Now that the presidential inauguration is behind us, we can officially turn our attention to this week’s other massively anticipated, world-changing event: the return of Lost! It’s been eight long months since we last left the island, though, and, despite our excitement, we’ll admit that we can’t quite remember all of the unsolved mysteries that television’s most complicated show was juggling at the conclusion of its fourth season. Who’s the Eyeliner guy again? How many toes did that statue have? To better prepare you for tonight’s two-hour season premiere, we’ve compiled a list of twenty big questions we hope Lost’s writers answer soon.
At the end of the season four finale, when Jack tells Ben he’s decided to return to the island, Ben unpleasantly informs him, “The island won’t let you come alone – all of you have to go back.” But why? Is it because when Ben turned the wheel and “moved the island” he was really moving the island through time and now the only way to avert a time paradox is for all members of the Oceanic Six (plus Locke’s dead body and maybe Walt and Desmond too) to go back simultaneously? If so, that makes complete sense – forget we even asked!
According to all promotional evidence, Lost’s fifth season will indeed focus on Ben and Jack’s efforts to gather the evacuees and return to the island – but is there any way for them to transport a cadaver from Los Angeles to South Pacific without hilarious shades of Weekend at Bernie’s? How will they get it on a plane? The scene in which Jack attempts to bring Locke’s expired body as carry-on luggage is the one we’re most looking forward to this season.
We also learned at the end of last season that, prior to his death, Locke left the island, returned to the United States, and adopted the alias “Jeremy Bentham” (the name of a philosopher whose views were opposite those of real-life philosopher John Locke’s). Does this mean Locke’s personal belief system changed after the Oceanic Six were rescued? Or did he just think “Jeremy Bentham” sounded cool?
Though Ben and Jack are skeptical, Locke’s death is officially ruled a suicide. Why would he kill himself? Did he return to civilization and find that his legs no longer worked? Could it have had something to do with the still-unknown “very bad things” he told Jack happened after the Oceanic Six left?
According to John “Jeremy Bentham” Locke, something awful happened on the island following the departure of Jack and his compatriots. What was it and how was it worse than any of the things happening in Bush’s America between 2005-2006?
For their plane-crash-related troubles, the Oceanic Six received vouchers for a lifetime of free air travel, plus a generous cash settlement – but the exact dollar amount has never been revealed. It must’ve been huge, though, since Sun is able to buy a controlling interest in her father’s corporation, Paik Heavy Industries. Did they get billions? If so, why can’t they just pay Ben or Charles Widmore to explain what the hell is going on?
Sun had never before showed an interest in the manufacture of industrial products in any previous episodes, so why did she buy Paik? She apparently blames her father for Jin’s death, so was it simple revenge? Or does it have something to do with her proposed alliance with the mysterious Charles Widmore, whose Widmore Corporation may be somehow related to Palk and the DHARMA initiative?
Charlotte arrived on the island via the same helicopter that brought Daniel and Miles, but when Daniel tried to take her back to the freighter in a lifeboat, she declined because she was “looking for where she was born.” So is she really an island native? Or was this just one of those stupid things that characters on TV shows sometimes say?
When Ben turned the frozen underground wheel at the end of season four, the island vanished and he was transported ten months into the future and to Tunisia. Did the same thing happen when Desmond triggered the fail-safe mechanism in the hatch at the end of season two, which also caused the sky to turn purple? If so, is Desmond mad he didn’t get to go to Tunisia?
Speaking of which, everyone knows that the DHARMA Initiative was running experiments on polar bears to determine if they could survive in tropical climates – but how did Charlotte manage to find the remains of a DHARMA bear in Tunisia? Could the bear have once turned Ben’s frozen wheel?
Producers have implied that this season we may finally learn the secret of the mysterious four-toed statue that we glimpsed at the end of season two. Apparently it’s the work of the island’s original (pre-DHARMA) inhabitants. Also, at Comic-Con last July, apropos of nothing, Damon Lindelof promised we’d see Richard Alpert (Eyeliner Guy) without shoes on.
Well, he certainly isn’t in any of the network’s promotional shots, so that certainly does not bode well for him as a character (nor for Daniel Dae Kim’s wallet). And Sun sure got pissed at her father in last year’s season finale for causing Jin’s death. But then again, this is The Island that we’re talking about, and we’ve seen its regenerative powers at work before. Heck, for all we know, maybe Jacob hired Jin to be his bodyguard!
Speaking of Jacob, last time we saw Claire, she was hanging out in his cabin. Depending on who you believe, Claire’s son Aaron is either the savior of the island or the next coming of Rosemary’s Baby, which means we’ve probably not heard the last of her thick Australian accent on the show.
Last season we learned that Ben is somehow able to summon Cerberus (a.k.a. Smokey a.k.a. The Monster) and order it to attack (he used it to attack Keamy and his henchmen after they killed his daughter, Alex). But we still don’t know what it is, why it exists, or who created it. Our best guess: Walter from Fringe invented it during his mad scientist days at Harvard.
The Wire’s Colonel Cedric Daniels is a J.J. Abrams favorite, having just moved from Lost to Fringe. However, on Lost, his affiliation is still unknown. We know the somewhat sinister character has appeared when both Locke and Hurley were in hospitals receiving treatment (physical and mental, respectively), and also that he recruited the scientists to go to the island. We’re inclined to believe he’s on the payroll of evil gazillionaire Charles Widmore, which officially makes him a bad guy in our book.
Given all the times his apparition has appeared to characters (most recently to Michael on the freighter just before it exploded), we’re surprised he has yet to raid the DHARMA beer store. After all, nothing makes you more thirsty that escaping the clutches of death. Wait, did we just say that? Even though Lost producers have acknowledged that Dr. Christian Shephard is, in fact, dead, we also know that his coffin no longer contains his corpse. So unless Smokey is into necrophilia, we’re guessing he’s making a transcendental booze run of some sort.
In these harrowing economic times, we’re pretty sure that Jacob is on the run from creditors and is moving his cabin in order to avoid being foreclosed upon. And as to whether Locke is secretly Jacob, well, that’s a tricky one. It would go a long way towards explaining why Locke doesn’t want to leave the island. After all, having two working legs and a modestly furnished cabin on a magical island is vastly preferrable to Locke’s post-island residence: a coffin.
Our first suspicion was that he asked her to post a webcam video of herself to Redtube, but then we remembered that Locke destroyed the only working computer on the island back in season two. So there goes that theory.
After Sayid’s wife Nadia is murdered by someone purportedly working for Charles Widmore, Ben coerces him into becoming an assassin, ordering hits on an unnamed economist and some unlucky golfer named Mr. Avelino. Why? Also, since Sayid’s a member of the Oceanic Six, isn’t he one of the most recognizable people on earth? Why the heck doesn’t this preclude him from being a successful hitman?
The seemingly ageless Richard Alpert, a.k.a. Eyeliner Guy, is one of our favorite characters from the show (and not just because he looks like he might have been a member of David Bowie’s backing band) so we’re glad he was given an expanded role in season four. But what will season five reveal? We know he can apparently move freely between the island and civilization, and the show’s implied he can travel through time as well. Also, though we have no proof of this, we’re pretty sure he only has four toes.