Watching Lost is a wonderful experience, and although the mysteries, mythology and relationships aren’t for everyone – it’s worth seeing just to experience the incredible storytelling.

Anyway, seeing as i’ll be watching episode 3 tonight, i thought i’d just copy and paste my “brain dump” for episodes 1 and 2. I’ll write a detailed post about episode 3 after i’ve watched it.

–

That ep gave us a lot to think about, quite a lot of curtain drawing back, but not much Wizard of Oz behind it.

The first big reveal is that there’s a new timeline in which 815 doesn’t crash, and obviously events differ as soon as it passes the “crash moment”. But there are a couple of noticeable differences that set it apart from OUR 815.

The first being the fact that Desmond is on the plane.

The second, unless i’m going insane, is that Hurley is happy and believes himself to be the luckiest man in the world. I’m pretty sure he’s just coming back from being knocked back by the wife of the guy who gave him the numbers. Not giving him the sympathetic ear, the understand, that we know he wanted. Plus, I’m guessing someone who says that nothing ever bad happens to them wouldn’t have that mindset if their mansion had burned down, or their chicken franchise had been hit by a meteor. So I’m guessing those things haven’t happened in this timeline. But it’s understandable that things relating to the numbers might change if the timeline has changed.. We’ll get to that later.

Anyway, the next reveal we have is that in the divergent timeline we see that the island is underwater, which would’ve really got the Atlantis-theorists going giddy if it wasn’t for the inclusion of the Dharma huts, and the Dharma branded shark. Which means that the island submerged at some point after the 70′s, fairly congruent with the idea of a hydrogen bomb going off in 70′s…

Then we see that OUR losties are still on the island, but have moved back to the “present”. The hatch is back, albeit destroyed.

We get Sawyers “IT HASNT WORKED” hissyfit, then Juliets posthumous “oh but it has” rebuttal.

In my opinion, she’s right:

The point of the hydrogen bomb was to disperse the electromagnetic energy and change the past in such a way that it couldn’t course correct. If the electromagnetic energy is dispersed, the hatch doesn’t need to be built, Desmond can’t be there pushing the button, so he won’t fail, and 815 won’t crash.

They’ve basically committed a grandfather paradox by going back in time and stopping themselves crashing.

Grandfather paradoxes are exactly that, paradoxes, they can’t exist in a simple way, you can’t go back and change your own past.

So how does the universe cope with the idea that the person who’s changing reality won’t exist?

It forks.

So the losties HAVE to still exist, in their own timeline, because otherwise our new losties couldn’t land at LAX.

I still don’t really know why the island would end up underwater, but maybe that’s just what would happen after a subterranean h-bomb detonation.

Okay, to progress:

Hurley DOES see dead people, fair enough, no idea why, but we also have no idea why miles can hear them, it’s just something that seems to have happened.

One of my theories is solidified, you see Montands body in the temple, but not the bodies of the other French people. I was initially convinced they were dead and possessed, but that was before we learned that smokey doesn’t need to possess the corpses, he just takes their visage.

So, if he had been doing that, they wouldn’t have had bodies when Danielle killed them. So perhaps they WERE still humans, just… converted somehow. There seems to be some “truth” that converts/recruits people to the cause, we meet the stewardess from the plane again in the temple. She doesn’t seem bothered at all by Jack and co turning up, she acts as if they’re from another life or something: “oh, they were on the plane with me”, as if she doesn’t think of herself as one of them anymore (which she may not be).

The whole water resurrection thing I can’t interpret yet, the “water of life”, “fountain of youth” idea has been floated before, to explain Richards immortality, but i’m not sure what i think about that.

I imagine that Sayid coming back to life of his own accord is either because of “course correction” or (my preferred explanation) because of Jacob touching him in the past. We’ve been shown Jacob touching certain people in their past, and we were shown a scene that very much appeared to be Jacob resurrecting Locke (after being thrown out of a building) by touching him on the shoulder.

We’ve also, going way back to the beginning, seen proof that fake-locke IS Smokey – “i’m sorry you had to see me like that”. We’ve also seen proof that the ashes protect against smokey (so the cabin encirclement was either to keep him out, or keep him in). We’ve seen that smokey killed those people without judging them – his normal modus operandi. Perhaps because they were “soldiers” or followers of jacob, he didn’t need to judge their free will. We also saw that shooting him didn’t seem to have an effect, he was fine when he reappeared, so we need to wonder here why jacob died. Was it because he was killed by someone who did so out of pure free will (Ben), or was it because he was in his original body? I don’t really believe the latter.

Okay, to proceed. His exchange with Richard is FASCINATING. “Nice to see you out of those chains”. My original Richard theory, way back, was that he was a slave from Egypt, being carried on the Black Rock. Richard being “in chains” is fairly congruent with that notion. I’m not talking ancient Egypt, just that Egypt was (if i understand correctly) used a lot in the slave trade, and he particularly looks like he could pass for Egyptian in a pinch.

We know that the man in black was wandering around when the Black Rock arrived, so if the last time he saw Richard was when Richard was in chains, it must’ve been after that point. So I assume richard was on that ship. But after that, some event must have occurred that either took the man in black out of the loop (imprisoning him perhaps), or forcing him to remain in smoke form (where he can’t exactly interact with people).

Either way, this is the first conversation he’s had with Richard in a long time (at least 50 years), which is troubling. Richard hasn’t been hiding, and we know the smoke monster was wandering around in the 70s. Like i said, troubling.

We also get to see that there’s definitely a conflict of sorts between the temple-others, and the man in black. They have counter measures (the firework alert, and the ashes) ready to go. So why does Jacobs death suddenly mean that they’re a target? Was Jacob protecting them? hiding them? Or did the RULES of the conflict forbid the man in black from hurting Jacobs followers. Rules which are made irrelevant after jacob dies. We know that the others made a truce with Dharma, perhaps that isn’t the first truce they’ve been involved in…

I think I’ve covered everything save for the events in the divergent timeline – which i don’t think are important yet.

I also haven’t mentioned my utter frustration at Sawyer for not taking Juliets body to the temple.