Wave Functions Don’t Collapse, They Just Appear After the Commercial Break

Okay, the dust has settled and after re-reading my live-blogging of the premiere diptych of LOST season six, I’m a little taken aback by how haiku-y the whole thing is. Don’t get me wrong, it was fun, but the sheer speed that the exercise requires precludes any really thoughtful asides. I promise this won’t become a LOST blog, but there’s at least one thing I want to get out there regarding these episodes and this new season.  

There’s been some anticipation, to put it mildly, regarding how the writers and producers of the show would be able to follow Ezra Pound’s dictum to “make it new.” The show has already twisted us around in so many directions, it’s hard to think of what they could do next that would be fresh and surprising. I’m going to go on the record that the new plot device is incredibly clever, and while not completely unprecedented, certainly a huge leap forward for prime time network television. I admire the writers for trusting the audience to be smart and keep up. At this point in the post, by the way, if you didn’t watch? Stop reading now.

Okay, if you did, basically it appears that at the moment our heroes detonated an H-bomb in 1977, reality split down two courses; in one world the crash of Oceanic 815 never occurred and life is proceeding as it would have sans crash and Island mayhem; in another world things are a little stranger, with Jack, Kate, Sawyer, Hurley, Jin, and Sayid (Jesus there are a lot of characters on this show) no longer stuck in 1977, but still on the Island. I say this is stranger because while it’s pretty clear that decimating the Swan in ’77 would prevent Oceanic 815 from crashing, it’s not at all clear how a nuclear blast would lead to the second scenario. The fun, as always, will be in finding out how and why this has happened, and  how the two realities will interact or possibly merge once again.

Now, I’m sure that there will be the predictable legion of complainers who find the plot splitting and alternate realities too complex to follow. To those I say: Watch Something Else. Personally, I hope that the writers push this as far as they can take it. Part of the joy of LOST is the complexity of it all, and for this last season to live up to the promise that the previous five have shown, it had better be pretty whiz-bang.

I’m also, to be perfectly honest, doing a happy little nerdling dance about the new plot device because, really, I TOLD YOU SO. For further reading about the science behind the splitting realities, looky here and here.