and I’d put my small bet on the premiere opening with Richard Alpert on the Black Rock. I’d certainly like that, and also I think it’s a likely possibility — I feel pretty sure they will open with a temporarily unidentifiable scene, in the best Lost style, for the final season premiere.