TV Blog and Journals

Nearly 10 million people sat in front of their televisions last night, transfixed by the mind-melting events of the sci-fi, philosophical smorgasboard that Lost has become. We watched the impossible become possible, we learned that everything we thought about the island was dead wrong, and we were left with a dizzying final scene that mirrored the end of the very first season. Will the next eight months be just as painful for you as it will be for us?

Let's get some fun out of the way before I dive into some thoughts about the episode!

I finished tallying the results of our Lost Finale Predictions Game and I'm happy to announce PrettyKateMachine as the winner, who won with a whopping 51 POINTS! She answered most of the questions correctly and even predicted details in the simple "Yes/No, A/B" questions, including how the bomb would detonate and Juliet shunning Sawyer. However, she was the only person to correctly guess all 9 people who'd be able to see Jacob, earning 23 points alone for that question. Quite a few users correctly guessed the number of times Hurley would say, "Dude." (Five.) Only one user correctly guessed both of the "numbers" that would appear in the episode. (8 and 23.)

Congrats to all who entered and extra special congrats to Kate!

And now, onto Lost....

"It only ends once. Anything that happens before that is progress." - Jacob

I'm going to keep this relatively brief, because so much can and has already been said about the finale of Season 5, "The Incident." At this point, most of what I could say is just a rehashing of the hundreds upon thousands of comments I've read about the episode, spread out over AbsolutePunk, the AFI board, TheBoreds, Doc Jensen's blog, Alan Sepinwall's blog, and the brief moments I've been on DarkUFO.

If anything, Season 5 of Lost was about reciprocity and duplicity, of transference and transformation. The Oceanic 6 returned to the island, transformed into new people and transported to a foreign time in the past, only to meet their friends, transformed into the Dharma Initiative and living in....well, happiness.

Both Ben and Locke returned to the island too, and were transformed in the process. Locke was surprisingly alive, despite having died at the hands of Ben. But we learned last night that things are not quite what they seem. Locke never was alive; in fact, the writers have pulled off a nine-episode long con, both on those people in 2007 and the audience. In fact, in the very opening of episode, when we were still wondering if we'd ever see Jacob, Lost hands him over to us, one cryptic and significant batch of dialogue at a time. (While cooking up a "red herring" on a "black rock." Get it? I stole that, by the way. Don't give me credit.)

The opening scene of "The Incident" was, to me, more important to the whole series than any piece of information that followed in the next two hours. We've been led to believe that the castaways, especially Locke and Jack, are integral to the "truth" about the island. But in five shocking minutes, we're instead shown that no one is more important to the island than Jacob and his unnamed nemesis. (Esau? Set? Who cares at this point? AWESOME.)

"The Incident" mirrored episodes like "Live Together, Die Alone" (which Juliet totes name-checked), "The Constant" (with Sawyer and Juliet's parting a complete polar opposite of Desmond and Penny's reunion, yet with even more raw emotion), and the season one finale, "Exodus." (Compare the shots/feeling of the camera descending into The Swan, through two different time periods.)

At this point, I am 100% unsure where the next season will go. This isn't just a "game-changing" event, as most of the cast and crew so lovingly referred to the finale; this is a sweeping reboot of everything we've come to know about Lost. Our main characters are ostensibly dead (or victims of a failsafe flash, similar to what happened to Desmond in "Live Together, Die Alone"); Locke may not ever return to the show as the Locke we'd come to adore (or despise); the events of the past 5 seasons seem to suggest that our main characters are pawns in a horrifying struggle between two gods. (Demigods? Angels? Ghosts? Biblical beings? Who knows?)

This just means the next 8 months will go a little bit quicker, because I've got a lot of Lost to rewatch and process with this new understanding of the Island.

See you on the other side.

Discuss "The Incident" in the official Buzznet Lost Group.