Trying to wrap my head around Lost: The Final Season

Time for a frantic romp through last night's Lost and where we're headed. If I could make more sense of things, this would be a better written column. But, considering the program, I am just going to ramble.

For much of season six, we, as the audience, have assumed that Smoke/Locke wanted to either kill everyone or force everyone off the island, so he too could leave. (Everyone, in this case, just means all the candidates because it appears as though no one else matters really.) If one of the candidates remained island-bound, so too was Smoke/Locke. But the question was always out there of why he didn't just easily kill everyone and float his way 'home.' This was finally addressed directly during last night's episode, where Jack just comes out and says what we were all pondering. Perhaps Smoke/Locke is not allowed to kill them.

In fact, it seemed as though Charles Widmore's crew knew the same information. When the group was boarding the submarine, not one person was shot or shot at, except for Kate, who is not a candidate. Widmore's crew in the woods apparently did not want to harm any of the candidates. At least that is what I took out of that scene. Of course we still do not know how Widmore found the island again, got back to it, what he is doing there, what he wants, how he knows anything, etc, etc.

That brings us to the end of this most recent episode, with a seemingly shortened cast list and the story coming to an end. Presumably, there are only three hours remaining in the series. The plot itself can be wrapped up in that time span in a nice little package. I have confidence in this. We need Smoke/Locke to be trapped by the new candidate, everyone else to go home or die, and the two worlds to connect, probably immediately before the prior happens. And that will be that. There is really nothing else left to happen, in the broad sense of the plot line. Desmond is still alive and kicking, albeit with not much room to kick, being trapped down a well, Lassie-style. His job is to connect the worlds and I assume nothing else. No idea how this is going down, but that doesn't really matter as long as it happens. The candidate to stay and be the new Jacob is presumably Jack, but I suppose it can also be Hurley or Sawyer. Those are technically the only three options left. With Sawyer now forced to take a back seat to Jack, after being wrong about the bomb and killing a number of candidates, it has to just come down to Smoke/Locke vs. Jack. That is what everything has led up to and that will tie it off nicely at the end.

However, there is still so much left to explain, many factors that I had previously forgotten about, because they hadn't been addressed in so long. What happened to Richard, Ben and Miles? Didn't they go to destroy the plane a while ago? They obviously failed, Widmore beat them to it, or they joined Widmore since they each had the same objective. Can Hurley actually talk with dead people, or is his conscience giving him a platform to tell him what should be done when he does not have enough self-confidence to think these actions are his own opinion?

But let's travel further back. What about Walt? He was made out to be so special in prior seasons and now is irrelevant. What of Aaron and Claire leaving the island as per one of Desmond's earlier premonitions? He was never wrong on any of the others. What about the fact that Ben was apparently dealing with the Smoke Monster all those years, never having met Jacob? He was getting his orders from him, dressed most recently to that point, as Jack's dad Christian. What about how all pregnant mothers were dying, except when they weren't? I know that doesn't make sense, but that is only because it doesn't make sense in the show either. The Dharma Initiative mothers were able to give birth. Claire was able to give birth. Sun was pregnant and did not die, nor did her child (born off the island) have any problems. So all pregnant mothers died on the island, except the ones who did not die! Hopefully this is addressed. And what about Desmond? He turned a key to seemingly save everyone's life, and 'something' happened. His mind could subsequently travel back and forth through the past, and now, through alternate realities. Yet he is not a candidate and never was brought to the island by Jacob. He seemed to always be brought by Widmore, whether literally or figuratively. But pretty much everything about Widmore is, to this point, unanswered, except for the technical information of who he is.

There are plenty more question still remaining. Why was Sun never transported through time when they first returned with Locke's casket? Why was Jin 'grabbed' by the circumference of the island when it moved through time, yet the helicopter was not? Jin was much farther from the island than Jack and Kate, etc. in the helicopter were. Why did Ben have access to millions and millions of dollars when Miles tried to bribe him when Widmore's first boat came to attack? Miles asked the other characters if they knew who this guy (Ben) actually was. Well, didn't we know? He was a man who controlled an island that produced nothing. He made no money off anything that happened anywhere on the island. In my recollection, he would have had access to an amount of money reaching zero dollars. Where would Ben have gotten all that cash? Besides the ability to transport himself to a random Tunisian desert, (and, oh by the way, supposedly never be able to return to his precise island afterward) Ben had access to nothing worthwhile in the 'real world.'

But all of these things do not necessarily need to be answered, or even addressed, ever again. We will get an explanation of who Smoke/Locke is (probably next week based on the sneak peak.) We will get an end to Desmond's tale. The plot will come to a conclusion. I am not sure we will get anything more than that. T minus three hours left to find out.

(What does T minus mean? They use it in aircraft launch countdowns and such. Does it just mean 'takeoff minus?' So T minus 10 seconds means takeoff in 10 seconds. I guess that is feasible.)

My only Lost hope is that if I go back and watch old episodes, I am very pleased with how the seasons connect and the characters develop, rather than constantly disappointed with how many plot lines end up going nowhere.

Okay, I actually have one more Lost hope: that Dominic Monaghan is more typecast/associated with Charlie than as being a hobbit.