After watching Tuesday’s Lost premiere, this much we can say for certain: The bomb did and didn’t work, and Locke is Smokey, dead, and missing a suitcase full of knives. Now that they’ve had two days to think about it, what can the Internet’s brainiest Lost theorists tell us about the show’s final season?
• The two timelines the show now features are going to be reconciled at some point this season, but how? The best bet is a special individual. But will it be Desmond, for whom “the rules don’t applyâ€; Juliet, whose final words before death seemed to suggest she knew something Sawyer didn’t; or Aaron, who may not even exist in the reboot timeline for all we know, but whose alluded-to importance in prior seasons seems to foreshadow him playing a pivotal role now? [Incident]
• Using Juliet’s experience as a starting point, one recapper posits that characters in one timeline may share a “co-conscience†with their counterparts in the alternate timeline, meaning they could possibly warn themselves about things. Bonus theory: The island’s whispers, the subject of much attention in the first two seasons, are the sounds of Others moving through underground tunnels that lead to the temple! [TV Squad]
• Expert recapper Vozzek69 has way too many insights to list here, but there’s two we’re hung up on. First up, pointing out that we’re only shown the cut on Jack’s neck in the mirror, Voz suggests that maybe it’s not real and exists only in the mirror as some sort of foreshadowing. Second, on the issue of the Man in Black wanting to go “home,†Voz uses the word that makes many a Lost fan cringe, purgatory, and wonders if Jacob and his foe are fallen angels of a sort. [DarkUFO]
• Similarly, this analysis of possibilities regarding the Man in Black asserts that he could be the devil, an angel, an alien, or just someone from an alternate universe. [BuddyTV]
• Usually we skip the time-suck of reading theories posted online by viewers who haven’t dedicated themselves to maintaining a Lost blog, but we really like this one (even if it’s not entirely novel) about the reboot timeline just being one iteration of a continuously repeating series of events that has led to these characters getting on Oceanic 815. And if it’s an iteration that has already happened, perhaps that timeline is a “flashback†of sorts. [LOST Theories]
• Not having seen any concrete evidence to the contrary, there’s no reason to assume that the flight in the reboot timeline is taking place in 2004. In fact, what if the the alternate realities are happening at the exact same time? [Long Live Locke]
• Is it possible that Jughead was detonated in conjunction with some movement of the island in time and space? If so, maybe it created a pattern of sorts, which would help to explain why there are alternate realities: one in which the bomb worked, and one in which it didn’t. [EYE M SICK]
• There’s not any evidence to back it up, but at least one person thinks Charles Widmore will return to the island, but instead of ruling the Others he’ll be replacing the Man in Black. [Magic Lamp]
• This writer concludes that Shannon’s absence only means that Maggie Grace asked for too much money to return to the show. More importantly, he wonders if the legend of Atlantis holds any clues for the story of the sunken island. [TV Guide]
• Desmond, who was obviously not on the original Oceanic 815 flight, might be appearing in the reboot as an agent of course correction. Or maybe as a disciple of Eloise Hawking? [Filmfodder]
• Questioning why, circa 1988, Smokey was living in the outer walls of a safe place for Jacob’s people, this writer guesses that the Man in Black was once Jacob’s unwilling servant, and that finding a “loophole†had as much to do with preventing people from coming to the island as ending his job as security system for the Temple. [Zap2it]
• Not much has been made of the premiere’s title (“LA Xâ€) title, but this guy, pointing out important episodes from past seasons like “The Variable,†thinks that X stands for the unknown variable in an equation, much like the characters themselves seem to be unknowns right now. [DocArzt’s LOST Blog]
• Two writers debate, among many other things, the effect Jughead had. One thinks it spawned an alternate reality; the other thinks it created a wormhole, with Jack’s looking in the mirror serving as a reference to Donnie Darko. [Celebritology/Washington Post]
• With everyone looking to the future and wondering how the series will end, this recapper wonders if Jack and Locke are somehow going to become the next Jacob and Smokey. [Watcher/Chicago Tribune]
• Doc Jensen says he’s not offering any grand theories in this final season, but his smaller speculations still get our minds going. Here he suggests that Jughead is likely not what sunk the island in the reboot timeline. So what did? Consider that pesky Radzinsky drilling into the pocket of electromagnetic energy and causing a cataclysm (uninterrupted by the bomb’s detonation) that caused the island’s plunge beneath the sea. [EW]