Lost, Season 4, Episode 1

"The Beginning of the End"

It’s back!! And as per usual, the season premiere introduces more questions than it answers, but by now, anything else would be disappointing. There are only 47 more of these to go, and I'm savoring every one.

At the tower

Picking up exactly where we left off, Jack gets ready to move the lostaways back to the beach for their rescue. Ben tells Rousseau to take Alex and get out of there, but she objects to him calling Alex “[his] daughter” and punches him in the face. Jack gets a call from the boat, and finds out that the sat phone needs to be reconfigured before they can be rescued. The guy on the other end wants to talk to Naomi. Unfortunately for Jack, Naomi’s corpse is apparently not a corpse, because she has picked up and disappeared. Rousseau, Ben, and Jack head off to follow what they think is her trail; but not before Kate finds another trail, sneakily takes the sat phone from Jack, and heads off in another direction. Jack and Rousseau quickly lose the trail and Jack realizes that he has lost the phone. Meanwhile, Kate has found Naomi, who is understandably upset about getting knifed by one of the people she’s supposedly trying to rescue. Kate manages to convince her that Locke is a crazy mofo who operates on his own, and Naomi stays alive just long enough to talk to her people and fix the phone so that the resuce can go ahead.

On the beach

Desmond gets back to the beach and tells Bernard, Jin, Juliet, Sawyer, and Sayid about Charlie’s final message. They argue about what it means and what to tell Jack, but Hurley is the only one demanding to know what happened to Charlie. They decide to head into the jungle to warn the others about the “rescue” boat. During their trek into the jungle, Sawyer shows some genuine compassion for Hurley, asking him if he’s OK about Charlie’s death. Hurley cuts him off pretty quickly and then when Sawyer goes on ahead, Hurley loses sight of the rest of the team and finds himself alone in the jungle. He wanders by Jacob’s cabin and when he looks in, we see a man in the rocking chair (who TOTALLY looks like Jack’s father, right down to the white sneakers he always wears) and then somebody looks right at Hurley (someone who’s definitely not Locke, because on freeze-frame, I could clearly see dark facial hair) and Hurley freaks out and runs away. He runs into Locke and they head toward the group meeting place; Locke has every intention of talking them out of going on the boat. They are not happy to see Locke - - who they haven’t seen since he defected to the Others camp in the middle of season three. While they chat, the group from the radio tower shows up and there are many happy reunions. Among this, Hurley has to go and tell Claire that Charlie is dead, and I cry over his death all over again.

In the middle of all of this, Jack shows up and immediately punches Locke (who’s doing pretty well for someone who just got shot) and then shoots him- except that the gun isn’t loaded. Locke says that he’s not getting on the boat and is going to the Others’ barracks for protection. After a lovely speech by Hurley about Charlie’s sacrifice, some of the lostaways head over to Locke’s side. Among those we care about, Hurley, Claire, Rousseau, Ben, Alex, Karl, and Sawyer (over protests from Kate) head off with Locke. Team Jack includes: Juliet, Rose, Bernard, Kate, Sayid, and Desmond.

It all ends with Jack and Kate greeting another parachutist, dropped in from a helicopter.

Flash-forward

We see someone lead the police on a car chase through Los Angeles, and when he is stopped and arrested, Hurley gets out of the car and tells the police that he’s one of the “Oceanic Six.” In the interrogation room, he seems to be having hallucinations, and after being questioned by Big Mike (Ana-Lucia’s old partner, and interestingly enough, Hurley claims never to have met her) Hurley heads back to his old mental institution.

His first visitor is Daniels from The Wire, (or Matthew Abaddon- in Hebrew, abaddon means "place of lost souls," associated with hell) who claims to be an attorney from Oceanic, but clearly has ulterior motives. He asks Hurley if “they” are still alive, and after Hurley freaks out, Abaddon slips out quietly.

Sometime later, he’s visited again, this time from a healthy-looking Charlie, who claims to be “dead and also here.” He proves to be a figment of Hurley’s imagination (or was he? Because Hurley’s fellow inmate also saw him…) but not before Charlie tells him that “they” need him.

Hurley’s final visitor at the mental institution is Jack, who is pre-grizzly man beard. Jack seems to be checking up on Hurley, making sure he “won’t tell.” Hurley is convinced that they made the wrong decision in leaving the island. He says, “I think it wants us to come back, I think it’s going to do everything it can—“

So, here’s what I’m thinking: the six (my guesses: Jack, Kate, Hurley, Claire, Aaron, and the dead guy--Michael?) lied about what happened, or made a deal to get off the island, and told the rest of the world that everyone else died. And they’re all feeling some degree of guilt about it, because I’m guessing that the people showing up now in the freighter are the descendants of DHARMA, and they’re going to do experiments on the people left behind.

But Hurley getting off of the island really threw me. If he went with Locke, what happened to make him get off the island? And why did he apologize to Jack for going with Locke?

My initial reaction was that the previews for this episode were incredibly misleading. There was no rescue, only another parachutist. Where’s the boat that the entire episode was spent obsessing about? I suppose I should be used to misleading promos from ABC by now. Other than that, taking the episode for what it was, I was pretty impressed. It kind of goes without saying that I’m practically counting down the seconds until next Thursday night.