Jam-packed with more crazy plot twists, strange developments, and time travel than most shows pack into a season, the two hour, two episode fifth season premiere of Lost showed that the writers no longer care about making concessions to new viewers. Mad Men may be slow and ambiguous, The Wire hopelessly complex, but there's no show as challenging and rewarding as Lost.
We begin, as is our season premiere custom, with a jaunty song and a man going through his morning ritual. That man: Dr. Pierre Chang who you may remember from such hit movies as The Swan Station Orientation Film and The Orchid Station Orientation Video. He travels out to the construction site of what will become The Orchid, the location of “an almost limitless energy that will allow us to manipulate time.” But there are rules, rules that will likely come to play this season. Oh yeah, and Daniel Farraday is there. I don't think I'm overstating things by saying this may be one of the best sequences Lost has produced and perfectly launches us into the epic and exhausting season premiere.
Back off the island, Ben has set about his plan to bring the Oceanic Six plus Locke back to the island. Their first step is to go get Hurley, but Sayid has already busted him out and now Hurley's wanted for murder. None of the rest of them will be any easier for Ben/Jack to get to, with Sayid clearly having had some kind of falling out with Ben and Sun making a pact with Widmore to kill Ben (also something that's against the rules, if what we learned at the end of The Shape of Things to Come is to be believed). As for Kate, she's on the lam after lawyers come to give Aaron a maternity test (a kind of test that I imagine doesn't really get a lot of action). I'm still betting that the lawyers work for Ben, but it is for now unclear.
This was all very exciting, but it was the stuff on the island that really captured my imagination. It appears that by turning the wheel and moving the island, Ben caused the Losties still left on the island to become displaced in time in what appears to be a more severe version of what Desmond went through. Speaking of Desmond, we got to see hatch-bound Desmond again, who Farraday told to go see his mother. So did Daniel change the future, even though he was insistent that's not possible? Why do the rules not apply to Desmond? Either way, Desmond had better hurry, since Charlotte is getting the Nosebleed of Doom. It seems like she still has way too much story to tell before she can go the way of Minkowski (there wasn't any mention of the still looking for where I was born thing), but I'm worried because it doesn't look like there's going to be a solution to their problems anytime soon.
Meanwhile, Sawyer (if he doesn't refer to Farraday as Doc Brown by the end of season I will be very disappointed) took over as leader of the survivors who because of the time travel stuff, lost their shelter and all the Dharma gizmos and supplies that had been keeping them alive. Frogurt(!) seems especially freaked out by all of this, but hiss terror would be short-lived as things got even worse when someone with flaming arrows attacked them, someone who appears to be neither Dharma nor Other. Or are they? Could these people be the Others before they became Other? Widmore and his cronies?
And Locke had a couple of bang-up sequences of his own. First, he encountered the plane crash that brought Eko's brother to the island. Then he runs into Ethan who nearly kills him before the island shifts through time and Richard Alpert shows up in time to give Locke the information he needs. It seems that what's happening on the island wasn't supposed to happen and in order to fix it, Locke's going to have to bring everyone back. And die, confirming the Locke-as-island-Jesus theory. Oh, and Richard gives Locke a very familiar looking compass (which one of these things belongs to you, already)
The second hour focused a little too much on the Oceanic Six, specifically Hurley who didn't want to lie but had to. But unlike last season's "The Beginning of the End," which was really about the same thing from an emotional standpoint, this one came up a little short, since there was too much going on for Hurley's emotional beats to resonate, but not so much going on that it could make up for that problem. That being said, there was still a lot to like in "The Lie," from Mr. Reyes watching Expose (with a special cameo from the Previously on Lost guy) to the Ana-Lucia appearance.
With Hurley still on the lam, he goes to the only people he can trust: his parents. They do a decent job of stopping the police, but Sayid needs a doctor, so he goes to see Dr. Shepard. Jack revives Sayid, but their story ended before we could get into the meat of why Sayid now distrusts Ben or how Jack will convince him to go back. Meanwhile, Kate met up with Sun, but not a lot happened there either. And in the end, Ben came to see Hurley and seemed to just about have him convinced when Hurley ran out in the street and turned himself into the cops.
This was really about just stacking the odds against Ben and while the process that got us there was kind of tedious, the pay-off was excellent. Ben goes to see Mes. Hawking, the grey-haired lady who talked Desmond out of marrying Penny the first time he traveled through time. It seems that she is in league with Ben (and the woman who works at that butcher's shop), but tells him that he only has 70 hours to convince the Oceanic Six to go back. What happens if he fails? "God save us all."
So in my humble opinion we got one killer episode and one just okay episode. "Because You Left" showed us what Lost 5.0 would look like while relaunching us into the action with the pedal to the floor. "The Lie" suffered from being a little plot heavy, but I think the awesome ending kind of redeemed it. Either way, our long wait is over and its clear that Lost is as exciting and action-packed as ever. Downloading that much mind-blowing information at once was very exhausting but so worth it. Relax and sleep well everyone, our obsession is back.
Because You Left: A
The Lie: B
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