Lost in the Interim

Note from future me: A dated relic of an article, containing a big spoiler warning for Lost, a series which later turned out to spoil itself.  But I did like it a lot while it was running and the watery ending doesn't change that the ride along the way was fun.



Lost won't be back until February, so there's time to write up a few speculations about the upcoming season before it airs. This week: The Dead Pool.

***SPOILERS***

do not proceed unless you've seen all the way through season 5

or don't care.

Given the show's less than straightforward approach, the dead pool has a few complications of its own. The last question we'll get to is which characters have the least chance of surviving to the end of the series.

Before that, though, we've got to figure out who has a chance of being alive at the beginning of the season. A nuclear bomb does rather seem to have gone off, after all. So first up we have:

Percentage chance character will be alive at the end of the first episode of season six

Juliet: 90% No really, I'm serious. I'm pretty sure of this, since I'm also reasonably sure that we've seen another character live through exactly the same thing: not just a nuclear explosion, but one going off in the face of whatever the hell kind of 'electromagnetic anomaly' is under the Swan station.

In 1977, the 'incident' was not just the anomaly doing something -- it was what we've just seen happen, a bomb detonated in the shaft by Juliet and all her time-travelling crowd. Fortunately there was a bomb, meaning the anomaly didn't eat the world, so in order to contain it, the Dharma people put another nuclear bomb under the Swan bunker, where it could be detonated if something went wrong with their peculiar 108-minute containment mechanism. Where they get the bomb I'm not so sure, but it could either be the detonating charge for Jughead -- since they took that one's core explosive out, but I know at least one kind of nuclear bomb uses a smaller one to detonate the main one -- or possibly the US had another bomb on the Island.

That's what Desmond did at the end of season 2 -- and he survived, somehow, appearing in the crater where the bomb apparently went off, naked and strangely diconnected in time, but alive. So my prediction is that Juliet will be found in the same state (and I have to admit that, despite her annoying inability to stop fucking smirking all the time, I'd rather see her running around naked than Desmond) -- though we might not find out about it for several episodes. I'm also predicting that she'll have some drama involving skipping through time and needing to find a 'constant', which will probably end up involving Sawyer.

So yeah, a high chance of survival at least to the start of season 6.

Sawyer, Kate, Jack: also 90% John Locke and Eko were at least as close to the explosion when Desmond triggered the failsafe -- and besides, please, they're not gonna kill any of these three until the series finale at least.

Miles: 50% I'm reasonably sure that he's surived the explosion, so he'll start the episode alive, but he's guaranteed to die either saving his father's life (which to be fair he has done, but I think it'll be more drawn out) or better yet, sacrifice himself to get his mother and baby Miles safely off the island. So 50% he won't have gotten around to this sacrifice by the end of the first episode, but his survival chance drops off by at least 10% for each ensuing episode.

Dr. Chang and Radzinsky: 100% We know these two survive -- Dr. Chang goes on to record the Swan video and others, while Radzinsky goes on to spend the ensuing years pressing the button in the hatch until he gets whatsisface, Clancy Brown, to replace him, then blows his own brain onto the ceiling.

John Locke: 40% He looks pretty dead at the end of the previous episode, but I'm pretty sure they aren't aiming to make a total tool out of John; if he's just dead without some kind of closure on his 'destiny' would just suck and I don't think they're going that way. I'm pretty sure that within the first few episodes we're going to see the for-real Locke walking around again, and it will probably come as a hell of a shock to this Adversary-in-black who's been impersonating him. The odds that he'll return in the premeire episode, though, I think are lower than even.

Ben: 50% And that's an 'at-best' estimate. Fake-Locke doesn't need him anymore and has good reason to keep Ben from saying anything about what happened under the statue. I don't think Ben's story is over yet, but he might end up having to finish it as one of the ghosts.

Richard Alpert: 95% I don't think he's going to die until we get at least one episode telling his backstory...which I strongly suspect begins at least as far back as ancient Egypt. Plus, I'll bet he picks 'Alpert' as a psuedonym, within the story, after reading Alpert's published work.

Hurley: 90% They're not gonna kill Hurley right away...but we'll get back to that 'right away' later.

Claire: 3% I'm pretty sure she's been dead since the later part of season 4. They'll probably hold off revealing this until a good bit later. I give her almost no chance of appearing at all in the premiere, and when she does appear we'll find out she's been dead all along.

Sayid: 20% Oh deary deary. Much as I like Sayid, I'm afraid he's a really prime target for pathos points as the last season gets rolling. He's going to get at least one more moment of being totally badass, but he's very likely to die for some extremely noble reason -- and it could well be during the premiere.

Jin and Sun: 95% I'm all but certain that they're not going to kill off either of these two, but if they do it'll be Jin. Not in the season premiere, though.

Desmond: 95% He doesn't appear to be in any immediate danger...actually, where is Desmond? In the hospital still?

All right, so that gets us through the first episode of the next season. Next time, we'll work on who has a chance of actually living all the way to the end.