"What's Done Is Done" - 5x16 & 5x17: The Incident

You've GOT to be kidding me.

A white flash? That's all we get? That's what we're supposed to be hanging off a cliff with for 9 months?

Do I laugh or do I cry? Do I love it for completely leaving us hanging and making Season 6 a total mystery? Or do I hate it for the same reason? Somebody, anybody - please help me with this!

I think this will be one that I'll need some time to make peace with. Deep down, I know I love that they did this to us, just for the discussions that are going to go on about what the aftermath of the explosion will be alone. I loved everything else in the episode - the pace, the flashbacks, Jacob's involvement (more on that in a moment), the statue, and on and on - but the ending had me literally cursing at my TV. It was the exact same cliffhanger as the end of Season 1; they finally blew open the hatch, looked down into it, and saw........cut to black and "LOST." Tonight? The Jughead explodes, the screen goes white, and......"LOST." It is worth noting that this is the first time that the ending title screen was black letters on a white background. It could simply be for continuity with the white flash of the explosion. Or it could be a signal of what's to come next season. The idea of the duality of black and white has been a part of the show from the very first episode, as has the idea of mirror images (especially this season, with the Ajira 316ers acting as proxies for the Oceanic 815ers), so maybe we're going to see something opposite of what we've been seeing up until now. The explosion of the Swan has been described as a sort of "reset button," so I can only imagine what that might mean. I noticed another possible tiny clue to this which I will mention at the end of this post...

For the record, let me ask you: have you ever literally been on the edge of your seat? Because I was tonight for the entire second hour.

My heart is broken. Juliet joins Charlie as the most heroic characters in LOST history. I teared up when she fell down the shaft, and I teared up even more when she was pounding on the guts of the Jughead, screaming, "Work, you son of a bitch!" And I may have actually stopped breathing during that scene. I honestly feel sadness that she is dead. Maybe we'll see her again, though.

And Sawyer. Oh, Sawyer. That was the cry of utter devastation. After all he's been through, especially as we were reminded in his flashback. He's lost everyone he's ever cared about.

Okay, let's get down to a huge element of this episode: Jacob.
I was blown away by how they introduced him, and continue to be even more blown away about what they did with him. He was there at a pivotal moment in the lives of Jack, Kate, Sawyer, Hurley, Locke, Sun, and Jin (am I forgetting anyone?). The scene when he was on a park bench, reading that Flanery O'Connor (I think) book and just waiting for Locke to be thrown out the window by his father was incredible. Did you catch how Locke came to (...or came back to life...?) when Jacob touched his shoulder? If you watched carefully, and after he playfully poked Kate on the nose I was looking out for this, he touched all of them. The only one I didn't really get was when he was with Kate as a young, criminal-minded girl. Maybe her promise to never steal anything again was a clue to her future (she robbed a bank back in Season 1), but was this a pivotal moment? Anyways, this might all mean that he really did call all of them to the Island. But do we have any idea why? What's his motivation?
An even bigger question I have is why he let Ben stab him? Were fans who thought he wanted Locke's help to die correct? Is he dead? Is it even possible for him to die? Will he be a phoenix that will quite literally rise from the ashes of the fire that Locke (or whoever he is) threw him in? That would be yet another tie to ancient Egyptian beliefs.

And yeah, about Locke: there are two Lockes? Whaaaaa? I honestly have no idea what that's about, other than some time travel issue, or how it's possible that Locke........ohhhhh, wait a minute!!! How about this? Because the bomb did go off, Jack never went to see Locke in the casket, and never saw Ben, who never told him that he had to bring John back to the Island. But before the bomb exploded, he did bring Locke to the Island. Does that make sense? Probably not. Why would Locke have died, then? Why would Ilana bring his body back? I don't know. Forget it.
Remember this, though - the man in the opening scene, who asked Jacob, "Do you know how much I want to kill you" - could Locke really be him in reincarnated form? When Locke finally meets Jacob, Jacob says, "So, you found the loophole, huh?" Is being resurrected the loophole?
My mind is blown. (By the way, I took a peek at some of the message boards after the episode, and there are some amazing theories going around about just that first scene with Jacob and the other man on the beach.)

I didn't take any notes as I watched this one, and I'm sure I will be writing more extensively on this episode sometime soon, after I do a little research (which I'm going to start after I post this!), but those are my initial reactions. To be honest, I could go on forever about this episode. It was incredible, wasn't it?

I will leave you with three things - for now.

First, this one may go down as one of the best episodes of LOST of all time. It was so deep, so tragic, so dark, it answered some major questions, and opened up a whole new question: what happens next?

Second, since I know you're dying to find out, the answer to the question of what lies in the shadow of the statue was, courtesy of someone from TheFuselage.com, "Ille qui nos omnes servabit," which is Latin for "he who will protect us." To put it another way: Jacob.

And lastly, after the reversed black and white LOST end title and during the credits, they obviously couldn't give us a preview of Season 6 since they haven't written or filmed any of it yet, but they did give us one brief flash at the very end. It was of an eye opening, and it looked exactly like the opening shot of the Pilot episode of the show - the person the eye belonged to seemed to be lying on the jungle floor - except that it didn't look like Jack's eye. And I only saw it once, but I'm almost positive it was Kate's...

As I mentioned in my post last night, keep checking back here during the hiatus, because I will be posting periodically, including a breakdown of tonight's finale. I hope you enjoyed it!

So for now, Good Luck, and Namaste : )