EPISODE REVIEW: Lost: “LAX” (Season 6, Episodes 1 and 2)

I was feeling terrible last night, just full-on sick terrible. One of those flu-days where you just want to go to bed at 7, and lapse into a coma for a couple days until you’re feeling better. I really didn’t feel like staying up for two hours of Lost, and I didn’t feel like I’d have been able to do it even if I wanted to. I try to put the needs of you, the readers, before my own, however, and I figured I’d give it a shot.

I’m really glad I did. The episode hooked me and held on tight for two hours. Just as I think things can’t get any stranger, they turn up the convolution factor again, and manage to re-ignite my waning interest. (As opposed to, say, the RDM Galactica, where my interest was long since spent, but I held on to the bitter end in hopes the show would redeem itself in some way. It didn’t, of course.)

PLAY BY PLAY

We start out with a recap of the bomb and Juliet’s sacrifice from the season finale last year. Everything goes white - which most of us presumed was the bomb going off - and the next thing you know, we’re back on the original plane trip, with jack being snarky about his drink to the stewardess, and them hitting air pockets. Everything calms down, however, and they continue to fly on their way without incident. We then get a quick shot of The Island sunken beneath the ocean.

We then have *another* recap of the bomb and Juliet’s sacrifice, after which everything goes white, and then we find Kate in a tree. She gets out of the tree, finds Miles, then finds the blast crater created when the Swan Hatch blew up at the end of the second season. “It didn’t work,” she says.

That’s right, kids, we now have two timelines running divergently! To avoid taxing your patience, I’ll detail them separately:

In The Rebooted Timeline:

The Transoceanic flight heads towards LA, and Desmond - who’s inexplicably on board - sits next to Jack and reads a book. but someone notes that Charlie isn’t coming out of the bathroom. They ask Jack for help. Sayid busts open the bathroom door, and Jack finds that the washed-up rock star isn’t breathing. He fixes that, but of course they find he was choking on a bag full o’ cocaine. He’s none too thrilled about being rescued. Charlie is restrained and sent back to his seat. When Jack gets back to his own, Desmond is gone. Meanwhile, Locke and Boone strike up a conversation, but Boone’s sister, Shannon, is inexplicably not on the flight.

They land at LAX without further incident, but Jack finds out they’ve lost his father’s corpse. Locke explains that they didn’t loose Jack’s dad, just his dad’s body. Moved by this, he offers to try and fix Locke’s spine, free of charge. Kate, meanwhile, manages to escape form her guard/escort, and carjacks a cab with a very pregnant Clair Littleton in it. Sun and Jin never make it through customs - the officials find a big wad of cash in his suitcase that wasn’t declared, but since he speaks no English they take him into custody until the matter can be straightened out. Sun speaks English, but can’t blow her cover about that, so she plays dumb.

In The Business As Usual Timeline:

Meanwhile, everyone connected with the bomb fiasco. Sawyer beats hell out of Jack for being wrong and killing Juliet. They hear Juliet screaming from the shaft, so Sawyer heads down to rescue her. She has a breakdown when she realizes her sacrifice accomplished nothing, then she starts doing that same Billy Pilgrim “Unstuck in Time” thing that Charlotte was doing, where she’s speaking her half of a conversation from the past, unaware of the present. This clears, and she tries to tell Sawyer something really important, but dies.

Jacob’s ghost appears to Hurley, and tells him to take the briefcase and Sayid to “The Temple.” Jin will know where it is. After some uncomfortable milling around, team Jack goes, leaving Sawyer and Miles behind to burry Juliet.

Sawyer forces Miles to read Juliet’s dead mind: the message she was trying to impart was, “It worked.” Neither of them know what this means.

At the statue, “John” talks to Ben about killing Jacob. He tells Ben to go outside and bring in Richard. He attempts to do