So if you’ve already checked out The Physics of LA X, we’re all clear on the crazy alternate timelines and have absolutely no problem understanding that. Right? Doc Jensen does a great job of unraveling all of this stuff, so check him out for another perspective. He’s calling this new device “flash-sideways,” which I’m quite taken with. He also interviews Damon and Carlton in that link, and they ask a thousand useful questions that really help set a context for what they’re going to try to do with the rest of this season. Really: READ IT.

First thing, just a bit of news: the finale has been confirmed for Sunday, May 23rd. This is perfect because I can now dedicate an entire weekend to the ultimate Loststravaganza. Mark your calendars! Also, jump up and down and squeal about how 23 is one of the numbers.

Soon, I’m going to write a post about the episode itself, and catch you up on the theories that are floating around the internet. But I’m sure we’re all in agreement that the most important thing to get to is the question of what’s going on with the alternate timeline, and that’s where I’m going to start.

For clarity, I’m going to try to refer to the story we’ve been watching for 5 years, where Jack and Kate and Sawyer and everyone else ended up on a creepy island and had horrible things happen, as “Our Lost(ies).” And the other story — the story of what would have happened if the Incident never occurred — as the “Alternate Future Lost(ies).”

I hope you’re all ready for Lost! Before the season starts, I have one final batch of fun stuff to share:

• During tonight’s episode of Desperate Housewives, they’re going to show the first promo for this season of Lost that actually contains footage from this season. Watch at your own risk!

Every season, the media goes a little bit nuts in advance of the Lost season premiere, typically focusing on what’s going to happen that season, what the actors think of it, and so on. This time around, things are a little bit different, because there’s also a lot of focus on how the series will ultimately end, before the season has even begun. In article after article, Damon and Carlton are asked to comment on how things are going on-set, and every once in a while some juicy stuff leaks out. I know a lot of us have been worried that maybe this show isn’t going anywhere, or there isn’t really a plan behind it, but I feel a little bit better with every interview I read where they promise a definitive answer.

Lost’s storyline has become pretty convoluted, and it can be difficult to remember what’s going on. Adding time travel to the mix just piles on more confusion — who’s in 2008, who’s in the 1970s, and is anyone going to actually be in 2010? I thought it might be a good idea to cover some of the basics of time travel as it’s been presented in Lost so far.

This season, Lost moves to Tuesday nights; as usual, the premiere is an “event” with a ridiculous special airing at 8 p.m. (which I will of course watch and be disappointed by) and the season 6 premiere will begin at 9, running through 11. One word of warning: the first hour of the premiere will actually be shown at an official Lost beach party event in Hawaii on January 30th, so if you want to be sure to know absolutely nothing about the premiere before it airs, be careful for the days in between that premiere and the broadcast. Sites like Dark UFO and Lostpedia don’t show spoilers without lots and lots of warning, but otherwise, tread carefully.

A couple of weeks back, the world freaked out when the White House floated Feb. 2nd as a possible date for the State of the Union Address. Carlton Cuse promptly tweeted that he would be willing to answer any question President Obama had about Lost if the date were changed. And as far as anyone can tell Lost is precisely the reason that Feb. 2nd was not the chosen date, which just goes to show how completely insane people are for Lost. Myself included!

Between now and then, it’s probably a good idea for us to review what was happening last season, since I’m pretty sure there was time travel, someone hanging out in the form (but not the body) of John Locke, and two dudes who may or may not be omnipotent beings. For a quick refresher, check out my post from the season 5 finale. The most important stuff: Jack has become convinced that blowing up a hydrogen bomb in the past will change the past, thus changing everything that we’ve ever see on Lost. Locke is dead, as I mentioned above, and some of the Losties are on the Island in 2008 but others are stuck in the Dharma 70s. And Jacob isn’t the only important powerful figure on the Island; he also has a nemesis, who has been trying to kill him for a long time, known on the intertubes as either Esau or the Man in Black (and you know I’m a sucker for a Princess Bride reference). Oh, also Jacob is played by one of the dudes who dunks Jeff Bridges in the toilet at the beginning of The Big Lebowski, so there’s that.

Last night, “Damon, Carlton and a Polar Bear” got its first update for the summer game that’s beginning, and the URL for Ronie Midfew Arts now redirects to DC&PB. Something I should mention: in addition to Spoiler TV, the Lost ARGs blog will be following the game as well, so you can check there for updates.

The game itself? DC&PB now shows a picture gallery with 16 picture frames. One is filled in, displaying a photograph (more on that in a second) and the rest are blank with blue question marks in their centers — except for the 16th, which has a red question mark. 15 will be lost, the 16th will be found, anyone? There’s also a link at the bottom right which reads “Hub” and seems to take you to the same information you would find by individually clicking on the pictures in the Gallery, although perhaps that will change in the future.

In the past couple of months, there have been a few Lost-related announcements, as well as the usual fun stuff at ComicCon. I’ve been putting this off for a while (wading into the ComicCon stuff is always a nightmare) but here’s what we have for you! Be warned — there are likely to be spoilers for the upcoming season.

This episode, like every finale episode, starts right off by slamming us with information. We see Jacob, learn that he has a mysterious (nameless) friend who is looking for a “loophole” so he can kill him, and we get a really clear view of the statue. What more answers could we really demand? Well, they do give us one more tidbit: Kate is a New Kids on the Block fan. And, perhaps of more interest to those of you not born in 1983, Jacob has been interested in the Losties for a long time.

In case you might have forgotten, the season finale of Lost airs next week! There’s going to be a clip show (of course) followed by two hours of finale. And then we wait another 40 weeks or so, and then we’ll have our last 17 episodes of Lost, ever (and every single question we can possibly think of will be answered, right?). So of course I’ll blog next week and try to keep up on the Season 6 speculation — keep your eye on this space!

I’m sure you all could have guessed that I really love an episode that opens with Jack getting the crud beaten out of him. It was the most satisfying thing I’ve seen in weeks. Then he tries to tell Kate that the last 3 years have been misery, without acknowledging that, for her, going “back in time” and making the plane land in LA successfully, would mean a pretty hefty prison sentence. Oh, Jack. Do you ever think? Sometimes I think he’s actually a better person during his nightmare descents into booze and pills (and facial hair).

I ended up not blogging last week’s clip show, since there wasn’t anything new in it that I noticed (even though that’s what we were promised); there will be another clip show airing just before the finale in May.

As Betsey pointed out, this episode should have been pretty amazing if it’s called “The Variable,” in contrast to “The Constant,” which is pretty widely considered to be the best episode of Lost so far. And yet I didn’t really love it — I think it just brought up a ton of unanswerable questions, given the information we currently have, and I’m not entirely sure what to think of those questions. At the end of this episode, we know that Eloise has been trying to get Daniel to go to the Island for years, she’s kind of working with Ben and with Widmore, simultaneously, to make this happen, and he has recently become convinced that time travelers CAN change the past. But we have no idea why, or if he’s right, or if his perceptions of what’s going to happen and what has happened are coming from a reliable narrator. Is his idea that Hawking was wrong about “their destiny” something we should believe? Or should we assume, from the ending of the episode, that she’s been right all along and he’s the one who’s been tragically mistaken? Basically, I don’t know what to think and I don’t think I’m going to get any great ideas before next week’s episode! The only thing I know for sure is that Sawyer should have killed Phil, or at the very least he could have had his TWO surgeon friends use some pharmaceuticals to keep him from being such a death sentence.

Sorry for never having the chance to update last week! To make up for it I wanted to include some hieroglyphic treats but it looks like there’s still not a TON of translation information out there. Still, it’s a start.

UPDATE: In the scene where Jack is cleaning blackboards in the Dharma classroom, it’s apparent the students are learning Egyptian history.

“Some Like It Hoth” was an enjoyable episode — I’m really liking everything we see this season — but it was a bit light on juicy tidbits and answers. I think a lot of people had already come to the conclusion that Chang was Miles’ father, so while it was good to see it confirmed it didn’t completely bowl me over. I guess it could be interesting later if we find out that the mystery of the Island is somehow related to all the daddy issues that folks seem to have, but I’m having trouble seeing how that could come together for all of these characters and have any relation to the Island. Plus, it seems pretty plausible that whatever reason Chang had for “getting rid of” his wife and child, it turned out to be for the best for them safety-wise. Perhaps the “incident” we’ve heard so much about wasn’t entirely a surprise to Dr. Marvin Candle? While otherwise this was an interesting story and set up some drama for the new episode two weeks from tonight, it didn’t advance the mystery too much.

Wow, there was a lot here! Tons of stuff in The Temple, Ben flushing his closet to make Smokey come out, Ilana and friends acting like maybe they’re Others, and the Island definitively choosing Locke over Ben while Alex basically spits in his face in front of a ton of hieroglyphics.

One of the first things we learn in this episode is that, as of 1977, “Jacob” is still an important entity. There had been some speculation that, as leadership changed from Widmore to Ben (and had changed from someone else to Widmore before that), the entity known as Jacob changed too, in name alone or in true identity. And seriously, this kid who plays Ben creeps me out. He looks like someone I used to know.

I’ve been really excited to see this episode ever since I found out what it was called. And that was before last week’s episode, when we watched Sayid shoot Ben. So as soon as I saw that scene play out, I thought of this title, and figured that this meant Ben couldn’t really have been killed.

Today I woke up, flew to San Diego, rented a car, and drove up a mountain. Upon arriving here, the first thing I did was figure out how I was going to watch Lost (well, not quite — I did take care of some pretty key responsibilities first). Josh let me know via email that this episode was going to “make [me] crazy” and that I was going to lose my MIND, so of course I watched it as soon as I could.

From the moment I saw the “Previously . . . on Lost!” scenes, I know I was going to get another episode based around Sayid, my favorite character. On the other hand, I kind of remembered what used to happen on Lost when a character would get a flashback episode. For most of this episode, I thought Sayid was going to end up dead at the end of it. I really enjoyed how the first scene of him growing up in Iraq tried to trick us into thinking he was the sweet, gentle boy, sort of like the childhood scenes of Eko. But, of course, Sayid is a total torturer from the very beginning. And Ben clearly is a sociopath from a very young age. Kind of a match made in heaven!

I really enjoyed this episode, but as far as “clues” it was a little bit light. The only thing that really jumped out at me was Radzinsky’s threat to “call Ann Arbor” and get them involved. The DeGroots, the founders of the Dharma Initiative, are, in the backstory of Lost, researchers at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, where Pierre Chang is also an astrophysicist. Maybe, then, this was a hint that we could eventually get some more info on this side of things. And I think we got our answer about how Sayid ended up on the plane: Ben used his knowledge to have Sayid taken into custody by a private bounty hunter. This also explains why Sayid didn’t seem too shocked when we first saw him on Ajira 316 a couple of episodes ago: he knows full well that there are no coincidences in the Lost universe, and that Ben probably had something to do with what was going on. Otherwise, though, this episode was fairly straightforward.

Until the last ten seconds, of course. But I don’t really know what to say about that! Actually, I was here at the observatory when they aired the episode where Locke was shot by Ben, and fell into the ditch filled with Dharma bodies, so to say the least I’m not really convinced that shooting someone and leaving them for dead really cuts it on Lost Island. This is especially true since we have every reason to believe that Ben is in Jacob’s favor when he’s a young guy. Without having any way at all of knowing what’s going to happen next, I really don’t want to drive myself crazy trying to figure out what’s going on. Generally, though, I tend to agree with Faraday: “What happened, happened.” If I had to guess right now — let’s say Sayid was holding a gun to my head — I would say that young Ben has to survive, since we have Old Ben. That doesn’t mean he needs to be totally unscathed, but I do expect that Sayid didn’t just completely thwart the space-time continuum along with Stephen Hawking. And we have to admit it would be pretty amazing if Ben shows up, as Henry Gale, in 2004, knowing full well that Sayid Jarrah tried to kill him when he was a little boy.

It’s fully possible, of course, that this is completely wrong, and that the past has been changed. After all, Ben referred to his father in the past tense when he went to see Sayid (“I really hated him”) and if I didn’t have the bias of wanting to believe that the past couldn’t change, I could totally get on board with the idea that Ben set that van, full of his father, on fire, even though we know that Ben in the usual timeline doesn’t kill Roger until 1992. If this show just changed the timeline, it totally changed the game.

I’m exhausted and tomorrow night I stay up all night, so I’m going to sign off for now and probably won’t have a chance to do much more than this for this week. Luckily, it was more of a character-driven filler episode than a real plot developer. Let me know if you find or think of anything!

As a closing note, I would like to point out to the ads for The Haunting in Connecticut that the movie you’re promoting is not, in fact, “based on a true story.” For the love of Mike.