Looking Uh Forward at Lost

Oh season three…

Oh…uh… season three…

Season three kicked off rather lackluster.  Michael and Walt disappeared from the story (Walt makes a sudden appearance towards the end of the season).  But Ben, having been revealed as the boss of the Others, has Jack, Kate and Sawyer locked up in…well, oddly high tech surroundings considering how the Others appear so scruffy looking.  It turns out to be an act, one that I never have quite understood.  Why the fake beards?  Why the tattered rag outfits?  I suppose there is an argument that it was to throw off the Survivors of Flight 815.

Even though the sky turned purple ad the hatch blew sky high, Desmond is alive-and naked.  Seriously, Lost serves up more male skin than female skin on an episodic basis.  No, really… in any given scene, Sawyer or Jack or Sayid will be shirtless.

Season three saw the much lamented introduction of Nikki and Paulo.  A writers experiment that never took off, the pair were retroactively inserted into scenes as if to say, hey, you never noticed these guys, but they are hanging out with the heroes.  In fact, they were so despised, their best moment was how they were removed from the show.  Seriously.  It was like… totally Hitchcock.

The first half of season three is pretty much a dud.  Then the show went on, and I kid you not, a three month hiatus. Way to endear the fans, ABC.  People were already griping about the condition of the series (though, it was still doing better than Heroes was) and you give them an easy opportunity to give up hope?  I mean, Jack had caved and saved Ben from cancer, but did so on the condition that Ben let Kate and Sawyer go.  Jack stayed with Ben and company, apparently falling for Juliet.  It was a downer.

But, then something changed.  During the hiatus, Lost’s producers came to a deal with ABC to end the show in 2010.  hey also added Brian K. Vaughan to their staff.  Vaughan was the hot writer of several comic books (including Y:the Last Man and Ex Machina) and while he is to self deprecating to take much credit, I feel pretty confident that my next statement is due in large part to his presence.

Lost came back with a vengeance for the second half of the third season.  John Locke had essentially defected to the Others, Jack and Juliet had defected-but Juliet was actually a double, double agent.  She was spying on the pregnant ladies (which for a time appeared to be Kate and Sun, but Kate turned out to not be with child).  This allowed them to resolve the “Is it Jin and Sun’s baby” with a resounding yes.  The baby was conceived on the island.  *sniff*

After finding the mysterious Naomi in the wounded in the woods, they thought they were on their way home, she claimed to be on a freighter and implied she was there at the behest of Desmond’s love Penny Widmore.  Desmond was having visions of Charlie dying and the Others were trying to stop Jack from leading everyone to safety.  Because Jack was so confident he was doing the right thing, I suspected this would go very badly (see Season 4).  Jack and the team set traps to take out the others, and Desmond and Charlie go diving to turn off a beacon blocking their ability to transmit messages to passing ships and Penny’s freighter.  Charlie successfully shuts the beacon down, only to discover the boat they are communicating with is not Penny’s boat.  Then, in a sad and dramatic moment?  Charlie dies.

John shows up, throws a knife in Naomi’s back, Jack freaks out and they lose Ben who runs away.  Because Ben knows the boat is bringing some bad mojo.  And after three seasons of flash backs?  The show throws us for a loop- the flashes in the final episode are flashes forward.  Three years in the future.  O boy.  That was a sneaky trick.