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Jack - Matthew Fox Kate - Evangeline Lilly Locke - Terry O'Quinn Sayid - Naveen Andrews Sawyer - Josh Holloway Hurley - Jorge Garcia Charlie - Dominic Monaghan Walt - Malcolm David Kelley Sun - Yunjin Kim Jin - Daniel Dae Kim Claire - Emilie de Ravin Benjamin Linus - Michael Emerson Juliet - Elizabeth Mitchell Desmond- Henry Ian Cusick 
OTHER LOST SEASONS Season 1 Season 2 Season 3 Season 5 Season 6 OTHER LOST TRAVELLERS The Fantastic Journey Logan's Run 
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The Beginning of the EndJack and Kate are at the top of the island, finally in touch with the people who are coming to save them (or so they say), but have to decide how to tell them that their pilot Naomi is dead. Or is she? Sawyer, Saheed and Hurley are on the beach with Desmond trying to figure out how to tell the others that the rescuers are not what they seem. Locke is in the middle, trying to explain his murder of Naomi and Ben's still scheming from the sidelines. Yes, LOST is back. Answers are coming'! proclaimed the bus stop posters advertising the start of this season, but not in this first episode they're not. Dealing with the fallout from the climactic events of last season, this opening show kicks off as though it had never been away. Events are moving quickly as a schism opens up within the group, half electing to go with Jack to the beach to meet the newcomers and half deciding to go and hole up somewhere with Locke. In the midst of this there is some fine character work as people come to terms with Charlie's death. Jorge Garcia's Hurley is the epicentre of the episode as we get flashforwards (as opposed to the flashbacks that have plagued the show) to a time when the Oceanic Six are off the island. We glimpsed Jack and Kate at each others throat in the last episode of last season, so who are the other three? Finding out who and how is likely to provide the heart of this season's storylines. It's slick stylish and compelling and we realise now how much we've missed it. Welcome back LOST. Now about those answers? TopConfirmed DeadThere are four new arrivals on the island, all members of Naomi's rescue team. Jack finds three of them, Locke the other. After guns are waved around liberally and one is actually used, it becomes clear that the rescue team's real purpose on the island is not to rescue the survivors of the Oceanic flight, but rather to capture Ben. Well now, here's a turn up for the books. Jack demands to know what the rescue team are doing on the island and they actually tell him. Locke demands to know how Ben knows all about the rescue team and he tells him. If people start giving direct answers to direct questions then LOST might actually live up tot he promise of giving some real answers in this fourth season. That said, there are more than enough mysteries still to go around. Who set up the downed airliner to make the world think that the Oceanic flight was lost with all hands? If it wasn't this rescue team then who are they and why do they want Ben, the leader of the Others? Why does the team have a man who talks to ghosts on it? Why an anthropologist. What was a polar bear doing in the desert in one of the flashbacks and what's the significance of the Dharma plaque that was found with it? There are the usual twists and turns in this episode and whilst they might not be as compelling as once they were, they are still more than enough to keep an audience hooked. The newcomers are, however, jarring additions to the cast. None of them seem in step with the show, their accents and acting marking them out. This might be deliberate or simply annoying. It's impossible to tell with LOST. One thing's for sure, we can't miss a single episode. TopThe EconomistSayid decides that the easiest way to get some answers is to be on the helicopter when it heads back to the rescue ship. In order to ensure his place aboard, he heads off to Locke's stronghold with Kate and one of the rescue team. There, they find Hurley locked in a closet, but all is not what it seems and soon they are all prisoners. In a flash-forward it is revealed that Sayid is one of the 'Oceanic Six' and is now working as an assassin wooing a German woman in order to get closer to her mysterious employer. Both stories (the island and the flash forwards) have more twists and turns than a sidewinder snake slithering the marathon, but this is LOST as we love it - constantly shifting, pulling the rug out from under our expectations and understanding. Showing us what is happening in the future (and therefore who we know to be alive) may undercut the tension and threat to certain characters on the island, but there are more hints and glimpses of answers to questions (glimpses of answers, not answers themselves) that everything remains compelling even whilst being completely obscured. On top of that, there is a twist at the end that is classic LOST. The newcomers are settling down and becoming much less jarring to the general tone and flow of the show than previously and everyone else is up to the mark, especially Naveen Andrews who anchors this episode with ease. What we want to know most is what is the significance of the apparent time discrepancy between the rescue ship and the island? It affects the flight of a missile, but not radio waves. TopEggtownWhen Sayid went to trade prisoners with Locke to get his seat on the helicopter, Kate stayed with Locke. She needs to know what the so-called rescuers know about her in order to decide whether she should leave the island or not. That knowledge comes at a price, 10 minutes with Ben, something that will require Kate to betray not just Locke but Sawyer as well. The off-island story is proving to be more exciting than the on-island one at present. Clearly this is the story that the writers are wanting to concentrate on, giving hints all the way along as to what is going to happen to the survivors of the plane crash come the big finale it. It's blatant manipulation, but we don't care because it's so brilliant. It also gives us the chance to say how great Kate looks in a skirt. It's not something that we're used to seeing and we like it. The shock of learning that Kate has a child is played with all the way through (is it Sawyer's? Is it Jack's?), but the final twist is actually obvious all the way along (for a change). LOST is still frustrating in providing more questions than answers, but we still love it. TopThe ConstantSayid and Desmond arrive on the ship of their supposed rescuers, but things don't go quite as they should and Desmond finds himself bouncing backwards and forwards in time uncontrollably. A conversation with one of the team that came onto the island explains that this will accelerate and eventually kill him unless he can find one constant in his life in both time periods. That constant is his girlfriend Penny, the woman who hated him in the past and whose number he doesn't have in the present. A complete step outside the main story and diversion that goes nowhere, this sets up a situation that can be resolved in a single episode, but actually advances the main plotlines not at all (and we can't say that's the first time). As a result, it feels a lot like padding. Fortunately, it's pretty good padding with a good performance from Henry Ian Cusick to anchor it. What it tells us is that the island's in some kind of temporal anomaly, time passing differently on either side. What that means for the characters is obviously something for another time, but what it means for the audience is that if they missed this one altogether then they'd hardly even notice. TopThe Other WomanTwo of the new arrivals set off for the island's powerplant with a whole load of gas masks. It turns out that's where the gas that wiped out the Others is controlled from. Jack and Juliet go after them, picking up Kate along the way, but who's going to get there first and will any of them survive. Another episode that smacks a little bit of padding in the whole 'must stop the gas' storyline. If that wasn't there nobody would miss it and it does feel pretty forced. What is interesting, though, is the story that Ben weaves. He reveals the face of his enemy and Locke releases him from his captivity, but he has already gotten the message to Juliet that she has to kill the two newcomers. How did he do that from inside Locke's basement? The flashbacks (no, no not flashbacks!) to Juliet's troubled relationship with Ben are a total waste of time and only lead up to the dramatic moment when she and Jack...well. TopJi YeonWhen Sun decides to go and join Locke's band in the barracks, Juliet warns her that both she and her child will die and even goes so far as to tell Jin of Sun's affair to prevent them from going. The flashforward tells of the birth of Sun's baby off the island. On the boat, Sayid and Desmond meet both the ship's captain and its familiar janitor. Now this is a tricksy little episode. By throwing both flashforwards and flashbacks into the mix at the same time, it tries to keep its climactic revelation as a shock, though we all twigged it fairly early on, so it doesn't manage it too well. That said, Sun and Jin's story has been one of the more interesting backstories that we've been subjected to. Apart from that, nothing much seems to be happening until the captain of the ship tells his guests that Desmond's almost father-in-law is behind the ship being there and that someone has faked the crash of the plane so that the bodies could all be found (unidentifiable after the time in the water, course) -something that is laid at the hands of one Benjamin Linus. The big reveal, of course, is Kevin Johnson, the ship's cleaner, but more of him next time around. TopMeet Kevin JohnsonSayid recognises deckhand Kevin Johnson as being Michael, the only person from the plane ever to make it off the island (Live Together, Die Alone - Part 2 way back at the end of series 2). Now he is back on the so-called rescue boat. Sayid wants answers and he gets them. Michael tells the whole story, from the time that he escaped to the moment that they saw him, a tale of failed suicide, manipulation, rejection and bombs. The last episode completed before the writers' strike disrupted everything is one that encompasses everything there is to know about LOST. It is breathtaking in its audacity and storytelling bravado, almost as breathtaking as it is in its ridiculousness. The story isn't believable for a moment and yet you do believe for the whole time that it is unspooling before your eyes. That's the quality of the writing and the sincerity of the acting, in this case mainly from Harold Perrineau Jr as Kevin/Michael, a man torn apart by guilt and wishing only to end it all. He is convincing and therefore so is the story, until you think about it afterwards that is and everything seems to be fashioned of smoke and mirrors. But then this is LOST and for every question answered, new ones are raised and a few of the cast get brutally murdered. Who? Now that would be telling. TopThe Shape of Things to ComeA telephone rings in the house being shared by Locke, Sawyer and Hurley and announces that the barrier is down. Ben immediately panics. The enemy is coming for him and he is not about to go with them. They, however, have his daughter hostage, but he has a backup plan of his own. Down on the beach, Jack is getting sick. LOST is back from its enforced hiatus and it means business. The body count hasn't been this high on the show for a while, but it's the manner of it that is so compelling. The story is centred around Ben and we still don't know why he is so important, but we do learn, through the dreaded flashback/forward/somewhen format, how Sayid comes to be working for him after they get off the island. The plot is tight, exciting and full of surprises. This is LOST as we expect it to be - tricksy but compelling. No hint of any answers, of course, but another couple of pieces in the big picture are slotted into place. TopSomething Nice Back HomeJack's sickness takes a turn for the worse and Juliet diagnoses appendicitis. She sets about getting everything needed to take out the offending appendix. Meanwhile the story of what happened to Jack and Kate after they left the island gets told. Sawyer and Claire are making their way back to the beach when she has an unexpected visitor. The Season 3 cliffhanger showed Jack and Kate off the island with him drunk and her hating him. This episode shows them happy in their lives together, but then goes on to depict how it all started to go wrong. This is the more interesting part of the story as Jack's illness is fairly straightforward, dull even. The teasing hints continue. Jin makes a deal to get Sun off the island, Sawyer chose to stay, Claire gets a visit from her and Jack's father who we know to be dead. What does it all mean? Not a thing, but there is a very real sense that the threads area coming together for a finale that's going to be something really special. As usual we're as hooked as hooked can be. TopCabin FeverLocke, Ben and Hurley go tramping through the jungle in search of Jacob's cabin. Only, it's not Jacob's, it's Horace's and his ghost kindly helps Locke find the way. To find out what he must do, he need only enter the cabin. On the freighter, however, things are getting serious. The leader of the military operation so decimated by Ben sicking the smoke monster on them has lost it big time and is going back to torch the island utterly and anyone getting in his way is sure to end up dead. The stakes have been raised to nothing less than the complete existence of the island. There is a real sense of the plotlines finally coming together towards a finale and the casual deadly brutality of the bad guys promises that it's going to be a bloody one. As usual, there's lots of spooky, unexplained stuff such as Locke's encounter with the dead Horace, Claire's presence in Jacob's cabin, Jacob's representative himself, all set to tease the audience. As usual there's not an explanation in sight for anything. As usual, the flashbacks (this time to Locke's past) add nothing to the story at all. But, as usual, it's just addictive, compelling stuff. TopThere's No Place Like Home Part OneThe Oceanic Six (Jack, Kate, Sayid, Hurley, Sun and Claire's baby) all arrive back in the US and face the press with their carefully pieced together cover up story. How they got there and nobody else did, however, is yet to be revealed. The first set of survivors get from the beach to the freighter in time for Desmond to find it packed with enough C4 explosive to vapourise it whilst everyone else is converging on the Orchid station, the place that Ben and Locke believe can move the island. This is the final set up for the end game. The pieces are in their positions now, there are no more hints about who gets off and who doesn't and therefore what the fates of the others might be. This doesn't make for the best episode, but we are so tied into the plotline now that even the lesser episodes are compelling. The end is night and it's going to be apocalyptic. TopThere's No Place Like Home Part TwoBen is taken prisoner by the soldiers from the freighter, but his own people manage to rescue him and he takes Locke down into the Orchid, a place set up near a site of 'negatively charged exotic matter'. It is from here that they plan to move the island. Jack, Kate, Sawyer, Sayid and Hurley manage to get the helicopter towards the safety of the freighter, but since the freighter has a huge bomb on it that is triggered by the device monitoring the heartbeat of the soldier that Ben just killed on the island then that safety is dubious at best. There's an awful lot of plot to tie up in this two-hour finale of LOST. Right back at the beginning of this fourth season we were promised answers and there are answers, of a sort, but mainly to the new questions raised in this season rather than the ones that have dogged us since the beginning. What is the island? Don't know. Who is Jacob? Don't know. Why is Ben so important? Don't know. Why does Widmore want the island so badly? Don't know. What we have learned is that the island is tied into 'exotic matter' and the space-time continuum. The island can be moved, but to where? Or when? The Dharma Initiative were carrying out experiments on the time/space properties of the island, but why Ben had to destroy all that is unanswered. Because of all the answers that we weren't given, this last episode is something of a disappointment. There is plenty of action, in fact so much that even a two hour special can't fit it all in without it feeling rushed and certain explosive incidents losing some of their impact. Even so, the writers still have one ace up their sleeve as the mysterious Jeremy Bentham is finally revealed in the season's closing shot. Will we back for season five? Damn right. The island doesn't let go of those that it has touched and that includes us. Top |
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