Notice how the only character NOT facing the audience is Locke? How very interesting. Source.

The highly anticipated final season of Lost arrived with big expectations from the fans – would every question be answered? What characters would live/die? Would we finally find out what the island is or isn’t? Turns out, as with everything else, the answer was: Kind-of.

LOST – Views from a Veteran – Season Six: Episodes 1-8

You can let go now” – Rose in “LAX – Part 1”

This is it folks, the much debated final season of Lost!

I will get into the actual ending of the season later, and I will have most of the final post devoted to the final episode and what it meant for the series. But, before we can get to that, we still have the entire season to watch.

This season began much like the first season did, with Jack on Oceanic flight 815 to Los Angeles from Sydney. But, for the careful observer, things were a bit different: Jack only got one bottle of alcohol from the flight attendant (while he got two back in season 1), Jack had a cut on his neck (which we do not learn about until the finale – Smoke-Locke cut him with a knife), the island is underwater, and Desmond was on the plane.

Does that mean that re-setting the time-line with the nuclear bomb actually worked? Sadly no, everything is still the same. The flash-sideways are actually glimpses of the castaway’s limbo, or afterlife, where they all are waiting to move on. As mentioned previously, this will be discussed, at length, in the final post.

There are a few things that have happened during the first half of the season that actually hint at the nature of the flash-sideways, and I will tell you about two.

The first one was in the premiere, when Juliet says, “We could get coffee sometime … we can go Dutch.” While seemingly meaningless babble at the time, as it ends up, this is exactly what Juliet says to Sawyer in the flash-sideways when they find one another.

The other, slightly more obvious hint is in the episode “Recon,” when Sawyer is on a date with Charlotte. When she asks him why he became a cop, he says, “I guess I got to a point in my life, when I was either gonna become a criminal or a cop. And … I chose cop.”

By saying this, Sawyer lets us in on how his life could have been different if he just made a different choice. After all, Lost is fundamentally all about the difficult choices we/the characters need to make in our/their lives.

This season also finally has gone into a bit more of the mythology of the island, with Richard’s path finally being described in “Ab Aeterno,” The Temple (and its inhabitants) being shown, the introduction of “candidates,” the lighthouse where Jacob observed them all, the spring that can heal, the notion of the MiB corrupting the souls of Sayid and Claire, and the cave where Jacob recorded and wrote down the names of all the candidates.

As for the plot of the first half of this final season, the survivors have pretty much split into 2 separate factions – Those with the MiB (Sayid, Claire, Sawyer, Jin and Kate), and those against him (Jack, Hurley, Sun, Ben, Richard, Lapidus and Ilana). Meanwhile, Widmore is back on the island with Desmond it tow, to apparently help save the island from the MiB.

The season is dedicated to answering some difficult questions, as well as setting up all the characters for a (hopefully) satisfying finale. It is hard not to discuss too much here, so I will save much of the discussion for the final post.

It’s time for the “Lost-isms” for the first half of season six!

We now have a grand total of 31 fights, with Ben & Sawyer and Sawyer & Sayid in the lead with three fights each, and Jack & Ethan, Sawyer & Jack and Sawyer & Pickett tied for second place with two.

Ben’s beatings have stayed steady at seven, while Sawyer saying “Sonofabitch” has been said on 31 separate occasions. But, Desmond saying “brother” still holds the lead with an impressive 40 times!

Finally, as always, I will now end with the top “Sawyer-isms:

“Freckles” and “Doc” are still tied with being said a total of 35 times. Coming in second is “Sweetheart” with eight mentions, with “Hoss,” “Boss,” and Chief” tied for third with six mentions each. Lastly, the fourth spot belongs to “Chewie” and “Blondie,” for Sawyer saying each of them four times.

“That man who sent you to kill me believes that everyone is corruptible because it is in their very nature to sin. I bring people here to prove him wrong. And when they get here, their past doesn’t matter” – Jacob in “Ab Aeterno”