*

Let me just say...watching the rest of the LOST season 6 premiere on my glass-cleaner-streaked Vizio from Costco does NOT compare w/ the above (i.e. watching it on Waikiki Beach, tradewinds blowing through my hair, bellyful of Mai-Tai's and beers, surrounded by like-minded geek-tastic superfans, the cast sitting in uber-special plastic chairs mere feet from where I took this shot, 3 nights before it first aired on ABC...

BUT...seeing the second half last night really did add some depth to my initial viewing.  To kick us off this time, I'm just gonna work straight from the notes.  Asterisks and thoughts, you know the drill.  So here goes nothing:

LAX Part 1:
*We all gasped when we saw those first shots of white cloud.  We were thinking: afterlife?!?

*After the initial tumult of turbulence, Jack remarks: "Looks like we made it!" (Never mind that that's a kick-ass Barry Manilow song); Rose responds knowingly, blissfully, with a prelapsarian Garden of Eden-watt glow:  "Yeah we sure did."  Rose seemed almost...angelic?  otherworldly?  More on this in a sec... 

*I thought of the episode "Through the Looking Glass" when Jack is in the airplane lavatory.  If you re-watch and freeze it (as I did) you'll truly see two Jacks: on the left (in mirror) the Dharmaville Jack...accepting, weary, diffident, nearly shrugging...on the right of your screen (standing before the mirror) is the quote-unquote real Jack...he looks agitated and angry with a smidgen of fearfulness until he notices that cut..."Hey I didn't do that shaving in Sydney!?!?"

*And suddenly Desmond David Hume is there.  We can almost hearing him chuckling to Jack: "Remember when I told you I'd see you in another life brutha?"  And Jack can't place it, but he knows something is off.  David Hume, who once said,  "A purpose, an intention, a design, strikes everywhere even the careless, the most stupid thinker..." And Jack may be a lot of things: sometimes hero, frequent wannabe savior, badass macho man with strangely convoluted facial expressions signifying confusion and exasperation, but let's be real: a lot of times he is DENSE!  A medical wunderkind, but a stupid thinker... 

*So is this it?  Is this the alternative timeline we've speculated about?  The camera pans downward, gaining speed and momentum, until we plunge through the ocean's surface and scatter some colorful fishies and move down to the water's Davey Jonesy depths and, say hey, look there's the infamous swing set from Dharmaville and there's the statue of Taweret.  Are we in Atlantis?

*Right into Season 1-ish standoff's: Sawyer tattooing Jack's forehead with his workboot, punting Jack like an Australian Rules Football football into the pit formerly known as the Swan Hatch...and of course Kate in the middle, the damsel in this stress, between her two former flames

*Confronted by Sawyer, Jack can only stutter: "I thought we were s'pposed to..." and even he can't find the wherewithal to finish the thought.

*I'm at least temporarily calling the flight and LAX scenes not the afterlife but the alterna-timeline.  Pretty cool how the jumpcuts are now not really FLASHBACKS or FLASHFORWARDS but kinda FLASH-BETWEENS or FLASH-SIDEWARDS...

*Hurley usually closes his eyes to make his "visitors" (i.e. his hallucinations) disappear.  This time the tight closing of his ojo's seems to instead CONJURE Jacob!

*Most of this episode, Ben is timid and shell-shocked.  But there are those moments of malevolent nastiness, as when he spears Illana with scorn: "Oh I'm sorry.  Who are you?" after she asks after Jacob...

*Classic Hurley-logism upon learning Jacob was offed by Ben's Psycho-shower scene send-up and subsequent kick into the ring of fire: "Sorry Dude.  That sucks!"

*Fake Locke rocks a Faux-Hawk: try saying that 8 times with a mouthful of mango.  Just joking...whomever's inhabiting Locke's body is still bald as a baby's behind.  And anywho, it doesn't take us long to learn that it's the Man In Black, Jacob's tunic-touting nemesis, Smokey the Bearer of all Bad Island Shit who has actually taken over Locke's human shell.  When that ass-whupping in the temple went down, you shoulda heard the gasps and cheers from all us crazed LOSTIES on Honolulu shores...

*For a while (until part 2 at least) we are led to wonder about what Juliet needed to tell Sawyer.  I was hoping it was a kind of writerly, meta-nod to the audience.  There WILL be some mysteries in this show that simply WILL NOT be told.  They will die with the finale, a tragic and blood-smeared beautiful blonde death, but gonzo nonetheless...

*Again, I considered the brilliant words of David Hume in lieu of Jack's chronic fuck-up's/attempts at hero-hood: "The corruption of the best things gives rise to the worst..." Take a savior complex, mix in a little desperation and Daddy issue, and even 6 seasons in, we're witnessing this whole giving rise to the worst! 

*More reasons to ponder Alterna-Timeline Concerns: Where'd that wascally, lovable lout Desmond David Hume scamper off to?  Wa'nt he just here, brutha?  And while we're at it, where's Shannon?  You mean this time, in this version, THIS TIME, she doesn't leave Sydney with befuddled brother Boone? 

* Desmond's disappearing act prompts Jack to ask Rose about was there a dude sitting here which in turn prompts rosy-eyed Rose to kinda blush and say she wasn't paying all that much attention considering she had this hot hunk of Bernard right next to her which prompted me to ask myself the following: What was the pretentious term I learned in Grad Skool [sic]??  Oh yeah, liminal zone.

And so my understanding of a liminal zone is that it's a place that's set apart from while still existing within the dull, pedestrian, workaday world.  Think of jury duty.  You've got this broad swath of fine upstanding, taxpaying citizens: housepainters, horticulturalists, street punks, professional prophets, pharmacists, publishers, the occasional aspiring prison guard, you name it.  And they're all rubbing elbows and either chewing the fat with people they normally wouldn't (the extroverts) or they're going inward, burying themselves in The Financial Times or The Washington Post, their laptops or cellphones or Sudoku puzzles (the introverts).  The point is they're still part of the world (i.e. like, they're breathing and taking care of biz and snacking or pacing or whatever) and yet for that time, before "LeRoll-Not-LeRoy++" beckons or dismisses them, they are also not part of the world.   

Come to think of it, the cast and crew, that is the characters and caricatures of a trans-oceanic plane ride, are also kinda functioning in a liminal zone.  Or better yet, consider a honeymoon.  Bernard and Rose are in the quote-unquote real world, but simultaneously they're in this liminal zone+++ in a flying tube over the Pacific Ocean and to push it even further they're also in a lovey-dovey Honeymoon haze.  Thus, liminal zone within liminal zone.  Shocking that this show would offer us one more Chinese Box of relationship intricacies to puzzle out!  I jest.  (I once heard a woman at a comparative literature conference at Cal State Long Beach refer to the unisex restroom on Ali McBeal as a liminal zone. To which I say...I guess.  But McBeal ain't no LOST!)

*Oh and so where was I?  As the plane descends into LAX (just as our plane would a short spell after watching this premiere) you need to love the trope of the Slow-Mo passenger exodus!  Very reminiscent of the pilot episode.  The acting is superb during this sequence.  Not a dry eye in the Ross roost (tho' that wasn't hard to do, as I was watching it solo)!  Kate's darting eyes and expression of fruitless desperation; Sayid's determined beelining it for an EXIT (who wrote NO EXIT?  The existential crisis play?  I'll need to look back into that?  Sartre?); and most heartbreaking of all, of course, the brilliant Terry O' Quinn (who in the span of the two-part premiere will literally seem to pull off playing a Dupe and a Devil): just the tragic resignation on his puss deserves its own special Golden Globe.


++ = Revered and iconic Torrance Municipal Main Courthouse clerk and ringleader for the teeming, potential masses of jurors

+++ = Don't ask me why I insist on italicizing this phrase each time I use it; I s'ppose it makes me feel all academi-geeky once more!