Lost Season 6, Episode 1

SPOILER ALERT!  If you haven't yet seen the season premiere, do not read this post!

Season six opens by showing us a parallel universe (alternate beginning?) where the plane does not crash but lands at LAX as planned.  As Bernard makes his way back to his seat next to Rose, it hits me that she will die; her cancer will not be cured by the island's magical powers as it did before.  Gosh, after all of this time hoping that the Oceanic Flight 815 survivors would find their way home and get off this freaky island, it occurs to me how sad this would have been is for all of the Oceanic Six (plus a few more).  Kate is on the run again, Sun and Jin are once again in a complicated and loveless marriage, Claire is giving up her baby, Locke is paralyzed, heroine-addicted Charlie almost dies in the airplane's bathroom, Jack is dealing with the death of his father and I assume Sawyer is still working as a con.  Not to mention the fact that they may never meet and know one another as they did on the island (we'll have to see about that). 

The only person who seems to have a perfect existence so far is Hurley who exclaims, "Nothing bad ever happens to me.  I'm the luckiest guy alive!" Hmm...Does this mean his grandfather is still alive and his mother's house did not burn to the ground before he boarded the plane as we have previously seen?  He tells the Cluck U fan that he won the lotto, but I guess the lotto curse never kicked in? We also see Boone; he is alive and well but could not bring his sister Shannon back with him, could not convince her to leave the bad boyfriend.

Then we see Desmond.  But he was never on the plane!  He was sitting in the hatch pressing the button.  Then we are shown the island, and in this reality at least, it lies beneath the ocean. 

So Locke is not Locke.  He is the man in black, who also happens to be the smoke monster.  I admit I'm not the sharpest knife in the drawer when it comes to putting the pieces together when it comes to LOST, but this I had figured out from the season 5 finale.  They did show us Locke's dead body. Yay, something finally made sense to me!  I'm hoping for more of this as this final season unfolds.

The thing that really ticked me off was that the producers gave us false hope that Juliet would pull through.  As unrealistic as it was, Sawyer stepped on into the hole where she lay (it seemed just a few steps down under the ground) and pulled her out after hearing her voice from above.  She expressed her disappointment that it the hydrogen bomb did not not explode and then later Miles tells Sawyer that dead Juliet says, "It worked."  How did she go from crying "It didn't work!" to realizing that it did?  Maybe her spirit friends told her.

Now the smoke monster shrouded in Locke's body took advantage of Ben.  He convinced Ben to do his dirty work by killing Jacob, because he couldn't do it himself.  I'm not sure why he couldn't do it by his lonesome, but how is this for justice?  Too bad the real Locke wasn't around to see Ben get manipulated for a change.  But still, I don't like that Jacob is dead and the evil smoke monster has manifested into a human body and is now more powerful than ever.  And even with his track record, I can't help but sympathize with Ben a little bit.  However knowing him, he'll probably become smoke monster Locke's right hand man because he's a big coward.  I wonder how he unleashed the monster before all of this happened?

It seems that Jacob expected this to happen/knew it was going to happen.  He didn't fight back when Ben killed him.  He also visited the Oceanic 6 throughout their lives and convinced Hurley to return to the island.  Which is key to this next part.

Back to the jungle.  We know Hurley can see the dead, and Jacob's spirit tells him the Sayid can be saved if Hurley brings his body to the temple.  They go there and meet some other other others (Mayans?), in an attempt to save Sayid, but instead they drown him.  Nice.  But then at the end he's alive again.  Thank God - I love Sayid!  I guess it was too late for Juliet. The other other others know all about Jacob and the smoke monster, and one of their people was on flight 815!

Now in the parallel universe, Oceanic Airlines have lost Jack's father.  Correction: They didn't lose him, they just lost his body.  At least that's what John Locke tells Jack.  I'm not sure what will come of this yet, but I do think that the smoke monster had previously been existing in Christian Sheppard's (Jack's father) body.  This is another thing that makes sense to me.  His father had seemed to be alive in the cabin and the real Locke had heard Jacob saying "Help me." So dead bodies = helpful for Mr. smoke monster.

The season premiere was a bit like a roller coaster, and to me was a little disappointing.  I don't want parallel stories and different endings.  And that appears to be the way it's going.

What do you think?  Did I miss something, or do I have something confused?   Link up your LOST posts!