Lost -- "LA X, Parts 1 & 2"

Okay, so tonight's Lost season 6 premiere "LA X, Parts 1 & 2" was just as much a mind bender as the season 5 ender "The Incident". Leave it to Lost to give you the aftermath of a HUGE cliffhanger with tons of scenes that don't actually tell you what happened after the bomb.

Let's see if we can recap the big Lost premiere moments. We start with Jack on the Oceanic flight, and it seems as if the bomb detonation has worked. The plane hits some turbulence, but doesn't crash. Rose is there, Bernard is there, Sun and Jin. Kate is there, in handcuffs.

But some things seem different. Hurley tells a curious Sawyer that he's the luckiest lottery winner on earth; that nothing bad ever happens to him. Boone is sitting near Locke, with no sister Shannon. And then there's the biggie--Desmond is on the plane as well. This seems to stir something in Jack, and he asks if they've met before. Desmond doesn't seem to remember anything, but later on he disappears from the flight.

Jack is called to the back of the plane to save someone locked in the bathroom--turns out it's Charlie, who swallowed a bag of drugs in an attempted suicide. He's not happy that Jack saved him. "I was meant to die," he tells Jack glumly, in an eerie parallel to the Lost sequence of events we know.

It was interesting to see how things would turn out if the plane didn't crash. I liked the easy friendship between Boone and Locke--a sort of fascination on Boone's part again--that mirrored their earlier relationship. It was hard to watch Sun and Jin, their marriage still strained. As Jin gets taken away by airport security for having undeclared wads of cash in his suitcase, Sun keeps her English to herself and lets him get into trouble.

Kate does a masterful escape once again, with just a teeny bit of help from bad boy Sawyer. Kate ends up forcing a cabbie to drive at gunpoint--with Claire sitting next to her on their getaway ride. And then we get another twist--Jack finds himself in the airport claims office with Locke. Locke lost a suitcase of knives, and the airline lost Jack's father. There's a nice scene with these two, when Locke tells Jack that no one can know where his father is. After all, the airline hasn't lost his father--they've only lost his body. Is this perhaps a hint about Locke's soul as well?

This isn't all, though. After we first see Jack on the plane, we then turn to Kate's point of view, where she wakes up dangling from a tree. On the island. Yes, that's right, Kate is still at the bomb site, though she's now back in her own timeline. And Sawyer is there, and Jack. Wait--Jack? But...

Sawyer is furious that the plan hasn't worked, and Jack for once has no answers for anything. Kate then hears Juliet, who somehow is still under the rubble, barely alive. So Sawyer at least gets to be with her one last time, but has to suffer through the realization of losing her--again. On top of it, she dies just before telling him something "important".

Hurley gets visited by the ghost of Jacob, who tells him to take a dying Sayid and the mysterious guitar case to the temple (home of the smoke monster and young Ben's life-saving change) in order to save him. The wound is too bad for Jack to heal, so he goes along with Kate, Hurley, and Jin to the temple. They're nearly killed by Others before they open the guitar case to find a message from Jacob that supposedly says they'd better save Sayid or else.

Meanwhile, we get a glimpse of Ben and Not-John-Locke. Ben is still confused as to why Jacob didn't put up a fight. Ilana sends her men in to find Jacob, and they shoot Not-John--but the bullets just bounce off. Then the Smoke Monster appears, and Ben learns that Not-John IS the Smoke Monster. Who just killed a bunch of men.

Ben is powerless to stop him. Shocking the collection of new crash victims on the beach with his Locke appearance, Not-John punches out a terrified Richard and carries him off to who knows where. As creepy as he's been in the past, I still have a soft spot for Eyeliner Man Richard, and don't want to see him meet a bad end.

Back at the Temple, Sayid drowns, despite the Others supposed attempts to revive him in the "healing pool". When the Others at the Temple discover that Jacob is dead, they freak out, sending up a flare to warn everyone and barracading themselves against the Smoke Monster they fear is coming. Then a very dead Sayid wakes up, which begs the question--is he Sayid, or is he perhaps Jacob returned? Will we now have a Not-John and a Not-Sayid?

The other twist is when Sawyer keeps Miles behind to help him bury Juliet. He has an ulterior motive, because he wants Miles to use his talents of listening to the dead. Sawyer is frustrated when Miles tells him Juliet's message is "It worked." If she means the bomb worked, and things went back to normal, then what are they all still doing on The Island? Do we now have two alternate realities operating at the same time?

Lost has certainly started the final season off with some big questions. Will any of them be answered in the next episode, or will we be left hanging all of season 6? There's only one way to find out...

Watch Lost on ABC, Tuesday nights at 9/8c. Read all my Lost-related posts!




PHOTO: The Losties captured by the Others in "LA X"; Boone and Locke in earlier days; Juliet before the bomb; Lost screencaps, c2010, 2009 ABC Studios.