Lost Season 5: Already Under My Skin
By stephanie - Thursday, January 22nd, 2009
If the first episode of Season 5 of Lost bored you, then you are either not a fan or just a TV critic watching it because you have been forced to. As Lost’s creators explained in the pre-show, we are now finally at the point in Lost where more questions will be answered than asked, and that has to be exciting for any true Lost fan.
SPOILER ALERT: Alert your eyes from here on out if you haven’t watched this on your DVR yet!
For me, the major revelation in this episode was that the characters could get physically dislodged in time. Daniel Faraday, the physicist who is seen it the beginning of the show back in the Orchid station circa 1980, likens the time shifting to be like a record skipping.
For many years now fans have been wondering what the true key to the island was, and this has to be it. Time is what Lost is about, which is why flashbacks were integral in the show’s first seasons. Now we can see that time travel is perhaps what will explain most of the strange happenings on the show, from the Black Rock being stuck in the middle of the jungle to the appearances of Jack’s father. (Somehow, I suspect, dead people walking around like the living will have something to do with the time travel.)
My brain was working on so much overdrive from the idea that I had Lost dreams last night, dreams in which I was a woman from the 1970s but kept appearing at different moments in time here in the civilized world. I could not remember, however, exactly where I was from, and I felt considerable confusion as I kept finding myself in the same house but in a different decade. In one scene from my dream (because it was seriously like a television show), I was getting ready in this house, which used to be mine in the 1970s, but was now owned by new people in the present day. The new owners thought I was an intruder. Then a large group of people started to gather at the house at a particular time period, because we’d all gotten dislodged somehow and this became the focal point.
The underlying theory in such time travel is that all time is simultaneous, but we only perceive it to be separate. Thus, it would be possible to exist at other points in time simply because all time is here, now, overlapped with all other time.
One thing that I am thankful for is that Lost is not trying to work in time paradoxes. Faraday clearly states that history cannot be changed, that we can “jump along the string” but not change it, no matter what we do. “What happened, happened.”
This is a thankful respite from all the ridiculous time travel sci-fi out there, made possible by 50 zillion time paradox episodes in the Star Trek shows (most notably Voyager) and the Terminator franchise.
We also find out in the premiere episode that the wheel that dislodges the island from space-time was buried underneath it before the Dharma Initiative arrived, which then begs the question: Who put it there? Aliens? Or Atlanteans? Because it’s entirely possible we’ll find out that the island is, indeed, the mythical Atlantis, with the Others as the only survivors of whatever holocaust dislodged it from regular space and time in the first place.
You’ll find some excellent predictions as to what will happen this season over at Slate.
February 4th, 2009 at 8:39 pm
The time traveling paradox was the biggest issue I have with the time travel side of Lost. Noe that we know that this paradox is not going to interfere with the series, I hope that we will start finding the answers in every new episode!.
February 25th, 2009 at 12:57 am
I love lost too, but don’t you think they’ve hit us a little too strong with the time traveling this season? It’s been fun but it seems a little out of the blue (not entirely of course). I just think it’s too much too fast.