Feb 01 2008
Lost Season Premiere!
The long-anticipated (at least by me and most people I know) season premiere of Lost took place tonight. So if you missed it and would like to know what happened, read on. If you missed and you’re still planning to watch it then be warned:
SPOILERS AHEAD
In case you are just here for the secret site revealed in the commercial during Eli Stone, here it is:
Brief synopsis:
Lost is a series that revolves around the survivors of Oceanic Flight 815 which was bound from Sydney to Los Angeles when it more or less split in half. The plane and all the passengers that survived ended up stranded on what appears to be a tropical island in the middle of nowhere. They didn’t land on just any old tropical island though - in the first three seasons we see the “Lost” survivors exposed to psychotic polar bears, murdering black smoke, and homicidal “others” that already inhabited the island prior to their arrival. The majority of the episodes from the past three seasons have been devoted to establishing how all the main characters ended up on Flight 815 and thus on the island and more importantly how they are going to escape from the island and return home. For a more in-depth summary of lost Seasons 1-3 I suggest checking out IMDB or Wikipedia.
Season 4: Episode 1 premiered right where Season 3 left off. Here are the key points that I picked up from the show:
- Instead of doing a lot of flashbacks, the show had a whole lot of flash-forwards. The flash forwards are mainly focused on the character of Hurley aka Hugo. In the future time we see that he appears to have lost his mind (he is seeing things that aren’t there ~ or are they ~ talking to dead Charlie, etc.). He manages to get himself committed to a mental asylum to avoid having to deal with “something” although by the end of the episode we don’t really know much of what that something is. Through the flash forwards we learn that Hurley is part of what has become known as the “Oceanic Six” indicating that it is possible that only 6 of the survivors return. The “something” that Hurley seems to be avoiding may have to do with their actually being other survivors left.
- When the show goes back to “present” time we see that all of the survivors are in the middle of the tropical jungle waiting to be rescued.
- Ben is convinced that the would-be rescuers want to kill all the people on the island and doesn’t want to be found.
- Jack makes repeated contact with these rescuers via a SAT phone.
- Naomi who was part of a search party (supposedly) briefly escapes the group. However, John had stabbed her in the last season and that wound turns out to be fatal.
- Naomi managed to enable the SAT phone for her team to find everyone’s location before she succumbed to her wounds.
- The group that went out to the underwater station in Season 3 return to the island minus Charlie.
- Charlie’s dying message from Season 3 of “Not Penny’s Boat” was passed on to a team of survivors sewing doubt in a lot of the people as to who to trust.
- Hurley is deeply impacted by Charlie’s loss as are the other cast members. There are a lot of deep, meaningful looks being exchanged.
- Hurley appears to begin hallucinating during this episode. He finds the crazy haunted shack that Locke found in the last season.
- John Locke reappears now that other people are against the idea of going with the “rescuers”.
- All of the survivors divide into two camps at the end of the episode, those who don’t trust the rescuers are part of Locke’s group and those that do stay with Jack.
- Jack takes Locke’s gun and aims it at him. Locke says he won’t shoot it. Jack does shoot the gun at Locke but it turns out to be unloaded.
- Hurley tells Jack in one of those flash forwards that he made a mistake going with Locke and also that they need to go back.
Rating: 
(The long commercials and soap-opera-like cliffhangers makes this series hard to watch on tv. I can see why some viewers are opting to wait till the DVD is released.)