And a thousand nerds creamed their pants at once, as the last season of LOST was underway. We had traveled through time ourselves, arriving in front of our televisions, our pants soggy, our lungs shuddering, our heart thundering. Sweet Jesus Christ, I had my mind fucked and left for dead last night. You know how sometimes a dog gets too excited, and it piddles on the floor? Well unfortunately, I’m a human, and I had the misfortune of running around my room screaming in-between commercials and peeing all over brother and friend alike.

Where to start? Where the fuck to start?

The episode starts and already I’m hyper-ventilating. I had a good suspicion that the episode was going to start with the plane crashing. Wrong, I’m already wrong. Jack’s sitting in the cabin and I’m vibrating back and forth and saying annoyingly out loud “Is this the actual footage from Season One? Is it? Pepsibones? Is it? Is it?” and he isn’t paying attention to me and I don’t blame him.

Turbulence starts! And I’m like, alright, they’re going back to the Island I knew it! Suck it, destiny prevails! And then I have the experience of being wrong twice in a row. So then they show the sunken Island, and I’m all like, we’re not on our Island anymore!

And then they come back from the commercial and they’re on the Island? What the fuck is going on? Oh, only one of the nerdiest things ever: alternate dimensions! As in Dimension X! LA X! Get it?! Is it only so amazing to me!? I’m shitting myself just thinking about it. Was anyone else hyper-paranoid and staring at all the passengers trying to see if they were conscious of some sort of shift? Because I think there may be one guy who knows all the different timelines.

Mr. Desmond Hume.

I mean, I’m not really basing that on anything, other than the fact that he fucking disappeared off of the plane. But if this is a guy who has been traveling through time and space for a long, long time, maybe he has been aware of the different possibilities? He’s seen Charlie die a zillion different ways, in what I assume are different dimensions.

So now it becomes apparent where the wrinkle in the narrative is coming for this season. When I was told that they were no longer doing flashforwards or flashbacks, I was like, well then, what does that leave us with? The producers are calling it “Flash Sideways”, but we can just call it following the alternate dimension that occurred when Juliet smashed a hydrogen bomb with a brick and “fixed” everything. It’s a neat twist. I had always assumed that if they had prevented the pocket of energy from being released, that reality would have rebooted. Instead, there’s another splinter reality that broke off from the one we already knew.

It’s going to be interesting watching where this LA X goes. Thematically, you can already see them suggesting that a reality in which they never crashed wasn’t the Utopia that they had perhaps deluded themselves into thinking it was. Charlie wants to die, Kate’s on the run, Locke is still a crippled mess.

During an intermission, Pepsibones began rambling about how the Island is the means through which perhaps these people were able to correct their flaws, and they needed the tragedy to improve themselves. There may be something to that.

Let’s take a break from LA X, shall we?

Meanwhile, on the Island, the grand reveal I had been prognosticating with a lot of others came true: Smokey is fucking Jacob’s Nemesis. The entire reveal was immeasurably fucking awesome, and centered around an action sequence that had me shitting my pants, and one of my favorite lines in a long, long time. After thrashing all of Jacob’s bodyguards as Smokey, Facob comes back and tells Ben:

I’m sorry you had to see me like that.

My brain actually exploded in an alternate dimension when I heard that line. In this reality I just moaned uncontrollably and pissed off my friends with fist-pumps and hand-claps. I’m slowly realizing I’m like a toddler when I get worked up. You’ve probably all known that way before me though.

And since I’m still bragging about being correct, Smokey wants exactly what I predicted: he wants to be free from the Island. The dude has been bound to the Island, and I assume Jacob, for god knows how many centuries. This entire time Smokey has been manipulating people to get exactly what he wanted: Jacob dead, himself freed. All of this was detailed in an epic speech given to Ben by Facob as they laid in the Shadow of the Statue. The speech also contained one of the most heart-breaking moments in the show for me.

Locke’s ultimate fate is heart-smashing, and the speech that Facob gives about it laid waste to my skin with goosebumps.

You should know, he was very confused when you killed him…Do you want to know what he was thinking while you choked the life out of him was, Benjamin? I don’t understand. Isn’t that the saddest thing you ever heard? But it’s fitting in a way. Because when John first came to the Island, he was a very sad   man. A victim. Shouting at the world for what he couldn’t do. Even though they were right. He was weak, and pathetic, and irrepairably broken. But despite all that, there was something admirable about him.

So what are they going for here? We have had the clash of the titans, Faith versus Reason since the show kicked off. Jack Shepherd versus John Locke. And both of them, both of them are miserable, sad bastards. My first inclination is to hold up Faith and say “See, this is what you get when you believe in something so blindly. You get choked to death in a hotel room for nothing.” But that isn’t entirely true, because as Facob said, there is something admirable about that dedication.

And I find that poor bastard’s fate to be entirely more heart-wrenching than the Sawyer and Juliet bullshit. Shit, she died. Oh well. And the Freckled Hussy still lives. But while Sawyer and Juliet hugging and making out covered in each other’s hemoglobin were one of the few times I was bored, hearing Facob describe Locke’s life nearly broke me. I got goosebumps, feeling for the guy. And I can’t help but hope that both Locke and Jack have happier lives in LA X, as suggested by the idea that Jack could cure Locke’s paralysis.

And I hope so for Jack’s sake, too. For reason has clearly failed Jack where faith has failed Locke. Jack wakes up, somehow being nuclearly-propelled back into the present day. Juliet’s dead, and they’re hanging out in the Temple of Doom with Jacob’s followers or some shit. It seems that the writers are trying to stem a bridge between the worlds of Faith and Reason, suggesting that the two of them are useless to an extent without the other, and suggest that staunch adherence to either of them gets you….Choked out in hotel rooms or fighting for you life on the set of an Indiana Jones movie.

As always, LOST follows the formula of giving us four mysteries for one answer. Alright, Smokey is Facob. But who the fuck are these people? What is this temple? What’s going on? Jesus Christ. The entire show has gotten entirely more epic in scope, for it appears that the fate of the world rests on Jack and his Buddies. They need to stop Smokey the Amorphous Cloud of Doom from leaving the Island, but how! And just who the fuck is he? Or Jacob?!

Facob is clearly heading for that Temple, where Jack and the rest are, and he does so after putting a serious stink onto Alpert’s face. Seriously, my heart seethed when I saw my boyfriend get laid out by Not-Locke. There was a serious ass-whupping dealt out. Facob comments that it’s good to see Richard out of “those chains”, which makes it clear the dude was summoned to Island by Jacob as part of the Blackrock. In addition, it would fit in with my idea that Richard was bound to Jacob just like Facob was bound to him. Not only would Facob have freed himself from serving some unaging-fish-eating master, but he would   have let Alpert off the leash as well.

And then, the episode ends with Sayid waking up, after being resurrected in some Fountain of Youth/Lazarus Pit. Two hours of mindfuck, doled out to all of our unsuspecting asses. The entire experience has blown me away, and I cannot, for the life of me, stop thinking about it. I couldn’t stop thinking about it prior to it airing, and now all I want to do is watch it again.

The questions are overwhelming: why are Jack and everyone else important? Who are the people in the Temple? The amount of awesomeness that occurred in two hours far too much for me to cover. I mean, I haven’t even mentioned Hurley, who is beyond hilarious, and scripted to say exactly what the viewing audience is thinking, “Why aren’t you answering any of my questions?!”