Will Jack Go Back?

Even if the most popular TV show about a plane crash didn’t have its season premiere last night, plane crashes (or almost-crashes) would still be at the front of the collective conscious right now, thanks to last week’s miraculous crash landing of Flight 1549 in the Hudson River. The American public is always drawn to the complex stories borne of a bumpy landing—real or imagined.

Millions of viewers tuned in last night to see the fate of the Oceanic Six, those left behind on the island, and those new kids who arrived via helicopter last season. The Season Five premiere wasted no time doling out a treat for the numbers-freaks in the Lost fanbase: an alarm clock goes off at 8:15—the same number of the flight that went down, Oceanic flight number 815. (And, according to the “Lostpedia,” 8:15 is also the time that Sayid kills someone in the Season Four finale.) Aha.

The hand that slaps the alarm clock’s off button belongs to Dr. Marvin Chang —the stoic, knowing host of those fuzzy, black-and-white, supposedly helpful Dharma Initiative instruction videos. Oh, and who is that among the Dharma station-construction-site hard-hat-wearing crew? It’s Daniel Faraday, the awkward Oxford physicist who seems to have the answer to all the crazy stuff happening with the time-shifts on the island “right now.”

As for more familiar faces, Jack, who once was the Captain Sully of Lost characters (the show’s hero, savior, picture of calm in a swirl of confusion) has long since had his denouement. And, paradoxically, it’s this downfall that has made him more of a hero in fans’ minds: something about his excessive, unflagging virtuosity made him less a fan favorite than, say, Locke  (whose morals sometimes were controversial) and Sawyer  (whose morals are only sometimes not controversial). But if this first episode is any indication, we’re rooting for Jack again, if only because in Season Four, we finally began to believe that Jack is human: even Jack can fall prey to the frailty of addiction, even Jack can make an embarrassment of himself in front of the woman he loves, even Jack can betray the better interests of those he cares about. Now that we’ve truly seen Jack’s lesser self, we are rooting for him to return to his better self.

When we first see Jack on the Season Five premiere, he’s the same bearded, beat-up, drugged-up wreck that he was in the Season Four finale. But it’s not long before he’s shaving the beard, becoming lucid, and seemingly heading in the direction of “doing the right thing”—albeit with his former nemesis, Benjamin Linus.

And, as has been happening with increasing frequency on Lost, the show is again veering into soap-operatic territory: John Locke (a.k.a. Jeremy Bentham) is dead—or is he? Ben Linus is the evil anti-hero—or is he? There are even hints that Jin might have survived the explosion on the freighter.

While Ben, Jack and Locke unsmilingly navigate these twists and turns, it sure is nice to get a reality check and some comic relief in the form of our favorite wisecracker, Sawyer, and the not-actually-a-stoner-but-sure-seems-like-one, Hurley—whose mere presence on the screen seems to summon laughter. Hats off to J.J. Abrams and crew for conjuring laughs in the moments that lead up to, include, and follow a pretty gross dishwasher-murder scene.

And no episode of Lost would be complete without the requisite science-geek, space-time-continuum metaphysical plot points that would have lost millions of Lost viewers long ago if it weren’t for some Lost characters themselves laughing at their utter implausibility. We can always count on Sawyer to be the voice of “you gotta be kidding me” reason on points such as the movement of the island and its “record-skipping” time disturbances. Without Sawyer to call B.S. on—and subsequently become convinced of —these seemingly preposterous notions, viewers like you and me would’ve changed the channel well before the finale of Season One.

If I was a betting woman (and believe me I am), I would bet a large sum that we’ll soon be seeing a reunion—if not an entirely happy one‚on the island. It’s simple math, really: at least half of the characters show signs of heading that way—Kate, Hurley, Ben, Jack—and over half of the episode’s screen time was devoted the island itself.

You wanna go double or nothing? I’ll see you next week.

Tags: Lost, season five