Lost: Key storylines
By Casey Gillis on Feb. 17, 2010
Season One: Primarily deals with the characters getting accustomed to life on the island and the mysteries it brings with it.
They often venture into the vast jungle, where Locke first discovers the Swan Station hatch, while, back on the beach, Jin and Michael build a raft. They, along with Sawyer and Walt, try to leave, but are stopped by the Others, who kidnap Walt. As becomes custom, the season ends in a cliffhanger, with Locke, Jack and Kate opening the hatch.
Season Two: We learn more about the hatch and its inhabitant, Desmond. Another group of Oceanic survivors, who were sitting in the plane’s tail section, are introduced, and we meet Ben for the first time. He is captured by the castaways and pretends to be a man named Henry Gale, who crashed onto the island in a balloon. The survivors don’t believe him and, thinking he might be an Other, have Sayid interrogate him.
Michael tries to find Walt and eventually makes a deal with the Others: he’ll help Ben escape and deliver Kate, Jack and Sawyer to them in exchange for his son. He and Walt are eventually released, and Ben, after taking the trio into captivity, tells them the Others are “the good guys,” which still remains to be seen.
Elsewhere, Locke has a crisis of faith and fails to push the hatch’s button, which causes it to explode. The final moments cut to a polar research station where two men notice a burst of something — the energy released from the explosion — and call Penny to say they’ve “found it.”
Season Three: We learn more about the Dharma Initiative and the Others while Jack, Kate and Sawyer are held in their facilities. It’s soon revealed that Ben needs Jack to remove a tumor from his spine.
We also meet Juliet, a fertility doctor who bonds with Jack during his captivity, and he eventually agrees to remove Ben’s tumor in exchange for Kate and Sawyer’s freedom. Jack gets out, too, and he and Juliet are reunited with the castaways.
Later, a woman named Naomi parachutes onto the island and says she’s with a group of people, on a freighter, who Penny has sent to save them. Their intentions come into question, and the castaways divide into two groups: those who believe Naomi is telling the truth (Jack and Kate are among them) and those who don’t (led by Locke and Ben).
The season ends with Jack calling the freighter for help.
Season Four: Turns out Jack was wrong, and the freighter people did not come in peace. They were sent by Charles Widmore, Penny’s father and the Others’ former leader, to find and capture Ben, who ousted him from power years earlier.
Naomi’s cohorts include Miles, Daniel Faraday, Charlotte and Frank, as well as a group of nasty mercenaries who will go to any extreme, violent length to get to Ben.
From there, it gets more complicated than you can even imagine. As the Oceanic 6 escape the island on a helicopter, the island up and disappears on them, and the flash forwards begin to show us what happened after they got back home. Kate is raising Aaron as her own son and has a brief engagement to Jack. But their relationship falls apart, and Jack’s life spirals out of control, after a visit from Locke, who tells him they all have to go back to the island.
After a mysterious obituary alarms Jack, the cliffhanger happens when Jack opens the coffin of its owner: John Locke.
Season Five: Time jumps between the Oceanic 6 in 2008 and the group that was left behind on the island, where all hell has broken loose as it literally skips through time.
Now bear with me for the next few seconds. To make the island disappear, Ben had to turn a large, frozen wheel located within the depths of the island. As a result, the island experiences one flash after another, sending the left-behind group (Juliet, Sawyer, Miles, Faraday and Locke) through time.
Locke soon finds the wheel and turns it again, which stops the flashing. But it leaves them stuck in the 1970s, when the Dharma Initiative ran the island, and sends Locke to the Tunisian desert (an unfortunate side effect of turning the wheel; the same thing happened to Ben).
Back in 2008, Ben eventually kills Locke and teams up with a clueless Jack to bring the Oceanic 6 — plus Locke’s dead body — back to the island aboard Ajira Flight 316.
When it lands on the island, Jack, Kate, Hurley and Sayid are transported to the 1970s, where Sawyer and his crew have been living among the Dharma folks for three years, while Sun, Frank, Ben and the rest of the passengers wind up on the island in the present time. There, we first think Locke is alive, but it’s later revealed that the Smoke Monster is impersonating him.
Then the Monster, as Locke, convinces Ben to kill Jacob, who we finally meet. As he lies dying, his final words are cryptic: “They’re coming.”
Where we are now: This is the clincher, folks.
As the left behinders are first traveling through time, Daniel Faraday discovers that the Others have a hydrogen bomb during a stop in the 1950s. Years later, when they’re in 1970s Dharmaville, the folks there are drilling, and Daniel realizes that an incident there is what creates the need for the Swan Station and its button.
So the theory becomes that if the 1970s-era castaways can prevent that incident, there would be no need for the station or the button, which is what caused the plane crash in the first place. Faraday convinces Jack that if they set off the nuke, it will reset time. History will be rewritten, and Oceanic 815 would land safely in Los Angeles.
That’s how season five ended, with the bomb going off.
Now, in the sixth season, the action follows both storylines: what would’ve happened if the plane never crashed while, at the same time, showing us the aftermath of the explosion, which sent everyone back to the present time on the island.
So does your head hurt yet?
COMMENTS