The Beginning of the End

WOW. That's all I had to say. After the last night's season finale of Lost, that's all I could say. I was shocked. My mind was racing. That was one hell of shocker.

Everyone got it wrong, basically. For much of season 3, the freaky theorists among us suspected that Lost was setting us up for some continuum-contorting twist of Hiro Nakamura-esque proportions. Instead, the wrinkle in time that the show's sensational season finale laid on us was smaller and more human than our fantasy-soaked imaginations envisioned, and yet it was every bit the capture-the-imagination mindquake we were hoping for: Goodbye, flashbacks; hello, flash-forwards. Although we don't have confirmation that this narrative conceit will become Lost's new format, the epic episode seemed to strongly suggest that beginning next season, the on-Island drama in the present (or is that the new past?) will inform the revelations about the castaways' off-Island future (the new present?) — and vice versa. Wow. Wow! With this simple shift, Lost flipped the switch on itself, revealing new dimensions to its creative world and grander ambitions in its exploration of redemption and damnation. And lest we miss the episode's most important implication amid all this talk, we learned that yes, eventually, at least some of the castaways are definitely gonna get their butts rescued! (But how many? And who?) Again, I say: Wow! Wow!

Although the big twist was saved for the final moments of the episode, titled "Through the Looking Glass," I suspect some people figured it out in the opening sequence. (I did!) We saw Jack on a plane, badly bearded and guzzling booze, clearly a man transformed — for the worse. We weren't given a time frame for this flash-forward, and how coy of the show to give Jack a newspaper but not give us a good peek at the dateline. Something else about the newspaper was denied to us, too — a death notice (but whose?) that left Jack emotionally rattled. When Jack got off a plane, he drove to a bridge and made a call to a person unknown. "I just read — " he said through tears. He just hung up and the despairing, spiritually distraught doc made a move to jump off the bridge. But Jack's suicide attempt was interrupted by a car crash, and suddenly, Action Jack, Island Superhero, found at least one fleeting moment of off-Island relevancy.

As we watched him sink into the depths of pill-popping, booze-guzzling, rock-star-sunglasses-wearing spiritual oblivion, Jack reminded me of all those stories of real-life heroes who can't make the adjustment back to "normal life" after their extended moment of living in a heightened reality fades. Later in the episode, on the Island, Rousseau told Jack that if they were to be rescued, she would never want to leave: "This is my home now. There is nothing for me off the Island." Perhaps in her oblique way, she was trying to warn Jack, too. "Through the Looking Glass" wasn't a fantasy about tumbling into Wonderland — it was a cautionary tale about what can happen when you tumble out of it.

The future drama of Jack was spliced into the Island-set story that brought the season-long conflict between the castaways and the Others to a close. It was also an interesting meditation on varying degrees of heroism, from the innocent, desperate-to-help idealism of Hurley to the by-any-means-necessary Machiavellian manipulations of Ben. There were many separate strands of plot — Charlie and Desmond in the Looking Glass trying to deactivate the jamming signal; Jack and the castaways trekking to the radio tower to hail Naomi's ship; Sayid, Jin, and Bernard on the beach battling Tom and the mercenary band of women-swiping thugs; Ben at the Others' encampment, scrambling to repair his unraveling plans amid a growing revolt among his doubting people; and John Locke in the Dharma mass grave, finding new life from an old, young friend. (Walt!!) Taken together, the finale paid off on a plethora of season 3 plot points and set up many more for next season and beyond.

The castaway exodus provided the backbone for the sprawling story. They began on the beach, with tearful goodbyes said to the brave trio of sharpshooters tasked with blowing the invading Others to hell. Rose made Bernard repeat, "I am a dentist; I am not Rambo." I also loved the line Naomi said to Jack as they trudged along the shoreline and into the jungle like Israelites marching toward the promised land: "What did you do before you became Moses?" (Even Jack the Shepherd had to laugh at that one.)

Of course, Jack's "blow 'em all to hell" gambit to avert the Others' abduction plot didn't go off exactly as planned: the sharpshooters succeeded in detonating only two explosions instead of three, killing some but not all of Tom's posse. When the castaways realized something had gone wrong at the beach, Kate wanted to go back, and wanted Sawyer to go with her. The shaggy con man — sleepwalking through life since killing Anthony Cooper in "The Brig" — seemed not to care. But, awyer roused himself to reluctant valor, though he refused to take Kate with him. Jack later had to spell it out for her: "He only wanted to protect you." Then, the whopper: "I love you," the doc told Kate. Though she didn't say it, Kate's eyes said it all: "I know." It hit me like Cupid's arrow: All these weeks of Jack cozying up to Juliet may have been a ruse, perhaps an attempt to draw info out of the former Other. Whatever the case, Juliet was into it. She gave him a tender kiss before heading back to the beach with Sawyer. Clearly, next season will focus on the Jack-Kate-Juliet-Sawyer quadrangle.

It also appears that next season will see Ben rejoin the beach bunch as a prisoner. Tipped off by the lovely ladies of the Looking Glass that the castaways were en route to the radio tower, he moved to intercept them, determined to prevent them from leaving the Island. And having learned that his daughter, Alex, had betrayed his plans via her boyfriend, Karl, Ben brought her with him, telling her that he was abandoning her to the castaways, her "new family." We learned that the reason Ben was so determined to keep Alex and Karl separated was that he didn't want her to get pregnant and fall victim to the Island's curse.

When Ben caught up with the castaways, he and Jack retreated to a quiet place for a superpower summit that played out like some Art of War scenario from hell. What came out of Ben's mouth was either a torrent of lies or some serious foreshadowing of next season's central conflict. He alleged that Naomi was not the woman she said she was but rather a representative of a group of people who've been trying to find the Island for a very long time, presumably for nefarious, exploitive reasons. These people, he claimed, were "the bad guys," and bringing them to the Island would be very, very, very bad — for the Others, for the Castaways, and especially for the Island. Ben's deal: Naomi's satellite phone in exchange for Jin, Bernard, and Sayid, who could be heard yelling, "Don't negotiate with terrorists!" over the walkie-talkie as Ben laid out his proposal. Jack refused. Ben ordered that the hostages be killed. Bang! Bang! Bang! Jack responded by beating Ben into a bloody pulp, an act of violence as terrifying as it was cathartic. Boy, did Ben deserve it. And boy, do I worry about the rage in Jack's heart, especially when he followed it up by swearing War on Terror vengeance on all the Others. His ultimate dream: humiliating Ben by making him watch as the castaways get rescued — then killing him. Heavy stuff.

The twisted twist of Jack's rage was that back on the beach, Sayid and company were still alive. Ben's order was, apparently, a coded bluff: Pryce actually fired his bullets into the sand, even though Doubting Tom — increasingly disenchanted with Ben's leadership — wanted to blow the captives away. But the mercenaries paid the price for not killing and running when the castaway cavalry arrived in the form of...Hurley, charging onto the beach in his magic Dharma bus! Sawyer, Juliet, and Sayid sprang into action. Bullets were fired, necks were broken, and the Others were subdued — and then executed. In a move that left Hurley and Juliet shocked, Sawyer put a bullet into Tom. "That's for taking the kid off the raft," said Sawyer, referring to the Others' abduction of Walt in the finale of season 1. "Dude, it was over," Hurley said. "He surrendered." Sawyer's response: "I didn't believe him." Like Jack, Sawyer's "heroism" in this episode was darkened by the complexity of personal history, unresolved angst, and deep-seated fear. Sawyer, it seems, is still stuck in the brig of his damaged past.

A cleaner portrait of selfless heroism was provided by Charlie during his assignment in the Island's aquatic underworld. I loved the wisecracks while the lovely ladies of the Looking Glass were playing good-cop/bad-cop on him. And after some bloody speargun violence involving the lovely ladies, Patchy, and Desmond, Charlie succeeded in shutting down the station's signal jammer by inputting a harmonic code, one loaded with tons of theory-spawning potential — the Beach Boys' "Good Vibrations." And when the light stopped blinking, a transmission came in — it was Penelope, Desmond's lady love, confirming for certain that nope, Naomi wasn't working for her, and nope, she doesn't have a ship waiting offshore. Then Charlie died. Now, I know a lot of people are going to question the logic of this scene, as it seemed Charlie had many options to save himself. But remember why Charlie swam down to the Looking Glass in the first place: to fulfill the requirements of Desmond's prophecy of rescue for Claire, baby Aaron, and hopefully the rest of the castaways. For that to happen, Charlie needed to die, per the rules established about Desmond's precognition. The image of him pushing away from the window and crossing himself was so sad and it got to me. Rest in peace, Charlie Pace. You earned it.

The drama of season 3 came to a climax in the shadow of the old Dharma radio tower, a legendary locale that's been begging for a visit since season 1. With the jamming device disabled and Rousseau's distress call turned off, the mysterious Naomi phoned the freighter — then sputtered blood thanks to a knife in the back. The cause of her fatal misfortune? Locke, who was beckoned out of the Dharma ditch by a vision (?) of Walt, and who seemed to share Ben's seemingly mystical conviction that the castaways were not meant to leave the Island. At least not yet. Jack was furious. He grabbed the phone. Locke pulled his gun. A standoff ensued, and Locke was the one who blinked. Distraught, the born-yet-again true believer disappeared into the jungle as Jack made the call to Naomi's freighter.

Ben begged him not to. "Making that call will be the beginning of the end!" he said. "Jack, please — you don't know what you're doing!" Jack: "I know exactly what I'm doing." The castaways cheered their fearless-leader hero as a friendly voice on the other end named Minkowski told him that rescue was on the way. ("Minkowski," no doubt, is a nod to Hermann Minkowski's theory of four-dimensional space-time, which has inspired many Lost theories.) Ben shook his head in defeat — or was that a bloody smile on his face? Did Jack just save his friends or doom them all? Take your time answering the questions: We have seven months to debate and theorize.

And we also have seven months to debate the climactic, show-changing twist. In the final scene — the big reveal that the whole flashback was actually a flash-forward — we saw Jack meeting a cleaned-up Kate near the airport. He asked her why she didn't go to the funeral for the mystery person — a dude or dudette so dislikable that nobody except Jack bothered to pay his respects. (Who could this be? Locke? Ben? Who?) Their dialogue was full of other cryptic bits that raised many other questions. Jack: "I'm sick of lying. We made a mistake!" (About what? Have the surviving castaways been sworn to secrecy about their Island ordeal?) Kate: "He's going to be wondering where I am." (Who's "he"? Sawyer? Maybe her husband, the cop played by Nathan Fillion?) Why isn't Kate in jail, considering she's a fugitive? Did she get pardoned? As the third season of Lost passed into history, Jack called out to the woman he said he loved: "We have to go back, Kate. We have to go back!" But Kate just drove away, leaving Jack the Hero all alone, and hopelessly...lost.