DÉJÀ VU ALL OVER AGAIN

Another Tuesday night, another stop on the Great LOST Farewell Nostalgia Tour. Season Six is turning out to be like a trip back to the old neighborhood. Before it all ends, we're getting one more chance to see all the faces and places we remember. Look! There's the big bully who terrified all the locals.

Oh, and over there! The garden where Sun used to grow healing herbs, until she got conked over the head by Charlie so Sawyer could steal the guns.

Yay! Bpo Bpo lives!

And OMG! Whaddayaknow! There's that super kewl brainwashing room from all those years ago! Room 23!

The purpose of which was ...

... uh

... ?

Oh, whatever, it was wicked cool.

I've got to admit LOST is losing me. Here we are just past the halfway point of the grand finale season, a perfectly legitimate point at which to stop and take stock. So where are we? What has this season been all about? Where is it headed? Where are we going now that we're close enough for the end to be in sight? I don't know about you, but I'm totally lost when it comes to trying to figure out LOST.

I'll start with something fairly basic - the unmistakable pattern that has emerged, where each character's centric is framed as an homage to centrics past. This week it was KwonBack Time. For the last time.

The Kwons have become background furniture on LOST in recent years, but in this final season, it's only right that they should be honored for their rightful place in LOST history. As with other KwonBacks, in The Package Jin and Sun weren't two separate people. They were a pair.

Sun was playful and adventurous.

Jin was straitlaced, conservative, restrained ... and hard as a rock. Yeah, baby. Even Omar wanted a second look.

They had the same passion for each other.

They feared Sun's powerful father the same way.

OtherSun, just like original Sun, had made a careful plan to run away from home. Only since she'd never married Jin, she hadn't had a chance to hate him, she hadn't had a chance to cheat on him, hadn't had a reason to learn English from her English speaking lover and so therefore it wasn't Jin that she was dying to get away from. She was trying to run from Daddy. This time it was Jin she wanted to run to.

But just like Sun's plan to leave Jin ended in an unplanned disaster,

OtherSun's plan to flee her father ended horrifically as well.

In the Season One KwonBacks, ...In Translation and House of the Rising Sun, Jin insisted that Sun's father acknowledge him openly, that they marry, even if that meant he had to work for the sturgeon faced Mr. Paik.

But in OtherLOST, Jin and Sun were not that honest. They were sneaking around doing the wild thing while putting on a big front about booking separate hotel rooms.

Their hanky panky had aroused the wrath of the great and powerful Paik, and he had come up with a brilliant solution: OtherPaik sent OtherJin on a mission to L.A., to deliver a watch ...

... the same thing original Paik had sent original Jin to do.

We never found out who Jin was bringing the watch to. It ended up in a pawnshop in Brooklyn after Michael Dawson sold it to buy the gun that wouldn't kill him.

In OtherLOST we found out that Jin was bringing the watch, along with a fat wad of cash, to pay off Martin Keamy, who was then going to deliver services on the spot ... and kill Jin dead.

Jin was paying his own assassin. That's how much OtherPaik hated OtherJin. He wasn't going to just kill him - he was going to make him kill himself. A perfect closed loop of conserved energy.

Other circles and loops were closed as we took our weekly trip down Memory Lane.

Jin's "button your sweater" byline was recycled to good use in this episode. Jin's domination of Sun was tweaked seductively into Sun's ability to effortlessly control Jin.

In ...And Found, a Season Two KwonBack, Locke enters Sun's garden while she's working and asks her, "Bad day?"

In The Package, Locke's doppelganger, The Smoke Monster, approaches Sun the identical way and asks the same question.

In Glass Ballerina, Sun shoots Colleen in the stomach, killing her.

In The Package, Sun is the one who takes the gut shot.

Women dying from bullets to the belly is one of LOST's most hallowed traditions.

In fact, it's a rare woman on LOST who dies any other way! Does this mean OtherSun will soon go the way of Colleen ... and of Shannon, Ana Lucia, Libby and Danielle Rousseau?

It wasn't only Kwon memories that got reprised. Sawyer and Kate drank imaginary cocoa under the watchful green eye of Widmore's spies -

- a dimly lit shoutout to the imaginary peanut butter that once sustained Charlie and Claire during hard times.

Jack was acting very Season One doctorlike, calmly traipsing around with his backpack full of helpful life lessons.

His scene on the beach with Sun, where he gently offered help as a caring human being, reminded me of the scene long ago in Walkabout when he reached out to Rose in much the same way. Oh, Jack, where'd you go all these years?

And having Desmond and Sayid meet up again at the submarine dock,

while obviously under very changed circumstances,

couldn't help but remind me of the last time Desmond ended up one of Widmore's boats.

Like other Kwon centrics, this episode was slight, delicate, concise. There's a kind of origami feeling to all the Kwonbacks.

Sun was first introduced to us as the Korean wife who secretly knew how to speak English. In this episode, that talent left her. Apparently it got knocked out of her head by the tree trunk she ran into.

She can still understand English and she can write it. Just can't speak it anymore. Of course, Jin can speak English now. It should make for a very interesting kabuki dance when the two lovers finally reunite and try to have a conversation.

While Sun was forgetting how to speak English, we were watching OtherSun, who apparently never learned it.

This was one of the ways that the relationship between the two realities began to evolve in this episode. The correlations between LOST and OtherLOST are becoming more intriguing. Did Sun forget to speak English because she hit a tree trunk, or did she hit a tree trunk and forget to speak English because her OtherSelf never learned how?

Mikhail Bakunin was back in this episode, looking decidedly less grizzled with two working eyes and a nice suit on.

But then Jin put his eye out! So that's how Mikhail lost his eye, right?

Uh, except no. Original Jin didn't shoot original Mikhail. So even though Mikhail would always lose his eye, the way he lost his eye could be different in differing realities.

I'm sure that further explains the relationship between the two worlds as well. Except I don't think anyone can figure out exactly HOW it explains it. Which means it didn't explain much.

Of course the most important interdimensional interface, the only one that really matters, is this one.

Original Jin had been diagnosed as infertile, making it something of a miracle when Sun conceived a child on the Island. OtherJin's swimmers, on the other hand, do not seem to have ever had any such problems.

Since we're all tripping down Memory Lane these days, this reminds me of one of the first reviews I ever did.

Season Three's KwonBack, D.O.C., was an episode of unalloyed hilarity, where Juliet famously tried to date Sun's pregnancy by the date when she'd last had sex, proving that she may have been a fertility genius, but she'd skipped seventh grade sex ed class. That KwonBack was the episode that first introduced us to LOST's most outlandish male fantasy - Super!Sperm!

Super!Sperm! turned out to be one of the great blind alley wild goose chases for those of us who once regarded every kooky LOST plotline as an ingenious mystery to be solved. In the past, I could joke that maybe this was how the mystery would be solved.

And wouldn't you know it? All these years later, I think that's probably as close as we're ever going to get to solving that particular mystery!

When Sun conceived on the Island, it was feared the child was in jeopardy, since one of the Island's misogynistic properties was that it killed young mothers dead for the crime of having a working uterus. In this episode, we saw that OtherSun and her baby were similarly endangered.

Ji Yeon survived. Will OtherBaby make it? Is OtherBaby going to be OtherJiYeon? Or would a baby conceived from normal non-Super!Sperm! be an entirely different baby? Will we ever find out? Maybe. Maybe not.

One of the things I'm beginning to do with LOST is try and define it in terms of what it is not. Since I really have no frakking clue what it might actually be about these days, I'm trying to use the process of elimination to whittle down the possiblities.

As we were told long ago, it's not about Purgatory.

Even though last week they seemed to be hinting very hard that it might be about Hell.

I know there's still some science fiction fans hanging onto hope for some pseudo-scientific pseudo-explanation for the shenanigans of the Island. For years many have suspected that the freaky magnetic properties of the Island are the reason that Widmore has prized it and sought to possess it. It's interesting that scientists at MIT have recently discovered that magnets can distort our ability to make moral evaluations. Maybe that's what's at the heart of our story ... but I really don't think so. At this point, I'd say it's a fiction that any of LOST's mysteries will ever be explained by anything remotely resembling science.

I don't think it's a Christian allegory either, despite the enthusiastic certainty some fans have that it's all devolving down to some clearcut Calvinist demarcation of good vs. evil. I don't see that happening. Jacob's willingness to drag civilians into his family feud is too evil for me to ever consider him good. And there is nothing in the OtherLOST storyline that looks to me like either reward or punishment. I don't think the story is going there, though it's certainly putting on a fine show of pretending.

It's not a Buddhist allegory either.

Although there is an occasional nod to the concept of balancing good and evil, yin yang style, it's going to be a hard sell for them to make that philosophical point conclusively at this point. It's a great idea, and something LOST could have been about, but I no longer see it happening.

LOST has always been a confusing story, but nothing really has befuddled me as much as trying to piece together the reason behind this season's sudden lurch into an alternate reality. Yes, I know we're not supposed to call it an alternate reality. We were told that it isn't alternate or less real than the reality of the six year storyline we were striving so mightily to comprehend.

That leaves us with a Many Worlds concept of infinitely diverging realities.

With each decision, each turning point, a new set of possibilities and probabilities spring into being. In a Many Worlds universe each new possibility creates an entirely new, entirely unique reality. The new realities do not intersect. They go off into infinity as separate lines, always diverging, never converging. The moment of choice is like the moment of conception, where something that never existed before comes into being.

But now we see that on LOST, the realities are starting to converge. Mikhail's lost eye, Sun's lost English, the baby who may be lost ... all these things seem to be echoing between the two realities.

There are other echoes. Jack's new slaphappy demeanor seems to have taken hold just as we met an OtherJack who seemed a lot less type A.

OtherSayid seemed more deadeyed in this episode, just as Sayid has become more zombielike on the Island.

What is OtherLOST trying to tell us? The timespace for OtherLOST is 2004, while LOST Is taking place in 2007. Time travel has not stopped after all. If 2007 LOST is converging with 2004 OtherLOST, does that mean that a new past is being written? If consciousness is now skipping across time and space and theoretical multidimensionalities, then it's not really a Schrodinger's cat situation any longer. It's not like the cat is both alive and dead until we make a final deciding measurement. It's more like the cat itself is ping ponging through quantum states, interfering in the mechanics of its own hypothetical dilemma. I'm starting to get the real sense that the reason they've referenced Alice in Wonderland so often on this show is they want us to just shut up and bathe in the pure nonsense of it.

"That's one stubborn tomato."

Some have theorized that OtherLOST represents the final reality. That this time in the past will become the one true reality once the characters in the present resolve all their issues on the Island of Mystery.

This would mean a number of things. For one thing, it would mean that if this child exists,

then this one does not. Or vice versa.

It would mean that people who died on the Island could be alive again, at least for a little while.

It also means that some characters that now exist, no longer do.

In fact, since the characters of OtherLOST are not the same characters that we've watched evolve all these years, it would mean the entire story we've been watching all these years will have never happened.

We were just running around in circles, caring about and learning about and wondering about characters that never really existed. The joke was on us.

One fun fact about this episode is that it's the first since the Season Three finale where all the credited cast members made an appearance. The Powers That Be even found some facetime for the annoying new character they decided in their infinite wisdom to spring on us in this final season.

Nerds!

Ben and Ilana traded some choice snark, which was fun, but redemption seems to have worked its magic on Ben and made him kind of ... boring.

He can still bring the funny, but he's a neutered puppy. The devious mastermind, murderer, and once omnipotent overlord of the fearsome Others has become just a witty schlub tagging along for the ride.

Ilana seems to have quite the crush on Richard.

If only he could manage to forget dead Isabella.

Claire is still seething. She's realizing that even if she were to see Aaron again, she'd be a stranger to him. A batshit crazy stranger, at that.

But her friend, Mr. Monster, assures her that she'll still have a chance to punish Kate. He tells her "Whatever happens, happens", a telling change of verb tense that seems to give Crazy Claire carte blanche to murder Kate once his mission is accomplished.

Kate appeared in this episode, but aside from drinking imaginary cocoa and staring impassively into the fire, she was just a placeholder.

Sawyer's plan to walk The Monster into Widmore's trap didn't turn out as planned, so the elaborate set up in Recon seems to have fizzled out already.

He confesses to Kate that he's as frightened as she is, but he's hiding it, still trying to deke out the Monster's weakness and find a way to defeat him.

Jack, on the other hand, has become a zealot, a true believer, a faithful apostle of the Gospel of Jacob.

He tries in vain to convince Sun that having a Purpose! and a Destiny! is just the bestest thing ever, but she's not buying it. Poor Sun still seems to think she's got a chance of going home with her husband to their three year old.

Jin finds himself captured in both realities.

But we can see how his confidence has grown. On the Island, he demands that he be allowed to confront Widmore directly. And in the Other Reality, he takes command of the situation and does not hesitate to kill as needed.

At first I thought OtherKeamy seemed like a markedly less evil version, but then I realized that he was probably only sparing Jin long enough to get his paycheck.

Keamy has gotten a lot of facetime in this final season of LOST. We've seen more of him than we have of Rose or Boone or Charlie. I guess they figured we'd just like to watch him die a few more times. Bastards! You killed Keamy!

Since I have no idea where the storytellers are taking us with their parallel coexisting reality storyline that is bleeding into and out of their original storyline, I think I'll revisit a storyline of considerably longer standing - the Great Almost War of LOST Island.

The one that has been almost about to happen for going on three years now. It's not that they have always been at war. It's more like they have always been talking about how they're going to be at war. Like any day now.

In The Life and Death of Jeremy Bentham, Widmore told John Locke that a war was coming to the Island. The Monster again had one of those deja vu moments where he experienced the memories of the dead man he was impersonating, and he repeated Widmore's line to Sawyer.

The NotLocke Monster and Widmore had a face down on the beach, separated by the pylons that Widmore erected to keep the Smokey One at bay. In Recon some questioned whether the Monster could have gone to Hydra Island and killed the survivors of Ajira Flight 316. We know that he can travel back and forth to the Island in his man form, so I assumed he did just that and then converted to Killer Smoke once he was there. But it's an interesting point. Perhaps the Island has been such an effective prison for the Smoke Monster precisely because he can not travel over water. Now that he's inhabiting a human organism all he needs is a seaworthy vessel.

However that does not explain the pylons, which appear to still be an effective anti-Monster shield. Do they also repel the Monster when he's inside his humanoid Locke shape? Or was NotLocke just respecting the boundaries that not-yet warriors must respect? I mean, Monster has been waiting for Widmore and now there he is. Why not just leap across the invisible boundary, turn into Smokey and swallow him down like a little tasty morsel?

The Great Monstro-Widmore War can't happen yet because that would be the end of the story. In the meantime, I guess we can still try to understand why it is that Widmore wants so badly to kill poor old Monster. Was this what Widmore was always doing on the Island? Was he Jacob's General, and if so, why was Ben allowed to kick him out? It seems pretty obvious that Widmore is here to lead the final charge for Jacob in the battle against the Monster.

His people used darts and tazers to subdue the Losties, just like the Others did.

We can see that the Others learned their tricks from Widmore.

Widmore speaks to Jin about the Monster in apocalyptic terminology. It's obvious that the Monster isn't just the embodiment of evil, or that evil is being kept out of the world by keeping the Monster on the Island. The world has plenty of evil in it, with or without the Monster. Plenty of death and destruction and cruelty and violence and sin. But Widmore describes the Monster as something worse than evil. It almost seems like the Monster represents total annihilation.

"If that thing masquerading as John Locke ever got off this island, your wife, your daughter, my daughter, everyone we know and love - would simply cease to be."

Cease to be. Is Widmore talking about this timeline, on the Island? Or does that go for all existence everywhere of everyone? Does the Monster have the power to obliterate all existences in every reality for all of infinity? Does he represent pure nothingness? Is he The Void?

I am become Death, the destroyer of Worlds.

- Bhagavad Gita

Maybe we're headed for a showdown where the Monster wins and wipes out this reality, but since OtherLOST is a reality already in progress, all of their consciousnesses can just hop skip and jump over there and go on as if nothing happened. Or maybe the Monster will be defeated and that will be how the Island sinks to the bottom of the ocean ... but everyone's consciousness will still get to hop skip and jump over to OtherLOST. Maybe that's why they zapped this other reality into the storyline at the last minute, to give our Losties a lifeboat after the Titanic of this hopelessly muddled storyline finally sinks into oblivion.

If that is where this is headed, then what to make of the everpresent Fate vs. Free Will contest that has shadowed the plot since its beginnings?

It was interesting to me that the Monster did not snatch Sun after she'd fallen to the ground while running away from him.

Clearly he must have her. Sun was told by Ilana that she is a Candidate. It struck me as a little weird that Sun could be important in that way, after spending the better part of two seasons restricted to a one note storyline.

But it seems to be the case. We are learning a few things about the making of a Candidate. First of all, a Candidate can not be killed - not by Jacob, not by the Monster, not by Widmore. Why? I don't think it's because they are unkillable. I think it's because they are all necessities. The winner in this game of unknown rules must gain possession of all six Candidates in order to prevail.

But the intriguing thing is that the Candidates must choose to align themselves with one side or the other.

The Monster can not win the game if he takes any of the Candidates by force. I am only guessing at this explanation and as with any other LOST theory, there are holes in it. Did Locke choose to be killed by Ben and donate his doppelganger to the Monster? I don't think so.

Did Sayid choose to be drowned in the dirtywater mikvah and be resurrected as a soulless zombie? Not really.

Sawyer has chosen to be with the Monster, but he's only there in body, not in spirit, only hiding out to try and game the system.

Now that Jin is lost, it will be harder for the Monster to ever convince Sun to join him.

And what does it mean that Widmore has now brought Jacob an unwilling "package" that quite clearly has NOT made the choice to be there?

And so at the midpoint of this last ever season of LOST, I'm not giving myself very high marks for figuring anything out. I can think of lots of things LOST is not - it's not much of a science fiction, it's not a monomyth, it's not holding together as any kind of philosophical allegory. It seems like maybe it could be entitled Six Numbers in Search of Characters in Search of a Plot that Might Tie Them Together.

Maybe it's an anthology of character studies wrapped up inside a fairy tale where the characters have stumbled into an ancient family feud and are being forced to play out parts in a story that has nothing to do with them. Once the feud is settled, perhaps the fairy tale world will just collapse, and we'll watch all the characters, the dead ones and the live ones, head out into a non magical mundane reality that is entirely incidental to the story we thought we were watching.

There's a problem with all this of course. We've known the Smoke Monster for five years, and have heard Jacob's name for three, but their overarching myth only began in last season's final episode. I hate to say this, but sometimes it seems like the gods came out of the machine just in time to wrap up a story that never had an ending of its own.

And as for OtherLOST ... how can OtherLOST ever become the one true underlying reality? Since all of it happened the way it happened only because Flight 815 never crashed on LOST Island, wouldn't that mean that for the last six years we've been watching an actual Show About Nothing?

Your guess is as good as mine.

What else can we do but keep guessing to the end? At this point we're all prisoners.