Broken Frontier

(Partial Spoilers)

Lost’s season five finale end with a bang, quite literally. The premiere of season six was equally as stunning, but in a much more subtle way. Lost’s latest twist is that the timeline purging explosion actually worked, well, it both worked and it didn’t work at the same time.

In what amounts to a lesson on the Schrödinger's cat paradox of quantum mechanics, Lost is now split into two separate timelines: one where Oceanic Flight 815 never crashed, and one we know where it did. And so instead of “flashbacks” and “flashforwards” as a narrative device we get glimpses into an alternate reality where the plane never crashed at all. This new setup will make for a very interesting season.

“LAX” opens with an eerie alternate-timeline scene that follows Jack. The plane only hits a little turbulence instead of crashing. We find out the island is now underwater and also horribly rendered in 3-D. But sub-par CGI aside, the season six opener is almost flawless. And even after a two hour long episode you’ll be craving more Lost as soon as it’s finished.

In the plane-goes -boom timeline pressing issues such as Sayid’s gunshot wounds, the Sawyer-Juliet-Kate-Jack quadrilateral, and the murder of Jacob are addressed. This week’s who-didn’t-see-that-coming moment goes to Un-Locke/“the man in black” for being revealed as the smoke monster in disguise. That reveal had been pretty obvious since the middle of season five.

In the no-crash timeline Jack talks with a suspiciously smirking Desmond on the plane, saves a familiar passenger from suffocating and has a chance encounter with a certain paraplegic that seems like destiny. Every main character has reverted back to their old selves in this timeline, we are given glimpses of many characters doing what they did best: Kate runs, Sawyer cons, and Jack fixes. The alternate reality narrative really adds some interesting concepts to explore. Will the characters continue to meet up in coincidental ways? Will will the two timelines converge? And if so, How?

So, brush up on your Japanese and watch out for obvious Shakespeare references; because Lost has not failed to disappoint. After the watching the premier only one thing is certain, that Lost is back and at it’s best. All of a sudden, Tuesday is the most important night of the week again.