Slapinions

Truthfully, I wasn’t really feeling the season premiere of Lost.

Ok, sure, part of it was the terror that was the combined might of my children. And some can be chalked up to the disappointment of being greeted with a paltry one-hour season opener.

But really, there was no ‘oomph’ to the episode. No startling revelations or explanations (as if!). No sense of the drama of where the season 3 finale left off. No romantic news, no new characters, no new nothin'.

All of it a bit ‘blah’ really.

Here’s what we did learn:

At least six, but probably only six, survivors returned to the world. Among these ‘Oceanic Six’ are Hurley, Kate, and Jack. We can presume the coffin from the season finale contained another of the six, but that is just conjecture.

We’re made to think that the six returned only after forging a less than noble deal to keep their mouth shut about the island. We’re also led to believe that the rest of flight 815’s survivors remain, alive, on the island, held there at least in part by the complicit silence of the Six.

We know that neither Jack nor Hurley are comfortable with the deal they’ve made. Jack, however, seems to have choked down many of his demons and recovered a ‘normal’ life, albeit with a current of regret and pain running beneath the surface. Kate does not seem to share many of these misgivings, at least from what we’ve seen.

Hurley’s prediction about his money would seem to be incorrect, based soley on the car he was driving.

Hurley’s denial of Ana Lucia would indicate that the Six claim that no one but them survived the initial crash . . Or he just didn’t feel like talking : )

Much of the episode must be interpreted in light of Hurley’s illness. Is he crazy and imagining things, or are these people real? Or is it a combination of the two?

Presuming he is real, the mysterious visitor to the mental hospital would indicate that dark forces are still searching for both the island and the survivors. Whoare these people and what do they want? They can’t be the people who forged the ‘deal’, so who in fact did ‘rescue’ the Six?

By the way, that characters’ name, Matthew Abbadon, means roughly ‘place of the dead’ in Hebrew, presuming a reference on the web is correct. UPDATE: I guess that's wrong. Abbadon is an angel in Revelations who guards the place of the dead (hell).

Was Charley a real ghost or an imagined phantom? Either way he represents Hurley’s regret and his concern for the survivors so it really doesn’t matter. And they did surprise me with that one. I thought Hurley ran from the ’numbers’, not a person.

I vote that he’s a hallucination. No, make that a ghost - er, I can’t make up my mind quite yet.

Some questions I have:

“Not Penny’s Boat”. Maybe I’m misremembering the finale, but aren’t the Losties reading a whole lot into the scribbled words of a dying man?

The man in the chair in Jacob’s cabin looked an awful lot like Christian Sheppard, Jack’s Dad, didn’t it?

I didn’t dig Jack pulling the trigger on John, even if John deserved it. Jack is the moral compass of the show, and I don’t want to see him deviate from that.

If you’re hiding from a sophisticated boat-plane-skydiving-satellite phone yielding bad guys, why choose to hide in a man-made, in-the-open barracks John? Why not head for the caves from Season One?

Who left the second blood trail?

Hurley regrets going with John. That doesn’t bode well for Locke’s group, does it? Or is he simply just apologizing for not supporting Jack?

Well, fiddle-de-dee. Going into this I never would have thought that much of the episode sunk in. Huh.

You can bet I’ll be back for more next week.

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Update: Here's some interesting tidbits about the episode that were posted on Lostpedia this morning.

While playing horse with Hurley, Jack gets the letters "H" and "O". "H" is the 8th letter of the alphabet and "O" is the 15th - 815 (the flight number)

• Behind Hurley as he’s freaking out over Abbadon there’s a small sculpture of the letters ‘HO’ on a shelf.
• Hurley mentions Charlie’s ghost showing up in the convenience store right next to the “Ho Ho’s”.