OPEN THREAD: Lost Final Season Predictions
February 3rd, 2010
As anyone I’d ever associate with knows, the sixth and final season of Lost premieres on ABC tonight.
Before we get to our vague and assuredly wrong Season 6 Predictions (feel free to leave your own in the comments), let’s quickly recap some of things I noticed while re-watching through Season 5 this past week (spoilers, doy):
– At least 50 lines spoken in Season 5 involved people telling Radzinsky to calm down. It happened literally about 10 times an episode, with this basic exchange:
Horace: Hey person, here is a question.
Radzinsky: Whattya MEAN here’s a question??? That person SAW A THING and might have also seen this other thing! We have to murder them NOW and rape the corpse!!!
Horace: Radzinsky, calm down.
[REPEAT x Season]
– Speaking of things that got said over and over, I know it became a running joke on the internet last year, but hooooley crap they say “Where are we? You mean WHEN are we??” in Season 5 more times than a show ever should, which is zero times. It sounded like they were trying really hard to make sure this became the catchphrase from the season so they could reveal it on a t-shirt at the end of the year during the Bravo reunion show (they’d hold it up to Miles and he’d blush and kind of laugh).
Then Andy Coen would be like “When we come back, your pick for Fan Favorite. I’m not sure you’re gonna win this one, Ben!” and everyone lolz.
– If we did a Who’s Hot and Who’s Not List based on their Season 5 roles, it’d go something like this:
HOT:
Richard – Was literally in two places at once in the last three episodes. Between two dimensions and being Mayor of Gotham, dude’s got his hands full.
Locke – He’s gone from being one of the 6-8 interchangeably main people in Season 1 to being far and away the most important character on the show (or at least, Terry O’Quinn’s likeness, whoever he may actually be, is.)
Sawyer – Was smarter and more leaderly than Jack ever was, then beat the crap out of Jack in their eventual “Aidan vs. Big” fistfight.
NOT:
Jack – Went from being the group’s default leader to not knowing what the hell he was doing, ever, and not caring about not knowing, though by the end of the year, he desperately called blowing up the bomb “the most sure I’ve ever been about anything.” Which is to say, it’ll assuredly fail.
Ben – My favorite character, and I’m confident he’ll have something up his sleeve this season (his sleeves are really really big), but in the last few episodes of Season 5, he was solely Locke’s pawn, with no secretly sinister motives behind anything he said or did. Unless that’s the ULTIMATE UP HIS SLEEVE THING!!!! Yeah, probably.
Sun – Her screentime has increased, but she’s basically one of those talking action figures that can only say three phrases: “Is my husband alive?”, “Where is my husband?”, and “My husband, Jin Husband, is taking up animal husbandry.”
– In the Season 5 finale flashbacks, Jacob is seen magically saving Locke’s life after he’s thrown out of a building, then in a later flashback, Jacob helps Jack get his stuck candy out of a vending machine. I kept wanting Jack yell at the camera, “That’s my Jacob thing?? Come on!”
– The opening scene of the Season 5 finale, with Jacob talking to his adversary-man, may honestly be my favorite scene in the show to date. I’ve rewatched it probably 10 times now, and every line seems insanely dense, cryptic, weighty, and still strangely casual. It’s like watching the opening scene from an Arthur Miller play where you don’t know what the hell’s going on, the characters are never introduced, and the second scene doesn’t occur until nine months later.
Did I say nine months later? Looking slightly upwards I see that I did! So it’s time to move on to…
SEASON 6 PREDICTIONS
These are all very general, so (polar!) bear with me, but general is better than nothing, so here goes. As Samuel L. Jackson said in Jurassic Park, “Hold on to your butts, you dinosaurs!”
– Jacob’s alter-ego — should we call him “Esau?” “The Devil?” “Bizarro?” “Goofus?” — will turn out to not be the expressly evil half of the twosome, nor will Jacob be revealed to be necessarily the “good” side of the island duo. Likewise, Locke’s seemingly sinister and underhanded plot to kill Jacob will not turn out to be some coup to throw the island into dark evilhood, but rather a more ambiguously motivated, though possibly selfishly motivated act.
Maybe I’ve just watched too much 24 and automatically assume that the guy they set up to look like the bad guy is never actually the bad guy (unless he’s Muslim).
– The final confrontation between Locke, Jacob and Ben — a true “Bizarre Hate Triangle,” as an annoying New Order-referencing blogger might call it — was the most transparently religious metaphor in the show to date, adding credence to peoples’ long-standing theories that the island is purgatory or some form of generally religious parable. In the discussion, Ben tells Jacob, as a wronged mortal would perhaps say to God, “I’ve been taking your orders this whole time without ever seeing you, and when I wanted to see you, people told me I had to wait, and how do you repay me? By killing my daughter and stripping me of my leadership. Now I’m gonna be all stabbing you in your suddenly visible ass!” [paraphrased].
And truth be told, a mortal man, or at least a conventionally-defined religiously ‘flawed’ mortal man would, given Ben’s difficulties, probably consider laying into God if they were given the opportunity. My friend and I briefly discussed Ben’s test of faith and how it related to the story of Job, though in a very slight variance, Job increased his faith in the wake of his hardships, while Ben literally stabbed God to death and watched his body burn.
I’m not suggesting that Jacob will be revealed to be God or anything, but the finale did continue to move the theories of the religious aspects of the island forward, and I suspect we’ll see plenty more in Season 6.
– A friend of mine proposed the theory that Christian Shephard — pause for a second to remember how frickin’ religious that name is — may have been the failed result of one of Bizarro-Jacob’s past attempts to kill Jacob through a loophole. We know that Christian exists in a state of semi-alive ghostness, and is capable of SHEPHERDING people in certain directions (DUN DUN DUNNNN!!!!!!!), meaning that perhaps he never bent to the will of Esau, followed Jacob’s will to the end, and is now rewarded with eternal Heaven-like life. He’s even been seen in the cabin, where Jacob was living but “hasn’t been there for a long time.”
Jack’s father also seemed like a big ol’ D when he was alive, though, so it would’ve taken some epiphany for him to suddenly become immune to Esau’s manipulations. Or maybe the theory’s total BS. (This last caveat goes without saying for every sentence ever written in every Lost thing).
– Will the plane land safely in Los Angeles? Hard to say, but I think the episode will at least start out with something like this occurring, or more specifically, a casual-seeming scene that’s revealed to be Los Angeles in 2004 in a realm where the plane hasn’t crashed. I just don’t think it’ll land in Los Angeles at the expense of the entire reality of the show preceding it; if evil-Locke vanishes and Ben just goes back to being leader of the Others, it’d seem to be a giant step back plotwise, unless the characters still remember what happened.
Sacrificing 5 years of the characters’ relationships and starting the season with Ben or Widmore having to re-explain to the passengers what they’ve gone through and why they’re important to the island would just be tedious. But if any show would try it, well…
– And finally, another friend of mine suggested that the series will ultimately end with Desmond saying, “See you in another life, brother.” Really, I can’t think of anything else that could possibly top that.
Lost Season 6 Predictions? Let’s have ‘em. I’ll be back here tomorrow morning to recap the beginning of the end.
Related posts:
Posted in Best Week Ever