What lies in the shadow of the statue?

Season 5 is where it really started to get obvious that the writers of the first few seasons did not have a plan for where all of this was going to go. It manages to hold together relatively well–and we do get a few answers, mixed in with all those questions–but man, there are a few moments which just don’t line up with what we already thought we knew.

I suppose that’s what you get any time a show introduces time travel .

Faraday: I studied relativistic physics my entire life. One thing emerged over and over–can’t change the past. Can’t do it. Whatever happened, happened. All right? But then I finally realized… I had been spending so much time focused on the constants, I forgot about the variables. Do you know what the variables in these equations are, Jack?

Jack: No.

Faraday: Us. We’re the variables. People. We think. We reason. We make choices. We have free will. We can change our destiny.

We have, at first, a combination of ‘what is going on here’ on the Island, along with a ‘we have to go back!’ off it. And man, despite the fact that there are only the ‘Oceanic Six’, there are some pretty complicated shifting alliances going on here.

Frank Lapidus: In my experience, the people who go out of their way to tell you that they’re good guys are the bad guys.

And then, in the latter half, once the Island stabilizes a bit? Well, that’s where all the real trouble starts. Because the might just have made it back where they were trying to go. But not quite *when* .

Jack: If we can do what Faraday said… our plane never crashes… Flight 815 lands in Los Angeles. And everyone we lost since we got here… they’d all be alive. Kate: And what about us? We just… go on living our life because we’ve never met? Jack: All the misery that we’ve been through… we’d just wipe it clean. Never happened. Kate: It was not all misery. Jack: Enough of it was.

Oh, that’s quite the set up for season 6.

One more to go!