Previously on Lost

A crash course in island history

By James Poniewozik Monday, May 24, 2010

    • It's 2004. There's a plane. It crashes on an island. There are polar bears. And a smoke monster. And angry natives called the Others. Jack is a doctor. Locke is a paraplegic who can walk now. Sawyer's a con man. Kate's a fugitive. Kate likes Jack, and also Sawyer, and also Jack again. Jin and Sun are a married Korean couple. Claire's pregnant. Charlie's a junkie. Sayid's a former Iraqi torturer. Hurley's a lottery winner with extremely bad luck. The Lost ies find a hatch in the ground. Inside the hatch, there's a dude named Desmond. Every 108 minutes, he punches six numbers into a computer so the world won't end. (He believes.) The hatch was built by the Dharma Initiative. Dharma was a group of scientists and hippies who came to the island in the '70s and drove VW microbuses. The Lost ies capture Ben, the leader of the Others. The Others capture several Lost ies. Locke decides they should stop entering numbers in the hatch. The hatch blows up. The sky turns purple. Desmond starts seeing the future. The captured Lost ies escape. Desmond tells Charlie that Charlie's going to die. (He's right.) A freighter shows up offshore. Jack wants to be rescued, but Locke thinks the island needs them to stay. (He's right.) The freighter was sent by Desmond's girlfriend Penny's dad, who's kind of a jerk. It blows up. Jack, Sun, Hurley, Sayid, Desmond and Kate escape on a helicopter. It crashes. (They're O.K.) Locke, Sawyer and the rest are left on the island. Ben goes underground and turns a frozen wheel, which sends the island skipping about in time. The left-behinds end up in 1974 and join Dharma. Locke leaves the island via the frozen wheel. (It is confusing.) He finds Jack. Jack doesn't want to return. Locke is murdered by Ben. Jack changes his mind. The Lost ies return to the island, but some end up in 1977, where they find their friends. They detonate a hydrogen bomb to alter time and stop their original plane crash from happening. (It is confusing.) The Lost ies are back in 2004. The plane does not crash. But they are also in 2007. Still on the island. In a parallel timeline! (It is confusing.) Locke comes back to life. Except he is really the Man in Black, who has lived on the island with his brother Jacob for a really, really long time. (He is also the smoke monster.) Locke, who is not Locke, tricks Ben into killing Jacob. Jacob, who is maybe a ghost, tells Jack that the castaways are "candidates" to replace him. Desmond returns. On a submarine. With Penny's dad, who's still kind of a jerk. Penny's dad blasts Desmond with radiation. This makes alternate-reality Desmond aware of island Desmond. Alternate-Desmond tries to make alternate-everyone-else aware of the parallel universe. On the island, Locke persuades Jack and his friends to escape on the submarine. Which Locke has booby-trapped. Sayid blows himself up to save the rest. Sun and Jin are reunited! Then they drown. Locke vows to finish what he started ...