My Second-to-Last LOST Post Ever

Firstly, I'd like to congratulate ABC for using the word "penultimate" to refer to last night's episode of LOST.

So, here we are. After last night, only two and a half hours of LOST remain. This final season has been a rollercoaster of awesome and meh. A lot of people didn't like last week's episode "Across the Sea" and I'll admit it was a bit slow at times, but it was a very important episode. It could have aired earlier in the show's lifetime, but I think holding out until the almost-end created a bit more of "ohhhhhhhhhhh!" reaction from audiences than if it had aired earlier. This week's episode was great. it felt like an older episode, like maybe season four or five. It was action-packed, the acting was great, the story was great, had some laughs, set up some new questions and answered some old ones.

I'm not going to go through a full synopsis of the episode. If you're a LOST fan, you've seen it. I want to focus on the mysteries that got solved. The answers we got were mostly ones regarding small details, but those small details fill in some gaps to other questions.

We found out that the ashes that everyone always used to protect themselves from Smokey were Jacob's ashes. This makes sense since, as we learned in "Across the Sea", Jacob and the Man in Black's foster mother made it so that they could not hurt each other. If MiB's brother's ashes were encompassing people, he could risk hurting the ashes, so he'd back away. Now, how did so much ash of Jacob exist? No idea, but that's too tiny of a detail. The point is, as with all LOST mysteries, you have to suspend disbelief for a moment. The ashes protected people because they were Jacob's and Smokey can't hurt Jacob directly. That's all you need to know.

Jacob revealed last night that the reason he brought everyone to the island was because he needed someone to take over protecting the Cave of Light he had been protecting for so long. We knew this already, but it was finally spelled out for us. He said he chose all of those people because they were alone and/or unhappy and the Island would give them purpose, something real Locke had said from the beginning of the series and something Jack had started to feel once he wanted to go back to the Island in season five. What isn't clear, however, is whether Jacob nudged everyone into these unhappy lifestyles since he had visited so many of them when they were children and convinced them of certain "truths." Did he travel back in time to nudge them to make sure they came to the island? Or did he actually nudge them in the real original timeline? This isn't clear, but it seems like a detail that will never be answered and we'll have to interpret ourselves, which makes the story more fun. I like to wonder whether Jacob actually interfered with their future happiness or not.

We also found out that Kate's name was scratched out in the cave because she became a mother to Aaron, so she had a purpose in life. This also explains why only one of the Kwans had their name in the cave and not two. Sun was pregnant when all of this began and Jin was an angry man who felt he owned his wife, so he had a chance to do something real with his life on the island.

Speaking of being pregnant, I think it's safe to assume that what happened in "Across the Sea" last week with the biological mother of Jacob and his brother is likely the reason women couldn't properly give birth on the Island. Sort of like a curse. If you can't believe in a curse, then I don't know why you're watching LOST. There were polar bears in the jungle and a Smoke Monster. I think a curse is a valid excuse.

We half got answers about Charles Widmore and why he came to the Island. It still isn't very clear as to why he came in the first place (he's a miserable guy, so it's possible he was summoned just like everyone else and became obsessed just like nearly everyone else).

But perhaps the best thing that happened in "What They Died For" last night was we started to see the significance of the "Alternative Timeline." It's becoming more and more apparent that it isn't exactly an alternative timeline. The two … we'll say storylines… are closely related and tie together very well. Characters off the Island are have memories of being on the Island and they're noticing coincidences between each other. Desmond is very close to getting them all together again (the ones that are "ready" anyhow) and it seems a few of them will all be at Jack's son David's piano concert. And, David said his mother would be there, so there's a great chance that we'll finally see who jack's ex-wife is. It's obviously not Sun, Kate, Claire, Ana Lucia, Libby, Rose, or Rousseau. Could be Charlotte, but probably not. There's also the possibility of it being someone we've never even met, but I doubt we'll have too many new characters introduced int he final 2.5 hours.

Anyway, with that said, while things aren't totally answered, we're primed for an explosions of answers and "Holy crap!" moments on Sunday. As I've said before, I don't expect everything to be answered, but I think we'll get the general gist of everything on Sunday and tiny details can/will have to be interpreted by us. That, or, the tiny details don't really mean anything and they're just things that happened and so we shouldn't worry about them.

I'm just excited to watch the whole thing from "The Pilot" to "The End" on DVD eventually.

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