We all have multiple theories about what’s really happening on ABC’s Lost. Here’s one of mine: The entire storyline that has played out on this show, from its uniquely thrilling pilot to its mind-scrambling final hours, has been taking place in Libby’s head! How else to explain the countless narrative threads that demand explanations before Lost ends its six-year run in three short months, especially when each new hour in the mad dash to its conclusion continues to leave viewers with more questions than answers?
Could it all be the wild imaginings of one of the most interesting if under-developed characters in the history of this fearless franchise? Is it all about Libby? Let’s ponder that a moment while looking back on the overall experience of watching and obsessing about this show.
In hindsight, every time I thought Lost was in danger of becoming unwatchable it has turned around and drawn me in all over again. So I assume the growing frustration I’m feeling this season won’t last. The two most recent episodes, which have focused on Regular Kate and Alterna-Kate and Not-Locke and Alterna-Locke, have offered only a couple of interesting nuggets amid way too much filler – much of it coming in the alternate timeline. It’s interesting to see the show’s beloved characters living vastly different lives, but the novelty is already starting to wear off, because nothing that’s happening in the alternative stories seems to have anything to do with what I have been watching these last six years. I don’t care that Alterna-Locke is happy, because that’s not the Locke in whom I have made a long-term emotional investment, and I’m put off by the notion that I should somehow see them both as one and the same and be satisfied – unless something happens to connect the Lockes along with all the other dots.
There has been much speculation that the alternate timeline as we have experienced it so far is the story of what would have happened to the characters on Oceanic Flight 815 had it not crashed, but that isn’t exactly right, because there are too many differences between what we recently saw on the alterna-flight and what we remember from those harrowing sequences in the pilot that depicted the plane breaking apart, not to mention the aftermath of the crash. No Shannon, no Michael, no Walt, a bizarre appearance by Desmond, etc. After this week’s episode, in which Not-Locke revealed to Sawyer that Jacob had long been messing around with the lives of many Oceanic 815 passengers, likely before they even got on the plane, it seems to me that the alternate timeline may actually be showing us the lives these people would have led had Jacob (and/or the entity who is now Not-Locke) never messed with them in the first place.
One thing is certain: The alternate timeline has nothing to do with the island-sinking detonation of that atomic bomb at the end of last season, because the big bang would have killed all of the real-time inhabitants on the island in 1977 (though not the time-travelers who were transported back to 2007 when the bomb went boom). Benjamin Linus, who was a child on the island at the time of the big bang, could not be alive and well and teaching math in the alterna-verse as we saw this week, could he?
All confusion aside, I’m still going along on what has been and will clearly remain an unforgettable ride. It’s all merry madness, which brings me back to Libby. I’ve always thought there was much more to her than we saw during her too-brief run in Season 2. Remember the end of the episode titled Dave, which revealed that Libby (who would be shot by Michael two episodes later and die in the episode after that one) had been a patient in the same mental hospital as Hurley? That revelation has never again been referred to, but why was it there? To stick with the show’s own lunatic logic, Jacob must have paid a visit to that hospital at some point. But there was something about the way Libby was framed in the final shot of that episode that broke away from the show itself, as if it were a private moment (or a critical clue) for only viewers to see. It looked to me as if Libby was thinking of her next move in a game she might have been playing with Hurley, who was shown playing a game with someone else. Or she may have been off in her happy place, making up a very complicated story, influenced by what she was seeing and hearing around her.
Truth is, I can’t think of a more complicated tale than the one we have been enjoying since September 2004. Maybe that’s why I have never been able to shake that shot of Libby in the hospital: Lostmakes me crazy, too.